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 the only food they would eat was 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". After she learned to speak English, the girl explained that she and
her brother had come from St Martin's Land, an underground 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, and in Bishop Francis Godwin's fantastical The Man in the
Moone, 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 one beneath our feet 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 7 miles 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 and William of Newburgh, 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 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 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, who reportedly gave the green children refuge in his manor, 6 miles to
the north of Woolpit. The accounts given by the two authors differ in some
details. Story
One day at harvest time, according to William of Newburgh during the reign of
King Stephen, the villagers of Woolpit discovered two children, a brother and
sister, beside one of the wolf pits that gave the village its name. 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 beans, which they consumed eagerly.
The children gradually adapted to normal food and in time lost their green
colour. 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 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.
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 from Woolpit, where she was still living shortly before he
wrote. 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.
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.
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". In a few early as well as modern
readings, this other world is extraterrestrial, and the green children
alien beings. The second is that it is a garbled account of a real event,
although it is impossible to be certain whether the story as recorded is an
authentic report given by the children or an "adult invention". 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". 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.
= Folkloristic and extraterrestrial explanations=
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". 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". 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". 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." 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!"
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. 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.
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, published posthumously in 1638.
= 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. The children's
colour could be explained by green sickness, the result of a dietary
deficiency. Brian Haughton considers Harris's explanation to be plausible,
and the one most widely accepted, 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. 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 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. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen proposes that the
story is about racial difference, and "allows William to write obliquely about
the Welsh": 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 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".
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. But the children also
embody the earlier inhabitants of the British Isles, the "Welsh 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." 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".
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". It was the inspiration for his only novel, The Green Child, written in
1934. A 1994 adaptation of the story by Kevin Crossley-Holland tells it from the
point of view of the green girl. 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. 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. It therefore seems that Macklin's story
is an invention inspired by the green children of Woolpit, particularly as
there is no record of any Spanish village called Banjos.
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 titular 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". 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. In 2002 English poet
Glyn Maxwell wrote a verse play based on the story of the green children,
Wolfpit, 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.
Notes and references Notes
References Bibliography
Further reading Lunan, Duncan, Children from the Sky,
Mutus Liber, ISBN 978-1-908097-05-7 External links
The Mystery of the Green Children of Woolpit, an extensive article on the
green children mystery on Brian Haughton's website.