(suspenseful music) ♪ (host) Human bones can hide the most shocking of secrets.

(woman) Oh, my God, she's been killed.

(woman) She's been killed violently with a sword.

(host) Stories of slaughter, sacrifice, and disease.

(woman) Success was built on the broken bodies of children like these.

(host) Crimes covered up for hundreds or even thousands of years.

Somebody could've committed this murder and then jumped ship and never brought to justice.

I'm Dr. Tori Herridge, and I'm leading a team examining some of the UK's most mysterious archaeological burial sites.

There are so many unanswered questions.

Let's cut to the chase, is it a fertility ritual?

With bones as our only witnesses, mortuary technician Carla Valentine will help identify what happened to the bodies.

(Carla) To me, this is the most fascinating find.

(Tori) While archaeologist Raksha Dave gathers crucial evidence from key experts.

(Raksha) A line of small children's heads, that's absolutely bonkers!

(Tori) Across the length and breadth of the UK, we will reveal the way our forebears lived, loved, and died.

(Carla) What was in her head, what were her thoughts and her dreams and her plans for the future?

(Tori) People long forgotten... Makes you wonder what brought her here.

...until now.

♪ (dramatic music) Stoke Quay in Ipswich, part of a shining new waterfront development.

♪ There's nothing here to suggest its turbulent past.

♪ In 2012, this whole area was leveled to make way for this new development of apartments.

Archaeologists took the opportunity to see what lay beneath, and what they found took their breath away.

As they peeled back the layers of soil, they uncovered the remains of more than 1,000 men, women, and children.

♪ But who were these people and why were they buried here?

♪ This week, we are in East Anglia in Suffolk in the town of Ipswich.

The site itself is just south of the River Orwell.

You can see it's just here, right by the water.

It's an area known as Stoke Quay.

As you can see, the site is enormous.

-What is it now?

-Now it's apartment blocks.

(solemn music) ♪ Excavating the burials took about six months.

And then osteoarchaeologist Dr. Louise Loe and her team had the huge task of examining all of them.

(Louise) These burials represent a period spanning about 600 years in total.

-From when to when?

-They start in about the ninth, 10th century, and they go up until the 15th century.

-Wow.

-All the way through.

So that is really quite unique.

But what's also really interesting about this group is that they're from a port.

Nobody, I don't believe, has excavated such a large collection of burials from a medieval port before in this country.

(Tori) You've got that time depth, 600 years, over that really interesting period as well.

That amount of information must really give you the chance to unpick the past.

(Louise) It's really given us an opportunity to, I suppose, add color to a part of history that we didn't otherwise know much about from human remains.

♪ These burials were associated with St. Augustine's Church.

(Tori) St. Augustine's Parish dates from the 10th century, but when the church fell out of use in the 1500s, it was forgotten, erased from the map for 500 years.

No one knew where the original was sited.

It's only through this excavation that the church's true position has been identified.

(Louise) When we were excavating, we found the very, very foundations of the church, so this lost church has now been found, which is fantastic.

(dramatic music) (Tori) We're examining three of the skeletons, which together span approximately 600 years, allowing us to paint the fullest picture of life in Stoke Quay.

We're keen to find out what secrets they keep.

(Louise) St. Augustine's produced one of the most unusual cases that I've seen in my 25-year career of osteology.

-Really?

-Yeah.

This is a male individual.

He was about 60+ years of age when he died, and he dates between 1245 and 1400, so at the end of the period of the use of the cemetery.

He was buried in the nave of the church.

(Tori) And that means he's pretty important.

(Louise) That's right, he's clearly, from his burial position, a high-status individual.

We also know from his stable isotopes that he enjoyed a high-protein diet.

(Carla) So we know that he's quite wealthy then.

He's had the protein, he's been buried in the nave.

(Louise) Only high-status individuals of some wealth would've been buried in such an important location.

(atmospheric music) We noticed that his bones were actually quite heavy, so we got an X-ray, and it showed this sort of cotton wool appearance, which is typical in individuals with Paget's disease.

(Carla) Oh, okay, so Paget's disease is a condition of the bones where normally our bones kind of turn over new cells, and in Paget's disease, it sort of goes a bit wrong and it can make the bones a bit deformed, can't it, sometimes?

