Forbidden History - The Skeletons of Lewes

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

In this episode, we investigate a medieval skeleton found near Lewes, Sussex, initially suspected to be a casualty of the Battle of Lewes in the 12th century. But with radiocarbon dating revealing an even older origin, possibly the Norman era, the research team delves into whether this could be the first skeletal link to the Battle of Hastings... Cast List: Tim Sutherland: Archaeologist, University Of York Malin Holst: Osteoarcheologist, University Of York Chris Whittick: Senior Archivist, East Sussex County Council Luke Barber: Research Officer, Sussex Archaeology Society John Bleach: Sussex Archaeological Society Greg Chuter: Assistant County Archaeologist, East Sussex County Council Edwina Livesey: Sussex Archaeological Society Eric Meyers: Narrator  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. A skeleton recovered from the grave, perhaps a victim of medieval conflict, the only known evidence of the Battle of Lewis. On a lonely hillside, condemned men await their fate. You can't round up 20 or so large, strong.

young adults and execute them without having the capacity to do so. In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we explore a fascinating story from the medieval world. Between the 5th and the 15th century, this is the skeletons of Lewis. We're joined by Tim Sutherland, who is one of Britain's most experienced archaeologists. He and a team of specialists try to understand medieval life by exploring the realm of the medieval dead. We have a classic view of the storybook medieval life. We don't hear the stories about the common man trying to keep his family alive.

In our stores, there are hundreds, if not thousands of skeletons. Archaeologically speaking, we can now focus in on the medieval dead people. You're looking for clues in the skeleton all the time. You couldn't help almost look through their eyes thinking, what did they see? How did they die? The town of Lewis sits near the southern English coast, between the sea and the rolling hills of the East Sussex Downs. Lewis is the gateway to England. But this sleepy town hides a violent past.

Graves, skeletons, trauma, conflict. In 1264, the town saw at first hand the effects of medieval warfare. On the 14th of May, the Battle of Lewis ripped through the area as Henry III's men tried to protect their king against the rebel army of Simon de Montfort. I think the Battle of Lewis is a very important battle because Simon Demontfort's victory helped establish the first recorded representative parliament in this country. In May 2014, Lewis Castle was the... scene of an important gathering to remember the significant event in the town's heritage. This was the 750th anniversary of that battle. So in the years just leading up to that, the whole community is getting really excited about it,

and we had a lot of meetings and we're thinking, how are we going to celebrate this anniversary? There was a lot of interest in archaeology. To coincide with the commemorations, a single skeleton from Lewis has been selected for carbon dating analysis. It's one of more than 100 recovered in 1994. The whole collection had been stored away, but new funding meant further research could be done. They called in one of Britain's leading specialists, with a wealth of experience in archaeological human remains

which bear the physical trauma of battle. I got involved in the Lewis Project plain simply because I was invited to come to a conference in Lewis to compare known skeletal trauma from the medieval period with a skeleton that they'd found in the Lewis area, skeleton 180. Skeleton 180 had been selected, as it was thought to be possibly unique evidence of a body

which could be linked to the Battle of Lewis. That skeleton, their skeleton, had obvious evidence of weapon trauma on it. And what we simply wanted to do was, is it comparable with other medieval weapon trauma so that we could say, yes, this, looks like a battle victim. Tim got to work. He and osteo-archologist Malin Holst

carried out a full assessment. They found the skeleton was that of an adult male. On his skull, there was the grim evidence they were looking for. As soon as we took the skull out of the box, it was evident that it was covered in extensive weapon trauma, but almost certainly sword trauma. And again, that doesn't look like

into personal violence, this looks like it's a battle victim, basically. And once you've seen a few of these, they become very, very similar. When you attack somebody with sword, quite often you aim it at the head, and you usually end up with very, very similar injuries. You know, you either cut into the skull, or you just miss it and skip off the top, or you stab it. And those are basically the type of wounds you get, and sort of all different degrees of that. But that's it. And of course, once you get two or three or four, then it's not sort of a small bit of violence. This is extensive violence.

