Two 12th-Century English Chronicles Both Describe Children with Green Skin

Sometime in the twelfth century, in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk — the name comes from the Old English for "wolf pit" — harvesters reportedly found two young children at the edge of a field. Their skin was tinted green. They wore unfamiliar clothes, spoke a language no one recognized, and refused all food except raw broad beans, which they ate by splitting open the stalks rather than the pods. The boy died not long after baptism. The girl survived, learned English, lost her green color, and eventually married a man from King's Lynn.

This would be a forgettable folk tale except that two separate chroniclers wrote it down. William of Newburgh, an Augustinian canon writing in Yorkshire around 1189, says he hesitated to include the story because he distrusted it, then cited it on the authority of "so many" credible witnesses. Ralph of Coggeshall, an abbot in Essex about 26 miles from Woolpit, recorded a longer version sometime in the 1220s and described having heard it directly from the household where the girl was raised. The two accounts differ on small details but agree on the green skin, the beans, and what the girl said about her homeland: a place where the sun never quite rose and the light was always like dusk, called Saint Martin's Land.

No modern reading explains it cleanly. Proposed candidates have included Flemish refugee children with chlorotic anemia, fugitives from a local Anglo-Saxon community, and pure folkloric invention. The chroniclers' dates roughly fit the reign of King Stephen (1135–1154).