The Lost Youth of St. Martin's Land, or Woolpit's Green Children

In this installment, we finally retire from France and from ancient Palestine to the cold and misty environs of England in the Middle Ages. This is a ubiquitous story in some senses. One cannot seem to search the Internet for historical mysteries or strange occurrences in the past without turning up a "listicle" that features this tale in a prominent position. It has been touted as proof of alien contact by many who see in the tale a rather cinematic account of literal little green men, and held up by others as evidence of a mysterious subterranean race. But first and foremost, it has been considered an exemplary account of otherworldly visitation, in the sense of fairytales about a “Otherworld”…hence its evaluation in most historical circles as nothing more than colorful folklore.

The story did not actually reach a wide audience until 1850, when Thomas Keightley compiled a translation of it in his second edition of Fairy Mythology. Previous to Keightley, the story had mostly been read in its original Latin, through its two original 12th century sources: Historia rerum Anglicarum by William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall’s Chronicon Anglicanum. But after Keightley brought the story to the attention of the 19th century English-speaking world, it spread through reprinting and inclusion in many compendiums of British folk tales and fairy lore and even made its way into regional guidebooks. It is perhaps not surprising then that the story ranged so widely in the Age of Information, as it seems to have managed a respectable level of virality long before it even became common to think of stories as spreading like infections.  Of course, if we are to give such a popular tale serious consideration, we cannot take it as it has come down to us through centuries of the telephone game… rather, we must seek out the original sources, which surprisingly, treat the story as a true though mysterious incident, not a fanciful account of imaginary happenings. 

The first published work mentioning this strange incident is Historia Rerum Anglicarum, or The History of English Affairs by an Augustinian canon named William at Yorkshire’s Newburgh Priory, a work produced around 1198. Next it appeared sometime in the 1220s in Chronicon Anglicanum, or the English Chronicle of Ralph of Coggeshall, the abbot of little north Essex Cistercian monastery, but Ralph’s account had been compiled over the course of decades, including information from first-hand sources that could only have been gathered prior to 1188, so it can actually be surmised that Ralph’s account is at least cotemporaneous with William’s and perhaps predates it. Both tell the story of a small village in County Suffolk, East Anglia, by the name of Woolpit. This was an exceedingly fertile region in the Middle Ages, and thus well-populated, with a market town, Bury St. Edmunds, not far from the village in question, and connected by a network of trails and roads to other towns, such as Wyke and Lynn, so it was not such an isolated hamlet that any visitors would have been gawped at as alien. The village appears to have taken its name from a certain geographical feature, ancient ditches referred to as wolf-pits, which many assume to have been actual baited traps for the catching of wolves, and which some have suggested may have been engineered by Romans. It is in one of these pits, that our story begins, on a day during the harvest season, which judging from the mention in the story of beans being brought in from the fields we can presume was a summer day, that crop being gathered typically in July. The year itself may be unknown, but William of Newburgh tells us it happened during the reign of King Stephen, placing it between 1135 and 1154. 

William of Newburgh, via Wikimedia Commons

On this summer’s day, harvesters at work in the fields noticed two strange children emerging from the pit, a boy and a girl. This in itself may not have drawn their eyes as being out of the ordinary, but even a brief glance at them was enough to bewilder the villagers, for these children did not look exactly human. They had heads and arms and legs, all right, everything in proportion and faces with typical features… but their skin was of a verdant green color, and their clothing was of an unrecognizable style, in colors so strange they defied description. When the harvesters approached them, they seemed afraid, acting skittish. They spoke, but it was in no language the villagers of Woolpit recognized. Concerned for the children’s welfare, the villagers conducted them to the nearby manor of a knight, Sir Richard of Calne, in Wyke. There they were given food, but they refused everything, despite appearing famished, as though every dish offered them was unpalatable, or even inedible. By chance, some fresh-cut beanstalks were brought in, and the Green Children sprang at them ravenously, seeming to recognize something they could eat, although clearly they were unfamiliar with them, for they tore open the stalks at first, not realizing the beans would be found in the pods. These broad beans were the only thing they would eat for some time, but one daring taste at a time during the long weeks and months after their discovery, they tried other food and eventually acclimated to a normal English diet. As time went on, their skin slowly lost its greenish color, and they were baptized. After this, the girl, at least, grew healthier, but the boy became ill and died.