And this is a sort of trauma you get in medieval battle. And so it did look as though it was a battle victim, and that was that. But there was only one way to prove that the skeleton could be that of a victim of Lewis's medieval battle. We're no nearer to saying, yes, it's definitely from the Battle of Lewis, which everybody was assuming. So I just suggested, right, well, let's try to narrow it down. and we'll try and get a radio carbon date for it, we'll date it,

and hopefully it will fall nicely into place right over the Battle of Lewis. Yes, everything would be sorted, would go away, everybody would be happy. A sample of bone was sent away for the Carbon 14 analysis. It seemed the date relating to the 13th century battle would be a formality, and so preparations in Lewis intensified. Getting ready for the Battle of Lewis anniversary is just amazing. It was a very, very exciting, very frantic time, And looking after this whole project to do with Skeleton 118 is one of the most exciting parts of that project.

Because I knew that we had something really exciting to tell people about. It was a great chance to help engage people with archaeology and to find out more about a real person who really lived at that time. Revealing the story to the world was to be the crowning moment. Months of preparation had built up to this. At the main event, it fell to me. to disclose whether the skeleton truly dated to the Battle of Lewis in 1264. Now it's always quite difficult to get a precise date from radio carbon dates, but it dates to 887 before presence, which is 1950,

which makes it 1063 AD plus or minus 28 years. So it's 200 years earlier than We expect it. And of course that throws up, as Chris mentioned earlier, much more questions really than it answers. Not exactly the date everyone was expecting. I couldn't speak. I was in shock.

And it took me two or three days just to be able to call my boss and tell him. And he couldn't really deal with it either for quite a long time. We'd found this completely different in who had potentially died in a completely different violent era in our history. It's just extraordinary. What we were hoping for was something that's a highlight of our Battle Lewis anniversaries, our Battle Lewis skeleton.

But here was this, he was nothing to do with the Battle of Lewis. The date was seized on by the media and became headline news around the world. The speed of this took everyone by surprise. If it's 1066, this in some ways is more important because of course there is, as far as I know, there is no osteological evidence of anybody who died in the Battle of Hastings. There's very little physical evidence of the battle at all. And so of course suddenly everybody's ears prick up and think, oh, the Battle of Hastings, wow, this is really important. So of course people grab this headline and then start to run with it. And it's almost out of control.

And the gossip spreads, it's in all the newspapers, and it's literally going around the world. And you can't control it. Once that date is out there, somebody might have found something from the Battle of Hastings. It's off, and it's got a life of its own. Excuse me, stop this. This is just a preliminary analysis. We're in the middle of something, and you're finishing it off and saying this is what it is. The carbon date range was from 1035 through to 1091.

Yet the media only focused on 1066. Hastings, where King Harold's Saxon English, succumbed to William the Conqueror's Norman invaders. It's almost 30 miles from Lewis. It's possible that some casualties might have been taken from Hastings for burial elsewhere, but these would most likely be high status, and that's not suggested by Skeleton 180's grave. It's also plausible that he could have been killed after Hastings as part of the Norman suppression of East Sussex. But just one man on his own, tenuous indeed,

to link this to the conquest without further evidence. Just because it centres around 1066, it doesn't mean to say it's not 1,100, for example, or into the 1150s, and which case are there conflicts in and around Lewis from this early period to the much later period. And is it possibly one of those? And it's nothing to do with either the Battle of Hastings or the Battle of Lewis.

This is nothing new to Chris Wittick. Living in Lewis as I do, I've been used to the knee-jerk reaction that any find of a skeleton from Lewis is a fatality from the Battle of Lewis. Chris is the senior archivist for East Sussex. He's been studying the history of the county all his career.

It's disappointing that when scientific evidence proves that a skeleton from Lewis can't have come from the Battle of Lewis, that the Nieshirt reaction is to attribute it to another historical event, this time the Battle of Hastings. Both seem equally flawed and equally unquestioning of the historical evidence and the potential of these findings to give us real information, real facts, about what took place in the history. Lewis and its vicinity in not just the 13th century, but the last two millennia. Tim decides to leave aside for now the Lewis and Hastings battle hypothesis. He looks back to the original dig for some clues. Very little was known about the medieval hospital of St. Nicholas until the excavations in 1994.

