Gone Medieval - Medieval Burials

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

What can medieval burial practices reveal about societal values and beliefs? Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by biological anthropologist Dr. Jo Buckberry, to explore this question.They discuss the secrets behind Sutton Hoo's majestic burial mounds, the intriguing presence of grave goods from brooches to cremation urns and change in customs as Britain embraced Christianity. They delve into medieval battlefield mass graves and mysterious discoveries such as St. Bees Man to explore the profound human connections and societal structures reflected in medieval burial customs.Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega and edited by Amy Haddow. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK 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. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianaga and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here.

Some of the most enigmatic of medieval monuments are those to the dead. Whether it's the tombs of Westminster Abbey or immense memorials like Sutton Hoo. Medieval barriers loom large in our imagination when we consider the past. And there's a good reason for this. After all, everyone who ever lived in the medieval period is dead now. something that they all have in common. And looking at the way that people related to their bodies after their deaths tells us an awful lot about what their society valued. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonika. And today on Gone Medieval from History Hit, I'm speaking with Dr. Joe Buckbury, the

director of studies at the School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences at the University of Bradford, all about medieval burials and what they tell us about the living. Joe, welcome back to Gone Medieval and welcome to my little corner of Gone Medieval, I suppose. I've wrestled you away from Matt. Thank you for having me, Eleanor. It's lovely to be hearing back with Gone Medieval. I am so excited to talk to you today because we are going to get into one of my favorite subjects, which is burial practice. And, you know, this is one of those things where I think sometimes people can't quite get their heads around why this is such an interesting topic for a lot of us historians. So I thought we might start off today with me asking you, what is it that we can really learn about medieval beliefs by looking very specifically at burial practices?

I mean, I think the starting point for me as a bio-archologist is the burial itself, the body itself, I should say, in that we therefore have the person, the direct connection to that person so we can learn about them and their life story. But also from that, the way that they're actually buried tells us an awful. lot about the way people are treating them in that particular circumstance. So it's a mirror into what the mourners are doing rather than the person themselves in a lot of ways because those decisions are made by the people who are doing the burying. Now, the deceased person may well have had a say in all of that. But you can start to build ideas about what was important to that community. What were they trying to reflect in the way they do things? The challenge for us is it's all interpretation. So, you know, there are two or three different reasons you may be doing

the particular thing and we can't always know exactly which one it is, but it gives us a really fascinating insight into what was the appropriate way to deal with somebody who's recently deceased? What was the appropriate things to give them, the appropriate manner in which to bury them? And in a way, say your last respects, although of course we don't know what people actually said because, you know, we can't listen to them. I suppose that is such an interesting thing too and why I find your work so valuable as a historian, right? Because historians, we're dealing with texts, right? And obviously we take a look at what our fellow academics are doing over in archaeology. But what I would look at

would be, for example, a service for the dead, something that's written out where priests say, okay, and then you say this and then you do that. But you are having a look at what's actually happening in the grave itself. And this is so incredible because it's such a rich source for us. Yeah, absolutely. It then allows you to start looking at differences in how people were treated and how that changes from the beginning of the early medieval period through to the end of the medieval period. You can start thinking about are there differences local to that particular churchyard or cemetery, but also do we see differences within them? And what does that tell us about the kinds of people that are buried there? So it might give us indications about their personal identity, their interactions with different people in society, but also their social standing and social. status. Oh, absolutely, because, you know, everything is sort of up for grabs when it comes to burial, right? I guess that burial is this really unique reflection of how life in the medieval period works. So you can still tell things like rank and status and, you know, how groups are connected. There's so much to read there. Absolutely. I mean, you kind of, the burial practice of

any given period is normally within what are normal social boundaries. What is deemed appropriate for that period and by that community. But then you tweak things. You do things that have meaning regarding the person that you're burying or meaning to you and your connection with that person. And it's very much the same today, in actual fact, who you think about it, if you're burying a loved one, you make decisions about that burial. There are certain things that are kind of, they're just the done thing, but there are things that are very specific to you. And it's exactly the same in the past. And so our job as archaeologists is to try and piece together that story from the evidence that remains to try and figure out what those connections and aspects of importance

might have been. What are some of the things that you can kind of deduce from these burial practices, right? So you can tell things like maybe rank or, well, what I think are obvious reasons, but just because I've been reading your work. What stories do burial practices tell us, I guess, about life, not as much as death? Yeah, I mean, I think the starting point is it's kind of. kind of period specific, even within the medieval period. So if we're talking about early Anglo-Saxon burials, you have a high proportion of those individuals are buried with grave goods, things that are

placed into the grave. And we can kind of read those as indicators about what people were thinking, why were these objects chosen, what might they symbolise or mean to the people? And it's often like it's a visual clue as to what people were thinking at that time. And then as you move later on through the period, you're moving into sort of more Christian times, towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, people have converted to Christianity. So from that point onwards, actually, we can start thinking about who was buried inside the church, who was buried closest to the altar, who was buried right on the boundaries of a churchyard? And actually, for me, really interestingly, who was excluded from that Christian burial right and put way outside of that community,

