Village sign depicting the two green
children, erected in 1977[1]
The legend of the green children
of Woolpit concerns two children of unusual skin colour who reportedly
appeared in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England, some time in the 12th century,
perhaps during the reign of King Stephen.
The children, brother and sister, were of generally normal appearance except
for the green colour of their skin. They spoke in an unknown language, and
would only eat raw broad beans. Eventually
they learned to eat other food and lost their green pallor, but the boy was
sickly and died soon after he and his sister were baptised. The girl adjusted
to her new life, but she was considered to be "rather loose and wanton in
her conduct".[2] After she learned to speak English, the
girl explained that she and her brother had come from Saint Martin's Land, a
subterranean world inhabited by green people.
The only near-contemporary accounts
are contained in William of Newburgh's
Historia rerum Anglicarum and Ralph of Coggeshall's
Chronicum Anglicanum, written in about 1189 and 1220 respectively.
Between then and their rediscovery in the mid-19th century, the green children
seem to surface only in a passing mention in William Camden's Britannia in 1586,[1] and in Bishop Francis Godwin's fantastical The Man in the Moone,[3] in both of which William of Newburgh's
account is cited.
Two approaches have dominated
explanations of the story of the green children: that it is a folktale describing an imaginary encounter with
the inhabitants of another world, perhaps subterranean or even
extraterrestrial, or it is a garbled account of a historical event. The story
was praised as an ideal fantasy by the English anarchist poet and critic Herbert Read in his English Prose Style,
published in 1931. It provided the inspiration for his only novel, The Green Child, written in 1934.
Sources
The village of Woolpit is in the county of Suffolk, East Anglia, about seven miles
(11 km) east of the town of Bury St Edmunds. During the Middle Ages it
belonged to the Abbey of Bury St
Edmunds, and was part of one of the most densely populated areas in
rural England. Two writers, Ralph of Coggeshall
(died c. 1226) and William of Newburgh
(c. 1136–1198), reported on the sudden and unexplained arrival in the
village of two green children during one summer in the 12th century. Ralph was
the abbot of a Cistercian monastery at Coggeshall, about 26 miles (42 km) south of
Woolpit. William was a canon at the Augustinian Newburgh Priory, far to the north in Yorkshire. William states that the account given
in his Historia rerum Anglicarum (c. 1189) is based on
"reports from a number of trustworthy sources"; Ralph's account in
his Chronicum Anglicanum, written some time during the 1220s,
incorporates information from Sir Richard de Calne of Wykes,[a] who reportedly gave the green children
refuge in his manor, six miles (9.7 km) to the north of Woolpit. The
accounts given by the two authors differ in some details.[1]
Story
One day at harvest time, according
to William of Newburgh during the reign of King Stephen (1135–1154),[1] the villagers of Woolpit discovered two
children, a brother and sister, beside one of the wolf pits that gave the village its name.[4][b] Their skin was green, they spoke an
unknown language, and their clothing was unfamiliar. Ralph reports that the
children were taken to the home of Richard de Calne. Ralph and William agree
that the pair refused all food for several days until they came across some raw
broad beans, which they consumed eagerly.[c] The children gradually adapted to
normal food and in time lost their green colour.[1] The boy, who appeared to be the younger
of the two, became sickly and died shortly after he and his sister were
baptised.
After learning to speak English, the
children – Ralph says just the surviving girl – explained that they
came from a land where the sun never shone and the light was like twilight.
