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Bones for Historians:
Putting the Body back into Biography
ROBIN FLEMING

OR MANY people the men, women and children who lived fourteen or fifteen
centuries ago are mere abstractions, and it is sometimes hard to comprehend
that the people we early medieval historians study were actually people rather
than concepts or faceless automatons pushed across time and space by anonymous, impersonal, historical forces. But the evidence of human bones helps to
re-animate the historical dead. When confronted with the skeletons of a mother
and baby who died during pregnancy, or the body of a tenth-century peasant with
polio, or a woman whose arthritic toes and bunions must have caused her feet to
ache, it is only then that we truly begin to comprehend that people in early
medieval Britain did live and did breathe. Bones, as a matter of fact, enable us to
say all sorts of things about the overall health and well-being of people living a
millennium before we have any other useful demographic data. Skulls and tibias,
for example, can betray dubious water and teetering health; tiny bodies infant
mortality; broken-necked corpses the terrible, bodily consequences of thievery.
While bones permit us to track broad demographic trends that none of the
periods texts disclose, the specificity of bones allows for more than this. Skeletons, first and foremost, are the remains of individuals, who, while living, had
hopes and sorrows all their own. These were people with individually aching
knees and their very own sore shoulders. They had private sufferings brought on
by infected lungs, poorly-mended fractures and dead loved ones. Because of this,
their remains can disclose truths about unique beings and singular lives, present
in no text and otherwise obliterated from all memory.
So, let us begin with some intimate details about the life and death of an otherwise anonymous seventh-century woman, a woman whom I shall call Eighteen
after the number archaeologists assigned to her grave. Eighteen was probably not
quite twenty when she died. In life, she had been on the tall side, indeed, as tall
as some men. Her early childhood had been a healthy one: she had never suffered
from serious anaemia, the way almost a fifth of her neighbours had, nor had
she lived through serious, growth-stopping malnourishment or dangerously high
fevers. She had never fallen so badly that she had broken a limb, although admittedly, this happened more to men more than to women, and she was not plagued

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by arthritis, but what nineteen-year-old is? Nonetheless, hers was an early death.
The most dangerous years for the women buried alongside her were those
between twenty and thirty-five. This is probably because they married late and did
not begin succumbing to the complications of pregnancy and childbirth until their
twenties. Eighteen, however, did not make it that far.
The community in which she lived, somewhere near Barrington in Cambridgeshire, was a little old fashioned. It was not as hierarchical as some seventhcentury communities: certainly, there were no new-fangled princely burials in
the cemetery where her community laid its dead to rest. Nor were women there,
if their graves are anything to go by, wearing much continental exotica, objects
that were wildly popular in other contemporary settlements. Still, some among
the community were given more elaborate send-offs than others, and this included
Eighteen herself. She was buried next to a clutch of spear-bearing males and was
accompanied by the most impressive cache of grave goods in the cemetery. The
most interesting thing about her grave is that it contained a bed, and hers is one
of only eleven bed burials known in England. Our woman wore a necklace hung
with silver rings and had latch-lifters hanging from her belt, accessories reserved
for high-ranking women, and she was laid to rest with special things an oak
bucket, a small vessel made from maple wood, a rare sword beater, and a box full
of little treasures, including a fossilized sea urchin. The most astounding thing
about Eighteen, though, was not her grave, but her skull. It is the skull of a leper.
Given what we know about the disease, she probably contracted it from someone
within her own household in her early teens, but its tell-tale lesions would not
have appeared for another three or four years. Although the disease, by the time
of her death, had not caused her to lose any fingers or toes, as sometimes happens
with leprosy, her lower legs were badly infected, and her face was terribly disfigured. She had lost much of the bone supporting her upper front teeth and nose.
Her face would have sunk in at its centre, and her wreck of a nose would have
been an infected, discharging horror. Yet in spite of her deformities, she was
treated in death with great respect, buried with considerable wealth and some ceremony in a well-dug grave lying at the heart of a communal cemetery. There is
no sign here that she led a pariahs life the way later medieval lepers did.1
The bones of Eighteen, her family, and her friends tell us things about life and
death in early medieval Britain that texts rarely do intimate things, the kinds
of things that we know from our own experiences make or break individual
lives and are the mainstays of modern biographies. But Eighteen is obviously a
special case, her remains extreme and dramatic in ways that most are not. Eighteens own affliction, after all, a rare, bone-deforming malady, enables us to know
things about her life and death that we can never discovered about the vast majority

The paragraphs on Eighteen are based on T. Malim and J. Hines with C. Duhig, The Anglo-Saxon
Cemetery at Edix Hill (Barrington A), CBA 112, 1998; K. Manchester and C. Roberts, The
Palaeopatholgy of Leprosy in Britain: a Review, World Archaeology 21, 1989, 26572; S. Anderson,
Leprosy in a Medieval Churchyard in Norwich, Current and Recent Research in Osteoarchaeology 3,
1998, 317; M. A. Judd and C. A. Roberts, Fracture Trauma in a Medieval British Farming Village,
American Journal of Physical Anthropology 109, 1999, 22943; T. Waldron, Counting the Dead: The
Epidemiology of Skeletal Populations, New York 1994, 73, n. 17.

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of early medieval people, even the ones we dig up, because most died as a result
of infections that moved so quickly that they left no impressions on the bones of
their victims.2 Beyond this, Eighteens skeleton and the story it tells are only
meaningful in the context of the bones and stories of the rest of her community,
and this is a truism for all osteological evidence: it is really only useful when
aggressively aggregated. When used properly to identify problems that plagued
whole communities, to compare the prevalence of these problems among different groups, and to think about their causes and their effects across entire populations human bones can provide historians with important and compelling
evidence.
Before we can explore this evidence and its implications, however, most historians will first need a short, crash course on the four gross skeletal indicators
of stress, things that can help us make determinations about the overall health,
morbidity (that is, disease load) and longevity of medieval people. The first indication of stress is constituted by a porous bone lesion, known as porotic hyperostosis (when found in the crown of the skull) or cribra orbitalia (when manifest
in the orbits of the skull). It is formed as a result of iron-deficiency anaemia suffered between the age of six months and about twelve years. When anaemic, a
childs body increases the bone tissue that creates red blood cells at the expense
of outer, non-blood-cell-producing bone, and it is this reaction that creates the
tell-tale lesion.3 Although developed early in life, it is permanently inscribed on
the skull, and thus, in adult skeletons these lesions preserve information about
serious bouts of childhood anaemia.4 Anaemias effects include exhaustion and
decreased learning ability, both of which can have major effects on the wellbeing of communities. More seriously it can also result in the late onset of sexual maturity; and severe maternal anaemia can lead to underweight newborns and
premature births: these, in turn, can significantly impact birth rates and infant
mortality.5 The most important thing, however, for historians to understand about

2
3

See below, p. 34.

