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REVIEW BY KK
This is the third book in Alice Roberts’ recent series, which began with Ancestors (highlighting seven famous burials from prehistoric Britain; see CA 380), followed by Buried, which covered the quickly evolving funerary traditions from late Iron Age Britain to the early medieval period. Crypt now heads firmly into the medieval period, dealing with human remains from roughly c.AD 1000-1500.
I am perhaps biased given my area of expertise, but I found this book the most compelling of the three. It helps that, by writing about medieval remains, Roberts is able to provide more details of the burials she has chosen to cover – both because of the accompanying historical record and the fact that human remains from this period are more plentiful and often better preserved, as well as being better researched. Due to this greater wealth of knowledge, Roberts decided to narrow the focus of this book specifically to health in this period, and to great effect. As with her previous books, she highlights what advances in ancient DNA have been able to bring to the table, including the ability to sequence viruses and bacteria found in the remains, even when no trace of disease is visible on the skeleton.
While Roberts still focuses on seven stories, as she did with her previous two books, in some instances the ‘osteobiographies’ – as she calls them – encompass remains from whole sites or, in one case, no specific site at all. The book opens with the story of the mass grave found on the grounds of St John’s College in Oxford, thought to have contained the remains of victims of the St Brice’s Day Massacre instigated by Æthelred the Unready after his unsuccessful dealings with the Danes (see CA 251). While this story deals more with evidence of violence than health, it does highlight the effects of growing xenophobia in this period – a key theme of the book that Roberts touches on throughout.
The second story heads firmly into the realms of disease, examining the site of the leprosy hospital of St Mary Magdalen on the outskirts of Winchester (see CA 267), while the third chapter tells the story of missing remains – those of Thomas Becket – and how his burial became the most famous medieval tomb in Britain (see CA 376). The fourth story delves into a medical mystery: the case of an apparent prevalence of individuals with Paget’s disease found at Norton Priory in Runcorn, Cheshire (see CA 353); while in the fifth story, Roberts covers perhaps the most famous health crisis during the medieval period: the Black Death. In this chapter, she eschews her theme a bit, to focus not on any one site in particular but instead on tying together the growing evidence of how long the bubonic plague had been present in Britain – with recent DNA evidence finding it among Bronze Age remains from Charterhouse Warren (see CA 401) – as well as on how many waves of pandemic it might have caused and the impact each one had. The sixth story is then back on more familiar territory, highlighting the famous skeletons of the archers from the Mary Rose (see CA 282). The seventh and final story delves into the intriguing details of a possible anchoress from York with syphilis (see CA 397).
One of the biggest strengths of the book, as I note above, is that Roberts has so much more material on which to draw, but, in some respects, that is also to the book’s detriment. Unlike in Ancestors, where she had the time and space to cover each burial in detail, here she has to cram a lot more knowledge and detail into the same number of pages. While on the whole she succeeds in this endeavour, it does change the tone of the book, making it a bit more academic (at one point she uses several pages to cover the finer details of how bones grow) with fewer personal anecdotes and asides. In her usual fashion, though, Roberts manages to cover these more intellectual points in a comprehensible and engaging way.
Crypt: life, death, and disease in the Middle Ages and beyond
Alice Roberts
Simon & Schuster, £22
ISBN 978-1398519237
