Neither Ralph of Coggeshall nor William of Newburgh offer an explanation for the "strange and prodigious" event, as William calls it, and some modern historians have the same reticence: "I consider the process of worrying over the suggestive details of these wonderfully pointless miracles in an effort to find natural or psychological explanations of what 'really,' if anything, happened, to be useless to the study of William of Newburgh or, for that matter, of the Middle Ages", says Nancy Partner, author of a study of 12th-century
historiography. Nonetheless, such explanations continue to be sought and two approaches have dominated explanations of the mystery of the green children. The first is that the narrative descends from
folklore, describing an imaginary encounter with the inhabitants of a "fairy Otherworld". In a few early as well as modern readings, this other world is extraterrestrial, and the green children alien beings. The second is that it is a "garbled account" of a real event, although it is impossible to be certain whether the story as recorded is an authentic report given by the children or an "adult invention". His study of the story led Charles Oman to conclude that "there is clearly some mystery behind it all, some story of drugging and kidnapping". Medievalist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen offers a different kind of historical explanation, arguing that the story is an oblique account of the racial difference between the English and the
indigenous Britons.
Folklore Twentieth-century scholars of folklore such as Charles Oman noted that one element of the children's accounts, the entry into a different reality by way of a cave, seems to have been quite popular. The medieval historian
Gerald of Wales tells a similar story of a boy, a truant from school, who "encountered two pigmies who led him through an underground passage into a beautiful land with fields and rivers, but not lit by the full light of the sun". However, the specific
motif that refers to the green children is poorly attested; E. W. Baughman lists it as the only example of his
F103.1 category of English and North American folktale motifs: "Inhabitants of lower world visit mortals, and continue to live with them". Madej has similarly argued that the tale of the Green Children was part of a popular skein of imagination, "originating in the territories of England and Wales, that of passing through a cave to another world". Martin Walsh, a scholar of folklore from around the world, identifies the story of the green children as "a garbled account of an atavistic harvest ritual". He considers the references to
St Martin to be significant, and sees the story as evidence that the feast of
Martinmas has its origins in an English aboriginal past, of which the children's story forms "the lowest stratum". However, John Clark questions Walsh's conclusions, arguing that there is no evidence of St Martin as "a figure with Otherworld connections", or to connect the children with "an atavistic harvest ritual". Madej connects the hypothetical St Martin's land with the saint himself, echoing Anne Witte who had previously argued for a connection between St Martin and the
underworld. Medieval folklore closely associated him with symbols of death, such as his being mounted on a horse—a common
psychopomp of the period—and his carrying a stick symbolising
resurrection. He also suggests that the two children may represent, simultaneously, life and death, similarly to the near-contemporaneous tales of the
Green Knight. The children's pigmentation change "would symbolise the passing from death to life, the revival occurring overground". The eating of
beans has also attracted the attention of folklorists. "It is to be noticed, too, that the habitual food of the children was beans, the food of the dead", observes K. M. Briggs. She had made the same observation about the food of the dead in her 1967 book "The Fairies in English Tradition and Literature", but John Clark casts doubt on the supposed tradition that Briggs is referring to, commenting that "an identification of beans as the food of the dead is unwarranted". However, he agrees that "beans are in many cultures associated with the dead", and Madej argues that not only had broad beans "been the symbol of death and corruption since the ancient times... they were also associated with opposite phenomena, such as rebirth and fertility". , 1879 A modern version of the tale links the green children with the
Babes in the Wood. Although there are differing stories, a common
motif is that they are left or taken to die in the woods—often identified as
Wayland Wood or
Thetford Forest—after being
poisoned with arsenic by their uncle. The arsenical poisoning resulted in their colouration; they became further linked with the Woolpit children after escaping the woods, but falling into the pits before their ultimate discovery. This version of the story was known to local author and folk singer
Bob Roberts, who says in his 1978 book
A Slice of Suffolk "I was told there are still people in Woolpit who are 'descended from the green children', but nobody would tell me who they were!" Other commentators have suggested that the children may have been
aliens, or inhabitants of a world beneath the Earth.
Robert Burton suggested in his 1621 that the green children "fell from Heaven", an idea that seems to have been picked up by
Francis Godwin, historian and
Bishop of Hereford, in his speculative fiction
The Man in the Moone, published posthumously in 1638, which draws on William of Newburgh's account.