(Tori) And is that disease fatal?

-Is that what killed him?

-No, no, it's not, but I can tell you probably something that did contribute to the circumstances of his death.

If you have a look at his skull, unfortunately, his skull wasn't very well preserved.

When we took a look at it and pieced those fragments together, we noticed that there were some very sharp, clean cuts there.

(Tori) Sliced clean through the skull, wasn't it?

(Louise) This isn't something that has resulted from being broken in the ground after he was buried, it's happened around the time of his death.

(Carla) Do we know with what sort of implement?

(Louise) It's consistent with a bladed weapon, probably a sword.

-Murder, isn't it?

-It's murder.

(Louise) It's not just one bladed weapon injury that we saw, we saw at least three, one of which is delivered to his frontal bone.

Maybe that was the first one to be delivered.

Perhaps being high up on the skull like that, it was delivered by somebody who had a height advantage, so maybe somebody on a horse.

They've struck him down, he's incapacitated, and then they've delivered a further two blows to the right side of his head.

(Carla) It paints a picture, doesn't it?

(Tori) A nasty one.

That combination and the fact that you're saying "sword blade" plus person on a horse, are you suggesting a battle?

So he was killed in battle?

But equally, could he not just be an unfortunate wealthy gentleman, a target maybe because he's wealthy?

This kind of person doesn't die without comment.

(bells pealing) Raksha is finding out if there's any record of this man.

(Raksha) Claire, I've got a bit of a mystery on my hands.

I've got this elderly gentleman who was buried in the nave of St. Augustine's Church, but he's been brutally murdered by three blows to the head.

I'm just trying to figure out who he is.

Well, it's interesting that you say he's buried in the nave of the church, because immediately that suggests to me that he is an individual of great wealth and possibly power as well.

To be buried there, you had to have a lot of money.

So Ipswich is quite a small town at this point, and the fact that he's buried there would actually narrow your search considerably.

(bell ringing) Ipswich in this period is a very wealthy town, and it's a place where you could really become one of the more rich and powerful if you're in the right place.

So what we have in 1200 is a charter that's issued to the town, which allows self-governance, and there are key positions in this structure.

You've got the portman, the bailiffs, and the burgesses.

Now, although they're elected positions, they are dominated by eight or nine key families, and these families have made their wealth as merchants trading in wool and cloth, and there is serious money to be made.

(bell ringing) So we've got these families vying for power and position, and actually there's a lot of tension between them.

There's a lot of feuds going on that we can trace through the documents for several generations, which shows just how important these positions were.

It's all very Game of Thrones, isn't it, Claire?

(Claire) It is exactly like Game of Thrones.

They could really hold a grudge.

(Raksha) So it's quite possible that this individual had a dispute over money, so can we narrow our search down even further?

Definitely.

In this period, Ipswich is really a hotbed of rebellion.

We have got a really interesting individual, John de Holtby.

Now, he is not a pleasant man.

-How so?

-He is involved in robbery, he is involved in really getting heavyweights in to beat people up, he steals from other merchants, he's spying on other merchants and reporting them for smuggling to the king.

He is absolutely reviled.

Now, he's murdered in 1344, but people aren't actually that upset by it, he is such an unpleasant individual.

Although, you know, we've got John de Holtby engaging in these violent activities, he's not the only one.

(Raksha) So come on, Claire, do you think our mystery man is John de Holtby?

(Claire) Although his is one of the very few violent deaths of a merchant in the area that we found in the documents, we can't say for certain that the guy you found and John de Holtby are one and the same.

(suspenseful music) ♪ (Tori) The whole John de Holtby angle is fascinating.

It's tantalizing, it circumstantially fits, but it's just that: circumstantial.

That aspect of it is interesting.

The murder itself is interesting, but you said this was one of the most interesting cases of your entire career, and that makes me think you have been holding out on us.

(Louise) Have a look at this.

My colleague osteologist, Helen, she was the first person to examine this skeleton.

She started with the sacrum and, oh, it's in two pieces, okay.

The sacrum, the spine, it's very crumbly bone, very spongy bone.

It easily degrades in the burial environment, so it's not that surprising to find it in a couple of pieces.

