Aliens, Circus Performers, or Miners: Where Green Children Come From to Woolpit

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

This strange story, which took place at the beginning of the 12th century in England, dispels the myth that in the Middle Ages the inhabitants of Europe were extremely cruel and declared witches and sorcerers to everyone who was even slightly different from them. In any case, the inhabitants of the small English village of Woolpit and the feudal lord, who owned this village, faced with two very different boy and girl, not only did not send them to the fire, but surrounded them with care.

Meeting at the edge of the forest

It happened in the summer. The inhabitants of Woolpit were mowing the grass in a meadow near the forest and suddenly saw a boy and a girl, eight or ten years old, come out to the edge of the forest. The children stopped at the edge of the forest in confusion, and several peasants went to them to find out who they were and where they were from. Imagine their surprise when they saw that both children were bright green! Their faces, hands, and hair looked like they had been painted green.

It turned out that the children do not understand the local language. They were dressed in rags and looked very thin and weak. And the villagers did not become afraid of strange children and declare them evil spirits - instead, they brought the children to one of the houses and tried to feed them. After that, a new oddity was discovered - green strangers refused the bread and vegetables with fruits offered to them, as if they did not understand what to do with food.

Then the peasants turned to their lord Richard de Calnes, who ordered the strange children to be brought to his castle. There they first tried to wash the green guests, but they remained green, and then they tried to feed them again, and out of all the food offered to them, they decided to try only beans. De Calne kept them with him and began to take care of them, teach them to eat differently and teach them English.

After learning to speak a little English, the children told that they accidentally got into the forest near Woolpit, hiding from a thunderstorm in a cave not far from their home. Answering the question where their home is, they described a country in which the sky is always hidden by clouds and eternal twilight reigns, and a thick fog always spreads over the earth. It was not possible to get other details from the children: they made it clear that they could not tell anything more because of their ignorance of the language.

The boy died, the girl survived

Gradually, the green boy and girl began to get used to other foods, although beans remained their favorite food. Sir Richard invited a priest to the castle, who baptized his young guests. What name was given to the boy is unknown, but the girl was called Agnes. Other knights also came to de Calnes to look at the outlandish children. Everyone was surprised by the color of their skin and hair, but the attitude towards them remained very friendly.

However, the green boy, despite all the care, remained frail and weak, and then began to get sick at all. A physician invited by Sir Richard could not help him, and in the end the child died. Agnes lived a long, happy life - when she grew up, the feudal lord who sheltered her found her a groom, and the chronicles mention that she had children and grandchildren. Apparently, they did not inherit her unusual appearance, because no chronicler mentions this.

Aliens, circus performers or miners?

Where did these two green children come from? A modern man, reading this story, will first of all think that these were aliens from outer space, those same little green men. And the story of the children themselves about how they got to Woolpit suggests a parallel world, from which they accidentally found a passage into our reality.

However, there are more realistic versions of the origin of these children. Both were put forward by the historian, archaeologist and science fiction writer Igor Mozheiko, to the general public under the pseudonym Kir Bulychev. According to one of them, the children escaped from a traveling circus, where they were mistreated, and invented a story about a twilight country and a cave so that they would not be returned back. Among medieval artists, it was often possible to meet people painted in some bright color, who were shown to the public as curiosities, and such living exhibits were painted not just with paint, but with various vegetable dyes that eaten deep into the skin, like they eat into it ink tattoos.

The second version says that children could have escaped from copper mines in Scandinavia, where they were forced to work even harder and were not allowed out of the mine to the surface at all. Copper compounds can build up in the body and stain skin and hair a greenish or bluish tint, which is what happened to these children. In this case, they could not be so fancy, describing "a country where twilight always reigns", and the boy could die from poisoning with large amounts of copper.

This does not happen in legends

Whether any of these hypotheses are true or whether the mystery of the green color of the children was something else is now hardly ever known. It can only be asserted with a high degree of certainty that these children actually existed. If it were just a legend invented by someone, it would have ended either tragically for all participants, or, conversely, with a happy ending. But the story of Woolpit's green children is most similar to ordinary life, in which someone dies early, someone lives to old age, and adults are ready to help all the young and defenseless.

And not so long ago in England was discovered Templar cave - a mysterious dungeon with a 700-year history.