r/HolyShitHistory

The small East Anglian village of Woolpit was by no means exceptional, a prosperous little farming community. Then, sometime in the mid-12th century, something "strange and prodigious" supposedly happened.

One autumn day, villagers checking the wolf pits found two children unlike any they had ever seen. They looked perfectly ordinary except for one unmistakable detail: "the whole surface of their skin was tinged in a green colour."

The terrified boy and girl spoke an unknown language, wore unfamiliar clothing, and refused every food they were offered. They simply cried. Then they discovered fava beans growing in Sir Richard de Calne's garden and devoured them.

Sir Richard took the children into his household, patiently caring for them until they gradually accepted ordinary food. As they did, their green skin slowly faded. The boy, who had always been frail, soon died, but the girl survived, learned English, was baptized, and remained "very wanton and impudent."

Asked where they had come from, she claimed they were from St. Martin's Land, a country where the sun never truly shone, only perpetual twilight. In one version, the children had followed their father's cattle into a cave, heard the ringing of church bells, and suddenly found themselves in England.

This was written down as history by two near-contemporary chroniclers: William of Newburgh, writing in the 1180s from "trustworthy sources," and Ralph of Coggeshall, whose source was supposedly Sir Richard de Calne himself. While William admitted he was skeptical, neither man dismissed the event as fiction.

Many historians today suspect there is a real event buried beneath the legend. One theory is that the children were Flemish orphans. East Anglia had a large Flemish immigrant population, and after the Battle of Fornham in 1173, anti-Flemish violence may have left children wandering the countryside.

Speaking Flemish, dressed differently, and suffering from chlorosis, “green sickness," a form of anemia that can give the skin a pale greenish tint, they would have appeared incredibly strange to the villagers. Fed and cared for by Sir Richard, they recovered, while the story itself grew stranger with every retelling.

If you’re interested, there’s more about the story of the Green Children of Woolpit here: https://open.substack.com/pub/aid2000/p/hare-brained-history-vol-108-the?r=4mmzre&utm\_medium=ios

r/HolyShitHistory

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Artistic depiction of the Green Children of Woolpit, two children described as having skin "tinged in a green colour" who appeared in the Suffolk village of Woolpit in the mid-12th century. Their story was recorded as history by two separate medieval chroniclers.