Woolpit is a village in Suffolk, a few miles east of Bury St Edmunds. The name is the wolf pits. Two writers tell of a boy and a girl found there with green skin. They did not see it. William of Newburgh, a canon in Yorkshire, put it in his Historia rerum Anglicarum at the end of the twelfth century, in a history that runs to 1198. He sets the find in the reign of King Stephen, 1135 to 1154, at harvest. Ralph of Coggeshall, a Cistercian abbot in Essex, tells it again in the Chronicon Anglicanum, early in the thirteenth century, and says he often heard it from a knight, Richard de Calne, and from that man’s family.

William says reapers found the children beside one of the pits and took them into the village. Their skin was green, their speech was not understood, and their clothes were not the clothes of the place. They would eat nothing that was offered. When beans were brought in from the field they seized the stalks and looked for the pulse in the hollow of the stem. Finding none, they wept. Someone shelled the pods and gave them the beans, and they ate those. William says beans kept them for many months, until they learned to eat bread. The green, he writes, went off by degrees from the food, and they came to look like other people, and learned English. They were baptized. The boy, the younger, lived only a little time after that and died. The girl stayed well. William says she was afterward married at Lynn, and that she was said to have been living not many years before he wrote. He says he long thought the story absurd, and that the number of people who stood by it overcame him.

Once they had the language, William says, they were asked who they were. They answered that they were from the land of St Martin, a saint held in special honor where they were born, a Christian country with churches. They said they did not know where that land was, or how they had come to Woolpit. They remembered only that they were feeding their father’s flocks when they heard a great sound, like the bells at Bury St Edmunds, and that while they listened they were suddenly beside the pits. The sun did not rise on their people. The light was like the twilight before sunrise or after sunset. A bright country could be seen from theirs, across a very wide river.

Ralph does not use the name St Martin’s Land. He says the children were found by the people of St Mary’s of the Wolf-pits, near the mouth of a pit, green over the whole of the skin, and that nobody understood them. They were taken as a curiosity to Richard de Calne’s house at Wykes, not kept in Woolpit, and they wept. Bread and other food were set out. They would not touch it, though the girl later said they were very hungry. When beans just cut, stalks and all, were brought in, they signed for them and opened the stalks instead of the pods, thinking the beans were inside. They wept again. The people opened the pods and showed them the beans. They ate those, and for a long time nothing else. Ralph says the boy was always languid and low, and died within a short time. He does not say the boy was baptized. The girl, in his account, lost the green completely as she got used to other food, was baptized after that, and lived many years in the knight’s service. Ralph says she was rather loose and wanton in her conduct. Asked about her country, she said the people and all they had were green, and that they saw no sun, only a light like the light after sunset. Asked how she and the boy had come, she said they were following their flocks, came to a cavern, and heard a sweet sound of bells. They wandered a long time in the cavern until they came to the mouth. The sunlight and the strange air struck them senseless, and they lay a long time. Frightened by the noise of the people who found them, they wanted to run, and could not find the way back in before they were caught.

Neither chronicle gives her a name. “Agnes,” and “Agnes Barre,” are a modern guess, not a line in William or Ralph. What the two of them do agree on is a boy and a girl, green, found at the pits, living for a time on raw beans, the boy dead soon, the girl losing the color and remaining in Suffolk. The land without a sun, the river, and the cavern are what she is said to have told them, and the two books do not tell it the same way.