The past was not a good place to die in Britain. Frightening diseases that are essentially vanquished in modern times were rife, deadly, and untreatable. Think syphilis, leprosy and the Black Death. Then there was the endemic violence. Readers of Alice Roberts’s Crypt, the third in her trilogy of books on life in Britain told through bones (after Ancestors and Buried), have the treat of meeting these monsters again. This time they’re not under our beds — they’re under our feet.
Crypt focuses on the “Middle Ages and beyond” (so roughly 1000-1500 AD) and chapters tell the stories of particular skeletons, anchored in the history of the time. The horrors start immediately, with a mass grave of violently massacred Danes. Soon we’re beneath the grounds of a medieval hospital in Winchester. Roberts, an academic anatomist and TV presenter, brings us up close with victims of leprosy whose faces were wrecked by the condition. “Where the maxillae, the bones that form the upper jaw should have been… there was a huge, gaping, figure-of-eight shaped hole.”
