Two green-skinned children appeared in a 12th-century English village
by Mark Frauenfelder · Boing BoingThe girl said she came from a place called Saint Martin's Land, where the sun never rose, and everything sat in permanent twilight. She and a younger boy had been herding cattle, heard a sound like the bells of a great church echoing across the fields, and then found themselves standing by a wolf pit in Suffolk, England. Their skin was green.
King Stephen sat on the English throne, placing this in the 1150s, near the village of Woolpit (named for the wolf pits dug to trap wolves). The children spoke a language nobody recognized and refused everything offered to them until somebody brought out raw broad beans, which they ate hungrily and lived on for months.
Two medieval writers recorded the story. William of Newburgh, a canon in Yorkshire, put it in his Historia rerum Anglicarum around 1189 and called the event "strange and prodigious," saying he relied on "reports from a number of trustworthy sources." Ralph of Coggeshall, an abbot in Essex, wrote his version decades later, drawing on Sir Richard de Calne, who took the children into his manor house. Ralph added that in their homeland "everything there was green."
The boy was the younger and sicklier of the two, and he died soon after the pair were baptized. The girl grew stronger, gradually ate ordinary food, and lost her green color as she did. She learned English, served for years in de Calne's house, and later married a man from the port town of King's Lynn. William noted she was still living when he wrote.
The explanations people have offered since run from a folk tale about a fairy Otherworld reached through a cave, to a garbled memory of Flemish immigrant children orphaned during the persecution of Flemish settlers, to a poor diet that produced chlorosis, an anemia once called "green sickness" that tints the skin and clears up with better food.
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