D. J. Ortner and W. G. J. Putschar, Identification of Pathological Conditions in Human Skeletal
Remains, Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology 28, Washington D.C. 1981, 25763; P. StuartMacadam, Porotic Hyperostosis: Representative of a Childhood Condition, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 66, 1985, 39198, and Anemia in Roman Britain: Poundbury Camp, in Health in
Past Societies. Biocultural Interpretations of Human Skeletal Remains in Archaeological Contexts, ed.
H. Bush and M. Zvelebil, BAR, Int. Ser. 567, 1991, 10113, at 105; D. M. Mittler and D. P. van Gerven,
Developmental, Diachronic, and Demographic Analysis of Cribra Orbitalia in the Medieval Christian
Populations of Kulubnarti, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 93, 1994, 28797.
On the difficulty of scoring the severity of cribra orbitalia and judging whether the lesion is active or
healed, see K. P. Jacobi and M. E. Danforth, Analysis of Interobserver Scoring Patterns in Porotic
Hyperostosis and Cribra Orbitalia, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 12, 2002, 24858. On a
possible solution to this and other problems associated with determining cribra orbitalia, see M. Schultz,
Paleohistopathology of Bone: a New Approach to the Study of Ancient Diseases, Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 44, 2001, 10647.
S. M. Garn, Iron-Deficiency Anemias and their Skeletal Manifestations, in Diet, Demography
and Disease: Changing Perspectives on Anemia, ed. P. Stuart-Macadam and S. K. Kent, New York
1992, 3361, at 33, 467; and G. R. Wadsworth, Physiological, Pathological, and Dietary Influences on the Hemoglobin Level, in ibid., 63104, at 92; A. S. Ryal, Iron-Deficiency Anemia in
Infant Development: Implications for Growth, Cognitive Development, Resistance to Infection, and
Iron Supplementation, Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 40, 1997, 2562, at 356, 4041, 4550.

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anaemia is that although it can be caused by starvation, poor diet, or scurvy,6 it

is much more commonly the result of either chronic blood loss (through, for
example, diarrhoeal diseases, many of which are caused by parasites), or because
of bacterial or viral infections.7 This is because in the face of chronic infections,
the body removes iron circulating in the bloodstream in an attempt to reduce its
availability to whatever bacteria, parasites, or viruses are infecting it, all of which
need iron to thrive, but none of which produce it on their own.8 Anaemia is,
therefore, typically an adaptation to poor environmental conditions such as
appalling sanitation or high levels of pathogens, rather than diet.9 As a result, the
amount of hyperostosis and cribra orbitalia found within a burial community tells
us things worth knowing about the overall health and living conditions of that
population.
The second skeletal manifestation of environmental stress is dental enamel
hypoplasia, a condition that typically displays itself as horizontal lines etched
across the external surfaces of teeth, lines most clearly seen on the canines and
incisors. There is considerable evidence to suggest that dental enamel hypoplasia
is caused by stress-induced interruptions of tooth growth during childhood, and
that it is brought on by, among other things, an onslaught of disease, malnourishment, low birth-weight, or parasitic infection.10 Since tooth tissue is not remoulded
during life, and the tooth one has at seven is still the tooth one has a thirty, dental
enamel hypoplasia is a permanent record of early childhood trauma. The location
of hypoplastic lesions on the tooth, moreover, reflects the timing of stress during
childhood; and although aging these events is difficult, most experts agree that the
bulk occur between the ages of two and four, although lesions can begin to form
in the womb and continue to appear as late as six or seven.11 The severity of the
lesions, and thus the severity of the stress, can be measured by the deepness of the
ridges; and the number of stress incidents can be counted by toting up the number
of horizontal lines on individual teeth. This allows us to see how seriously and how
often children in a community suffered from bouts of ill health.
The third gross indication of stress is delayed or stunted growth. Patterns of
growth in a population are a good measure of a communitys overall health and

6
7

8
9
10
11

Schultz, Paleohistopathology of Bone, 137; D. H. Ubelaker, Porotic Hyperostosis in Prehistoric

Ecuador, in Diet, Demography and Disease, ed. Stuart-Macadam and Kent, 20117, at 21213.
Wadsworth, Physiological, Pathological, and Dietary Influences, 63104; K. J. Reinhard, Patterns
of Diet, Parasitism, and Anemia in Prehistoric West North America, in Diet, Demography and Disease, ed. Stuart-Macadam and Kent, 24851.
S. Kent, Anemia through the Ages: Changing Perspectives and their Implications, in Diet, Demography, and Disease, ed. Stuart-Macadam and Kent, 28.
P. Stuart-Macadam, Anemia in Past Human Populations, in Diet, Demography and Disease, ed. Stuart-Macadam and Kent, 159.
S. Hillson, Dental Anthropology, Cambridge 1996, 16577.
A. H. Goodman and R.-J. Song, Sources of Variation in Estimated Ages at Formation of Linear
Enamel Hypoplasias, in Human Growth in the Past: Studies from Bones and Teeth, ed. R. D. Hoppa
and C. M. FitzGerald, Cambridge 1999, 21040; D. J. Reid and M. C. Dean, The Timing of Linear
Hypoplasias on Human Anterior Teeth, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 113, 2000,
13539. On the possibility that male and female episodes of dental enamel hypoplasia may be timed
slightly differently, see V. Gallien, La Femme: Tmoin de lvolution du cimetire de la basilique,
Saint-Denis, durant le haut moyen ge, in La Femme pendant le moyen ge et lpoque moderne,
ed. L. Buchet, Dossier de Documentation Archologique 17, Paris 1994, 6986, at 8182.

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12

nutrition, so failure to thrive is a useful indicator of stress. Skeletal evidence

makes it is clear that medieval children were much smaller than their modern
counterparts, and this suggests that the former were subject to stresses that the
latter are not. Nonetheless, those who reached adulthood had heights very similar to those of mid-twentieth century Britons, so adult heights are not very useful for determining levels of stress.13 Besides subadult height measurements,
Harris lines are another indication of childhood-growth interruptions. Harris
lines are horizontal lines of increased bone density, most frequently found in
long bones and detected through x-ray. They are formed when a childs growth
has ground to a halt, and thus they can signal periods of childhood illness or
malnutrition. Since bones are remodelled throughout life, however, Harris lines
gradually disappear, so they should only be studied systematically in the skeletons of those who died as children or adolescents.14 Although there is no significant correlation between Harris lines and long-bone length (in other words,
children with Harris lines are as tall as children without),15 there is a relationship between Harris lines and the thickness of cortical (outer) bone, and in some
cemetery populations there is a correlation between Harris lines and dental
enamel hypoplasia or Harris lines and cribra orbitalia.16
The fourth and final stress marker is periostitis, an inflammatory response to
infection or injury that manifests itself in the formation of bony plaques grown
on the outer surface of bones. Unlike our previous three stress markers, periosteal
reactions can occur in adulthood as well as childhood. The lesions can be systemic, and found throughout a skeleton, or they can be highly localized; and in
medieval English populations periostitis is often confined to the tibia, that is, to

12

13

14

15
16

R. D. Hoppa, Evaluating Human Skeletal Growth: an Anglo-Saxon Example, International Journal

of Osteoarchaeology 2, 1992, 27588; L. Humphrey, Growth Studies of Past Populations: an
Overview and an Example, in Human Osteology in Archaeology and Forensic Science, ed. M. Cox
and S. Mays, London 2000, 2338.
Stunting occurs only if individuals suffer prolonged, severe deprivation. Otherwise, the growing period
is simply extended (S. Mays, Linear and Appositional Long Bone Growth in Earlier Human Populations: a Case Study from Medieval England, in Human Growth in the Past, ed. Hoppa and FitzGerald, 290312; R. H. Steckel, Stature and the Standard of Living, Journal of Economic Literature 33,
1995, 1911, 1923). As Brothwell points out, the difference in adult male height was negligible between
the peasants of Wharram Percy, members of Yorks Jewish community and the monks at Fishergate
despite their radically different diets (D. Brothwell, On the Possibility of Urban-Rural Contrasts in
Human Population Palaeobiology, in Urban-Rural Connexions: Perspectives from Urban-Rural
Archaeology, ed. A. R. Hall and H. K. Kenward, Symposia of the Association of Environmental
Archaeology 12, Oxbow Monographs 47, Oxford 1994, 12936).
S. Mays, The Relationship between Harris Lines and Other Aspects of Skeletal Development in Adults
and Juveniles, Journal of Archaeological Science 22, 1995, 51120; J.-L. Groulleau-Raoux,
E. Crublzy, D. Rouge, J.-F. Brugne and S. R. Sanders, Harris Lines: a Study of Age-Associated Bias
in Counting and Interpretation, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 103, 1997, 20917.
I. Ribot and C. Roberts, Study of Non-Specific Stress Indicators and Skeletal Growth in Two Mediaeval Subadult Populations, Journal of Archaeological Science 23, 1996, 6779.
Mays, Linear and Appositional Long Bone Growth, 290312. For a correlation between Harris lines
and enamel hypoplasia at Wharram Percy, see Mays, Relationship between Harris Lines, 51120. For
the correlation between cribra orbitalia and Harris lines at Barrington A, see Malim and Hines, The
Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Edix Hill (Barrington A), 176. See also, C. S. Larsen, Bioarchaeology: Interpreting Behavior from the Human Skeleton, Cambridge 1997, 423.

