-
Archaeologists discovered 123 bodies from the 12th century dumped in a vertical shaft near Leicester Cathedral.
-
The remains include men, women, and children, and show no signs of violence.
-
The find is situated near where the body of King Richard III, located 12 years ago, was discovered.
123 bodies from 12th century Britain appear to have been dumped down a vertical shaft near the Leicester Cathedral.
The shocking new find of what amounts to three successive cartloads of bodies in a garden nearby the cathedral follows the discovery of Richard III’s remains in the area 12 years ago. The 2012 discovery brought renewed interest to the area, and experts undertook a complete archaeological survey of what was once a burial ground, locating the remains of 1,237 bodies with a range of burial dates. But it was the vertical shaft full of remains that struck a chord.
“Their bones show no signs of violence—which leaves us with two alternative reasons for these deaths: starvation or pestilence,” Matthew Morris, project officer at Leicester University’s archaeological services, told The Guardian. “At the moment, the latter is our main working hypothesis.”
But don’t blame the Black Death—the team isn’t. While their first guess was the 1348 bubonic plague, which resulted in the deaths of roughly one-third of the entire English population, Morris said that radiocarbon dating of the bones places them at least 150 years before the 1300s event.
The team enlisted the help of the Francis Crick Institute in London to sample the bodies in their search for any clues to the potential disease that struck the area, but no results have yet been announced. “It was clearly a devastating outbreak,” Morris said. He added that the event was handled in a controlled manner, with people likely collecting bodies in a cart. “What we see from studying the bodies in the pit does not indicate it was created in panic.”
It appears that each of the bodies was wrapped in a shroud—indicating families likely prepared the bodies for burial. Additionally, none were clothed or clad with additional adornments, offering “nothing to suggest these were people who were dropping dead in the street before being collected and dumped.”
“It looks,” Morris said “as if successive cartloads of bodies were brought to the shaft and then dropped into it, one load on top of another in a very short space of time.”
Morris predicted that the 123 residents represent roughly 5 percent of the town’s population. “Other pit burials have been found in the region,” he said, “but this is the biggest. Actually, just trying to find comparable pit burials anywhere in the country is proving really hard.”
For centuries, pestilences and plagues—or even death from famine—were a not-so-uncommon occurrence in England. Bouts of disease or hunger could wipe out large numbers of residents in very short spans of time. “This mass burial,” Morris said, “fits within this timeframe and provides physical proof of what was then occurring across the nation.”
The larger effort to map the history of the Leicester Cathedral burial grounds displays burials from a stretch of 850 years, all from a single population center—a rare occurrence that now offers plenty for the archaeologists to digest. Morris said that he and his team also located evidence of Anglo-Saxon dwellings and even a Roman shrine.
You Might Also Like
