the Green Children

Has anyone heard of the Green Children of Woolpit before?

Sometime in the 12th century, two little kids appeared right outside the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England. Their skin was a very unusual color, they spoke a language that no one understood, and the only food they ate was green beans.

This was in the time when people believed in faerie-changelings and those types of stories.

The boy was unhealthy and died shortly after they arrived in the village and were baptized. The girl, however, survived, and eventually learned English. When she did, she said she and her brother were from a place called St. Martin's Land, where it was always twilight and all the people were green. She grew up healthy and eventually got married. The strangest thing is that after they had arrived and began to eat normal food (other than beans) their skin lost its green color.

People have different theories for what really did happen, one being that they were, actually, faerie children, but also that they may have had chlorosis (what turned them green) or arsenic poisoning (both are scary ideas.) Rather than having come from a magical unknown place, it is possible they were North Belgian refugees, as at the time Belgian people were trying  to immigrate to England and a large number of them killed.

I won't give all the details of the theories now, because I have a plan for a project where I tell their story from different perspectives, each one illustrating a different theory or idea of what could have happened.

I shall start posting them as soon as I can.