The Green Children of Woolpit

The Legend of the Green Children of Woolpit: Folklore, History, and Rational Explanations

 

Introduction

Every so often, history coughs up a story that refuses to be pinned down - a tale that blurs the line between folklore, fact, and pure mystery. One such story begins in the quiet Suffolk village of Woolpit sometime in the 12th century.

There, villagers stumbled upon two children with green skin, speaking an unknown language, dressed in unfamiliar clothes, and refusing to eat anything except raw broad beans. One child soon died. The other survived, learned English, lost her unusual color, and revealed that she came from a place of perpetual twilight known as St. Martin’s Land.

Were they fairy folk who slipped out of the Otherworld? Lost refugees whose strange appearance was explained away as legend? Or something stranger - even extraterrestrial? For centuries, the Green Children of Woolpit have fascinated historians, folklorists, and paranormal enthusiasts alike.

Folkloric Context and Mythological Interpretations

The Green Children story has often been framed as a medieval folktale, an encounter with beings from an Otherworld.

  • Fairy Origins: Since folklorist Thomas Keightley published the tale in The Fairy Mythology in 1850, many have linked it to the fairy-faith of England. Tales of hidden races, subterranean worlds, and twilight lands are common in Celtic and Anglo-Norman folklore. The children’s arrival through a cave-like passage echoes myths where mortals stumble into fairy realms.

  • Symbolism of St. Martin: Some scholars argue that references to “St. Martin’s Land” may tie the story to harvest rituals or spiritual themes of death and rebirth. In medieval imagery, St. Martin was sometimes associated with guiding souls - making the children’s liminal, green-hued existence symbolic of life suspended between worlds.

  • Beans and the Dead: Even their diet carries folkloric weight. Broad beans were long associated with fertility, rebirth, and even the souls of the dead in European folklore. That the children ate only beans until assimilating to “normal” food has been read as a sign of their otherworldly nature.

Later folklore embellished the legend further. A modern Suffolk tradition merged it with the Babes in the Wood tale, suggesting the children were poisoned with arsenic by a cruel uncle, their skin turned green, and they wandered into Woolpit. Others imagined even grander origins: Robert Burton claimed they fell from heaven, while Francis Godwin whimsically proposed they came from the Moon.

These interpretations highlight how the story evolved into a mythic canvas - open to fairy lore, harvest symbolism, and cosmic speculation.

Historical Accounts in Medieval Chronicles

Two chroniclers recorded the incident within living memory:

  • William of Newburgh (Historia Rerum Anglicarum, c. 1189) described how villagers discovered the children during the reign of King Stephen (1135 -1154). He noted their green skin, strange language, refusal of ordinary food, and eventual adaptation. The girl, William reported, later married in King’s Lynn and explained her homeland as St. Martin’s Land, a place of twilight with a luminous country visible beyond a great river.

  • Ralph of Coggeshall (Chronicum Anglicanum, c. 1220) gave a more detailed version. He claimed the children emerged from a subterranean cavern after following the sound of bells. Dazzled by sunlight, they collapsed near the wolf-pits where harvesters found them. Ralph emphasized that everything in their homeland - people, animals, and objects - was green. He also included the vivid anecdote of the children crying when they failed to find beans inside stalks until taught to open the pods.

Both chroniclers acknowledged skepticism but insisted on trustworthy sources. Ralph even cited Sir Richard de Calne, the landowner who sheltered the children. Their careful inclusion of the tale shows that, while wondrous, it was treated as a genuine marvel of the age.

Scientific and Rational Explanations

Modern historians and folklorists have sought to demystify the Woolpit mystery with rational theories:

  1. The Flemish Orphans Hypothesis
    Historian Paul Harris suggested the children were Flemish refugees from the nearby village of Fornham St. Martin. After the 1173 Battle of Fornham, many Flemish mercenaries were killed, and civilians may have fled. The children, speaking Flemish (unintelligible to villagers), displaced and starving, may have wandered into Woolpit. Their green skin could have been caused by chlorosis (iron deficiency anemia), which would have improved once they ate a balanced diet.

  2. Medical Theories: Green Sickness
    Derek Brewer proposed a simpler scenario: lost or orphaned children suffering from malnutrition. Chlorosis can cause a pallid greenish complexion, which disappears with proper nutrition. In this reading, the Woolpit children were not foreign at all - simply traumatized, sick, and unable to explain themselves.

  3. Allegorical Readings
    Literary scholar Jeffrey J. Cohen interprets the tale as an allegory of cultural difference in Norman England. The green children represent marginalized outsiders (such as the Welsh or indigenous Britons) assimilated - or destroyed - under Anglo-Norman rule.

  4. Other Theories
    Some have speculated about kidnapping, poisoning, or even psychedelic folklore origins. While these are less substantiated, they underline the enduring mystery of the case.

The Green Children in Modern Culture

The Woolpit mystery didn’t die with the Middle Ages. It has re-emerged again and again in literature, pop culture, and speculative theories:

  • Science Fiction & Fantasy: The Green Children have appeared in novels, including Herbert Read’s The Green Child (1935), which reimagined the tale as a surreal allegory. Later, they inspired stories in science fiction anthologies, where their “twilight land” is sometimes recast as another planet or dimension.

  • Television & Documentaries: The legend has popped up in British documentaries about medieval folklore and in paranormal shows, usually framed alongside cases of “fairy encounters” or alien abduction stories.

  • UFO & Alien Lore: Some modern theorists cheekily classify the Green Children as one of the earliest “alien encounter” stories. The strange skin tone, incomprehensible language, and claim of coming from a land without sunlight have been compared to extraterrestrial contact narratives.

  • Local Identity: Today, Woolpit embraces the mystery as part of its heritage. The village sign itself depicts the two children, showing how deeply the legend has become embedded in Suffolk identity.

Conclusion

The Green Children of Woolpit endure not because we can solve them, but because we can’t. Their story sits at the crossroads of history, folklore, and imagination.

Were they refugees from a Flemish village suffering from malnutrition? Were they wandering orphans, remembered through the distorted lens of medieval wonder? Or were they really emissaries from some twilight Otherworld?

Eight centuries later, the mystery resists closure. And maybe that’s the point. The Green Children remind us that some legends aren’t meant to be solved - only retold, again and again, each generation finding new meaning in the green glow of Woolpit’s most famous children.

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