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17

the shin bone. This is a site of poor circulation, and thus an excellent home for
bacteria. Shin bones, moreover, have little padding, and bruising along the shin
promotes bacterial proliferation at the bone. Periostitis of the tibia was sometime
likely accompanied by oozing, chronic leg ulcers.18
As compromised as the health of excavated individuals were whose skeletons
and teeth are marked by stress, these people were not necessarily the sickest
members of their communities. We know, because of their skeletal and dental
lesions, that they were hearty enough to survive whatever ailed them long enough
for their teeth or bones to have been marked by the stress. Those who died of
their ailments swiftly, on the other hand, did not live long enough to undergo
such changes. Thus we face the famous osteological paradox: bad skeletons
(that is, skeletons marked by stress) sometimes represent healthier people than
good skeletons.19 Nonetheless, broad studies comparing trends across cemetery
populations do show, on average, that those whose skeletons exhibit signs of
stress had shorter lives. Individuals with dental enamel hypoplasia, for example,
show a marked tendency to die younger, indeed, much younger, than people in
their communities whose teeth were unmarked by enamel deformities. One
study, for example, has shown that individuals whose teeth display a single
episode of dental enamel hypoplasia died on average five and a half years earlier than individuals without such lesions, and those with two episodes died on
average eight years earlier.20 Similar examples are legion.21 This suggests that
individuals in historic populations who were ill in childhood were more likely to
be ill as adolescents and adults, because their immune systems had been damaged by stress, because those who were already sick were more likely to succumb to yet other infections, or because such individuals were more vulnerable
as a result of their social or economic circumstances.22

17

18
19

20
21

22

C. Roberts and K. Manchester, The Archaeology of Disease, 2nd edn, Ithaca 1997, 12930; Ortner and
Putschar, Identification of Pathological Conditions, 12938; C. S. Larsen, Bioarchaeology: Interpreting Behavior from the Human Skeleton, Cambridge 1997, 8291.
Larsen, Bioarchaeology, 85; Roberts and Manchester, Archaeology of Disease, 129.
For this paradox, see J. W. Wood, G. R. Milner, H. C. Harpending, and K. M. Weis, The Osteological Paradox: Problems of Inferring Prehistoric Health from Skeletal Samples, Current Anthropology
33, 1992, 34370. For an argument against this position when considering broad patterns across cemeteries, see M. N. Cohen, Does Paleaopathology Measure Community Health? A Rebuttal of the Osteological Paradox and its Implications for World History, in Integrating Archaeological Demography:
Multidisciplinary Approaches to Prehistoric Population, ed. R. R. Paine, Center for Archaeological
Investigations, Occasional Papers 24, 1997, 24260.
A. H. Goodman and G. J. Armelagos, Childhood Stress and Decreased Longevity in a Prehistoric Population, American Anthropologist 90, 1988, 93644.
See, for example, S. M. Duray, Dental Indicators of Stress and Reduced Age at Death in Prehistoric
Native Americans, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 99, 1996, 27586; A. L. Stodder,
Subadult Stress, Morbidity, and Longevity in Latte Period Populations on Guam, Mariana Islands,
Journal of Physical Anthropology 104, 1997, 36380; M. laus, Biocultural Analysis of Sex Differences in Mortality Profiles and Stress Levels in the Latte Medieval Population from Nova Ra!a, Croatia, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 111, 2000, 193209, at 208; D. P. Van Gerven, R.
Beck, and J. R. Hummert, Patterns of Enamel Hypoplasia in Two Medieval Populations from Nubias
Batn El Hajar, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 82, 1990, 41320; Mays, Relationship
between Harris Lines, 51120.
Goodman and Armelagos, Childhood Stress and Decreased Longevity, 93644; K. Manchester, The
Palaeopathology of Urban Infections, in Death in Towns, ed. S. Bassett, Leicester 1992, 814.

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So much for the basics. We will now turn to historic populations and explore
the ways in which poor sanitation, bad diet and disease affected the lives of early
medieval people like Eighteen. Let us look first at mortality within individual
cemeteries. One of the most striking things that comes out of the bone reports of
fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-century cemetery excavations is that some communities
were lucky and others were not.23 In a world in which people lived so close to the
margin, a single rainless summer, a few weeks of child-killing measles, or the
death of cattle could wreck the hopes of an entire hamlet for decades, and it is
clear from the bones of the early medieval dead that some communities were
dogged by misfortune. Nearly 40% of the skeletons excavated from the sixthcentury cemetery at Oakington, in Cambridgeshire, for example, show signs of
serious stress. A toddler there, dead before its second birthday, was suffering from
chronic anaemia. A dead eleven-year-old in the same cemetery had teeth marked
with the grooves and pits of dental enamel hypoplasia. Skeleton after skeleton at
Oakington exhibits related pathologies just over a third with cribra orbitalia and
just under a third with dental enamel hypoplasia.24 Similarly, over half the people
buried in another sixth-century cemetery, this one at Norton, in Cleveland, had
hypoplastic teeth, as did every juvenile buried in the eighth-century cemetery at
Nazeingbury. At Mill Hill, in Deal, Kent, on the other hand, only about 5% of the
population shows signs of hypoplasia.25 Clearly misfortune struck different places
in different ways, but a community with many desperately anaemic and sick children would have had a grimmer future than one in which they had all been spared.
Differences in communities fortunes can also be seen in the quite different
mortality rates of men and women as we move from cemetery to cemetery, a fact
recently emphasised by John Hines (see Table One).26 At Mill Hill half of all the
girls who survived to the age of fifteen were dead by twenty-five, and 65% were
dead by thirty-five.27 At Norton 47% of all the women were dead by twenty-five,
and 82% were dead by thirty-five.28 On the other hand, at the cemetery where
our leper was laid to rest Barrington A in Cambridgeshire only about a third
of all women died by twenty-five, although almost three-quarters were dead by
23

24

25
26
27
28

For a discussion of the marked variability in mortality statistics between early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, see J. Hines, Lies, Damn Lies, and the Curriculum Vitae: Reflections on Statistics and the Populations of Early Anglo-Saxon Inhumation Cemeteries, in Burial in Early Medieval England and Wales,
ed. S. Lucy and A. Reynolds, Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 17, London 2002, 88102,
at 98102. The first adult age-band Hines uses, however, is 1225, and this tends to even out male
and female mortality rates, because women probably did not begin dying at a higher rate until they
were old enough to become pregnant.
A. Taylor, C. Duhig, and J. Hines, An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Oakington, Cambridgeshire, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 86, 1997, 5790, at 66. To see just how high the prevalence of cribra orbitalia was at Oakington, compare with the data on stress from Table Seven, below.
Another early cemetery with similarly high levels of cribra orbitalia is the early medieval British cemetery at Cannington, where it was 35%. Levels of dental enamel hypoplasia at Cannington, at 54%, were
also extraordinarily high, P. Rahtz, S. Hirst, and S. M. Wright, Cannington Cemetery, English Heritage
Britannia Monograph Series 17, 2000, 253, 255.
K. Parfitt and B. Brugmann, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery on Mill Hill, Deal, Kent, Society for Medieval
Archaeology Monograph 14, London 1997, 236.
Hines, Lies, Damn Lies, 98102.
Hines, Lies, Damn Lies, 99, table 1.
S. J. Sherlock and M. G. Welch, An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Norton, Cleveland, CBA 82, 1992, 111,
table 16.

