Sometime during the reign of King Stephen, in that fractured period English historians call the Anarchy, the villagers of Woolpit found something beside one of their wolf pits that would generate eight centuries of argument.
The village took its name from these traps. Wolf pits, wulf-pytt in Old English, were deep holes dug into the earth and baited with carrion, designed to catch the predators that threatened livestock. They appear in Anglo-Saxon charters from as early as 955. Woolpit, in the flat agricultural landscape of western Suffolk, was a village defined by its relationship with the earth: what you dug into it, what you pulled out, what sometimes climbed out on its own.
What emerged that summer day was not a wolf. It was two children. A brother and a sister. Their skin was green. Their language was incomprehensible. Their clothes were cut from unfamiliar cloth. And they refused every food offered to them except raw broad beans, still in their stalks, which they ate with desperate hunger.
This is not a fairy tale. It was recorded as fact by two of the most respected chroniclers of 12th-century England, writing independently, decades apart, for different audiences, and agreeing on nearly every detail.
Two Chroniclers, One Mystery
The first account comes from William of Newburgh, an Augustinian canon writing his Historia rerum Anglicarum in the late 1190s. William was no credulous gossip. He is famous in medieval scholarship for calling Geoffrey of Monmouth a shameless fabricator, systematically dismantling the Historia Regum Britanniae as fiction dressed as history. When William included the Green Children story, he did so with visible discomfort. He wrote that he had “protracted doubts” about the event and found it “absurd to accept as genuine” something whose “rational basis was non-existent or most obscure.”
But he included it anyway. He said he was finally “overwhelmed by the weighty testimony of so many reliable people.” And he closed with a phrase that says everything about his position: “I am not ashamed to have described this unnatural and remarkable event.”
That is an unusual sentence for a historian to write. You don’t say “I am not ashamed” unless part of you thinks you should be. William was a man who prized his reputation for rigor, and he placed this story in his history despite every rational instinct telling him not to. Whatever we think of the Green Children, we should take seriously that this particular historian thought the evidence was too strong to ignore.
The second account comes from Ralph of Coggeshall, abbot of a Cistercian monastery roughly twenty-six miles from Woolpit. Ralph wrote his Chronicon Anglicanum around 1220, and he had something William lacked: a named source. Ralph claimed to have received his information from Sir Richard de Calne of Wykes, the knight who actually took the children into his household. Historical records confirm Richard de Calne as a real person, appearing in legal documents between 1130 and 1160, dead by 1188. His manor was approximately six miles north of Woolpit.
The two accounts differ in small details but converge on the core narrative. Where they disagree, the disagreements are informative. Where they agree, the agreement is striking.
What Happened
The children were found beside a wolf pit during harvest time. They were starving. Brought to Sir Richard’s manor, they wept at the sight of bread and meat, refusing everything offered until someone brought them raw broad beans still in their stalks. The children seized them and ate with desperation.
Over time, they adapted to other foods. The green tint faded from their skin. But the boy, apparently the younger of the two, remained sickly. He died, Ralph says, shortly after baptism. William’s account is vaguer on the timing, but both agree: the boy did not survive.
The girl lived. She learned English. She was baptized. Ralph describes her as nimium lasciva et petulans, excessively wanton and impudent. That phrase has generated its own small industry of interpretation. Was she sexually promiscuous? Simply rude? Or was she a woman who carried the strangeness of her origins too visibly in a society that expected deference from women, servants, and strangers? We cannot know. What we can say is that a girl who arrived speaking no English, eating only beans, with green skin and no known origin, managed to learn a new language, adapt to a radically different culture, enter domestic service, and eventually marry. Ralph records that she married a man at King’s Lynn, about forty miles north.
Some modern researchers have proposed that she married Richard Barre, a diplomat and archdeacon of Ely under Henry II. The evidence is thin. Barre’s last documented activity is from 1202, and the biographical details do not align cleanly. What we can say for certain is that the girl survived, integrated, and disappeared into the ordinary stream of English life. We do not know her name with certainty. We do not know when she died.
Saint Martin’s Land
When the girl learned enough English to describe where she came from, she told a story that has resisted easy explanation ever since.
She and her brother had been herding their father’s cattle. They heard bells. William suggests these may have been the bells of Bury St Edmunds Abbey, which lay about eight miles southwest of Woolpit. Following the sound, they entered a cavern. They walked for a long time through darkness. When they emerged, they found themselves in a world of blinding sunlight and unbearable heat.
