One of the largest medieval hospital burial grounds in Britain, containing an estimated 1,300 burials, once stood on the site of what is now a Cambridge College, according to a report published in the latest issue of the Archaeological Journal. 
 
 The report marks the first public release of evidence gathered by an archaeological dig beneath the Old Divinity School at St John’s College, conducted as part of the Victorian building’s refurbishment in 2010-2012. Images from the dig, showing almost perfectly preserved medieval skeletons unearthed after centuries of burial, are also being released for the first time today. 
 
 The report reveals that the complete skeletal remains of over 400 medieval burials were uncovered by a team from the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, along with “disarticulated” and fragmentary remains of what could be as many as 1,000 more individuals. 
 
 While the existence and location of the cemetery have been known to historians since at least the mid-twentieth century, the sheer scale and extent of the burial ground was unclear until now. 
 
 The bodies, which mostly date from a period spanning the 13th to 15th centuries, are burials from the medieval Hospital of St John the Evangelist which stood opposite the graveyard until 1511, and from which St John’s College takes its name. The number of remains discovered was far more than the team had expected, and they shed significant new light on life and death in medieval Cambridge. Craig Cessford of the Cambridge University Department of Archaeology and Anthropology led the dig and authored the report. He said the Old Divinity School excavation was “one of the largest medieval hospital osteoarcheological assemblages from the British Isles”. 
 
 The site of the Old Divinity School, built in 1877-1879, was formerly the burial ground of the Hospital, instituted around 1195 by the townspeople of Cambridge to care for the poor and sick in the community. Originally merely a small building on a patch of waste ground, the Hospital grew with Church support to be a noted place of hospitality and care for both University scholars and local people. 
 
 Despite local rumours linking the Hospital cemetery to the Black Death, no evidence of this disease was found on any of the remains, nor did the team find any sign of large burial groups from that period (1348-1350). In later centuries, plague victims in Cambridge were buried on local grazing land such as Midsummer Common, and it is likely that the same locations were used in the medieval period as well. 
 
 The Hospital cemetery, dating from the early 13th century, contained the bodies of approximately 1,300 people, most of which were buried in neatly laid-out rows, or deposited in a charnel house on the site. The team, from the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, found the cemetery to have six “cemetery generations”, defined as the time taken to fill all available space before burying other bodies in the same locations. 
 
 The cemetery was found to have had gravel paths and a water well, along with seeds from various flowering plants, suggesting that much like today’s cemeteries, it was a place for people to come and visit their deceased loved ones. 
 
 Of the various human remains excavated by the team, 400 individuals were closely analysed to discover clues as to the nature of the cemetery and the surrounding community. The vast majority of burials took place without coffins, many even without shrouds, suggesting the cemetery was primarily used to serve the poor. Grave-goods such as jewellery and personal items were only present in a handful of burials. 
 
 “Evidence for clothing and grave-goods is rarer than at most hospital cemeteries”, said Dr Cessford, “principally because this was a purely lay graveyard with no clerics present. Items were found in graves that might represent grave-goods, but their positions were ambiguous and it is equally possible that they represent residual material from earlier activity at the site”. 
 
 Also of interest to the archaeologists was the relative lack of remains of young women and complete absence of infants, which would normally be expected in a medieval hospital cemetery. Of the remains that could be identified, there seems to have been a roughly equal gender balance, with the majority of individuals having died between around 25 and 45 years old. The lack of young female remains can probably be explained by the Hospital’s Augustinian ordinance from 1250 which established its areas of concern to be “poor scholars and other wretched persons”, and specifically excluded pregnant women from its care. 
 
 The bodies surprisingly did not exhibit many serious illnesses and conditions that would have required medical attention. The Archaeological Journal report suggests that “this could reflect that the main role of the Hospital was spiritual and physical care of the poor and infirm rather than medical treatment of the sick and injured”. 
 
 The full report has been published in the latest issue of the Archaeological Journal, number 172. ||||| A lost medieval cemetery discovered under Cambridge University contained graves that had been pre-dug in anticipation of winter deaths, archaeologists have discovered. 
 