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Table One: Percentage of women who reached adulthood dead by the ages of twenty-five and
thirty-five
Cemetery

Dead by 25 (%)

Dead by 35 (%)

Castledyke
Barrington, A
Raunds
Norton
Mill Hill

25
35
44
47
50

42
72
71
83
65

Table Two: Highest adult mortality by cemetery and sex

Same
Men
Women
Total

Rural

Urban

Monastic

All

5
5
24 (73%)
34

0
2.5
7 (74%)
9.5

0
1.5
3 (67%)
4.5

5
9
34 (71%)
48

thirty-five.29 And at the cemetery at Castledyke South, in Barton-upon-Humber,

only a quarter of the women were dead by twenty-five, and over half lived thirtyfive years or more.30 Behind these dry statistics lay real communities, some with
few women and many motherless children, and others with adolescent girls and
grown women in every household. In the early medieval period, in particular in
the sixth century, when individuals and families were scrambling for resources
and social position, a hungry year or the dearth of household labour could ruin
a family, indeed could wreck a whole community, for generations. The quality
of life, then, communal sociability, the commonness of orphans and the competition between young men and older men for wives were dictated absolutely by
local demographic differences, which could vary markedly depending on the
luck of a community or a generation.
Nonetheless, in spite of their variability from one cemetery to the next, the statistics for mens and womens mortality tell broadly similar stories (see Table
Two).31 Out of forty-eight medieval British cemetery populations for which such
data is published, in five, adult men were as likely to die by the age of thirty-five
as women; in nine they were more likely to die by thirty-five; but in the remaining

29
30
31

Malim and Hines, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Edix Hill (Barrington A), 293.
G. Drinkall and M. Foreman, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Castledyke South, Barton-on-Humber,
Sheffield Excavation Reports 6, 1998, 225.
Some of the variation in the mortality rates of different cemeteries may be the result of problematic
data. In some cemeteries, for example, older womens graves may have been clustered in a part of the
cemetery that was never excavated. It is probably wise therefore, when thinking about overall mortality rates to discount the outliers Empringham II and Norton for their astonishingly early deaths, and
Caister-on-Sea and Castledyke for their populations equally astonishing longevity and take the midrange cemeteries as typical.

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Table Three: Percentage of adults dead by thirty-five by cemetery and sex

Cemetery

Femals (%)

Males (%)

Empringham II
Norton
Whithorn (Late Medieval)
Barrington, A
Sewerby
Raunds
Mill Hill
Berinsfield
St Nicholas, London
St Helen, York
Great Chesterford
Castledyke
Caister-on-Sea

94
83
75
72
71
71
65
64
60
56
45
42
41

86
82
65
63
50
46
47
62
63
39
47
41
24

Table Four: For every 100 men and 100 women who reached adulthood, number in population who lived to the age of thirty-five
Cemetery

Females

Males

Barrington, A
Berinsfield
Caister-on-Sea
Empringham II
Mill Hill
Raunds
Sewerby
St Helen, York
Whithorn (Late Medieval)
Castledyke
Norton
Great Chesterford
St Nicholas, London

28
36
59
6
35
29
29
44
13
58
17
55
40

37
38
76
14
53
54
50
61
35
59
18
53
37

Table Five: For every 100 males or 100 females born, number in population who reached the
age of thirty-five (child mortality calculated at 48%)
Cemetery

Females

Males

Empringham II
Whithorn (Late Medieval)
Norton
Barrington, A
Sewerby
Raunds
Mill Hill
Berinsfield
St Nicholas, London
St Helen, York
Great Chesterford
Castledyke
Caister-on-Sea

3
6.5
9
14.5
15
15
18
19
21
23
28.5
30
30.5

7
18
9.5
19
26
28
27.5
20
19
32
27.5
30.5
39.5

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thirty-four, women were more likely to die before men. The relentless and uneven
nature of these statistics overall shaped individual lives and communities in profound ways (see Tables Three, Four, and Five).32 At Raunds Furnells in Northamptonshire, for example, a cemetery used in the tenth and eleventh centuries, twice
as many women as men who reached the age of seventeen died by the age of
twenty-five (44% and 22% respectively). By the age of thirty-five, 71% of the
women were dead, but only 46% of the men were.33 What happened to all of these
dead womens households? Their children? How did people in Raunds clothe
themselves, with female labour is such short supply? What chance did a twentyyear-old man have of finding a wife, with so many older, more established widowers on the prowl? Were forty-year-old women lonely because most of the girls
they had grown up with were dead? We do not know the answers to any of these
questions, but given the evidence of bones, they are questions we should at least
be asking. The dearth of adult female labour, so clearly manifest in burial populations, may also help to explain broad economic and social transformations; for
example, why peasant families were increasingly drawn to nucleated settlements
in the middle and later Anglo-Saxon periods (because these were places where
female labour could be pooled), and why places with mills became such powerful
attractors of peasant populations (since the labour of what women there were was
freed from grinding corn each day). In any case, one of the constants across the
period we study is a worrying disparity in the mortality rates of men and women.
No history of a single childhood or adult life can be divorced from such statistics.
In spite of the inequalities in life expectancy between the sexes, whether male
or female, what the numbers on Tables Three, Four, and especially Five show, is
that the news was not good. At Raunds and Mill Hill out of every hundred boys
born, something like twenty-eight survived to see their thirty-fifth year, while at
Berinsfield and Barrington A only about twenty would. In twenty-first century
Afghanistan, present-day home of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, people have a life expectancy at birth that is slightly more than twice what it was for
the community burying at Raunds, and that of twenty-first-century Britons is

32

33

This trend was noted long ago by Brothwell, but he was using average age at death figures, which
can be misleading, D. Brothwell, Paeleodemography and Earlier British Populations, World Archaeology 4, 1972, 7587. Data for Tables Three, Four, and Five come from V. Evison, An Anglo-Saxon
Cemetery at Great Chesterford, Essex, CBA 91, 1994, 53, table 17; J. R. Timby, The Anglo-Saxon
Cemetery at Empringham II, Rutland, Oxbow Monograph 70, Oxford 1996, 30; A. Boyle, A. Dodd,
D. Miles, and A. Mudd, Two Oxfordshire Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries: Berinsfield and Didcot, Thames
Valley Landscapes Monograph 8, Oxford 1995, 1089, table 29; V. Evison, Dover: The Buckland
Anglo-Saxon Cemetery, London 1987, 128; M. J. Darling and D. Gurney, Caister-on-Sea Excavations
by Charles Green 195155, East Anglian Archaeology 60, 1993, 256, table 60; Drinkall and Foreman,
The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Castledyke, 225; Sherlock and Welch, An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at
Norton, 111, table 16; S. M. Hirst, An Anglo-Saxon Inhumation Cemetery at Sewerby, East Yorkshire,
York University Archaeological Publications 4, 1985, 34, figure 12; A. Boddington, Raunds Furnells:
The Anglo-Saxon Church and Churchyard, English Heritage Archaeological Report 7, London 1996,
115; W. White, Skeletal Remains from the Cemetery of St Nicholas, Shambles, City of London, London 1988, 30; Hines, Lies, Damn Lies, 97, figure 9; J. D. Dawes and J. R. Magilton, The Cemetery
of St Helen-on-the-Walls, Aldwark, The Archaeology of York 12/1, 1980, 65, table 14; P. Hill, Whithorn
and St Ninian: The Excavation of a Monastic Town, 198491, Stroud 1997, 5202.
Boddington, Raunds Furnells, 115.