She described her homeland as a place where the sun never fully rose. The light was perpetual twilight, neither full day nor full night. Ralph records that everything there was green. William adds the name: she called it Saint Martin’s Land. She said that across a considerable river, a luminous land was visible, but they could not reach it.
That is the testimony. It is brief, consistent between both sources, and entirely resistant to straightforward interpretation.
The distance between Woolpit and Bury St Edmunds presents an immediate acoustic problem. A well-cast medieval bell could be heard up to about five miles under ideal conditions: a clear day, minimal wind, flat terrain. At eight miles, the abbey bells would almost certainly not have been audible at Woolpit. This does not necessarily discredit the story, but it does mean the bells are either symbolic, misidentified, or the distance estimate is wrong.
The institutional connection between Woolpit and the abbey was real, however. Between 1174 and 1180, Woolpit’s revenues were granted to the monks of Bury St Edmunds by papal bull of Alexander III. The two places were linked in the administrative geography of the Church, if not always in the acoustic one.
The Color Green
Why green? Of all the details in the story, the children’s skin color is the one that anchors it in the mind. And in medieval England, green was not a neutral color.
Green was the color of the fairy world. In Celtic and English folklore, the Good Folk dressed in green. In parts of Scotland, wearing green was considered genuinely dangerous, an intrusion on fairy territory. Children dressed in green were thought especially vulnerable to fairy abduction. The superstition was strong enough that it persisted into the modern period.
Green was the color of the boundary between life and death. The Green Man, those foliate heads carved into church stonework across England, represented vegetation sprouting from the human face, life emerging from the inanimate, the blurring of the line between person and plant. The Green Knight of Arthurian romance, written down around 1375, survives his own beheading because he belongs to the cycles of nature rather than the mortal world. Green was the color of things that grow whether you want them to or not.
And green was the color of decay. Bodies turn green in death. Stagnant water greens. Copper corrodes to green. The same color that signifies new growth also signifies rot. Medieval people lived close enough to both processes to understand them as connected rather than contradictory.
The children’s green skin places them at the intersection of all these associations: fairy, vegetation, death, rebirth, the wild, the otherworld. Whether the green was literal (a medical condition) or literary (a storytelling convention that signals otherness), it does real narrative work. It tells the medieval listener, before anyone speaks a word, that these children come from somewhere else. Somewhere that is not quite alive and not quite dead.
The Beans and the Dead
The children would eat nothing but raw broad beans. This is not a random dietary preference. It is one of the oldest and most consistent symbolic associations in the Western world.
Start with Pythagoras. Around 500 BCE, Pythagoras forbade his followers from eating fava beans. The ancient sources give multiple reasons. Aristotle recorded that beans “resemble the gates of Hades” because they are the only plant with jointless stems, providing an unbroken passage between the earth and the underworld. Diogenes Laertius wrote that beans were made of the same substance as human souls. The Latin anima (soul, spirit) shares its root with the Greek anemos (wind), connecting the flatulence beans cause to the breath of life itself. Pliny the Elder reported that Pythagoreans believed fava beans contained the souls of the dead because the plants’ hollow stems served as “ladders for human souls” between the earth and Hades.
One tradition holds that Pythagoras himself died because he refused to cross a bean field while fleeing attackers, preferring death to stepping on the plants. Whether this is biography or parable, it preserves the seriousness of the prohibition.
The Romans formalized the connection in the Lemuria festival, held on May 9, 11, and 13 each year. At midnight, the head of the household walked barefoot through his home, washed his hands in spring water, took black beans in his mouth, and spat them out behind him, repeating nine times: “With these beans I redeem me and mine.” The hungry lemures, the malevolent dead, would gather the beans in the darkness. Ovid describes the ritual in Fasti, Book V. The logic is transactional: the beans are payment. The dead accept them because beans belong to their realm.
Herodotus records that Egyptian priests would neither eat beans nor even look at them, considering them unclean. Yet Pharaoh Ramesses III offered 11,998 jars of fava beans to the god of the Nile, a deity associated with death and regeneration. The taboo and the offering are not contradictory. They reflect the same understanding: beans belong to the boundary between the living and the dead, and handling them requires either reverence or avoidance, not indifference.
