The Green Children of Woolpit: Two Kids Who Climbed Out of a Wolf Pit

It was harvest time, sometime in the 1100s, in the Suffolk village of Woolpit.

The village took its name from the wolf pits nearby—deep holes, baited with carrion and covered over with branches, built to trap wolves. Beside one of them, the reapers in the fields found two children.

A boy and a girl, brother and sister. Their clothes were made of material no one recognized. They spoke a language nobody could understand.

And their skin was green.

Who wrote it down

This isn't a story that grew up in a pub. It was recorded by two of the most careful English chroniclers of the period, writing separately.

William of Newburgh was a canon at a Yorkshire priory, writing a history of England in the 1190s. He was famously skeptical—he dismissed Geoffrey of Monmouth's tales of King Arthur as lies. He placed the green children in the reign of King Stephen, between 1135 and 1154. He admitted he'd hesitated to include the story, but said so many trustworthy people vouched for it that he felt he had to.

Ralph of Coggeshall was the abbot of an Essex monastery, about 25 miles from Woolpit. He said he'd heard the story from Sir Richard de Calne—the local landowner who took the children into his household.

Scholars generally don't think either man copied the other. Their accounts differ in the details. On the core of it, they agree.

The beans

The children were taken to Richard de Calne's house at Wikes. They were offered food and refused all of it. For days, they ate nothing and cried.

Then someone brought in beans freshly cut from the field, still on their stalks. The children grabbed at them, tearing open the stalks instead of the pods, looking for the beans inside. When they were shown how to open the pods, they ate them raw, hungrily. For a long time, beans were the only food they'd eat.

Gradually they began to eat other things. And, both chroniclers say, as their diet changed, the green faded from their skin.

The boy didn't recover. He'd always been weaker, and he died around the time they were baptized. The girl lived.

St Martin's Land

Once the girl had learned English, she was asked where she came from.

She said their people were Christians and had churches. William records that she called her home St Martin's Land. The sun never rose there; the light was like the twilight before sunrise or after sunset. Across a wide river, she said, they could see a bright, shining land. Ralph adds that everything in her homeland was green.

How did they get to Woolpit? In William's version, they'd been tending their father's flocks when they heard a great noise, like the bells of the abbey at Bury St Edmunds, and suddenly found themselves among the reapers by the pit. In Ralph's version, they followed the animals into a cavern and came out, guided by the sound of bells, into blinding sunlight.

Ralph says the girl worked in de Calne's household for many years and was considered "very wanton and impudent." William says she married a man from King's Lynn, and was said to be still living there not long before he wrote.

What might explain it

Lost Flemish children. In 1998, researcher Paul Harris argued the children were Flemish—descendants of immigrants who'd settled in East Anglia and were persecuted under Henry II, especially around a battle at Fornham in 1173. "St Martin's Land" could be the nearby village of Fornham St Martin. The green skin could be chlorosis, a type of anemia from malnutrition once called "green sickness." Lost, starving children who spoke Flemish would have sounded alien to Suffolk villagers. It's the most popular explanation, but it has problems. Harris's timeline puts the events under Henry II, while William dates them to Stephen's reign. Writer Brian Haughton points out that an educated landowner like Richard de Calne would probably have recognized Flemish. And if malnutrition turned people green, plenty of medieval villagers should have looked the same.

Folklore with roots. Some folklorists see a fairy story or harvest-ritual tale: beans were linked in some traditions with the dead, and children emerging from underground fits the pattern. Others argue it's not possible to separate fact from story at this distance at all.

Something stranger. Writers since the 1990s have suggested the children came through some kind of portal—or from another planet. There's no evidence beyond the account itself.

What we know

Recorded: Two independent 12th- and 13th-century chroniclers telling the same core story: green children found at Woolpit, an unknown language, a diet of raw beans, the boy's death, the girl's survival and marriage. Ralph names his source, Richard de Calne.

Unknown: Whether the story happened as told, and if so, who those children really were.

William of Newburgh, the man who called King Arthur a lie, wrote this one down anyway.

Watch the Short below. Lost Flemish orphans, folklore, or something else? Tell us what you think.