Gone Medieval - Battle of Towton

Episode Date: March 11, 2023

What do skeletal remains from the fifteenth century tell us about one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the Wars of the Roses? The Battle of Towton — fought on 29 March 1461 in North Yorkshire — was a decisive victory for the Yorkists over the Lancastrians, resulting in Edward IV taking the throne from Henry VI.Skeletons found in a mass grave at Towton Hall in 1996 shed new light on the battle. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Dr. Jo Buckberry about what has been learned from these remains about the battle and the injuries these men suffered.This episode was edited by Anisha Deva and produced by Rob Weinberg.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here >If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android > or Apple store > Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. The Battle of Tauton is right in my history home of the Wars of the Roses. In 1461, it settled the House of York on the throne and all but ended the Lancasterian line. Well, for a while anyway, but that's another story. Toughton is often billed as England's bloodiest battle. Contemporary chroniclers cite up to 100,000 men present and around 28,000 casualties.

One of the mass graves from that battle was discovered a few years ago, and I'm delighted to be joined today by Joe Buckbury of the University of Bradford, who knows these skeletal remains really well, and is joining us to talk about the injuries they suffered and what we can learn about a medieval battle from those who didn't survive this one. Thank you very much for joining us, Joe. Hi, Matt. Nice to see you. It's great to talk to you.

I guess first off, what can you tell us about how and what, where and when these skeletons were found? It's one of these chance finds that happens in archaeology. So back in 1996, the people who lived at Toughton Hall were building an extension. I think it was a garage or something. And the builders came across some skeletons. So they did what they were supposed to do. They got in touch with the authorities and the decision was made that these skeletons should be lifted

and then re-buried in the nearest churchyard. Fortunately, the deputy county archaeologist went and visited the site and kind of went, Hang on, I think this is really important. Obviously, the skeletons that the builders had already dug up were mixed up, but they managed to establish from that that it was a mass grave. And those ones were actually reburied not much longer after that. But they actually discussed this with the landowner, who was quite excited by the fact that there was such an important archaeological discovery.

And they actually permitted excavation by archaeologists next to where the extension was going to be. So because this wasn't a normal type of site, it didn't have the normal funding schemes that you'd expect where the developer pays for everything. So they organised basically a consortium from the Heritage Unit of North Yorkshire County Council, West Yorkshire Archaeology Service,

who are a local contracting archaeology group, but also the University of Bradford to excavate and analyse that mass grave. So the second excavation was in September 96. Interesting. So there remains that we, or that you've been studying that we know about today, are actually the second set of remains that were found. The first ones were re-buried? Yeah, absolutely. So they're all from the same mass grave. It kind of extended under the foundations. And they're the ones that the built just dug up. And then you kind of move to the side of that and you have the rest of the mass grave.

And then some of it went underneath the building and is still there. Wow. It must be a bit weird, knowing that you've got part of them underneath your chimney or whatever. Yeah, a little bit unsettling when you're sitting in the living room at night, I should think. Yeah. So how big do you think this mass grave was and how many sets of human remains were found there? Oh, one really good question. I can't actually remember the exact size of it, but it contained about 36 or 37 individuals, probably 38. It's a little bit complicated working out exactly how many people were there because they're all intermingled and sort of like one arm on top of the body and then the leg underneath or mixed up. But based on a count of bones, there were definitely 37 people because we have 37 right tibby, which is the lower leg, though. And then we also have a pair of feet which don't look like they belong to any of those tiby because of where they were located. So we're pretty certain 38 individuals.

Wow. And potentially more still. Not really. There's not a vast amount of the mass grave unexcavated based on the estimated size. It just clips the building. But obviously we don't know what was in the half that was excavated by the builders. So, you know, we've got 50% of the evidence-ish, at a guess. How early were you sure that these related to the Battle of Tauten?

How were you able to tell? I mean, I guess where they're found and being in a mass grave is a big pointer, but how do you become sure that they're associated with the battle? It's one of these things that it takes a process of elimination rather than anything else. And I think back in that sort of first July visit, the county archaeologists went, hang on a minute, lots of skeletons, sounds quite a lot like a mass grave, where in Toulton. That could be the Battle of Toulton.

