To give you an idea of the type of book it comes out of, it is an article in Brian Haughton's Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries, in which he also provides articles regarding The Real Robin Hood, Troy, Atlantis, The Dead Sea Scrolls, The Queen of Sheba, etc. I just think it's interesting so I'm going to provide some excerpts below.
"During the troubled reign of king Stephen of England (1135-1154), there was a strange occurrence in the village of Woolpit, Near Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk. At harvest time, while the reapers were working in the fields, two young children emerged from deep ditches excavated to trap wolves... The children, a boy and a girl, had skin tinged with a green hue, and wore clothes of a strange color, made from unfamiliar materials. They wandered around bewildered for a few minutes, before being taken by the reapers to the village... They broke into tears and for some days refused to eat the bread and other food that was brought to them. But when recently harvested beans, with their stalks still attached, were brought in, the starving children made signs that they desperately wanted to eat them. However, when the children took the beans they opened the stalks rather than the pods, and finding nothing inside, began weeping again After they had been shown how to obtain the beans, the children survived on this food for many months until they acquired a taste for bread...The boy...sickened and died. But the girl adjusted to her new life, and was baptized. Her skin gradually lost its original green color and she became a healthy young woman. She learned the English language and afterward married a man at King's Lynn...
"The two original sources are both from the 12th century. The first is William of Newburgh (1136-1198), an English historian and monk, from Yorkshire...The other source is Ralph of Coggeshall (died c. 1228), who was the sixth abbot of Coggeshall Abbey in Essex from 1207-1218."
Haughton lists some explanations that have been put forward for the enigma of the Green Children, that the children:
- originated from a hidden world inside the earth, that they had somehow stepped through a door from a parallel dimension
- were aliens accidentally arrived on Earth
- were the children in the Babes in the Wood folktale (first published in Norwich in 1595), except in this version (and therefore in reality), they survived an attempted arsenic poisoning by the medieval Norfolk earl
- were Flemish and lived in the village of Fornham St. Martin, and escaped to Woolpit when their parents were killed in the conflict. Their limited food supply caused them to develop chlorosis due to malnutrition. (Though there are many geographic and cultural issues that make this hypothesis unlikely)
"There are many aspect of the Woolpit tale that are found in English folk beliefs, and some see the Green Children as personifications of nature...Perhaps the children are related to the elves and fairies which, until a century or two ago, were believed in by many country folk. If the Green Children story is a fairytale, then it has the unusual twist of the girl never returning to her otherworldly home, but remaining married and living as a mortal...The color green has always been associated with the otherworld and the supernatural...Beans were said to be the food of the dead" (234-38).
Just an another tidbit for the stew of green-thinking.
1 comment:
Had you been here two years ago, you could have heard an excellent lecture in our Graduate Speakers Series about precisely these green children from Woolpit. Luckily, however, an article version of that talk has recently been published as a chapter in a book edited by its author, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. The book's entitled Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Island, Archipelago, England, and I have a copy, so if you want to read the article, just let me know.
Post a Comment