kind of, I'm not going to say forgotten, excluded. We'll stick with excluded. And I think that that is such an interesting thing, right? Because the community of people doesn't necessarily die along with those people in general, right? You're still in relation to and communion with people even after they die. The place where you put them could be equally important. So we often talk about high status burials being close to places where people would walk or gather or congregate so that they are close and they are in your mind. And that's part of the whole idea of saying masses for the dead, that actually the more important you are, the more likely you are to have masses said, but also having that burial close to, and obviously saying this person is buried here,

adds that story of remembrance for that person, just in the same way that placing somebody right on the outskirts of a cemetery, perhaps their graves not marked in any way, those are the individuals who may become forgotten more quickly. They're probably not forgotten by their closest friends and family. People don't forget the people they know and love. but they aren't as prominent and obvious within that sort of cemetery setting as the people whose burials have been deliberately placed in a way to foster that remembrance. Well, speaking of remembrance, and you've already kind of brought this group of people up, I think that, you know, when people think of England and burial practice in the medieval period, a lot of time what they're thinking about is the early medieval period, very specifically.

And, you know, the rich areas that we find, for example, at Sutton Who, where you have these incredible burial mounds. And that's really a kind of pre-Christian burial, is it not? Probably. So this is the really interesting thing about the early medieval period that, well, first of all, if you're thinking it right at the beginning of this, we have people living in the country already who were probably Christian. They don't all vanish. So we may well have some semblance of Christianity continuing on in some way that we're not able to. to pick up on from the evidence that we have. But by and large, it's agreed that the beginning of the early medieval period, is a migration period, we have movement of people, maybe not so many as we used to think, but potentially movement of some people, and a reintroduction of a pagan burial rite in a pagan religion. And so we see the reintroduction of cremation, which had kind

of declined prior to that period, and we see increased use of grave goods in the graves. Not everybody had those grave goods. Who got them? Who didn't? That's a really interesting area of debate. But as you move through, we know that from 597, we have the first conversion to Christianity that's documented. So we've seen that is the first one and there wasn't anything before that. Maybe something else happened we don't know about, who knows. But from that point onwards, we know that we're moving from a pagan to a Christian religion. And so alongside that, we get a change in burial practice. But it's actually really hard to say for certain. that this burial practice represents this religion.

And I'm going to give you two examples. And Sutton Who, which you've already mentioned, is the obvious one. So you have this amazing mound one, big barrow, boat in the middle of it, lots and lots of grave goods, probably no body, although given the bone preservation at Sutton Who, it's possible that there was a body and the traces disappeared and weren't seen at excavation because subsequent excavations in the area have found just faint outlines of where a body used to.

to be in the sand and the sand is a slightly different colour. So I think whether or not the was was-once body in that grave is an interesting debate. And what we have is an awful lot of sort of overtly pagan grave goods, things like feasting equipment, drinking horns, things that are associated with countries overseas, but also silver baptismal spoons. So something that would be given to somebody for their christening as a sign of that Christianity. So was the person buried in that mound, a Christian, a pagan, somebody who was a little bit undecided, somebody who was dipping a toe in both cups, so to say, to try and, you know, hedge their bets into the afterlife? Or are they representing the community around them that has a mixture of pagan and Christian people? And that's the kind of

exciting interpretation that we get from that kind of burial is, what does that mean? And for me, the really fascinating thing is this idea that in the Christian period, oh, you know, Gravegood's decline, and that must have been because of Christianity. But actually, you're a historian, you know, the church didn't write lots about you must not have grave goods. These are very, very bad and they're anti-Christian. That's not something that happened. Rather, those grave goods seem to decline of their own accord. So that moves me on to my second example, which is going to be St. Cuthbert. He's buried at Durham Cathedral and he has all of the bling. You know, it's got very Christian symbolism, but I would call those grave goods. So if grave goods are not Christian, What happened to St. Cuthbert? Because he's about as Christian as you can get for that period. So there's a bit of a juxtaposition in our interpretation between these grave goods equal pay good versus actually when you delve a bit deeper. Perhaps that's not quite as clear. Perhaps that's not as clear cut. Leaglias to think that that declining grave goods is something connected to broader patterns in society and not just Christianity. Yeah, I mean, I suppose it could literally just be a matter of fashion. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, these things change all the time, really. Absolutely.

And a lot of things that we see in the 7th century is changing the design of things that were placed in graves. The jewelry gets smaller, perhaps a little bit more refined, slightly less showy. And we get an increased use of the sort of very fine golden garnet, cloisinet-type approach. And these are the kind of things that we see an awful lot more on the continent. They've got very strong links with places like Francia. But there are also certain items that stylistically lend a lot to the Roman an empire and Byzantium. So you've actually got influences around the world coming in. And as you say, it has fashions, things that become more popular for that period. So you've touched on this

already now. But what are examples of grave goods? So you might have feasting equipment. You might have jewelry. Are there other things that we typically associate with this period? Yeah, absolutely. So beginning of the period, we tend to get a series of items that are probably just things that are part of people's clothing. So things like small. buckles, knives which are often held on a belt, things that are fairly nondescript, not in a particular patterning to. We then get a series of burials that we tend to refer to as weapon burials because they can include weaponry. So swords are relatively rare. Shields are moderately common really. Occasionally we'll see spears. They're probably the more common of those.

