The Green Children of Woolpit: A Medieval Mystery

Sometime in the 12th century, according to two medieval chroniclers, people at Woolpit in Suffolk found two children, a boy and a girl, whose skin was green. Nobody could understand a word they said, and they would eat nothing until someone brought them beans. More than eight centuries later the story has no settled explanation, which is why the Green Children of Woolpit remain one of England's strangest medieval puzzles.

Who wrote down the story of the green children?

The tale survives in two Latin chronicles. William of Newburgh (c. 1136–c. 1198), an Augustinian canon of Newburgh Priory in Yorkshire, put it in his Historia rerum Anglicarum (History of English Affairs), written in the last years of his life. Ralph of Coggeshall, abbot of the Cistercian abbey of Coggeshall in Essex from 1207 to 1218, who died sometime after 1227, told it in his Chronicon Anglicanum (English Chronicle) in the 1220s. Neither man copied the other, but the two versions are so close that recent scholars, including the historian Michał Madej and John Clark, a former curator of medieval collections at the Museum of London, conclude that both drew on a common source. The two writers handled it differently. William admitted that the story strained belief, but said he had been "so overwhelmed by the weight of so many and such competent witnesses" that he had to record it. He dated it to King Stephen's reign, which ran from 1135 to 1154. Ralph named his source: he had heard it often, he said, from Sir Richard de Calne, the knight who took the children in, and from his family.

What did the chroniclers say happened?

The outline is the same in both. William says that at harvest time two children came out of the old wolf pits beside the village, which he says gave Woolpit its name, meaning pits for trapping wolves; the reapers took them to the village. Ralph places the event "at St. Mary's of the Wolf-pits." The children were green all over, and William adds that their clothes were of a strange color and unknown material. For days they refused everything offered to them, until fresh beans were brought in, still on their stalks. Then, in a detail both chroniclers record, they split open the stalks rather than the pods, looking for the beans inside. They lived on beans for months, slowly learned to eat bread and lost their green color.

The details then part company, and popular retellings often blur them. According to William, both children were baptized, and the boy, who seemed the younger, died soon afterward. Ralph says only that the boy was always languid and depressed and died within a short time. It is the girl he describes being baptized, after which she "lived for many years in the service of that knight." Ralph also notes, in a Victorian translation, that she was "rather loose and wanton in her conduct." William adds that she married at Lynn, the Norfolk port now called King's Lynn, and was still alive a few years before he wrote. Neither chronicle gives her a name. The name Agnes Barre, found in many retellings, comes from the modern writer Duncan Lunan's archival detective work, and Clark's 2024 study rejects it.

Where did the children say they came from?

Once they had learned English, the children described their home, and here too the chroniclers differ. In William's version both children speak. They call themselves "inhabitants of the land of St. Martin," a Christian country with churches, where the sun never rises and people make do with a half-light like the twilight before sunrise or after sunset. Across a very wide river, they say, a bright land can be seen. They were tending their father's flocks when they heard a great sound, like the bells they now heard ringing at St Edmund's, the abbey at Bury that held Woolpit, and suddenly found themselves among the reapers in the fields. Ralph tells it through the girl alone. In her land there was no sun, only a dim light like that after sunset, and its people and all they had were green. She and her brother had followed their flocks into a cave, heard a delightful sound of bells and wandered toward it through the dark until they reached the cave's mouth, where the sunlight struck them senseless. Like the dancing plague of 1518, the episode survives because serious writers set down something they could not explain. Unlike that case, there is no town record to check it against, only the two chronicles and the memory of one Suffolk household.

Is there a natural explanation?

The best-known attempt came from Paul Harris in the journal Fortean Studies in 1998. He suggested that the children were Flemish. Flemish mercenaries had been numerous in England under King Stephen, and on 17 October 1173, during a rebellion against Henry II, a rebel army made up largely of French and Flemish mercenaries was destroyed at Fornham, near Bury St Edmunds, where local people are said to have killed many with pitchforks and flails. Harris proposed that two Flemish children from Fornham St Martin, a few hours' walk from Woolpit and a possible source of the name "St Martin's Land," survived the violence and wandered until they reached Woolpit, speaking Flemish and dressed in foreign clothes. He even tried to connect the wolf pits with flint-mine tunnels some 50 kilometers away. Their color, he argued, was chlorosis, the "green sickness" of older medicine: an iron-deficiency anemia that gave its sufferers a greenish pallor and could be treated with iron. The name comes from the Greek chlōrós, light green.

It is a neat solution, but historians are unconvinced. Madej points out that Harris's date contradicts William, who places the story in Stephen's reign, which ended in 1154, nearly twenty years before the battle. He also argues that the chlorosis idea does not hold up: if hunger and poor food turned children green, many people in 12th-century England would have been green. Chlorosis was, besides, classically a disease of adolescent girls and young women. Clark rejects the very idea that modern medicine can diagnose the children from such sources. Other readings treat the tale as literature rather than a case file. Folklorists point to its otherworldly furniture. Beans had been linked with death since ancient times, though also with rebirth, and St Martin's feast on 11 November falls just after All Saints' and All Souls' days, which led one scholar to connect St Martin's Land with the land of the dead. The medievalist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has read the story as being about the peoples the English pushed aside when they conquered Britain. In each chronicle it sits among other marvels: William groups it with strange things found underground, and Ralph with a wild man caught in the sea, giants and a spirit called Malekin.

Why does the mystery refuse to die?

The story has been reinvented for four centuries. Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621, wondered whether the green children "which Nubrigensis speaks of" (Nubrigensis being William of Newburgh) had come from another inhabited world, and later editions added that they "fell from heaven." Some scholars now treat that line as an early seed of science fiction. Thomas Keightley retold the tale in the 1850 edition of The Fairy Mythology, and in 1965 John Macklin's book Strange Destinies printed a supposed repeat case from "Banjos," Spain, in 1887 that turned out to be a close paraphrase of Keightley; no such village has ever been traced. Lunan has since argued that the children were raised by extraterrestrials. Like the Loch Ness Monster, the legend keeps outliving every attempt to explain it away. Woolpit itself has made peace with its strangest visitors. The village sign, put up for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977, shows the two children alongside the parish church and a wolf. That is probably the real reason the mystery endures. It sits where history and folklore overlap: a real village, two careful chroniclers and a named local knight, wrapped around details too strange to accept and too specific to dismiss. Read one way, it is the garbled memory of two lost, frightened children. Read another, it is a medieval marvel tale about a world beneath our own. The chroniclers could not settle it either. They simply wrote down what they had been told.