The Green Children Of Woolpit

Raymond · The Green Children Of Woolpit

At harvest time during the chaotic reign of King Stephen (1135-1154), there was a strange occurrence in the Suffolk village of Woolpit, near Bury St. Edmunds.
While the reapers were working in the fields, two young children emerged from deep ditches excavated to trap wolves.
The children, a boy and a girl, had skin tinged with a green hue, and wore clothes of a strange colour, made from unfamiliar materials. They wandered around bewildered for a few minutes, before being discovered by the reapers and taken to the village.
Here the locals gathered round and questioned them, but no-one was able to understand the language the children spoke, so they were taken to the house of local landowner Sir Richard Colne, a few miles away at Wikes.

Here they broke into tears and for some days refused to eat the bread and other food that was brought to them. But when newly-shelled beans with their stalks still attached were brought in the starving children immediately made signs that they were desperate to eat. The children survived on raw beans for many months until they acquired a taste for bread.

As time passed the boy, who appeared to be the younger of the two, became depressed, sickened and died, but the girl adjusted to her new life, and was baptised.
Her skin gradually lost its original green colour and she became a healthy young woman.
She learned the English language and afterwards married a man of the nearby town of King's Lynn.
After a few years, she was left a widow. Some sources claim that she took the name 'Agnes Barre' and the man she married was a senior ambassador of Henry II.

When questioned about her past the girl was only able to relate vague details about where the children had come from and how they arrived at Woolpit.
She stated that her and the boy were brother and sister, and had come from 'the land of Saint Martin' where it was perpetual twilight, and all the inhabitants were green in colour like they had been.
She was not sure exactly where her homeland was located, but another 'luminous' land could be seen across a 'considerable river' separating it from theirs.
She remembered that one day they were looking after their father's herds in the fields and had followed them into a cavern, where they heard the loud sound of bells.
Entranced, they wandered through the darkness for a long time until they arrived at the mouth of the cave, where they were immediately blinded by the glaring sunlight. They lay down in a daze for a long time, before the noise of the reapers terrified them and they rose and tried to escape, but were unable to locate the entrance of the cavern before being caught.

Various explanations have been put forward for the enigma of the Green Children of Woolpit.
The most extreme include that the children originated from a hidden world inside the earth, that they had somehow stepped through a door from a parallel dimension, or they were aliens accidentally arrived on earth.
One supporter of the latter theory is the Scottish astronomer Duncan Lunan, who suggests that the children were aliens transported to Earth from another planet in error by a malfunctioning matter transmitter.

Whatever the true origin of the green children, the village of Woolpit is to this day still very honoured that such a strange thing should have happened in their sleepy village.

The story of the mysterious green children is still kept alive through the village sign.