(Mystery) John Clark ”The Green Children of Woolpit” pt. 2

[00:00:02] From the darkest reaches of space to the deepest corners of your mind. Welcome to From The Void.

[00:00:17] Welcome to From The Void. I'm your host, John Williamson, and we're back with the conclusion, the second part in conclusion of The Green Children of Woolpit with John Clark.

[00:00:26] If you haven't heard the first part yet, hit pause, go back and listen to last week's episode first, or this part won't make any sense.

[00:00:32] But if you've already heard it, then welcome back. And without further ado, I give you John Clark on this week's mystery of From The Void, The Green Children of Woolpit.

[00:00:50] So if you're looking for descendants of The Green Children, start in Kings Lynn in Norfolk, because that's where the family eventually finished.

[00:00:59] But in the meantime, she had actually learnt English and gave a rather contradictory set of answers to questions about where the children would come from.

[00:01:19] And if you then compare what I called the children's story, because remember, this is secondhand.

[00:01:27] This is not, we've got apparently a chain of witnesses for everything up to this point, through the villagers of Woolpit, via the household of Richard D. Corn,

[00:01:41] and through Rafe of Coggershaw, because Rafe actually, he claims, met Richard D. Corn and his household.

[00:01:52] He had spoken to them on various occasions, and he'd heard the story direct from them several times.

[00:01:58] So we're getting third-hand reports.

[00:02:03] So obviously, all sorts of things going on between.

[00:02:07] And remember, Rafe was writing the story down about at least 20 years after he first heard it.

[00:02:16] He'd no doubt been telling it to other people in the meantime.

[00:02:20] He must have improved upon it.

[00:02:22] There's no way you could tell the same story for 20 years without actually improving it around the edges.

[00:02:29] And then we eventually hear what the green girl herself said.

[00:02:41] And if you go down the Rafe of Coggershaw chain on that, you get a story that looks a bit too much like folklore to be true.

[00:02:56] And whether it's the girl herself or whether it's Rafe of Coggershaw improving on it, adding in bits from other stories he'd heard because it makes a better story, I don't know.

[00:03:11] Whereas William, he says, he's a bit wary.

[00:03:18] He says the girl actually said various other things too long to mention.

[00:03:25] And I think he is censoring it.

[00:03:31] He is trying to make it make sense in his terms.

[00:03:37] And there the girl says that she and her brother, she does say, yes, the boy was her brother, came from a land where it is always twilight.

[00:03:54] The light is like we have here at sundown, twilight.

[00:04:03] We never see the sun.

[00:04:07] This is, William points out, an answer to a direct question.

[00:04:14] And he makes it clear the kids were being almost interrogated.

[00:04:18] Everywhere would get, where do you come from?

[00:04:20] What's it like there?

[00:04:21] Is Christ worship there?

[00:04:22] Et cetera, et cetera.

[00:04:23] And one of the questions that I particularly ask is, does the sun rise in the country where you came from?

[00:04:31] So somebody in the audience has got the idea, well, they're probably from some other world.

[00:04:37] It's subterranean.

[00:04:38] So the sun doesn't rise.

[00:04:40] Let's ask them.

[00:04:41] They'll make it clear, won't we?

[00:04:43] And the girl apparently agreed that they never saw the sun.

[00:04:48] So whether you're trying to answer the question in the way the question expected or whether there is some truth to it, we have to make up our own mind on that.

[00:05:00] But he says, yes, we are Christian.

[00:05:05] We are a Christian land.

[00:05:07] There are churches.

[00:05:09] The land is called St. Martin's land because St. Martin is worshipped there, is especially revered there.

[00:05:19] So where was St. Martin's land?

[00:05:22] Move on.

[00:05:24] And she says that she and her brother have been asked by their father to go out and look after the herds, the cattle, pecus.

[00:05:36] It could mean cattle.

[00:05:38] It could mean sheep, but whichever.

[00:05:41] They were pasturing them, which is what you do in the summer.

[00:05:44] Take them out of the fields, make sure they don't roam off, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:05:50] But apparently some of the cattle did roam off.

[00:05:53] And the cattle apparently wandered into a nearby cave.

