Hermitess and Green Man

The Sunday Pilgrimage #6

St Mary the Virgin Church, Iffley, Oxfordshire, England

I lived in the city of Oxford for fifteen years. I went to university there, I got married there, my daughter was born there and plenty of other things happened there too, some of which are even printable. Formative years, and all that.

If you live in a city long enough, then you work out the best places to go to escape it. Iffley was one of those places to me. Once a village on the banks of the Thames, it has now been absorbed into Oxford, but you can still reach it by walking along the river bank, crossing over the lock bridge and winding up the old lanes to the village, with its pub, community shop, village hall, war memorial and church. Even now, it offers a bit of a haven.

Recently, back in the city after many years away, I visited Iffley again. There’s not much to do there, to be honest, which is why I like it. The main attraction is the village church. But this is not just any church. It is something quite special. Behold:

Iffley has been described as ‘one of the most spectacular Romanesque parish churches in England’. For those of you who don’t know what ‘Romanesque’ means, it’s a style of architecture associated in England with the dastardly Normans, but which was common right across Europe from the 9th to the 12th centuries. You can always spot it by the shape of the windows: those semicircular arches are the giveaway. Romanesque buildings have small, arched windows, thick walls and big supporting pillars. Compared to the later Gothic style, the architecture is solid and straightforward.

Less straightforward though, very often, is some of the decoration, and in this, Iffley excels. You can see from the photo above how the architects of this church went to town on the stone carving. Iffley church was built in the 1160s, when Romanesque stone carving was at its peak, and Iffley’s west doorway, which you can see on the two photos above, is a riot of stone art. The biting birds - which you’ll also find in old Anglo-Saxon manuscripts - have always been a particular favourite of mine:

The whole of the church exterior is a riot of funky early medieval stonework. The south doorway is almost as impressive, and also a little more mysterious:

Around the arch of the door here are carved the symbols of the four evangelists - lion, ox, eagle and man - as well as the signs of the Zodiac and references to scenes from Ezekiel and Revelation. This was the door through which the priest and the parishioners would enter the church on a daily basis, and it is a condensed symbol of the various aspects of the spiritual life. It is the doorway from the everyday world into the spiritual world.

Speaking of symbols, if you look closely you can see my very favourite English church mystery of all:

This is a green man. I have been obsessed with these things all of my life; I have a collection of them on my wall at home, which I’ve picked up from my various travels through Britain. They’re not hard to find, because these strange things are carved on and in churches all over Britain. Green men - or ‘foliate heads’ if you want to be academic about it - are one of the strangest mysteries of the ancient English church. Versions of them can be found in other parts of the world, but this particular being - a human head with foliage sprouting from the mouth, ears, eyes and nose - is most common in Britain, and especially England. You’ll find him in hundreds of churches and cathedrals all over the country.

What is this very pagan-seeming symbol doing in Christian churches? There are a thousand theories to explain it. More than a decade ago, I wrote an essay about my then-favourite theory, which is probably not true but appealed to me nonetheless. More convincing, perhaps, is this essay by Josh Robinson at The Symbolic World, which links the Green Man to an ancient story about the death of Adam. Whoever he quite is, he appeals to my pagan-Christian soul.

Iffley is only a little place, but there’s too much in it to talk about in one short Sunday morning travelogue. I can be a bit of a church geek when I get going, so I have to control myself. I could talk for hours, for example, about how the development of this church over the centuries offers a narrative of English ecclesiastical architecture in miniature. Look at this left-to-right development of window design, for example, starting with Romanesque and ending with High Gothic:

Speaking of windows, how about this beautiful early twentieth-century piece of stained glass by the artist John Piper:

Or this window above the west doorway, with the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove descending onto those who enter beneath:

I need to keep hold of at least some subscribers, though, so I’ll stop talking about windows now. Let’s just take a quick peek inside the church, before I tell you two of my favourite stories about it.

Here’s the view from the nave, looking towards the lighted altar:

So then, two final stories: of a tree, and of an anchoress. Back outside, in the churchyard, we find a vast yew tree, which overshadows the church in more ways than one. Iffley church is nine hundred years old, but this tree is older. By some estimates, it may be as old as 1600 years:

Ancient yews are a feature of churchyards all across England, and it’s not uncommon for the tree to be older than the church. Why is this? One theory is that yews were sacred trees in pre-Christian England. The missionaries who were sent to evangelise the Anglo-Saxons by Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century were under specific instructions not to destroy pagan temples or sacred sites, but to re-dedicate them to Christ instead of Woden. ‘In this way’, Gregory wrote to St Augustine, apostle to the English, ‘we hope that the people, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may abandon their error and, flocking more readily to their accustomed resorts, may come to know and adore the true God.’¹ Were yew trees part of the ‘accustomed resorts’ of the pagan English? It’s a notion I’ve always liked.

I’ve saved my favourite Iffley story until last. It has nothing to do with windows, though it is revealed by an architectural feature which is easily missed if you’re not looking for it. Take a careful look at this picture of a boring bit of wall. Do you notice anything?

That little walled-up doorway is the only remaining evidence of the cell of an anchoress, which was once part of the church. Anchoresses - female hermits - were not uncommon in medieval England. They would be literally walled up in cells attached to the church, in which they would remain until their death. In the thirteenth century, this little doorway was once the entrance to the cell of an anchoress named Annora. She was the daughter of a powerful local baron who fell out with King John. The quarrel left half of her family dead and saw her imprisoned as a young woman. After being freed, she was married, and on the death of her husband she chose to commit herself to a religious life.

In her fifties, then, Annora became an anchoress. She was walled up in a room in the church, vowing never to leave again. It wasn’t a completely punishing existence - in an adjoining room she had a maid who cooked for her, collected wood and attended to the fire which kept her warm - but it was one completely dedicated to God. Her cell had only two windows: one into the church, through which she could view the Mass and take communion, and one into the churchyard, through which she could talk to visitors who came for advice or prayers. Both had curtains which could be used to cut her off from the world outside. On the floor of her cell was the stone lid of her own coffin, to remind her of the fleeting nature of earthly life. Annora seems to have lived here for nine years. When she died, she would have been buried beneath the floor of her cell. Presumably she is still there now.

That’s what I call commitment. To those who say that ‘Christian civilisation’ is built by warriors, politicians or people arguing on the Internet, I say: no, it was built by people like Annora. This kind of life - inexplicable to the comfortable, rational denizens of our technological age - is, it seems, pleasing to God. It’s a manifestation of love, and sacrifice. I wonder if England will ever see its like again.

1. This letter is quoted by Bede in chapter 30 of his History of the English Church and People.