Forbidden History - Black Death: The Mysterious Plague Skeleton of Tadcaster

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we follow a team of experts as they investigate the life and death of a medieval woman whose skeleton was found at Tadcaster Castle, North Yorkshire. Could her burial be part of a grave of plague victims? Cast List: Simon Richardson: Metal Detectorist Dr Piers Mitchell: Biological Anthropology, University of Cambridge Dr Michelle Mundee: Bioarcheologist, University of York Tim Sutherland: Archaeologist, University of York Malin Holst: Osteoarcheologist, University of York Eric Meyers: Narrator  Episode originally produced in 2013 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Mid-1300s, in the small Yorkshire town of Tadcaster, in northern England. By a simple shallow grave, a body is prepared for burial. There are no grave goods to accompany this person on the last journey to the afterlife. Perhaps just a plain shroud.

There are no clues as to who this person was, nor what has taken their life. Now a team of archaeologists investigate. They'll use all their experience and a range of techniques, the latest advances in genetic research, and hard work on the ground. A lot of people were killed in and around Tadcasta. They'll try to discover who who will discover who's just to discover who's not. discover who this person was, how did they die, and what can their remains tell us about life more than 600 years ago?

There was less fear of death and more acceptance that it was going to happen. Until now, the truth was known only to the medieval dead. The seventh year after it began, it came to England and first began in the towns and ports joining on the sea coasts. In Dorsetshire, whereas in other counties, it made the country quite void of inhabitants, so that there were almost none left alive. And finally it spread over all England, and so wasted the people that scarce the tenth person of any sort was left alive.

So a chronicler wrote of what befell England in the 14th century. It was a pivotal time in the Middle Ages across the whole of Europe. The medieval town of Tadcaster, 15 miles south of York in northern England, was no exception. The Yorkshire landscape is prosperous now, but it veils the many years of hardship and suffering that ordinary people endured just to get through their daily lives. The average life expectancy was around just 30 years. Things then were bad enough without war, poverty, famine, and famine. disease.

It's all dirty backgrounds, people walking around in the mud, the dirt and the lower echelon of society is rough in it. And it wasn't very pleasant. It's easily a third world environment as we would see it today. People live in at a subsistence level, hand to mouth, farming at a very basic level. Even when they farm for somebody else, the majority of the crop would go to the church in the state so again it goes back up out of their system. For a lot of medieval aspects of archaeologies,

Knights armour, the conflict, rather than focusing at the top end of society we can now focus on the bottom end of society, the people who lived and worked on the land at a very, very basic level. We can do scientific analysis on their skeletal remains, on their teeth, to find out where they were born, where they were brought up, and what sort of food they're at. And so at a subsistence level we can now record that so we can see exactly how they lived and what they went through and sometimes even how they died. The medieval dead still exist.

Around the United Kingdom, skeletal remains are kept for future study. In our stores in England there are hundreds, if not thousands of skeletons that have not been analyzed yet. Many of them were excavated in the 60s and 70s. Some are still even unwashed. these skeletons still warrant analysis. The University of York's Department of Archaeology preserves many such skeletons. The remains of some of the population of medieval Yorkshire.

The medieval period is very interesting because there are lots of aspects still that we don't know so much about, and it's fascinating to find out more about it. There are documents that might relate to propaganda or political, intrigues and so on that distort the actual evidence and when we have the skeletons themselves and the archaeology itself we can see what really happened in the medieval period I think I think the general public is surprised that there's still so much to be left to be discovered about the medieval period people relate to other people so the medieval skeletons are

very fascinating to the general public in the medieval period you see see very different diseases that you might then compared to the post-medieval period or the early medieval period or the Roman period. You try to think about the social context, whether they were from a richer site or a less well-off site. And then you try to look for patterns, whether there was malnutrition at the site, if it was a poorer site, or whether they were all very tall people on their wealthier site. So you try to put the skeleton straight away into its archaeological. context. The medieval period is clearly a very great distinction between different classes and between different social status of individual, but also a total

misunderstanding of diseases and also their cures. Malin is often called in to carry out analysis on bones found at the many archaeological sites in and around York and all over the UK. Her work entails establishing all the facts she can about an individual who lived hundreds of years ago from the bones they leave behind. I'm an osteo-archologist, and what we do is we visually analyze the skeleton, so we determine the age, the sex, the living height, and any diseases the person suffered from or any injuries they suffered from.

