The Green Children of Woolpit: A Land Where the Sun Never Rose

0:00 [gentle music] The reapers found them at the edge of the field, beside the old pits. Two children, a boy and a girl, standing where the ground fell away. They were dressed in clothes made of a material no one in the village could name. They spoke, but nobody could understand a word they said, and their skin was green. This is Midnight Signals. This is how the story was told in Suffolk, in the East of England, in the 12th century. It was written down by two men within living memory of the event. One was a canon in Yorkshire who had never been to the village and did not want to believe it. The other was an abbot in Essex who knew the man who had taken the children in. Neither of them could explain it.

0:46 Both of them wrote it down anyway. The village was called Woolpit. It still is. It lies in the gentle farmland of Suffolk, a few miles east of the town of Bury St Edmunds, where one of the richest abbeys in England stood around the shrine of a martyred king. The name Woolpit comes from an Old English phrase, a wolf pit. Long before the 12th century, the people here had dug deep trenches at the edge of the woods to trap the wolves that came for their sheep. By the time of this story, the wolves were mostly gone. The pits remained. It was harvest time. In a village like Woolpit, that meant almost everyone. The men worked along the rows with sickles, cutting the grain close to the ground. Women and children followed behind, binding the stalks into sheaves and gleaning what fell.

1:37 It was hot, hard work, and it went on from first light until the evening. Nobody had time to wander the edges of the fields. Anything out of place would have been noticed. Sometime during the day, according to the chroniclers, they noticed two figures near the mouth of one of the pits. Children, lost, frightened, and wrong in a way that was difficult to describe. They were green, not pale, not sickly, but green, their skin a color the reapers had only ever seen in leaves and grass. Their clothing was strange, made of cloth unlike anything the villagers had seen. When the villagers approached, the children spoke to them in a language that none of them recognized. It was not English or French or Latin or any of the languages a traveler might bring to an English village.

2:27 The children were crying. The reapers did what people do with lost children. They brought them in. Our two witnesses tell the story slightly differently, and the differences matter. The first was William of Newburgh, a canon at an Augustinian priory in the north of England. He was one of the most careful historians of his age. He was the writer who dismissed Geoffrey of Monmouth's famous history of King Arthur as a pack of lies at a time when most of England believed it. Writing in the 1190s, he was famous for his skepticism. He attacked other writers for inventing history, and he had no patience for marvels. He placed the arrival of the green children in the reign of King Stephen, sometime between 1135 and 1154.

3:15 He admitted that he had hesitated for a long time before including it in his history. He said he had been overwhelmed by the number and the quality of the witnesses. The second was Ralph of Coggeshall, abbot of a Cistercian monastery in Essex, writing a few decades later. Ralph had a source closer to the event. He said the children had been taken to the house of a knight named Sir Richard de Calne at a place called Wykes, about six miles from Woolpit. Ralph said he had heard the story from Richard de Calne himself and from his household. They had lived with the girl for years. Ralph had an eye for the strange. In the same chronicle, he recorded another Suffolk marvel, a wild man covered in hair, caught in the nets of fishermen off the coast at Orford. The man was kept in the castle there.

4:05 He would not speak, and he ate raw fish, and eventually, he slipped back into the sea and was never seen again. Ralph wrote these things down because he believed they had happened and because the people who told him were people he trusted. It is through these two men and through the knight's household that we know what happened next. The children would not eat. Richard de Calne's household offered them bread and the ordinary food of an English manor. They refused all of it. For days, they ate nothing at all. They wept, and they grew weaker, and no one could understand what they were trying to say. Then, one day, someone brought broad beans into the house, freshly cut from the garden, still on their stalks. The children seized them, but they did not know how to open them.

4:56 They broke open the stalks, searching inside for something to eat, and found nothing. They wept again. Someone in the household showed them how to split the pods, and then, at last, they ate. For a long time, beans were all they would eat. Over the months that followed, the children were taught to eat bread and other food, and as they did, something began to change. The green began to fade from their skin. Little by little, according to the chroniclers, they took on the color of ordinary people. The boy did not do well. He was smaller, and he had always seemed weaker than his sister. He grew sick and listless.

