The Green Children of Woolpit: Folklore, Fantasy or Fact?

  

North of London in the county of Suffolk sits the medieval village of St.  Mary of the Wolf-pits.  The village is equi-distant from the Channel coast and from the town of Bury St. Edmunds which is home to an abbey and a thriving monastic community.

St. Mary of the Wolf-pits could be described as rural; the type of place where nothing much has ever happened and where nothing much is likely to ever happen.  The village’s only claim to fame is the large “wolf-pits” for which it is named that ring the outskirts of the community.  The wolf-pits are six foot deep holes dug in fields around the town that are lined with stone and are designed to protect livestock and townspeople alike from the ferocious and marauding wolves who reside in the forest nearby and routinely venture near town looking for easy prey to devour.

It is not uncommon for the villagers to awake in the morning and go out to find a helpless wolf trapped in the deep hole, howling and struggling to get out.  When this happens, the townspeople promptly kill the hapless wolf and feel relieved for the moment that at least one more predator has been eliminated and that there is one less chance that a member of their flock of sheep, or a member of their family, will fall victim to a brutal, bloody and untimely death.

St. Mary of the Wolf-pits is a place where nothing much ever happens until one morning sometime around the year 1150, quite probably during the reign of King Stephen, when something decidedly unexpected and perhaps even other worldly occurs.

On this morning, some farmers set out into the fields, but before they begin their labor of reaping and sowing, just as they do every morning, they take a look inside the wolf-pits to see if they have inadvertently captured one of the beast’s of the forest which so besets their town with worry.

The farmers gaze over the edge of the pit, expecting to see a growling cur snarling and foaming at the mouth struggling to get up the stonewall, but what they see there in the six foot stone lined pit on this day is like nothing they have ever seen before.  What they see this day causes a huge crowd to gather around the wolf-pit and stare in amazement at what is trapped at the bottom.  The memory of this event will stay with the residents of St. Mary of the Wolf-pits for the rest of their lives.

Down at the bottom of the pit are two helpless children.  But these two children don’t look like any ordinary lost scared and frightened children--these two children are green!

There at the bottom of the wolf-pit are a young boy and girl, no more than eight years old, dressed in foreign clothes more suited for a fairytale than medieval farming.  The children are the color of the grass of the fields from head to foot and they are frantically mumbling in a language that none of the residents of St. Mary of the Wolf-pits has ever heard before.

Chroniclers will record these two children, a boy and a girl, as the green children of Woolpit England.  Over time the prosaic name of the St. Mary of the Wolf-pits will change to the much more commonplace sounding name of Woolpit, England, but the memory of the discovery of these two green children who seemingly dropped into that wolf-pit from out of thin air will stay with the townspeople forever.

The children are certainly strange.  Bewildered, the villagers pull the two seemingly alien green children up out of the wolf-pit and take them to stay at the large manor home of Sir Richard de Calne, located about 7 miles distant from the town of St. Mary of the Wolf-pits.

Sir Richard takes the children unders his wing.  He monitors their health and attempts to ensure that they grow into responsible upstanding adults.  When the green children first arrive at de Calne’s manor they refuse all offers of food.  For days neither the boy nor the girl touch a single morsel of anything edible.  Sir Richard is near the brink of despair and fears that the strange children will starve to death, until he offers them some beans, or dried peas, and the green children greedily eat of these.

Over the course of time under de Calne’s tutelage the girl, who is the slightly older of the two, will learn English.  The boy, just a toddler, is sickly and weak.  Although, within a few month’s his sister’s skin will lose most of its green hue, the boy’s remains green.  The two children will grow more and more accustomed to other foods and soon eat a more varied diet than just the dried peas and legumes that they at first seemed so fond of.  

Only several weeks after their discovery, the children will be taken to the nearby church at Bury St. Edmunds to be baptized.  Tragically, only days after being baptized, the little boy will die.

The girl will go on to live out her adolescence in Richard de Calne’s home as a servant and be given the name Agnes.  De Calne will later report that the girl’s behavior was impudent and even rude, but no one ever doubts her intelligence and lucidity.