None of those weapons are particularly common. They're more middle range right. There's a reasonable number of people with them, but it isn't in really dominant burial form. And they're not always complete sets of weapons. So you may have just a sword or just a shield or just a spear or a combination of them. So we have those weapon burials. And then we also have burials that we tend to refer to as jewelry burials. And these will have things like brooches, beads, many, many beads. There are some individuals who have had hundreds of beads and very elaborate bead necklaces and pendants. I've seen absolutely exquisite armbands up from Northumberland that are just some of my favourite grave goods ever.

Something called wrist clasps, which are like a giant hook and eye at the wrist, kind of hold a sleeve together. So things that are quite beautiful. And items known as girdle hangers, something you would hang from the waistband, the belt. Some of those look like keys and may have functioned as a key, so they're referred to as a latch lifter because they're used to lift a latch. But also more foil-like things in a similar shape. And they're thought to be more symbolic items because they couldn't actually have done anything

particularly useful because they're kind of foil and quite thin. That's so interesting. I love the jewelry in particular. I guess I'm just a cliche. The jewelry's beautiful. You know, the first thing that I want to see is what jewelry was in there. And please, all museums take note. Could we have replicas?

Yep. I'm trying to buy this. I think it's so beautiful the things that we do find. It is. It really is. And I'm going to be honest here. And I am the woman who bought a replica Iron Age necklace when I was visiting a museum because it was just too beautiful.

Not quite my period, but still stunning. Absolutely stunning. Wear it all the time. So, yeah, there's definitely a market out there, museum people. We would love this stuff. Come on. But, yeah, I mean, the jewelry, it's just exquisite. And the level of craftsmanship that goes into these items,

the investment of skill as well as material to produce these, it's just phenomenal, beautiful pieces of artwork, really. I absolutely love to see it because it shows us so much about what daily life would have been, you know, obviously these are grave goods, so, you know, maybe they were made especially for, you know, burial. But it also probably shows us, actually, this is what people are wearing in everyday life. This is the sort of stuff that they're going to have on them. Here are the ways we think about jewelry. And, you know, it's those little details that give us a real rich picture of the past, I think. Yeah, I mean, I think we need to be careful in assuming that in the

burial, it reflects exactly what was happening in life. And this is really interesting. occasionally if you have a piece of metalwork sitting on top of a piece of fabric, the corrosion of that metal can kind of encapsulate information about the fabric that was once there. And people have looked at this and kind of reconstructed what that fabric might have been. And in some cases, the fabrics that broaches are pinned on are so thin, they probably wouldn't have been able to hold up the weight of the item that's pinned on them, because these things were so heavy and so chunky. So it could be that the dress is deliberately not as long as,

warm and thick as the one that somebody might have had in life when things were a little bit cold and you cared about that. It could be that this item was given to that person in their death and placed in the grave. It may not have been something they actually wore and therefore it didn't quite match with their everyday outfit. So we have to be a little bit careful about assuming these direct connections. And I think it's fascinating to think that this item could not possibly have gone on the dress that it was attached to when that person was standing up because it just wouldn't function. I love this idea of perhaps maybe being buried in your favourite dress and with your favourite item of jewellery, which are from two different seasons. Yeah, and they don't match, but they're the things you love most. And I think that's the important thing is that personal connection, you know, what did people want to have buried with them? What did people want you to have? And who made those decisions? That's a really interesting one.

It's like, you know, did you say, do you know what? I'm definitely being buried with my great-grandmas watch because of you or broach or necklace or whatever it is because they gave it to me and I'm taking it. with me and you can't have it or actually this is the family heirloom that it should continue through and therefore not to be buried with me and those are very personal decisions and I think that they are the same today as they are in the past you know there's there's no particular reason why people wouldn't have been having similar thought processes when they're picking what to dress somebody in at a funeral absolutely and I guess this shows how similar we still are with people from you know 1,500 years ago yeah you know yeah which is it's age is when you think about it but

Okay, so we find all these incredible things in these early medieval graves. But what about the graves themselves? You know, we have these huge burial mounds. Is there a particular reason that we have these mounds that we're aware of? So the biggest mounds are thought to be related to social status. So they've often been assumed to be something of a princely burial right for the very high status people. And what's interesting is we tend to see them in particular within the 7th century. So that is coinciding with the origins of Christianity and the conversion.

to Christianity in England. But actually also, we have this increase in kingdoms and kingship at the time. So you kind of start off with what's allegedly tribe, if you believe every word the bead ever wrote, which now I'm a bit of skeptic on this one. Yeah, there's probably some truth in there. But gradually as we're moving through the sixth and seventh centuries, the smaller kingdoms are kind of merging into each other. You know, one's, you know, has a conquest over the other. they assimilate and become a bigger kingdom, and you get bigger and bigger kingdoms. So it's kind of a politically charged and somewhat volatile thing in terms of the very high status, the everyday people probably don't care so much.

