Some stories refuse to behave. They sit in the historical record, anchored to real places and real chroniclers, yet they carry an atmosphere that no purely rational explanation can ever quite dissolve. The Green Children of Woolpit is one of those stories.
It happened (or was recorded as having happened) during the reign of King Stephen, somewhere in the middle of the 12th century. Harvest workers near the village of Woolpit, in Suffolk, found two children sitting beside one of the wolf pits that gave the village its name. These were not decorative landmarks. They were traps, cut into the earth to snare the wolves that still ranged through medieval East Anglia.
The children were unlike anything the villagers had seen. Their skin was green. Their clothing was made of an unfamiliar material. They spoke no English, no French, no Latin: no language anyone could place. They were frightened, confused, and entirely unable to explain themselves.
Taken In
The villagers brought them to the household of Sir Richard de Calne, a local knight whose manor sat roughly six miles north of Woolpit. He gave them food. They refused it. For days, they would not eat anything placed before them until someone brought in raw broad beans, fresh from the fields. The children fell on them ravenously. For weeks, broad beans were all they would accept.
Gradually, de Calne’s household weaned them onto a more ordinary diet. As they ate better, something else changed too: the green tint of their skin began to fade.
The boy, the younger of the two, never recovered his health. He was baptised, then died shortly after. The girl survived. She adapted, integrated into the household, and, over time, learned English.
When she could finally speak, she had a story to tell.
St. Martin’s Land
She said she and her brother came from a place called St. Martin’s Land. It was underground, or at least subterranean in character. A world of perpetual twilight, where the sun never rose. She described a luminous country nearby, visible but not accessible, whose light was like their daytime. The inhabitants were Christian. They venerated St. Martin. And everyone, she said, was green.
She explained that they had been herding their father’s cattle when they heard a loud sound — bells, most likely — and followed it into a cave. They emerged, blinking and overwhelmed, into the Suffolk light. They wandered until they collapsed near the wolf pit.
That was as far as her account could go. How they got from underground to Suffolk, she could not say.
The girl was eventually baptised and given the name Agnes. Some accounts record that she later married a man named Richard Barre, an archdeacon of Ely who served Henry II as a judge and ambassador. A real historical figure. Agnes herself appears in historical records as his wife.
Two Chroniclers, One Strange Event
The story comes down to us through two independent medieval writers. William of Newburgh, a Yorkshire-based historian, included it in his Historia Rerum Anglicarum, written around 1189. He found it extraordinary (he wrote that he was “crushed sufficiently” that he was forced to believe it) yet considered it important enough to record. Ralph of Coggeshall, the abbot of a Cistercian abbey in Essex, wrote his account in the 1220s, drawing on testimony he claimed to have received from Sir Richard de Calne himself.
The two accounts differ in small details, as oral accounts always do when committed to parchment decades after the fact. But the core is consistent: green skin, unknown language, broad beans, St. Martin’s Land. Neither man appears to have copied the other. William wrote from Yorkshire; Ralph from Essex. The story evidently circulated widely enough to reach both.
What Can Be Said
Nine centuries of speculation have produced several competing explanations, none of them entirely satisfying.
The most widely accepted theory holds that the children were Flemish refugees. Large numbers of Flemish immigrants had settled in East Anglia during the 12th century. Henry II’s accession in 1154 brought persecution — in 1173, many Flemish settlers in the region were massacred during a period of civil unrest. Orphaned, traumatised children, speaking an unfamiliar dialect, suffering from severe malnutrition, could plausibly have wandered into Woolpit having hidden underground for days or weeks. The village of Fornham St. Martin — from which “St. Martin’s Land” might derive — lies not far away.
The green skin has a medical name: chlorosis, or hypochromic anaemia, a condition caused by severe nutritional deficiency that produces a greenish tint in the skin. The fact that it faded as the children ate better food is consistent with that diagnosis.
But the theory has its critics. An educated man like Richard de Calne, familiar with the substantial Flemish population of East Anglia, would almost certainly have recognised a Flemish dialect. And the clothing, described as strange and unfamiliar to everyone, remains unexplained.
William of Newburgh, for all his scepticism, put it simply: “Let every one say as he pleases, and reason on such matters according to his abilities.”
What Remains
Woolpit still stands in Suffolk, seven miles east of Bury St. Edmunds. The village sign depicts two small green children. The wolf pits are long gone, but the name holds.
What makes the story durable is precisely what makes it unresolvable. It is not pure folklore — it has named witnesses, real locations, and two independent chroniclers who thought it worth preserving. It is not confirmed history either. It exists in the uncomfortable space between them.
A boy and a girl emerged from the earth speaking no known language. One died. The other lived, learned English, and married into the English establishment. Whatever she knew about where she came from, she carried to her grave.
Some threads simply refuse to be tied off.
I remember reading about this in one of those big books of unsolved mysteries. Fascinating story and great article. I suppose there’s a prosaic explanation such as the Flemish one, which has subsequently been embellished, but the mine sometimes likes to think of stranger ideas. Which I suppose is again testament to the story’s endurance.