The Green Children of Woolpit: The Mystery Medieval England Recorded Twice
It was harvest time in Suffolk, somewhere near the middle of the twelfth century. The men cutting barley at the edge of Woolpit, a village roughly seven miles east of the great abbey town of Bury St Edmunds, came upon two children crouched near the mouth of one of the old wolf pits, the trenches dug to trap the wolves that had given the village its blunt name. A boy and a girl, small and frightened, clinging to one another. Their clothes were cut in a fashion nobody recognised, sewn from a material no harvester there could name. They wept and they spoke, but the sounds they made matched no language anyone in that field had ever heard. And their skin was green.
That is the opening of one of the oldest recorded mysteries in English history, and, unusually for a medieval marvel, it does not rest on a single voice. Two churchmen wrote it down, decades apart, in different orders and at opposite ends of the country.
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