The Green Children of Woolpit: Medieval England's Strangest Visitors

Sometime during the reign of King Stephen, in the mid-12th century, reapers working the fields near the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England, discovered two children sitting at the edge of one of the wolf pits that gave the village its name. The children were brother and sister. They were terrified, clinging to each other, babbling in a language no one could understand.

And their skin was green.

Not painted. Not stained. Green, from head to toe, as if they had been born that way. The villagers brought them food, but the children refused everything placed in front of them, weeping with what appeared to be genuine hunger but unable or unwilling to eat. It was only when someone brought freshly harvested broad beans, still in the stalk, that the children tore them open and devoured them frantically.

This is not a folktale passed through oral tradition and embellished over generations. It was recorded independently by two of medieval England's most respected chroniclers, Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh, both writing within a few decades of the alleged events. William of Newburgh, in particular, was known for his skepticism and his contempt for writers who fabricated marvels. He included the story, he wrote, because so many credible witnesses vouched for it.

What You'll Learn

• •Who Found the Green Children?
• •What Did They Look Like?
• •Where Did They Say They Came From?
• •What Happened to Them?
• •Could Malnutrition Explain the Green Skin?
• •The Flemish Orphan Theory
• •An Underground World?
• •Why This Story Endures
• •Frequently Asked Questions

Who Found the Green Children?

The children were discovered near the wolf pits at the edge of Woolpit, a small agricultural village in Suffolk, about 80 miles northeast of London. The reapers who found them brought the pair to the home of Sir Richard de Calne, one of the local landowners, who took them in.

Neither child could communicate with anyone in the village. Their language was entirely unrecognized, not just a foreign dialect, but something no one present had ever heard. This was in a region that regularly encountered speakers of English, French, Flemish, and Latin. Whatever tongue these children spoke, it was none of those.

What Did They Look Like?

Both chroniclers are consistent on this point. The children's skin had a distinctly green hue. Their clothing was described as being made from an unfamiliar material, though accounts differ on specifics. They appeared disoriented and deeply frightened, as if everything around them was alien to their experience.

The boy, who was the younger and weaker of the two, remained sickly after their discovery. Despite the care provided by Sir Richard's household, he never fully recovered and died within a year or so of their arrival.

The girl adapted more successfully. Over time, she began to eat other foods. Gradually, the green color faded from her skin entirely, and she came to look like any other person in the village. She learned to speak English and was eventually baptized.

Where Did They Say They Came From?

Once the girl acquired enough English to communicate, the story she told was more bewildering than her appearance.

She said they came from a place she called St. Martin's Land. It was a country where the sun never shone directly. The light was perpetual but dim, like twilight just after sunset. Everything in St. Martin's Land, she said, was green. All the inhabitants had green skin like theirs.

She described being able to see a luminous land across a great river, but she and her brother had never crossed to it.

As for how they arrived in Woolpit, her account was frustratingly incomplete. She and her brother had been tending their father's flocks when they heard a loud sound, like the pealing of bells. They followed the sound into a cavern or passage and walked through darkness for what seemed like a long time. Eventually they emerged into blinding sunlight, the first direct sunlight they had ever experienced, and collapsed in the field where the reapers found them, overwhelmed and unable to find their way back.

What Happened to Them?

The boy's death is recorded simply and without much comment. The girl, however, lived a full life. Both Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh note that she eventually married a man from King's Lynn, a town about 40 miles north of Woolpit. Ralph of Coggeshall adds that she was reportedly "rather loose and wanton in her conduct," though whether this was his own judgment or local gossip is impossible to say.

What matters is that she was a real, physical person who lived among real people, married, and presumably had children. This was not a phantom or an apparition. She was a flesh-and-blood woman whose origins nobody could account for.

Could Malnutrition Explain the Green Skin?

The most commonly offered conventional explanation is chlorosis, a form of iron deficiency anemia that can give the skin a greenish tint. If the children had been severely malnourished and subsisting on a diet almost entirely of green vegetables, the theory goes, their skin might have taken on a greenish cast. As the girl's diet improved, the green faded, which is consistent with this explanation.

But chlorosis produces a faint greenish pallor, not the vivid coloration described by the chroniclers. It's also a stretch to imagine that the villagers of Woolpit, who would have encountered plenty of malnourished people in 12th-century England, would have been so astonished by ordinary pallor that two separate historians felt compelled to record it decades later. These were people who saw hunger regularly. Whatever they saw on those children was something different.

The malnutrition theory also does nothing to explain the unknown language, the unfamiliar clothing, or the girl's detailed and consistent account of a sunless land.

