The Unsolved Medieval Mystery Of Woolpit’s Green Children

Woolpit likely takes its name from the Old English for “wolf pit” (a hole used in trapping wolves), and harvesters supposedly discovered a boy and a girl there during the reign of King Stephen. The pair allegedly spoke in a tongue no one recognized and could be traced to no location in the area. William of Newburgh dated the incident between 1135 and 1154.

Ralph of Coggeshall mentions these children in the early thirteenth century, noting that they came out of a cave or tunnel and were blinded by the sun to which they were not accustomed.

Both sources described them as being green, although the way colors were categorized in the Middle Ages wasn’t the same as ours. Some modern writers consider the greenish color to have been a symptom of illness rather than a literal skin tone, and it could well be an embellishment that accumulated over years of oral transmission.

They would not eat anything given them, until they saw broad beans growing nearby. Then they frantically looked over the bean-stalks, never thinking of looking in the pods for the beans. When once they were taught to open the pods they ate the beans like creatures starved, and broad beans were said to be the only article of diet they would have for some time afterwards. Eventually they took to ordinary food, including bread.

Their confusion over the bean pods could mean they were either just hungry, used to different harvesting methods where they came from, or panicked after a scary event. But that’s probably an exaggeration, or at least has been exaggerated in retelling via oral tradition.

When they finally started eating normal food, they lost their green color. They became English speakers and were baptized in William’s account, where the boy died shortly after his own baptism. In Ralph’s version, the brother died before either child was baptized, and the girl was baptized afterward and continued to grow strong.

Writers have proposed anemia, starvation, or a more modern medical condition known as chlorosis, or green sickness, as reasons for their green appearance. Yet there are no medical records, no doctor saw them, and chlorosis is associated primarily with teenage girls. The girl’s apparent improvement on a more varied diet has led some writers to suspect malnutrition; yet no diagnosis made nine centuries ago can be certain.

According to William, after learning English, the children were asked where they had come from, and their answers are where the story stops sounding like a lost-child narrative and starts sounding like folklore. William says that they said they were from a place called Saint Martin’s Land, where Christianity was followed, where there were churches, and where, take this, the sun never fully rose, leaving the land in permanent twilight.

William tells us that the children claimed there was another country on the other side of a river that was brighter than their own twilight country; and that they were tending cattle when they heard bells, and then found themselves in Woolpit without being able to say how they got there. They told him all about this country at length, yet nowhere do we read of anyone believing it to be a physical place that might be located.

We do not know if these were the actual words of the children; it’s possible this was simply the way a man of the middle ages imagined a confused child would speak. In William’s telling, however, the account had already gone through many retellings before it got to him, decades after the events that occurred by the pit.

Ralph’s version had them go through a cave and called their entire homeland green, yet said nothing about Saint Martin’s Land. The dim light and bells are in both accounts. William’s account also added the name Saint Martin’s Land, Christianity and churches and the bright land across the river. Modern retellings often combine the two into a single cohesive tale, but the well-known story we have today is actually a composite of two chronicles that differ in some pretty fundamental ways.

Neither of them, however, claims that they saw the children arrive. William admits that at first he didn’t believe the story, but then he heard it repeated so many times he started believing it himself. Ralph linked his version to Richard de Calne, the local knight who sheltered the children.

It should be noted that medieval chroniclers routinely recorded miracles, omens, and monsters as well as dynastic transfers and battles; for William and Ralph, the line between an unexplainable phenomenon and a factual account may not have been as distinct as ours.

There were Flemish migrant settlements in eastern England at the time, and political unrest often displaced foreign families throughout the region. According to this explanation, the children may have spoken Flemish or a different unknown tongue, lost their way in the confusion following some sort of disaster, and stumbled upon Woolpit starving, dehydrated, and frightened.

Others link them to Flemish soldiers defeated near Fornham St Martin in 1173, suggesting Saint Martin’s Land may be a corruption of the name. But the story says William placed the incident during the reign of King Stephen, which ended in 1154, nearly two decades earlier than the battle at Fornham. There is no record of the children being Flemish and no mention of any lost children from Fornham being discovered in Woolpit.

One theory on the internet suggests the children’s green tint came from arsenic poisoning before they showed up near Woolpit. But that doesn’t seem to be in any of the medieval sources either.

The story has various features typical of otherworld journeys, including caves, unending dusk, strange bells, and the difficulty of entering the mundane world from the magical one. Folklorists have found parallels with other such stories, and later authors tended to imagine the two children as fairies. William and Ralph did not take that final step; they saw the event as simply a marvelous occurrence, worth recording but not inherently supernatural.

When considered together, the series seems almost like a narrative of assimilation: weird talk becomes normal talk; exotic cuisine turns out to be not so exotic; the children’s unexplained coloration fades away; and the children are baptized into the community.

William tells us that the girl lived to marry someone from Lynn, that is, King’s Lynn in Norfolk. Ralph tells us that she remained in the household of Richard de Calne and describes her as ‘rather loose and wanton in her conduct.’ An attempt to identify her as an Agnes Barre does not find support in any medieval source.

Long before the advent of flying saucers, early modern writers drew on the tale to fuel speculation about life on the moon. Later, twentieth-century UFO enthusiasts turned the story into a possible extraterrestrial encounter. But there’s nothing in the original accounts that points to spaceships, other worlds, or nonhuman physiology. Every time, the children were given an explanation to fit the context of the age, not evidence of something new: first as a marvel, then a fairy tale, and finally, aliens.

This content was created with the help of AI.