The association survived into Christian Europe. In Italy, on the night before All Souls’ Day, the dead were believed to visit their homes. Children received cookies shaped as broad beans, fave dei morti, beans of the dead. In parts of southern Europe through the 19th century, stewed beans were distributed to the poor on All Souls’ Day as food of the dead, because beggars and the dead shared the condition of being stripped of possessions and in need of assistance.
Katharine Briggs, the great scholar of English fairy lore, saw the connection plainly. She noted that “the habitual food of the children was beans, the food of the dead.”
Consider the full picture. Two children emerge from underground. Their skin is the color of growing and decaying things. They speak no known language. And the only food they will accept is the food that, across 2,500 years of Mediterranean and European tradition, belongs to the dead. Whether the chroniclers understood the symbolic weight of this detail is unclear. But the pattern is there, and it is old.
The Passage Underground
The Green Children said they walked through a cave from their world into ours. This motif, the underground passage between realities, runs deep through British and European folklore.
The closest parallel appears in Gerald of Wales’s Itinerarium Kambriae, written in 1191, within a few years of William of Newburgh’s account. Gerald tells the story of a boy named Elidyr who, at age twelve, fled the harsh discipline of his teacher and hid beneath the hollow bank of a river. After two days, two small men appeared and offered to lead him to “a land of playtime and pleasure.” He followed them through a dark underground passage into a country that was beautiful, full of rivers and meadows, but “not lit by the full light of the sun.” It existed in perpetual twilight.
The inhabitants were small but perfectly proportioned, with long flowing hair. They rode tiny horses the size of greyhounds. They ate no meat, living on milk dishes prepared with saffron. They never swore oaths and detested lies.
Elidyr visited repeatedly until his mother asked him to bring back gold. He stole a golden ball from the king’s son, ran home, and stumbled at the threshold of his father’s house. Two of the small people seized the ball and departed, “showing the boy every mark of contempt and derision.” Despite searching for a year, Elidyr never found the passage again. Gerald notes that when the small people asked for water, they used a word resembling the Greek hydor. He found this remarkable.
The structural parallels with the Green Children are obvious: the underground passage, the twilight land, the linguistic difference, the inability to return. But the direction is reversed. Elidyr travels from our world to the other. The Green Children travel from the other world to ours. It is the same door, swinging both ways.
The pattern extends further. Thomas the Rhymer, a historical figure from 13th-century Scotland who appears in folk ballad, follows the Queen of Elfland through the Eildon Hills into a fairy realm. Childe Rowland, in an English fairy tale, enters a green hill to rescue his sister from the King of Elfland’s dark tower. The Irish aos si, the people of the mounds, dwell inside ancient burial mounds that serve as portals to the Otherworld. The Tuatha De Danann, a race of Irish gods, were driven into the hollow hills after military defeat and live there still.
All of these traditions share the same architecture: the mortal world has a physical underside. It is accessible through specific points in the landscape, hills, caves, riverbanks, ancient pits. The boundary is crossable but dangerous. Time works differently on the other side. Those who return are changed. And the passage, once lost, cannot be found again.
The Bell Between Worlds
The children said they followed the sound of bells into the cavern. This detail, too, carries more weight than it appears.
Medieval church bells were not simply timekeeping devices. They were consecrated through a formal ritual called baptizatio campanorum, the baptism of bells, involving holy water, oil, incense, and the assignment of a personal name. After this ceremony, the bell was considered a spiritual instrument, capable of repelling demons and purifying the air. A 13th-century bell from the Franciscan church at Assisi bore the inscription: “I determine the Sabbath, I lament funerals, I break lightning. I rouse the lazy, I tame the cruel, I disperse the winds.”
Bells tolled for the dead. At a person’s death, the ringing guided the departing soul toward heaven and prevented evil spirits from interfering with the journey. This creates a specific double meaning: bells both protect against spirits and guide souls between realms. They are the sound that marks the boundary between sacred and profane, between this world and whatever lies beyond it.
The Green Children heard bells and followed them through a cave. Whether we read this literally or symbolically, the narrative logic is consistent. Bells are the sound that calls between worlds. The children were called.
The Flemish Theory
In 1998, historian Paul Harris proposed the explanation that has since become the most widely cited: the children were Flemish refugees.
