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Last night, @colindickey invited me to join him for @atlasobscura 's Monster of the Month talks. We chatted about the Green Children of Woolpit.
Here's the story: sometime in the twelfth century, two bewildered children, a boy and a girl, speaking an incomprehensible language, were picked up in a field near Woolpit, a Suffolk town, and taken to a local knight to be exhibited as a wonder.
For, despite being otherwise typically shaped children, their skin had a greenish tint. They refused all food but beans, but, as they came to eat our food, their skin gradually became ruddy.
Depending on which of the two sources you read, the boy and girl were baptized, learned English, and told the story of their homeland and how they came to ours, or just the girl did. In both accounts, the boy wastes away and dies.
William of Newburgh, one of the historians, has them say that there were tending their father's livestock, when they heard a bell, and suddenly found themselves in our world.
They call their world St Martin's Land, after the saint they revere, and from their country, bathed continually in twilight, they can see a glowing land over a river: perhaps that's ours?
Scholars of varying abilities have done much with the story: they have read it as a Christian or political allegory. Perhaps the writers are worried about heresy, and the children, and other wonders, represent threats to the normative Christian body politic.
Perhaps the children represent the repressed memory of the conquered Bretons. Perhaps the children are Vikings (?!), or orphaned survivors of a pogrom of Flemish immigrants, perhaps from the Antipodes, or the Moon, or Mars, or from a gravitationally locked planet far away.
Diagnoses of their greenish skin aren't infrequent either: perhaps secondary anemia, hypochronic anaemia, or chlorosis. Are they fairies?
Maybe: Gerald of Wales has a story about vegetarian little people who come from a cave, and the other Green Children chronicler, Ralph of Coggeshill, likewise has the children emerge from a cave, having followed first their cattle, and then the sound of a bell.
Ralph's account is important for another reason: he actually cares about the children.
Much of the scholarship has been so concerned with the greenness of the children that it's forgotten that it's a story about lost children, cut off from their family and homeland, unable to speak the local language, unable to tolerate its food.
Ralph speaks of them crying as they're taken away to be exhibited, crying as they wait for their precious beans, the boy wasting away, perhaps from sorrow, and of their terror during their last desperate attempt to find the cave entrance, "donec ab eis comprehenderentur."
There's another political allegory, inevitably, in the story of these terrified, captured children. For the whole story, with notes, see my post here: https://medievalkarl.com/blog/the-green-children-of-woolpit/