It's usually not possible to tell the cause of death. And then they're specialists who undertake biomolecular studies of human skeletons, and they can determine much more about the diet of the person by undertaking destructive analysis of the teeth and bones, and they can also often tell when individual comes from through isotope analysis. Among the breakthroughs in biomolecular research is DNA analysis. This is revolutionizing osteoarchiology, unlocking whole new areas of potential for the study of skeletal material. In future there will be this new generation DNA analysis, which are called SNPs,

where you can determine the eye color, the hair color, whether somebody had a coffee allergy, and where almost exactly somebody came from. But that's something in the future that we can do with these assemblages that are still stored in the future. stored in British museums. Most of the skeletons she analyzes come from sites where the archaeology is already understood, often as part of a batch of several sets of remains, from a recognized burial context, such as a conventional cemetery. But sometimes there's a skeleton that carries with it a little more mystery. Tadcaster has seen centuries of conflict. A castle once

stood here from the days of the Normans, though it was a ruin for most of the medieval period. Not far from the town's main church, the site has lain for centuries as wasteland. Raids from the north, battles in the Middle Ages, and the English Civil War have all left their marks on the area. While the Castle Hill site has remained empty and largely free from modern building, people ever realize that it was a place of death. Simon Richardson was just a boy here when he heard that a grim discovery had been made in the garden at Castle Hill. It sparked in him a lifelong passion for history and archaeology. When I was 11 years old, they asked

the landowner or the homeowner if I could have a look around the garden. People said this undulating landscape was a Roman castle. But a lot of it was a lot of wasn't a Roman castle, even at 11 years old I knew it was a Motten Bailey from around the period of the Norman conquest. The chap who had the garden, he let me look around. I came back a few more times, one particular day, showed me some photographs. And they were talking in 1975, I was 11. My eyes must have lit up, there were photographs of skeletons which had been excavated from

his garden. And I missed the excavation by a few months. And it turns out he'd found, he found a bone whilst digging a small vegetable patch. It went to the police and then to the coroner. And they decided that there were human remains. It was a bone from the arm. The remains that found were very, very old. They investigated a few areas within the garden.

And I think they turned up about 12 individuals. I remember one specific photograph, and it was of a skull when it had a rhomboid hole in the side of its head, which is like sort of a squat diamond shape. So it was all very, very interesting. And I came for quite a number of years, and I found a large amount of pottery, mainly medieval, but quite a bit of Roman. But he also found some musket balls, and they were from the Battle of Tagcaster, which

was 1643. As Simon's enthusiasm for archaeology grew, he kept going back to Castle Hill to help where he could as the local historical society explored the site. And then, almost two decades went by, and after a change in ownership, Simon found the site little resembled the place he knew from childhood. Quite some number of years later, I came back to the garden and I was totally taken aback by what I saw. The garden was completely overgrown.

I was asked to come down and clear the grounds. It was a huge task and it took some weeks. One of the first things I did was remove a large hemlock plant, which is a very poisonous plant. So just at a fairly shallow depth I got under the roots and I spayed just caught on something which I thought was a stone, but it turned out to be a skull. It was a completely unexpected find and it left Simon wanting to find out more. There was no evidence as to when the body had been buried. So there was one possible clue as to the individual's fate, a small trauma mark on the skull.

About 96, the masquerade was found at Toughton, at Toughton Hall. I saw some photographs of some of the skulls which had been excavated at Tauton, and they had in the side of the head these rhomboid-shaped holes. Simon had heard of the excavations at Toughton Battlefield, where Tim Sutherland had been network to recover the remains of victims of a battle in 1461. Remembering the skull with a rhomboid hole in the side of its skull and the ones at Toulton, sort of putting two and two together. What I'd found there might have been a victim from the Battle of Toughton, so then I got in touch with Tim.

Several of the skeletons had trauma marks, including rhomboid holes thought to have been caused by Warhammers or pole axes. Could the skull belong to a combatant? who'd fled the battle during the route and was killed or died of wounds at Tadcaster? In 2009, Tim and Simon carry out an excavation on the spot where Simon had found the skull. They unearthed the rest of the skeleton, and several more partial skeletons. It seemed as if the site had been used as a cemetery, yet intriguingly, this was outside the bounds of the nearby medieval churchyard. It wasn't straightforward though.

Many of the remains were less than ideally preserved. When we carried out the excavation, we came down onto several skeletons, but they're all very fragmentary or in not very good condition. And then we came down on this one skeleton and was in good condition and there was more of it showing than the others. And so we thought, right, it was quite robust person. This bone was in really good condition. So we thought, right, this is the one that we'll try to find out more about. And so we fully excavated it and record it and pulled it out the ground and we thought, right, this hopefully will be a good enough sample to represent the other skeletons that we found in the whole of the site.

