Episode Description
The Green Children of Woolpit: The Children Who Came From Somewhere Else
In 12th-century Suffolk, something very strange was said to have happened.
According to medieval accounts, two children appeared near the village of Woolpit. They were dressed in unfamiliar clothing, spoke a language nobody understood — and their skin was reportedly green.
The children were taken in and cared for, eventually learning to eat ordinary food and, according to the accounts, losing their unusual green colouring. The boy died soon afterwards, but the girl survived and was eventually able to communicate. She reportedly described a strange underground world where everything was green and where the two children had been tending livestock before finding themselves in our world.
So what actually happened at Woolpit?
Were the children victims of illness, malnutrition, migration or a misunderstanding that became a legend? Could there be a real event buried beneath the medieval storytelling? Or is the story exactly what it appears to be — a strange piece of folklore that has survived for almost 900 years?
In this episode of The Eclectic, we follow the story of the Green Children of Woolpit, examine the medieval accounts behind it, and separate what was supposedly recorded from the theories that have grown around it ever since.
Some mysteries become less strange with time.
This one somehow became stranger.
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