She starts to get the rest of the spine out-- oh, that's in two pieces as well.

And as she moves up, she starts to think, "Hang on a minute, there's something going on here," and she takes a step back.

What she saw was actually the spine has been bisected by the sharp, incised cuts all the way down, right from the top of the neck all the way through to the tailbone.

The vertebral arches here, the knobbly bits on your back, they've all been cut through.

(Carla) So this isn't a haphazard series of cuts or anything, is it?

This looks like it's been done with a specific purpose in mind.

(Louise) It's clearly very premeditated, very organized, precise cuts, not done with a large blade like we've seen with the skull, but you know, a smaller bladed tool.

(Carla) And what is somebody doing cutting into a spine in medieval Ipswich?

(Tori) We need to know more about the circumstances that have led to him meeting such a violent end.

♪ Deeper in the past of this parish lies another mysterious burial.

We've got a 600-year window.

Do we know when this individual died?

(Louise) We actually got a radiocarbon date from this skeleton, and that returned a date of A.D. 860 to 1040.

-So before the Norman Conquest.

-Before the Norman Conquest.

-So this is late Saxon period.

-Yeah, it's at the very beginning.

It's one of the earlier burials from the site.

(Tori) Do we know anything more about them?

What can we say about this person?

How old were they when they died?

Were they male or female?

(Louise) What we notice first of all is that their bones haven't fused, their bones haven't finished growing.

And there's only one bit of bone where the fusion has taken place, and that's on the distal humerus on the elbow joint.

Yeah, and that happens to individuals who are sort of young teenagers.

We can refine that by looking at the dentition.

What we're interested in here is this last, third molar, the wisdom tooth.

Can you see there that the root hasn't finished growing, because the ends of the root haven't closed over?

(Carla) They're like open tubes, aren't they?

(Louise) Yeah, but that's a good indication that this individual is probably about 13 to 16 years of age.

(eerie music) (Carla) There can be a real difficulty, can't there, with these sort of immature adults, they're in that puberty stage?

They don't really have any sexual characteristics.

If you don't have that information from the bones, is there a way that you can tell what sex the skeleton is?

(Louise) What we have been able to do is apply a really new, exciting method that's recently been developed.

And all this involves is taking a tiny bit of enamel from the surface of a tooth.

It's called peptides analysis, it's a type of biomolecular analysis, and in this case it tells us that our individual is a male.

(Tori) And a young male at that.

Basically a boy, really.

Teenager.

It's a young age to die.

(tense music) (Louise) Actually, it gets sadder than that, because when we look closely at the spine, the cervical vertebrae-- (Carla) So this is the nape of the neck?

-That's right, yeah.

-Shall we take a closer look?

(Louise) They've got a very sharp incision there.

♪ (Carla) That is a very obvious cut that, isn't it?

(Tori) What would've caused something like that?

(Louise) Well, it's unlikely to have been something like an axe, because an axe delivers quite a heavy blow, you'd expect crushing of the bone.

It looks to me more like a fine blade-- (Tori) Do you mean a sword or a knife or-- (Louise) Yeah, a sword or a knife.

Looking further up in the neck, in the second and third cervical vertebrae, again, we've got another cut.

(Tori) Would it have severed the head?

(Louise) In this case, it hasn't.

The cuts seem to stop short of the front of the neck.

(Carla) It hasn't completely decapitated him, but they're very deep cuts.

In a lot of the cases that I've seen where somebody's been attacked with a blade, I might expect them to defend themselves, you know, so I might see defense wounds in the arms, in the fingers, the hands.

Do we have anything like that here?

(Louise) No, we haven't got anything like that.

(Tori) The lack of that evidence for defense wounds makes you sort of think this scenario is not one where there was kind of a large fight beforehand.

It feels much more like someone came up behind, took them unawares.

I mean, were they executed?

(Louise) If it had been an execution, it seems to be quite a botched job.

(Tori) Basically, the only way really, I think, to characterize this kind of violent death, in modern-day terminology is... -Murder, isn't it?

-Yeah, it's murder.

(suspenseful music) ♪ What circumstances could lead to a teenage boy getting attacked and murdered in late Saxon Ipswich?

♪ (Raksha) Give me a sense of what this place was like in the 10th century.