Recording data about the location, orientation and potential age of the burial was vital if clues were to be gathered that could help explain this strange burial. We're assuming that this one skeleton is representative of everybody in this cemetery because it's in a strange location. It's in the middle of a medieval castle that was falling into ruins. And there was a cemetery, a perfectly good cemetery, just down the hill, that they should have really been using. So why weren't they using that? And also, some people are buried face down, some people are buried face up, most of them are east-west,

but they all seem to be in little groups, as if they've been rushed. The burials have been rushed. So there's something very unusual going on. Was it possible the grave was conflict-related, like the one at Tauton? Tim needed to consider the many layers of history affecting Tadcaster to try and understand the confusing nature of the archaeology at Castle Hill. We have an anomaly that we have skeletons in the ground and we thought it'd be easy enough. We excavated them,

usually we can date them by associated pottery or whatever and therefore you can apply a period and then you can hypothesize that they were killed in a civil war or, you know, there were Romans or whatever or Vikings. And then what happened was that the context they were, were in was completely undecipherable. And so what we needed to fix them, anchored down to a period, was a dating mechanism. Simon and Tim returned to Castle Hill after the break. Several years after the excavation, the site has changed a lot since they were here, just

as it's done throughout its history over hundreds of years. On this piece of ground, we've got, basically, we've got evidence of Roman remains. potentially a fortlet. It's something that was guarding the river crossing. We've got bits and pieces that might be Anglo-Saxon. And then we're into the 11th century when for some reason there was a castle built on this site, the classic Motten Bailey, small Motten Bailey, wooden timber-palisaded castle that was built in the 11th century, obviously to guard the river crossing exactly the same way as the Roman fort would have been. The medieval castle was only in existence for about 100 years. and so I presume

It's unusual that isn't it? Yes, it was never developed into anything other than the original Motten Bailey Timber Castle It was never fortified with or extensively with stonework And so presumably it just wasn't significant as a location for a castle anymore Development of the town is probably 12, 13, 14th century And therefore that's when the major river crossing moves away from the Ford here onto the present location of the bridge

and that's when the town developed around the bridge, as they quite often do. And then of course this place is abandoned completely. And there's nothing here then for significant number of years, possibly even until the English Civil War, when it was re-fortified to a certain degree, we know that because it was obviously fought over. And then it looks like it was abandoned completely until the 18th century, or late 17th 18th century, when they built the house.

And then, of course, it turned it into formal gardens. And that brings up the question as to why these skeletons that were found here in the 70s, and then we subsequently re-found, why were these bodies buried on the top of this hill? Are they Roman, are they Anglissaxon? Are they Norman? Are they Poster or are they Polish Civil War, for example? Are they people that died joining one of the sieges of Tadcaster? Or are they significantly later? And we need to know that. The bridge at Tadcaster forms a vital crossing point at the River Wharf. Historically, its position has held significant strategic importance.

This means the town has been no stranger to war over the centuries, particularly in the medieval period. Tim had to consider a number of possibilities to support the idea that the skeleton might have been the result of conflict. In the early 14th century, the Scottish leader William Wallace led attacks into England, and many were killed during his raids on the York area. It's not commonly known that the Scots travel this far south and succeeded in creating a lot of damage, but they did, they moved further south than this, and there were conflicts in and around this area,

and it's known that there was a conflict when the Scots invaded in the early 1300s down here. But the most significant military event in the Tadcaster area for hundreds of years dated to the 15th century to the 15th century, more than 150 years after Wallace. In 1461, thousands of men fled through the town, routing from the Battle of Tauton just a few miles away.

One of the reasons we thought there may have been a cemetery here is the extension of the cemetery needed when in 1461, after the Battle of Tauten, there was a significant route between Tauten through Tadcaster on the way to York, which is on the same route. and what happened is that significant numbers of people were caught because the bridge had been broken by the Lancashions

in order to stop the Yorkist invading York and so what happened is there's a lot of people who were killed in and around Tadcast at the time we know this from the documentary evidence and we thought well potentially this could be a cemetery associated with the dead people that were caught up in the Wars of the Roses and of course by dating the skeleton to potentially the mid-1400s it might have been the case that that was what has happened ascertaining why the skeleton was buried here was not going to be simple.