Not only did the girl learn to eat a variety of foods, but she also learned to understand English and express herself to her benefactors.  So, years after appearing in the wolves’ pits with her brother, it is said she explained to the knight, Sir Richard, where they had come from. It was a land where everyone and everything was of a lush green color, where the sun never fully shone, being lit by a perpetual misty twilight. She and her brother, out tending their family’s cattle, followed the herd into some caverns, where they had become lost. Hearing the peal of bells, they followed the sound and emerged from the caves into the bright sun of our world.

Ralph and William’s stories differ in some regards. For example, William of Newburgh says that she called her home country St. Martin’s Land, claiming that everyone there venerated that saint, a major figure in Western monasticism whose November feast day, a harvest festival, has been compared with Halloween. Though this was a misty and twilit realm, across a great river, William reported, inhabitants could see a bright land. William’s version of the story also omitted the cavern, having the children simply appear in our world after hearing the clamor of bells. According to Ralph of Coggeshall, she had become a servant in the knight’s household when she told her story, and she had turned into something of a “wanton and impudent” young woman, whereas William reported that she went on to marry a man from the nearby town of Lynn, where she was known to be living just before he had written his account.

Ralph of Coggeshall's Chronicon Anglicanum, via the British Library

The disagreements in these accounts serve to support the historical consensus that the story of the Green Children of Woolpit is nothing more than a folktale, passed from person to person and evolving during the course of its transmission. One folklorist even asserts that it must have been a traditional tale long before Ralph and William set it down in writing, though evidence of its previous existence is lacking (Clark, “Small, Vulnerable ETs”). Nevertheless, some of the earliest appraisals of the story reached a similar conclusion. In his 1586 work Brittania, William Camden called it a “prety…tale,” suggesting the children were “of Satyrs kinde” who had come “from the Antipodes.” Today we might take the term satyr as meaning a mythological creature, but to Camden it surely meant something more along the lines of a wild man. And if we take the Green children as wild foundlings, there certainly are parallels here to other, more recent stories of feral children. Think, for example, back to my episodes on Kaspar Hauser, the Child of Europe. When he slouched into Nuremberg with his note, he refused all food except bread and water, displaying a seemingly genuine physical aversion to it, as though his system could not process it, but eventually, as his mind learned to communicate, his body learned to accept meat and other foods. But of course, Kaspar Hauser did not speak an unknown language or wear clothing of an unrecognizable manufacture or have an unusual skin color. There is, however, a common depiction in ancient art of a wild man that is sometimes thought to be green and has even come to be known as the Green Man. This figure, known as a foliate head for the consistent detail of leaves worn in his hair, is quite common in medieval church carvings (Centerwall). Although some have argued that the Green Man may not be green, as most depictions of him lack color, he appears to be variously shown as either entirely hirsute, with hair all over his body, or as being covered, almost clothed, in foliage, and thus green. Could it be possible that the story of the Green Children is just a garbled folktale about two young foliate heads being integrated into the civilized world?

In searching England’s murky past for other examples of green people, some have looked to the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, penned by an unknown poet sometime in the 14th century. In this tale, Sir Gawain, a young knight of the Round Table, accepts the challenge of a knight who appears all in green, riding a green horse. While later in the poem, the knight’s identity is revealed, some have suggested the Green Knight is meant to seem a wild man or foliate head, a Green Man combatant, as some might designate him, but in the poem, all take him to be a “aluisch mon” or elvish man (Puhvel 225). The challenge this Green Knight poses is to strike him now upon the understanding and acceptance that he would return the stroke in a year’s time. Gawain nearly severs the Green Knight’s head, but the knight merely picks it up and rides away, reminding Gawain to meet him in a year at the Green Chapel. This Gawain sets out to do, and on his way to his appointment with the elvish knight, he encounters a mist that readers of the poem might take to represent a passage to the Otherworld, for this is a recognizable motif in medieval Celtic tales of men passing into the realm of the fairy (Puhvel 226; Patch 627). In the poem, the Green Knight ends up being a mortal in disguise, teaching Gawain a lesson, but the elements present suggest that there was a tradition connecting elvish kind with the color green, if not with the foliate heads, and their realm lay obscured by magical mists. Thus could not the Green Children tale be a part of that tradition, being foliate-head elves or fairies from a land of twilit mists? A further element of their story that aligns with this interpretation has to do with their aversion to human food, for indeed, it is motif in fairy mythology that fairies hold the eating of mortal food as a taboo (Clark, “Martin and the Green Children” 211)