 The huge graveyard was found during excavations beneath the Old Divinity School at St John's College during recent refurbishments. 
 
 The mass cemetery, which was far larger than the small burial ground which archaeologists had expected, contained around about 1,300 burials, including about 400 complete skeletons. 
 
 And experts made the sinister discovery that many of the skeletons did not fit their graves. 
 
 An Archaeological Journal report on the excavation said: “This suggests that some, but not all of the graves may have been dug in advance of being needed. 
 
 “One possibility is that this occurred prior to the winter, when ground conditions would have potentially made digging graves considerably more difficult.” 
 
 One skeleton found in a grave which was too big for the body 
 
 The bodies, which mostly date from a period spanning the 13th to 15th centuries, are burials from the medieval Hospital of St John the Evangelist which stood opposite the graveyard until 1511, and from which St John's College takes its name. 
 
 Craig Cessford, from the university's department of archaeology and anthropology, said it was one of the largest finds of its kind in the UK. 
 
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 Although the existence and location of the cemetery have been known to historians since at least the mid-twentieth century, the sheer scale and extent of the burial ground was unclear until now. 
 
 The vast majority of burials were without coffins, many even without shrouds, suggesting the cemetery was primarily used to serve the poor. 
 
 There were very few bodies belonging to women and children - probably because its main purpose was to cater for "poor scholars and other wretched persons" and pregnant women were excluded from its care. 
 
 Grave-goods such as jewellery and personal items were only present in a handful of burials but they included a jet crucifix and the head of a woman. 
 
 A crucifix found in one of the graves 
 
 Dr Cessford said: "Evidence for clothing and grave-goods is rarer than at most hospital cemeteries. 
 
 "This is principally because this was a purely lay graveyard with no clerics present. 
 
 "Items were found in graves that might represent grave-goods, but their positions were ambiguous and it is equally possible that they represent residual material from earlier activity at the site." 
 
 Originally a small building on a patch of waste ground, the hospital grew with church support to be a noted place of hospitality and care for both university scholars and local people. 
 
 Archaeologists working at Cambridge 
 
 Despite local rumours linking the hospital cemetery to the Black Death, no evidence of this disease was found on any of the remains and the team did not find any sign of large burial groups from that period of the 14th century. 
 
 In later centuries, plague victims in Cambridge were buried on local grazing land such as Midsummer Common, and it is likely that the same locations were used in the medieval period as well. 
 
 Most of the bodies were buried in neatly laid-out rows or deposited in a building on the site. 
 
 The cemetery was found to have had gravel paths and a water well, along with seeds from various flowering plants, suggesting that much like today's cemeteries, it was a place for people to come and visit their deceased loved ones. 
 
 The bodies surprisingly did not exhibit many serious illnesses and conditions that would have required medical attention. 
 
 The graveyard was found during the refurbishment of St John's College at Cambridge University ||||| The audience of an event at this year’s Cambridge Science Festival found themselves staring into the face of a fellow Cambridge resident – one who spent the last 700 years buried beneath the venue in which they sat. 
 
 The 13th-century man, called Context 958 by researchers, was among some 400 burials for which complete skeletal remains were uncovered when one of the largest medieval hospital graveyards in Britain was discovered underneath the Old Divinity School of St John’s College, and excavated between 2010 and 2012. 
 
 The bodies, which mostly date from a period spanning the 13th to 15th centuries, are burials from the Hospital of St John the Evangelist which stood opposite the graveyard until 1511, and from which the College takes its name. The hospital was an Augustinian charitable establishment in Cambridge dedicated to providing care to members of the public. 
 
 “Context 958 was probably an inmate of the Hospital of St John, a charitable institution which provided food and a place to live for a dozen or so indigent townspeople – some of whom were probably ill, some of whom were aged or poor and couldn't live alone,” said Professor John Robb, from the University’s Division of Archaeology. 
 
 In collaboration with Dr Chris Rynn from the University of Dundee’s Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, Robb and Cambridge colleagues have reconstructed the man’s face and pieced together the rudiments of his life story by analysing his bones and teeth. 
 