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almost four times what it was for people in the early Middle Ages. The expectation of such extraordinary and commonplace longevity is transformative. How
different life must have looked to those digging graves at Raunds or Mill Hill.34
What about child mortality? It is usually impossible to determine, since children, especially those under two, are badly under-represented in British cemetery populations. Only three cemeteries the fifth- and sixth-century cemetery
at Great Chesterford in Essex, the tenth- and eleventh-century cemetery at
Raunds Furnells in Northamptonshire, and the somewhat later twelfth- through
sixteenth-century cemetery at Wharram Percy in Yorkshire seem to contain all
the children they should, so it is only here that we can estimate the prevalence
of child mortality. In spite of their chronological and geographical range, these
cemeteries tell a remarkably consistent story. Very nearly half of the individuals
buried in these three cemeteries were children under the age of seventeen,35 a
figure that closely matches levels of child mortality both for eighteenth-century
London and for undeveloped and developing parts of the world before the
onslaught of AIDS.36 A closer look at our three cemeteries makes it clear that the
first two years of life were the most lethal. Of all the people who were born in
Raunds, for example, 6% died at birth, another 15% died during their first year,
and another 3% in their second; thus, about half of all of the children who died
before seventeen died in their first couple of years, and a quarter of all babies
born died before they were walking and talking.37 At Great Chesterford, although overall child mortality rates were the same, more one- and two-year-olds
died here: 84% of all those who died before the age of fifteen died as babies or
toddlers.38
This level of mortality among children makes it clear that children as a
whole were unhealthy,39 a fact borne out not only by the skeletons of these three

34

35

36

37

38
39

In Afghanistan it is 42.9 years (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/af.html#People

accessed 28/11/2005), and at Raunds Furnells it was 21.8 years, Boddington, Raunds Furnells, 114,
table 42. In twenty-first-century Britain, life expectancy at birth is almost four times as great (78.38
years) (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/uk.html#People accessed 28/11/2005). It is,
however, clear that the age of older adults in archaeological populations is consistently underestimated
(R. G. Aykroyd, D. Lucy, A. M. Pollard, and C. A. Roberts, Nasty, Brutish, but Not Necessarily Short:
a Reconsideration of the Statistical Methods Used to Calculate Age at Death from Adult Human Skeletal and Dental Age Indicators, American Antiquity 64, 1999, 5570). It is important to remember that
just because many people died in their twenties and thirties that does not mean that everyone did.
Data from Parfitt and Brugmann, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery on Mill Hill, 219, table 18; M. E. Lewis,
Impact of Industrialization: Comparative Study of Child Health in Four Sites from Medieval and PostMedieval England (AD 8501859), American Journal of Physical Anthropology 119, 2002, 21123.
J. Landers, Death and the Metropolis: Studies in the Demographic History of London 16701830,
Cambridge 1993, 154, 340; T. Molleson and M. Cox, The Spitalfields Project, vol. 2. The Anthropology: The Middling Sort, CBA 86, 1993, 20913; Evison, An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Great Chesterford, 59.
Boddington, Raunds Furnells, 114. Similarly, in the parish registers kept for the poorest York parishes
in the 1590s, it seems that there was a 25 to 30% mortality rate among those under the age of one,
Rahtz, Hirst, and Wright, Cannington Cemetery, 1423.
Evison, Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Great Chesterford, 523, table 18.
According to a recent review article by Mary Lewis, child mortality and morbidity rates have become
accepted as a measure of population fitness and data from non-adult skeletal material are widely
believed to represent the most demographically variable and sensitive barometer of biocultural
change, M. Lewis, Non-Adult Palaeopathology: Current Status and Future Potential, in Human

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cemeteries, but by many others. At St Helen-on-the-Walls, a hardscrabble postConquest cemetery in York, the baby teeth of many of the youngest children
buried there are marked by dental enamel hypoplasia. Hypoplastic lesions on
deciduous teeth form in utero, so we know that these childrens mothers had been
sick or malnourished while pregnant.40 These children, then, had been born
stressed, and they must have been especially vulnerable to disease. At St Andrew,
Fishergate, another York cemetery, three-quarters of all those who died before
the age of twenty had hypoplastic lesions: a quarter of these had had at least three
episodes and a few had had as many as seven.41 Or again, at Wharram Percy more
children dying between the ages of six and eleven suffered from periostitis than
any other age group, which strongly suggests that these children were not only
the victims of low-level, systemic infections, but that their ability to fight other
diseases was compromised by their underlying ill-health.42 The babies, children,
and adolescents who were buried at Raunds, Wharram Percy, St Helen, and St
Andrew, Fishergate, all exhibit high levels of stress (see Table Six),43 and when
compared with those buried at the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cemetery
at Spitalfields in London, we can see that medieval children had considerably
more hypoplasia and periostitis. And when we compare these four medieval
cemeteries with another medieval cemetery, the one excavated at Chichesters
leper hospital, we can see that normal children did not have that much less cribra
orbitalia and dental enamel hypoplasia than children buried in the cemetery of a
leper hospital.44 Sick children and dead babies, then, were part of everyones life.
A statistic from Raunds, a community of some forty souls, gives some idea of
what it would have been like to live among so many dying children. Between the
ages of four or five and thirty-five, a villager would have probably witnessed the
deaths of well over thirty children.45
Although adults buried in medieval cemeteries were as tall, on average, as midtwentieth-century Britons, their anaemic, parasite-ridden children were not.46
One-year-olds at Raunds were the same size as modern babies, but by early adolescence many lagged behind twentieth-century children by as much as four

40
41
42
43
44
45
46

Osteology in Archaeology and Forensic Science, ed. Cox and Mays, 39. For a detailed study of childhood morbidity and mortality, based in part on data from Raunds, St Helen-on-the-Wall, and Wharram
Percy, see Mary Lewis, Urbanisation and Child Health in Medieval and Post-Medieval England, BAR,
Brit. Ser. 339, 2002.
Lewis, Impact of Industrialization, 21123; G. Stroud and R. L. Kemp, Cemeteries of St Andrew,
Fishergate, The Archaeology of York 12/2, 1993, 200.
Stroud and Kemp, Cemeteries of St Andrew, Fishergate, 204.
Lewis, Impact of Industrialization, 21123.
Data from Lewis, Impact of Industrialization, 217, table 3; Ribot and Roberts, Study of Non-Specific
Stress Indicators, 724, 78; Stroud and Kemp, Cemeteries of St Andrew, Fishergate, 2047, 219.
Ribot and Roberts, Study of Non-Specific Stress Indicators, 78.
Estimate based on the statistics published in Boddington, Raunds Furnells, 11315.
According to Waldron, the nineteenth century was the shortest moment in British history since the
Stone Age, but heights across the Middle Ages were the same as earlier and later periods (T. Waldron,
The Effects of Urbanization on Human Health: the Evidence from Skeletal Remains, in Diet and
Crafts in Towns: The Evidence of Animal Remains from the Roman to the Post-Medieval Periods, ed.
D. Serjeantson and T. Waldron, BAR, Brit. Ser. 199, 1989, 5573, at 62).