This is really significant. It became more evident that this was likely to be from the Battle of Toulton when they started to identify trauma on the individuals, which then increases the likelihood that we're looking at a battle rather than a plague pit or something. And then you kind of start thinking about, well, how do we narrow that date down? Unfortunately, there weren't any artefacts that really, really nailed the date. There was some medieval pottery, a couple of pieces of iron, but nothing that was really distinctively 15th century, which is what they were looking for. So they went and got a radiocarbon date.

Radiocarbon dating is a bit complicated because of the way you have to establish sort of climatic variations and things like that. So it came out as being somewhere between 1440 and 1640. and we're about 95% confident that the date was inside that. So you kind of have a date range that's 200 years wide, but includes the Battle of Toughton. So if you had the date on its own, you wouldn't say battlefield. If you had the trauma, you'd probably go battlefield, but you wouldn't be able to say Touton, but you put the two together, and that's a really likely story, given where it's located. We always find it fascinating how lots of these disciplines come together,

and it's a case of arranging all the jigsaw pieces to make the right kind of picture. Yeah, I mean, the Tauton project, which was done quite a number of years ago now, was brilliant because it brought together so many different people. You had the archaeologists and the osteologists looking at the skeleton, but they worked with people from the Royal Armouries thinking about the weapons that were used, talking about the sort of like battlefield archaeology, the historical evidence, and just pulling all that together. It's fantastic. Yeah, it's great to see it all working in harmony. So what can these remains tell us about the people who were involved in the battle? what sort of age ranges do we think the people were? What do we know about them? Well, the first thing is that they all look to be adult skeletons, which is a good start.

And when we sort of got them to the lab and started looking at them in more detail, it was identified that they were all male. Age ranges all over the age of 16. There's only strong evidence for two of them being over the age of 45, but we do have some problems with adult age estimation, because how we do that is quite a complex process. And you're kind of looking at how the body changes as you age and it varies from individual to individual. So the age ranges per person could be quite wide.

And then you kind of say, right, these are probably middle adults between 25 and 45. But the chances that some of those middle adults are actually older than 45. But broadly speaking, we're looking at young middle adults, middle-aged people and nobody who's looking especially elderly. There were two skeletons where we thought they were probably over 45. But again, it's a woolly area in terms of age. As someone who's over 45, I don't like talking to. talking about over 45 as elderly just yet. No, I don't. I object to that strongly.

It's a mature, adult. But there was nobody who was looking like there was 70 or 80 or anything like that. They were kind of like fit, robust, normal people rather than somebody who's kind of frail and elderly. And they're actually reasonably taller, about 5'8 on average. I think the shortest individual was 5 foot 3, the tallest was 6 foot. So we're looking at a fairly normal range of height for the medieval period, maybe slightly above average, but nothing spectacularly different. Yeah, and I guess that slightly above average might be because these are potentially men who are fighting men.

You know, they're liable to be the bigger and stronger men. Well, possibly, but we've got to bear in mind that we're looking at a sample of at most 37 individuals. So that's not likely to be representative of the 100,000 people that may have been at town at the time. You know, one person at six foot would have skewed that number by quite a bit just because they happen to be in the bit we excavated. So they're probably average height, really. And was there any evidence on the skeletal remains that these people have been involved in battles before, were there pre-existing wounds that you were able to identify?

Yeah, absolutely. So nine of the individuals have got evidence of healed injuries from various weapons. One individual, 1016, who had a facial reconstruction done for TV back in the 1990s. If anybody remembers meet the ancestors, that's where he appeared. Then he has this massive blade injury to the side of his face, hitting the left side of his face into his lower jaw is mandible. And it would have left him with significant scarring across his face, really dramatic, very visible injury. And then at the other end of the spectrum, we have 1041, who actually had multiple injuries that had healed on his head. I think it was three. There were two tiny little depressions. We don't know what caused those, but there's some kind of trauma. But he also