 The work is one of the first outputs from the Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘After the plague: health and history in medieval Cambridge’ for which Robb is principal investigator. The project is analysing the St John's burials not just statistically, but also biographically. 
 
 “Context 958 was over 40 when he died, and had quite a robust skeleton with a lot of wear and tear from a hard working life. We can't say what job specifically he did, but he was a working class person, perhaps with a specialised trade of some kind,” said Robb. 
 
 “One interesting feature is that he had a diet relatively rich in meat or fish, which may suggest that he was in a trade or job which gave him more access to these foods than a poor person might have normally had. He had fallen on hard times, perhaps through illness, limiting his ability to continue working or through not having a family network to take care of him in his poverty.” 
 
 There are hints beyond his interment in the hospital’s graveyard that Context 958’s life was one of adversity. His tooth enamel had stopped growing on two occasions during his youth, suggesting he had suffered bouts of sickness or famine early on. Archaeologists also found evidence of a blunt-force trauma on the back of his skull that had healed over prior to his death. 
 
 Click on images below to enlarge: 
 
 The face of Context 958. Image credit: Dr. Chris Rynn, University of Dundee 1 of 4 Facial reconstruction of Context 958. Image credit: Dr. Chris Rynn, University of Dundee 2 of 4 Dr Sarah Inskip examines the skull of Context 958. Image credit: Laure Bonner 3 of 4 Context 958 buried face-down in the cemetery of St John's. Image credit: C. Cessford 4 of 4 Prev 
 
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 “He has a few unusual features, notably being buried face down which is a small irregularity for medieval burial. But, we are interested in him and in people like him more for ways in which they are not unusual, as they represent a sector of the medieval population which is quite hard to learn about: ordinary poor people,” said Robb. 
 
 “Most historical records are about well-off people and especially their financial and legal transactions – the less money and property you had, the less likely anybody was to ever write down anything about you. So skeletons like this are really our chance to learn about how the ordinary poor lived.” 
 
 The focal point of the ‘After the Plague’ project will be the large sample of urban poor people from the graveyard of the Hospital of St John, which researchers will compare with other medieval collections to build up a picture of the lives, health and day-to-day activities of people living in Cambridge, and urban England as a whole, at this time. 
 
 “The After the Plague project is also about humanising people in the past, getting beyond the scientific facts to see them as individuals with life stories and experiences,” said Robb. 
 
 “This helps us communicate our work to the public, but it also helps us imagine them ourselves as leading complex lives like we do today. That's why putting all the data together into biographies and giving them faces is so important.” 
 
 The Old Divinity School of St John’s College was built in 1877-1879 and was recently refurbished, now housing a 180-seat lecture theatre used for College activities and public events, including last week’s Science Festival lecture given by Robb on the life of Context 958 and the research project. 
 
 The School was formerly the burial ground of the Hospital, instituted around 1195 by the townspeople of Cambridge to care for the poor and sick in the community. Originally a small building on a patch of waste ground, the Hospital grew with Church support to be a noted place of hospitality and care for both University scholars and local people.
– Historians have long known that a medieval cemetery existed on the grounds of what is now the University of Cambridge, but until a recent dig they didn't realize just how big it was. Archaeologists uncovered the full or partial remains of about 1,300 people beneath Old Divinity School at the university's St. John's College. The numbers make it one of Britain's largest medieval cemeteries, reports the Guardian. Most of the people were buried between the 13th and 15th centuries, when the cemetery was in operation near the ancient Hospital of St. John the Evangelist. Most were buried without coffins or shrouds, suggesting they were poor, notes the Telegraph. Unusual for cemeteries of this era was the lack of infants and young women, likely because the nearby hospital did not treat pregnant women and instead focused on "poor scholars and other wretched persons," reports the University of Cambridge. Archaeologists also found evidence of gravel paths, seeds, and a water well, meaning that the cemetery seemed to be a place where loved ones would visit and pay their respects. (Click to read about how a medieval potion might help against modern superbugs.)