The hospital itself had long since disappeared, leaving an area known as Spittle Cotter, It's now thought the hospital was at the epicenter of the fiercest fighting in 1264, further explaining why the theory came about that Skelaton 180 died in the Battle of Lewis. The Diggs supervisor in 1994 was Luke Barber. He oversaw the excavation of all 104 burials. We don't necessarily know trauma, pathology, etc., etc., on these, unless it's it's really obvious at the time. So of course, yeah, we're sort of starting

getting a little bit twitchy about the battle of this because we know all the rumors and we know where we are. Tim has a lot of experience with medieval mass graves, especially when they're the victims of conflict, like the Battle of Taun excavations in Yorkshire. But the St. Nicholas Hospital burials don't fit the pattern of conflict graves he's familiar with. Tim speaks with Luke Barber, who is hard at work

on another site near Lewis to find out more about the 1994 excavation, which happened to be beneath a local school. Finding 103 burials at the site was not unexpected. I think the children who had their dining hall above it were more concerned that had been eaten above these. So was it a known medieval cemetery when you started today? It was a known medieval hospital. The burials Luke and the team found were more varied

than might be expected from a single event like a battle. There was a few unusual burials that there were time, you know, there's one with a manacle around the ankle. Right, yeah. So obviously, even at a very early date, there was a range of types of burials. You could see there was infants, we could see those males and females, and again, fairly typical for what we expected for a hospital. Of 103 skeletons, 180 was one of only four with trauma.

The obvious connection was that those trauma victims were going to be Battle of Lewis. The original analysis involved any C-14 dating. The dating was based on its association with the hospital and also the few finds and pottery found within the grave soil generally. One thing always worried me about it is if you look at this basic plan of the cemetery, the yellow highlighted bodies are the ones with trauma, and you can see they're not altogether. That always worried me.

And that's why in the report I actually said, you know, Battlelou is quite possibly for some of them, or all of them maybe, but other scenarios cannot be ruled out. You know, it's very easy to jump to the conclusion. It's got a sword cut, therefore, the only thing that's like to have caused that is the Battle of Lewis. You know, there's foot pads, there's outlaws, there's any number of ways that in the medieval period someone could have been killed with a sword or a sharp-edged weapon. Skeleton 180's 11th century carbon date wasn't a problem for Luke.

I wasn't unhappy about the date because I say there was always a... worries about why were they not buried together. So to have quite wide chronological range within this group of individuals does not upset me at all. And because 180 does not now appear to be battled at this, that doesn't upset me either. It's not a great wind out of your sails. What upset me more personally was the fact that I suggested the hospital is a pre-conquest foundation. Well that's what's so interesting. I mean was there supposed to be something on this site at that period? No. Well not that we knew of. Right. Not that we knew of. Not So that's quite important really, isn't it?

So for the archaeology of Lewis, it's a very important discovery. But the other thing is, of course, we've got one date for one skeleton. So of course it's more important that we analyze the dates of all the other, or as many other skeletons as possible, especially the trauma victims, because of course if we're talking about the same dates for those victims, it looks like something is happening at that time. Until we've got them, we don't really know where we're going. Right.

You know, it could be a wide chronological range, we could get a, get Battle of Lewis in there. We may find it's quite early, much early than we thought. If the medieval St. Nicholas Hospital wasn't the first building on that site, then many of the graves also might be much earlier than expected. The whole understanding of this part of Lewis might have to be rethought. The quandary about St. Nicholas Hospital is this. The burials are in the backfill of quarries.

The quarries, it has been assumed, were used partly to build the hospital itself. The hospital is thought to have an immediately post-conquest foundation. So what is a skeleton of the date that the scientific dating has produced doing in the backfill of such a quarry pit? At the moment it doesn't add up. So what we need are more dates from more skeletons to try and put what we have. have in context. For this reason, it's decided to test more of the burials from 1994.

Tim helps Edwina with the additional skeletons selected. We've got 11 skeletons here that we've got from the store. They're really good if you could just have a look at them. And these are all from one cemetery? They're all from sent note for cemetery. The 11 include the three other cases which bear trauma marks. Now I can already see on this one that there's got some sort of cut. See the injury there.

