The story of the Green Children of Woolpit is a well-known example of medieval English folklore. It survives in two accounts from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries: William of Newburgh’s Historia Rerum Anglicarum and Ralph of Coggeshall’s Chronicon Anglicanum. Since then, it has been interpreted and reinterpreted by countess authors, scholars and enthusiasts, from folklorists and historians, to Forteans and ufologists. John Clark’s aim is to bring together many of these disparate threads in one publication. This text serves as an overview (and a critique) of the theories and approaches that have been brought to bear on this story, ranging from rationalist scientific diagnoses to the conventions and traditions of fairy folklore, to its modern integration into extraterrestrial-encounter narratives and science fiction.
In many respects, this publication reads like a scholarly edition, complete with new translations of its two medieval Latin sources. The level of detail is impressive and there is no doubting the significant effort involved in assembling the information presented here. However, Clark’s approach is often fastidious to a fault. His well-intentioned purpose is to sort the wheat from the chaff in what has become quite a convoluted (and is some cases misinformed) field of study. But the quantity of information provided in this publication, much of it only tangentially linked to the very short story of the Green Children, makes navigation of this otherwise valuable resource quite a challenge in itself.
The book is broken into nine chapters, followed by a brief eight-page Appendix containing the two translations. Across these chapters, Clark examines the story’s legacy, its transmission from the Middle Ages to the present day, related scholarship and its limitations, authorial and historical contexts for the Latin sources, interpretations of the children’s story and its frame narrative and, finally, theories and approaches that have not been addressed elsewhere. Chapters one through three serve to illustrate just how widespread the story’s reach is. This is best illustrated in chapter three, which traces the influence of the Green Children through numerous adaptations and retellings, ranging from the first English science fiction story--Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638)--to twentieth and twenty-first century adaptations, including several planned operas. Chapter four focuses on past scholarship (academic and amateur) and presents a fairly critical overview of the limitations of individual disciplines, from folklorists and historians to Forteans and Science Fiction scholars. Chapter five very briefly addresses the chroniclers and their place in history, but it is in chapter six where we find the bulk of Clark’s work. Here, he focuses on the framing narrative of the story: William and Ralph’s accounts of the sudden appearance of the two children (a boy and a girl) in the village of Woolpit, their unnatural green colour, their predilection for green beans, the death of the boy, and the eventual integration of the girl into East-Anglian society. The arguments and ideas that appear in this chapter vary in terms of quality. Clark makes a useful contribution to existing debate concerning the children’s green skin tone through his well-evidenced dismissal of two widely-attested theories: 1) that green skin appears regularly in folkloric records relating to fairy or otherworldly encounters; 2) that we can apply scientific knowledge to diagnose the Green Children’s condition. Clark refutes both of these points effectively, but in other areas he is able to do little more than speculate along with other commentators. What is more, the level of detail provided in this chapter can occasionally border on indulgence. Clark frequently dedicates pages to contextual information covering, among other things, the status of Flemish immigrants in England, the history of bean cultivation and harvesting, and the easily-disproven (indeed, disproven by Clark) theory that the young girl can be identified in surviving medieval pipe rolls as Agnes Barre. The value of supplementary tables and images varies significantly, too. In chapters six and seven, Clark provides tables that assist in a formalist reading of the story and help to identify important variations between the two surviving sources. As a point of contrast, the section of the text that covers Ralph of Coggeshall’s use of the term prassinus (leek green) is accompanied by a grayscale image of leeks growing in a field. Drawing attention to this perhaps feels like nitpicking, but I use this example as evidence of a trend that exists throughout the book. Clark’s prerogative is to include any and all information that might be deemed relevant to the story of the Green Children of Woolpit, but this often leads to entire sections feeling somewhat drawn out.
This emphasis on quantity over quality is also true of chapter seven, which seeks to unravel the children’s account of their place of origin. The issue here is that Clark has no way to distinguish between the voices of the Latin chroniclers, their sources, the villagers of Woolpit who first encountered the children, or the children themselves, and so attempting to uncover any truth buried in the details of the children’s story is an impossible task. As much as Clark does a good job of challenging speculation by others, he inevitably spends just as long doing the same. He deliberates extensively on the children’s claim that they came from a place called St Martin’s Land (found only in William’s Historia), but ultimately brings his reader no closer to an understanding of what this might mean. This issue is brought to the fore again in chapter eight, where Clark seeks to address theories and ideas that have not been extensively considered by others. At attempt made here to raise the possibility of a link between St Martin and Merlin feels particularly thin, the evidence for such a connection appearing tangential at best.
In the final (very brief) ninth chapter, Clark argues that amidst all the conjecture, the children themselves have become lost under the weight of interpretation and applied meaning. Here, he criticises the approach of, among others, university history departments who have “ignored the children and what happened to them to concentrate on how the medieval chroniclers used such stories and what messages might be coded within them” (191). The problem is that speculating on realities that we cannot nor will not ever fully understand brings us no closer to the children and their actual experience than any other approach. To be fair to Clark, this is a point that he is all too willing to acknowledge. On the same page, he writes:
“This book may itself have done nothing to lighten the burden borne on
the slight shoulders of these two little twelfth-century waifs--although
perhaps we have now clarified the nature of the load. We have at least
warned of its unsteadiness and tendency to slip, and identified particular
pieces of luggage that should now finally be discarded.”
Clark is certainly at his most effective when dismantling the claims made by others and so reducing the level of misinformation that surrounds this story. In this respect, Clark’s approach is a success, but the route taken to achieve this could have been refined and reduced significantly.