The legend of the green children of Woolpit concerns two children of unusual skin colour who

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, sometime in the 12th century, perhaps during the reign of King Stephen (r. 1135 to 1154). The children, found to be brother and sister, were of generally normal appearance except for the green colour of their skin. They spoke in an unknown language and would eat only raw broad beans. Eventually, they learned to eat other food and lost their green colour, but the boy was sickly and died soon after his sister was baptized. The girl adjusted to her new life, but she was considered to be "very wanton and impudent". After she learned to speak English, the girl explained that she and her brother had come from a land where the sun never shone, and the light was like twilight. According to one version of the story, she said that everything there was green; according to another, she said it was called Saint Martin's Land.

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 two works from the early 17th century, Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy and Bishop Francis Godwin's fantastical The Man in the Moone. 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. The story was praised as an ideal fantasy by the English anarchist poet and critic Herbert Read in his English Prose Style, first published in 1928, and provided the inspiration for his only novel, The Green Child, published in 1935.

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 to 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 Cistercian Coggeshall Abbey 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 Historian rerum Anglicarum (c. 1189) is based on "reports from a number of trustworthy sources"; Ralph, writing his Chronicum Anglicanum in the 1220s, drew on the account of Sir Richard de Calne of Wykes, who supposedly sheltered the children in his manor house, six miles (10 km) north of Woolpit.

While it was common for medieval chroniclers to copy others' passages verbatim—often with little or no attribution—the accounts given by the two authors differ in some details. Michał Madej, of Jagiellonian University, does not believe that William or Ralph had seen the other's manuscripts when they told the story of the Green Children. 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", making it even more unlikely that the former would have had any reason to copy from the latter. Ralph, after all, names his sources, whereas William states he heard the tale from "unnamed persons". John Clark has suggested that it is possible that Richard de Calne was the...

LINK TO ARTICLE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_children_of_Woolpit

TAGS: Green children of Woolpit, Woolpit, Suffolk folklore, Medieval legends, Legendary English people, Forteana, Feral children, 12th century in England

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