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12th c. mass pit burial found at Leicester Cathedral
One of the largest mass burial pits ever discovered in the UK has been unearthed next to Leicester Cathedral. The pit contained the skeletal remains of 123 men, women and children dumped down a narrow vertical shaft in the early 12th century.
“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 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 remains of King Richard III in a Leicester parking lot in 2012 caused a seismic shift in Leicester Cathedral’s identity as a place of worship, pilgrimage and tourist attraction. His body was reburied in a purpose-built tomb at Leicester Cathedral in 2015, triggering a ten-fold increase in the number of visitors to the church.
In January 2022, the cathedral closed its doors for two years while the building was repaired and restored to ensure its long-term stability, the first phase of an ambitious £15m renovation project. Meanwhile, the Old Song School at the eastern end of the cathedral on the garden green was demolished to make way for a new Heritage & Learning Center (HLC). Services resumed November 26, 2023, while University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS) were engaged to explore the site dedicated to construction of the HLC.
The Cathedral Gardens is a tranquil green space that developed over the course of the past 80 years from what was once the old churchyard (closed to new burials in 1856). The churchyard wasn’t just a burial ground in the centuries before its closure. Like many cemeteries, it was a park-like gathering place for the residents of a densely-populated urban center, and there is archival and archaeological evidence of buildings dating to as early as the 12th century as well as dwellings rented to tenants by the church from the 15th through the 18th centuries.
What is now Leicester Cathedral began as the parish church of St. Martin. It is first mentioned by name in historical records in 1220, but historians believed there was an earlier iteration of St. Martin’s dating to before the Norman conquest. In the excavation of the HLC site, archaeologists hoped to find evidence of the earliest church, as well as remains of the ancient Roman settlement of Ratae Corieltavorum, most of which is under the historic center of Leicester and therefore inaccessible to archaeologists.
Excavations concluded in March 2023. In ten months of digging in a relatively small pit 43 by 49 feet by 20 feet deep, the team unearthed 19,754 artifacts and 1,237 skeletons spanning 15,000 years of history. The burials range in date from the 11th through the 19th century, the full period when St. Martin’s churchyard was in use.
“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.”
After documentation and assessment of the archaeological materials collected from the site, the ULAS team analyzed the skeletal remains. The bones underwent osteological analysis, radiocarbon dating, DNA and stable isotope analysis. The dating confirmed that St. Martins was founded in the late Saxon era (a penny found in that layer dates to 880-973 A.D.) and while most of the site was a garden space in the Roman era, the northwest quarter of it housed a building with a cellar that had painted stonework walls and a concrete floor. The base of an altar stone was found there, suggesting this may have been a private cult ceremonial space.
The analysis of the bones in the pit burial revealed that they were older than previously thought. Because there were so many bodies in the shaft, archaeologists first suspected they were victims of the Black Death which cut such a deadly swath through Europe that a third of its population was killed. This would have been the first archaeological evidence of the Black Death in Leicester. Instead, radiocarbon dating results showed the deceased had been dumped into the pit 150 years before that.
To pinpoint what the cause of this mass death event may have been, the ULAS team has sent samples of the bones to the Francis Crick Institute in London for DNA analysis that might identify the pathogen.
“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.”
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