5:38 The household had both children baptized. For the people of the 12th century, this mattered enormously. Whatever the children were, wherever they had come from, baptism made them part of the Christian world. It brought them, in a sense, into this side of the river. Not long after, the boy died. The girl lived. She learned English, and once she could speak it, the household began to ask her the questions they had been asking since the day the reapers found her. Where had she come from? How had she and her brother arrived at the pit? Her answers are the strangest part of the story. She said they came from a place called St. Martin's Land.

6:21 The people there were Christians, she said, and they had churches, but it was not like this land. In her country, the sun never rose. There was only a kind of perpetual twilight, the light you see just after sunset or just before dawn. Everything there was green, the people, the animals, everything. Across a broad river, she said, they could see another country, a land full of light, but no one from her land ever crossed over to it. She explained how they had come to Woolpit. She and her brother had been looking after their father's flocks in the fields. They heard a sound, a great ringing, like the bells that rang at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Bury was only a few miles from Woolpit.

7:07 Its abbey was one of the greatest in England, built around the shrine of St. Edmund, the East Anglian king killed by the Danes three centuries earlier. Pilgrims came from all over the country to visit it. Its bells would have carried far across the flat Suffolk fields, marking the hours of prayer, day and night. For the people of Woolpit, it was the most familiar sound in the world. For the girl, it was the sound of something she had never heard before. The children followed it. In Ralph's version, they wandered into a cave or a passage underground. They walked in darkness for a long time, following the sound until they came out into the open air, and the light hit them. They had never seen sunlight.

7:54 They were dazzled by it, overwhelmed, and they lay down where they were, unable to move or to see. They were too frightened to find their way back to the passage. That was where the reapers found them, at the mouth of the wolf pit, in the full glare of an English harvest afternoon. The girl's later life is ordinary, and somehow, that makes it stranger. According to Ralph, she stayed in Richard de Calne's household for many years and worked there as a servant. Ralph described her, rather unkindly, as very wanton and impudent. William says that she eventually married a man from the town of King's Lynn, about 40 miles away on the coast of the Wash. He says she was still alive a few years before he wrote.

8:42 She lived among the people of Norfolk and Suffolk, spoke their language, ate their food, and went to their churches. Her skin was no longer green. If you had passed her in the street, you would not have known. We do not know her name. We do not know if she ever had children of her own or what she told them. We do not know if she ever tried to find the passage again. The chroniclers recorded where she came from, and then they stopped writing about her. For more than 800 years, people have tried to explain the green children. For a long time, the obvious answer was that they had come from fairyland. Medieval Europe was full of stories about the land beneath the hills, where the fair folk lived in perpetual twilight, and about mortals who strayed into it through caves and mounds and lost track of time.

9:33 Green was the color of the fairies. Food was always important in these stories. A mortal who ate fairy food could never go home, and a fairy who ate human food might never return. Read that way, the children's refusal to eat and the fading of their color as they did follows the shape of a fairy tale almost exactly. But William and Ralph were not telling a fairy tale. They were writing history, and they insisted that this had happened to real people in a real village within living memory. In the 20th century, others offered more modern explanations. Some suggested the children had come from inside the Earth.

10:14 Others, more recently, suggested they had come from another planet, a world where the light was always dim, and had arrived through some accident of space or time. One researcher, Duncan Lunan, went further. He spent years in the archives and claimed to have identified the girl. He suggested she had been given the name Agnes and that she married a royal official named Richard Barre. The claim is intriguing, but it has never been confirmed. These ideas have been popular. They have not been taken seriously by historians. One theory has been taken seriously. In 1998, a writer named Paul Harris proposed an explanation that fits most of the details without needing anything supernatural. He began with the language. The children had spoken something no one in Woolpit understood.

