Book Review:

Review of John Clark's The Green Children of Woolpit: Chronicles, Fairies and Facts in Medieval England. Exeter New Approaches to Legend, Folklore and Popular Belief. University of Exeter Press, 2024. 274 pp. Hardcover (ISBN: 978-1804131367). Kindle (ASIN: B0CV6RSS8F).

John Clark’s monograph explores the strange story of the Green Children of Woolpit, a legend that has long fascinated historians, folklorists, and literary scholars, as well as fiction writers, illustrators, UFO-enthusiasts, and students of unexplained phenomena. Originally recounted in two medieval chronicles, the tale has inspired numerous modern retellings in the form of juvenile and adult fiction, poetry, graphic novels, and plays; in recent years, as an example of “the unexplained,” the Green Children have also been the subject of several podcasts.

Two twelfth-century clerical historians, William of Newburgh and Ralph Coggeshalle, writing in Latin, include the tale in their chronicles. Both claim to base their writings on eye-witness accounts. While the chronicles differ in detail and in context, they both recount the same main events. During harvest season, farm workers outside the town of Woolpit discover a boy and a girl wandering alone. The children have green skin, speak no recognizable language, and refuse all food but raw broad beans. They cannot explain their origin, but they say that in the land from which they come, the sun does not shine. Taken in by the townsfolk, the children eventually learn to eat normally and to speak the language. While the boy soon dies, the girl grows to adulthood and spends her life in Woolpit.

While many researchers, both popular and academic, have examined the tale, Clark remains skeptical of previous analyses, which reflect, in his view, both a lack of scholarly rigor and a desire to promote a particular agenda. In his book, Clark aims “to remedy this situation and put this strange story on a sounder footing” (60). His meticulous scholarship offers no definitive explanations or conclusions but carefully examines the tale and its sources in addition to the scrutiny, speculation, and adaptation they have inspired.

Clark divides The Green Children into nine chapters, some of which seem slightly repetitive. The initial third of the book introduces the story, its sources, and the interest it has generated over the years. Chapters one and two briefly relate the story itself and establish the long-standing wide fascination with the mysterious tale. Chapter three explores the transmission of the tale, beginning with the chronicles themselves. Clark summarizes scholarly attempts to identify the tale’s genre or establish its historical veracity and outlines the Green Children’s numerous literary adaptations and reworkings. He argues critical that transmission of the tale has been faulty and that its critical analysis has suffered from sloppy translations, conflations of the two chroniclers’ accounts, and dependence upon earlier scholarship.

Chapter four outlines various academic approaches to the tale. He convincingly supports the argument, established in his introduction, that divergent scholars’ biases and agendas have determined the way the story has been analyzed and interpreted. For example, folklorists have sought to demonstrate the way the tale incorporates standard fairy-tale motifs; historians have used the legend to speculate about relationships between the various races of medieval Britain or to explore ways in which medieval chroniclers incorporated “fiction” into their recordings of factual events.

Chapter five returns to the the two primary sources: the chronicles of William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshalle. This chapter showcases Clark’s meticulous scholarship as he carefully combs through the two chroniclers’ iterations of the tale, notes all of the variations in their accounts, and speculates about a possible lost shared source. Clark is careful not to reach conclusions without adequate evidence (as he feels other scholars have been anxious to do).

Chapters six and seven are by far the most substantial. They form the crux of Clark’s analysis, asking some salient (and previously ignored) questions about issues of translation, belief, perspective, and basic understandings of the way the world works—in other words, the difficulties of using twelfth-century chronicles compiled by twelfth-century clerics writing in Latin to form modern interpretations and conclusions. He notes, for example, that medieval readers and writers would not share our ideas of “fact” and “fiction” or “natural” and “supernatural.” Also of interest are his speculations about children’s description of their origins, suggesting that persistent leading questions may have influenced the children’s responses, reflecting a trauma response.

Amidst these fascinating questions about medieval belief, however, he includes information about later, seventeenth-century, ideas of the nature of fairies. While I understand that he is trying to piece together the analysis of other scholars, I don’t really see the relevance of many of these observations, which in my view, obscure the clarity of his analysis of the tale.

In the final two chapters, Clark discusses some unexplored issues related to the Green Children’s story and offers some suggestions about the continued popular fascination with the tale. Unlike the previous scholars whom Clark criticizes, he refrains from offering definitive conclusions. Rather, he focuses on what many critics have perhaps ignored: the two lost, terrified children, taken in by strangers, and imprisoned in a “narrative over which they had [and continue to have] no control” (191).  His return, at the end of his study, to the experience of the children themselves, adds a welcome element of humanity to the legend and its legacy.

Despite its at-times confusing organization, The Green Children of Woolpit is a fascinating and well-researched piece of scholarship that will be of interest to a wide range of readers. Clark, the long-time Curator of the Medieval Collections at the Museum of London, spent his career negotiating the museum’s “ongoing interplay between conventional history and archaeology on the one hand and the traditional ‘legendary’ narratives on the other” (3). In examining the Green Children, such interplay is a vital element. Clark’s interdisciplinary background seems crucial to his nuanced analysis of the tale in its historical, cultural, linguistic, and geographical context. Moreover, the book proves interesting as much for Clark’s examination of previous analyses of the legend as it does for his exploration of the Green Children’s story. He outlines the tale’s complex and fascinating critical history, in which readers with disparate goals and sets of beliefs attempt to classify the children to match their own interests—as elves or fairies, supernatural inhabitants of an underground realm, extraterrestrials, or human victims of alien abduction.

-7 Sep. 2025