William says the children called their home St Martin's Land; Ralph adds that
everything there was green. According to William, the children were unable to
account for their arrival in Woolpit; they had been herding their father's
cattle when they heard a loud noise (according to William, the bells of Bury St
Edmunds[9]) and suddenly found themselves by the
wolf pit where they were found. Ralph says that they had become lost when they
followed the cattle into a cave and, after being guided by the sound of bells,
eventually emerged into our land.[1]
According to Ralph, the girl was
employed for many years as a servant in Richard de Calne's household, where she
was considered to be "very wanton and impudent". William says that
she eventually married a man from King's Lynn, about 40 miles (64 km) from
Woolpit, where she was still living shortly before he wrote.[1] Based on his research into Richard de
Calne's family history, the astronomer and writer Duncan Lunan has concluded that the girl was
given the name "Agnes" and that she married a royal official named Richard Barre.[10]
Explanations
Neither Ralph of Coggeshall nor
William of Newburgh offer an explanation for the "strange and
prodigious" event, as William calls it, and some modern historians have
the same reticence: "I consider the process of worrying over the
suggestive details of these wonderfully pointless miracles in an effort to find
natural or psychological explanations of what 'really,' if anything, happened,
to be useless to the study of William of Newburgh or, for that matter, of the
Middle Ages", says Nancy Partner, author of a study of 12th-century
historiography.[11] Nonetheless, such explanations
continue to be sought and two approaches have dominated explanations of the
mystery of the green children. The first is that the narrative descends from folklore, describing an imaginary encounter with
the inhabitants of a "fairy Otherworld".[1] In a few early[1] as well as modern readings, this other
world is extraterrestrial, and the green children alien beings.[10] The second is that it is a garbled
account of a real event,[1] although it is impossible to be certain
whether the story as recorded is an authentic report given by the children or
an "adult invention".[12] His study of accounts of children and
servants fleeing from their masters led Charles Oman to conclude that
"there is clearly some mystery behind it all [the story of the green
children], some story of drugging and kidnapping".[13] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen offers a
different kind of historical explanation, arguing that the story is an oblique
account of the racial difference between the contemporary English and the indigenous Britons.[14]
Folklore
Scholars such as Charles Oman note
that one element of the children's account, the entry into a different reality
by way of a cave, seems to have been quite popular. Gerald of Wales tells a similar story of a boy
who, after escaping his master, "encountered two pigmies who led him
through an underground passage into a beautiful land with fields and rivers,
but not lit by the full light of the sun".[13] But the motif is
poorly attested; E. W. Baughman lists it as the only example of his F103.1
category of English and North American folk tale motifs:
"Inhabitants of lower world visit mortals, and continue to live with
them".[15] Martin Walsh considers the references
to St Martin to be significant, and sees the story of the green children as
evidence that the feast of Martinmas has its origins in an English
aboriginal past, of which the children's story forms "the lowest
stratum".[16] E. S. Alderson suggests a Celtic connection in a 1900 edition of Notes and Queries: " 'Green'
spirits are 'sinless' in Celtic literature and tradition ... It may be
more than a coincidence that the green girl marries a 'man of [Kings] Lynn.'
Here the original [Celtic word] would be lein, evil, i.e. the
pure fairy marries a sinful child of earth."[17]
In a modern development of the tale
the green children are associated with the Babes in the Wood, who were left by their wicked
uncle to die; in this version the children's green colouration is explained by
their having been poisoned with arsenic. Fleeing from the wood in which they
were abandoned, possibly nearby Thetford Forest, the children fell into the pits
at Woolpit where they were discovered. Local author and folk singer Bob Roberts
states in his 1978 book A Slice of Suffolk that "I was told there
are still people in Woolpit who are 'descended from the green children', but
nobody would tell me who they were!"[1]
Other commentators have suggested
that the children may have been aliens, or
inhabitants of a world beneath the Earth. In a 1996 article published in the
magazine Analog,
astronomer Duncan Lunan
hypothesised that the children were accidentally transported to Woolpit from
their home planet as the result of a "matter transmitter"
malfunction.[18] Lunan suggests that the planet from
which the children were expelled may be trapped in synchronous orbit around its sun, presenting the
conditions for life only in a narrow twilight zone between a fiercely hot
surface and a frozen dark side. He explains the children's green colouration as
a side effect of consuming the genetically modified alien plants eaten by the
planet's inhabitants.[10]
Lunan was not the first to state
that the green children may have been extraterrestrials. Robert Burton
suggested in his 1621 The Anatomy of
Melancholy that the green children "fell from Heaven",
an idea that seems to have been picked up by Francis Godwin, historian and Bishop of Hereford,
in his speculative fiction The Man in the Moone,[1] published posthumously in 1638.[19]
Historical
explanations
Many Flemish immigrants arrived in eastern England
during the 12th century, and they were persecuted after Henry II became
king in 1154; a large number of them were killed near Bury St Edmunds in 1173
at the Battle of Fornham
fought between Henry II and Robert
de Beaumont, 3rd Earl of Leicester. Paul Harris has suggested that
the green children's Flemish parents perished during a period of civil strife
and that the children may have come from the village of Fornham St Martin, slightly to the north of Bury
St Edmunds, where a settlement of Flemish fullers existed at that time. They may have fled
and ultimately wandered to Woolpit. Disoriented, bewildered, and dressed in
unfamiliar Flemish clothes, the children would have presented a very strange
spectacle to the Woolpit villagers.[20] The children's colour could be
explained by green sickness,
the result of a dietary deficiency.[1] Brian Haughton considers Harris's
explanation to be plausible, and the one most widely accepted,[21] although not without its difficulties.
