Fairies, Folklore and Forteana

SIMON YOUNG FILES A NEW REPORT FROM THE INTERFACE OF STRANGE PHENOMENA AND FOLK BELIEF

IT’S NOT EASY BEING GREEN

Sometime in the middle of the 12th century, a boy and a girl crawled out of a set of trenches at Woolpit in Suffolk. They did not speak English, they wore unusual clothes and most importantly – there is no getting around this – they had green skin. Their arrival was recorded by two different writers, within a half century of the kids unaccountably turning up, one living relatively close to Woolpit.

There have been many explanations proffered as to the true identity of the green pair (see FT57:39+41, 222:5455, 377:40-45, 381:18). Were they perhaps foreigners who had somehow got separated from their parents; were they aliens who had been left on Earth by a UFO; or were they fairies who had come out of the bowels of the Earth? We have some more details. The boy and girl lost their green colour as they started to eat local food. The boy died before adulthood, while the girl grew up and married, joining East Anglian society: she moved to King’s Lynn. One of our chroniclers records that she looked, as an adult, just like other women.

I revisited the ‘green children’ this week while reading John Clark’s magnificent study of the sources: for anyone interested, John’s work can be downloaded from his academia page (https://museumoflondon. academia.edu/JohnClark). John very sensibly stays away from anything as vulgar as a solution to the mystery: though he insists on the detail about ‘leek-coloured’ green skin, much as many would want to just ignore it. John tells me he is convinced that whatever the origins of the children, the locals believed that they were fairies. For instance, they were alleged to have come from a twilight underground world: the children refused to eat human food at first, much as fairies are recorded as refusing in some legends.

What is most disturbing about the story for me is the way that the two (who I imagine were all too human) had walked into a fairy tale not of their making. The locals understood the children to be fairy offspring who had stumbled into the human world. Their discovery was read in this way and the details of their discovery were put through a fairylore filter. Then, by the time that the only survivor, the girl, knew enough English to tell her story, she too seemed to believe that she had come from fairyland. Her past had been obliterated. A fragment possibly survived in her notion that her world had been called ‘St Martin’s Land’: was she recalling a parish somewhere else in Britain or on the Continent? There can be few horrors worse than becoming a bit player in a collective fantasy.

Simon’s latest book is The Boggart (Exeter University Press, 2022).

THE BOY DIED BEFORE ADULTHOOD, WHILE THE GIRL GREW UP AND JOINED EAST ANGLIAN SOCIETY