Green Children of Woolpit

Record summary

This medieval account describes two unusually colored children found near Woolpit, speaking an unfamiliar language and initially eating only beans. Later versions say they identified an underground or otherworldly homeland, while one child reportedly adapted to ordinary society. The episode matters for comparison because it combines a human anomaly, linguistic difference, folklore motifs, and possible later reinterpretation as a nonhuman encounter. Its original testimony, chronology, and relationship between the surviving Latin accounts remain uncertain; naturalistic explanations such as malnutrition or misunderstood migration are speculative rather than established.