When I use a word,’ says Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll's fantasy world of White Rabbits, Gryphons and other curious hybrids, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean.’ As modern viewers of misericords, as much as we may identify with Langland's constantly questioning Will, we may equally find ourselves in the position of Carroll's dream-narrative protagonist, Alice, asking questions of strange figures, always curious though sometimes sceptical of the answers as they appear to invent their own rules of meaning. As we have seen throughout our investigations, these figures, occupying that curious space which paradoxically draws attention to itself through its partial obscurity, act as enigmatic intermediaries between the devotional culture of the late Middle Ages and the present, with a frequently obtuse, Humpty-like self-confidence which we must negotiate. Carroll's own response to the misericords of Ripon Cathedral, to which he was a regular visitor when his father was a cathedral canon during the 1850s and 1860s, was to create the irascible White Rabbit who leads us into ever more baffling conundrums and the obtuse Gryphon who offers answers which clarify nothing at all, a situation which neatly mirrors the mix of intrigue and frustration which often faces us today. Whilst this interpretative challenge is always present, it is perhaps most acute when we look to those fantastic creatures of the imagination – the legendary beasts, hybrids and semi-humans who populate the margins of the imagined medieval world with seemingly little differentiation from the people and beasts who could be encountered daily in town, village or, indeed, monastic life. It is to these we shall now turn, before addressing their place in the one part of the British Isles which we have not yet visited, a geographically and ideologically ‘marginal’ place in the Middle Ages, in which England and its influence was arguably most contentiously felt: Ireland.

In chapter 4 we have already seen how widespread the motif of the seductive bird/fish-woman hybrid is, yet an even more commonly represented fantastic creature on misericords is the Wild Man, otherwise known as a wodehouse or wodewose, whose human form is covered in coarse, shaggy hair. A popular motif of both ecclesiastical and domestic medieval art throughout Europe, more than forty Wild Men survive on English misericords, where they are often depicted alongside – and sometimes fighting – dragons or lions.