So this has got at least two on. This wound there is typical of medieval conflict. When somebody's had a go at the head, and obviously it was too high, the sword blow or whatever it was too high, or the man ducked. And so, of course, what's happened is it's glanced off the top of his head. Right.

So that, although it's cut through the cranium, it doesn't necessarily mean he was going to be killed by it. It almost looks like he missed there to us, although he definitely hit it. Do you mean it's a slight the top of his head off? Yeah, it's almost like a glancing blow of that one. So somebody's been going for the neck and in this case they've been very successful because they've chopped straight through the back of the skull and so of course this would have severed the muscles on the back of his head

and it might even have broken through his spine, spinal column and therefore killed him straight away. Yeah. That looks pretty convincing from a for a conflict situation. Put it that way. Would he be wearing any protection? Well, this suggests that he wasn't wearing headgear at this time because those are two nice, sharp, bladed injuries

to two parts of the cranium that suggests he's not wearing headgear. So you couldn't go through? You wouldn't go through a steel helmet. You could argue that it was a very sharp sword and it was something like a leather cap or a leather helmet, even a boiled leather helmet. It suggests that it might have gone through that relatively easily. But even so, they offer quite a bit of protection.

does. But this means he's definitely not wearing a helmet as we would envisage it. So that's interesting that we've got one individual and it's two blows and it looks like a conflict's injury. Archaeologists have to check every single bone

of a skeleton for evidence. Weapon trauma isn't always found on just the skulls. So you think this individual has got trauma on as well? This has got trauma as well. Yeah. He's a male 35 to 44. five years old, just so you know.

That is an amazing... So that's definitely interesting because we've got the left thigh and it's got a fantastic cut mark through it. It could be a spade cut from the excavation. So it doesn't have to be battle related. Yeah, that's pretty sharp. That's not a spade, is it? So it's a very sharp bladed weapon or it's a very sharp implement that did it.

So just looking at that, I would assume that it's probably, more likely to be a bladed weapon rather than something like an over-ambitious archaeologist, for example, or even a grave digger. There's trauma from a sword or other blade on a femur. The injury would have been painful, though not necessarily fatal. For most of the skeletons here, there's no trauma, no clue as to the cause of death. You could slit somebody's throat, and you could not touch any. bones and of course that person would bleed to death and then you never know how they died.

Right. And of course if you died of a disease and it was a very rapid disease where you died within a few days and there's no trace on the human bone from that disease and of course you don't know how that person died either. Or you could just die simply die of old age. And so we're very very fortunate when we get an individual and if we see the exact method by by which they died and so what interests me here is obviously it's conflict related. Hopefully the carbon date for these skeletons will bring new light to the story of the St. Nicholas Hospital site and Skeleton 180. They don't have long to wait.

The results come back, and they range in date from the late 10th and 11th centuries, right through to the late medieval, the 15th, and even into the 16th century, as you'd expect from a hospital cemetery, which lasted hundreds of years. But when it comes to Skeleton 180, there's another surprise in store. The initial dating was flawed. When recalibrated, it comes out not as late Saxon as everyone had got used to thinking, but between 1215 and 1280. So he could date to 1264 and the Battle of Lewis after all.

It's another layer in this story. And through, we thought it was from the Norman, we thought it was from Battle of Lewis. Then we think he might date to the Norman conquest. So in that time, we found out lots of new things that we'd never have known about if we hadn't thought just from the Norman conquest. Now it turns out he isn't from the Norman conquest,

but we've got far more knowledge than we had even imagined having before. In some ways it's a shock, but this is what archaeology is. static, it's never really boring and it will really upset you and that's why you've got to be really careful about nailing your colours to the mass say, this is 1264 or this is 1066 because of course there could be a major upset and you go oh suddenly I was wrong. There are still other reports of mass graves. How did they fit in to the archaeology of Lewis? This small Sussex town hides dark secrets, yet one thing is for sure. The graves can't all be from

the Battle of Lewis. This is only a small town. We're surrounded by hills, and we keep finding these big pits of bones right in the town centre. So, supposing there's from Battle of Lewis, we've found about 2000 so far. And every time there's a building development,

I think, are we going to find the other 700? Because there's only so many more places we can dig. It's not just in the modern era that these burials have come to light. The early 19th century, was a time of sweeping industrial change across Britain. Lewis was no exception. In 1810, three pits were discovered not far from St. Nicholas Hospital.

