The Wanderlight Chronicles – Coming Soon

Book 1. The Green Children.

From the Historia Rerum Anglicarum of William of Newburgh, Augustinian Canon of Newburgh Priory, Yorkshire. Written circa 1196–1198.

During the reign of King Stephen, there was found in the county of Suffolk, near the village called Woolpit, from which it takes its name, a boy and a girl, unknown to any man, who had crept forth from the excavations which the people there dig for the catching of wolves. Their whole bodies were of a green colour. Their clothing was fashioned from a material of an unknown kind. Bewildered by the strangeness of what they saw, they wept. They were brought to the house of a certain knight, Richard de Calne, and kept there. They would eat nothing. Though much food was set before them, they refused it all, and for several days grew weak with hunger.

Then it happened that some beans were brought in still on their stalks, newly cut, and at the sight of these the children showed great eagerness. They took the stalks in their hands, and searched within them for the beans, finding nothing where the pods were not. At this they wept again. One of the households, seeing their disappointment, opened the pods and showed them the beans inside. They ate the beans with great gladness, and for many months lived on nothing else.

In the course of time, they were brought to receive baptism. The boy, who was the younger and the more sickly, did not long survive the sacrament, and died. But the girl lived on in good health and became no different in her bodily appearance from other women, for her green colour faded by degrees as she took to eating ordinary food. She was afterwards given in marriage to a man at Lenna, a place not unknown.

When she had in time learned the English tongue and was asked about her country and her kin, she said that she came from a land where the sun never rose high, where the light was always as the light before dawn, and where everything was green. Asked how she had come to be here, she said that she could not tell with certainty how it had happened. She and her brother had been following their flock when they heard a great sound like the ringing of bells, and then found themselves here in the pit, in the strange bright light, which had so terrified and confounded them that for a long time they could neither move nor speak. She said that in her own country there was a broad river, and that beyond it could be seen another land, bright and luminous, but that she had never been able to reach it.

I set this down not as a thing proven but as a thing reported. If any man can offer an account of it, let him do so. I cannot.

William of Newburgh Newburgh Priory, Yorkshire circa 1196

Coming soon!