What would our boy have experienced with life in Stoke Quay and the rest of Ipswich?

(Caleb) Well, Ipswich obviously would have been a very different place back then.

In terms of the population, you can have around 2,000 people living here.

By the standards of the time, that's quite a considerable place and it's quite an important trading center because of that.

We would have people trading from the continent from what is now Germany and France and Denmark, that kind of area.

By the 700s, you're looking at Ipswich being one of the four main emporia in Britain, really.

You've got, along with York and London and Southampton, so that gives you kind of the status of, you know, what a trading center Ipswich was at that point.

(mellow music) The smells might be quite bad, so obviously lots of, like, open fires and stuff, you're gonna have things like metalwork going on there, pottery, weaving, antler work, and if you've ever cut into antler, that produces a really strong smell like burning hair, but much worse, so it's gonna probably be quite a busy but smelly place.

(Raksha) I'm trying to figure out, if you're a 15-year-old boy, what would you be doing there?

(Caleb) First of all, he would definitely be working at that age.

He may have been involved in learning a trade in some way or he could've been a general laborer on the quay side as well.

(Raksha) I've got a bit of sad news to tell you, though.

Our boy, he was killed.

So is it usual to see that kind of level of violence here?

♪ (Caleb) A port is always gonna have a bit of a reputation.

In that time period, 10th, 11th century, he might've been used to experiencing more violence than young people would do today, but that's still, obviously, a really brutal thing to happen to anyone of that age, whatever the time is.

♪ (Tori) Stoke Quay, it wasn't some kind of backwater.

This was an important trading hub with links all over Northern Europe, so Germany, the Netherlands, France, Denmark.

This was a busy port.

♪ (Carla) It does make you wonder, though, doesn't it, with all these people kind of coming and going at this port?

Could they really keep tabs on everyone?

(Tori) What you can get from what Caleb said is a really vivid picture of what life in Stoke Quay might have been like for our boy.

It seemed like it was a really busy, maybe quite vibrant, but certainly a very dirty and smelly place.

And if our boy lived there, he would've been working.

And if he was working in a very physical job... (Carla) Then hopefully we'd see a bit of a sign of that on the bones!

Is that the case, Louise?

Do we see any signs of labor on these bones at all?

(Louise) Well, it's really interesting you say that, because we've got this little bit of arch from the seventh thoracic vertebra, so the middle bit of the spine, and we found this crack on the lamina.

(Carla) So that's where the muscles attach.

(Louise) Yeah, that's right.

This crack, at first we thought, well, it could've happened in the burial environment.

It's quite common to see cracks on bones, but actually, if you take it and turn it over, it's got really smooth biological margins.

(Carla) So that means that there's been biological activity or healing on the edges of this crack.

(Louise) Yeah, that's right.

This happened before the individual died.

This is what we'd call a stress fracture.

You might be familiar with shin splints, they're a type of stress fracture.

(Carla) So this would've taken a while to develop then.

(Louise) It's not acute, it's not something that would've happened in one episode.

It's associated with repeated stress on these muscles pulling on the spine over a long period of time.

(Carla) What activities, then, would cause that kind of stress?

Because of its location, it's obviously associated with this sort of powerful arm movements.

-Rowing-- -Yeah, you're making a definite rowing action there.

I'm also thinking, okay, if you're repeatedly lifting something, that's also moving the arms around, isn't it?

You're moving cargo off ships or onto ships, that's another job that would be quite likely, I guess, to have been done in this place.

The thing is, this boy died young.

He died violently, too.

He was only, what, 16, max, when he died?

And the bones are telling us the story of the years leading up to his death.

We don't know whether those years were spent entirely at Stoke Quay, we don't really know enough about what his life was like, and if he was working throughout his entire adolescence, who was looking after this guy?

I feel like we need to know more about the lives of teenagers like him to understand the circumstances that may have led to him meeting such a violent end.

(intense music) ♪ Eighty miles away in London, there are some valuable clues from an archaeological site at a priory and hospital called St. Mary Spital.

(atmospheric music) Excavations began here in 1991.

Over the next 16 years, the remains of over 10,500 human skeletons were discovered, amongst them hundreds of adolescents.

