Sometime around the year 1150, at harvest time, the reapers of a Suffolk village looked up to find two children standing at the edge of the field. A boy and a girl, frightened, speaking a language no one could understand, dressed in a strange and unfamiliar cloth. And their skin was green. Nearly nine centuries later, no one has ever fully explained who they were.
Two children at the edge of the village
The village was Woolpit in Suffolk — its name comes from the Old English wulf-pytt, the wolf pit, after the trenches once dug there to trap wolves. It was during the troubled reign of King Stephen, a period so lawless it is remembered as the Anarchy. The two green-skinned children emerged near those old pits, terrified and babbling in an unknown tongue.
The villagers took them to the manor of a local knight, Sir Richard de Calne. There the children refused every food they were offered — until someone brought in fresh broad beans. These they seized and ate hungrily, and for a long time afterwards they would eat almost nothing else.
The girl who survived
The boy did not last long. He grew weak, fell ill, and died not many months after they were found. The girl lived. As she slowly began to eat ordinary food, her green colour faded, until her skin looked like anyone else’s. She learned English, was baptised, and stayed on in the household. By some accounts she later married a man in King’s Lynn.
The land she described
Once she could speak, she was asked where they had come from. She described a place she called St Martin’s Land — a country of perpetual twilight, where the sun never truly rose and everyone was green like her. Beyond a great shining river, she said, lay a luminous land. She and her brother had been minding animals when they followed a sound into a cavern, wandered through the dark, and stepped out — dazzled by the sunlight — into the fields of Woolpit. They could never find the way back.
Why historians take it seriously
The tale survives because two respected chroniclers wrote it down within living memory. Ralph of Coggeshall, abbot of a monastery some twenty-six miles away, recorded it in his Chronicon Anglicanum and said he had heard it directly from Sir Richard de Calne. William of Newburgh, a canon far to the north in Yorkshire, included it in his history despite his own doubts — writing that he felt “compelled to believe” it. Two independent, sober churchmen treating the story as a genuine marvel is exactly what has kept it from being dismissed as pure fairy tale.
What might really have happened
The leading rational explanation is that the children were Flemish orphans. Flemish immigrants were resented and, at times, violently persecuted in twelfth-century England, and there was a village nearby called Fornham St Martin — a neat fit for the girl’s “St Martin’s Land”. Orphaned, traumatised and speaking Flemish, a language the Suffolk reapers would not have recognised, they could have wandered lost and been found half-starved.
The green skin most likely came from chlorosis, once known as “green sickness” — a severe anaemia caused by malnutrition that can give the skin a greenish cast. It fades once the diet improves, which matches the girl’s colour vanishing as she began to eat properly. Put together — frightened refugee children, an unknown language, and a starvation illness — the impossible starts to look almost ordinary. Almost. It still doesn’t fully explain the strange clothing or the underground land of twilight, and no parish record has ever been found to confirm a word of it.
Frequently asked questions
When did the Green Children of Woolpit appear?
Around 1150, during the reign of King Stephen. The chroniclers never gave an exact date.
Is the story true?
It rests entirely on two medieval chronicles, with no independent record to confirm it — so it can’t be proven. But both writers treated it as a real event.
Why were the children green?
The most likely explanation is chlorosis, a malnutrition-related anaemia that tints the skin green and fades with a better diet.
What happened to the girl?
She survived, lost her green colour, learned English, and by some accounts later married.
The Daily Mist — Beyond the mist, uncover the stories.