Original image from the manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, artist unknown, via Wikimedia Commons

If we then return to Camden’s Brittania, we see that he seems unsure whether the Green Children should be considered wild foundlings or visitors from the Antipodes, which would appear to be two very different things. We must then consider what “the Antipodes” might mean, what kind of place it is and how one would reach a little Suffolk village from there. Originally, the idea of the Antipodes was the notion of the other side of the earth, a kind of anti-earth, an upside down world, and a notion that evolved with our changing understanding of the shape of our world. Therefore when children dig a hole in their backyards and expect to emerge in China, they are in effect attempting to tunnel to the Antipodes. The Antipodes had long been thought to be inhabited, but as our conception of the earth changed, so did our ideas of the Antipodes and those who called it home. Whereas previously it was a kind of polar opposite zone, it became caught up with ideas of the Underworld and the Land of the Dead. And in the Middle Ages, it became a place of monsters and inhuman creatures. Thus it took no stretch of the imagination to conflate this Underworld with the Otherworld of fairy mythology. Specifically in Celtic lore, the Otherworld is often seen as being below ground, inside a hill or mountain (Patch 612). For a further example, consider the Irish Gaelic tradition of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the fair folk, or fairies, who dwelt beneath cairns and barrows. Thus we see that Camden’s assessment of the Green Children being of the satyr kind and being visitors from the Antipodes both can be interpreted as suggestions that they should be viewed as fairies, and the account of their appearance little more than a pretty fairytale.

However, not everyone who considered it thought that the idea of an inhabited underworld was purely the stuff of fantasy. Some even made of this notion a credible—or seemingly credible—scientific theory. In the late 1600s, an English natural philosopher and polymath named Edmund Halley proposed a radical new conception of the earth’s structure: that it was hollow. Halley is remembered today mostly for the comet that bears his name, but in his time, he was an authority on astronomy and gravitation second only perhaps to Isaac Newton. In fact, his theory of a hollow earth derived from Newton’s own calculations of the density of both the earth and the moon, a calculation that it turns out was incorrect. But it helped Halley to explain a scientific mystery that he had been struggling with for years:  magnetic compass variations, or the gradual shifting of magnetic lines of declination that were of great importance in navigation. Halley had hypothesized that the earth must have four magnetic poles, but he could not explain them or their slow movement. In fact, he would spend a great deal of his life tracking this anomaly, even captaining a little single-deck, fifty foot ship that was frequently mistaken for a pirate vessel and sailing all over the world in his efforts to document these variations in compass readings. The idea of a hollow earth and within it another earth with its own, slower rotation accounted for the extra set of poles he had envisioned as well as their unusual movement. He even allowed that this inner earth may be populated, saying, “I have adventured to make these Subterranean orbs capable of being inhabited” and suggesting that some luminous material in the mineral roof over the region might provide the inhabitants some kind of half-light. It did not take long before contemporary writers drew a connection to the Green Children, and indeed, in 1691, before Halley had even published his major paper on the theory, one John Aubrey made the suggestion that the foundlings of Woolpit had merely been travelers from Halley’s inner Earth.