This gave archaeologists an unprecedented opportunity to use these bones to find out what the lives of medieval teenagers were really like.

♪ (woman) When we think about cemeteries, we think about having lots of very young people, so, small children under the age of five, and a lot of older people.

♪ It's quite unusual to get adolescents in that.

-How old is this one?

-So this one is 12.

This was an age where they could leave home and go to work, and London would provide lots of opportunities for that.

They're moving from rural locations to towns to get apprenticeships and start working.

A lot of the times, for London, it seems they're coming from like the home counties region particularly.

(Tori) They're actually leaving home at quite a young age -to start learning a trade.

-Yeah.

(fire whooshing) Some of them trained working with precious stones or were training as goldsmiths and things, so they would have a different risk and a different way of life compared to children who were doing a lot of manual labor, so they would maybe train to be masons or builders or they'd just be laborers.

(Tori) Maybe it's best to kind of scratch the idea of thinking of them as teenagers or whatever, or preteens at all, because it seems that they're living an adult lifestyle.

(Rebecca) But there's lots of evidence from the primary sources that actually they are having quite a lot of fun, but they're being very disruptive.

(distant men shouting) They're going out and getting drunk, and their behavior is socially not acceptable for a lot of people living in medieval towns.

We know from primary sources that there's often battles between different guild groups, so it would be like the bakers going up against another guild.

♪ When people are fighting, we are seeing that fighting leaves very particular types of fractures.

We're getting people with broken noses, broken teeth, dents in their head, or broken cheekbones.

If you look at A&E data today, they're exactly the same places where people get punched in fights.

You know, everything you're telling me is-- it feels really familiar.

Our 15-year-old, he's showing so many similar signs.

He's a teenager, working hard in a tough world.

(suspenseful music) ♪ Becky highlighted a whole load of things that made these medieval teenagers more vulnerable to dying young.

For one thing, they were often hanging out together, getting into trouble in what we might call, for want of a better word, teenage gangs.

But then also, they we were working, they were working in quite physical jobs.

Those physical labor jobs that, you know, it can make them sick or even cause them illness or even kill them.

Then on top of that, to get this work, these teenagers had left home, they were living away from their families, and of course, that would obviously make them more vulnerable with no one looking out for them.

And they hadn't just gone a short distance, sometimes, they traveled quite long distances.

You know, looking at this information, teenage, I mean, that's true of our boy, and he was involved in physical labor.

(Tori) Yeah, exactly, exactly, so maybe that third point is also true.

Maybe our boy had also moved into Stoke Quay from elsewhere and therefore was away from home and therefore increasingly vulnerable to dying young.

(ominous music) Isotope specialist Eleanor Farber has examined almost 400 of the skeletons from the site, including the boy.

She has her own theory as to why he might have been killed.

(Eleanor) Teeth can actually tell us a lot.

A lot of the time, they're the only material that survives if there's poor burial conditions.

♪ Stable isotope analysis can tell you about the diet of a population, it can show you where a person was coming from, so if they grew up in an area different from where they were buried.

(Raksha) So what about our teenage boy?

What did you find out about him?

(Eleanor) Right, so with him, I analyzed his second molar.

He might have come from areas such as Denmark, potentially parts of the Netherlands.

We know that after eight years of age, this individual moved.

A lot of times, we tend to think that migration happens with adults, especially adult men, or women coming into an urban area to do work, but this is a child who would have migrated from somewhere.

And especially the fact that he died in such a violent manner makes you wonder if this was because he was a foreigner or if it was mere coincidence.

(tense music) Was he vulnerable because he had moved in from elsewhere and he was in Stoke Quay alone?

He could even have been from Scandinavia.

I have to ask it, could he have been a Viking?

We have evidence from the rest of the cemetery for a Viking presence.

But, you know, we're not seeing suggestions of a population that was experiencing massacres and attacks.

The impression is much more of peaceful settlers in this community at least.

(Tori) But he could equally just have been a very unfortunate person in the wrong place at the wrong time.

(Carla) Exactly, I mean, it's very like some of the things that we see nowadays, you know, there's knife crime that we have on the streets.

(Tori) That kind of untimely death must've made an impact in whatever community he was part of.

He was buried in the parish church, someone cared enough to do that for him.