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Table Six: Prevalence of stress indicators in subadults

Cemetery

Cribra Orbitalia (%)

Hypoplasia (%)

Periostitis (%)

Raunds
Wharram Percy
St Helen, York
Fishergate, York
Chichester Hospital
Spitalfields

58
56
56
64
67
57

32
30
34
76
38
24

18
13
20
10
55
4

years.47 The same is true for Wharram Percy. Fourteen-year-olds there were the
same height as modern ten-year-olds. Even nineteenth-century child factory
workers were taller than these children. Still, undersized children grew to their
more-or-less genetically-programmed adult heights in the Middle Ages; it just
took them longer. Modern children finish growing at about eighteen, but in the
nineteenth century, a period for which we have good data, the working classes
continued to grow, on average, until the age of twenty-nine, and it looks as if
something similar was taking place among medieval populations.48 This simple
fact has profound economic and social implications. This was a world in which
human muscle power was in chronic short supply. Many people, by the tenth and
eleventh centuries, practised communal farming, which centred around the whole
villages participation in heavy ploughing with large teams of oxen. It was very
hard work, and some of its associated tasks required full-grown, male labour. Yet
this is a world in which about half the people living in it were children (see Figures One and Two),49 a world, moreover, in which many sixteen-year-old boys
were the size of todays twelve-year-olds, so most could not have done a mans
work.50 In a world like this it is little wonder that food was so often a worry, and
it is of no surprise that conspicuous consumption and the public squandering of
food were the best ways for aristocrats to show the world how rich they were.51
Hardwired into the demography of this world, then a world where about half the
people in it were children (and undersized children at that) was the predisposition towards poverty, labour shortages, hunger, and probably violence.
Town life in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries may have been even more
lethal than life in the countryside. A study of those living and dying in Early Modern Vilnius has shown that, on average, people there had both more stress episodes

47
48
49
50

51

Hoppa, Evaluating Human Skeletal Growth, 284.

Mays, Linear and Appositional Long Bone Growth, 299300, and The Archaeology of Human Bones,
London 1998, 6670.
Data from Boddington, Raunds Furnells, 114, table 42.
By the eighteenth century the sons of aristocrats were taller than the sons of members of lower social
classes, although this difference in height was more marked in childhood. During industrialisation, this
height gap widened, Steckel, Stature and the Standard of Living, 192122. It is not clear whether
there was a similar height gap in the Middle Ages.
R. Fleming, The New Wealth, the New Rich, and the New Political Style in Late Anglo-Saxon England, ANS 23, 2001, 122.

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ROBIN FLEMING
20
18
16

Population (%)

14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
01

12

26

612

1217 1725
Age range

2535

3545

45!

Figure One: Age structure of population at Raunds

46% adults
54% children

Figure Two: Ratio of children to adults at Raunds

and more severe ones than did Danish peasants living in the thirteenth, fourteenth,
and fifteenth centuries, and something similar may hold true for England.52 Certainly, periostitis, dental enamel hypoplasia, and cribra orbitalia were more prevalent among townspeople than among those burying in many rural cemeteries, and
this suggests that townspeople had higher parasite and pathogen loads.53
A comparison, for example, of the urban cemetery of St Helen-on-the-Walls and

52

53

P. Zydrune, R. Jankauskas, and J. Boldsen, Enamel Hypoplasia in Danish and Lithuanian Late
Medieval/Early Modern Samples: a Possible Reflection of Child Morbidity and Mortality Patterns,
International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 12, 2002, 189201.
22% of the people buried at the urban cemetery of St Helen, York, for example, were suffering from
periostitis, and at Fishergate 20% were. At the rural cemetery at Castledyke, on the other hand, the prevalence of periostitis was 7%, and at Mill Hill, Norton, and Raunds it was 8%, A. L. Grauer, Patterns of
Anemia and Infection from Medieval York, England, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 91,
1993, 20313, at 208; Brothwell, On the Possibility of Urban-Rural Contrasts, 135; Drinkall and

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the rural cemetery of Wharram Percy, 30 km down the road, has shown that both
porotic hyperostosis and periostitis were twice as prevalent among those buried at
St Helen. There are a number of reasons for this. An individuals immunity is influenced, in important ways, by living and sanitary conditions.54 In urban communities
both were considerably more degraded than they were in small-scale settlements.
Towns, with their large populations, their pools of new immigrants, and their seriously compromised drinking water were environments in which diseases tended to
linger longer, kill more, and, indeed, settle in and become endemic.55 Immigrants
from rural communities arriving in late adolescence would have suffered very high
mortality rates in towns, because they did not have immunities to urban scourges
that those who had grown up with them did.56 And because urban communities had
comparatively large and vulnerable populations, they had enough people to serve
as permanent human reservoirs for slow-moving killers like leprosy and tuberculosis. Many an excavated rural cemetery has disgorged a leper or two, but it was
only in towns, and probably only from the twelfth century on, that leprosy was a
serious scourge.57 The cemetery attached to St John Timberhill in Norwich, for
example, used on either side of the Norman Conquest, contained something like
thirty lepers,58 a number never seen in rural cemeteries. Rural cemeteries often
contain one or two victims of tuberculosis as well, but this disease, and, indeed, a
nastier form of it, was far more prevalent in towns, where it had larger numbers of
hosts, and, therefore, higher levels of infection.59 Other faster-moving killers
smallpox, mumps, influenza, and cholera were unable to persist in small, rural
settlements for any length of time, because they would erupt suddenly and infect
all those without immunity. Within a week or two some would have died, but
everyone who had survived gained immunity, so these infections disappeared as
quickly as they had come. Tenth-, eleventh-, and twelfth-century towns, however,
with their hefty populations and their pools of immigrants ripe for infection were
places where diseases simmered, or came back year after year.60

54
55
56
57

58
59
60

Foreman, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Castledyke, 231; Parfitt and Brugmann, The Anglo-Saxon
Cemetery on Mill Hill, 230, table 23. Similarly, the prevalence of dental enamel hypoplasia differed
between rural and urban cemeteries. At the rural cemeteries of Empringham II and Castledyke its prevalence was 13% and 9% respectively, but for the urban sites of Ipswich School Street and Norwich Castle, it was 32.4% and 80%, Timby, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Empringham, 28; Drinkall and
Foreman, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Castledyke, 228. For the relative rates of cribra orbitalia
between early Anglo-Saxon and urban communities, see below, Table Seven.
Manchester, The Palaeopathology of Urban Infections, 89.
Manchester, The Palaeopathology of Urban Infections, 1112.
Landers, Death and the Metropolis, 2930; B. A. Kaplan, Migration and Disease, in Biological
Aspects of Human Migration, ed. C. G. N. Mascie-Taylor and G. W. Lasker, Cambridge 1988, 21547.
Indeed, between 1066 and 1250 several hundred leper hospitals were founded, C. Rawcliffe, Learning to Love the Leper: Aspects of Institutional Charity in Anglo-Norman England, ANS 23, 2001, 231.
For a list of cemeteries with excavated lepers, see C. A. Roberts, The Antiquity of Leprosy in Britain:
the Skeletal Evidence, in The Past and Present of Leprosy: Archaeological, Historical, and
Palaeopathological and Clinical Approaches, ed. C. A. Roberts, M. E. Lewis, and K. Manchester,
BAR, Int. Ser. 1054, 2002, 21321, at 218, table 1.
S. Anderson, Leprosy in a Medieval Churchyard in Norwich, Current and Recent Research in
Osteoarchaeology 3, 1998, 3137.
Manchester, The Palaeopathology of Urban Infections, 1011.
Manchester, The Palaeopathology of Urban Infections, 1112.

