Gone, but not forgotten: Personalising the anonymous medieval dead

This article is from Current Archaeology issue 412

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The decision by St John’s College, in the historic heart of Cambridge, to refurbish various properties just outside its main footprint prompted a series of small-scale excavations by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, beginning in 2004. These proved illuminating, and in 2007 our work beside the 19th-century Old Divinity School (which stands opposite the college’s grand Tudor Great Gate) uncovered a large quantity of disarticulated human remains. Human bones had also been discovered at the time of the building’s construction, in 1877, and documentary evidence provided the explanation: the medieval Hospital of St John, which was suppressed in 1511 to create St John’s College, had maintained a cemetery in the area.

Redevelopment plans for the Old Divinity School included creating a basement within the structure, and while our initial evaluation in 2009 was small and relatively inconclusive, doing little more than confirming the presence of more human remains, in 2010 we returned for a full-scale excavation within the building (see CA 286). At first, the remains that we uncovered were structural rather than human – representing a series of buildings and features dating to the 19th century and earlier – but after a few weeks skeletons began to appear from the soil, and soon densely packed graves had been revealed across the whole area, arranged in multiple layers. It was clear that, once the entire cemetery space had been filled with burials, the hospital authorities had simply repeated the process, creating new, shallower graves on top of their predecessors. The burial ground had been filled at least six times between the early 13th and early 16th centuries, and from this relatively small space our investigations recovered 400 skeletons.

Following analysis, in 2015 an account of the human remains was published in the Archaeological Journal, and while we regarded the project proudly as a thorough and competent piece of developer-funded archaeology, there was a nagging feeling that the skeletons remained a rather anonymous, undifferentiated population, and that we had not properly got to grips with the question of who had been buried in the hospital cemetery. These individuals had almost all been buried in regular rows, following the same rite and without grave goods, in what felt like a rather uniform, depersonalised manner, and our report had treated them in a rather similar style.

We had a chance to change this, however: through a series of serendipitous conversations and meetings, it became apparent that the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge possessed the expertise in several fields, such as stable isotope analysis, ancient DNA, and geometric morphometrics, to greatly enhance our understanding of the skeletons and who they once were. With Professor John Robb taking the lead, in 2016 a successful application to the Wellcome Trust saw the launch of a major research project based at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research: ‘After the Plague: health and history in medieval Cambridge’.

Comparing collections

From the outset of ‘After the Plague’, we realised that, in order properly to understand the hospital skeletons, we would need to compare them to groups excavated from other areas of medieval Cambridge. Fortuitously, soon after the project started, another CAU excavation revealed further traces of this period of the city’s past: the remains of Cambridge’s Augustinian friary, together with a portion of its associated burial ground (CA 409). We also relocated another group of skeletons that had been recovered during a much earlier investigation, centred on the cemetery linked to the parish church of All Saints by the Castle in the 1970s. Long before our initiative, in the early days of rescue archaeology, John Alexander (one of the founder members of Rescue – the British Archaeological Trust) discovered human remains while excavating on Castle Hill, a site that he had been exploring since the 1950s. Funding was raised from the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments (Department of the Environment) and the landowner (coincidentally, also St John’s College) to support a six-week excavation, and this work was directed by Paul Craddock and Vince ‘Greg’ Gregory, together with a small team including a youthful Phil Harding, later of Time Team fame.

Over the course of this investigation, Craddock and Gregory’s team excavated more than 160 skeletons from three areas of the site, while Alexander recovered 30 more from a fourth. The project was highly successful, methodologically innovative in its use of photogrammetric recording, and had ambitious plans to publish the remains along with a contemporary, contrastingly rural cemetery at the deserted village of Clopton that Alexander had excavated in 1964. Unfortunately, as was often the case at this time, post-excavation did not go so well. The skeletons were transferred to the Duckworth Laboratory of Physical Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, where they were studied by Charles Denston, and Craddock and Gregory produced an interim report, but a lack of resources and other factors meant that publication of the results did not progress any further.

By the time the ‘After the Plague’ project began in 2016, the excavations were a barely remembered rumour among local archaeologists – but we were able to track the skeletons down, still safely stored at the Duckworth Laboratory, where they had lain largely undisturbed for four decades since the mid-1970s. In 2017 we also managed to locate Paul Craddock, who still had the original archive for the investigations, and both he and Vince Gregory have generously supported the ‘After the Plague’ project in our efforts ever since. Their help proved vital to our research, as no other parish cemetery in the Cambridge area has been excavated on such a significant scale.