The evidence he assembled is real. Flemish immigrants had settled in eastern England from the early 12th century, many working as clothmakers and fullers in the wool trade. Under Henry II, who took the throne in 1154, these communities faced growing hostility. On October 17, 1173, the tension exploded at the Battle of Fornham. Robert de Beaumont, Earl of Leicester, invaded England with an army of Flemish mercenaries during a revolt against Henry II. Royal forces caught them fording the River Lark near Fornham St Genevieve, about four miles north of Bury St Edmunds. The result was a massacre. Contemporary chroniclers record thousands slaughtered, with Gervase of Canterbury estimating some 3,000 Flemings killed.
Harris connected several dots. Fornham St Martin, a village adjacent to the battlefield, is a plausible candidate for “Saint Martin’s Land.” The River Lark could be the “considerable river” the girl described. Children orphaned by the violence, malnourished, speaking only Flemish, might have wandered through the region and emerged at Woolpit confused and starving. And the green skin? Harris pointed to chlorosis, also called hypochromic anemia: an iron deficiency that can produce a greenish tinge to the skin, which resolves with improved nutrition. A documented modern case confirmed that a nine-year-old girl with severe iron-deficiency anemia developed a genuinely green complexion.
The theory is appealing. It explains the language barrier, the malnutrition, the geographical proximity, and the fading of the green color. It transforms a fairy tale into a refugee story, which is, in its own way, more disturbing than the supernatural alternative.
But there are problems. William of Newburgh places the events during King Stephen’s reign, which ended in 1154. The Battle of Fornham occurred in 1173, nearly two decades later. Harris must argue that William was wrong about the dating, which is possible but requires discounting the more careful of the two chroniclers. If Sir Richard de Calne was dead by 1188, and the events occurred in the 1170s rather than the 1140s, the chronology becomes extremely tight.
There is also the language question. Flemish was a Low Germanic dialect. Sir Richard de Calne, as an educated knight, would likely have encountered Flemish speakers in the wool-trading communities of East Anglia. Why would he fail to recognize the language, or at least identify it as Germanic? And if the children came from Fornham St Martin, a village only eight miles from Woolpit, why did nobody in the surrounding area recognize them or their dialect?
The chlorosis explanation is medically plausible but imperfect. Iron-deficiency anemia can produce a faintly greenish tinge, but the chroniclers describe the children as unambiguously, strikingly green. Chlorosis is subtle. The Green Children were apparently anything but.
Saint Martin and the Threshold
The name Saint Martin’s Land has generated its own line of interpretation that runs deeper than geography.
Martin of Tours (c. 336-397) was a Roman soldier who became a monastic founder and then Bishop of Tours. His feast day, Martinmas, falls on November 11. In the medieval calendar, Martinmas was the final harvest festival of the year: the day livestock was slaughtered for winter provision, new wine was tested, and the growing season formally ended. It was simultaneously a feast and a death, the last celebration before the dark half of the year began.
Martinmas absorbed elements of older traditions. In the Celtic world, the transition from autumn to winter was marked by Samhain, when the doors between the living and the dead stood open. When the Church established Martinmas on November 11, the two observances merged over centuries. In Welsh tradition, Saint Martin’s Day is associated with the Cwn Annwn, spectral hounds who escort souls to Annwn, the Otherworld.
Folklorist Martin Walsh argued that the Green Children story preserves fragments of an ancient harvest ritual connected to this liminal season. “Saint Martin’s Land” would not be a geographical place at all, but a temporal and cosmological one: the realm that opens when the boundary between summer and winter, light and dark, living and dead, becomes permeable. The qualities the girl described, perpetual twilight, everything green, neither full day nor full night, map onto the quality of the Martinmas season itself. It is the land of the threshold.
John Clark, who published what may be the definitive study of the Green Children in 2024, rejected this interpretation, finding no clear evidence of Saint Martin as a figure with “Otherworld connections” in 12th-century English tradition. The debate is unresolved.
What the Girl Knew
Here is what the evidence actually tells us about these children, stripped of theory.
They recognized each other as siblings. They understood herding, agriculture, family structure, and domestic labor. The girl grasped the significance of baptism and chose to accept it. She learned English as an adolescent. She entered service in a knightly household, adapted to its customs, and eventually married. She carried knowledge of a specific place with its own geography (a river, a luminous far country), its own atmospheric conditions (perpetual twilight), and its own name.
Whatever happened to these children, they were not blank slates. They came from somewhere that had families, livestock, language, and enough social complexity for the girl to describe it coherently in a second language years after leaving it. The medieval chroniclers emphasize strangeness. But read carefully, the sources reveal two children who were remarkably competent at adapting to a new society, because they came from a society of their own.