These bones are telling us something about this boy's life, which makes me think, you know, who was his community?

(somber music) Though murdered and originally from elsewhere in Europe, this boy's body is buried properly in the churchyard.

What does that tell us about the community in Ipswich at this time?

Dr. Katherine Weikert is an expert on the social history of the period.

(Raksha) I'm just wondering what it would have been like in Ipswich during the ninth and 11th century for this really poor 15-year-old boy who got attacked and killed.

(Katherine) In a town like Ipswich, it's very community-based and family-based along with Christian law and Christian ideas.

(Raksha) So it's the collective responsibility of the community to look out for each other.

He was obviously given the proper rites.

(Katherine) But I think it's really important as a part of, shall we say, the social fabric of the town at the time.

We don't know if he had a family.

We know that he came from Scandinavia, but he was a part of that community, he was buried properly in the Christian tradition, as you should've been.

People cared for him, people were looking out for him, and people were sad that he was killed.

(dramatic music) ♪ (Tori) With over 1,100 skeletons, we have so much to discover about how these people are living and dying.

What secrets will the third set of bones reveal?

(Louise) This is an adult female.

She died between the age of 25 and 35 years.

She dates between 1150 and 1300.

(Tori) That's about 200 years after our boy.

(Louise) Yeah, yeah, that's right.

It's about in the middle part of the period over which the burial ground is being used at St. Augustine's.

We first got interested in this individual, because her craniofacial features stood out to us as being nontypical of a European.

And the best way to demonstrate that is to show you another skull from the same cemetery.

This skull is a female with typical European craniofacial traits.

(Carla) What are the features in particular that sort of stand out for you?

(Louise) This face is looking quite long and narrow compared to this one on the right.

Then, when you start to look a bit more closely, look at the aperture, or the opening for the nose.

It's quite narrow in this individual -and quite wide here.

-If she's not European-looking, what does her skull suggest?

(Louise) We compared the measurements of her skull with a world sample, and interestingly, hers are closest to individuals of African descent.

But the isotopes point to her spending her childhood maybe in France, Germany, Denmark.

(Tori) This does indicate there's some kind of African ancestry in this woman's genealogy, then that's not actually in her lifetime, presumably, because the isotopes are saying that she grew up in Europe.

(Louise) Yeah, she could be second generation.

(Tori) You get this picture of a real melting pot, a really multicultural place.

We know that during the medieval period, people were coming to Ipswich from all over Northern Europe.

Tax records at the National Archives will tell us more about the story of immigration to England at this time.

(Mark) All across the Middle Ages, we've got good evidence now that there are people coming in from Continental Europe who scatter across the country, the big towns of London and Southampton and Bristol, over 10% of the population is probably first generation immigrant.

And then in smaller towns, like Ipswich for example, the evidence that we have suggests that we're looking at about 4% of the population.

And what the material really shows is that you were never more than 10 miles from a first generation immigrant.

That's absolutely fascinating.

So okay, what have we got here?

(Mark) So this is a set of documents from Suffolk.

This record is particularly striking in giving us good evidence about the nationalities of the people involved.

We've got lots and lots of people here called Frenchman.

The surname that's applied to them in England is Frenchman.

Surnames are still a relatively new invention in this period.

Suddenly you find people with the name of Beerbrewer, for example, and we could guess what their occupation was -from that name.

-Absolutely!

I'm particularly interested in women and children, because we're kind of focusing on two individuals, and they seem to be coming from Northern Europe, actually.

(Mark) That doesn't surprise me at all.

There's a reasonable amount of evidence that we have now that suggests that children are part of a kind of forced labor that's going on in the immigrant population during this period.

So, for example, particularly in Bristol, we've got good evidence in the documents of-- they're described as Icelandic boys.

They're not even given names, they're just "boys."

(soft music) With women, there are a lot of high-status women, a lot of merchants' wives.

♪ Plenty of women actually plying their own crafts.

If they're unmarried, they can work in their own right and actually have a remarkable number of freedoms.

♪ But, women are predominantly working in the unskilled labor force, probably earning lower rates than foreign men and certainly lower rates than English men and women.

(Raksha) So the gender pay gap is-- (Mark) The gender pay gap is there loud and clear, I think, in this period, and we've also got evidence that women are forced into prostitution as well, which is usually a sign, of course, of the fact that they've reached a point where they can do nothing else.

