Crypt: Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages and Beyond
Alice Roberts
Simon & Schuster, £22, 352 pages
Alice Roberts’s new book is the f nal instalment of a trilogy, which looks at death and burial using a “synthesis of history, archaeology and genetics”. In Crypt, unlike in her other books, Professor Roberts incorporates the study of disease. The result is a fine-grained yet elusive insight into moments in time. As Roberts explains in the epilogue, “archaeology is not the handmaiden of history”. Bone and biomolecules provide information about the past that is relatively free from the bias of historians.
Inevitably, though, Roberts brings her own bias to the facts. A vocal atheist, she struggles at times with our Catholic past. For instance, labelling 12th-century Santiago de Compostela a “tourist destination” misses the meaning the place would have held for the leprous pilgrim who took a scallop shell to his grave. Comparing a clerk who witnessed Thomas Becket’s murder (and described what he saw as like Christ’s Passion) to a person engaged with modern “culture wars” detracts from the reader’s ability to imagine the man’s outrage.
But Roberts is open about her bias and acknowledges that we “must be careful about viewing the past through our own cultural, moral lens”. She admits the impossibility of being “objective”. This self-awareness, combined with scientific rigour and dogged curiosity about the lives of others, makes for a compelling account of ordinary lives during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.
We begin with evidence of a late Saxon outburst of rage against Danish residents of Oxford. A mass grave made inside a Neolithic earthwork running beneath St John’s College and Keble College contains 35 individuals, most of whom were young men under 25. Study of their remains reveals violent attacks and evidence of burning, which can be vividly recognised in photographs of the bones.
The injuries suggest these men and boys were running; their skeletons tell us they were probably of Viking descent (they ate a lot of fish). Therefore, researchers are able to conclude that the St Frideswide Charter is likely to have been correct in asserting that “Danes” were attacked by locals, carrying out the instructions of Aethelred, and burned inside a local church. The Saxon record gains visceral reality through analysis of the bones.
Next we look at those who died in an early Norman hospital in Winchester dedicated to the care of people with leprosy. Roberts questions the motives of benefactors who cared for the sick by keeping them on the margins of society, but also conjectures that the disfiguring disease could have held a different meaning for 12th-century Christians. Through reference to contemporary accounts of “pious men”, Roberts suggests “perhaps someone with leprosy really did see their disease as almost akin to a religious calling.” At such moments, Roberts seems open to medieval systems of thought and belief.
We move on to the mystery of a skeleton discovered in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral in 1888 and re-examined in 1949. Reactions to these bones provide insight into the persistent significance of a certain saint. The Victorian investigators were sure they had discovered the bones of Becket – rescued by monks resisting the orders of Henry VIII. But they overlooked glaring inconsistencies with contemporary accounts of his murder, such as the absence of severe head trauma.
Roberts tells us that, within two weeks of the bones’ discovery, “a man from Margate” brought his son, whose sight was failing, to be cured. This incident speaks of the persistent importance of Becket and reflects the zeal of those who proclaimed these bones to be Becket’s despite uncertain evidence. By summarising what is known, Roberts allows the reader to speculate. She decides this is not Becket but – in the absence of conclusive evidence – does not assert it. Tantalisingly, a tooth, sent for dating in 1951 and returned undated, remains somewhere – lost. There could still be a way to date these bones.
In a chapter on plague victims, we see how DNA can record the plague’s mutations over centuries. Also – incredibly – DNA confirms the pathogen emerged between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago: as Neolithic people were shifting from hunter-gathering to farming. In addition, the discovery by archaeologists of a mass grave and previously forgotten hospital at Thornton Abbey in Lincolnshire confirms plague pits were even necessary in the countryside during the Black Death, which speaks of the extent of its devastation.
Studies of remains from the wreck of the Mary Rose – sunk in the Solent while fighting the French in 1545 – unravel secrets of Tudor weaponry. Biomechanists’ analysis of damage to the shoulders of these sailors is consistent with a 16th-century treatise that asserts that “English Bowes… do exceed and excell al other Bowes… in substance and strength, but also in the length and bignes of the arrows”.
Finally, a 15th-century skeleton lead s an osteoarchaeologist to discover the real historical woman who left written record of her life. Isabel German, an anchoress, was found bur ied in a crouched position in a pitlike grave located in the apse of All Saint’s, York. It seems she was a person of status, to be buried in this prominent position. But her grave is unusual and her bones display evidence of advanced syphilis.
An account of this disease and its spread leads Rober ts to speculation about the nature of this person’s role in her community and what sort of life she led. Did she dig her own grave with her hands, as anchorites were advised to do in their 13th-century rule of life, the Ancrene Wisse? Is there a possibility that syphilitic delusions characteristic of a late stage in the illness were interpreted by others, or the anchoress herself, as divine revelation? Roberts encourages us to wonder.
One of the most affecting aspects of this book is how Roberts reminds the reader of the dead all around us with stories to tell. For instance, “a strange rectangular feature” under the grass by Thornton Abbey contains the bones of children and adults laid carefully in the ground having been “individually wrapped in shrouds” by monks struggling to survive the Black Death themselves. Their evident care retains the power to move us. In this way, Roberts makes real individual lives, which have not left a significant impression on the historical record. She delineates their experiences precisely and with compassion.
<em>Hannah Glickstein is a youth counsellor</em>
