A new podcast from The Crime Desk forensically unravels historical crimes and works to solve the unanswered questions that still haunt them centuries later.
Hosted by historian Rebecca Rideal and Time Team archaeologist Professor Raksha Dave, Buried evidence takes you into the lives of victims of the most barbaric crimes, whose names have been largely forgotten by time.
In the first episode, available at YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts, Rideal and Dave dissect the St. Brice’s Day massacre and its links to a sinister archaeological discovery.
In January 2008, a routine dig at St John’s College, Oxford, carried out to build new student accommodation, revealed a gruesome scene.
The bodies of 37 men and boys, aged between 12 and 45, were dumped in a ditch more than a thousand years ago. As Professor Dave explained, it quickly became clear to archaeologists on site that this was no ordinary cemetery.
“When we look at funerals, they’re normally a bit uniform,” she said.
In January 2008, a routine dig at St John’s College, Oxford, carried out to build new student accommodation, revealed a gruesome scene.
The bodies of 37 men and boys, dumped in a ditch more than a thousand years ago. As Professor Dave explained (L), it quickly became clear that this was no ordinary cemetery
‘People are wonderfully relaxed. They are placed in certain positions or lie straight on their backs. But this was a messy mess.
“We had a beheading, skulls and arms everywhere. I mean, you name it, it was a mess… it’s what we would call an aberrant funeral. It didn’t quite make sense and it seemed like these guys were literally thrown in like crap.”
Archaeologists were struck by another detail. Many of the men had wounds to the back, indicating they were running from something when they were killed.
Some bones were also burned. It was the fire, in particular, that would ultimately point researchers to one night in Oxford’s history.
Documented in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, King Ethelred the Unready ordered the death of all Danish people in his realm on November 13, 1002, after being warned that they were plotting to assassinate him and seize his throne.
The townspeople turned on the Danes who lived among them, chasing them through the streets and killing them where they stood. The event became known as the St. Brice’s Day Massacre, because the king’s order fell on the saint’s feast day.
In Oxford, a group of Danes broke into the church of St. Frideswide and barricaded themselves inside, believing that refuge would save them. That didn’t happen. Unable to drive them out, the crowd set fire to the roof and burned the building with them inside.
Many of the men had wounds to the back, indicating they were running from something when they were killed
While it seems plausible to match the bodies to the massacre, some details don’t quite fit the historical record
While it seems likely that the bodies match the massacre, some details don’t quite fit the historical record, as Dave explained.
“Oxford was a real Wild West city in the early Middle Ages,” she said.
‘There were groups of mercenaries living there… when we look at who is buried there, there are no women or children, none.
‘It could have simply been an act of mafia violence. They’re all back injuries, so they’re clearly being pursued.”
The bones themselves also indicate that these men were soldiers, not Danish townspeople rounded up on the orders of a fearful king.
Dave added: ‘When they later did more analysis on the bones in a laboratory, they discovered older wounds.
‘When you break something, you can actually see where the bone has repaired itself. It almost looks like extra bone growth on top… they found a lot of these trauma wounds where the bone had been reworked.
‘So based on that evidence it is very likely that these were trained professional soldiers… the bones were also very robust, compared to the Anglo-Saxon population. So they appear to have been big musclemen, with enormous muscles.’
Whatever happened at Oxford, the pattern did not end there. A second mass grave was discovered in Dorset a year later. Radiocarbon dating placed it in the same period as the St John’s College massacre, and these men were also likely Scandinavian soldiers or mercenaries.
Two mass graves, hundreds of kilometers apart, both filled with slaughtered Nordic men from the same narrow window of history.
Listen to Buried Evidence in full to hear Rideal and Dave’s assessment of what really happened. Subscribe to The Crime Desk to get access to new episodes a week early.