[00:05:58] So the children walked in after the cattle to see where they were going and got lost in this cave, wandered for a very long time until they heard the sound of bells.

[00:06:16] And I'm going to pause that point and realise I've gone up the wrong chain on this, because this is Rafe of Coggershall's story, which is straight out of folklore.

[00:06:27] Because following cattle into a cave or following an animal into a cave, it leads to another world, is worldwide folklore.

[00:06:37] It goes everywhere.

[00:06:38] So that's the wrong chain if you want a bit of history, because what William of Newborough says is that they were out there in the fields and they suddenly heard a very loud noise, extraordinary sound.

[00:06:55] And the girl likens it to the sound of all the church bells in Berystown Edmonds ringing at once, this sound of bells.

[00:07:06] And suddenly it was if they were thrown out of their minds, they were so totally dazed.

[00:07:12] And when they came round, they found themselves in the fields in Warprit, in the bright sunlight.

[00:07:19] And the bright sunlight was so alien to them that they tried to huddle back into this pit where they were.

[00:07:32] But the villagers hoiked them out.

[00:07:34] So she never actually explains it.

[00:07:37] So having gone that train, let's go to Rafe of Coggershall, who left the kids wandering this cave,

[00:07:45] just like so many other folkloric explorers before them.

[00:07:50] And they heard the sound of bells.

[00:07:53] And they followed the sound, the sweet sound of bells, and came out in this little pit on the edge of the fields of Warpit,

[00:08:01] where the villagers discovered them.

[00:08:04] And they couldn't find their way back in to the cave they'd wandered through.

[00:08:11] So that really throws these two stories into two totally different areas that you can't relate to each other.

[00:08:20] One of them must be what the green girl said.

[00:08:25] The other one seems to be Rafe of Coggershall, trying to improve on the story on the basis of other things he's heard.

[00:08:35] But what is interesting about his story is that it's the mirror image.

[00:08:47] The normal story is how a human being finds their way into a fairy otherworld.

[00:08:54] Here, Rafe is coming up with this marvellous mirror-reversed way round.

[00:09:00] This is how people from a fairy otherworld find themselves in the human world.

[00:09:07] So it's pretty clear that Rafe and quite probably the people he spoke to thought the kids were from some sort of subterranean fairy otherworld.

[00:09:19] In spite of the fact that they sort of lost their green colouring and the girl got married and presumably raised a family up in Kingslyn

[00:09:32] and served a while as a servant in Richard E. Corn's household.

[00:09:43] So that's the story with all its rather intriguing implications that has kept me interested and busy for quite a few years now.

[00:09:58] Yeah, I can see why.

[00:10:00] And you talk a lot about in the book about how historians and just people interested in the story in the years since then have sort of debated the historicity of the story

[00:10:14] and have come out in very different directions, I would say.

[00:10:19] And so talk a little bit about like on the basic facts.

[00:10:23] Are there any things that we can know about this story?

[00:10:27] I mean, there's the interesting piece about the reference to St. Martin,

[00:10:32] which seems like something that may have been, as you said, applied later after the fact.

[00:10:38] What connection is there to St. Martin based on what we know about the people of that time period?

[00:10:48] St. Martin is presumably, though there are others, St. Martin of Tours in northern France.

[00:10:56] And if you look for a land where St. Martin was particularly revered, well, France is the place to go because there are so many villages called St. Martin,

[00:11:06] or places called St. Martin, so many churches dedicated to him.

[00:11:10] He really was the saint.

[00:11:12] He wasn't a patron saint.

[00:11:13] He was the saint of France.

[00:11:15] On the other hand, he does seem to have been also particularly revered in Belgium, Flanders, sort of east of France,

[00:11:29] and particularly almost regarded as the patron saint of children.

[00:11:35] It's St. Martin who delivers presents on St. Martin's Day, November 11th, instead of Christmas time.

[00:11:46] And these are children, so various people think, well, the children obviously came from that part of Europe,

[00:11:53] because that's what you have to do.

[00:11:55] You say, well, OK, where did the children come from?

[00:11:58] They were foreign.

[00:11:59] They were alien.

[00:12:00] They weren't English.

[00:12:03] So first, where did they come from and how did they get here?