Do we have any evidence of individuals who are feeling as though they're threatened because they're non-locals?

(Mark) There are moments when there will be organized uprisings against foreigners, but these on the whole took place only in London.

I'm not suggesting that there wasn't low-level activity and discrimination pretty much all the time and that some people were given a hard time by their English neighbors.

For the most part, they may have a good time, they may have a rough time, but they're allowed to get on with it.

(solemn music) (Tori) Makes you wonder, you know, what brought her to Stoke Quay.

If she grew up in either Denmark or Germany, something must've brought her here.

(Carla) Absolutely, you know, what was in her head, what were her thoughts and her dreams and her plans for the future?

(Tori) Yeah, and did she come as an adult, with her family, with her husband maybe, to set up a business, you know, was she a brewer, brewer's wife?

Or was she maybe a civil servant?

(Clara) Of course, and maybe, you know, even a prostitute.

-It is a port, after all.

-It is a port, after all.

What is really interesting, though, is that we've these two non-local individuals separated by 200 years, yes, but these are people who are both coming to Stoke Quay for whatever reason.

And yeah, you could say, "Okay, maybe they're just passing through, it's a port."

But, from what Mark was saying, there were plenty of people who didn't just pass through, who did stay put, and who made their home in Stoke Quay.

There's so much we don't know about our boy or about our woman.

And for example, she was a relatively young woman.

♪ Do you know what caused her death?

(Louise) No, but what we can see is evidence of her poor health on her bones.

This poor woman had tuberculosis spondylitis, so it's affecting her spine.

If I just take this segment from the mid-thoracic region, you can see quite clearly, they've collapsed and fused, and it's causing what we'd call an angular kyphosis, so her spine would have been bent over.

(Tori) So she had TB of the bones, it's affected her spine, but when I think of TB, I think the typical image of someone coughing up blood, it being a lung disease.

(Louise) We've got these lesions on her ribs here, this largish cavity, probably pulmonary infection as well.

-Nasty.

-She seems to have this huge hole, doesn't she, in her upper jaw there.

Is it possibly a cyst or an abscess?

(Louise) It's probably a cyst looking at the size of it.

It's actually quite difficult to say without the soft tissue.

(Carla) Is she just unfortunate for having these sort of things or is this very sort of indicative of what the rest of the skeletons were like?

(Louise) The skeletons from this period to which she dates were seeing an increase in disease.

We've got rickets appearing for the first time, we're seeing increased infection, things like tuberculosis, there's more evidence of that.

-Syphilis... -And that is different to the early population of Stoke Quay.

So when our boy was living, his population was overall healthier than this medieval one.

You sort of think, what has happened, what's changed in Stoke Quay to have caused that for the population?

(suspenseful music) ♪ (Raksha) Teeth not only tell us where we come from, they store information about health and disease.

But can they tell us what is causing increasingly poor health in the parishioners at St. Augustine's?

I want to know all about the health of the population of Stoke Quay.

(Eleanor) The teeth and the bones are showing us that this was a population in decline as time went on.

We're seeing a lot of different pathologies that indicate that people had a lot of stress in their lives, so there are things called dental enamel hypoplasia, which is lines on the teeth, and that can show when growth has stopped, because the body's fighting off an infection or some other sort of stressor.

And so we're seeing that at pretty high levels in the population.

We're seeing a lot of incidents of leprosy, tuberculosis, some syphilis.

Part of that may have been due to urbanization, which would cause people to have poor sanitation, potentially, and more crowding as they lived in tighter and tighter spaces.

And so we're seeing higher levels of disease.

We're also seeing more interpersonal violence than we saw in the earlier periods.

(Raksha) It's like a little snapshot into the life of Stoke Quay.

(Eleanor) Mhm.

♪ (Tori) The bones at St. Augustine's, they tell a story of decline at Stoke Quay, and I think we now know why.

It is a victim of its own success.

With an increasing population comes increasing disease, a decrease in good health.

(Carla) The thing is there was such an increase of people, and with that, an increase in ideas.

This find in particular is fascinating.

♪ (Louise) We've just looked at three individuals, each one has a fascinating story to tell.

