The green children of Woolpit

Some time in the reign of King Stephen, so between 1135 and 1154, two children were found by the wolf pits at Woolpit in Suffolk. Their skin was green. They spoke no English, would eat nothing but raw broad beans at first, and when the girl later learned to speak she said they came from St Martin’s Land, where the sun never shone and the light was always like twilight, and where, Ralph of Coggeshall adds, everything was green. Two separate chroniclers wrote it down, William of Newburgh around 1189 and Ralph in the 1220s, which is why it is not simply a folk tale. The boy died around his baptism. The girl lived, worked in Richard de Calne’s household, and by William’s account married a man from King’s Lynn and was still alive shortly before he wrote. Modern readings run from Flemish orphans with chlorosis, the green sickness, to a garbled memory of real events, to a story about difference between the English and the people they displaced.