Archaeologists at Cambridge University have reconstructed the “biographies” of hundreds of the city’s ordinary medieval residents by examining their skeletons in detail, using a wealth of scientific data to fill out the life stories of poor or disadvantaged people whose names were never recorded.

By examining the bones of more than 400 adults and children who were buried in the grounds of a medieval hospital between AD1200 and 1500, the researchers have built up a detailed picture of the lives, health and even appearance of those who lived and died in Cambridge in the period.

They also gained clues to how the charitable institution operated its medieval “benefits system” and decided who was worthy of help in what must have been an overwhelming “sea of need”.

The people buried in the hospital, they discovered, didn’t come from one social class but included orphan children, university scholars and a category of people they call the “shame-faced poor” – people who had previously lived in relative prosperity but had fallen on harder times, and who were deemed particularly worthy of charity.

The site of the hospital of St John the Evangelist was excavated in 2010, uncovering hundreds of unidentified graves. For the new study, experts in DNA and isotope analysis, human skeletal variation and a range of other disciplines examined up to 50 individual characteristics of each skeleton, to build what they believe is one of the richest such datasets ever compiled for medieval England.

You can read more in an article by Esther Addley published in TheGuardian website at: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/dec/01/archaeologists-life-stories-medieval-cambridge.