Halley's hollow earth schema, via BRANCH

The theory of the inhabited hollow earth became common fodder for writers of fantasy and science-fiction. And the story of the Green Children of Woolpit itself, even before Halley’s hollow earth ideas, had also become their fodder, with some speculative writers even suggesting, despite the details of the original accounts, that the children had arrived in the pit not from below, but rather from above. In 1621, a brief aside by Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy suggesting that the planets and the moon were inhabited and that the Green Children may have come from one of them seems to have inspired a contemporary by the name of Francis Godwin, who wrote about a Spaniard’s voyage to the moon (Clark, “Small, Vulnerable ETs”). Once there, the Spaniard encountered Lunar people with strange clothing and skin of an unrecognizable color. There he learned that when the moon men were unhappy with their children, perhaps because of some predisposition toward character faults, they sent them to earth, where they would eventually lose their strange color. Here again, we see the story evolving and spreading like folklore. Indeed, in this case it has taken on the elements of fairy stories regarding changelings, or fairy children sent to the world of man, although without the kidnapping and substitution of human children. Nor would this tendency toward an extra-terrestrial hypothesis fade away. Rather, it seems only to have grown as the tale entered the modern era. Duncan Lunan, for example, paints the picture of a human colony established by aliens on a planet whose hemispheres remain either in scorching direct sunlight or in darkness, such that only a narrow band of inhabitable land remains in perpetual twilight, where these human colonists sustain themselves on foods genetically modified by aliens, giving their skin an unusual color. To this explanation, Lunan adds interplanetary travel via matter-transmitting stargates, and a secret agreement between the Knights Templar and extra-terrestrials that resulted in “Templars using windpower, waterpower and methane digesters running on horse-dung, to charge up devices which let them walk between worlds,” and somewhere in the midst of all this, the Green Children getting lost and showing up in Woolpit. In short, a perfectly rational theory… at least for where it first appeared: the sci-fi magazine Analog.

All of this to progress the assertion that the Green Children of Woolpit was nothing more than a folktale set down by Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh. Indeed, the folktale appears to have never ceased spreading. For example, in 1965, John Macklin, in his book Strange Destinies, shares a remarkably similar story that clearly seems to just be a corruption of the original. According to Macklin, in 1887, field workers in a place called Banjos in Spain (a nonexistent place, as it turns out) discovered two green children in strange metallic clothing near a cave. Taken to the home of one Ricardo de Calno, a ridiculously obvious adaptation of Richard de Calne, the children refused to eat. The boy died but the girl ate beans and lived, her skin color changing, and the tale she told matches that of the Woolpit girl’s pretty well. This blatant retelling of the original tale spread widely itself, adapted into a song by 10,000 Maniacs and copied and pasted onto many a paranormal website until it seemed like a separate story from the original. This seems a perfect illustration of how folklore is transmitted, spreading and evolving orally at first, then put into print and spreading thereafter which each new slightly altered inclusion in a text, until finally in the Age of Information we see tales of the fantastical gone viral. Indeed, most studies of the story consider how it has spread and transformed and dismiss any possible veracity in the tale because of the mere fact that it has been so often reworked and retold.

There is an argument to be made, however, that there may actually be some truth to the original accounts. As I previously noted, there is no evidence of this tale existing before the 12th century, and both Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh include a variety of concrete details in their accounts, including names of people involved and real places with verifiable geographical landmarks, all of which are hallmarks of medieval history and not usually present in medieval fiction. William even goes out of his way to defend his inclusion of the story as a true account, saying, “Certainly I long hesitated about this matter, although it is spoken of by many people. It seemed to me ridiculous to take on trust a story that had either no rational basis or a very obscure one. At last I was overcome by the evidence of so many witnesses of such weight; so that I was forced to believe it, and to marvel at what, for all my strength of mind, I cannot grasp or fathom.” Therefore, out of deference to William of Newburgh, let us endeavor to consider some possible rational explanations for such an incident really occurring.

The sign of Woolpit village, where many believe the story has some basis in truth, via Wikimedia Commons

Today, it seems that among those who live in the region, the story of the Green Children has been conflated with the traditional tale of the “Babes in the Wood,” a children’s story that first appeared as a ballad in the 16th century, telling of two children who after their father’s death were commended into the care of an uncle who conspired to have them murdered in the woods so he could take their inheritance (Clark, “Small, Vulnerable ETs”). As with the Green Children, there are some who claim this folktale is based on a real incident, but it seems difficult to get its details to conform with those of the Green Children story. Firstly, the “Babes in the Wood” story seems to have originated in Watton, Norfolk County, about 30 miles north of Woolpit, and according to the tale, the children both died there in Wayland Wood of exposure, rather than surviving to stumble into a wolf pit in Suffolk. Moreover, this explanation tries to suggest that their green discoloration was the result of being poisoned with arsenic by their uncle, but this doesn’t really pass scrutiny. Long term exposure to arsenic is known to cause a darkening of the skin, but not a green color, unless one is confusing its symptoms with the results of Victorian incidences of arsenic poisoning caused by green dye in clothing, but that is a different thing entirely and would be anachronistic in the 12th century. Moreover, nothing in this version accounts for their strange clothing and language or the girl’s eventual claim that she and her brother came from an extraordinary dusky land.