has a kind of linear depression in the top of his head, which looks like it's a blade injury that's kind of hit the top of his head, but not gone all the way through the skull. So the skulls protected his brain. I didn't mention earlier, but I actually came and visited you and you very kindly showed me some of these skeletons for a film for history hit too. And I was struck by the size and the depth of some of those healed wounds. And I think it drives home the real human element that these people had done this before. They'd suffered, you know, a couple of them had had chunks of bone cut out of their skulls by previous injuries. The one you mentioned had a huge scar down his face. They'd done this before and yet they're doing it again. You know, they're all going

into battle again. We say they're experienced soldiers. We know they're in a fight or a battle. We don't know that it was actually a battle. It could have been a small domestic fight involving a sword. I don't know if they happened regularly in the Middle Ages, but one would assume that occasionally these things did happen. But certainly they knew what that kind of injury was like. They've experienced it before. They know how painful it is. They'll know it's life-threatening. You know, they're going out and they're knowing exactly what they're getting into. And they did it again. And it speaks to all the sort of soldiers today who are off in conflict, knowing what that is and what that entails. and sometimes going out there having already had the mental anguish as well as the physical pain

of being in battle before. And I think it really drives it home that these are people, people who have lived experience, who are apart from their loved ones, probably some distance from home, dying. It's essentially an unmarked grave of the medieval period. They're not really being buried in their local churchyard as you would normally expect to see with medieval people. Yeah, and it's interesting you mentioned the mental trauma that most likely went with those injuries because you can see the physical trauma, but what you can't see is the mental effect that must have had.

And we know from soldiers today that that leaves marks on people. We don't know for certain they have that mental anguish, but I think it would be hard to imagine a case when you're faced with such brutality that you would come away without some awareness of that. You know, if he speaks volumes of the PTSD of the First World War, not really understood until people understood that process and mental language much more.

I don't think that was a First World War thing. I think it was something that happened before and people didn't fully understand it. They don't have that awareness of mental health and I think it would be wrong with us to assume that that didn't happen in the deep past. It's also wrong of us to assume that that happened to all of those individuals

because people are people. They have that individuality or their individual responses to trauma, both physically and mentally. And I guess one of the other interesting questions about these human remains is we have this idea, this impression, or this understanding

that medieval archery changed English men's body, so they had bigger muscles in their shoulders and down one side, perhaps, because of doing archery. Was there any evidence on these skeletons of changes brought about by what might have been archery? Yeah, for few of them, not for all of them. So it was a requirement in the medieval period that people would practice with a bow and that they would do this throughout their life. So your body responds to how it's used, you increase muscle mass, but you also increase bone mass and bone size. And equally, if you're not using something, it will decrease in size. So what we see in a group of the individuals from Towton is that they have really asymmetric upper

arm bones, their humourous is different on the left and right sides. And normally you'd expect people to have a large right arm and a smaller left arm because they're using their right arm because they're right-handed, vice versa if you're left-handed, of course. But what we're actually seeing at Toughton is that in the shoulder, we're seeing the increase on the right-hand side where you're pulling that bow back. But actually, that increase in size is happening on the elbow on the left-hand side. So it's like they're using those muscles and it's been hypothesized that's from the sort of

bracing arm holding the bow and then the right shoulder is pulling that bowstring backwards and the power is in the shoulder. And so there are two individuals where that's quite clear at Tauton. And there are also a few individuals that have a condition that we call osochromyali. So this is looking at the shoulder blade and just on the top of your shoulder,

you have a little bit of bone that sticks out and it kind of links across as a ridge across the sort of back of your shoulder blade. It's the part you can see moving up and down as you move your arms. Something that you can kind of observe on people. If they're doing that without a shirt or sort of a smaller top on,

you can kind of see that in the gym, for example. And what happens with osochromiali is either there's a pre-existing genetic weakness in the bone or it's entirely due to the trauma, but the very tip of bone separates off. So you have this separate piece of bone. It'll have been joined by cartilage, probably, or had a little false joint between it.

