Last week news broke on the results of a study which was set up after the discovery of a medieval cemetery in Cambridge a few years ago that just happens to have been active during the Black Death.
It is thought that London possibly suffered the worth mortality rate in the world from the Black Death but back then Cambridge was a a comparatively small city numbering a couple of thousand people so how was life for them?
Researchers analysed over 400 humans remains from the main cemetery of the hospital of St John the Evangelist in Cambridge.
Their analysis reveals how people buried there came from a wide variety of backgrounds.
From a plague-survivor named Wat to a woman called Eadgifu who died in childbirth, meet some of the ‘common’ people of medieval Cambridge.
The hospital of St John the Evangelist was founded in 1195, and housed a dozen or so ‘poor and infirm’ inmates at any one time. The hospital lasted for around 300 years, before being replaced by St John’s College in 1511.
While the site was first excavated back in 2010, until now, little has been known about the patients who lived there. Now, scientists have combined skeletal, isotopic, and genetic data in the hopes of piecing together their lives.
‘Like all medieval towns, Cambridge was a sea of need,’ said Professor John Robb, who led the study.
‘A few of the luckier poor people got bed and board in the hospital for life. Selection criteria would have been a mix of material want, local politics, and spiritual merit.’
On average, inmates in the hospital were an inch shorter than townsfolk, and were much more likely to have traces on their bones of childhood trauma.
However, they also had lower rates of bodily trauma, which suggests life in the hospital reduced physical hardship or risk.
Based on their findings, the researchers have launched a new website called ‘After The Plague’, which details the life stories of 16 of the residents.
For example, one man named Wat survived the plague, eventually dying as an older man with cancer in the hospital.
Anne, meanwhile, had a life beset by repeated injuries, leaving her to hobble on a shortened right leg.
‘She is clearly what is sometimes called a “trauma recidivist” – somebody who repeatedly suffers injuries,’ the researchers write on the website.
Edmund suffered from leprosy, but – contrary to stereotypes – lived among ordinary people, and was buried in a wooden coffin.
And Eadgifu was a young woman who moved to the hospital from the nearby village of Hinton, and possibly died in childbirth.
‘When “Eadgifu” died, she had active inflammation inside her sinuses and inside her nasal cavity,’ the team explained.
‘She also had a 36-40 week old foetus, which was found in her abdominal region when her skeleton was excavated.
‘It isn’t clear whether she died in childbirth, or died shortly before she would have given birth.’
The researchers hope their study will highlight how medieval poverty was not homogenous, with the hospital helping people from many different backgrounds.
‘They chose to help a range of people,’ the researchers added.
‘This not only fulfilled their statutory mission but also provided cases to appeal to a range of donors and their emotions: pity aroused by poor and sick orphans, the spiritual benefit to benefactors of supporting pious scholars, reassurance that there was restorative help when prosperous, upstanding individuals, similar to the donor, suffered misfortune.’
Lepers, pregnant women and the insane were prohibited, while piety was a must. Those living in the hospital were required to pray for the souls of hospital benefactors, to speed them through purgatory. So in a way it was a system that suited the fortunate and less fortunate as the poorest and illest got help in this world whilst the hospital was like a prayer factory and helped get the rich benefactors into heaven.
If you visit their website you can read up on a number of life stories that have been determined by the skeletal remains of those buried in the hospital graveyard but I have copied one below… a man called Wat.
“Wat” was probably born between 1316 and 1347. He grew up in or around Cambridge. He lived to at least 60 years old, and he died between 1375 and 1427. In his early years, he consumed more animal protein in his diet than a typical child in the town, and more than the average person who ended up in the Hospital. However, at some point he experienced a minor episode of disease or malnutrition. He grew to about 160 cm: about 6-7 cm below the average for his time. He was small and stocky, with brown eyes and dark brown or black hair.
In his adult life, “Wat” does not show many signs of heavy physical labour; he has little skeletal degeneration (osteoarthritis) for somebody of his age, aside from some in his right wrist, and he only has two lesions suggesting damaged intervertebral disks (many of the skeletons show far more, even if they died at much younger ages). We do not know what he did for a living, but it was probably not heavy manual labour. As an adult, he experienced several accidents. He broke three ribs on his left side, most likely in a fall. He also broke two bones in the palm of his right hand, probably in a single incident. Both of these happened sometime before he died, and they healed well.
He also had other wear and tear that goes with a long life. He had severe osteoarthritis in his neck. He had lost several teeth before death; a remaining tooth shows the gross caries that may have claimed some of the others, and his tooth wear shows that he had been chewing upon the stumps of teeth broken down by decay. Some of his surviving teeth had heavy deposition of calculus. Moreover, bone scans show him to be one of the frailest people in the population, perhaps from long inactivity or from cancer.
“Wat’s” diet appears to have dramatically changed in his adult life; his bones, reflecting the last decade of life, suggest that he consumed much less animal protein than when he was a child. In fact, his late-in-life isotope readings are among the lowest in the anyone studied in the entire town. This is very unusual; almost everybody else’s diet seems to have remained the same or improved over their lifetime. This is particularly so for people buried at the Hospital of St. John, whose adult diet often seem noticeably improved over their childhood diet, probably because the Hospital gave them a more varied diet containing more meats, dairy and fish than most poor people lived upon. There are several possibilities. Perhaps by the end of his life, his teeth were so bad that he lived on broth, porridge and gruel. Alternatively, it is possible that he may have lived reasonably well most of his life, but fell into poverty towards the end of it, perhaps because of some inability to work. If so, he may have been taken into the supportive surroundings of the Hospital late enough in life that the Hospital’s relatively nutritious diet did not register in his bones before he died. If this is so, it may account for his presence in the Hospital; in late medieval theories of charity, people who had formerly well-off but who fell into poverty were considered to be the pauperes verecundi, the ‘shame-faced poor’, and were particularly deserving of charity.
“Wat” was ill and frail when he died; he had a metastatic cancer which affected his pelvis, spine, skull and other bones. Perhaps a month or so before he died, he fractured at least one vertebral body, as well as his right forearm (ulna) near the wrist and two metacarpal bones in his hand. These may have happened all together in one episode such as a fall. These bones were unhealed or only partially healed when he died, and he probably broke these bones in part because they were weakened by cancer and age-related bone loss. Although we cannot be certain, the cancer probably caused his death or at least contributed to it.
“Wat” lived through an eventful time, the later fourteenth century. As a child or young adult, he almost certainly lived through the great Black Death plague of 1348-9, seeing half the population of Cambridge – friends and family among them – dying around him. He certainly lived through at least one subsequent major epidemic, in 1362, and perhaps others in the 1370s. There was much social change in Cambridge in the later fourteenth century. Much of the town was semi-depopulated by plague. The university was expanding with the foundation of new colleges. Civil unrest appeared in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which in Cambridge also involved riots against the University and monasteries. Perhaps we can imagine him as an old man, frail but surviving to an age few achieved, reflecting upon all he has seen.
Back then life expectancy in Britain during the medieval period was far shorter than today due to brutal jobs, rife disease and a lack of sanitation. The Black Death may have killed half the country in a single year but the biggest threats to life in medieval England, and in Western Europe as a whole, were chronic infectious diseases such as tuberculosis.
At birth, the average life expectancy was 31 years old whilst those living in England today might reasonably expect to get to 80.
Stephen Liddell 