Sometime during the reign of King Stephen—between 1135 and 1154, in that fractured period English historians call “The Anarchy”—the villagers of Woolpit made a discovery that would puzzle scholars for the next eight centuries.
The village itself took its name from the wolf pits: deep traps dug into the earth, baited with carrion, designed to snare predators that threatened livestock. But on that summer day, what emerged from beside one of those pits was far stranger than any wolf.
Two children. A brother and sister. Their skin was the color of moss, of new leaves, of the world after rain. They spoke in a language no one recognized. Their clothes were cut from unfamiliar cloth. And they would eat nothing except raw broad beans.
This is the story of the Green Children of Woolpit—and why, after 800 years, we still cannot agree on what actually happened.
The Discovery
The earliest written account comes from William of Newburgh, an Augustinian canon writing around 1189. He heard the story from “trustworthy sources”—unnamed, but apparently credible enough for a careful historian to record. About thirty years later, Ralph of Coggeshall, abbot of a Cistercian monastery roughly twenty-five miles from Woolpit, wrote his own version. Ralph claimed to have spoken directly with Sir Richard de Calne, the knight who sheltered the children.
The two accounts differ in small details but agree on the essentials.
The children were found beside a wolf pit during harvest time. They were starving. Taken to Sir Richard’s manor, they wept at the sight of bread and meat, refusing everything until someone offered them raw broad beans still in their stalks. The children ate greedily.
Over time, they adapted to normal food. The green tint faded from their skin. But the boy—apparently the younger of the two—remained sickly. He died before his baptism, or perhaps shortly after.
The girl survived. She learned English. And eventually, she told her story.
Saint Martin’s Land
According to Ralph of Coggeshall, the girl explained that she and her brother came from a place where the sun never rose. The light there was perpetual twilight. “Everything was green,” she said. William of Newburgh adds that she called their homeland “Saint Martin’s Land.”
They had been herding their father’s cattle when they heard bells—perhaps from Bury St Edmunds Abbey, William suggests. Following the sound, they entered a cavern. They wandered for a long time. When they emerged, they found themselves in Woolpit, blinded by sunlight, disoriented by the heat.
Ralph records that the girl eventually married a man from King’s Lynn, some forty miles away. William notes she was considered “very wanton and impudent”—medieval shorthand, perhaps, for a woman who did not know her place, or who carried the strangeness of her origins too visibly.
Neither chronicler offers an explanation. William calls the event “strange and prodigious” and leaves it at that. Ralph, writing for a monastic audience, seems more interested in what the story reveals about faith and baptism than in solving the mystery.
The Flemish Theory
In 1998, historian Paul Harris proposed a solution that has since become the most widely accepted: the children were Flemish refugees.
During the early 12th century, Flemish immigrants had settled in eastern England, many working as clothmakers. Under Henry II, who became king in 1154, these immigrants faced persecution. In 1173, the Battle of Fornham near Bury St Edmunds ended with thousands of Flemish mercenaries slaughtered.
Harris suggests the children’s “Saint Martin’s Land” was Fornham St Martin, a village just north of Bury St Edmunds. Displaced by violence, the children may have wandered through the region’s extensive mine tunnels—emerging at Woolpit confused, malnourished, and speaking only Flemish. The green skin, Harris argues, was hypochromic anemia (also called “green sickness”), caused by dietary deficiency.
It’s a tidy explanation. Perhaps too tidy.
Other scholars have noted problems. If Sir Richard de Calne was an educated knight, why would he fail to recognize Flemish? And if green skin was simply malnutrition, why don’t medieval records describe it more commonly among the poor?
The Otherworld
Medieval listeners would have recognized another possibility entirely.
The motif of entering another world through a cave appears across European folklore. Gerald of Wales tells a similar story of a school truant led by “pigmies” through an underground passage into a beautiful land lit by dim, eternal twilight. The Green Children’s journey follows a familiar template: the threshold crossed, the bell that calls, the disorientation upon return.
Folklorist Martin Walsh has argued the story preserves fragments of an ancient harvest ritual, with Saint Martin—a figure associated with death and resurrection in medieval iconography—providing the mythic framework.