And it's thought that this may have increased the range of motion. And it's thought that this may have developed because of the use of the shoulder. And that increased range of motion is part and parcel of that drawing of the bowstring. And what's interesting is that this evidence of oscaromiali is most frequently in individuals who died on the Mary Rose. And we know that there were lots of archers there as well. So the hypothesis is that this is a suggestion of archery. Can't save third. Yeah.

I mean, I think the right shoulder. is something you would expect from drawing back the string of the bow, but the left elbow is an interesting place. As you say, that must be what's bracing the actual bow itself and taking an awful lot of strain on the left elbow, which I find surprising. The right shoulder seems natural. Absolutely.

I mean, a medieval longbow, you're probably looking at over £100 in terms of the draw weight. That is really, really hard to do. I had a go last week, and I didn't be able to move that bow string by a centimetre. So difficult. So these guys are really, really strong. And they've been doing it since they're very, very young. So their bodies have changed to that.

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New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday. So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. And so what have these remains that you've been studying, been able to tell us about the ways in which these men died? Do we have an idea from the injuries that they suffered what may have killed them? Absolutely. I mean, I think one of the really important things that happened with the Tauton project was identifying the perimortem trauma. So that's trauma that happens around the time of death. And we're really looking that a forensic anthropologist had just joined the University of Bradford at the time, Shannon Novak. So she was able to bring experience from working on forensic cases,

both in the United States but also in the former Balkan states, looking at trauma in a modern context and applying that knowledge to these skeletons. And what we find is evidence of injuries across the bodies, but primarily in the skulls. So there were 28 skulls found in total at Toughton. So some of them will have been underneath the building or perhaps had been in the builder's rubble that had been moved. But of those 28 skulls, 27 of them have evidence of trauma, which is a really high percentage, obviously. And looking at those skulls, they had between one and 13 injuries per

individual. And I think the average is just over four, four injuries per person. But there are only two of the skeletons that have more than 10 injuries. So the vast majority had one, two or three. And then if you have quite an extreme number of injuries to them. And then we start thinking about what kind of injuries these were. So about two-thirds of them were sharp-force traumas. That means we're looking at something from a blade in a medieval context, the most likely thing is going to be a sword. Around about a quarter of them have what we call blunt force trauma. So blunt force trauma is something with a large surface area hitting the body. And we can't really say exactly what it was that did that trauma in many cases, that the shape often reflects the shape of the skull rather than the shape

of the object. Around about 10% of the injuries at Tauton were what we'd call puncture injuries. So this is where something has gone into the skull and left a hole. But we don't know if it's sharp or blunt until we've known what the weapon was that caused that hole. So trying to understand that further. They worked with Graham Reimer at the Royal Armouries in Leeds, looking at medieval weapons and the kind of holes they would make. And this is where the really fun stuff happened and gutted. I wasn't part of the team at this point.

And they were hitting the weapons into acoustic ceiling tiles to see what holes would be produced by those weapons. And it gives you a really good idea of how the object will shape the hole in the skull. And doing that, we've identified. punctures from blades, from hammers, a warhammer specifically, not DIY hammers, but also from pole axes and arrowheads. So we're seeing lots of different kinds of weapons within that. And what's really interesting with the trauma is looking at it as a whole is the directionality of it. So the sharp force trauma is coming from all sides. We're seeing it on the front, we're seeing it on

the back. We're seeing it on both sides, slightly less at the side than front or back. And when we're looking at the skull straight on, we tend to see the injuries, on the left-hand side, suggesting that the people who were fighting were more likely right-handed. And with the blunt force trauma, again, the front, the back, the left side more than the right side. So we're getting this pattern of injuries all around the skull, and I think that's kind of testament to the type of fighting you'd have in a battle. So we're not talking about two people standing face-to-face, neatly fighting each other. We're talking about potentially as many as 100,000 people involved fighting each other for their lives with deadly weapons

and they're getting hit from all directions. It really does speak to that kind of the press of the medieval melee that you're not fighting just one person in front of you in this kind of chivalric knightly one-on-one combat. You're flailing in all directions and everyone from every direction is flailing at you and it's a case of hit them or be hit and it's self-preservation I guess. Absolutely. And that kind of leads you on to what. what's happening with the rest of the body. So Touten, the vast majority of the injuries are to the skull, but we also see stuff in the post-cranial skeleton, so from the neck down. And what's interesting