For instance, he suggests it is unlikely that an educated local man like
Richard de Calne would not have recognised the language spoken by the children
as being Flemish.[22]
Historian Derek Brewer's explanation
is even more prosaic:
The likely core of the matter is
that these very small children, herding or following flocks, strayed from their
forest village, spoke little, and (in modern terms) did not know their own home
address. They were probably suffering from chlorosis, a deficiency disease
which gives the skin a greenish tint, hence the term "green sickness".
With a better diet it disappears.[23]
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen proposes that
the story is about racial difference, and "allows William to write
obliquely about the Welsh":[24] the green children are a memory of
England's past and the violent conquest of the indigenous Britons by the Anglo-Saxons followed by the Norman invasion.
William of Newburgh reluctantly[25] includes the story of the green
children in his account of a largely unified England, which Cohen juxtaposes
with Geoffrey of Monmouth's
The
History of the Kings of Britain, a book that according to William
is full of "gushing and untrammeled lying".[26] Geoffrey's history offers accounts of
previous kings and kingdoms of various racial identities, whereas William's
England is one in which all peoples are either assimilated or pushed to the
boundaries. According to Cohen, the green children represent a dual intrusion
into William's unified vision of England. On one hand they are a reminder of
the racial and cultural differences between Normans and Anglo-Saxons, given the
children's claim to have come from St Martin's Land, named after Martin of Tours; the only other time William
mentions that saint is in reference to St Martin's Abbey in Hastings, which commemorates the Norman victory
in 1066.[27] But the children also embody the
earlier inhabitants of the British Isles, the "Welsh (and Irish and Scots)
who [had been] forcibly anglicized ... The Green Children resurface
another story that William had been unable to tell, one in which English
paninsular dominion becomes a troubled assumption rather than a foregone
conclusion."[14] The boy in particular, who dies rather
than become assimilated, represents "an adjacent world that cannot be
annexed ... an otherness that will perish to endure".[28]
Legacy
The English anarchist poet and critic Herbert Read describes the story of the green
children in his English Prose Style, published in 1931, as "the
norm to which all types of fantasy should conform".[29] It was the inspiration for his only
novel, The Green Child,
written in 1934.[30] A 1994 adaptation of the story by Kevin Crossley-Holland
tells it from the point of view of the green girl.[1]
Author John Macklin includes an
account in his 1965 book, Strange Destinies, of two green children who
arrived in the Spanish village of Banjos in 1887.[1] Many details of the story very closely
resemble the accounts given of the Woolpit children, such as the name of Ricardo
de Calno, the mayor of Banjos who befriends the two children, strikingly
similar to Richard de Calne.[31] It therefore seems that Macklin's
story is an invention inspired by the green children of Woolpit,[1] particularly as there is no record of
any Spanish village called Banjos.[31]
Australian novelist and poet Randolph Stow uses the account of the green
children in his 1980 novel The Girl Green as Elderflower; the green girl
is the source for the title character, here a blond girl with green eyes. The
green children become a source of interest to the main character, Crispin
Clare, along with some other characters from the Latin accounts of William of
Newburgh, Gervase of Tilbury, and others, and Stow includes translations from
those texts: these characters "have histories of loss and dispossession
that echo [Clare's] own".[24] The green children are the subject of
a 1990 community opera performed by children and adults, composed by Nicola LeFanu with a libretto written by Kevin Crossley-Holland.[32] In 2002 English poet Glyn Maxwell wrote a verse play
based on the story of the green children, Wolfpit (the earlier name for
Woolpit[33]), which was performed once in New York City. In Maxwell's version the girl
becomes an indentured servant to the lord of the manor, until a stranger named
Juxon buys her freedom and takes her to an unknown destination.[34]
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