The story survives because two serious men wrote it down. William of Newburgh — among the most sceptical historians of his age, famous for demolishing the King Arthur legends — included it in his history around 1198, confessing himself “overwhelmed by the weight of so many and such competent witnesses”; Ralph of Coggeshall, an abbot writing nearby a generation later, added details he had, he says, directly from the knight in whose household the girl later lived.
At harvest time — the reign of King Stephen by one account, Henry II by the other, so sometime in the mid-1100s — reapers near Woolpit in Suffolk found two children, a boy and a girl, beside the ancient wolf-trapping pits that give the village its name: dressed in clothes of unfamiliar material, speaking an unknown language, and with skin tinged green.
St Martin’s Land
Taken into the household of Sir Richard de Calne, the children at first refused all food, weeping — until, by both accounts, they were shown raw broad beans, which they devoured. The boy declined, sickened, and died, around the time of both children’s baptism. The girl lived: she took to ordinary food, and — the detail every retelling loves — her green colour gradually left her entirely. She learned English, and answered questions: they came, she said, from a country called St Martin’s Land, where the sun never fully rose and all was a perpetual twilight-green; herding their father’s animals, they had followed the sound of bells into a cavern, and emerged, dazzled, into the reapers’ field. She grew up in service, was — Ralph notes with clerical disapproval — “rather loose and wanton in her conduct,” and married a man of King’s Lynn; a later tradition names her Agnes and marries her to a royal official, from which enthusiasts have constructed descendants.
The explanations
Rationalisation has never quite closed the case. The strongest modern reading makes the children Flemish orphans: Flemish settlers were numerous in the region and were massacred near Bury St Edmunds in 1173 — a displaced pair from the nearby, Flemish-linked village of Fornham St Martin (“St Martin’s Land”), speaking Flemish (an “unknown tongue” to Suffolk peasants), starving in the woods, would show precisely the green-tinged pallor of chlorosis, severe iron-deficiency anaemia — the “green sickness” of later medical writing — which resolves with diet, exactly as described. The fit is neat; the chronology (which king?), the cavern, and the bean-field arrival stay stubbornly odd, and folklorists counter that the tale carries the standard furniture of medieval otherworld stories — green, twilight lands, forbidden thresholds.
Woolpit’s village sign shows the two children. The story remains what it was for William of Newburgh: too well-attested to dismiss, too strange to file — the twelfth century’s most durable open question, still politely refusing both the fairies and the footnotes.