In 2008 a stash of human bones was discovered in a ditch running under St John’s College, Oxford. They dated from the Anglo-Saxon period and, once reassembled, revealed themselves as the remains of 35 young adult males. The fact that these men had been thrown into a mass grave, with none of the usual pieties, suggested that they were outlaws of one kind or other. At the time England was engaged in a war of attrition with “the Danes” (a generic description that encompassed people from across Scandinavia), so the most likely explanation was that these unfortunate skeletons belonged to prisoners of war.
But on closer examination, explains Alice Roberts in this gripping set of tales from the crypt, the bones told a different story. There was no evidence of the badly healed old fractures that you would expect in fighting men. All the violence – savage lunges to the skull and puncture wounds to the vertebra – had occurred at the moment of death. Further testing on the teeth, which hold clues about childhood environment, showed that these men had grown up on a diet rich in fish protein, unusual for landlocked Oxford. The conclusion must be that they were indeed of Scandinavian origin but, far from being soldiers, they were settled civilians who had met a catastrophic end.