The Afterlife of a Legend
For four centuries after the chroniclers, the story barely surfaces. William Camden dismissed it briefly in his Britannia (1586). Then Robert Burton, writing The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621, took the opposite view entirely. In a passage discussing whether the moon and planets might be inhabited, drawing on the new ideas of Galileo and Kepler, Burton cited the Green Children as possible evidence of extraterrestrial life, claiming they had “fallen from heaven.” This makes Burton, writing in 1621, the first person to propose an alien interpretation of the story, nearly four centuries before Duncan Lunan’s 1996 version.
The tale resurfaced properly in the Victorian era when folklorist Thomas Keightley included it in The Fairy Mythology (1828). The anarchist poet Herbert Read called it “the norm to which all types of fantasy should conform” and used it as the foundation for his only novel, The Green Child (1935). Read reversed the story’s direction: his protagonist descends through underground caverns into an ideal realm, inverting Plato’s Cave so that the underground is the real, and the surface world the shadow.
In 1977, the village of Woolpit erected an iron village sign near St Mary’s Church depicting the two green children alongside a wolf and a church tower. The legend is now the village’s official emblem. A story that two sober chroniclers found almost embarrassing to record has become a point of civic pride.
What We Cannot Know
Every theory explains part of the story and fails on the rest.
If the children were Flemish refugees, the green skin has no satisfying medical explanation, the chronology does not align with the more reliable chronicler, and the language barrier is harder to account for than it should be. If they were fairy children or visitors from an actual otherworld, then we must explain how they adapted to mortal food, lost their color, and integrated completely into human society. If the story was folklore, a harvest myth encoded in the language of chronicle, then we must explain why two of medieval England’s most careful historians both recorded it as fact, independently, with a named source between them.
Duncan Lunan, a Scottish astronomer, proposed in 1996 that the children were accidentally transported from a tidally locked planet via a malfunctioning matter transmitter. He later added Knights Templar cooperation with extraterrestrials. This has not gained scholarly traction. The Banjos (or Banyoles) story, a supposed Spanish parallel from 1887, was traced by researcher Jason Colavito to a 1965 book by John Macklin, who had simply retold the Woolpit legend with the details changed. The key tell: the rescuer in the Spanish version is named “Ricardo da Calno,” transparently derived from Richard de Calne.
Perhaps the most honest position is William of Newburgh’s own. He found the story’s rational basis “non-existent or most obscure.” He recorded it anyway, because the evidence demanded recording. He did not resolve it, because it could not be resolved. He said he was not ashamed, because part of him thought he should be.
Something happened in Woolpit during the Anarchy. Two children appeared from somewhere. They were green. They ate beans. One died. One survived and told a story about a twilight land called Saint Martin’s, separated from ours by nothing more than a long walk through the dark. The most truthful thing we can say about the Green Children, eight centuries later, is what William of Newburgh said at the time: the event is unnatural, remarkable, and impossible to fully explain.
The evidence exists. The patterns are there. The resolution is not. And the honest response to that is not to force a conclusion, but to keep the question open.
Sources
- William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, Book I, Chapter 27, “De Viridibus Pueris” (c. 1196-1198). Howlett, ed., Rolls Series No. 82, Vol. 1 (1884)
- Ralph of Coggeshall, Chronicon Anglicanum (c. 1220)
- Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Kambriae (1191)
- Harris, Paul. “The Green Children of Woolpit: A 12th Century Mystery and its Possible Solution.” Fortean Studies, Vol. 4 (1998)
- Clark, John. “‘Small, Vulnerable ETs’: The Green Children of Woolpit.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2 (2006)
- Clark, John. The Green Children of Woolpit. Exeter Press (2024)
- Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Green Children from Another World, or the Archipelago in England.” In Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages (2008)
- Madej, M. “The Story About the Green Children of Woolpit According to the Medieval Chronicles of William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall.” Res Historica, Vol. 49 (2020)
- Briggs, Katharine. The Fairies in English Tradition and Literature (1967)
- Walsh, Martin. “Medieval English Martinmesse: The Archaeology of a Forgotten Festival.” Folklore, Vol. 111, No. 2 (2000)
- Ovid, Fasti, Book V (Lemuria)
- Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VIII (Pythagoras)
