A medieval mystery: the green-coloured children found in an English village
In the 12th century, two strange children suddenly appeared in a Suffolk village. Why, the villagers wondered, were they completely green? The story of the otherworldly children of Woolpit has long been treated as folklore – but, as John Clark explains, the tale may not be as fanciful as it seems...
The children were green. There were other strange things about the boy and girl found in a Suffolk field on a summer's day in the middle of the 12th century, but it was their hue that was most striking.
“In the shape of their whole bodies they were like other people,” wrote the chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall, “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.”
The essentials of the story run as follows. In a field in Woolpit, a Suffolk village between Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, harvesters came upon two terrified children apparently emerging from a pit. Their skin was, in the words of Ralph of Coggeshall, “prassinus color” – the dark green of leek leaves. They were strangely dressed, spoke an unknown language, and did not understand English.
The villagers quickly decided to make the pair somebody else’s problem. But, rather than taking them to the local landlord, the Abbot of Bury in Bury St Edmunds, they led the youngsters some 8 miles north to Wykes, the manor house of Sir Richard de Calne in the parish of Bardwell. Not much is known about Sir Richard, but he seems to have taken ownership of Wykes by 1135, and died around 1188. The de Calne family also owned various other properties in Suffolk and Essex.
Sir Richard took in the children. They were clearly starving, but for some days they refused all the food they were offered. By chance, they then saw some fresh-cut bean- stalks being brought into the house, and gestured eagerly that they wanted the beans. A bystander had to show the children how to open the pods to extract the beans, which “they ate... with great joy, and would touch no other food at all for a long time”.
Feeling off colour
The boy was sickly, and died soon after arriving at Wykes. But the girl, wrote Ralph, “becoming used to all sorts of food... totally lost her leek-green colour, and gradually recovered the ruddy appearance of her whole body”. Ralph associated the children’s green colour with their strange diet – and he wasn’t alone. William of Newburgh, an Augustinian canon at Newburgh Priory in Yorkshire who also chronicled the strange episode, agreed with this assessment.
According to Ralph, who heard the story from Richard de Calne and members of his household, the girl went on to work as a servant at Wykes for many years. William adds that “She was not in the least different from women of our kind” and that, according to local sources, she eventually married a man in King’s Lynn and was still living there shortly before he wrote his History in 1198.
This may sound like a fantastical story, but there are good reasons to think that the events described really happened. First and foremost, both Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh were respected chroniclers interested in ‘wonders’, and reported unexplained events alongside the more conventional history of their times.
William included a chapter ‘Concerning green children’ in his Historia Rerum Anglicarum (The History of English Affairs), written around 1198. He based his account, he said, on reports from a number of trustworthy sources, and dated the episode to the reign of King Stephen (1135–54).
Meanwhile, a chapter titled ‘Concerning a boy and a girl who emerged from the ground’ appeared in Ralph of Coggeshall’s Chronicon Anglicanum (English Chronicle). Though this was not completed until the 1220s, it incorporated text he had written much earlier and, in the case of the green children, information received directly from Richard de Calne.
Familiar with strangeness
In short, these two sources largely agree on what happened, and the well-witnessed story is detailed and convincing. Nevertheless, the sheer outlandishness of the tale begs more questions. What, for example, did those who met the children make of them? Were they shocked by the youngsters’ outlandish and alien appearance? Probably – but that reaction could have been tempered by a familiarity with strange sights and stories.
The medieval village of Woolpit stood on a major road that linked the port of Ipswich with Bury St Edmunds, where annual trade fairs attracted foreign merchants to purchase English wool and woollen cloth. Another nearby road led via Thetford to the shrine at Walsingham in Norfolk, a popular destination for pilgrims.
Woolpit’s villagers must have been aware of ‘outlandish’ travellers on these roads. Yet the children, with their green skin and their diet of beans, were more ‘alien’. Was it possible they came from an ‘otherworld’? One story circulating in the 12th century told of the land of the Antipodes, reached through the Peak Cavern in Derbyshire, for example. Another recounted the experiences of a small boy in south Wales who, delving into a cave under a riverbank, visited a land inhabited by people “no bigger than pygmies” – a place of permanent twilight where the sun didn’t shine.
