The two earliest accounts are William of Newburgh, writing around 1189, and Ralph of Coggeshall, writing in the 1220s. Ralph drew on the testimony of Sir Richard de Calne of Wykes, whose household took the girl in. The two versions differ in detail but probably share a source, and both place the discovery in the reign of King Stephen (1135 to 1154).
The villagers found a brother and sister beside a wolf pit at harvest time. They had green skin, spoke no known language and wore strange clothes. At first they refused all food, then ate raw broad beans eagerly and slowly came round to an ordinary diet, losing their green colour as they did. The boy, who looked the younger, sickened and died around the time of his baptism. The girl survived, worked as a servant for Richard de Calne, and was later said to have married a man from King's Lynn.
When she learned English the girl said they came from a twilight country where the sun never shone brightly. William gives the name as St Martin's Land; Ralph adds that everything there was green. Modern readers have offered several explanations. Folklorists read it as an encounter with the otherworld. Paul Harris suggested in 1998 that they were Flemish children orphaned in the troubles of the time, with the green tint caused by chlorosis, a nutritional anaemia. Others point to malnourished children lost in woodland. None of these can be proved, and the story remains an unresolved medieval puzzle rather than a haunting.
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