Contemporary explanations In 1998 Paul Harris argued for a "down to earth" explanation of the green children in the context of 12th-century history. He identifies them as the children of
Flemish immigrants, who arrived in eastern England during the early 12th century and were later persecuted after
Henry II became king in 1154. He proposes that the children's homeland of "St Martin's Land" was the village of
Fornham St Martin, just north of Bury St Edmunds, and suggests that their parents were Flemish clothworkers settled there. Furthermore, in 1173 Fornham was the site of the
Battle of Fornham, during the civil war between King Henry II and his son "the
Young King Henry". Rebel forces led by
Robert de Beaumont, 3rd Earl of Leicester, together with a large number of Flemish
mercenaries, had landed in Suffolk, but were defeated by royal forces on the banks of the
River Lark. The Flemish mercenaries were slaughtered, and Harris suggests that there might have been violence against peaceful Flemish settlers in the area. The children may have fled and ultimately wandered to Woolpit. Disoriented, bewildered, speaking no English and dressed in unfamiliar Flemish clothes, the children would have presented a very strange spectacle to the Woolpit villagers. Harris believed that the children's colour could be explained by
hypochromic anemia (also known as chlorosis or green sickness), the result of a dietary deficiency. In a follow-up article, John Clark drew attention to some problems with Harris's use of the historical evidence, and remained unconvinced by the identification of the children as Flemings or their colour as due to green sickness. Brian Haughton describes Harris's hypothesis as "the most widely accepted explanation at present" and maintains that it "certainly suggests plausible answers to many of the riddles of the Woolpit mystery". However, he concludes that "the theory of displaced Flemish orphans ... does not stand up in many respects". For instance, he suggests it is unlikely that an educated man like Richard de Calne would not have recognised the language spoken by the children as being
Flemish. Similarly, concerning green sickness, Madej counters that much of the contemporary population should probably have suffered from the same disease, and also appeared green; "the tone of green of the children's skin must have been something unprecedented and unusual." Historian
Derek Brewer's explanation is even more prosaic: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen proposes that the story is about racial difference, and "allows William to write obliquely about the Welsh". He argues that the green children are a memory of England's past and the conquest of the indigenous Britons by the
Anglo-Saxons followed by the
Norman invasion. William of Newburgh—reluctantly, suggests Cohen—includes the story of the green children in his account of a largely unified, homogenous England. Cohen juxtaposes William of Newburgh's account of the green children with
Geoffrey of Monmouth's
The History of the Kings of Britain, a book that according to William is full of "gushing and untrammeled lying". Geoffrey's history offers accounts of previous kings and kingdoms of various ethnic identities, whereas William's England is one in which all peoples are either assimilated or pushed to the boundaries. According to Cohen, the green children represent a dual intrusion into William's unified vision of England. On one hand they are a reminder of the ethnic and cultural differences between Normans and Anglo-Saxons, given the children's claim to have come from St Martin's Land, named after
Martin of Tours; the only other time William mentions that saint is in reference to in
Hastings, which commemorates the Norman victory in 1066. But the children also embody the earlier inhabitants of the British Isles, the "Welsh (and Irish and Scots) who [had been] forcibly anglicized ...The Green Children resurface in another story that William had been unable to tell, one in which English paninsular dominion becomes a troubled assumption rather than a foregone conclusion." The boy in particular, who dies rather than become assimilated, represents "an adjacent world that cannot be annexed ...an otherness that will perish to endure". Historians have suggested motivations for the two monastic authors. Ruch, and Gordon, have proposed episodes such as the Green Children are comments on the main historical narrative. The
medievalist Catherine Clarke argues that although these stories "have often been dismissed as strange folkloric diversions or playfulness", they are not random interpolations of fantasy but actually play a central role in his overall narrative. Often a reaction to the trauma of the Anarchy, Clarke says, Newburgh's musings on the fantastic all combine the common theme of "normal experience disturbed by something which cannot be fully reached or grasped through reason". Elizabeth Freeman, commenting on Ralph's account, similarly notes that his stories "commonly treated as light entertainment, are in fact united by their treatment of a common theme", albeit one being "the threat posed by outsiders to the unity of the Christian community". Carl Watkins has commented on the demonization, literally and figuratively, of the girl in William's account, while James Plumtree has viewed the narratives as twelfth century historiographic digressions "that permits a didactic theological exegesis". ==Publication and legacy==