Discovery in Croydon

Hi all!

(This started off a news story and ended up with me getting exceedingly interested in Anglo-Saxons with rickets. A topic for another time, clearly.)

---

Today’s Anglo-Saxon in the news is a 1,300 year old skeleton from a front garden in  Croydon 16th April 2014. It was dug up by a builder. The homeowner got a distinctly unexpected phonemail to say that they had found a skull. She called the police, and the entire area was promptly shut down as a potential crime scene. Quite understandable, however on this occasion any crime which may have been committed was definitely out of their jurisdiction!

After testing in Florida it was revealed that the bones dated from 670 to 775. There was an almost complete adult skeleton, aged no more than 36, and a thigh bone from a child somewhere between 3 and 11. The bones are now on display in the Museum of Croydon. In 2016 apparently a report was commissioned to find out more about them. I can’t find it to save my life, so we’re just going to have to go with what the newspapers say the report said. *shudders*

Neither skeleton nor thighbone could be confirmed as male or female. The adult had had rickets as a child, but was no longer deficient as an adult.

For another Anglo-Saxon with a similar had-rickets-now-don’t, have a look at this cool article on skeletons found under Lincoln Castle. His reconstructed face is here!

Rickets is caused by lack of vitamin D, or sometimes lack of calcium. It was common before the 20th century but massively shrunk in occurrences after we started fortifying food like breakfast cereals and margarine. So eat your cornflakes, they really are good for you! People think that rickets is all about sunlight, and while sunlight is definitely incredibly important you can also get vitamin D from oily fish and eggs – and I’m sure we all know a few common ways to get calcium through food. More relevantly of course, this means that rickets can not only be caused or exacerbated by lack of sunlight but by malnutrition too. Thus it can be treated by eating more of the right food. Presumably the Anglo-Saxon had better access to eggs and stuff as they got older, somehow – I’m not good at 8th century life in comparison to 10th and 11th.

There are many signs and symptoms of rickets, and having as I said no access to the actual report I’m going to assume (gasp) that the diagnosis of childhood rickets was gained through skeletal deformities. The NHS website states some of these as: thickening of the ankles, wrists and knees, bowed legs, soft skull bones and, rarely, bending of the spine. There’s also the fact that bones with rickets don’t grow properly so the adult may have been shorter than others around them. On the other hand, they probably all had rickets too … hm, according to this book most adults were “of normal height”, which was 1.72 for men and 1.61m for women. Taller than bones found from the Roman period!

Rickets also messes with your teeth so the adult may have really needed a filling or two. Do I know Anglo-Saxon dentistry practises? No, I do not. Do I really want to  research if it was anything more than “This is very sore; please yank it out?” Most definitely. Making a note for after this month is over.

Oh boy, I’ve been sidetracked. No, but personally I find that this sort of thinking really helps me to visualise the person. They’re not just a skeleton now because we have a clue about how their early life may have been. Every now and again it pays for me to step back and remember that these were actual living human beings, not just stats or facts. I suppose that’s why historical novels are so popular.

---

Well, that was a random collection of words tonight! Hope you found some of it of interest! See you tomorrow!

An exceedingly natural burial

The French do make my life difficult sometimes. For once I’m not talking about the Normans, or even the French public toilets of my childhood holidays.

I have an alert set up for when “Anglo-Saxons” get mentioned in the news, and it’s often filled with French newspapers talking about us. Like, I know we as a country left the rational world a good ten months ago and are charging onward to the moon yelling “WE CAN DO ANYTHING!”, but still, stop clogging up my early medieval interests!

Eventually I found a couple of recent pieces of news about Anglo-Saxon discoveries. Sadly these won’t be quite as thorough as I was able to be with the cannibalism vs vampire story, because I can’t find the original report behind either story.

---

Today’s is about … well, not quite mummified trees. Kind of exactly the opposite, if you’re associating mummies with heat and drying out. Preserved. Really stunningly well-preserved.

(I tried to come up with an Old English heading along the line of “waterlogged trees” but couldn’t find any decent adjectives and couldn’t for the life of me think what tense the verb would be in (trees which had been soaked???). Ah language skills, I miss you.)

The story is about a discovery of two very rare types of Anglo-Saxon grave on a dig in Great Ryburgh in Norfolk. I’ll link you to the funding body’s article, Historic England, for want of a better source. I don’t know if I can use the images from that so I won’t – you should really go and look at them!

(I love learning about things like this. It can be so difficult to picture people from a long time ago without actual things to look at.)

As it obviously by now, these graves involved trees. The majority, with 81, were tree trunks. I think they were oak trees. These had been cut in half lengthwise and hollowed out. The bodies went in the bottom half and the top half was the lid. To continue the mummy theme, imagine a kind of tree sarcophagus. (Click the link up there and you’ll find an option to explore one of the coffins in 3d!). This is an ancient form of burial which we first see evidence for in the early Bronze Age, so, around 2000BC.

