Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries (50 page)

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,
known as wolf pits (hence the name of
the village). 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, where the locals gathered round to stare at them.
No one could understand the language
the children spoke, so they were taken
to the house of local landowner Sir Richard de Calne, at Wikes. Here 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.

As time passed, the boy, who appeared to be the younger of the two,
became depressed; he 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, in the neighboring county of
Norfolk, apparently becoming "rather
loose and wanton in her conduct." Some
sources claim that she took the name
Agnes Barre, and the man she married
was a senior ambassador of Henry II. It
is also said that the current Earl
Ferrers is descended from her through
intermarriage. What evidence this is
based on is unclear, as the only traceable senior ambassador with this
name at the time is Richard Barre,
chancellor to Henry II, archdeacon of

Ely and a royal justice in the late 12th
century. After 1202, Richard retired to
become an Austin canon at Leicester,
so it is seems unlikely that he was the
husband of Agnes.

When questioned about her past,
the girl was only able to relate vague
details about where the children had
come from and how they arrived at
Woolpit. She stated that she and the
boy were brother and sister, and had
come from "the land of Saint Martin"
where it was perpetual twilight, and
all the inhabitants were green in color,
as they had been. She was not sure
exactly where her homeland was located, but another "luminous" land
could be seen across a "considerable
river" separating it from theirs. She
remembered that one day they were
looking after their father's herds in the
fields and had followed them into a cavern, where they heard the loud sound
of bells. Entranced, they wandered
through the darkness for a long time
until they arrived at the mouth of the
cave (presumably the wolfpits), where
they were immediately blinded by the
glaring sunlight. They lay down in a
daze for a long time, before the noise
of the reapers terrified them and they
rose and tried to escape, but were unable to locate the entrance of the cavern before being caught.

Is there any truth behind this extraordinary story, or should it be listed
among the many fantastical marvels
listed by chroniclers of medieval England? 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. His main work, Historia
rerum Anglicarum (History of English Affairs), is a history of England from
1066 to 1198, in which he includes the
story of the Green Children. The other
source is Ralph of Coggeshall (died c.
1228), who was the sixth abbot of
Coggeshall Abbey in Essex from 1207
to 1218. His account of the Green Children is included in the Chronicon
Anglicanum (English Chronicle) to
which he contributed between 1187
and 1224. As can be seen from the
dates, both authors recorded the incident many years after it was supposed
to have taken place. The fact that there
is no mention of the Green Children
in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, which
deals with English history up until the
death of King Stephen in 1154, and
includes many of the wonders popular
at the time, could indicate a date for
the incident early in the reign of Henry
II, rather than in the reign of King
Stephen.

Ralph of Coggeshall, living in
Essex, the neighboring county to Suffolk, certainly would have had direct
access to the people involved in the
case. In fact, he states in his Chronicle
that he had frequently heard the story
from Richard de Calne himself, for
whom Agnes worked as a servant. In
contrast, William of Newburgh, living
in a remote Yorkshire monastery,
would not have had such first-hand
knowledge of events, though he did
use contemporary historical sources,
as is indicated when he says, "I was so
overwhelmed by the weight of so many
and such competent witnesses." The
story of the Green Children remained
in the popular imagination throughout
subsequent history, as testified by references to it in Robert Burton's The
Anatomy of Melancholy, written in

1621, and a description based on the
12th century sources in Thomas
Keightley's The Fairy Mythology
(1828). There was even a supposed second sighting of Green Children in a
place called Banjos in Spain, in August 1887. However, the details of this
event are almost exactly the same as
in the Woolpit case and the story
seems to originate with John Macklin
in his book Strange Destinies (1965).
There is nowhere called Banjos in
Spain, and the account is merely a retelling of the 12th century English
story.

Various explanations have been
put forward for the enigma of the
Green Children of Woolpit. The most
extreme include that the children
originated from a hidden world inside
the earth, that they had somehow
stepped through a door from a parallel dimension, or they were aliens accidentally arrived on Earth. One
supporter of the latter theory is the
Scottish astronomer Duncan Lunan,
who suggests that the children were
aliens transported to Earth from another planet in error by a malfunctioning matter transmitter. A local legend
links the Green Children with the
Babes in the Wood folktale first published in Norwich in 1595, and probably set in Wayland Wood, close to
Thetford Forest on the Norfolk-Suffolk
border. The story concerns a medieval
Norfolk earl who was the uncle and
guardian of two young children, a boy
(age three) and a younger girl. In order to inherit their money, the uncle
hires two men to take them into the
woods and murder them, but they are
unable to perform the deed and abandon them in Wayland Wood, where they eventually die of starvation and
exposure. The Woolpit variation
moves the story to Woolpit Wood, just
outside the village, and has the children surviving an attempted arsenic
poisoning only to emerge onto Woolpit
Heath where they were found by the
reapers. Arsenic has been put forward
by some as the reason for the their
green skin. The possibility that they
were the real-life 12th century babes
in the wood who inspired the folktale
cannot entirely be discounted.