In the late 1990s, Paul Harris argued for a commonsensical explanation, suggesting that the children were actually members of a Flemish settler family that had lost their parents, perhaps having been displaced due to anti-Flemish laws passed in 1154 or having been the victim of violence by Flemish mercenary supporters of Robert, Earl of Leicester’s 1173 rebellion. Flemish dyeing and weaving practices were known to produce unusual clothing, Harris asserts, and their unrecognizable language, obviously, would have been Flemish. As for their green skin, he suggests they were suffering from chlorosis, or green sickness. And the tales of St. Martin’s Land? Well, in Belgium, St. Martin was venerated as the patron of children, so it would be natural for them to mention the saint… but here Harris waffles. Perhaps, he allows, the children were only referring to the nearby village of Fornham St. Martin, just north of Bury St. Edmunds. Or perhaps, he hedges, they meant St. Martin’s Hundred, more than a hundred miles south of Woolpit in County Kent’s Romney Marsh. Already we see his uncertainty begin to weaken his theory. Firstly, a long and arduous northward march from Kent would likely have been mentioned by the girl, and if they meant Fornham St. Martin, which was only ten miles from Woolpit, wouldn’t the villagers or their host Richard de Calne, a well-travelled knight, have realized where they meant? Likewise, would not de Calne or someone have likely realized they they were Flemings? Woolpit was not so isolated as to not be aware of immigrant populations. And even if one took Harris’s third possibility, that she referred to her home country by identifying it with St. Martin, why would she talk of there being no sun there? And as for the idea that chlorosis explained their skin color, anyone familiar with that supposed illness would consider the suggestion ridiculous, since it is widely accepted that there was never any such disease as green sickness. Chlorosis, also called morbus virgineus or the “disease of virgins,” was a common 19th-century diagnosis for symptoms that today might be attributed to anorexia nervosa or simple anemia. It was said to be a hysterical condition, relating to the womb, that could be entirely cured in young women by marriage, as through intercourse, semen would settle the womb. Even if one were to take this for a misdiagnosis of a genuine condition, however, despite the name “green sickness,” it usually presented as an ashen pallor, perhaps tinged yellow, rather than the overt green described in the Green Children. But, again, Paul Harris provides a further alternative for his scattered theory: that these Flemish kids dyed themselves green for camouflage… a suggestion I find hard to consider seriously.

Portrait of a young lady looking green behind the gills, so to speak, by Pietro Antonio Rotari, via The Artchive

Still… some dietary explanation for their greenness seems the most likely, since the girl is said to have improved upon changing her diet. And perhaps the pallor of anemia is a likely candidate, although, as pointed out by John Clark, whose work on this topic I have relied on heavily in this episode, anemia was quite common in the Middle Ages, and the villagers of Woolpit surely would have recognized it as such, so perhaps something more was at work. Clark puts forth the idea, based on their insistence on eating beans, that they clearly had been subsisting on this food and that their bodies may have been suffering for it. There is, he notes, a certain condition, called favism, an allergy to not only ingesting but even coming into contact with bean plants. It is most common in children, and as it attacks the kidneys, it results in extreme pallor and jaundice, the combination of which may have appeared greenish. It also results in death, as we see with the green boy. Nevertheless, while this is a strong working explanation, it doesn’t account for the stories the girl later told, which suggested that everyone in St. Martin’s Land was green.

For an explanation of her revelations, we will have to rely on Occam’s Razor, that philosophical principle that tells us the simpler of explanations is to be favored. Therefore, might we not simple consider that the girl lied? Perhaps a couple of similar stories will help to illustrate how a simple lie could mushroom into a long-lived folktale. 