11:04 In 12th century England, the obvious candidate was Flemish. During the reign of Henry I, many people had come from Flanders to settle in England, especially in the east, as weavers and merchants. Then Harris looked at the geography. Not far from Woolpit, just north of Bury St Edmunds, lies a village called Fornham St. Martin. Between it and Bury runs a river, the Lark. A child from Fornham St. Martin describing home might well call it St. Martin's Land and might well describe a brighter country across a river. Harris also pointed to the politics of the time. In 1173, an army that included Flemish mercenaries was defeated in battle near Fornham, and many of the Flemings were killed, some of them by local people as they tried to escape.

11:55 Flemish settlers in the region would have had reason to fear for their lives. In Harris's reading, two Flemish children might have been orphaned and fled into the woods. They might have hidden for days in the dark of the forest until they followed the sound of the bells at Bury and stumbled out into the fields at Woolpit. And the green skin? Harris suggested a condition called chlorosis, sometimes known as green sickness. It is a form of severe anemia caused by poor diet that can give the skin a greenish tinge. For centuries afterward, green sickness was a familiar diagnosis in Europe, especially among poor and underfed young women. Starving, frightened children who had been living on almost nothing might well have looked green. And once they were fed properly, the color would fade.

12:44 The boy, weaker to begin with, might have been too far gone to recover. It is a neat explanation. It might even be true. But it has its problems. The children's clothes were said to be of a strange material which does not fit children from a nearby village. A Flemish speaker would not have been entirely impossible to understand in 12th century East Anglia, a region full of trade and travel. And the dates do not line up. The battle at Fornham took place in 1173, nearly 20 years after the end of King Stephen's reign, when William says the children appeared. Harris' theory turns the story into something we can understand.

13:26 It does not prove that it happened that way. What the explanations cannot quite reach is the girl's own description. A land where the sun never rises, a twilight that never ends, a bright country across a river that nobody crosses, a long walk in the dark following the sound of bells. Whatever she was describing, she described it the same way for years to a household that knew her well and believed her. She was not a traveler passing through with a story to sell. She stayed. She grew up there. She married and lived out her life in Norfolk, and she never changed her account. And there is the detail of the beans. Broad beans have a long history in folklore.

14:11 In parts of medieval Europe, beans were associated with the dead and with the underworld. They were offered to spirits, eaten at funerals, and avoided at certain times of the year. It may mean nothing. It may only be what was growing in Richard de Calne's garden that week. But the only food the children would accept, for a long time, was the food of the dead. Woolpit still stands. Its church, St. Mary's, has a tall spire that can be seen across the fields, and its village green is surrounded by old houses. The wolf pits have long since been filled in. A painted sign stands in the village, showing two small figures, a boy and a girl, standing beside a wolf. Visitors stop to photograph it. Most of them have never heard the story. The village has kept it anyway.

15:00 William of Newburgh, the skeptic, the historian who hated marvels, gave the episode a careful ending. He said he had resisted believing it for a long time. He said that, in the end, the weight of the evidence had overcome him. He did not claim to understand it. He did not try to explain it. He simply left it in his history, among the kings and the battles, for anyone who came after him to puzzle over. Tonight's signal, it is the bells. Everything in the girl's story begins with a sound. Not a light, or a door, or a voice, but the ringing of bells, like the bells of Bury. In her own land, there was twilight, and green, and a river no one crossed.

15:45 And somehow, from somewhere beneath it, she could hear the bells of an English abbey, and she followed them. Somewhere in the east of England, a woman once lived who had been born in a land of perpetual twilight, or who believed she had. For the rest of her life, every church bell she heard would have sounded like the one that called her out of the dark. And she never found her way back. Next time on Midnight Signals, we jump forward almost 700 years to Nuremberg in the spring of 1828. A teenage boy appears in a city square, swaying on his feet, holding a letter. He can say only one sentence.

16:26 And when he learns to speak, he will say that he has spent his whole life in a dark room. This has been a broadcast by Midnight Signals. I'm Russ Chamberlain, guiding you through the shadows where history meets mystery. Visit midnightsignals.net to continue the conversation, explore more episodes, and say hello. If you enjoyed tonight's journey, please like, subscribe, and drop a review. Until next time, stay vigilant, seek the hidden, and remember, in every silence there is a signal, and in every signal a story waiting to be told. [outro music]