[00:12:06] And that's the train that so many people trying to study the story have gone down.

[00:12:15] It becomes very difficult because you cannot explain every aspect of it via the same rationalisation.

[00:12:26] There's always going to be something that doesn't fit.

[00:12:28] And then you have to explain where it came from.

[00:12:32] And the easy way out is, say, these sort of things seem rational.

[00:12:39] These are the sort of things that seem they might have happened.

[00:12:43] This one, like wandering through a cave following the cattle.

[00:12:50] There are no caves in Suffolk sort of thing.

[00:12:54] Not quite true, but there are no great cave systems leading miles and miles from one part of Suffolk to another.

[00:13:06] And nobody followed a cow into them.

[00:13:07] So, but on that basis, you have to say, well, that is awfully folklore.

[00:13:16] It's just somebody's making it up.

[00:13:21] You couldn't see the sun.

[00:13:23] Well, perhaps it was a cloudy day.

[00:13:26] So you muck around with it.

[00:13:30] You chop the edges off.

[00:13:31] And then you, what has tended to happen is you come up with your theory and then make it fit.

[00:13:41] You have to do a little bit of tweaking and hope nobody, or you don't notice yourself.

[00:13:48] You're doing it to make it fit a sort of rational historical explanation.

[00:13:58] The other way to go is to say, yes, it all happened.

[00:14:03] And then you have to tweak history to fit.

[00:14:08] You can look for a sort of very complicated, shall we say, conspiracy theory based fact involving the Knights Templar,

[00:14:27] involving high-powered government clampdowns on secret knowledge about contacts with alien intelligences,

[00:14:41] with planets in a closed circuit of their suns.

[00:14:50] So they're fixed.

[00:14:51] So you never see the sunrise or set.

[00:14:54] You go down wormholes and a tight beam transport of entities backwards and forwards between Earth and another planet,

[00:15:11] alien colonies, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:15:16] Or straight say, well, the kids came to St. Martin's Land.

[00:15:19] It must be Mars.

[00:15:22] Or they came from a land under the Earth where the flying saucers are based.

[00:15:27] When flying saucers were popular, that was a popular theory.

[00:15:33] Or you shovel that aside and you come down.

[00:15:36] Well, they were foreign.

[00:15:38] What sort of foreigners were in England at the time?

[00:15:41] What sort of events were happening about those foreign people?

[00:15:46] Because there are periods in England's history when lots of immigrants come in.

[00:15:52] There are periods in England's history when those immigrants get very unpopular.

[00:15:58] And in the period of the 12th century, the immigrants who were getting unpopular were Flemings from Flanders,

[00:16:07] which is one of the areas where St. Martin is particularly revered.

[00:16:13] And Flemings were great craftsmen.

[00:16:18] And they came to England originally to trade in wool.

[00:16:27] England was famous for its wool.

[00:16:29] Exports of wool and woolen cloth were famous.

[00:16:32] But the Flemings were better at weaving than the English were.

[00:16:36] They had the technical skills.

[00:16:38] So basically they wanted raw wool to take back to founders, put it on their looms

[00:16:45] and weave wonderful cloths in fine colours, including green, that the English weavers couldn't do.

[00:16:56] They also came as mercenaries.

[00:16:58] They were great soldiers, the Flemings.

[00:17:02] So given that the middle 12th century or the whole reign of King Stephen from the 1130s onwards was a period of civil war,

[00:17:12] it was ongoing civil war in England.

[00:17:14] And every great Norman lander wanted an armed force.

[00:17:20] And hiring in a few Flemish mercenaries was a good way of doing it.

[00:17:27] So those mercenaries did not actually make themselves very popular with the people whose farms and villages were being burnt down

[00:17:36] as the ravaging forces went backwards and forwards.

[00:17:42] So it isn't until the 1170s there's actually any sort of evidence of pogroms or attacks on resident Flemings.

[00:17:58] Until 1173, when the Woolpit area suddenly hits the national press,

[00:18:06] because there was a battle during the civil wars between King Henry and his son,

[00:18:18] known as young King Henry, were actually in a new civil war.

[00:18:22] And one of the battles took place at a place called Fornham St. Martin, not very far from Woolpit.

