It's Not Easy Being Green.

It's not easy being green. It really isn't. Kermit the Frog may have risen to the very top of the Muppet hierarchy but he still had to suffer being pursued by a lustful porker and he grew up in abject poverty in Mississippi with over 2,300 siblings. His nephew Robin sounded pretty sad when he sang Halfway Down The Stairs and then there's all the other green dudes.

The Incredible Hulk had serious anger management issues, Oscar the Grouch and his girlfriend Grungetta lived in dustbins, poor Shrek was lonely, the Grinch didn't even like Christmas and yet had to suffer being permanently associated with it, Slimer had to contend with the nickname "Ugly Little Spud", and though The Jolly Green Giant seemed to have his shit sorted out, who knows what depths of despair his soul plumbed? Spending your life shilling for frozen vegetables can't have been much fun.

 

Then there's the less celebrated (unless you live in Suffolk) Green Children of Woolpit and I was at Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub (in their new home, The Duke of Greenwich - closer to Maze Hill than Greenwich proper) to learn all about them. The ever reliable writer and folklorist Deborah Hyde was my/our guide.

On the A14 road between Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket lies the unremarkable village of Woolpit. Ian Lavender who played Private Pike in Dad's Army is buried there, Time Team's Helen Geake was a Green councillor there, and its primary industry is brick making. Oh, and about nine hundred years ago two green children were found wandering around in unusual clothes speaking a language that nobody else could understand.

It's a story that became part of local folklore and then, in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, gained national notoriety through the then popular compendium books of mysteries and marvels. Deborah Hyde, ever keen in her research, visited Woolpit last year to dig a bit deeper into the mystery of the Green Children of Woolpit. Who feature on the village's sign!

The legend of the green children was taken more seriously than other potentially tall tales because it was related by two different people. Both, presumably, trusted sources. There was Ralph of Coggeshall, an English chronicler and monk (later an abbot) from nearby Essex most famous for penning the Chronicon Anglicanum who later went on the Third Crusade in an attempt to reconquer the Holy Land.

Then there was William of Newburgh (William Parvus). William was from Yorkshire (much further away than Essex) and was both a historian and an Augustinian canon who composed sermons based on the liturgical texts of Saint Alban. Both religious men. Surely they would never lie!

The story goes that two children, a boy and a girl, appeared one day in the 12th century (possibly during the reign of King Stephen) in the village of Woolpit. They were brother and sister and of generally normal appearance apart, of course, from their green skin. They spoke a language nobody could understand (at that time Suffolk was a multicultural area and French, German, and Flemish would have been widely recognised if not spoken), and they wouldn't eat anything except fava beans.

Broad beans as you may have called them growing up. Even then they had trouble separating the beans from their leaves. As time passed, they learned to eat other food and eventually lost their green colour but the boy became sickly and died. The girl learned to speak English and later married. She was deemed to be wanton, impudent, quarrelsome, and troubling though in 12c Suffolk that was a charge probably levelled at a lot of girls and women.

The children said they had come from a place called St Martin's Land. A twilight land where the sun never shone and everything, and - it seems - everyone, was green. The girl was believed to have become a servant in the house of local nobleman Richard de Calne and de Calne is another who passed the story on.

With what he called 'improvements'. What we may call lies. He brought in mythical elements to the tale. He suggested the cave they had been found in (there aren't caves in Suffolk and though Woolpit's name comes from two pits that were believed to be wolf pits it seems more likely they were something far more humdrum like grain silos) was an entry to fairyland and he told stories of people chasing a pig into a cavern and then finding themselves trapped in a different world as well as the story of King Herla. Herla was a legendary leader of a mythical Germanic hunt (who gave his name to the Old French word, harlequin) who, following a wedding held in a mountain, was handed a dog that could make men, Herla's soldiers, disappear.

Deborah was away, quite literally, with the fairies here and took us on a diversion into the story of the 13c Scottish laird Thomas the Rhymer and how his friendship with the Queen of Elfland gave him the (supposed) power of prophecy. There was also a digression into 12c royals from Henry I (buried in Reading, fact fans), his daughter Matilda and the violent dispute - known as The Anarchy - between her and her cousin Stephen over who would take over the monarchy, Stephen himself, and his successor Henry II. 

Returning the conversation back to the green kids of Woolpit, Deborah looked into some of the theories and explanations behind this story. Were the childen extraterrestrials? Some say they gave rise to the concept of 'little green men'. Were they fairies? Or elves? Were they Flemish immigrants!? Or were they from even further afield? Some suggested they may have come from the Levant and that they may have even been Jews or Muslims. Though, at the time of the Crusades, it would have been very very risky to be a Muslim in England. Some have suggested the green was quite simply camouflage and have others wonder if the siblings may have been suffering from favism.

Flamingoes are pink because their diet consists almost entirely of shrimp. Greenwich Skeptics host Chris French offered that he knew a woman who went orange because she only ate carrots - and lots of them. Favism (or Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficieny to give it its more catchy name) is a form of anaemia than can be caused by excess intake of fava beans. It could cause a sufferer to go a bit green and it also has an X-linked pattern of inheritance which means that male sufferers are far more likely to die of it than female ones. That would explain the boy dying and the girl surviving.

Of course, it could all be a complete load of bullshit and Deborah Hyde, though in far more polite words, would almost certainly agree with that but her interest, and mine, is not so much in the veracity of the story but in how stories, how folklore, spreads, mutates, and changes over years, decades, and centuries. In this case, almost an entire millennium. A 12c audience would have taken different things from this story compared to a 17c audience or, indeed, an audience sat in a Greenwich pub on a Wednesday evening in March 2025.

It's a good story and it was a good night. Thanks to David V Barrett for joining me, thanks to Professor Chris French for hosting, thanks to Goddard's Pie and Mash (as so often) for feeding me beforehand, thanks to The Duke of Greenwich, and thanks, most of all, to Deborah Hyde and those long gone, and seemingly unnamed, green children of Woolpit. It's not easy being green.