# Two green-skinned children appeared near a medieval English village

**No verdict.** Two independent medieval chroniclers record the story, which lends it a documentary footing most folktales lack. But both wrote decades after the fact, no physical trace survives, and the rational reading (Flemish immigrant orphans suffering from dietary anemia) is plausible without being provable. The account is neither confirmed nor safely dismissed.

Category: Lost History & Ancient Mysteries · Era: Medieval (12th century, Suffolk, England) · First circulated: Recorded c. 1189–1220 by the chroniclers William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall; the events are dated to the mid-12th century · Believed by: Treated by most historians as a garbled account of a real event or a folktale; a persistent fringe reads it as evidence of fairies, a parallel world, or extraterrestrial visitors
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/green-children-of-woolpit

## Summary
Sometime in the 12th century, according to two English chroniclers, harvesters near the Suffolk village of Woolpit found two children with green-tinted skin who spoke no known language and would eat nothing but raw beans. The boy sickened and died; the girl survived, lost her green color as she took to a normal diet, learned English, and described coming from a sunless twilight country called St Martin's Land. The story has been read as garbled history, folklore, and, more speculatively, something stranger.

## The claim
That during the reign of King Stephen (or, by another account, Henry II), villagers at Woolpit in Suffolk discovered a brother and sister whose skin was green, who wore unfamiliar clothing, spoke an unintelligible tongue, and at first refused all food but broad beans; that the boy died soon after baptism while the girl lived, lost her green coloring on a normal diet, was baptized, and later married; and that once she could speak English she said the pair had come from a subterranean land of perpetual twilight where everyone was green, having wandered out through caverns while following their father's cattle.

## Origin and timeline
- c. 1135–1154: William of Newburgh dates the event to the reign of King Stephen. At harvest time, reapers near Woolpit (a village roughly seven miles east of Bury St Edmunds, named for the wolf-pits that once trapped predators) find two children beside one of the pits, a boy and a girl, with green-tinted skin, strange clothing, and speech no one understands. (Ralph of Coggeshall instead places the episode under Henry II, a discrepancy scholars still note.)
- c. 1150s: The children are taken to the household of the local knight Sir Richard de Calne at Wikes. They weep, refuse all food offered, and are on the point of starving until they are shown freshly cut bean-stalks, from which they eat greedily, living on beans alone for months before gradually accepting other food.
- c. 1150s: The boy, described as the younger and more listless of the two, sickens and dies at around the time of baptism. The girl thrives, loses her green color as her diet broadens, is baptized, and in time learns to speak English.
- c. 1150s: Once she can be questioned, the girl explains that she and her brother came from a land of green people where the sun never shone and light was like a long twilight; she recalled minding their father's cattle, following the sound of bells into a cavern, and emerging, dazzled, into the daylight at Woolpit. In one version the country is called St Martin's Land.
- c. 1160s–1180s: The surviving girl, characterized by Ralph as 'rather loose and wanton in her conduct,' is said by William to have eventually married a man at King's Lynn, some forty miles away, where she was reportedly still living not long before he wrote.
- c. 1189–1198: William of Newburgh, an Augustinian canon in Yorkshire, includes the story in his Historia rerum Anglicarum, admitting he long doubted it but felt compelled by the weight of testimony to record it.
- c. 1200–1220: Ralph of Coggeshall, abbot of the Cistercian abbey in Essex, sets down a fuller version in his Chronicon Anglicanum, stating that he had it in part from Sir Richard de Calne's own household.
- 1998–2012: Modern scholarship crystallizes: Paul Harris (Fortean Studies, 1998) argues the children were Flemish immigrant orphans; John Clark surveys the interpretations in Science Fiction Studies (2006); and astronomer Duncan Lunan revives an extraterrestrial reading in Children from the Sky (2012).

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The whole thing is obviously a fairy tale: green children who came from an underground world are not the stuff of real history.
  Evidence: That is the strongest single objection, and it may be right. But the story is not preserved as a fireside legend: it appears in two of the more sober English chronicles of the period, written independently by educated clergymen, one of whom (William of Newburgh) was famously skeptical of tall tales and elsewhere ridiculed the fabrications of Geoffrey of Monmouth. That does not make the account true, but it means it cannot be dismissed as pure folklore quite as easily as its surface suggests.
- Claim: The children's skin was literally green, which no ordinary human explanation can account for.
  Evidence: A recognized medical condition does account for it. Chlorosis, historically nicknamed 'the green sickness,' is a severe iron-deficiency anemia that can lend the skin a pale greenish cast and which resolves once nutrition improves. Half-starved children living on beans and then recovering on a fuller diet fit that arc closely; the loss of the green color as the girl began eating normally is exactly what the condition predicts.
- Claim: They spoke a language no one in Suffolk recognized and came from a place called St Martin's Land: proof of an origin outside the known world.
  Evidence: There is a mundane candidate. Paul Harris proposed the pair were children of Flemish immigrants (a large, resented community in 12th-century East Anglia) orphaned amid the reprisals that followed the Battle of Fornham in 1173. Flemish would have been unintelligible to English harvesters. Nearby Fornham St Martin supplies the 'St Martin's Land'; the River Lark fits the 'considerable river' the girl described; and disorientation in old flint mine workings could explain emerging underground and dazzled by light. The chief snag is chronology: this dating clashes with William's placing the event under King Stephen.
- Claim: Two chroniclers independently confirm the same account, so the core facts must be solid.
  Evidence: They corroborate each other only in part. William and Ralph disagree on the reigning king, differ in emphasis, and both wrote decades after the supposed events, William perhaps forty years on, Ralph even later. Their shared details may reflect a common source or a story already smoothed by retelling rather than two independent eyewitness streams. Genuine agreement on the striking particulars is meaningful; it is not the same as verification.