According to reports at the time, there were nearly 500 bodies in each. No record remains of the exact location, nor of any related artifacts. Then, three decades later, another mass grave was unearthed. This time, a newspaper recorded the event. Maybe this account contains a clue. It was 1846 when the railway first came to Lewis. John Bleach has researched the story. He's found the original account from a Sussex newspaper.

It records the discovery of the railway skeletons. In the 1840s, the railway was king. Nothing could stand in its way. certainly not the mere crumbling ruins of an archaeological site like Lewis Priory. The story is that they found some human remains and again the story is that the human remains relate to the Battle of Lewis. Now, can you enlighten us any further on that? Sure, I can confirm that the London, Brighton and South Coast were building a railway from Brighton to Lewis and the route took it through part of Lewis Priory.

The plan here shows you, it brought it through the Chapter House, through the actual choir of the large monastic church. So it's quite destructive in that respect. Yeah. Totally. One thing that was definitely found, and it's marked on this plan, was a large pit, sometimes referred to as a well, full of bones. Estimates are that there were 600 bodies.

I'm looking at the report from the Sussex Agricultural Express, January 1846. And it talks about the excavators finding this mass of human bones, described as nearly six feet thick, 10 feet in diameter. So that's quite a large... A significant amount of bones which were deposited 18 feet below the surface. So they are quite a long way down.

This was an original burial, was established by the fact that when the bones were first exposed, the effluvium was so obnoxious as to cause the men to desist from their work until the next day. Several, in fact, were taken ill. Now, now I'm no archaeologist.

smell coming out of a pit of bones? It would have to be something that was, it probably wasn't the bones that were smelling, but it might be the context that they were in. So it might have been an existing well or something. And therefore it was or had been waterlogged. But then the paper goes on. The bones were conveyed away in about 10 railway wagons,

and this gives us some idea of quantity as well. This is 10 railway wagons. And were thrown into the massive rubbish, which forms the embankment through, through the brooks. Human bone used in the building of an embankment. In 1846, the priority was the railway, not archaeology. It is a source of deep regret that human bones should have been employed for such a purpose.

And you can just imagine the editor something is at the table. There is something so revolting in this appropriation that we cannot permit ourselves to speak upon the subject, best our feelings should be excited to censure with severity, the despoilers of the dead, isn't it wonderful? But if we compare this to the modern press, would that make a good story if they were just re-buried in the churchyard, or would it make a good story if they were... Now, did it actually happen?

Well, it sounds good. Don't always believe what you read in the newspaper. It does sound good, and if it didn't happen, where on earth? Are they dreaming this up from? Yes. It does look as though it's based on truth in terms of its location. where they found them at the extent of how many there were. But we don't know whether it's related to the priory

or whether it's related to the battle or whether it's related to some unknown concept. Yeah, yeah, quite. We have no bones, we have no artifacts, as far as I'm aware, that were found at the bone pitch. So quite where one goes from there. And we don't know, if there were any of these bones exhibited any evidence of trauma on them

or anything, we don't know anything about them at all, do we really? It doesn't say anything about trauma in the, reports that we have. With no evidence of trauma, it's difficult to link the bones to the Battle of Lewis in the way they did at the time in 1846. Also, there's something about the position of the grave that doesn't seem right. When you look at the plan, you realize that the bone pit is just outside the eastern point

of this large monastic church. Very conveniently placed. Ritually quite an important thing. One of the most important parts outside the church. Yes, yes, certainly. So would you actually create a battle pit there? Possibly. Possibly not.

No. Rather than a mass grave from the battle, the bones might just have been the accumulated remains of many years of ecclesiastical burials. Lewis Priory was found by the Normans in the 1080s. As with St. Nicholas Hospital, It was on a site that had been in use for centuries before the medieval. I think the important thing about this area is that it's when you stand on a hilltop like this

and you can see how the landscape is surrounding you. It literally is because you've got high ground over there, then you've got Lewis in this lower ground and then you've got high ground over there. It's a way of access from the lower ground in the sea up into the high ground. So of course you can use it to your advantage. If you own this ground, you can tax people, you can sort of restrict their actions. You can control them. And also you can build a castle here and you can start to defend this piece of ground,

this access into the high ground. And in that respects it's perfect. There have been countless generations of occupation here in this narrow corridor of settlement, bounded by the high ground. Because of its restrictions, unless it goes and expands onto the high ground, there's only certain size this town can ever expand to. It's a town that's never been developed. So we've still got the medieval level.