at this point is that the vast majority of post-cranial injuries are in the forearms. And these aren't the part of the body that you would automatically use to defend yourself. But you put your arm up to cover your face in particular. So we're seeing both fractures and sword injuries to the arms. And one of the individuals that we looked at in Bradford, Toughton 30, had that really dramatic cut mark through the elbow. And by lining up the cut that was on the humorous, so the upper part of the arm and the radius, the lower part of the arm, and moving that joint, you can actually start to see the angle that that elbow was held when that sword struck to cut both of them in a line. And it looks as though the elbow was bent, and because of the

angle of it, either somebody had the sword on the ground and was hitting upwards, which seems remarkably unlikely, or the elbow was raised for that sword to come down to hit it. So, So we're not looking at people who are in a fairly static place being hit. They are fighting back and they're getting those injuries whilst fighting back. So we see this pattern of different things going on. And what's also quite interesting at Townton is the fact that, as I said, most of these injuries are cranial. When you look at other battlefield sites, particularly ones where the fighting is believed to be mostly on horseback, you tend to see a lot of leg injuries as people are hitting legs trying to stop people in their tracks and so on.

and we don't seem to see that at Toughton. There are relatively few injuries to the legs, and we don't see any rib injuries either. And one of the easiest ways to incapacitate somebody is to puncture a lung. People knew this, but it's not something we see at Toughton, which has left people thinking, well, is this because the upper body,

the torso, was being protected by some kind of armour or the padded jackets that people had if they couldn't afford armour? Were they just not targeting the chest? Or is it that we're only seeing flesh wounds and not bone wounds? Because of course, we've only got part of the storm. We don't know what happened in terms of the flesh of the individuals.

So it's only if something hits the bow that we've got that evidence to talk about. Yeah, but fascinating, again, just bringing home the human element that you can almost position one of these men's arms from more than 550 years ago in a position where he's trying to defend his life and he hasn't succeeded. Either immediately after that blow or sometime shortly after that defensive blow of holding his arm up over his head to protect himself, he has been killed. does bring home the human terror of it for me. Absolutely. And I think one of the other things is that so many of these individuals have got

multiple injury. So are they still fighting whilst somewhat incapacitated or very incapacitated, but they're still fighting for their life? You don't just stop because you've had an injury that hurts. You can carry on fighting. But it also leads on to the question of, to what extent were people being hit once they'd actually fallen? And again, it's really hard to pick that out because all we can say is something happened around the time that somebody died. We can't always say this is the one that killed them and this happened afterwards. So it's a sort of a bigger picture of enormous brutality. And, you know, we're looking at a time when there's been wars for a number of years,

multiple battles, and a lot of people on that battlefield, they knew each other. They'd faced each other on the battlefield before. We've got that evidence of the pre-existing injuries. And there are also statements of no quarter should be given at the Battle of Touten. and it looks like that was really the case based on the extent and the severity of the injuries that we were seeing. It speaks to the brutality and the human cost of that battle. And I guess the adrenaline, you know,

do you stop hitting someone because they go down? You want to make sure they're dead if you're in a battle situation. And perhaps you're full of anger. Perhaps people are settling scores on this battlefield with rivals, neighbours, people they dislike. But, yeah, you know, it really speaks to the brutality that was going on, that potentially people were being battered, on the floor even after they'd fallen and perhaps even after they were dead.