And it could be that that's part of what this is about. It's people saying, this is my status. I am this important. This is me with my big burial mound, with all of my stuff, and I'm really, really important. And so I like to think of it as being something that's very much about that power play almost. And I suppose this is kind of like our own personal pyramids of Giza, right? Yes. You know, obviously it's on a much smaller scale.

But obviously, regular people are not being buried in huge mounds. They probably have some much more ordinary kind of rights, I suppose. Absolutely. And, you know, the size of a grave does vary between people. And sometimes we find structures. So shelves inside graves. There's a small minority right of people being buried on their beds, which I kind of love.

I can't think of anything more comfortable personally. But, you know, people just inside a coffin or just placed in the grave, in their clothes, with their items around them. But also, you know, there could be things in there that we're not seeing because organic material's not going to survive that buried environment. So nowadays we've got this new fashion for wicker coffins.

What if there was something like that in the past? Because they're not going to survive unless the ground is very, very waterlogged. And then we don't have any evidence for wicket coffins. that's kind of like a pipe dream. And that we do have evidence of wooden coffins in certain places or wooden beers that people were laid on so they could be carried to the grave

and stone linings around individuals, particularly as you're moving into sort of later early medieval and medieval period. So, yeah, there's a whole range of ways that people are memorialised. And I think the other thing that we tend to forget are the cremations. And so particularly in the fifth and early sixth cemetery, cremation was a really dominant funerary right. and the vast majority of those cremations are in a ceramic pot, burial urn, and there's a small proportion of them in other vessels,

and there may have been some that weren't in vessels, but most of them are buried in pots. And what's really interesting, we tend to think one pot, one person, but actually from some of those cremations, we know there's more than one person in there. But also we know there's animal bones in there as well, and those animal bones are normally also cremated. So that gives you an idea of the scale of that burial right at the point.

point of the cremation itself. And so I'm going to say right now that the analysing cremations is not my favourite thing. It's like a, it's like a 2,000 piece jigsaw and everything's grey. However, I work with some great people who are brilliant at cremations. One of my colleagues, Julie, is amazing at identifying cremated animal bones and actually identifying which animals are found inside those cremation urns, which is kind of fun as well. Wait, what kind of animals are found inside of them? So we find the kind of animals you've seen in everyday life. There's a reason about of horses in there.

If I remember correctly, sheep and pigs occur. Not so much pigs are more sheep, but don't quote me on that because I can't quite remember. And very rarely you will find a slightly more exotic sort of animal in that mix as well. But yeah, horses seem to come up quite often, which is quite interesting. Yeah, I guess that just raises so many questions for me because it's sort of like, is this your favorite horse? And you're being cremated. is this a sacrifice?

Like what's going on? Whose horses? Who's horses is it? Did they die natural causes or not? Because, you know, something needs to have died around about the same time because otherwise things are going to get a little stinky. Or you may have sacrificed or killed for another reason and the animal to be part of the funeral.

And why is it important to do that? And it's really, really hard to disentangle that because the ultimate thing is we don't genuinely know, but we see these patterns happening across northern Europe really. That is so interesting. And I guess it gets even murkier when you've got more than one person in there. Absolutely. And this can be really challenging because you look at a cremation and an awful lot of it, that's a bit of a limb bone.

That's another bit of a limb bone. And that's another bit of a limb bone. I can't even be certain which limb bone it is because it's so fragmented, but it's one of the bigger ones. So trying to piece out how many people you have can be quite hard. And what tends to happen is a lot easier to do if they're really different ages. So if we had some children's bones with some adult bones, because of the way they fuse, we can say, okay, so this is an unfused bone, so this is from a child, this is a fused bone, so this is an adult.

And the same with teeth and the way teeth form. So if we have forming teeth, we know it's somebody whose teeth haven't finished forming. If we have adult teeth, it tends to happen as we get the root parts alive in the cremation, the crown tends to not survive cremation so well. But we can look at those roots and go, well, these are all finished growing. this is somebody who is over this age. And then you can kind of say, okay, so I have somebody in here who must have been under the age of five. And I have somebody else here who must have been over the age of 18.

They're not the same person. So we have two people. And sometimes it's just because we have a duplication. You know, if you have three kneecaps, you've got three kneecaps, which has got to be at least two people because two legs is the norm. So this is all stuff that we find in the specific circumstances of cremation. But I am just going to, wager an educated guest here. You know, as we move into the medieval period, we must move more

towards burial and away from cremation, right? Because this is kind of a thing for Christianity, right? It's like one of the things that Christians often talk about is how they use burial practice instead, because, of course, at the final judgment, at the end of the world, everyone has to jump up out of their grave in order to go and be judged by the Archangel Michael and, et cetera, et cetera. So for that you need an actual grave. You're not supposed to be burning people up. Now, this isn't to say it didn't happen, but it is marked as we move through the period that suddenly...

