Sometime in twelfth century England, two medieval chroniclers recorded an extraordinary story from the village of Woolpit in Suffolk. A boy and a girl reportedly appeared near the village with green colored skin, speaking a language local people could not understand and refusing almost every kind of food.

This episode examines what William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall actually recorded, what reportedly happened to the children afterward, and the historical explanations proposed centuries later. The surviving accounts leave open the possibility that a real event was transformed through medieval storytelling.

Were the Green Children visitors from a mysterious place, displaced children misunderstood by the villagers who found them, or characters in a story whose original meaning has been lost?