It wasn't even clear what sex it was. Detailed analysis was needed. There are certain individuals that really stick out, partly maybe because they have unusual pathology or because they have a particularly well-preserved skeleton, but some you really connect with and you feel for them if they suffered or you see what circumstances they were buried under,

and you're trying to understand the reasoning behind that. So some people you really do connect with. The bones were strong and solid, showing signs of a relatively long life of hard work. What's more, the bones appeared to be those of a woman. This meant the skeleton couldn't be that of a soldier. But could the victim still have been in the grave as a result of the as a result of the conflict.

A clue on the skeleton at first caused Tim to speculate the woman might have died through being caught up in a battle or its aftermath. One of the marks on the skull, as Simon had found, seemed to indicate trauma and injury. We initially thought there was some head trauma. It looked like a blade wound on parts of the skull. And so we got really excited and thinking, thinking niches it, it is a result of head trauma during conflict or whatever. Subsequently, had the skeleton analysed and it looked like it was done by a spade. And of course, these skeletons are just below the surface.

So, of course, obviously with a little bit of overactive digging, you could cause some damage to these skeletal material. The radiocarbon result finally puts paid to the idea of a conflict-related cause of death. The skeleton was from the mid-1300s. This put it too late to be as a result of Wallace, and too early for Tauton. One by one, the options were being eliminated. So of course that's another thing we can just wipe away and say, fair enough, now we've managed to cancel that. So it's like we know that they're not Roman, we know they're not Anglo-Saxon,

we know that not from the 15th century, the wars of the roses, We know they're not civil war soldiers that were fighting in around the settlement here and the castle itself. And so we managed to squeeze it down to a very narrow period of time. Tim was forced to think again. What else was going on in the mid-1300s in Yorkshire? This is where we start getting some interesting results, because we radiocarbon dated it, and it dated quite securely to the early to mid-1300s. because the castle has already been abandoned by them.

If the castle's been abandoned, it's obviously waste ground, it might have been farmed or cultivated as a private allotment. But if something happened in a very short period of time that accumulated large numbers of dead people in a small cemetery, and that was unusual. Rushed burials, particularly of more than one body, could suggest the cause of death that in some ways was even more terrifying than battle. One of the things that immediately strikes you is that the whole of Europe was decimated by the Black Death, by the plague.

Between a third and half of population potentially died, of Europe died. A significant number of people died in and around Tadcaster. And that means that the cemeteries would have been full. Within a few months or a year or so, the cemeteries would have been full. Because there's just nowhere else to put them. There could be potentially hundreds of people dying in a very short period. time in around Tadcaster and the surrounding district because remember this is a parish church and so of course it attracted a lot of people from in and around Tadcaster significantly distant

from Tadcaster itself and so they would have been drawn here to be buried after their life had ended the black death ripped across the landscape wiping out entire communities yorkshire was no exception for the people of medieval england who experienced it life was never the same again Peers Mitchell lectures in biological anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He studied how what we know as bubonic plague spread throughout medieval Europe. There are certain epidemic diseases like bubonic plague that many people would have never experienced until the epidemic swept through. And then virtually everyone would have been exposed to it

and a proportion of people would have died. For example, in the Black Death in 1348, perhaps 50, 60 percent of people seem to have died in Europe. seem to have died in Europe. Coping with such catastrophic losses must have been traumatic for the survivors who had to rebuild their lives. We have to remember that in medieval Europe,

attitudes to death were somewhat different to what they are now. Religion was very important. And the place of the church was very important. So although no one particularly wanted to die, there was a much stronger thought that, what's important is that you live your life, so you go to heaven when you do die. So unlike today, there was less fear of death and more acceptance that it was going to happen.

And people were taught by the church that what's important is when you did die, you'd lived a good enough life to go to heaven. And so there were slightly different attitudes to disease and different attitudes to death. Didn't necessarily have to be cured of a disease to have a good life, but so long as you prayed and ticked all the boxes from the point of view of the church, then it didn't matter if you died early, because if you went to heaven, that's what life was all about to the medieval mind.

