Qualla: Woolpit

Woolpit: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sometime in the reign of King Stephen, around 1150, harvesters working a field outside a Suffolk village saw something they could not explain. Two children climbed out of one of the wolf-pits at the edge of the field, a boy and a girl, holding hands. Their skin was green. Their clothes were of a material no one recognised. They spoke a language no one understood. The harvesters took them to the house of Sir Richard de Calne, who tried to feed them. The children refused everything except raw broad beans. The story is recorded by two twelfth-century chroniclers, William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall. It has been told in Woolpit for nine hundred years.

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Woolpit: Pit for Wolves

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The village name was first written down in the tenth century as Wlpit, later as Wlfpeta. It derives from the Old English wulf-pytt: a pit for trapping wolves. East Anglia in the early Middle Ages still had wolves; they preyed on livestock, and villages dug deep pits and baited th...

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Woolpit: What Happened to Them

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

According to the chroniclers, the boy soon sickened and died. The girl survived. She gradually lost her green colour as she ate ordinary food. She learned English. When she could finally explain herself, she told Sir Richard that she and her brother came from a land called St Mar...

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Woolpit: The Church and the Angels

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The legend is not the only treasure here. The fifteenth-century parish church of St Mary's contains some of the finest medieval woodwork in Suffolk. Its hammer-beam roof is studded with carved angels, wings outstretched, faces serene, looking down on the congregation below. The b...

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Woolpit: Suffolk White Bricks

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From the sixteenth century onward, Woolpit became known across England for its bricks. Local clay fired to a distinctive pale colour, almost white. Edward Duger and Richard Reynolds both had brick-kells, the local word for kilns, by the time of Elizabeth I. The traveller Frederic...

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Woolpit: Living With a Legend

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Modern Woolpit has about 2,000 inhabitants, midway between Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, just off the A14. It has two tea rooms, a fish and chip shop, a bakery, an estate agent, a dentist, a hairdresser, and the inevitable industrial estates on the outskirts. The archaeologist ...

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