The Green Children of Woolpit: Medieval England's Oddest Visitors

Sometime in the 1100s, at harvest, villagers of Woolpit in Suffolk found two children — a boy and a girl — standing by the wolf-pits that named the town. Their skin was GREEN. Their clothes were of unfamiliar material, their speech unknown to anyone; they wept and would eat nothing offered until they saw raw beans, which they devoured. Taken in by a local knight, the boy sickened and died; the girl survived, lost her green tint as her diet changed, learned English — and then told them where she was from: a place called St. Martin's Land, where the sun never fully rose and everything lived in a green twilight, across a "river of light". She and her brother had been herding, heard bells, wandered — and were suddenly HERE, in the unbearable brightness. She grew up, took service, was noted as "impudent and wanton" (history's finest character note), and married at King's Lynn.

The case would be dismissed as fable except for its paperwork: TWO independent chroniclers — Ralph of Coggeshall (who knew the knight) and William of Newburgh, a notably critical historian who admitted he resisted the story until "overwhelmed by the weight of witnesses" — recorded it within living memory.

The explanations, ranked

The sturdy one: Flemish immigrant children — orphaned by 12th-century persecution — wandering from a nearby settlement (Fornham St. Martin fits "St. Martin's Land"), speaking Flemish (unknown to villagers), green from chlorosis, a dietary anemia that genuinely tints skin and fades with nutrition; "twilight land" as a child's memory of forest passage. It covers nearly everything, at the cost of villagers near trade routes never having heard Flemish. The others — folklore memory of the Fair Folk, and the modern favorite, an accidental crossing from somewhere with a dimmer sun — spend nothing on chlorosis and everything on the river of light. Twelve centuries later, the jury is still out; ours is in session below.