We've still got the medieval setup for this town that's never expanded into the 21st century, to the degree that other big cities and urban conurbations have expanded in different places. So basically what we're looking at is essentially a medieval town. People have been living and dying here for hundreds and hundreds of years. So all these burials are still here. And now, of course, they're coming to light. And we're thinking, why are all these burials here? There's nowhere else to go.

was an important area centuries before the high medieval period back in the Dark Ages. There's nothing dark about the Dark Ages at the time. What's dark about the dark ages is our lack of evidence for what happened. But both documentary research and archaeology is doing a huge amount to lighten that darkness. But it is clear, and it's been clear for a long time, that the Anglo-Saxon society in general and its administrative capability, abilities in particular were highly sophisticated, much more sophisticated than the Norman systems which followed it and which eradicated it largely. From around the 9th century, Saxon England was made up of a network of boroughs or

walled settlements, protection against Viking raids. It's actually a Saxon town and one of the wonderful things about the system of Saxon birds is that they were designed to protect people, so that if they were was an invasion by the Vikings, they've attacked by the Vikings, that the people from aroundabouts could come into the burr and be protected. So although in many ways the town looks similar to that,

now we've got the same high street, the same little twins eating off it, we've got his enormous Norman castle, where we would have had the fortress of the Saxons. This was before the days of the great battles of Lewis, or even Hastings. But there were still many ways to end up in the grave, bearing the trauma of a violent death.

Lewis was fortified by King Alfred as a burr against the Danes, and was clearly an administrative centre long before that. Chris Whittick has studied the few remaining records on Lewis since Saxon times. As an administrative centre, it would have also been the centre of judicial activity, both civil and criminal. So you always have to contemplate the fact that skeletons you're finding might not have died an unnatural death or a casually violent death, but perhaps a death meted out by the operation of justice, because Lewis would have been the place in this area of East Sussex where such things would absolutely have happened.

Another burial, this time certainly a mass grave, hints towards the administrative and judicial activity. On the opposite side of the town to St. Nicholas's Hospital, the land rises steeply to a long ridge, which overlooks the whole of Lewis, Malling Down. Walling Down is one of those very mysterious corners of Lewis. It's high up, it's got a beautiful view, the winds are swan. sweeping by you as you walk along. It's a wonderful sort of wild, has a wonderful sort of wild feeling. And it's a very strange and lonely spot.

It was on mauling down in the 1970s that a local boy made a grim discovery. In the 1973, a schoolboy who was playing in the field found a human skull and picked it up and took it to the local museum and said, yeah, this is what I found, you know, what is it? They took the decisions to do an excavation using local archaeological volunteers.

And in the summer of 1973, from what we can gather, they opened up a large excavation area and recovered about 12 human burials. More than two decades later, archaeologist Greg Schuter was called in after more accidental discoveries. We were approached by the landowner who'd found some bones on his site

and was concerned they could be human. The bones had come to the same. surface through rabbits digging, and so they come out into a spoil and then drifted down this bank, and was basically sitting on the footpath at the bottom of the bank. When we looked in the rabbit holes, we could see more human bones in situ where the rabbits have dug around them, so it's clear that they'd come from burials, in-situ burials. The dig unearthed two burial pits, one larger than the other. They were a few feet apart, right on the edge of the slope.

In both pits, the feet are pointing in towards this area. We investigated the area in between to look for more burials and found nothing at all. This certainly was not a grave which had steadily accumulated bodies over the years. The stratigraphy showed that this is one event, and they basically dug a very large shallow pit on top of an earlier field system boundary and placed these burials or deposited these burials face down into this. pit in one event. To help develop an impression of what must have happened here, Greg compared his dig with

the earlier one. When we looked at the 1973 excavation plan that we'd drawn up from the photographs and the rough plan that was drawn at the time, we saw that it fitted in quite nicely with our excavation plan. One detail related to every skeleton. We had evidence of all the burials having their hands crossed behind their backs, and the wrist area of the hands is crossed indicating that they're being tied. Gain another similar shot, face down, hands tied behind the back, gained face down, hands crossed.

