Gargoyles

[hope]

Gargoyles
In architecture the forms on buildings and churches not used as drain-spouts are known as gargoyles, the term, gargoyle originates from the French gargouille, meaning, throat or gullet. In Dutch it is a word for "water spitter"or "water spewed".' the spout is designed to convey water from the roof and away from the side of the building,preventing rainwater from running down walls and eroding the mortar between th stone blocks, the length of the gargoyle determines how far water is thrown from the wall and foundations.

Daily Mail, Monday April, 10th, 2017
Answers to Corresondents by Charles Legge
The Glories of gargoyles
Question Must a grotesque on a church act as a water spout to be a gargoye?
To be a true gargoyle, a carved figure must convey water from a roof and spew it on to the pavement, clear of the wall, avoiding the need for downpipes and drains, "Gargoyle" and "gargle" are from root, referring to the throat.
If you climb the tower of St Mary The Virgin, you can look down on the backs of the genuine gargoyles to see the
channel n their backs which leads the water to their mouths.,and contrary to popular beliefs,they are not all
medieval, new ones are goi going all the time.

In Oxford, the sixties restoration of St Edmund Hall has modern grotesques depicting college characters of the day,
the dean and his favourite labrador, the bursar and his moneybags, the principal with a squash racket.
Three other colleges-Brasenose, Magdalen and New-plus the Bodleian Lobrary offer some of the best ribaldry in
stonemasonry. The Duke of Humfrey Library at the Bodleian near Sheldonian has a choir of angels facing a choir of
demons.

New College has Seven Virtues on the sunny side of the Bell Tower and the Seven Deadly Sins on the dark north side.
The vulgar and bawdy is permissible at gargoyles level. At Magdalen College, which features a busty wench modelled
cheekily on one of the college serving maids, a monkey squats defecating into a drain head. This is despite a pious
bishop overlooking the bridge and blessing travellers.

Gargoyles can even settle 450 years old scores, when Magdalene college, Cambridge, redevolped a disused wharf into
the Qyayside Centre in the Eighties, an unusual detail was specified, a particularly ugly gargoyle of a banker who had
cheated the college of its endowment in 1542. It is now dribbling like a simpleton into the river, long memories.

Filthy looker-The banker's gargoyle at Magdalene College,Oxford

Ballad of the Green Man
Richard Hayman traces the changing significance of the Green Man, a term coined in 1930's for a medieval image of a
face sprouting foliage, the meaning of which has transformed itself across the centuries.
Green Men are commonly used as decorative architectural ornaments to cravings and are found on churches, chapels, abbeys, cathedrals and other buildings. The Green man motif has many variations and found in many cultures around the world. It is perceived as a natural vegetative symbol of rebirth representing the cycle of growth each spring and perhaps a fertility figure of a nature spirit.

Most people with a passing interest in history have heard of the Green Man, a face from the Middle Ages, that thanks
to its recent reincarnation, is now more recognisable than the saints or even the devil. The Green Man is the latest
accretion to the long cast of characters that have been featured in annual May celebrations, like Robin Hood, Jack-in-the -Green, May Queens and Lords of Misrule, at Clun in Shropshire you can witness a ritual tussle between the Green Man and the Frost Queen, with a rather obvious interpretation. The corresponding ritual at Pilton in Devon sees the Green Man face up to the medieval Prior of Pilton and force th church to accept this pagan figure within its walls.

[hope]

Face Pullers are carvings, also known as 'mouth gaper,' they also decorated the buildings and churches,face pulling in
medieval times was considered to be highly offensive, especially sticking your tongue out, I think this is probably why
we tell our children off when they do it.
These carvings are called 'Grotesque's as they don't have the water pipe common in gargoyles.

This wonderful face puller above, adorns the church of St Peter & St Paul at Cromer in Norfolk.

[Redbeck]

Good evening Hope, Yes I definitely like this one, because interestingly enough the word gaper is also found in the Dutch language, and has a similar interpretation but relates to a more activity and ethnicity specific head.

In Holland, a gaper (Dutch pronunciation: ya'per) is historically a stone or wooden head, often depicting a Moor, found on the front of a building. It was used to indicate that the building it adorned was, and perhaps still is, a pharmacy.

The literal translation of the Dutch word gaper is 'yawner'; the unbiquitously male figure is always displayed with an open mouth, sometimes with a pill resting on his tongue. This indicates that in fact he wasn't yawning at all, but opening his mouth to take medicine.

The remaining gapers in Amsterdam are almost all of Moorish appearance. This wasn't however supposed to represent the prevailing ethnicity of the apothecary founding fathers from whom the modern pharmacist developed (although quite frequently this was the case), but rather to indicate the exotic Middle Eastern/North African origins of the medicines. The apothecary would appear on market days all over the Netherlands along with his assistant who would play the character of a sick man. After taking the pill, the assistants (often dressed as a Moor themmmselves) would suddenly make a miraculous recovery and proceed to perform a dance to prove the curative potency of the medecines.

Later, when pharmacists opened permanent shops as opposed to travelling round the country's markets, the symbol of the Moorish man (now frequently depicted with a pill on his tongue) would indicate to an often illiterate audience that the building was the home or premises of a pharmacist.

Nowadays these symbols are a relatively rare find in situ. Outside museum collections, fewer than 50 can now be seen on buildings. Some have now lent their names to cafes, such as De Vergulde Gaper in Amsterdam.