There are rumours around the Battle of Tauton about executions of prisoners afterwards, perhaps even mutilation of bodies, are cutting off of noses and ears and things like that. Did you find any evidence that might support that? There's no real evidence suggests they were tied up prisoners. So I've worked on cemetery sites from other periods, other locations, where from the positioning of the body, it looks like people had their arms tied,

sometimes in the front, sometimes in the back. We don't see that in the positioning of the people. people at Toughton. And the injuries that we're seeing seem more consistent with injuries from around the body. So I'm thinking of the mass grave that was found in Waymouth when they were building one of the trunk roads just in the ramps of the Olympics where they found sort of Viking era mass grave. And those individuals, there's an awful lot of injuries at the back of the head. And they're kind of been hit at the back of the head and they're being pushed into the grave was one of the theories that was suggested at the time. And we don't see that type of thing. We're seeing these injuries

all the way around face to face. So I don't think that's a lot of the way. So I don't think any suggestion of prisoners from this sample. There's possibly some evidence of mutilation of bodies. So there's a couple of individuals that've got a series of multiple parallel cuts on the side of the skull around about where the ear is. They're parallel to each other. They're quite shallow and they're very fine bladed ones. And one of the hypotheses that I've heard suggested is maybe this is a form of mutilation. Maybe they're trying to remove ears as trophies or something or mutilating the body so it can't be recognized or just in terms of sort of your year anger situation as well. So possibly some evidence of mutilation, not from these individuals

in terms of prisoners, I don't think. But it all just seemed to speak again to the brutality of that day, you know, 29th of March 1461 was a bad time to be anywhere near Tauten, I'd imagine. Yeah, and bear in mind, it was terrible weather as well. It was all the talk of sort of like heavy snowstorms and rivers running with blood and, you know, in a pretty horrific place to be. Has any other testing being done on these remains or is any other testing planned? I'm thinking things like DNA analysis, isotope analysis. For example, from the DNA, do we know if any of these people were related? Lots of the sources talk about brothers fighting, brothers and fathers fighting sons, things like isotope analysis. Could that tell us whether these were foreign mercenaries who'd

come to take part in the Wars of the Roses or whether they were all sort of local people? Well, I mean, one of the things that's quite interesting with the Toughton Project is that it didn't really attract massive funding. And that's actually constrained what could be done with the remains. So nobody's actually looked at things like strontium and oxygen isotopes to figure out where these people may have grown up. Based on the documentary evidence, it would suggest they came from all over Britain. There's potentially some foreign mercenaries in there, but whether or not they ended up in our mass grave, we don't know. And it's the same with DNA testing. The first thing to bear in mind at that point is that when this was done in 1996, DNA analysis was possible, but

not massively successful, whereas with new techniques that have been developed in the last few years, we can get far better, far more robust data from ancient DNA. So they've kind of come up with a system to get maximum information out of something that's degraded quite enormously. So there is some potential to do DNA testing or do the oxygen and strontium work. It's dependent on funding. But you also need to think about the ethics of it and what are the questions you're asking because you're destroying part of a former person or somebody who is a person. In terms of the strontium and oxygen, yeah, I can see a really good argument for why you'd want to do that,

why you'd want to find out where they're from. The DNA work is a little bit more complicated because yes, they could be brothers or father and son or cousins or something, but the likelihood of those two people ending up in the same grave when you've got a snapshot of 37 out of potentially 100,000 is quite low. So I don't think it's likely to show up any family relationships. It'd be really interesting if it did. But then moving on from that, you've got the question of, well, where did medieval people come from? What's their origins in terms of sort of movement of population? over time. Tauton's a really bad study for that because we don't know where they came from. They're not local people in a local cemetery. So there's lots of questions around whether or not that testing

is actually appropriate and we need a really good reason to do it and also obviously funding to be able to do that. So that's one of the reasons we've not done that DNA work. The one thing that was done was a really interesting study looking at the diet of these individuals. This is a project run by Gundler-Moldner who looked at carbon and nitrogen isotopes. in individuals from various medieval sites. And what these isotopes will tell us is the kind of protein that people are eating. And it'll separate out plants from different photosynthetic pathways. So basically, most plants are what we call a C3 plant.

