Sometime during the reign of King Stephen of England, while villagers were out in the fields bringing in the harvest, two children appeared at the edge of a wolf pit in the village of Woolpit. They spoke not one word of English. Their clothes were strange. And their skin was bright, vivid green. Not a little off, not sickly pale. Green.
A village named for its traps
Woolpit got its name the hard way. The villagers dug huge, deep pits all around the edge of the village so that wolves coming into town to eat them would tumble in and be trapped. Nobody kept careful records back then, so the date of the children's arrival lands somewhere between 1135 and 1154. In that world a person could live an entire life within a three-square-mile radius and never meet anyone from anywhere else. There were no tourists and no decent roads. Two strangers standing side by side at the pit would have drawn a crowd even if they'd looked ordinary.
Nothing but green beans
The villagers were frightened, but they were decent, hardworking people, and the children were plainly starving, thin and drawn. The villagers offered bread, and the children wouldn't even taste it. Broth got the same answer: nopeski. Then someone brought out a bowl of fresh green beans, and the pair fell on it like the hungry wolves of the pits. Using pointing and gestures, the villagers worked out that the children had gotten lost while tending their father's cattle.
The children ended up with Sir Richard de Calne, the squire — the local lord whose land the peasants and serfs worked in exchange for a small share of the harvest and a hut to live in. He took them into his own home. The boy fell sick and died. The girl grew healthier by the month, and eventually her skin was no longer green. She learned English, was baptized into the church, took the name Agnes, and was married off to a man in a neighboring county.
The land of St. Martin
Once she could speak English, Agnes explained where she'd come from. She and her brother came from a land shrouded in perpetual twilight, where everyone was green, just like them. She called it the land of St. Martin. The two had been watching their father's cattle when they wandered off, the way children will, and kept going until they came upon a cavern. They walked through it and came out into very bright light, and they heard the sound of bells. That's where the people of Woolpit found them.
The story didn't survive as village gossip alone. Two English chroniclers wrote it down. Ralph of Coggeshall was an abbot at a monastery not far south of Woolpit — in those days the learned men were mostly clergy — and he said he heard the story firsthand from Sir Richard de Calne himself. That puts his account about as close to a primary source as the 12th century gets. William of Newburgh, far to the north in Yorkshire, told nearly the same story in his Historia Rerum Anglicarum, credited to trustworthy sources but without the squire's own testimony. Beyond those two, nearly everything passed by word of mouth among people who couldn't read or write, which turned history into a giant game of telephone.
Two green children who spoke no English walked out of nowhere into a medieval village. The girl grew up to be an ordinary married Englishwoman named Agnes, who said she came from a twilight land where everyone was green.
Twilight, or a tunnel of trees?
The most down-to-earth explanation starts with the green skin. Hypochromic anemia, once called chlorosis, is a condition brought on by poor diet and malnutrition, and it can turn skin green. A starving boy who died and a girl who turned a normal color once she was well fed fit that theory neatly.
The strange clothes and language may have a simple explanation too. Some historians suggest the children were Flemish — families from Flanders, fleeing persecution under Henry the Second. Their clothing and speech would have seemed strange only to villagers who had never met anyone from Flanders. The writer Paul Harris pushed the idea further. He argued the children were Flemish orphans from a village called Fornham St. Martin, which sounds a lot like the girl's land of St. Martin. If they had fled into the nearby Thetford Forest, then a wild, deep, dark wood could easily feel like permanent twilight, and the cavern might have been a tunnel of trees that opened onto the edge of Woolpit. His verdict amounts to this: not monsters, not aliens, but frightened, hungry orphans who couldn't make sense of the world they'd landed in.
It was aliens, obviously
Plenty of people have looked at that tidy explanation and declined. In 1621, Robert Burton wrote in The Anatomy of Melancholy that the green children fell from heaven, which modern readers happily take to mean extraterrestrials. In the mid-1990s, Duncan Lunan argued in the magazine Analog that the children were aliens accidentally teleported from their home planet and stranded in a small English village. He came back to the idea in his 2012 book Children from the Sky. Others point to an undiscovered civilization underground, or to physics theories about alternate dimensions and whether people can slip from one into another.
None of it can be proven now. Agnes, for her part, went on to live out her days as an English villager. If she really was a traveler from another world, what a comedown: one minute you're on your homeworld with flying cars And talking dogs and the next minute you're picking fleas off yourself in a medieval English village and living on gruel. Whatever the truth, the green children of Woolpit have gone unexplained for hundreds of years. It's not easy being green.