The Green Chapel

The Green Chapel exists because of a Christmas game. In the late fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, composed by an anonymous poet of the English West Midlands, a gigantic green stranger rides into Arthur's hall at Camelot on New Year's Day with a holly branch in one hand and a monstrous axe in the other. He offers what he calls a Christmas game: any knight may strike him one blow with the axe, if that knight will find him in a year and a day and accept a blow in return. Sir Gawain, the king's young nephew and the flower of courtesy, takes up the challenge and shears off the stranger's head. The headless body picks the head up by the hair, and the head speaks: come to the Green Chapel next New Year's morning, the Green Knight says, and be there to receive what you have given. Then he rides out through the hall doors with his head under his arm, and the court is left with the laughter of the game curdling into dread.

Gawain spends the next year as a dead man walking, and when winter comes he rides north alone through Wales and the wilderness, asking everyone he meets for the Green Knight of the Green Chapel, and no one has heard of either. On Christmas Eve, frozen and praying, he stumbles upon Castle Hautdesert, the hall of the bluff and hearty Lord Bertilak, where he is made lavishly welcome and told the Green Chapel lies not two miles away. For three days Bertilak hunts while Gawain rests in the castle, tested in secret by Bertilak's wife, and on New Year's morning a guide leads him out through a dark valley of crags and waterfalls. The guide stops short, swears the chapel is a place of slaughter, and begs Gawain to flee and let him swear they never met. Gawain refuses, and walks on alone into the valley.

What he finds is not a building at all. The poem's description is one of the strangest landscapes in English verse: a low mound beside a bubbling brook, bald of trees but thick with grass, with holes at each end and on either side, hollow within, nothing more than an old cave or a crevice in an ancient crag. Gawain circles it in disbelief and names it the corsedest kirk, the most accursed church he ever came in, a place where the devil might well say his matins at midnight. Then from within comes the sound that turns his blood cold: the rhythmic whir and clatter of a great blade on a grindstone. Someone inside the green mound is sharpening an axe, and everyone in the valley knows whose neck it is for.

Out comes the Green Knight, vaulting over the stream with the new-ground axe, and the game is played out. Twice he raises the blade and checks the stroke as Gawain flinches; the third time he brings it down and only nicks the skin of Gawain's neck, drawing a thread of blood. Then the giant laughs and reveals the whole design: he is Bertilak himself, transformed by the enchantress Morgan le Fay, Arthur's half-sister, to test the pride of the Round Table. The two checked strokes honour the two days Gawain dealt honestly with him; the nick is for the third day, when Gawain hid the green girdle, the lace he believed would save his life. Gawain tears at his own honour, curses his cowardice, and wears the girdle forever after as a badge of his fault. The chapel keeps his blood and his shame, and he rides home to Camelot alive, with a scar that the whole court adopts as a mark of honour.

The Green Chapel has been walked and argued over ever since. The poet's dialect places the tale in the borderlands of Staffordshire and Cheshire, and generations of readers have matched its valley to real ground: above all Ludchurch, a deep, moss-hung chasm near the Roaches where the light falls green even at noon, and Thor's Cave, a great arched hollow in the limestone of the Manifold Valley. Walkers follow the so-called Green Knight trail through that country today, and film-makers from Stephen Weeks to David Lowery have rebuilt the mound in mist and moss. The chapel endures because it was never really a church: it is the oldest kind of sacred ground, a green hill with something alive inside it, where a man goes to learn the truth about himself.