## Why people believe it
- It carries a documentary pedigree most 'mysteries' lack (two named, literate, roughly contemporary chroniclers rather than an anonymous legend), which makes readers reluctant to file it alongside dragons and saints' miracles.
- The specifics are oddly concrete and un-magical: raw beans, a knight's household, a marriage at King's Lynn, a girl called wanton. Mundane, unflattering detail reads as the residue of something that happened, not the polish of something invented.
- It maps neatly onto a deep and satisfying archetype (the visitor from an otherworld beneath the earth), so the story slots into a mental groove people already have, from Celtic fairy mounds to modern alien lore, and feels familiar even on first hearing.
- The rational explanation is plausible but not airtight, and that gap is precisely where belief lives: a solved case invites no wonder, while a case that is almost-explained keeps the door open just wide enough for fairies, parallel worlds, or ETs to slip through.

## Open questions
- Whether any real event underlies the story at all, or whether two chroniclers independently dressed up a piece of regional folklore as sober history, has no settled answer. The researcher Michał Madej has argued that neither William of Newburgh nor Ralph of Coggeshall appears to have copied from the other, given the distance between Yorkshire and Essex and their differing sources, meaning two separate strands of report converged on the same essential story. But convergence could just as easily reflect one vivid regional rumor reaching two separate collectors as it could a real event witnessed and reported twice, and eight centuries later there is no way to test which it was.
- Whether the Flemish-orphans-and-chlorosis reading is actually correct, rather than merely the best available guess, is unresolved. It explains the unknown language, the beans, and the fading green color without inventing anything, and it rests on a documented historical event (the 1173 Battle of Fornham and its aftermath) rather than pure speculation. But critics have pushed back hard on specific points: an educated household plausibly should have recognized Flemish speech as Flemish, and no other source from the period records the widespread green-tinged poor that a population-wide malnutrition disease should have produced. The theory remains the leading candidate without being a confirmed one.
- What 'St Martin's Land' was actually meant to name is still debated. The most literal reading ties it to Fornham St Martin, the parish nearest the 1173 battle site, which would support the Flemish-refugee theory directly. Other researchers, noting St Martin's prominence in the medieval liturgical calendar, have proposed the name instead points to something calendrical or to an older otherworld tradition, a reading the historian John Clark has specifically argued against, finding no solid evidence tying St Martin to otherworld beliefs in medieval England. Neither the geographic nor the symbolic reading has been confirmed, and it remains possible the name preserves something else entirely, now lost to record.
- It is also unclear why two chroniclers with reputations for relative care, writing in different parts of England for different purposes, both judged this particular story worth recording and standing behind. William explicitly says he doubted the account and included it only reluctantly, after being overwhelmed by testimony; Ralph, by contrast, offers no such disclaimer and writes with the plain confidence of a man passing on household report. Whether that difference reflects a genuinely unusual event forcing itself into two independent records, a single striking rumor that reached both men and read to each as solid testimony, or something about the specific people and places named in it that gave the story unusual local staying power, the surviving texts do not say.

## Sources
- Green children of Woolpit, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_children_of_Woolpit
- “Small, vulnerable ETs”: The Green Children of Woolpit, John Clark, Science Fiction Studies, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 209–229 (2006): https://www.academia.edu/5137440/_Small_vulnerable_ETs_The_Green_Children_of_Woolpit
- The Green Children of Woolpit (Fortean Studies, vol. 4), Paul Harris (1998)
- The Green Children of Woolpit: Chronicles, Fairies and Facts in Medieval England, University of Exeter Press (2024): https://www.exeterpress.co.uk/products/the-green-children-of-woolpit
- The Mystery of the Green Children of Woolpit, Mental Floss: https://mentalfloss.com/article/62878/mystery-green-children-woolpit
- The Green Children of Woolpit: Legendary Visitors from Another World, Ancient Origins: https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends-europe/green-children-of-woolpit-002347
- Exploration Mysteries: The Green Children of Woolpit, ExplorersWeb: https://explorersweb.com/exploration-mysteries-the-green-children-of-woolpit/
- Battle of Fornham, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fornham
- The Story About the Green Children of Woolpit According to the Medieval Chronicles of William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall, Michał Madej, Res Historica, vol. 49, pp. 117–132 (2020): https://journals.umcs.pl/rh/article/view/7611/0
- The Green Children of Woolpit: A Medieval Encounter with Aliens, the Fae – or Orphans of War?, Charles Christian, FolkloreThursday (2019): https://folklorethursday.com/folktales/the-green-children-of-woolpit-a-medieval-encounter-with-aliens-the-fae-or-orphans-of-war/

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/green-children-of-woolpit