That's going to be your weeds and so on. Some plants photosynthesize in a slightly different way and they have a different isotopic ratio because of that. So it pulls out things like millet, which we know was available in the past. But also by looking at the nitrogen isotope, can look at where something was in the food chain. So, you know, you start with your herbivores and you work your way up through your carnivores and your robinivores and so on. And also it's to pick out fish consumption because they have really long food webs, which also changes

both the carbon and the nitrogen isotopes. So looking at this, Tauton comes out as having particularly high nitrogen isotope ratios compared to many other sites. The other sites from Yorkshire were quite similar. But they don't have particularly elevated carbon isotopes. So normally when we see high nitrogen, we start thinking about fish consumption. And most marine fish also has high carbon. It doesn't look like they're eating marine fish. So they're probably either eating omnivores. Picks would be a really good example,

particularly pigs that are being fed on food scraps, or they could be eating freshwater fish. So it looks like they were having quite a protein-rich diet from animals that were also consuming other meat products or fish products. My mind boggles that you're able to tell these kinds of things from the remains. You know, the science is absolutely incredible to me to think you can talk about what people were eating 550 years ago before they went into a battle just based on their remains is absolutely astonishing. I think it's very interesting what you say as well about. Obviously, funding is an issue.

So if anyone wants to fund lots of Joe's work, get in touch. But also the ethics of it. I was struck when I came to see you with the dignity with which you treat these remains. I don't think you ever seem to lose sight of the fact that these were once people. They're not there to have fun with or just to learn from. They were real human beings who suffered a pretty horrific death. And I was really struck with the dignity that you treat these remains with when I came to visit you. Thank you. I mean, I think that's absolutely core to what we do.

It's something that I've tried to bring into all my teaching with undergraduates, all my open day talks, anything I do anywhere, is an absolute privilege to work with archaeological human remains. You can't treat them as an object. They're not like pots and pieces of... iron that my colleagues might be working with. They are once living people and we need to always consider that as part of our approach. If there was one thing that you were able to learn about the individuals that you've worked with there, what would that be? If it's something you could test for now or whether it's something that you would like to be able to test for in the future,

what is something that you would really like to know about them that you don't know at the moment? I am really fascinated with the isotope work and where they may have come from. But to do that, I think it would need to be part of a much larger study to understand how, homogenous a medieval population is to be given with. Because it's fine saying, oh yeah, the people from town and they're from loads of places, but maybe the people from York were as well, because it's quite an important town. So lots of questions around that. If it was like a possible thing, and it's not, I'd actually like to know more about them as people.

I'd love to know more about their families, about their emotions and how they felt and that side of it. Obviously, that's something that is completely intangible in terms of their past. And the other thing I'd absolutely love to do, and this is from a collections side of things, I curate these remains, so I want to preserve them in as good a way as possible. But I'd really, really love to be able to do some work with digital side of things, taking the glue that is holding these remains together to actually understand the pattern of trauma, you have to refit them together. And back in the 1990s, we'd also always do this with some kind of adhesive.

To be able to remove that, to expose those broken surfaces again, but then to digitally refit scams would be an absolute joy, because the potentially would have to tell their stories, with a movable image would be amazing. So that's something we'd love to be able to take forward. That sounds like it would be absolutely fascinating. And my big takeaway from talking to you today is that with a lot of these things,

there's a temptation to do everything that we can do, but just because you can doesn't mean you should. Absolutely. I mean, you know, I'm lucky that I curate a large collection of human remains from across the UK from all different time periods, and we do our research on them, but we get lots of researchers from the UK and from overseas coming to research them as well.

and every time we're asked to do destructive testing, if we always said yes, the amount of bone that we had left would be far less than when we started. So you have to weigh everything up very carefully and think about, will this sample answer the question you're asking? Is this the right method to do that? Isn't the right question to be asking? Is it an appropriate question? And it's kind of an emotional burden to look out for these people,

but in a positive way to kind of make sure you're not doing things just for the sake of doing it. and weigh those things up as effortly as you can. Well, thank you very much for sharing that with us. I think it's been really enlightening to talk to you about the toutan element of this, but also just your work with these human remains. And as I said before, the dignity with which you treat them, I find very moving and fascinating. So thank you very much for sharing all of that with us, Jo.

Thank you very much. You can join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone, If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts. It really does help new listeners to find us. If you're enjoying this podcast and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, then please subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter.

You can find the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I've better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hit.