Absolutely, yes. So again, that decline is happening around about the 7th century. There are a few cremations out there that date to the 8th. So, you know, there's some flexibility in there. Some people will just do their own thing. And again, I'm not aware of any particular dictat saying, thou shalt not cremate your loved ones, But certainly for cremation is very much on the decline at the same time that Christianity

has come to the forefront within those communities. But as we move past the 7th century, the norm burial right for most people is to be buried in their grave. That grave is aligned from the east to the west, to the hedges at the west end of the grave. So that on Judgment Day, when they rise up, they'll be facing the rising sun in the east and generally no grave goods. But what's really interesting is people still found ways to express a little bit of individuality within that. So we say there aren't many grave goods. Occasionally there are.

So example, at York Minster, there are individuals who are buried with simple finger rings. Kind of like people are buried in the wedding rings sometimes. Some people keep them, pass them on as something for their descendants. Some people are buried with them. And so we do occasionally see this kind of item being in there. But also the use of something to enclose the body. So, you know, were people buried in a shroud and placed in the grave? Or were they placed in a coffin? And does that coffin survive? Or you may have a grave that is lined with stone slabs. And in some cases, we have carved stone covers for graves or stone sarcophagite. Very rarely a lead coffin. So there are lots of different ways that people would, you know, use something a little bit different. And my gut feeling is that these fancier graves are, again, connected with the social elite. particularly something that is quite a conspicuous consumption of materials like a stone sarcophagus,

which requires quite a big piece of stone and somebody to carve it out, to take the body. Yeah, well, absolutely, you know, and this is one of these things I find quite funny, is how conspicuous consumption can follow you into the afterlife in these cases. No one wants to stop, do they? So I dare say there's probably no such thing as an overarching typical Christian burial, though, because there's such a difference in terms of what social status is. I mean, yes, as you say, you know, probably facing east. But so, for example, there's a real diversity in terms of location in terms of where people are buried.

And that can make a large difference as well, no? Yeah, I mean, so, yeah, the crucial thing in most of the sort of later medieval, but also the very end of the early medieval period is the fact that churchyards are generally the place of burial. so you would have a church in that and therefore proximity to the church is seen as being something that's reflective of status as well. But within that we have other interesting and intriguing patterns. So it's a very well excavated cemetery from Roans in Northamptonshire.

And one of the things that was noticed is there's a real cluster of infants and young children right up against the walls of the church and it's what's been referred to in various papers as the eaves drip area with this rather beautiful poetic idea that the rain would fall, hit the roof of the church,

and then it would be blessed because it would hit this holy building and it would drip down onto the graves of these babies and kind of like baptize or bless them in their graves at that point. And that's a pattern that is seen in some of the cemeteries.

We either get infants close to a church or clusters of infants in a particular location in a cemetery. It's not always adjacent to the church. And sometimes we don't know exactly where that church is. So I worked on an amazing site in York called Swinegate, where the archaeology was done in a fancy building. So they didn't excavate the entire area.

They just put in a few holes. And there's one big hole that has most of the adults in. And there's a couple of smaller holes with a few more adults in. And then there are these two other holes. They're a little bit ways away, absolutely full of infants and young children. And they're really clustered in these two trenches away from the rest of the cemetery. And I don't think it's away from the cemetery. I just think because didn't excavate that area.

We don't know what's going on. And what's really interesting, and I thought, well, you know, to me, that suggests this could be closer to the church, right? Because we have this idea of the Eaves strip burial. And then I was reading through and looking at the evidence. And lo and behold, the actual description of where that church may once have been is quite close to where those infants were. So it became a circular argument because we never found the church.

I should say, the archaeologist did the work, didn't find the church. I didn't actively look for the church. but it was this really lovely poetic story that kind of fits so nicely we can't prove it unfortunately at this point we'd have to take down a few shopping it's not going to happen they're not going to let us demolish those shops just so I can you know figure out what's going on it's a real shame it is a real shame more piteous frankly okay so these are the kind of burials like I say when I close my eyes what I'm thinking of when I think of a medieval burial that's kind of what it is you know you're buried in your

churchyard, you're among your community. But of course, there are big disruptive things that happen in the medieval period as well. So, for example, war, right? And you have these big conflicts and battles where people are killed out on the fields. And what happens then when you have fallen soldiers out just? This is really interesting. And I actually worked with a student who was researching this for her doctorate. And for a lot of cases, the people who were writing things about the battles did not say what they were doing with the dead bodies. It kind of isn't something that became an important part of that. But where we do have direct evidence is from mass graves. And the most famous of these is the mass grave at Tauton in Yorkshire, where the excavation revealed

the remains of 36 individuals, all of whom have very nasty injuries that occurred during the battle. they're things that were certainly contributed to their death if they did not kill them outright at the point of impact. And some of them have injuries from previous battles that have healed over. And they're kind of stacked somewhat irregularly within a single trench, suggesting a lack of detailed care. But we also know that certain individuals' bodies were taken away from the battlefield and buried somewhere else. And so what I think is probably happening is for the vast majority of cases, people would have collected the dead and buried them in the normal Christian manner. And so I worked with another student around about the same time.