[00:18:32] And the Flemish mercenaries on the losing side got slaughtered, partly by surrounding villagers who took the opportunity

[00:18:41] to make their sort of presence felt and fell upon the fleeing Flemings

[00:18:49] and massacred them with pitchforks and things.

[00:18:55] So if there had been any Flemish families living in Fornham St. Martin in 1173,

[00:19:05] they might have suffered.

[00:19:08] But there is no evidence there were any Flemings living in Fornham St. Martin.

[00:19:14] And if William is right about the date, it was 20 years later.

[00:19:21] So there are certainly occurrences for that.

[00:19:27] The other possibility is Flemish merchants.

[00:19:31] They would come to England to buy English wool.

[00:19:38] And the international trade at that date depended upon these great trading fairs.

[00:19:45] One important one of which was held in Bury St. Edmunds, just six miles from Woolpit.

[00:19:52] There were two in Bury St. Edmunds.

[00:19:56] One in the summer, in June, just right for the date of the bean harvest.

[00:20:08] And one towards Christmas time.

[00:20:11] Over several days, about a week, basically the whole town turned over to trading booths

[00:20:18] where the woolen fleeces or spun thread will be available for foreign merchants to come in and stock up,

[00:20:31] take back to the ports, load them onto their ships,

[00:20:36] and cross the North Sea to Flanders and the Rhineland, the Rhinestuary.

[00:20:43] So that will be the time when they're on the roads leading to Bury St. Edmunds and these other towns.

[00:20:55] And the road from Ipswich, great east coast port, to Bury St. Edmunds passes straight through Woolpit.

[00:21:04] And on the trail would be these groups, probably with armed men to protect them,

[00:21:14] but also with bags of silver coins to buy their wares.

[00:21:21] There is at least one instance of an occasion further to the south in Kent,

[00:21:28] where a Flemish merchant was ambushed, murdered, and his bullion was stolen on the way to London,

[00:21:38] between Dover and London, very busy road.

[00:21:41] But he was ambushed just outside London and murdered.

[00:21:45] So there were perils on the roads of England at the time.

[00:21:51] Robin Hood wasn't around, but his predecessors certainly were.

[00:21:57] So the villagers might well have been worried that these kids had somehow been caught up.

[00:22:05] They had come perhaps with their parents from one of the European trading towns

[00:22:14] and been caught up in one of these ambushes.

[00:22:17] Because what happened in the previous occurrence, just outside London, near Greenwich,

[00:22:25] was that the whole surrounding communities got fined because of this one instance.

[00:22:33] Every single villager had to pay up a fee to the king for this ambush of a merchant

[00:22:42] because the merchants were under the protection of the king.

[00:22:45] So don't attack anybody who's under the protection of the king,

[00:22:49] otherwise you personally and all your neighbours will be fined.

[00:22:56] So that was a chain I was going down for a while.

[00:23:02] I'm beginning to change my mind, and I've never really come up with it.

[00:23:05] And I'm never going to try and boil it all down into one story,

[00:23:11] because I don't think there is one story.

[00:23:14] I think that's what makes this mystery so interesting,

[00:23:17] is that, and you call that out in the book wonderfully,

[00:23:20] where you even mention some other theories put forth by a lot of other historians

[00:23:25] and folklorists, and none of them quite fit perfectly.

[00:23:30] None of the puzzle pieces quite fit perfectly in there.

[00:23:34] And so I think that's what makes it a wonderful mystery

[00:23:36] that likely we'll never know the truth of it.

[00:23:42] So anything else that you would like to add in terms of,

[00:23:46] I know one theory, I'd heard the Flemish theory,

[00:23:49] I'd heard someone even tried to make an attempt at why their skin might be green

[00:23:54] based on some sort of health issue or something.

[00:23:57] I've heard all sorts of interesting things,

[00:23:59] obviously the aliens and alternate dimensions,

[00:24:01] and there's all sorts of things.

[00:24:03] But often, as I'm sure you're well aware,

[00:24:07] a lot of times these legends are born out of a basis of truth

[00:24:10] and then somehow get elaborated upon over time.