The Black Death Outbreak in the 14th Century killed large numbers of people very quickly. Up until now, the only known evidence for mass deaths of this kind is from London. Could the comparatively small number of skeletons at Tadcaster also be a result of the result of the plague. The problem is we assume that the individuals from the black death were buried in massive

pits. Well, a lot of that wouldn't have been possible in normal churchyards. They were usually packed with remains. So it's likely that a lot of these plague pits were actually not in consecrated ground or were in ground that was later consecrated. And I'm sure there have been assemblage as found in Britain where the assumption has been that they are plague cemeteries, but it hasn't been proven. Malin said about finding how to verify whether the woman had died from black death, and

a recent discovery in bioarchology provided the means to do so. DNA analysis techniques have developed dramatically in recent decades. by Yersinia pestis bacteria and transmitted to humans by the fleas of infected rodents, bubonic plague or black death is a pathogenic killer. Though Yacinia pestis was discovered in 1894, its genome has only recently been decoded. This genomic sequence now allows scientists to pinpoint the existence of bubonic plague in the intact DNA of ancient skeletons. Michelle Mundy is an expert on analyzing the biomolecular structure

of archaeological specimens. When we have a skeleton and we can look at it morphologically, we can say certain things about it. And then if you want to get down to the molecular level and look at DNA, what we can look at, we can look at different genes. We can say, you know, more or less what color eyes someone might have had in the past. We can look at skin tone. We can look at things. like whether they had runny EOax or not.

These are all genes that we know what they do so that we can look for them. We can look for the genetic changes that cause these particular features to arise in your body. All of these things will tell us something about a person in the past. They might not have actually manifested them

completely, so we might be able to say this person contains, has the gene for this, but we don't know how much that was actually manifested in their actual life. I don't think we'll ever definitely get to that. There's a difference between what's in our genetics and what we actually did throughout life. So a lot of what we look like and our personalities is, you know, as you know, half about what's in our genes and what's in our lifestyle, how we've been brought up. Malin speaks with Michelle to find out more about the skeleton from Tadcaster.

It would be interesting to see whether this skeleton actually is related in any way or the mass grave is related in any way to the black death. What's inside is what we're actually going to be sampling, which is the dental pulp, which is right in the centre of the tooth. So what the specialist will do when they actually have the tooth, they'll probably cut it all longitudinally down the middle and scrape out with a small dental implement the pulp that's inside and use that for the DNA. Although you can get DNA out of any tissue that's surviving, the best to go for, or the best material to go for would be the teeth, because the dental enamel is what's protecting the DNA inside. It's much harder for things to get inside teeth than it is for things to get inside bone

and vice versa to get out as well. We want to use a tooth that is as intact as possible, has as much of the enamel there which would have protected the DNA inside, and we want these roots to be fused. And we're going to go for Yostinia pestis, which is the causative agent of the black death. The trouble with plague is that it kills you

too quickly for your skeleton to react to it. So we'll need to use DNA because you won't be able to look at the skeleton and say, we think this person has died of plague. Whereas you can look at a skeleton and say, we think this person might have been suffering from tuberculosis or leprosy and those sorts of ailments. We can look at the skeleton for that because they are long-term diseases where your bone has actually reacted to the disease.

Plague, no chance. Well, the DNA analysis would be very, very interesting in terms of whether we can tell whether this individual did suffer from the plague, because as Michel has said, this is something that we just cannot do from the osteological analysis of the skeleton. Did the woman die as a result of the plague? The story continues when forbidden history returns. As the plague spread across Europe, it had a great effect on the structure of society. entire cultures had to adapt quickly to enormous losses in their working population.

The Black Death swept right across Europe from 1348, about 1352, and had major effects, not only on people's lives, but the social structure of Europe at that time. It seems that perhaps 50 or 60 percent of people across Europe died during the Black Death. Firstly, it would have profound effects on the Jim genetics of medieval Europeans. If you think there's something different about the 60% that died and the 40% that didn't. So it's quite likely to have significantly affected our gene pool now so that we may be better able to resist certain kinds of infectious disease because those of us that couldn't cope with the black death had our genes removed from society. Secondly, it had significant effects upon the population number. A lot of the poor had to rely on the little work that was available.

They were attached to the land. They couldn't move about and live where they wanted to. A lot of them had to live where their hut was and they had to give a lot of their income on work for a particular land over on Noble. When you have 60% of workmen die, then you suddenly have this bizarre position where there's a shortage of labour and people can move around because the landover next store is prepared to pay you to go and work for him. And people could move to towns and get work there because all the labourers were dead.

And so suddenly people weren't tied to the land anymore. They weren't semi-slaves to the nobility. And we have a complete breakdown and change in the way people saw the ability to advance themselves, to move around the country and to change their career path. So in many different ways, the Black Death had a major effect. on both Britain and the rest of Europe, so that we find life in the 12th and 13th century is very different to the late 14th and 15th century.