And we started looking into, okay, so if we look at for all of the people with weapon injuries, where are they? And actually the vast majority of people with weapon injuries healed because they're dying in their communities, but also those that happened around the time of death are in the regular churchyards. So I think the vast majority of people who died in her back probably did end up in a churchyard. And there's one amazing individual, known as St. Bees' man, who was found up in St. Bees in Cumbria, and he was in a lead coffin, and I think it was

honey that would have been used on the wrappings, which is antiseptic, and he still had lots of flesh. He was funny, well, I want to say mummified, because actually he wasn't particularly dry either, and the people who discovered that burial did an autopsy, and actually when they were looking at that, when they first cut into the spleen, it was still red. The colour changed very, very dramatically, very, very quickly. But the preservation of this individual was incredible. And various research suggests that this individual may have died on a crusade and have been transported all the way back from the Holy Land and buried in Cumbria. Just unbelievable. I am gobsmacked by that. Yes. Yes. I mean, it makes me feel medieval. You know, he's in

incorruptible, or at least his spleen is. He doesn't make you wonder where these ideas the corrupted bodies may have come from. Hmm. Funny that. Funny that. Okay, this is really, really interesting because if we're taking this much care in order to bring someone back possibly from the Holy Land or to remove bodies from battlefields and give them good Christian burials,

what does that tell us about the people who are in a field somewhere? I think the probable things there are how far away you are from your family, who are the people who are going to want to recover for you, most of all. and the scale of the number of deaths as to whether or not it's feasible to recover all of those bodies. The idea of disfigurement due to injury could play into that, that it may be harder to recognise people of being certain individuals. And certainly the period immediately after a battle is often one of some confusion,

figuring out exactly what's happened. And there were some practicalities as well. If you're in the middle of a period of warfare, your army may need to move. on pretty rapidly to whatever's happening next and they may not have the time to identify all of the dead and make sure that they're buried in the right way. So there's a whole host of reasons that could kind of like feed into why some individuals are not collected. My gut feeling is social status is a big part of that as well. So St. B's man almost certainly very, very high status, which is why his body was brought back for burial in his parish church, whereas I imagine

the lowly foot soldiers did not have such a lovely transportation back home because it would have been expensive and people couldn't afford to do that. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, these are things, bodies are heavy. The Holy Land is a very long way away, you know. So, yeah, I suppose that, you know, if you're some foot soldier from Wales or something and you've managed to die in some kind of giant fight in England, and no one knows who you are, it's probably more likely that, unfortunately, you're just going to get buried there because who knows, really.

Yeah, and it could be that some of those individuals are buried in the churchyard by the local community because they've got the time. It could be that in certain cases, it's kind of like they're really angry that these people have this fight and these are the opposing side and they're not very happy about it and they could deliberately do that. It's almost an act of desecration for those bodies because they've not been treated in the proper Christian manner and therefore potentially condemning them a little bit in terms of their death, which is a really troubling way of thinking about it.

But, you know, there is documentary evidence out there about the importance of being buried on consecrated ground and what happens if somebody does. when it's not possible to bury them within a churchyard and what is the appropriate way forward in terms of those situations? I suppose, you know, being buried in a churchyard, you know, that's a real locus for a community. It sort of brings people into it. It says that you are a part of this. So, you know, if you do have belligerents that you're not particularly fond of,

I can understand why you might not want them in your patch, as it were. Absolutely. And that kind of leads us on to the deliberate exclusions, which we kind of alluded to earlier. And so some of the burials that I've had the joy and fascination to the research are individuals who were completely excluded from a Christian burial, buried away from the settlements, but not out of memory, very often in sort of like visually obvious locations, close to routeways between two settlements, and many of whom appear to have been deliberately executed, so decapitations primarily. And our interpretation around those is that these may well represent judicial killings in line with the law code for these periods. And these kind of span from about the 7th century into the 11th or 12th. That's the kind of time period for some of these. And in quite a few of those cemeteries, they're in use for hundreds of years, but there aren't very many bodies.

And which makes me think that this wasn't a frequent occurrence and that perhaps the visibility of these locations was a really good deterrent for other people not to do whatever resulted. in those poor individuals ending up in that particular location. Yeah, because the punishment keeps going, right? Not only have you been killed, but you are not allowed to be buried with the ordinary Christian rights, which has not gone effects for the soul in the afterlife is the theory. You're being sent to hell, essentially. You know, you're not being given the joy of the heavenly afterlife at all. And by not burying people in the correct alignment,

perhaps you're also thinking about the day of judgment at the end of the world, all of those things. Although the other thing I find fascinating is once you'd been buried in that correct location facing the east, you didn't have to stay there forever because your soul has departed the body. And so we know that when many people

were digging graves in their churchyards that had been used for quite a long period of time, they dug through earlier burials. And whereas nowadays people might go, oh, hang on, don't want to dig any deeper here, we'll kind of have a shallower burial or we'll open a new plot or we'll move slightly to the side. We know from the archaeology that this was not done in the medieval period.