Forgot to mention: not only were the graves still around, so were the skeletons inside! Truly phenomenal preservation.

One of the things that I found most fascinating about this form of burial is that the trees had to come from somewhere, reliably, in large quantities. Did the Anglo-Saxon community involved “farm” the trees? “Death Orchards”? Did they perhaps trade for the trees with other areas? And the work was extremely intensive, up to 4 days work according to the Historic England article, so again was that labour which came from within the Norfolk community or was that bought in? If it wasn’t skilled work, just difficult, maybe slaves were involved? I would assume that the burials would be high-status but there were so many of them!

(Yes, the Anglo-Saxons had slaves. I’ll try to do something on this later)

The remaining six graves were even rare and more unusual. The grave space was cut into the ground and then the area was lined with planks of wood and more planks were used for the covering/lid. These are thought to be the earliest examples of this type of burial yet found in England.

However, the buzzword on most of the newspaper articles about this was “Christian”, because the lack of buried possessions and apparent timber church foundations nearby, along with east-west oriented placement, suggests this rural 7th – 9th century Norfolk settlement was Christian. There’s a novel Christian funeral for you – inside a tree.

The only reason that these pieces of wood remain so astonishingly intact is apparently:

“James Fairclough, Archaeologist from MOLA said: “The combination of acidic sand and alkaline water created the perfect conditions for the skeletons and wooden graves to survive, revealing remarkable details of Christian Anglo-Saxon burial practices.””

Lots of future study is planned on the bodies and the coffins to find about more how they lived and died, and finds from the dig will be kept at the Norwich Castle Museum.

---

There we go, a summary of a unique find. Hopefully in a while I can link back to this blog as I discuss their findings on the skeletons’ lives, but if not I have certainly enjoyed reading around the internet about this.

Hope you enjoyed reading too; let me know!

 

A Quick News Roundup

Things have occurred and I am in a grumpy and demotivated mood, but since this is a challenge and I am sticking to it, dammit, I will just show you some links to nice/cool Anglo-Saxon/Viking/etc things which have happened (fairly) recently.

The Jorvik Viking Centre has reopened after massive flood damage at the end of 2015. Their “reimagined” exhibition is a whole collection of experiences based around the discovered remains of York while it was under Scandinavian control (remind me to do a 101 on this). I really, really need to go one day.

In 2015, researchers at the University of Nottingham working in a thoroughly interdisciplinary fashion (can’t think of many other times when medievalists work with biologists!) discovered that an Anglo-Saxon remedy for eye infections not only works, but actually kills the superbug MRSA. Thus creating the new field of “ancientbiotics”! (Actual study here – remember, go to the study!!) This research is still very much alive and kicking today across the pond. I remember feeling very proud of my university when I heard about this – and also it’s a good kick in the teeth to those people who believe that progress is linear, our technology is best, and nothing can ever be learned by looking backwards. I might do a full blog post on it soon.

The brilliant Anglo-Saxon exhibition and living history farm which I knew as Bede’s World in 2013 (actually for some reason I always called it Bede’s Farm??) had major issues with funding and looked set to go under, but has now re-opened as Jarrow Hall. I desperately need to go back there too.

OK, this may only interest me, but, the phenomenally detailed Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland was published late 2016. I have met one of the editors! (Actually I have seen talks by him, two research associates, and a researcher of Irish names. Rubbing shoulders with the greats at the place-names conference last month!)

Do you really know what “Viking” means?

And last but not least, possibly my next trip:

The University of Nottingham Museum (Lakeside Arts) is opening up a new Viking and Anglo-Saxon exhibition. THINK OF ALL THE PHOTOS.

That’s all for tonight, see you again tomorrow!

Spel Banum – The Story of Bones

I had a different blog topic planned for today, but a friend sent me a very interesting article instead.

(Also please forgive the bastardised Old English in the title. I couldn’t resist giving it a go.)

So today we are looking at the collection of mutilated bones found in the medieval settlement of Wharram Percy. This archaeological study has just been released, and I am delighted to say that it’s Open Access, which means FREEEEEEE, and you can read it here if you want to. I’d recommend it. That was the one thing that my Masters really drilled into my head: always go to the original source where possible.

Let’s just indulge my main interest for five seconds:

Wharram: Old English hwer “kettle/cauldron” but in the plural dative (-um), so it’s more like “(missing word) at the cauldrons”. First attested in the Domesday book as Warran.

Percy: de Percy, from the Percy family.

(All information from A Dictionary of British Place-Names by A. D. Mills (revised first edition, 2011).

Ok, good, that was cool, let’s go!