Agnes will go on to live a full life, even marrying a royal civil officer.  As an older adult she will say that she came, “from a place called St. Martin’s Land where everything is green>”

Agnes will further go on to relate, in adulthood, that one day she and her brother were tending cattle in their father’s fields in their native “St. Martin’s Land” when they wandered into a cave.  She reported that they went inside the cave a few steps, heard a loud noise like thunder, saw a flash of bright light, and then inexplicably ended up at the bottom of the wolf-pit in St. Mary of the Wolf Pits.

        The story of the green children of Woolpit England survives today due largely to two contemporary chronicles of the 12th and 13th centuries.  The first of these is by a monk named William of Newburgh.  It is called “Historia Rerum Anglicarum” and dates from the year 1189.  This source, though not being the most detailed of sources, is interesting because it is the source most contemporary to the events recorded and also because it reports the appearance of the two green children as having occurred sometime during the reign of King Stephen.

The second contemporary source that reports on the case of the green children of Woolpit is Ralph of Coggleshell’s “Chronicon Anglicanum” which dates from the year 1220.  And although  Coggleshell’s retelling of the event is much farther removed in time from the appearance of the green children, it is also much more detailed.  It is from Ralph of Coggleshell’s manuscript that we get the words of Agnes and also the information that the two children spent their time under the care of Richard de Calne.  Interestingly, neither chronicle speculates on where the children came from, what could have caused them to be green, or whether the story is true at all.  Both William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggleshell, two respected monk’s from the area of Woolpit, report the events surrounding the appearance of the green children as verbatim fact.

So what, or who, were the two green children of Woolpit and how did they suddenly appear at the bottom of a large hole in a strange land?  Are we to take Agnes at her word or could the Green Children of Woolpit have been something else entirely?

          It is possible that the Green Children of Woolpit never existed at all.  Perhaps, both Agnes and her brother are simply some sort of folktale, one that became married to a specific place and time (in this case the town of Woolpit England sometime around the year 1150) and never left.     Perhaps, the green children were simply used at the time as a morality or lesson tale such as “Little Red Riding Hood” to try and explain events that seemed inexplicable to local residents of the time period.  This is called the folktale theory behind the case of the Green Children of Woolpit.

The folktale theory is a good one and an intriguing one, but it leaves us with one more nagging question to answer.  If the story of the Green Children of Woolpit is a folktale meant simply to explain some event front the distant past to the residents of Suffolk County England, one which probably circulated orally for hundreds of years before first being written down by William of Newburgh in 1189--what was the event that the story of the green children was meant to explain?

In many ways attributing the tale of the Green Children of Woolpit to folklore leaves us today with more questions than answers.  For example, some today would claim that the story of the Green Children of Woolpit is meant to describe an encounter by people of the 13th century with UFO’s or alien beings,  Is this possible, probably not, but it cannot be completely discounted by merely attributing the story of the green children to folklore.

There is one more possible explanation for what happened in Woolpit England sometime around the year 1150.  It is possible that the appearance of the green children was a real event, but that over time its retelling became somehow garbled and the true explanation of who the green children of Woolpit actually were became lost to time.

During the second half of the twelfth century many Welsh immigrants moved into the south of England seeking employment and a better life.  Most of them fell into a sort of quasi-slavery or indentured servittute.  These Welsh immigrants lived on the fringes of English settlements, often very far from the center of town, and they survived in abject poverty on a bare subsistence level.  Most of them would have been accustomed to eating seeds, raw beans and unprocessed cereal grains just as the two green children of Woolpit are recorded as having taken such a liking to.  Also, it is highly possible that Agnes and her brother might have been suffering from a vitamin deficiency called Chlorosis that causes the skin to take on a greenish hue, but which also goes away over time with a more proper diet.

Most likely, the Green Children of Woolpit, were simply two small children who wandered away from home and spoke only Welsh.  In the dark they most likely fell into one of the six foot deep Wolf-Pits that St, Mary of the Wolf-Pits was named for and were unable to get out.  In the morning, the two diseased, starving and lost children were discovered by the local residents who only spoke English and were unable to understand anything the children said.   In the 12th century, at a time before home addresses, and in an era when few people ever travelled beyond the narrow confine of their native town or village, Agnes and her brother were lost from their home forever and sadly became recorded to history as the Green Children of Woolpit.

Or maybe the words of Agnes are just as true as the event recorded by the 12th century chroniclers and the Green Children of Woolpit really did come from some place, somewhere called St. Martin’s Land where everything, including themselves, was green...