They would dig through a grave to put in a new person. Occasion you will find additional bones kind of pushed to the side of the graves, almost like they've been scooted out of the way to make way for the new inhabitants for that particular space. But in other cases, those bones are picked up and placed in either charnel pits or charnel houses, so suitable locations for bones that have been. been disarticulated, but they're deliberately placed in these locations. But they're still within the churchyard, and it's not seen to be a barrier in terms of the idea of resurrection.

And to the point that there are beautiful illuminated manuscripts and illustrations of people standing by the grave side with a body in the grave. And then there's like a skull and a few long bones scattered around their feet as if that's just perfectly normal, which makes me think they'd you perfectly well what those bones were and where they'd come from. And that was just part of everyday life. Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. Anytime you see an actual depiction of medieval burial from a manuscript, there's almost certainly just some extra bones hanging around the entire time. And I really love a good charnel house myself. A lot of the time we've lost them over the years, but there is such incredible pieces of architecture that usually have really good frescoes in them

from my standpoint. You get a lot of a cool death frescoes in them. The way people treat that channel is it's just absolutely fascinating. And I've only really worked on material in the UK, but, you know, I was traveling over the summer. I was in Rome and I visited the Tomb of the Capuchin monks with one of my colleagues. And the bones from those monks had been moved around and used to decorate the catacomb, or the crypt even within this monastery with these amazing pieces of art made entirely, human bones, an hourglass, symbolising the passing of time. But the hourglass is a few long bones creating a box, then two sacrams, one upside down and one on top of it, basically creating the

hourglass shape, and then a few shoulder blades on either side as wings. And it was just like, this is just incredible. It's very, very peculiar. And mummified monks and all kinds of stuff. And an incredible place to visit, if you ever have the opportunity. But yeah, sometimes this channel is then reused in peculiar ways and that we don't expect really. It's something that I'm always really quite interested in because it seems that often people in the past are just a bit more comfortable. Yeah, I think so. Being around bodies. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, death is something that's omnipresent. It's going to happen to us all. It's always going to be there. But to a certain extent, nowadays, we're kind of a little bit distanced from it. Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know,

if you've ever been with somebody when they've passed, you spend your time with them, and then you leave the room, and then somebody else looks after them in most situations in the UK now. Now, there are certain religions and certain groups of society where actually, you do have these situations where members of the family and the community

will do the washing of the body and all of that preparation for the funeral. But for most of us, we don't do that. We put that into the hands of skilled professionals to do that work for us. So we kind of go from having a living person, saying our final goodbyes, if we are actually present, leaving them. And actually open casket funerals are not particularly common in the UK anymore. So we don't tend to look on those people again.

They have gone. So we don't see dead bodies very often. And we certainly don't see skeletonised bodies particularly often. Certainly, you know, if you're digging a grave in a cemetery these days, you tend to have some kind of matting over the sides. that you don't actually see even the soil in that situation. It's almost sanitized. We're distanced drum in a little bit. So it's a very different situation.

Yeah, and I'm always quite interested in well in terms of what you do when you have this surplus. You've got charnel houses. You know, you've got the Puchins who, I mean, they're more early modern who are doing a cool decoration. So I will give it up sometimes, you know, early modern people do some things I like. I'm a little down on them at times. but, you know, thanks. I enjoy the strange skeleton art.

But I think it actually tells us rather a lot about a society and how they treat death. When you have these circumstances wherein you've got a lot of bodies and you need to figure out what to do with them, right? Because, for example, in the Czech Republic at Kutonora, which is a really important mining town just outside of Prague, there's an ossuary as well. And it's got absolutely tons of bodies

and it's partially because, well, there was kind of the 17th century plague, but then also there had been the wars of religion, so there were just a lot of surplus bodies. And I'm like, well, what are we going to do with this? We're going to make some strange decorations, right? But we have a medieval example of what do we do with all these bodies in terms of plague pits. We do. And I find your work on this really fascinating because I think people have a tendency to relate to plague pits as though.

Everyone just goes, throw a body in and run away. And that's not what they are, right? And it's totally not what it is. I mean, these plague pits, you kind of. to get a sense of be an idea of last resort. You're trying to bury all of these people in their individual graves, inside the churchyards, in the way that is deemed proper at the time. But there's just too many dead people and it's not a pleasant task. And of course, anybody's doing it is going to be increasing their risk of illness because they're in contact

with people who have been recently deceased from this particular pathogen. And so you have to make a pragmatic solution. And the pragmatic solution is you dig a very, very, very big hole. which takes less time the digging many, many, many small holes, and then you stack the bodies in them. But the bodies that are in those graves are otherwise quite Christian in their burial form. So in neat rows with the head to the west and the feet to the east, again, in that correct orientation. So care is being taken in that situation.