Perhaps, as the children ate ordinary food and their green colour faded, some concluded that they were, after all, just normal people. However, once the children had learned enough English to respond to questions, their answers reinforced perceptions of ‘otherness’.
The questions may have been leading, of course. Someone asked the children if the sun rose in the land from which they came. “The sun does not rise among our people,” they replied. “Our land... gets only the amount of light that among you precedes sunrise or follows sunset.”
It was clearly a twilight – perhaps subterranean – otherworld. However, it was, the children said, a Christian place where St Martin was venerated – indeed, it was called ‘St Martin’s Land’. This must have puzzled the questioner – as it does later commentators, who identified St Martin’s Land variously as Fornham St Martin, just a few miles from Woolpit, or the planet Mars. Some have sought connections between St Martin of Tours and a Celtic cult of the dead.
Facing such interrogation, the pair’s responses grew incoherent. Accounts of the reactions of children put under similar pressure in modern times warn us what to expect in response. For example, in the 1990s, social workers around the UK took children into care following rumours that they had been “ritually abused”by parents who were Satanists. As anthropologist Jean La Fontaine concluded: “Children can be put under pressure until they invent stories that support the allegations of adults and reflect their beliefs.”
Moreover, the form in which their story has come down to us was clearly influenced by medieval concepts of a folkloric ‘other- world’. Ralph of Coggeshall, in particular, seems to have accepted the children’s otherworldly origins. Writing many years after the death of his chief informant, Richard de Calne, Ralph had time to elaborate the story in his own mind. He tells us, for example, that the children had followed some straying cattle into a cavern in their homeland, and became lost. After wandering for a long time, they emerged into bright summer sunlight in Woolpit. This is a deliberate reversal of a common motif in folk tales: a mortal follows an animal into a cave in our world and emerges in a fairy otherworld.
As to how the story of the green children came to modern attention, we must thank pioneering folklorist Thomas Keightley, who included a translation of Ralph of Coggeshall’s account in the 1850 edition of his book The Fairy Mythology. This set the tone for the treatment of the story by modern authors – as a traditional folk tale, not history. The children had strayed from a fairy otherworld, and parallels should be sought in other traditional accounts of dealings with fairy folk. The green children’s story has been retold, reworked and reimagined as a ‘Suffolk folk tale’ by writers ever since.
Tales of wonders
Academic historians have debated the motives of medieval chroniclers in including such tales of wonders (dismissed as fictions) in their otherwise factual histories. However, there have also been attempts to find a rational explanation for this story. This usually entails dismissing one or more incongruous elements as exaggeration or “contamination by folklore” – for example, the children’s claim to have come from a land where the sun never shone – and creating complex scenarios to explain what remains. Thus the children might have been strays from a Flemish immigrant family living in Fornham St Martin who became caught up in anti-Fleming violence.
If one ignores Ralph’s claim that the children were ‘leek-green’ and assumes that they were merely so pale as to look greenish, then a medical cause might be possible: an extreme form of anaemia. One favoured explanation has been ‘chlorosis’ or ‘green sickness’ – a term no longer recognised by the medical profession, but used for anaemia in teenage girls in the 19th century. Or perhaps the problem was favism – a disorder causing a reaction to broad (fava) beans that leads to weakness, anaemia and jaundice, culminating in some cases in kidney failure and death. This genetic condition is today found chiefly in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.
Medieval people’s interpretation of this still-puzzling occurrence in terms of a fairy ‘otherworld’ is surely similar to that of modern authors who have either sought ‘rational explanations’ or speculated about extraterrestrial intervention in human affairs. We explain the unexplained in terms of our own world view. But we should remember what the story was really about: two lost, frightened children, taken in by strangers, subject to suspicion, misunderstanding and misrepresentation – the fate of refugees and displaced persons throughout the world today.
John Clark was formerly curator of the medieval collections at the Museum of London. His latest book is The Green Children of Woolpit: Chronicles, Fairies and Facts in Medieval England (University of Exeter Press, 2024)
This article was first published in the March 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine