Mass grave reveals how Black Death impacted rural England

Enlarge (credit: Willmott et al. 2020)

Archaeologists recently excavated a mass burial of at least 48 men, women, and children on the grounds of a medieval monastery in Lincolnshire, UK. One person's teeth contained traces of bubonic plague DNA, and radiocarbon dating suggests that these people were victims of a 14^th century outbreak. It's the first time archaeologists have found a mass grave for plague victims outside of a city like London or Hereford, and it reveals that even small country villages struggled to bury the masses of plague victims.

A macabre surprise

University of Sheffield archaeologist Hugh Willmott and his colleagues didn't expect to find skeletons when they dug a trench on the grounds of Thornton Abbey. They thought the geophysical anomaly they were preparing to excavate was part of a 1607 mansion built nearby. But instead, they wrote, "the excavation immediately revealed articulated human skeletal remains." The dead lay in rows, packed so closely that they'd have been touching, with the feet of one row lying between the heads of the next.

Even more surprisingly, the skeletons included at least six women and 21 children, so they definitely weren't all monks from the abbey. The 48 bodies in the wide, shallow grave probably included people from the surrounding countryside who died at St. James hospital, adjacent to the monastery. In fact, the grave might have held nearly half the 14^th-century population of the surrounding parish, all buried together.

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