Hmm one thing occurs to me when reading Ralph's account as related by Thomas Keightley :
EXTRA: Ralph of Coggeshall's Account of the Green Children | Anomalies: the Strange & Unexplained (anomalyinfo.com)
Namely... Ralph seemed to treat the green skin tinge as unnatural. The boy was described as dying of whatever illness, and the girl eventually recovered. It's hard to be sure but is it possible Ralph means to imply that the people who found the children thought them to be unwell?
William of Newburgh as it was presented in 1856 by Joseph Stevenson:
EXTRA: William of Newburgh's Account of the Green Children | Anomalies: the Strange & Unexplained (anomalyinfo.com)
His doesn't seem to consider the odd color a sickness and seems to describe them as healthy.... until the boy dies anyways.
This is one of those weird things where separating signal from noise is pretty hard. There's two accounts that are reasonably original... and all others are mostly just rehashes of those. But when you filter out all the spurious details.... It's not that weird.... if not for the green skin it'd likely have been an unimportant historical footnote lost to time. Also... the BEST sources are third or fourth hand data at best. Ralph's version is mostly what Sir Richard de Calne told him about it. William seems to have collected and compiled accounts. But we don't have any of those, merely the syncretized version that he wrote down after fusing the many accounts into a single narrative. But certain parts, especially some of the more fantastical bits, might be the result of a game of telephone, and we only have access to the versions that have survived, and not the original accounts.
"Saint Martin's Land"
There IS a place named "Fornham Saint Martin" that is close enough(six miles) that a pair of sickly preteens could have walked from there to Woolpit. Also this incident seems to have happened during the warmer part of the year. It's mentioned that the people of Woolpit were harvesting crops including beans, thus probably some time in summer or early fall.
"lack of sunlight"
It's important to distinguish between the alien-ness of direct sunlight and the idea that they'd never seen sun before. It's that they'd never felt direct sunlight before. Which is odd given that the girl claims they'd been tasked with watching farm animals, presumably in a field. But by the same token she was said to have also claimed to have seen brightly lit places on the horizon. This feels like one of those things where it's possible she simply described things in an odd way and the people hearing misinterpreted them? One description of it is that it was a "luminous" land on the other side of a river? This is where the telephone thing comes in. We don't know WHAT she said. All we know is how people interpreted it years later.
"green skin"
first, the actual account is green "tinged" skin. So the popular depiction of them as fully green? NOPE! Also in the 1100s... the term
Hypochromic anemia - Wikipedia ]Chlorosis[/url] hadn't been invented yet and thus if people saw it they'd have no idea what it was. Given their odd dietary choices it's possible they simply had malnutrition and inadequate B6 in their diets.... which neatly squares with how BOTH sources observed that they changed color after learning to eat real food. IE the B6 deficiency was corrected and the Chlorosis disappeared. Why would they have it?" well the scant details the girl gave about her life in her former home... suggests they were poor peasants and probably had little to eat.
BUT.... B6 deficiency would be more likely CURED by eating beans than CAUSED by it... and the children were noted to have beans as their favorite food when first found. We don't know a whole lot about what else they ate before arriving in Woolpit. Sooo, hard to say. The accounts list only beans as a food they were willing to eat when found. Literally every other food the people of Woolpit tried to get them to eat was rejected until a week or so later when they started eating other foods. It's conceivable that they had a craving for beans because they needed them, but it seems odd they'd refuse everything else. I do have to wonder if this part was exaggerated by retelling it. It's mentioned they initially only ate FRESH beans which seems unlikely as a year round food source as beans are popular as food because of how easy they are to store in dried form.
It's also notable that while they recognized the bean plant as a food source, they didn't know how to harvest the beans from the plant. Which... kinda makes sense if the children were too young for their parents to have tried teaching them to cook.
"clothing and language"
These are less odd when you realize that England used to have more linguistic diversity than today. Today there's several languages(including Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Flemish) in the UK OTHER than English, and it used to be more so. Also neither source claims the language barrier lasted long. Some have speculated that it wasn't actually a fully distinct language they spoke but more an exotic dialect.
The weird clothing isn't even mentioned in Ralph's version, and is barely even mentioned in William's. Even then it's merely "unfamiliar" and seemingly not particularly interesting.
It's also interesting that this case is hard to date. Both sources seem to have been recorded decades after the fact. Neither actually gives the date it happened. It would have to be the mid to late 1100s given the way it's described.
Brian Haughton.com Mystery of the Green Children of Woolpit by Brian Haughton (brian-haughton.com) ]One analysis[/url] suggests that the vague date in William's version might be wrong and guesswork on William's part. William listed it as having taken place during the reign of King Steven. However, if that was the case one might expect it to appear in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles(technically 9 different but similar documents) which it doesn't. But this could simply be that the various chroniclers hadn't heard of it while writing the chronicles. However, it could also mean that it happened after the death of King Steven in 1154. No version of the chronicle extends past that date, and several don't cover any of King Steven's reign. Both William and Ralph wrote their chronicles decades after the death of King Steven.
Interesting footnote: why was there never a King Steven II? Hard to say... I'm guessing because none of his descendants was part of the royal family. He fought a civil war with the man who would later become King Henry II. Oh, also he was born in France and was nephew to Henry I. Henry's heir William Adelin died before he was able to claim the throne and the line of succession went into turmoil. The succession should have passed to Empress Matilda(Henry I's daughter), but but she lived in France and wasn't able to even go to England to be coronated. Which created an opening for Steven to exercise claim to the throne. He seemingly tried to be a good king despite his power grabbing, but multiple people in power wanted to dethrone him and used military force to try to do so. Eventually Steven agreed that instead of handing rule to his own heir... he'd turn over rule to Henry II(Empress Matilda's son).
And the Woolpit incident happened either during this fiasco or shortly after it. One question of course is why the children, especially the girl who seemingly lived long enough to produce children of her own, never tried finding their parents... well it's possible their parents died in that mess. Also if their parents were peasants... well... good luck finding them even if you did look. Also some people think they were Flemish and Henry II wasn't nice to the Flemish. Why? Because Steven had hired Flemish mercenaries to augment his military. Was Henry II trying to get rid of ALL of the Flemish or just the mercs? I have no way to know. But it's interesting to note that one of the major massacres of Flemish by Henry II was near Fornham Saint Martin.... not easy walking distance, but close enough to travel on foot from there to Woolpit.
yeah this set of conclusions is pretty similar to what Paul Harris had to say... but after you add in historical context, it does make sense.
