Green children of Woolpit
Eventually, they learned to eat other food and lost their green colour, but the boy was sickly and died around the time of his and his sister's baptism.
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 extraterrestrial, or it presents a real event in a garbled manner.
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.
He also argues that while Ralph was based approximately 40 kilometres (25 miles) from Woolpit, William "recorded it virtually from the other side of England",[5] making it even more unlikely that the former would have had any reason to copy from the latter.
[6] John Clark has suggested that it is possible that Richard de Calne was the source for both writers, and that, while William was the more distant, he was likely to have had contacts with the Augustinian Thetford Abbey.
[19] Twentieth-century scholars of folklore such as Charles Oman noted that one element of the children's accounts, the entry into a different reality by way of a cave, seems to have been quite popular.
The medieval historian Gerald of Wales tells a similar story of a boy, a truant from school, who "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".
[21] Madej has similarly argued that the tale of the Green Children was part of a popular skein of imagination, "originating in the territories of England and Wales, that of passing through a cave to another world".
Although there are differing stories, a common motif is that they are left or taken to die in the woods—often identified as Wayland Wood or Thetford Forest—after being poisoned with arsenic by their uncle.
This version of the story was known to local author and folk singer Bob Roberts, who says in his 1978 book A Slice of Suffolk "I was told there are still people in Woolpit who are 'descended from the green children', but nobody would tell me who they were!
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, which draws on William of Newburgh's account.
Disoriented, bewildered, speaking no English and dressed in unfamiliar Flemish clothes, the children would have presented a very strange spectacle to the Woolpit villagers.
Harris believed that the children's colour could be explained by hypochromic anemia (also known as chlorosis or green sickness), the result of a dietary deficiency.
[37] In a follow-up article, John Clark drew attention to some problems with Harris’s use of the historical evidence, and remained unconvinced by the identification of the children as Flemings or their colour as due to green sickness.
[38] Brian Haughton describes Harris's hypothesis as "the most widely accepted explanation at present" and maintains that it "certainly suggests plausible answers to many of the riddles of the Woolpit mystery".
For instance, he suggests it is unlikely that an educated man like Richard de Calne would not have recognised the language spoken by the children as being Flemish.
"[41] 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.
[45] Geoffrey's history offers accounts of previous kings and kingdoms of various ethnic identities, whereas William's England is one in which all peoples are either assimilated or pushed to the boundaries.
The Green Children resurface in another story that William had been unable to tell, one in which English paninsular dominion becomes a troubled assumption rather than a foregone conclusion.
[51] Often a reaction to the trauma of the Anarchy, Clarke says, Newburgh's musings on the fantastic all combine the common theme of "normal experience disturbed by something which cannot be fully reached or grasped through reason".
[53] Carl Watkins has commented on the demonization, literally and figuratively, of the girl in William's account,[54] while James Plumtree has viewed the narratives as twelfth century historiographic digressions "that permits a didactic theological exegesis".
[55] The story reappeared in the early modern period with the first printed edition of William of Newburgh's Historia rerum Anglicarum in the late 16th century.
[59] 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.
[61] Prynne never acknowledges this directly, however, merely alluding to it tangentially in his epigraph, a "fairly free rendering", says critic N. H. Reeve, of William of Newburgh's Latin text:[62] The sun does not rise upon our countrymen; our land is little cheered by its beams; we are contented with that twilight, which, among you, precedes the sun-rise, or follows the sun-set.
[63] In 1996 English poet Glyn Maxwell wrote a verse play based on the story of the green children, Wolfpit (the earlier name for Woolpit[9]), which was performed by the Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in that year.
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.
