GREEN CHILDREN

Opening

One summer in the twelfth century, at harvest time, villagers at Woolpit in Suffolk found two children beside one of the old wolf pits that gave the village its name. They were a boy and a girl, their skin was green, they wore clothes of an unfamiliar material, and they spoke a language no one understood. For days they would eat nothing, until they were shown raw broad beans, which they devoured.

The boy soon sickened and died. The girl lived, lost her green colour, learned English and said she came from a land where the sun never shone. Two medieval writers recorded the story within living memory of it, one naming the knight in whose house the girl served. Eight centuries later no one is sure what happened.

Timeline

The reign of King Stephen (1135 to 1154), or soon afterThe children are found at Woolpit, about seven miles east of Bury St Edmunds, at harvest time.

The following weeksThey are taken to the house of a local knight, Sir Richard de Calne of Wykes. They refuse ordinary food until they are given beans, then slowly adapt to other food, and their skin loses its green tint.

Soon afterThe boy, who seems the younger of the two, grows weak and dies around the time of his baptism.

LaterThe girl is baptised and works for years as a servant in de Calne's household. She tells her story once she can speak English, and later, according to one writer, marries a man from King's Lynn.

About 1189William of Newburgh, a canon in Yorkshire, records the story in his History of English Affairs, saying he was persuaded of it by the weight of trustworthy witnesses.

The 1220sRalph of Coggeshall, abbot of a monastery in Essex, records it in his chronicle, naming Richard de Calne as his source and saying he had often heard the girl's story from the knight himself.

1977Woolpit puts up a new village sign showing the two green children.

Key figures

The two children are unnamed in both medieval accounts. The name "Agnes" for the girl, and a marriage to a man called Richard Barre, come from modern research by Duncan Lunan, not from either chronicler.

Sir Richard de Calne of Wykes is the one named witness, and Ralph of Coggeshall's source. William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall are the two writers who kept the story, independently, within a generation or two of it. The harvesters who found the children are unnamed.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: two independent medieval accounts, Ralph of Coggeshall's Chronicon Anglicanum and William of Newburgh's Historia rerum Anglicarum, written decades apart, that agree on the main points and differ on details. The girl told William that they came from "St Martin's Land", where the light was like twilight and the people were Christians; in Ralph's account everything there was green. In William's version they were herding their father's cattle when they heard a loud noise and found themselves at the wolf pit; in Ralph's they followed the cattle into a cave, were led out by the sound of bells, and came out into our daylight, which dazzled them.

There is no other contemporary record: no charter naming the girl, no burial record for the boy, no surviving record of her marriage, and no other village reporting the same pair.

In the shape of their whole bodies they were like other people, but they differed in the colour of their skin from all the mortal inhabitants of our world; for the whole surface of their skin was a green colour.

Things you might not know

• Woolpit means wolf pit. The village name comes from pits dug to trap wolves, and the children were found beside one.
• Beans saved them. Both accounts say the children would eat nothing until they found raw broad beans still in the pod.
• The girl was no saint. Ralph of Coggeshall, who was told about her by the household she served, called her "very wanton and impudent".
• It inspired early science fiction. Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone of 1638 drew on the idea of the children as visitors from elsewhere.
• The village owns it. The green children have been on the Woolpit sign since 1977.

Competing explanations

Lost Flemish children. In 1998 Paul Harris suggested they were children of Flemish immigrants from Fornham St Martin, a few miles away, orphaned by violence against the Flemish around the Battle of Fornham in 1173, and that their green colour came from malnutrition (chlorosis, once called "green sickness"). Their language would have been Flemish; their "twilight land" a forest. Other historians dispute parts of this, including the date.

Starving children. A simpler version of the same idea: small children, lost from somewhere nearby, with a deficiency illness that tinted their skin. Beans as the first food they would accept fits hunger better than a fairy door.

A folk tale. Some scholars read the story as an otherworld legend, of the kind that tells of children who stray from fairyland, or as a story about the English and their neighbours. Against that, Ralph and William were careful chroniclers recording a marvel they had reason to believe, not writing romance.

Visitors from elsewhere. The modern reading, popular since the twentieth century, that the children came from another world. Nothing in the accounts requires it, and it adds nothing they can test.

Later life of the case

The green children are one of England's best-loved medieval mysteries, retold in poems, novels and children's books. For another strange arrival with a disputed origin, see Kaspar Hauser.

Finding

Something happened at Woolpit that two careful medieval writers believed, and one of them had it from the knight who took the children in. The strongest reading is two lost, malnourished children who spoke another language, perhaps Flemish, but the record is too thin to prove it.

What still will not resolve: where the children came from, since neither chronicle names their home except as a twilight land, and no record of their family has ever been found.