The Green Children of Woolpit: what the two chroniclers actually wrote

Two children were found near the wolf pits at Woolpit in Suffolk. Their skin was green. Their clothing was of an unfamiliar material. They spoke a language nobody present understood, and they would eat nothing but raw beans.

This is one of the oldest stories in English folklore that is not obviously a folk tale, and it survives in two independent medieval manuscripts. Reading them is more interesting than reading anything written about them since.

The two sources

Ralph of Coggeshall was abbot of the Cistercian house at Coggeshall in Essex. His Chronicon Anglicanum contains the fuller version, written around 1220.

William of Newburgh was an Augustinian canon in Yorkshire. His Historia rerum Anglicarum, written around 1189, contains the shorter one.

They disagree about when it happened. Newburgh places it in the reign of King Stephen, which ended in 1154. Ralph places it under Henry II, who reigned from 1154 to 1189. Neither writer was present, and both are writing decades after the fact.

What the accounts say

The children were taken to de Calne's house. They refused all food until beans were brought in — and they first tried to open the stalks rather than the pods, which reads like a real observed detail rather than an invented one.

The boy sickened and died soon after baptism. The girl lived. Her skin gradually lost its colour, she learned English, and she was described as remaining in service and later marrying.

Once she could be questioned, she said they came from a country where the sun did not rise properly and everything stood in a long twilight. Its people were Christian and it had churches. She called it St Martin's Land. She said they had been minding animals, heard a great sound, and found themselves at the pits, dazzled by the light.

That is the whole of it. There is nothing in either chronicle about a craft, a light in the sky, or a descent from above.

What was added later

The reading of the children as extraterrestrials is a twentieth-century construction. So is the parallel-world reading. Both take the girl's description of a dim country and treat it as cosmology, which is not how either chronicler treated it — both understood her to be describing somewhere on earth that she could not name in English.

The explanation that fits the period

Suffolk in the twelfth century had a substantial Flemish population — weavers and settlers, and at times mercenaries. Flemish communities in the region were the target of violence, and a Flemish force was destroyed at Fornham St Genevieve near Bury St Edmunds in 1173.

Fornham St Martin lies immediately beside it, separated from Woolpit by the River Lark and by a few hours of walking. The suggestion that "St Martin's Land" is that village, garbled by a child who could not yet make herself understood, was set out by Paul Harris in Fortean Studies in 1998 and remains the most economical reading available.

The green colour has a medical candidate too. Severe iron-deficiency anaemia was known for centuries as green sickness, and it produces a greenish pallor that resolves with adequate food. A child starving in woodland, then fed properly in a knight's household, would lose the colour exactly as the account describes.

The refusal of all food but raw beans fits children who had been surviving on what they could find in fields.

What the record cannot settle

Whether any of it happened. Two chroniclers, thirty years apart, recording a story from a household's memory of an event decades earlier, is evidence that the story was told in Suffolk in the twelfth century. It is not evidence that two green children were found.

No charter, court roll or manorial record naming the children has been identified, and it is unlikely one exists.