You know, we see that throughout these. And actually there aren't that. many plague pits have been identified so far, there will be more of them out there for sure. But actually, I think it's something that's like kind of a last resort when you can no longer cope with normal burial. This is what you could do as a solution. And I think it talks of that real pragmatism, people trying really hard to deal with an awful situation in the best way they can. But very, very different in character to the masqueros we associate with battles, which seem to be much more haphazard and disorganised. I guess that makes sense because it's up too.

an army or something to take care of things that's different from a community as a whole. So I'm sitting not far from where one of the London plague pits was. So I'm very close to the charter house at the moment. And there was a large plague pit here. And it makes perfect sense when you think about it because it's just outside the city walls of London. You know, you can understand why London has a lot more bodies that need burying than somewhere in the countryside. And that was a monastery. So we've got monks to have a look at them. And do all of the last rights and these sort of things. So even then it makes a real sort of sense. And I find that quite moving because it's just such a testament to how human they are,

even in the midst of this unimaginable horror, you know. Yeah, absolutely. And for me, the real moment of awareness of just how tragic that was was in the middle of the COVID pandemic, when all of a sudden we're seeing, you know, pictures where the only way people could deal with the massive excess in deaths, was to dig vast graves and place the bodies and I'm like, this is what the Black Death was like. You know, this is what people had to do as a reaction. And it's happening again. And that was quite terrifying.

But also, for me, there was a familiarity there. I'd seen it before. I kind of like, yeah, this is what people do. It's a response to that mass fatality. And it's pragmatism. It's doing something that is effective and efficient to deal with something that's quite horrible in a situation people living with and living through. I mean, I suppose in a way that is kind of what burial means in general. You know, it's the living, sort of coping with this loss and coping with us having to say goodbye to members of our community.

Yeah, and it's so hard. You know, it's losing somebody that you love is a horrible, horrible, horrible experience. And the more times it happens, it doesn't get easier because each one is a real loss. And for some people, that's their pets as well as their family and their friends. But it is. It's a deeply emotional time. And the thing that gets you through the, that is routine and doing things that are familiar. But also, I think those personal touches, the thing that make that particular connection between you and the person whose funeral you're at or that person who you're burying, that actually doing something that has meaning to you. And I think that's the hardest part as an archaeologist is that we can control and think about these big picture stories in terms of religion and identity and status. But actually that personal connection is so hard. And I'm sure those personal connections were there that this particular object is in this particular grave because X person wanted Y to have it with them. And we can't control for that

in our analyses. That's the kind of unknown that I don't think we will ever, ever be able to unpick. And it kind of adds to the fascination in the mystery of what we're trying to look about is, you know, why did this particular thing happen? And we may never know every single thing and every single meaning for all of those burials. But it's really comforting as well. You know, people are thinking about these things. People are caring for their dead friends, colleagues, and family members. Do you suppose that that's why we're still so fascinated by medieval burial customs?

Because this is the sort of thing that, you know, average people, not just huge nerds like ourselves, tends to ask me about a lot. You know, people want to go see osseweries. They are quite interested in things like plague pits. And do you think that it's just this human connection or is it something more than that? I think that human connection is a really, really big part of it. I think there's also a bit of a morbid curiosity and people are fascinated by the Gothic, the alternate, there's things that make you feel slightly uncomfortable sometimes.

But I think that personal connection is really important. And I think that in a way, I don't think people think about this when they're visiting. but in a way, looking at these burials helps us try and unpick some of the things that we've seen in our own life, things that we've had to do in our own life. So there's a direct connection to that. In a way that visiting, I don't know,

an ancient farmstead, most of us aren't farmers anymore. So that direct connection isn't there, but we're all still people. And so that the people in the past, it is a much more direct connection by looking at them and then mortal remains, things that we can actually see.

It's not quite as direct when you're thinking about the things that were people doing the way that we're living. Well, where are the people within that while they're actually in the cemetery? And so people are drawn to the people, I think. Jo, this has been such an incredibly fascinating conversation. And I want to thank you so much for coming on to, you know, help fill in my morbid curiosity about it. It's been an absolute pleasure, Ellen, at any time. Thank you so much for listening. And thank you once again to Joe for joining me.

If you'd like more from Joe, and I can't imagine why you wouldn't, you can check out my history hit documentary, The Medieval Afterlife, where I visited her lab to see firsthand some of the skeletons she works with. You can find it, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, as well as enjoying History Hit podcasts ad-free, by signing up at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Remember, you can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and requests.

And if you have a moment, please, could you drop us a review or rate us everywhere you listen to podcasts? It really does help new listeners to find us. As always, my co-host, Matt Lewis, will be back on the Gone Medieval Throne on Friday, and I will see you again next Tuesday. Until next time.