It is a fairly free rendering into English of a passage from a Latin text by William of Newburgh or Newbridge, collected in the Breviary of Suffolk for 1618, recounting the story of the Green Children of Woolpit, a village outside Bury St Edmunds. Sometime ‘in the reign of King Stephen’, as the chronicler reports, two children, brother and sister, appeared one morning in a harvest field, ‘with their whole bodies green and dressed in clothing of unusual colour and material’. They wandered about in amazement, staring at the villagers, speaking in a strange tongue, apparently able to eat nothing but the pith from the inside of bean pods; ‘they lived on this food for some months until they got used to bread. Then gradually their colour changed as the nature of our food affected them and they became like us; they also learned the use of our language’. Once they were able to speak, they explained that they came from ‘the land of Saint Martin’; that one day, while tending herds in the fields, they were overwhelmed by a violent rushing sound (other versions of the story talk of a gentle, bell-like sound and a journye through underground caverns), and found themselves inexplicably transported to Woolpit; that although there were churches in their own country like the ones they saw around them, and Saint Martin was greatly venerated there, many other things were very unlike: principally, that ‘the sun does not rise on our countrymen; our land is little cheered by its beams; we are contented with that twilight ...’ etc. The boy died soon afterwards, while his sister, ‘who now was not much different from our own women’, eventually married a man from Kings Lynn and drifted into obscurity.