Societal changes like this help pinpoint events such as plague in the historical record, even though until very recently there was no way to identify archaeological evidence. Now the DNA results are in, and Tim has exciting news. But just before we've done the research, research, somebody finds the DNA of the Yusinia pestis. And so obviously to not to utilise

that would have been crazy. So we asked them and it tentatively looks as though it's evidence of the plague, which is unbelievable and it's very unusual, I believe, because to find a plague cemetery that's not either a mass grave or somewhere very urban like London, for example, where they found huge burial pits from a huge plague pit. But to find what looks like almost a normal cemetery with evidence of the plague in this is fantastic and so it leads on to us to other things you know what can we say about this cemetery what can we find out about the plague that's not evidence in a mass plague pit for example and so it's really good news for us we've answered the main question it

does look like it's a plague cemetery that ties in with the date really nicely it also explains why they're where they are in an old abandoned castle and so in terms of the remit of why we're doing the research we've got a result it's The presence of Yusinia pestis in the DNA of the skeleton from Tadcaster is extremely interesting because we are only just starting to be able to even detect the DNA for Yusinia pestis. The genome for Yusinia pestis has only just been found about a year and a half ago. So this is very new stuff. We can never normally tell how people died unless it was a traumatic

death, for example, a skull injury or something like that. So it's very rare that we can say what a person's cause of death is. And in this case, of course, we also can't say Gisdina pestis, or the plague was definitely the cause, but it's very likely. If she suffered from the plague, then it's likely that that was the cause of death. So would this explain the burials at Tadcaster in the remains of the castle, away from consecrated ground? The problem of having to bury sudden large numbers of dead would have given the people of Tadcaster a serious problem.

What's happening is the normal method of dying and the disposal of the dead has been interrupted. There are just large numbers of dead. This cemetery is expanding to its limits. And now we've got evidence. It's actually burst out of the cemetery and it's gone into this waste ground which was the old abandoned medieval castle. Every day one or two people are dying. in the very local community. So imagine if you're people you know and they're literally dying around you, one after the other, one day after another, then another one goes, another one goes. And it must have induced some sort of terror in you because you don't know when you're going to go or if you're going to go. And so the whole atmosphere must have been really charged by this whole uncertainty about are you going to survive?

Are you going to end up on this hill in an abandoned castle up outside a normal cemetery? But you would have heard about it throughout Tadcastle, throughout the whole of York, throughout the whole of England, and beyond England. It was spreading across Europe. Even though it's known that plague affected almost all the country, DNA analysis like this provides a way of finding conclusive archaeological proof. There's only really one known plague cemetery in Britain, and that's Smithfield in London, where it was always suspected that actually these were plague victims. and the individuals are buried in large pits. So it could have also been another disease, but that was proven that these appear to have had the plague.

So this is really only the second individual or the second assemblage from Britain, where this has been proven, so it's very exciting. The excavation only uncovered a couple of skeletons, and only one of those was lifted. So we don't really know the extent of the grave or the number of skeletons, but it's possible that this is a plague pit and there are many skeletons there.

Many questions have been answered about the life and death of a woman buried in a shallow grave with a few other individuals over six and a half centuries ago. For Simon Richardson, it's decades since his childhood interest and enthusiasm for archaeology set him on the way to discovering the skull at Castle Hill. I suppose this garden's played a bit of an important part in my life because finding what I found here, fortunate enough to work on battlefields and other medieval sites around Britain and Europe. So I have a lot to be thankful for. The woman whose skeleton Simon discovered had lain within sight of the church in which he himself was married

and in which his children were christened. It's a reminder that the archaeology we find in the ground is often all that remains of the trace of a human life. Such is the fragility of what we leave behind beyond written record or living memory. You do think about these people when you dig them up. I mean, they're only bones or only human remains when we find them. But who was she? Was she an important person within the town? was your mother

she probably worshipped in this church she probably crossed the bridge nearly every day to go to the other side of the town drank in some of the old taverns and things washed her clothes in the river these things will never know I mean all we have are the human remains to go on but it doesn't stop you thinking

once upon a time she was a living, breathing person and she's ended up in this well it's a bit of waste ground we now know she died a horrible death and she died of a plague If I had knocked on the door all those years ago when I was 11 years old, she'd probably still be laid out there in the ground, undiscovered, forgotten about.

Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more. listeners like you. And for more from the Like a Shot Network, check out where did everyone go, Histories of the Abandoned, a deep dive into the incredible stories behind forgotten places,

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