And then there are the beans. In many traditions, beans connect to the dead. The Pythagoreans refused to eat them. Medieval folklore associated them with spirits and transformation. Katherine Briggs, the great scholar of English fairy lore, noted that “the habitual food of the children was beans, the food of the dead.”
Whether this means the children came from an underground realm, or simply that medieval listeners heard the story through a filter of folk belief, is impossible to say.
The Alien Hypothesis
Every few decades, someone suggests extraterrestrials.
The argument runs like this: perpetual twilight suggests a world with different solar conditions. The green skin could indicate photosynthesis or copper-based blood. The inability to tolerate sunlight points to a darker world. Even the name “Saint Martin’s Land”—with its suggestion of another place, separate and self-contained—fits the template of close encounter narratives.
Duncan Lunan, a Scottish astronomer, speculated in 1996 that the children might have been the survivors of a crashed alien vehicle. The green skin, the unfamiliar language, the disorientation upon arrival—all of it maps neatly onto science fiction tropes.
The problem, of course, is that we’re projecting modern frameworks onto medieval sources. William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall were not trying to describe alien contact. They were recording something they found inexplicable within their own worldview.
What the Girl Knew
Here’s what strikes me most about the story: the girl’s competence.
She recognized her brother as family. She understood the concept of servitude well enough to enter Sir Richard’s household. She grasped the significance of baptism and chose to accept it. She learned a new language as an adolescent—no small feat—and adapted to a culture radically different from her own.
Whatever happened to these children, they were not blank slates. They carried knowledge of herding, of agriculture, of social hierarchies. They came from somewhere that had families, livestock, bells, and perhaps even Christianity (Saint Martin was, after all, a Christian saint).
The medieval chroniclers emphasize their strangeness. But read carefully, the sources reveal two children who were remarkably capable of adapting to human society—because they came from human society.
The Silence After
We don’t know the girl’s name. Some modern researchers suggest she was called Agnes and married a royal official named Richard Barre, but the evidence is thin. We don’t know when she died. We don’t know if she ever found anyone else who spoke her language. We don’t know if she told her children where she came from, or if she buried that story deep enough that it never resurfaced.
William of Newburgh wrote that she was still alive when he composed his history. Ralph of Coggeshall wrote decades later, perhaps drawing on family memories passed down through Sir Richard’s household.
And then the story vanishes. For four hundred years, barely a mention. William Camden dismissed it as a hoax in 1586. Robert Burton, writing in 1621, believed it—but thought the children had fallen from the moon.
The tale resurfaced in the Victorian era when folklorist Thomas Keightley included it in The Fairy Mythology. In 1928, the anarchist poet Herbert Read called it “the norm to which all types of fantasy should conform.” It became the basis for his only novel, The Green Child (1935), and has inspired plays, poems, children’s books, and even an Anglo-Norwegian electropop duo who took their name from the legend.
The Questions That Remain
Every theory explains some elements and fails on others.
If they were Flemish refugees, why the green skin? If they were fairy children, why did they eat mortal food and lose their color? If they were aliens, why were they so biologically compatible with earthly nutrition? If it was all a folktale, why did two sober chroniclers—writing independently, decades apart, for very different audiences—both record it as fact?
Perhaps the most honest answer is that we cannot know. The sources are too thin, the context too distant, the original tellers too dead to question.
But something happened in Woolpit, sometime during The Anarchy, that was strange enough to be remembered. Two children appeared from somewhere. They were different. They were lost. One died; one survived. And the girl who learned English well enough to tell her story left us with an image that still resonates: a land of eternal twilight, of green things that never saw the sun, separated from our world by nothing more than a long walk through the dark.
Sources
- William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum (c. 1189)
- Ralph of Coggeshall, Chronicum Anglicanum (c. 1220)
- Harris, Paul. “The Green Children of Woolpit: A 12th Century Mystery and its Possible Solution.” Fortean Studies, Vol. 4 (1998)
- Clark, John. “‘Small, Vulnerable ETs’: The Green Children of Woolpit.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2 (2006)
- Madej, M. “The Story About the Green Children of Woolpit According to the Medieval Chronicles of William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall.” Res Historica, Vol. 49 (2020)
- Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Green Children from Another World, or the Archipelago in England.” In Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages (2008)