The first of our stories was compiled by a well-known collector of folktales, Gervase of Tilbury (Oman 10). He tells of a swineherd who served a rich master. One day, the swineherd realized that a sow who had been ready to farrow a litter of piglets was missing from the herd. Fearing the wrath of his master, he searched for the sow near the mouth of Peak cavern, around which an extraordinary wind was known to howl. Determining that she must have wandered into the cave, and finding the wind mild at the time, he ventured in after her and wandered in the darkness for a long time before seeing a light and heading toward it. Reaching the source of the light, he found himself in a great cultivated plain where harvesters were hard at work. Beneath a tree, he found his master’s sow with her litter suckling. So he managed to return with the object of his search through the caves, where on the other side he found that night had fallen.

A good representation of how it may have looked, emerging from a cave into a lush and vibrant land, from a painting by William Guy Wall, via Wikimedia Commons

The second of our tales is shared by Giraldus Cambrensis, who writes of a little boy of Swansea named Eliodorus (Oman 11). Preferring not to apply himself to his schoolwork and fearing his master’s discipline, he fled to a little valley to hide. There, two small men, pigmies, discovered him and took him through a passage underground, from which they emerged in a fertile land with rivers and fields that, much like St. Martin’s Land, did not enjoy full sunlight. Rather, days there, while bright, were always overcast, similar to the misty environs the green girl described, and nights were inky black, with no luminous heavenly bodies to light the sky. All of the inhabitants of this land were pigmies, and their animals were likewise diminutive. Eliodorus met and befriended the little prince of this land, and thereafter, he used to go back and forth from his world to theirs until one day he stole the prince’s toy ball. Two pigmies promptly came to his house to retrieve the ball, and after that, the boy never found his way back to that underground wonderland. In his elder years, he became a priest, and it’s said that Eliodorus never spoke of that land of pigmies and his friend, their prince, without crying.

Interestingly, these tales appear to place the story of the Green Children in a clear wider folk tradition, but they also, when analyzed, offer an explanation for why the stories may have been fabricated to begin with. The swineherd, gone until late at night searching for the sow, may have felt a more fanciful explanation than that he had merely been an incompetent herdsman would blunt the wrath of his master. And the lad Eliodorus may have only needed some explanation for why he had not been studying, a lie that perhaps was charming enough that he used it more than once to explain his absence, and maybe even to explain where he had acquired ill-gotten toys. Likewise, when the time came to share her story, the girl—who perhaps, owing to her language and garb, had been a Flemish refugee, something that the knight Richard de Calne and other villagers even realized and kept to themselves to shelter her from persecution, who had recovered from the greenish pallor induced by her allergy to the beans she and her brother had been foraging for, an allergy that in the end had killed her brother—perhaps she, like the swineherd and Eliodorus, simply told a fanciful lie. Maybe this was in an effort to obscure her true background, or maybe it was a lark, a hoax played on the credulous. After all, she was known to have grown into a “wanton and impudent” girl, or in an alternate translation, “saucy and petulant.” Certainly she doesn’t sound like a reliable source.

But in the end, one can look at this story in more than one way and raise evidence to support a variety of interpretations and explanations. Indeed, William of Newburgh sums it up best: “Every person can say what he wishes, and can rationalize these events as best he can; but I am not ashamed to have described this unnatural and remarkable event.”

Works Cited

Clark, John. "The Green Children of Woolpit." Academia, 28 June 2017, http://www.academia.edu/10089626/The_Green_Children_of_Woolpit.

---. “Martin and the Green Children.” Folklore, vol. 117, no. 2, 2006, pp. 207–214. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30035487.

---. “‘Small, Vulnerable ETs’: The Green Children of Woolpit.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 33, no. 2, 2006, pp. 209–229. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4241432.

Oman, C. C. “The English Folklore of Gervase of Tilbury.” Folklore, vol. 55, no. 1, 1944, pp. 2–15. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1257623.

Patch, Howard Rollin. “Some Elements in Mediæval Descriptions of the Otherworld.” PMLA, vol. 33, no. 4, 1918, pp. 601–643. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/456983.

Puhvel, Martin. “Snow and Mist in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’. Portents of the Otherworld?” Folklore, vol. 89, no. 2, 1978, pp. 224–228. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1260130.