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ROBIN FLEMING

Early medieval towns were also astonishingly filthy. Our evidence for this
comes primarily from excavations done at York.61 From them we know that
houses in Anglo-Scandinavian York were crawling with bugs, and this was probably true in all pre-Conquest towns. Rove and silken fungus beetles, hairy cellar
beetles, spider beetles, and nocturnal black beetles all of which could be found
scuttling in the thatch and walls, or scurrying across the floors of town dwellers
homes were common house dwellers at 1622 Coppergate. Pests with less
lovely names also infested Coppergate houses: fleas, body lice, flies, and sheep
keds found conducive environments indoors.62 Latrines and cesspits, too, were
homes to enormous populations of insects. The total number estimated from the
cesspits excavated at 1622 Coppergate alone is on the order of ten million!63
Flies, fleas, lice, and beetles also act as vectors for pathogenic micro-organisms,
including poliomyelitis, salmonella, and summer diarrhoea.64 Cesspits and
heaps of rotting, carelessly dumped rubbish were omnipresent in both AngloScandinavian and Anglo-Norman York, and they were fatally near wells.65 They
acted as reservoirs for intestinal nematode parasites, in particular whipworm and
maw worm, which are frequently recorded in cesspit fills and in excavated faecal
material; and there is evidence that some people in York bore very heavy parasite loads indeed.66 This terrible concatenation of insects, micro-organisms and
filth must lie behind much of the human misery etched on the bones of the urban
dead.
The insalubriousness of urban life was exacerbated before the later twelfth
century by the fact that so little was built in, or covered, by stone. RomanoBritish towns were cleaner, in part, because so much within them was constructed from inorganic materials like brick, tile, cobbles, and stone; and, as a
result, they had much less surface build-up of organic, rotting, insect-friendly,

61
62

63
64
65

66

H. K. Kenward and A. R. Hall, Biological Evidence from Anglo-Scandinavian Deposits at 1622 Coppergate, The Archaeology of York 14/7, 1995, 447, 6627.
Kenward and Hall, Biological Evidence from Anglo-Scandinavian Deposits, 662, 698705; H. K.
Kenward and E. P. Allison, Rural Origins of the Urban Insect Fauna, in Hall and Kenward, UrbanRural Connexions, ed. Hall and Kenward, 5577, at 59, 65. Human flea and lice infestations were also
common in rural sites, if the findings from the early medieval Irish rath at Deer Park Farms are any
thing to go by. Nonetheless, insect populations, while diverse, seem to have been smaller, H. K. Kenward and E. P. Allison, A Preliminary View of Insect Assemblages from the Early Christian Rath Site
at Deer Park Farms, Northern Ireland, in Environment and Economy in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. O.
Rackham, CBA 89, 1994, 93.
H. K. Kenward and F. Large, Insects in Urban Waste Pits in Viking York: Another Kind of Seasonality, Environmental Archaeology (a.k.a. Circaea) 3, 1998, 3553.
Kenward and Hall, Biological Evidence from Anglo-Scandinavian Deposits, 7624.
P. V. Addyman, The Archaeology of Public Health at York, England, World Archaeology 21, 1989,
24464, at 257. One of the Anglo-Scandinavian wells, moreover, when excavated, was full of frogs,
which had been trapped in life when they fell into the functioning well, and then died. This must
have fouled the water, P. J. Piper and T. P. OConnor, Urban Small Vertebrate Taphonomy: a Case Study
from Anglo-Scandinavian York, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 11, 2001, 33644, at 342.
Kenward and Hall, Biological Evidence from Anglo-Scandinavian Deposits, 6967, 7589; A. R. Hall,
H. K. Kenward, D. Williams, and J. R. A. Greig, Environment and Living Conditions at Two AngloScandinavian Sites, The Archaeology of York 14/4, 1983, 2259. Evidence for human parasites and
lice has also been found for tenth- and eleventh-century Norwich, ibid., 449, and Kenward and Allison, Rural Origins, 69.

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67

pathogen-loving waste. It was only from the later twelfth century on that York
and other English towns began using inorganic building material as a matter of
course, especially for cellars, foundations, and stone-clad wells, and they probably became healthier places as a result.68
When the prevalence of stress indicators like cribra orbitalia in urban cemeteries is compared with prevalence in early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, it seems that
early, rural populations were considerably less stressed than later, urban ones, and
they were probably healthier. In many pagan-period, rural cemeteries, for example,
well under 20% of the population exhibited signs of cribra orbitalia, but in urban
cemeteries the number is often closer to 30%. Similarly, in many early rural
cemeteries under 10% of the population exhibited signs of periostitis, but in urban
cemeteries it was often closer to twice this (see Table Seven and note 53).69
Nonetheless, peasants living in the relatively large, densely settled, nucleated
villages established from the mid to late Anglo-Saxon periods on were also
less healthy than their early progenitors, who had generally lived in small, open,
drifting settlements (see Table Seven). This suggests that life in tenth- and eleventhcentury nucleated villages with their larger populations, greater settlement densities, and permanent locations was hard on the health of cultivators. It is a
public-health truism that in pre-industrial societies, the larger and the more sedentary the group, the greater the frequency of chronic disease, tuberculosis, intestinal
infections, and parasites, and it follows that large, compact villages were less
healthful than small, scattered hamlets.70 In other historical contexts, moreover, it
is clear that taxing states and aggressive landlords, both of which were omnipresent
in late Anglo-Saxon England, were hazardous to peasants health. The frequency
of dental enamel hypoplasia among Floridas Native Americans, for example,
increased dramatically after they became entangled in the Spanish mission
system;71 and Christian communities in Late-Antique Sudan had a much greater
67

68

69

70

71

A. R. Hall, H. K. Kenward, and D. Williams, Environmental Evidence from Roman Deposits in Skeldergate, The Archaeology of York 14/3, 1980, 1334. Wooden houses without stone foundations or cellars must have been very damp and full of rot, given the fact that water and subterranean beetles were
often found in the floor debris of Coppergate houses (Kenward and Allison, Rural Origins, 5965).
Kenward and Hall, Biological Evidence from Anglo-Scandinavian Deposits, 446; Addyman, The
Archaeology of Public Health at York, 2599. Highly organised Roman institutions and infrastructures dealing with waste removal also made Roman cities healthier human environments, J. Greig, The
Interpretation of Pollen Spectra from Urban Archaeological Deposits, in Environmental Archaeology
in the Urban Context, ed. A. R. Hall and H. K. Kenward, CBA 43, 1982, 4766.
Data from Malim and Hines, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Edix Hill (Barrington A), 175; Parfitt, and
Brugmann, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery on Mill Hill, 229, table 23, 230; Hill, Whithorn and St Ninian,
546; Boddington, Raunds Furnells, 123; Sherlock and Welch, An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Norton,
119; Timby, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Empringham, 28; Taylor, Duhig, and Hines, An AngloSaxon Cemetery at Oakington, Cambridgeshire, 66; M. L. Blakey, T. E. Leslie, and J. P. Reidy, Frequency and Chronological Distribution of Dental Enamel Hypoplasia in Enslaved African Americans:
a Test of the Weaning Hypothesis, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 95, 1994, 37183, at
376; Molleson and Cox, The Spitalfields Project, 423.
Cohen, Does Paleaopathology Measure Community Health?, 244, 248; Molleson and Cox, The Spitalfields Project, 44; A. Keenleyside, Skeletal Evidence of Health and Disease in Pre-Contact Alaskan
Eskimos and Aleuts, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 107, 1998, 61.
S. W. Simpson, Reconstructing Patterns of Growth Disruption from Enamel Microstructure, in
Human Growth in the Past, ed. Hoppa and FitzGerald, 2589; M. Schultz, C. S. Larsen, and K. Kreutz,
Disease in Spanish Florida: Microscopy of Porotic Hyperostosis and Cribra Orbitalia, in Bioarchaeology of Spanish Florida: the Impact of Imperialism, ed. C. S. Larsen, Gainsville FL 2001, 20810.