The Flemish Orphan Theory

A more elaborate theory, proposed by historian Paul Harris in 1998, suggests the children may have been Flemish orphans from the village of Fornham St. Martin, only a few miles from Woolpit. During the turbulent reign of King Stephen, Flemish immigrants in England were persecuted, and Harris speculated that the children might have fled into Thetford Forest, become lost, and wandered into Woolpit disoriented and starving.

The name "St. Martin's Land" could then be a garbled reference to Fornham St. Martin. The green skin could be chlorosis from malnutrition. The unfamiliar language could be Flemish, which rural Suffolk villagers might not have recognized.

It's a tidy theory. Perhaps too tidy. It requires assuming that the chroniclers, one of whom was writing from nearby Coggeshall and would have been familiar with Flemish, somehow misidentified a known European language as something entirely alien. It requires that "dim twilight" is a metaphor for living under a forest canopy, that the "bells" were some natural sound, and that every strange detail has a mundane explanation just out of reach.

What the Flemish theory cannot explain is why this story, of all the displaced children in a war-torn century, was singled out by two independent chroniclers as something extraordinary. England was full of orphaned, starving, confused children in the 1100s. None of the others were green.

An Underground World?

Some researchers have taken the girl's account at face value. A subterranean world with no direct sunlight, a dim greenish twilight, inhabitants with green-tinted skin, a passage from below to the surface through a cavern system.

This reading connects the Green Children to a much older and wider tradition of underground or hollow earth stories found in cultures across the world. The Tuatha De Danann of Irish mythology were said to have retreated underground. Norse mythology speaks of Svartalfheim, the land of the dark elves beneath the earth. Across Central Asia, Europe, and the Americas, legends persist of people living within the earth.

Are these all just stories? Probably. But the Green Children of Woolpit are notable precisely because they appear in the historical record, not in a book of legends. William of Newburgh included them in his Historia rerum Anglicarum, a work of serious history, and he did so reluctantly, acknowledging that the story sounded absurd but insisting that the weight of testimony compelled him to include it.

Why This Story Endures

Nearly nine hundred years later, the Green Children of Woolpit resist easy categorization. They weren't ghosts. They weren't monsters. They were two frightened children who showed up in a field with green skin, speaking an unknown language, and claiming to come from a place where the sun never shines.

The boy died. The girl grew up, lost her green coloring, and lived an ordinary life. She never changed her story.

Every attempt to explain what happened has to ignore or minimize something. The chlorosis theory ignores the language and the consistent testimony. The Flemish orphan theory requires two respected historians to have been confused by a language spoken commonly in their own country. Taking the girl's story literally requires accepting the existence of a sunless underground civilization.

No single explanation accounts for all the details. And so the story sits, as it has for centuries, at the uncomfortable boundary between history and impossibility. Two green children, a wolf pit, a land without sun, and a question no one has ever fully answered.

Where did they come from?

Frequently Asked Questions

Were the Green Children of Woolpit real?

The account is recorded by two independent medieval historians, both considered reliable by scholars. Ralph of Coggeshall was an abbot writing near the time and location of the events. William of Newburgh was a canon known for his critical approach to sources. Both clearly believed the story was credible enough to include in works of history, not fiction. Whether one accepts every detail is another matter, but the chroniclers took it seriously.

What happened to the green girl after she grew up?

She lost her green coloring as her diet changed, learned to speak English, was baptized, and eventually married a man from King's Lynn in Norfolk. Ralph of Coggeshall mentions her living an otherwise unremarkable life. She never recanted her account of where she came from.

Could the green skin have been caused by a medical condition?

Chlorosis, a type of anemia, can produce a faintly greenish complexion, and it would fade with improved nutrition, which matches what happened. However, the degree of coloration described by the chroniclers, enough to astonish an entire village, seems beyond what chlorosis typically produces. It also doesn't explain the unknown language, strange clothing, or the detailed account of St. Martin's Land.

What was St. Martin's Land?

According to the girl, it was a country where the sun never rose above the horizon. The light was perpetual but dim, like a long twilight. Everything and everyone in that land was green. She could see a brighter, luminous land across a wide river, but had never visited it. No one has ever identified a real place matching this description.

Is there a connection to fairy folklore?

Many scholars have noted parallels between the Green Children story and the fairy traditions of the British Isles, where beings from an underground or otherworldly realm occasionally cross into the human world. The green coloring, the underground passage, the strange land, and the inability to eat normal food all echo fairy motifs. Whether the story inspired such legends or drew from them, or whether both point to something else entirely, remains an open question.

Why is this story considered credible?

Unlike most medieval legends, the Green Children account includes specific, verifiable details: the name of the village, the name of the landowner who took them in, the eventual fate of the girl. It was recorded by historians, not storytellers. William of Newburgh explicitly noted his own reluctance to include it, adding it only because so many trustworthy people confirmed its truth. Whatever happened at Woolpit, the people of 12th-century Suffolk believed it was real.