The Green Children of Woolpit: Superstitions Past and Present by Catherine Hokin

There's been a bit of a trend on social media recently for parents posting back-to-school pictures of their offspring. I'm not sure a snap of my 21 year old lugging beer back to Manchester would be quite so edifying but his return to university did get me thinking about my study days (at the same place - many veils have been drawn). His last week at home was marked by much amusement over my
old (typewritten) history notes and thesis and a walk around our local area that showed how close our past really is to our present.

 Medieval Votive Objects Exeter Cathedral

My over-confident undergraduate ramblings were centred on politics, witchcraft and superstition in medieval England. The main thrust was the treatment of women but there was also a chapter on votive objects.These examples of medieval piety can be found at all the great 'tourist' pilgrimage stopping points across England and Europe and have their roots in practices stretching as far back as the human need to look at the world around them and search for answers to unsolvable problems. Votives can be separated into two kinds: 'thank you' objects for a prayer answered, often hearts stamped with the letters VFGA (Votum Fecit, Gratiam Accepit, a vow was made and grace was obtained); requests for help, particularly to cure sickness and in the form of wax figures or body parts.

This practice has not died out and votives can still be seen in Catholic countries and, perhaps more surprisingly, in Scottish woods.  

 The Fairy House

 Doonhill Fairy Trail

The Doonhill Fairy Trail, just outside the town of Aberfoyle, seems at first sight to be a whimsical thing. The first marker you meet as you follow the signs to the trail is a cutely carved house and a whole collection of little fairy figurines and pixies dotted about the tree roots. So far so tongue-in-cheek and we were quite giggly by the time we reached the fairy clearing at the top. What greeted us there was very unexpected and enough to quieten our mixed and, let's be honest, cynical group. The whole glade was covered in rag trees, something I had read about in my early research but never seen. These votive sites have an ancient history in Scotland and Ireland and many similarities with the medieval Christian practice of asking for aid in times of trouble: strips of cloth, sometimes from the sick person's clothing or from cloth used to wash the affected part, are tied to the tree and, as the rag disintegrates, the affliction is meant to fade away. We spent quite a while in the glade, it is hard not to, reading the messages accompanying the ribbons and what was particularly fascinating was the range of beliefs addressed, sometimes fairies and more traditional religions implored in the same small letter. Writers of historical fiction, myself included, often say that people don't change, times do - standing in that clearing, feeling years of human helplessness in the face of an uncontrollable world stretching from the present to a very distant past, there was no arguing with the truth of that.

 Battle of Mortimer's Cross

Some superstitions stay just that, some get unpicked by history and explained. The three suns which apparently appeared in the sky at dawn on the morning of the Battle of Mortimer's Cross in 1461 can be explained nowadays as the meteorological phenomenon known as a parhelion: a pair of bright spots appearing horizontally on each side of the sun, often with a halo-like glow. To the soldiers waiting to fight it was simply frightening; to the Yorkist leaders it was a wonderful propaganda opportunity, a living symbol of the Holy Trinity and proof that God was on their side. I am currently researching the twelfth century, a time when 'pagan' beliefs and stories were still closely inter-woven with the Christian teachings that had overlaid them. A prevailing belief was in an underworld inhabited by 'faerie folk' - an 'otherworld' reached through caves or underwater which existed side-by-side with our world and could intrude into ours, eg. at midsummer. The folk who lived here were often thought to be green-coloured and the colour green frequently appears in myths such as the Green Man and the Arthur stories.

 The Sussex Wolfpits

In the middle of the twelfth century, during the chaotic civil war period known as The Anarchy, it seems the faerie world wandered into ours. Two near contemporary chronicles (the Historia rerum Anglicarum and the Chronicum Anglicanum) report the story of two children found wandering in Thetford Forest near the village of Woolpit, by the wolfpits which give the village its name. The boy and girl had green skin, spoke a language no one could understand and wore odd clothing. The children were taken to the house of Richard de Calne where all attempts to feed them failed until the children found some bean pods which they ate, continuing to eat only these for many months until they could be induced to eat bread and other foods. This added to the mystery surrounding them as beans had associations with food eaten by the dead. When the children eventually learned English, they talked of living in a dark land where the sun never shone and everything was green. The boy died within a year of being found but the girl survived and has been, possibly, identified as Agnes Barre who worked as a servant for de Calne and eventually married a royal official, Richard Barre. The Chronicum Anglicanum describes her as "very wanton and impudent" but this may simply be to underscore her strange heritage as faeries were commonly associated with lascivious behaviour.