The most widely accepted explanation at present was put forward by
Paul Harris in Fortean Studies (1998).
His theory is roughly as follows: First
of all, the date for the incident is
moved forward to 1173, into the reign
of King Stephen's successor Henry II.
There had been a continued immigration of Flemish (north Belgian) weavers and merchants into England from
the 11th century onwards, and Harris
states that after Henry II became king
these immigrants were persecuted,
culminating in a battle at Fornham in
Suffolk in 1173, where thousands were
slaughtered. He theorizes that the
children were Flemish, and had probably lived in or near to the village of
Fornham St. Martin, hence the St. Martin references in their story. This village, a few miles from Woolpit, is
separated from it by the River Lark,
probably the "very considerable river"
mentioned by the girl in account. After
their parents had been killed in the
conflict, the two children escaped into
the dense, dark woodland of Thetford
Forest.

Harris proposes that if the children
remained there in hiding for a period
of time without enough food, they

could have developed chlorosis due to
malnutrition-hence the greenish
tinge to the skin. He believes that they
later followed the sound of the church
bells of Bury St. Edmunds, and wandered into one of the many underground mine passages which were part
of Grimes Graves, flint mines dating
back more than 4,000 years to the
Neolithic period. By following mine
passageways they eventually emerged
at Woolpit, and here the bewildered
children in their undernourished
state, with their strange clothes, and
speaking the Flemish language, would
have seemed alien to villagers who
hadn't had any contact with Flemish
people.

Harris's ingenious hypothesis certainly suggests plausible answers to
many of the riddles of the Woolpit
mystery. But the theory of displaced
Flemish orphans accounting for the
Green Children does not stand up in
many respects. When Henry II came
to power and decided to expel the
Flemish mercenaries previously employed by King Stephen from the country, Flemish weavers and merchants
who had lived in the country for generations would have been largely unaffected. In the civil war battle of
Fornham in 1173, it was Flemish mercenaries, employed to fight against the
armies of King Henry II, who were
slaughtered, along with the rebel
knights they had been fighting alongside. These mercenaries would hardly
have brought their families with them.
After their defeat, the remaining Flemish soldiers scattered throughout the
countryside, and many were attacked
and killed by the local people. Surely
a landowner such as Richard de Calne, or one of his household or visitors,
would have been educated enough to
recognize that the language the children spoke was Flemish. After all, it
must have been fairly widespread in
eastern England at that time.

Harris's theory of the children hiding out in Thetford forest, hearing the
bells of Bury St. Edmunds, and thus
being led through underground passages to Woolpit also has problems of
geography. First of all, Bury St.
Edmunds is 25 miles from Thetford
forest; the children could not have
heard church bells over such a distance. In addition, the flint mines are
confined to the area of Thetford forest; there are no underground passages leading to Woolpit, and if there
were, it is almost 32 miles from the
forest to Woolpit, surely too far to walk
for two starving children. Even if the
Green Children originated from
Fornham St. Martin, it is still a 10 mile
walk to Woolpit, and as to the "considerable river" mentioned by the
girl-the River Lark is far too narrow
to qualify for this.

There are many aspects of the
Woolpit tale that are found in English
folk beliefs, and some see the Green
Children as personifications of nature,
related to the Green Man or Jack-inthe-Green of English folklore, or even
the Green Knight of Arthurian myth.
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. Perhaps Ralph of Coggeshall's
slightly enigmatic comment that the
girl was "rather loose and wanton in
her conduct" is a suggestion that she
had retained some of her fairy wildness. The color green has always been
associated with the otherworld and
the supernatural. The children's fondness for green beans does suggest another link with the otherworld, as
beans were said to be the food of the
dead. In Roman religion, the Lemuria
was an annual festival in which people
used offerings of beans to exorcise the
evil ghosts of the dead (the Lemures)
from their homes. In ancient Greece,
Rome, and Egypt, as well as in medieval England, beans were believed to
contain the souls of the dead.

Though the Woolpit story is included in two 12th century sources, it
must be born in mind that the
chronicles of the time, though describing political and religious events, also
listed many signs, wonders, and
miracles that would not be accepted
today, but were widely believed at the
time, even by educated men and
women. Perhaps then, the strange apparition of the Green Children was a
symbol of disturbed and changing
times intermingled with local mythology and folk beliefs of fairies and the
afterlife. Whatever the truth of the
matter, unless descendents of Agnes
Barre can be traced, as some have suggested, or further contemporary documentary evidence unearthed, the
story of the Green Children will remain one of England's most puzzling
mysteries.