---

ORIGINAL STUDY HERE

---

A collection of bones was found during an excavation for something else entirely in 1964. They were originally shrugged off as Roman remains, but some of them were carbon-dated somewhere between 182-86 and revealed to be from much later. Ten more samples were sent to be dated in 2014.

(Update for those unaware, the Romans were in Britain from AD43 to about AD410.)

Some of these bones were marked in ways that suggested they had been burnt, hit hard with something sharp, and broken soon after death. Some of the sharp implements used were knives, and others were “a sword or other sharp bladed implement”. (I wonder how many farming tools come under that heading …) The age range of the bones went all the way from 3 years old to over 50.

In sum, the whole collection consists of 137 bones representing a minimum of 10 individuals: six full adults (two females, two probable males, two unsexed), one possible female who died in her late teens/early 20s (above enumerated with the adults), one subadult in their mid teens, one child aged about 2–4 and one aged about 3–4 years.

We’re not talking full skeletons here, or anything close, as you can probably tell by those numbers. One complete human skeleton has over 200 bones. So. Bits and pieces.

Because I’m a medical nut too, I liked finding out that there was evidence of these diseases in the bones found: degenerative joint conditions, porotic hyperostosis and a case of Paget’s disease of bone.

The radiocarbon dating showed that most of the people probably died between 1000-1250.

So what happened to them?

Well, the investigation suggests that the heads were severed from the bodies before being burnt, and that the limbs were probably lying on the ground rather than stacked up in a fire since only one side of them is burnt. All the sharp implement marks were found on bones from the upper body, and all bar three of the marks are from extremely sharp un-serrated metal knives. They were probably buried elsewhere else before ending up in the pit where they were found. The scientists rule out several possibilities, like victims of battle (not enough sword marks) or a group of people excluded from church burials (suicides and unbaptised babies for example). They came up with two possibliltes: cannibalism through starvation, or:

“attempts to lay the revenant dead.”

Understandably the media has seized on “vampires” as their story, but I like the cannibalism theory, so let’s run through that briefly.

Potentially gruesome words ahead.

Medieval rural society was almost wholly harvest dependent – bad harvest meant a really, really bad food year. The study notes that between 1066 and 1300 twelve famines were recorded. And that was just the ones considered, and I quote, “worthy of note”. Wharram Percy’s soil wasn’t ideal quality for agriculture, and its upland northern location also made harvests less reliable than those lower down/more southern. (Despite what my mother thinks, those two things are not interchangeable). There isn’t much documentary evidence for medieval cannibalism, but the situation could have been severe enough, and other countries and places have shown that resorting to this does happen.

• Some of the long bones were broken: this could have been to extract tasty fatty bone marrow. Yum.
• They weren’t cooked in a pot, but could still have been roasted.
• There are some knife marks on bones which could indicate filleting the meat, but on the other hand the knife marks concentration around the head and lack beneath the chest area doesn’t fit known cannibalism patterns.
• The cut marks, burning and some breaking of these human bones are all different from those found on animal bones from Wharram Percy. This might indicate they weren’t being prepared for food, or simply, I think, that human remains in such desperate straits were treated differently.
• My Personal Thought: one of the diseases found in the bones, portico hyperostosis, has been used to show lack of adaption to environment, low iron due to fighting disease, and vitamin deficiencies. Sounds like a malnourished population to me …

Ok, fine, to the vampires. Zombies. Whatever.

People used to believe that corpses could rise from the grave, after death but before the flesh decomposed fully. These reanimated corpses generally had bad and destructive intentions. Though the Church tried to claim this belief had Satan at its roots, it might be far older than Christianity in Britain and was generally believed to happen to dead people who a) had done bad, bad things in life and had some leftover evil to spare or b) people who died very suddenly and so still had some life energy left over. How to deal with these horrors? Well, dig them up, cut them up, and burn them!

The fire at Wharram Percy wasn’t very hot (about 400 degrees) but would have been hot enough to remove or distort the skin and flesh, thus getting rid of the danger.

What’s the point of breaking the corpse’s legs if its flesh is the problem? Well, who knows, but it’s been recognised as a way that these corpses were dealt in other occurrences of reanimation.

Recorded “zombies” were always adults, and almost always men. This would seem to cast doubt on this interpretation, since as stated above there was a real mix of genders and ages in the Wharram Percy bones. However, documentary evidence is not the be all and end all, especially in an era without widespread literacy, and when looking at something that the church considered a sticky subject.

The authors think that the evidence weighs in the direction of reanimated corpses. I’m intrigued by the idea that it might have been cannibalism. Neither of these explanations explain why the bones were found in a pit away from where they had been buried, separate from the rest of their skeletons. I love a mystery.

Let me know what you think, or indeed if you’ve managed to read this far at all!

---

ORIGINAL STUDY HERE