Woolpit

In 1998, historian Paul Harris put forward the theory that the children were Flemish, hence the strange language, had fled into the forest after their parents had been slaughtered and lived there, either in the dark undergrowth or in the miles of ancient mine workings in the area, until they were found. Some of his reasoning about the children's Flemish origin has been questioned but what I found interesting was his explanation for the children's colour. When they were found, they were very malnourished and only recognised bean pods, which they would have encountered variations of in the forest, as food. His theory is that the children were suffering from what was known at the time as 'green-sickness' or what we know today as hypochromic anemia which is caused by a diet very deficient in iron and protein and causes the skin to have a markedly green tinge. Given that the chronicles state that both children, once they began to tolerate a wider range of food, lost the green colour and turned pink, this seems like a logical explanation. Not green children then, just very sick ones.

The superstitions of the past are fascinating things as is the science that unpicks them. The lesson of the Doonhill Fairy Trail, however, suggests that even our increased understanding of the world can't totally unpick us: scratch the surface and we're all still mentally throwing salt, crossing our fingers and wishing.

HISTORY IN THE MAKING, by Vanora Bennett

Being a part of history in the making is never comfortable. 

I learned that in my previous life as a foreign reporter, covering the various coups, conflicts, and crises that afflicted the people whose countries I was working in.

In those days I was usually in a foreigners’ bubble (with my finances and livelihood protected, a safe place to live, and a British embassy down the road), so I was a bit less bothered than everyone around me by whatever shock news was in the headlines that day. But still, there was something both utterly gripping and utterly boring about having to live through whatever the crisis was, in real time, rather than look back on it through a book or film.

It felt as though time itself started behaving in unpredictable ways when a crisis set in.

First it would race along – and someone’s career or life or a whole country would be gone before you’d had time to draw breath. But then things would slow agonisingly down. The rest of the story always took so long to unfold. You’d need to wait for the next day, or week, or month, for the next instalment, resignation, currency collapse, invasion, or whatever. 

And you’d need to fill the hours by worrying through the night, or fretting with friends about what would happen next, or doing the ironing or making breakfast, all the time itching with the enforced passivity of not being able to fast-forward to the happy-ever-after bit where it all finally gets sorted out.

I have since discovered, on starting to write historical novels, that one of the ways in which being a fiction writer is incomparably superior to being either a journalist or a person actually living through a public crisis is that you never need to live through the boring bits. You’re looking back, so you are in control of time, and have the power to just jump your characters from one speeded-up action moment in history to the next. The slow times are left out as if they never happened – at most, abbreviated to three dots.

Now, I think it’s safe to say most people in this country haven’t personally experienced major historical crisis, even if historical novelists do it vicariously all the time. But living through the past few weeks of Brexit Britain keeps reminding me of how bewildering time can feel when you’re in the grip of one - when reality starts doing that speeding-up-and-slowing-down thing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

First came the time-flashing-forward bit. On referendum night, my very political teenager, who’d wanted to watch the whole vote-counting drama play out and the result be announced, finally conked out at 4am. We woke him up at 8 and told him that Britain had voted for Brexit and the Prime Minister had just resigned. “WOTTT,” he said disconsolately. He’d only been asleep for four hours, yet he’d missed the moment when his world had changed.

“Now what?” he said, once he had recovered. We couldn’t tell him. We didn’t know, any more than anyone else. And, for all the millions of words spoken and written about it in the weeks since, we’re none the wiser now. Because now we’re in the slow-motion bit. Waiting.

I think part of what felt so bleakly funny about the cropper Boris’n’Gove came more recently was the speed with which it happened. No need to wait for a punchline, it was on us almost before we’d heard the beginning of the joke. 

Another quick thing happening at last, hoorah! At last, something we could understand without waiting forever to get to the end of the story! At last, a break in the tension! 

I think part of the belly-laugh the nation gave was in sheer relief.

But it's worn off. Slo-mo is back. I’ve returned to fretting on Facebook and scouring the papers for clues, omens and portents, waiting for the next convulsion in the bigger real-life drama. 

I can’t help feeling that I’m behaving as foolishly as those fearful or exultant crowds that get an occasional three-line mention in historical novels, frantically checking out the comets or mumbling superstitiously about giant fish in the Thames while, centre stage, Henry VIII shrugs off Wife One and pulls out of Rome. 

But I can’t help it. Time – real time, not the time we novelists have the luxury of rearranging in our work – is hanging heavy on my hands, just as it did on those people’s. There is history in the air. And there’s nothing else to do.

Vanora Bennett's website