The Green Children of Woolpit

Woolpit, eight hundred years ago: two children with green skin climbed out of the wolf pits, speaking a language no one knew.

Two twelfth-century chroniclers, William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall, tell of two children, a boy and a girl, found by reapers near the wolf pits that gave Woolpit its name. Their skin was green, their clothes strange, and they spoke no known language. For days they would eat nothing but raw beans. Slowly they took to ordinary food and lost their green colour. The boy sickened and died soon after baptism, but the girl lived and learned English. She said they came from a twilight land called St Martin's, where the sun never fully rose. She later served in a household and is said to have married a man from King's Lynn.