Same characteristics face down, hands crossed. There was certainly one individual who appeared to have clenched his fists as he's executed, whether that's just post-mortem, settling of the bones, or whether he was actually gritting his teeth and clenching his fist. We don't know. Things like that were quite eerie. These three have gone in first. This guy is then thrown over the top of them, and then this guy is dragged over the top of that one.

Eleven men, hands tied, buried face down, one by one. All the evidence seemed to indicate that they'd been executed. After the dig, there wasn't time for anything more than a brief examination of the bones. Now, a decade on, Greg revisits them to search more thoroughly. Helping him is osteo-archologist Lauren McIntyre. We've had another look at these skeletal remains to see if there's anything missed after the original assessment of them, and see if there's any new evidence that's come out which should give us a bit more of an understanding of, one, how they died and two, who they were.

The bones have been stored away for years, so the first thing Lauren has to do is to check everything is still there. First of all, we would, I'd lay the skeleton out in an anatomical position. I'd do a general assessment of things like preservation and completeness, measure all the long bones and try and work out the height of the individual when they were alive, try and assess the age at death of the individual, also whether they were male or female, and then I'd have a look at all the bone fragments to see if there are any pathological lesions that could tell us if they had any diseases or traumatic injuries or things like that. This individual looks to be, again, it's a young adult male, we're probably looking about 20 to 30 years, maybe more around the 25 mark.

Still quite tall, we're looking at about 5 foot 10, so he's still quite a tall guy for around about that time. It looks as though he's got a kind of hip deformity that's had perhaps a little bit of a knock-on effects on some of the rest of his body. This could have been for a congenital reason, so it could be some sort of congenital hip dysplasia, or it could have been some sort of traumatic event that happened when he was very young. and then it's just kind of never really, it's never righted itself. They're obviously all males, they're all of a certain age, they're all from sort of mid-adolescence through to young to mid-adult. There's clearly no females there, there are no children either, which is quite unusual.

If you're looking at a sort of normal sort of parish population or a normal village population, then you wouldn't expect, you'd expect to get a mix of everybody, not just men. So they look relatively healthy. There's no signs of deficiency or dietary deficiency in particular, no malnutrition. There's not very much in the way of healed injury, so we're not perhaps looking at something like a group of soldiers or anybody who's been killed in a battle or anything like that. If the men had been fighters, Viking raiders or other incomers, there might have been some

evidence of healed trauma after a life of training and conflict. And there were no other obvious causes of death. We're looking at something that's not really leaving an osteological signature behind for us to find. So normally we could say that might be a sort of infectious disease, but obviously I think the archaeological context has suggested that that's probably not the case with them having their hands tied behind their backs. So in that case, we're perhaps looking at something like strangulation or hanging. Possibly these are locals rather than possibly Viking marauders.

There's no obvious signs of battle injury, which you'd expect with a fighting group of men. At least one of them has got problems with his hip, which may have actually made him not a very good soldier or fighter anyway. So possibly we are looking at a local population or a selection from that local population who've been taken out and executed. Executed on an ancient land boundary.

A high place visible for miles for all to see. Everybody in Lewis would have been able to see that execution, and they can see it from a high point. Everybody had you been out on the streets looking at that execution. It was done there for a reason. By late Saxon times, the law codes ensured English kings exerted total judicial control. Convicted wrongdoers were banished, outcast from society. The condemned lost not only this life, but they were. denied entry to the next.

Buried in pagan grounds, at the limits of Christian community, evidence of Lewis's early medieval past, a vanished Saxon society. I can imagine they were terrified. They're obviously leaving families behind. They're probably not local, so in an area that they didn't understand, possibly not even understand the language. So I get a sense of quite a lot of trauma and... dismay up here.

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Histories of the Abandoned. A deep dive into the incredible stories behind forgotten places. Available now on your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for listening.