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Table Seven: Prevalence of cribra orbitalia in different burial populations

Cemetery

Type

Prevalence (%)

Early/Rural
Early/Rural
Early/Rural
Early/Rural
Early/Rural
Early/Rural
Early/Rural
Early/Rural
Medieval/Urban
Medieval/Urban
Medieval/Urban
Medieval/Urban
Medieval/Urban
Later/Rural
Later/Rural
Romano-British/Urban
18th & 19th Century/Urban
18th & 19th Af.Amer/Urban

Barrington A
Caister
Castledyke
Empringham II
Great Chesterford
Mill Hill
Mornington Thorpe
Norton
Fishergate, York
Ipswich, School St
Jewbury, York
Norwich Castle
Whithorn
Raunds
Wharram Percy
Poundbury
Spitalfields
Philadelphia

18
18
7
13
6
8
10
9
21
32
22
80
30
29
53
28
34
89

prevalence of cribra orbitalia than those living after state control and the power of
local landlords had collapsed.72 We should not, therefore, look for broad improvements of mortality and morbidity across whole populations as we move forward
in time.
Nonetheless, there is some indication that by the later twelfth century those
living economically and socially privileged lives were beginning to live longer,
healthier ones as well. In the early Anglo-Saxon period it does not look as if there
was enough real and social distance between people of high and low status for
the former to enjoy more favourable levels of mortality and morbidity; and I suspect this was more-or-less the case for the whole of the Anglo-Saxon period.73
Certainly, those buried with rich collections of grave goods often had bones
marked by stress, so wealth and social status did not stop the privileged few from

72
73

Mittler and van Gerven, Developmental, Diachronic, and Demographic Analysis of Cribra Orbitalia,
296.
Because the skeletal reports for two high-status sites, Flixborough and Brandon, are not yet published,
it is difficult to do more than guess. Nonetheless, what little has been published on the skeletal material from these sites suggests that their populations were none too healthy, in spite of their high-status
natures, C. Loveluck, Wealth, Waste, and Conspicuous Consumption: Flixborough and its Importance
for mid and late Saxon Settlement Studies, in Image and Power in the Archaeology of Early Medieval
Britain: Essays in Honour of Rosemary Cramp, ed. H. Hamerow and A. MacGregor, Oxford 2001,
856, and C. Loveluck and K. Dobney, A Match Made in Heaven or a Marriage of Convenience? The
Problems and Rewards of Integrating Palaeoecological and Archaeological Data, in Environmental
Archaeology: Meaning and Purpose, ed. U. Albarella, Boston 2001, 16062, 166; Parfitt and Brugmann, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery on Mill Hill, 230, 236. The body of Count Raymond II of Toulouse
(d. 978) has been examined. Besides having suffered a badly broken arm as a child, the counts skeleton bore signs of both cribra orbitalia and dental enamel hypoplasia, and he died in his thirties,
. Crubzy and C. Dieulafait, Le comte de lan mil, Aquitania, supplement 8, 1996, 10332.

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breathing the same air and drinking the same bad water as their dependants.
There is, however, some evidence that from the twelfth century on professional
religious were living longer that other people, and this may reflect lower mortality rates among all people of means, not just monks and canons. Cemeteries
of ecclesiastical communities (which, of course, did not just contain monks, but
sometimes include the bodies of wealthy patrons as well) often have larger numbers of older individuals than do other cemeteries. Among the canons buried at
St Andrew, Fishergate, for example, it seems that two-thirds died after the age of
forty, as did two-thirds of the monks of Westminster, which is astonishing, considering the mortality rates found in cemeteries used by peasants and the urban
poor.74 A condition, moreover, known as diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis,
or DISH, is particularly prevalent in monastic cemeteries. In modern populations
DISH is closely associated with aging, with late-onset diabetes, and with obesity. Its prevalence among monks is suggestive both of their high living and their
long lives.75 Economic privilege, carefully designed water systems, organised
waste disposal, and construction in stone must have all contributed to the increasing longevity of professional religious from the twelfth century on, and these factors may well have been operating in aristocratic households too.76
So, what, in the end, do the bones of the dead tell us about living and dying in
early medieval Britain that texts cannot? First they suggest that numbers matter.
It is not enough to say that women died in childbirth, that infant mortality must
have been high, or that people were often ill. It is only when we look at the statistics provided by the bones of the early medieval dead that we come face to face
with just how dire life in our period was; how sick, how sad and how short. With
the cold, hard numbers in our heads we can see that one out of every two babies
born in Raunds was dead by eighteen; that nine baby girls born there out of ten
would be dead by thirty-five; that most first-time seventeen- or eighteen-year-old
mothers own mothers were dead; that every village had to have had a sad, little
gang of orphans. Texts, especially British texts before 1100, do not tell us any of
this, and yet we have this vast reservoir of evidence that does, and it behoves us
to learn how to use it. Second, the specificity of bones matters. Narrative sources,
again particularly those before 1100, do not allow us to see the leg ulcers that
plagued so many; the swarms of disease-carrying flies; the constant discomfort
caused by a gut full of parasites; the scrawny, undersized, fourteen-year-old boys.
Yet these were fundamental, bodily aspects of most peoples lives in the early
Middle Ages, and we need to come to grips with them, if we ever hope to understand particular individuals lives. Third, bones betray the human cost of things
often written about by historians as impersonal and faceless trends. The story of
the rise of urban communities was clearly, when we look at cemeteries, about
more than the rise of the commercial economy. For many, it was about sick children, fast-moving illnesses, and early death. The genesis of nucleated villages and
74
75

76

Stroud and Kemp, Cemeteries of St Andrew, Fishergate, 256.

J. Rogers and T. Waldron, DISH and the Monastic Way of Life, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 11, 2001, 35765; W. Rodwell, Wells Cathedral: Excavations and Structural Studies
197893, 2 vols., English Heritage Archaeological Report 21, 2001, ii, 55053, 561.
Stroud and Kemp, Cemeteries of St Andrew, Fishergate, 255.

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interventionist landlords did more than change the look of the landscape and the
pace of the economy. Peasants lived less healthy lives because of these developments. The human costs of some of the periods grand trends, then, can sometimes
be recovered if we look at bones; and with them we can begin to discern just how
high a price some people did, in fact, pay. Fourth and finally, our texts, for the
most part, tell us about men, about monks, about the holders of land, and about
the people who lived after c. 700; but the vast majority of people in early medieval
Britain could be placed in none of these categories. Thus, if we limited ourselves
to texts we would never know about the likes of Eighteen. Yet this womans bones
allow us to say something specific, personal, and meaningful about her otherwise
forgotten life. In the end, then, bare bones are one of the few things that survive
from the period that actually allow us to see the flesh and blood of people whose
biographies we wish to write.