[00:24:13] Do you think that this is a story that has a basis in fact,

[00:24:18] and ultimately was just sort of elaborated upon over time?

[00:24:22] Or what are your thoughts after having spent a great deal of time researching it?

[00:24:27] Right. Well, I think there is a basis of fact.

[00:24:31] I think the children existed.

[00:24:35] I think they did turn up in the fields of wool pits.

[00:24:40] Where they had been in the meantime, we don't know.

[00:24:44] I think they were green, whatever that might mean,

[00:24:49] and that is certainly open to discussion.

[00:24:51] I think they were foreign in our sense.

[00:24:57] They spoke a language that was not recognised locally by anyone.

[00:25:06] They were wearing foreign clothes that were not like those you'd see

[00:25:14] in any sort of East Anglian village at the time.

[00:25:20] But given the fashions of the time,

[00:25:24] I think the villagers might well have been surprised

[00:25:27] if somebody from the Royal Court in London turned up.

[00:25:30] They would be so differently dressed.

[00:25:37] And worryingly, William Renewborough uses the same term

[00:25:40] to describe the strange colouring of the kids' clothes

[00:25:45] as he uses to describe a cup that was stolen from the fairies,

[00:25:53] from this fairy hill near where he lived at about the same time.

[00:25:57] So even that idea might well have some sort of folkloric improvement.

[00:26:05] So, and yes, I think the kids were taken to Sir Richard de Corn's house.

[00:26:11] And I think, yes, the boy died.

[00:26:14] And I think, yes, the girl lived on, worked as a time,

[00:26:19] as a servant in the household.

[00:26:20] And yes, I would like to believe she became a woman and married a man in King's Lynn.

[00:26:29] And again, everything else I think is up for grabs.

[00:26:36] And whether there is enough in there to even begin to speculate

[00:26:41] where they really came from,

[00:26:44] I do actually have some afterthoughts about that,

[00:26:48] which I'm still pondering over,

[00:26:51] basically because it's never a good idea

[00:26:56] to close a book on a piece of research.

[00:27:02] And a few days before I submitted my final manuscript

[00:27:08] to University of Exeter Press,

[00:27:11] lo and behold, out came a book with a chapter

[00:27:15] on the green children by a Canadian historian, Paul Dutton,

[00:27:21] which had, I looked at it and I thought,

[00:27:24] well, he's got in first.

[00:27:26] And basically he has followed the same sort of methodology as me.

[00:27:32] I was pleased to see there wasn't anything in it

[00:27:35] that I hadn't thought about.

[00:27:37] However, he had actually,

[00:27:39] he did say something in it that made me wonder

[00:27:42] and look back and think,

[00:27:44] well, perhaps I should have gone a bit further into that one.

[00:27:48] It's one of these businesses about the health of the children

[00:27:50] and the medical evidence and so on.

[00:27:52] So, which is a different story entirely.

[00:27:59] So I may actually put in a postscript at some point.

[00:28:03] That would be amazing.

[00:28:05] It's a wonderful book, thoroughly researched.

[00:28:09] Like I said, a fascinating tale

[00:28:11] that I think is probably lesser known,

[00:28:13] but is incredibly interesting.

[00:28:16] And so I really appreciate your time coming on today

[00:28:19] and sharing some of your research with my audience.

[00:28:22] And again, thanks again for spending some time with me.

[00:28:26] Well, thank you.

[00:28:27] I've been glad to be here.

[00:28:36] So did this event actually take place

[00:28:39] or is it just part of medieval folklore?

[00:28:41] Or does it fall somewhere in the middle,

[00:28:43] a story based in truth,

[00:28:45] but one that evolved over the centuries?

[00:28:47] Like many of the other mysteries we've covered,

[00:28:49] there doesn't seem to be one solid explanation that satisfies.

[00:28:53] So perhaps we'll never know for certain.

[00:28:55] We'll be back next week with a brand new mystery.

[00:28:58] So until then, if you've enjoyed this episode

[00:29:00] or any of the other episodes,

[00:29:02] please consider rating, reviewing, and subscribing

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[00:29:12] We'll be back next week with a brand new mystery.

[00:29:15] And until then, I've been your host, John Williamson,

[00:29:18] and you're listening to From the Void.