The New Murrey and Blue blog

One of the largest mass-burial sites ever found in the UK has been discovered next to Leicester Cathedral. It contains “….the skeletal remains of 123 men, women and children dumped down a narrow vertical shaft in the early 12th century….’Their bones show no signs of violence – which leaves us with two alternative reasons for these deaths: starvation or pestilence,’ said Mathew Morris, project officer at Leicester University’s archaeological services. ‘At the moment, the latter is our main working hypothesis.’….”

We are inclined to label the Black Death of 1348/1349 as the first arrival of the plague in England, but there had been other pestilences before it, and more outbreaks of “plague” would succeed it too. Maybe these bodies in Leicester were the victims of a previous contagion? Maybe not of the actual Black Death (https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/middle_ages/black_01.shtml), but of something similar and just as fatal? No doubt the truth will be learned in the coming months

This astonishing new discovery came about because of archaeological investigations at Leicester Cathedral prior to the erection of a new extension which was first mentioned on this blog here https://murreyandblue.org/2017/12/15/a-new-extension-for-leicester-cathedral-thanks-to-richard/. If you go next to https://leicestercathedral.org/archaeology-discoveries you’ll learn much more about the ongoing dig. Now, finally, there are these new revelations, about which you can read here https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/71667. (One of many such links to be found online, I’ve just picked it at random.)

So it’s a case of “watch this space”, as the saying goes. It will be very interesting to learn more. Perhaps there was something in Leicester’s Anglo-Saxon/early medieval history that wasn’t known previously.