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". 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, 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 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.
Story
One day at harvest time, according to William of Newburgh during the
reign of King Stephen (1135–1154), 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 broad 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 (according to William, the bells of
Bury St Edmunds) 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 (64 km) 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.
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". 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."
Illustration of the abandoned Babes in the Wood by Randolph Caldecott, 1879
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.
Painting by Konstantin Makovsky (edited), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons - Source
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.
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 (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." 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 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". 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 (the earlier name for Woolpit), 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.
SOURCE: Wikipedia
