The Green Children of Woolpit

Sources: https://s.hswstatic.com

Weird World: Snuggled in the English county of Suffolk, part of the district of Mid Suffolk, is a small village by the name of Woolpit. The name of the village goes back to at least the Tenth century and was recorded then in Old English as "wulf-pytt", named as the village was surrounded by large pits that had been dug to ensure the safety of the citizens and livestock by trapping large wolves that had engulfed the local area. It is an unremarkable village, but does have one claim to fame: it is here that sometime during the Twelfth Century, an event occurred that has had many historians, Ufologists, and conspiracy theorists talking about Woolpit for years.

A historian at the time, William of Newburgh, is said to be only one of two people who independently recorded the event at the time,and the story appears in his Historia Rerum Anglicarum(History of English Affairs), a work written in Latin that describes village life in the 12th Century, and contains reported stories about early accounts with Revenants(souls who have returned from the dead)and Vampires.

It is said that on a summers day in the 12th Century villagers discovered two children, a boy, and a girl, near one of the large pits surrounding the village. They wore strange clothes, spoke an unfamiliar dialect and, strangely, appeared to have green skin. They apparently were soon housed at a Manor owned by one Richard de Caine, where it is said they both refused food for days until being offered some raw beans which they devoured happily. The two children gradually adapted to life in the village, consuming new foods and apparently soon lost the green hue of their skin. Shortly after they were baptized, the boy, considered by many to be the younger sibling, died after a short illness.

Sources: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lhjpgfyP2Y0/

In time the girl(in some accounts she was given the name Agnes) learned English and it was reported that she soon claimed that the two children actually came from a place called St Martin's Land, where apparently there was no Sun and "light was like Twilight".She also claimed everything in their homeland was green. She claimed to have no idea how they had arrived at the pit all those years earlier, they apparently had been herding some cattle and walked into a cave, where they had heard bells in the distance and found themselves suddenly near the harvesting villagers. The girl was said to have been a maid for many years at the de Caine Manor, and supposedly married a man in a nearby village, however, in another account, it is claimed she married a scholar affiliated with the Royal Family and was never seen or heard from again.

Many theories have been put forth by many over the years to explain the "strange and prodigious" event if it occurred at all, and many believe the children were perhaps abandoned or had become strayed from a group of herders from a nearby village and spoke very little, if any at all, English. It is claimed the children may have suffered from a severe iron deficiency, which disappeared after returning to a healthier diet. Many have also claimed the children were Fey folk who became lost after leaving their "lower" world and found themselves near Woolpit.

And, of course, over the years many have charged that the children were extraterrestrials who had perhaps lost their way back to their spaceship or were abandoned on Earth for some unknown reason. However,the most logical explanation is that the children, who perhaps were suffering from an iron deficiency, were survivors of an "ethnic cleansing" enacted by Henry II against Belgian immigrants who had arrived in eastern England over the last decade, and perhaps the children actually had resided at an immigrant village by the name of Fornham St Martin, known at the time to be further North and to be inhabited by immigrant "fullers”, or workers involved in woolen cloth making.

Perhaps this explains the "strange" clothing the children wore???

We are now not likely to ever know what exactly took place in Woolpit all those centuries ago, but it has not stopped many modern scholars and investigators of the paranormal and mystery enthusiasts from speculating about the two children. If these children ever existed and the story is indeed based on fact, were they human children lost from a destroyed village of Belgian immigrants?

Or were they alien beings who assimilated into a village in Suffolk?

Words by Matthew Sweeney