Archaeology: From Dig to Lab and

UoR Report – Sarah Fleming:

Beyond

MEDIEVAL LIFE: PART 1

Video transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So here we're going to look at what the study of human bones can tell us about Medieval life. The medieval
period had a series of major climatic and disease events. In 900 AD, people were living in an almost
Mediterranean climate known as the Medieval Warm Period.

But this changed in 1300 when colder, wetter climate led to a series of crop failures. in 1315 to '18, we
know there were a series of famines that resulted in the death of between 10% to 15% of the population.
Many of these were rural peasants who were dying of disease known as ergotism. This is caused by
fungus that grows on crops and is eaten by starving people and cattle who die of poisoning.

By 1348, the Black Death hits Europe. 50% of the population died. It's thought that most of the people who
were dying were young children and the elderly as their poorer immune systems made them susceptible to
disease. By 1470, the population has begun to recover from the series of climatic and disease events. And
by 1520, the population has begun to increase, and we start to see the development of urbanisation and
industrialisation in the medieval period.

What do we know about the living conditions of the medieval period? We have a vision of polluted towns
and idyllic rural situation with people living in very polluted environments in the town where lots of fresh air
and green open spaces existed in the rural populations. We have lots of laws or edicts about mending
leaky middens into towns. This suggests that sewage is spreading from one house to another.

There are also reports and complaints of pigs roaming the streets and attacking small children. And
contaminated water supplies were known to exist, particularly the Thames and the Ouse in York. Medieval
people tended not to drink water. They would prefer to drink beer or wine if they could afford it in order to
avoid contaminated water supplies.

We also know that they had, compared to modern standards, a lack of personal hygiene. And this again
was probably resulting from their aversion to water. They usually had a bath once a year or on special
occasions, because they felt that bathing was bad for their health. In 1332, Edward the third described
York as the most foul smelling city in the kingdom.

However when we take these written descriptions of what it was like to live in a medieval urban town, we
need to be aware of Victorian propaganda. A lot of these documents were being written by Victorians who
were trying to explain to their populations how they were lucky to live in such a progressive Victorian city,
and that in the medieval period, life was nasty, brutish, and short.
Where we really get information what it's like to live in the medieval period is from the skeletal data. We
have human skeletons that come from many different samples. so those from general cemeteries or lay
cemeteries as well as more specialist areas like priories and nunneries, war cemeteries, plague pits, and
even religious burial grounds such as Jewish burial grounds. We even have access to some royal skeletal
remains or very high status individuals from castles.

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UoR Report – Sarah Fleming:
When we study the skeletal data, we like to look at our skeletons within their context. Calvin Wells was the
pioneer of human skeletal analysis in the UK. And he wrote that, "The pattern of disease or injury that
affects any group of people is never a matter of chance. It is invariably the expression of the stresses and
strains to which they're exposed, and a response to everything in their environment and behaviour." And
this is how we choose to interpret our data.
So I study paleaopathology, which is the study of ancient diseases. And this allows us to map diseases
through time and space and compare diseases in different populations.

In order to do this though, you need to be able to recognise the macroscopic and radiographic appearance
of disease. So macroscopic is really just looking at the bones and identifying lesions or taking X-rays to
examine the lesions more closely.

In order to show up on the skeleton though, a disease needs to be chronic. It takes about 10 days for bone
cells to turn over and for the skeleton to show any visible sign of disease. So diseases such as typhoid, the
plague, typhus, and cholera that we know were rife in the medieval period only affect the soft tissue
because people were dying too soon for the bone to actually react. So although we know these diseases
were there, we can usually only identify them indirectly through the appearance of mass graves in
cemeteries that suggest an epidemic.

Normally though we cannot determine the cause of death. Sometimes we find wounds, trauma to skulls in
the body that suggest somebody had a fatal injury. But most of the time, we don't know why someone died.
And in fact the very fact that we can see a disease on the skeleton suggests that this disease didn't kill
them.

A lot of what we know about medieval health comes from the osteological evidence, which was compiled in
2003 by Roberts and Cox. And this is a good source if you want to go and find out more about particular
periods and what we know about health in those times.
In general though, they discovered that in the early medieval period, there was an increase in infections
and the number and varieties of congenital diseases, which are diseases people were born with. Babies
born with different kinds of diseases usually suggest internal stress, and by its same token, maternal
stress. But also we start to see cancers appearing in the skeletal record.

In general though, people in the early medieval period were relatively healthy. By the later medieval period,
you have urbanisation, and economic differences begin to grow. So there are greater divides between the
rich and the poor in the population. There are fluctuations in the population, mostly due to famine and
Black Death we discovered earlier, but also climatic changes that affect health. Venereal syphilis also first
appears in the skeletal record, as does leprosy and tuberculous will become increasing social problems.

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