In gardens a few metres from Leicester Cathedral, archaeologists have made a disturbing discovery. Their excavations have revealed a narrow vertical shaft filled with the remains of 123 men, women and children.
It is one of the largest pit burials ever excavated in the UK, with subsequent research suggesting the bodies were dumped there more than 800 years ago, early in the 12th century.
However, the reasons for putting the corpses in this tiny, ancient shaft remain a mystery.
“Their bones show no signs of violence – which leaves us with two alternative reasons for these deaths: starvation or pestilence,” said Mathew Morris, project officer at Leicester University’s archaeological services. “At the moment, the latter is our main working hypothesis.”
The excavations by Morris and his colleagues suggest the bodies were put into the shaft in three deposits, in rapid succession. “It looks 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,” he said. “In terms of numbers, the people put in there probably represented about 5% of the town’s population.”
The discovery of the mass burial provides a vivid insight into life in England more than eight centuries ago, said Morris. “Other pit burials have been found in the region but this is the biggest. Actually, just trying to find comparable pit burials anywhere in the country is proving really hard.”
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles repeatedly mention great pestilences and fevers, severe mortality, and miserable deaths from hunger and famine in England from the mid-10th century through to the mid-12th century, said Morris. “This mass burial fits within this timeframe and provides physical proof of what was then occurring across the nation.”
The discovery of the mass burial is the result of a decision to build a new heritage learning centre at the cathedral. Twelve years ago, the body of Richard III was found underneath a nearby car park and was subsequently buried in the cathedral, triggering a tenfold rise in visitor numbers. To cope with this influx, a new centre supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund was approved for construction in the cathedral’s garden, a former burial ground, after a full archaeological survey had been carried out.
This has now been completed by Morris and his colleagues. In the garden, they uncovered the remains of 1,237 men, women and children, ranging from those buried in the 19th century, down to those who were interred in the early 11th century.
“It’s a continuous sequence of 850 years of burials from a single population from a single place, and you don’t get that very often,” added Morris. “It has generated an enormous amount of archaeology.”
Below these burials, the team found evidence of Anglo-Saxon dwellings and, further beneath, a Roman shrine. But most striking of all was the small vertical burial shaft that was discovered at one side of the dig: the pit burial containing the remains of 123 individuals.
At first, the team assumed these people had died during the Black Death, the outbreak of bubonic plague that struck England in 1348 and which is thought to have killed between a third and a half of the population.
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“We initially thought this was going to be the first evidence of the Black Death arriving in Leicester,” said Morris. Then the team got the results of radiocarbon dating tests of bones from the pit. These showed that the bodies had been dumped there almost 150 years earlier, around the beginning of the 12th century.
“That was surprising,” Morris admitted. “We have no idea, at present, what might have triggered such a massive cause of death. As far as we know, the bubonic plague did not reach our shores until 1348. So what was the cause of the mass deaths that occurred then?”
To find answers to this question, the Leicester team has sent samples from the bodies in the pit to geneticists at the Francis Crick Institute in London in order to search for viruses, bacteria or parasites that might have triggered the blight that struck Leicester.
“It was clearly a devastating outbreak that resonates with recent events, in particular the Covid pandemic,” said Morris. “But it is also important to note there was still some form of civic control going on. There was still someone going around in a cart collecting bodies. What we see from studying the bodies in the pit does not indicate it was created in a panic.”
He added: “There was also no evidence of clothing on any of the bodies – no buckles, brooches, nothing to suggest these were people who were dropping dead in the street before being collected and dumped.
“In fact, there are signs that their limbs were still together, which suggests they were wrapped in shrouds. So their families were able to prepare these bodies for burial before someone from a central authority collected them to take to the pit burial.”