The Effect
It is the mid 12th century, and in a picturesque corner of East Anglia, one of the strangest stories in English history is about to unfold.
It is a late summer’s day in the village of Woolpit, Suffolk, and its residents are hard at work bringing in the year’s harvest. Then, suddenly, two children appear. The children - a boy and a girl - are hovering at the edge of the settlement, looking lost. From a distance, they look quite ordinary, though the inhabitants of Woolpit do not recognise them as any of the village children. And this is in no small part due to the most bizarre aspect of their appearance. Every inch of their skin is a striking, vibrant green.
When the villagers approach the children and try to communicate with them, things become even more baffling. The children are completely unable to understand what the villagers are saying to them, and can speak only a totally unrecognisable and hitherto unheard language. Their clothes, also, are completely alien, in cut, colour and style.
Unsure what to do for the best, the villagers take the children to the home of a local nobleman named Richard de Calne. At de Calne’s house, the sickly-looking pair are offered food, but steadfastly refuse the delicious plates of meats and fruit, cheeses and bread placed in front of them, growing hungrier and frailer by the hour. Eventually, with the villagers and de Calne’s servants now at their wits’ end, the children are presented with a bowl of raw broad beans. And, to everyone’s surprise, they set upon the beans like a starving dog upon a bone, devouring the entire contents of the bowl. For some time after this, raw broad beans are the only foodstuff the children will allow past their lips.
As the weeks pass, the children gradually adapt to normal food and, the more of it they eat, the fainter the green colouration of their skin becomes. As their green skin fades, they also start to learn the local language, adapting bit by bit to life in Woolpit. A little while later it is decided that the two children should be baptised. However, the boy, the smaller of the two and the child with the weakest constitution, dies before the planned baptism can take place.
The surviving child - the girl - eventually becomes fluent in the local language, and explains where it is she has come from. Her brother and herself had, she claims, been born in a land where the sun never shines, a realm cast into a perpetual state of twilight. This curious place is called St Martin’s Land by the people who live there, and everything about it… is green.
The girl goes on to say that she and her brother had been herding their father’s cattle the day they had arrived in the village, when they’d heard the sweet peal of bells ringing through the air. Captivated by the sound, the children followed it, suddenly finding themselves emerging from the pit at the edge of the village, dazzled by the bright Suffolk sunlight. It was as though, she said, they had unwittingly crossed an unseen boundary from another world. When the children heard the villagers at work, they had tried to flee, but whatever portal they’d come through had, by that point, closed, leaving them stranded.
So how do we know of these mysterious, green children? The story was written down by the notable East Anglian chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall. But could Ralph have been mistaken? Could he have exaggerated the story or misinterpreted it? The fact that a second notable English chronicler, William of Newburgh, also recounted almost exactly the same details of this bizarre tale makes this extremely unlikely, especially as the two men were writing in different parts of the country. But why would two such eminent scholars have recorded the same peculiar story? A story neither man was able to explain.
So just what was going on in this pretty Suffolk village in 1153? It would be very easy to dismiss the bizarre tale of the green children as simply local legend, a myth reaching out to us across nearly nine centuries of history. But, contrary to its strangeness, might there be a real-world explanation for this seemingly very other-worldly tale?
The Method
In the mid 12th century, a young boy and girl appear in the English village of Woolpit as if by magic. Not only do they wear unfamiliar clothes, claim to be from another land and speak an unrecognisable language, but their skin is… green.
The Green Children of Woolpit is an almost nine hundred year old story steeped in English lore and fairy legend. But were these children really members of the fae-folk? Or might there have been an alternative explanation for their peculiar characteristics?
Theory One: the children were fairies or, at least, their story was consistent with a number of tropes of English fairy folklore.
The fact that the green children entered the village of Woolpit via a cave from another realm is a popular motif in folk stories about fairies. And humans entering the fairy realm, or vice versa, and subsequently finding themselves marooned in an unfamiliar world would, at the time, have been a well-known part of the zeitgeist. However, the idea of fairies having green skin was not such a well-known part of their lore in the early Medieval period, with fairies being clad in the fresh green of the natural world only coming into the public consciousness in later centuries.
Could it have been significant that the green children appeared at a very specific time of the year: harvest time? Perhaps their tale was never supposed to be completely rooted in reality at all, but a symbolic story of natural cycles, particularly pertinent to this part of the year. After all, during the harvest, the wheat is cut down to nourish the people over the harsher months to come. Maybe, in this way, the children represent death and life. They were nourished back to life and health by the food the villagers offered them; their harvest. Indeed, the St Martin the children referred to was known to be a figure of the underworld, and they came from a land beneath the ground. So it’s plausible they fictionally represent some sort of movement between death and life.
Theory Two: the story was a parable illustrating the relationship between early Britons and Norman invaders.
Could the differences of the children to the rest of the villagers have represented another race or community of people once living in Britain? Some academics argue that the green children are a memory of England’s past, and the conquest of the indigenous Britons by the Anglo-Saxons, followed by the Norman invasion. On one hand they are a reminder of the ethnic and cultural differences between Normans and Anglo-Saxons, but the children could also be said to embody the earlier inhabitants of the British Isles: the Welsh, Irish and Scots who had been forcibly anglicized. Perhaps this is why the boy in the story dies, because he symbolises a people who will not be assimilated.
Theory Three: the children were foreigners, from another - very real - country.
Might the strange children have actually been Flemish? Could this have been why the villagers of Woolpit didn’t understand their language? And the Flemish were also known at the time for the colour of their clothing, which was dyed a very particular shade of blue-green. It’s possible the boy and girl might have been the children of earlier Flemish immigrants, clothworkers perhaps. Or Flemish mercenaries. Perhaps the children were trying to explain they were actually from Fornham St Martin, a village to the north of Woolpit, and not from St Martin’s Land at all.
It’s an intriguing theory, but 12th century East Anglians were a surprisingly cosmopolitan bunch of people. They would, even if they couldn’t speak the children’s language themselves, have recognised it as Flemish. In the early Medieval period, England was a much more linguistically diverse place than it is today, with Norman French, Latin and variants of Norse being regularly spoken by different communities.
Another hypothesis suggests the children could have been from a country even further away than Europe. Was their reluctance to eat the food the villagers initially offered them because they were Jewish, or Islamic? Was the word ‘green’ in reference to their skin tone actually used to mean just a different colour to the very pale 12th century East Anglians?
Theory Four: the children were suffering from a medical condition and had been abandoned.
Perhaps the most persuasive theory of all relating to the Green Children of Woolpit speculates that the boy and girl were suffering from a medical condition and, as a result, had been abandoned by one or both of their parents. Perhaps their parents were immigrants, something that might explain their so-called alien language and unfamiliar clothing. But just which medical condition might have been the cause of their very unusual skin colour?
The illness that seems to fit most closely with the children’s green skin is hypochromic anaemia, also known as chlorosis. Sufferers of this condition can appear jaundiced due to a reduction of hemoglobin, the pigment in blood that gives it its red colour. But in many cases the skin does not merely look jaundiced, it takes on an actively green tint, which is how the condition gets another of its names: green sickness.
A final, intriguing theory put forward by the historian John Clark is that the children may have been suffering from an enzyme deficiency. Namely, Favism. This is a genetic condition relatively widespread in Eastern Mediterranean and North African countries. It is also more likely to be suffered by boys as it affects the X chromosome, and in males there is no additional X chromosome to balance out the faulty one. As Favism is a type of anaemia, it causes a number of physical symptoms including pale, jaundiced or discoloured skin. Most fascinatingly of all is the fact that this condition can be brought on by eating a very specific foodstuff… broad beans.
© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