Particularly, for me, this skeleton, the male with the cut spine.

We explored a number of possibilities that might have caused this.

We looked at things like postmortem dissection, surgery, even torture.

I mean, stereotypically, when you think medieval time period, you know, torture does spring to mind.

You'd want your victim to be alive to get information from them if you were torturing them, and would that be achievable by cutting the spine?

(Tori) It doesn't feel like it adds up.

So, I mean, I guess surgery-- Do you think it could be surgical?

(Carla) Well, that's the thing, I mean, the cuts, they look professional, don't they?

They look as if somebody knew what they were doing or at least had a specific intention.

Could it be some kind of surgical intervention?

(Louise) Actually, I don't think it is, because they've cut all the way up the spine, and that would be incompatible with life.

(Tori) You're right, it's not compatible with life.

It just makes it such a puzzle!

The bones are telling us something, and yet we don't know enough.

So to find out more, Raksha's gone to meet Dr. Piers Mitchell.

(Piers) This is what's particularly fascinating about this guy, because no one's seen a spine like this in Britain before, no one's seen a spine like this in most of Europe before, either.

We can see that there are cuts down the posterior part of the spinal arch right from the top of the neck right down to the very base of the spine where the sacrum is.

(Raksha) I'm guessing that's quite unusual.

(Piers) That's right, you couldn't possibly have this from a weapon injury going all the way down the midline like that.

It must've been a deliberate thing in someone that wasn't moving whatsoever, and to do that, they must've been dead.

The most you ever get from classical medical texts looking at operations on the spine, talk about operations looking at one or two levels of the spine being involved.

And by the medieval period, they've learned that if you operate on the spine, it goes badly wrong.

And so this must've been something else.

But it was clearly something deliberate, 'cause it's a beautiful straight line all the way down.

And this individual is thought to have died in the late 1200s or in the 1300s, and this was exactly the time when people were doing this kind of intervention to teach medical students the anatomy of the spine.

And they were doing this from 1316 in Northern Italian universities such as Bologna.

What's interesting is that the local universities around here such as Cambridge, there's no written record of them doing anatomical dissection of this early date.

The first anatomical dissection at Cambridge seems to be from the 16th century.

So we don't have any written comparisons to explain this, and that's what's so exciting.

It's certainly well ahead of its time.

(solemn music) ♪ (Tori) We've got this man, he is wealthy, he lived to a ripe old age, he's been buried in the nave, he's an important person, but he met a violent end, he's been killed by several slices to his skull.

The most remarkable thing about him is someone has cut down his spine and we don't know why.

Now, Louise and Piers are both convinced that this happened after death.

(Carla) So effectively, that does rule out torture.

(Tori) Yeah, and then also surgery.

And then that just leaves a postmortem dissection, which just completely surprises me, because I thought that that kind of dissection was not allowed in England at this time.

Is there a possibility it happened abroad?

Not only do we not know who killed our man, but we do not know who dissected his spine or why they did it.

♪ (woman) This is really, clearly the work of someone who knows what they're doing and is looking for something, which is what's interesting.

So I would say this is something that a college of physicians has had a look at.

They want to go inside, it looks like, someone's spinal column, and have a rummage around and see what's going on there.

Very, very normal on the continent around this point in time.

Well, I kind of buy that, apart from the fact that this individual, found in a local parish church, St. Augustine's is actually a small church in Ipswich.

-In Ipswich?

-In Ipswich.

-Mmm.

-Why are you doing that?

'Cause this is very naughty for Ipswich!

-Why?

-Because, well, if-- if we're saying, like, 13th century to 15th century, this kind of a range, they're not supposed to be doing this here.

In England, we are still under royal interdict.

There's not supposed to be any kind of postmortem examination going on, and that doesn't change until the 16th century.

(Raksha) So why couldn't these ideas have just been brought over?

(Eleanor) Well, I mean, that is within the realm of possibility.

The port towns here are incredibly important.

So there is a lot of back and forth, and one of the things that does go back and forth, especially with people who are more well-to-do, is knowledge.

There is also the possibility, if he's got some kind of underlying medical condition?

(Raksha) Well, he does have Paget's disease.

(Eleanor) If he has a kind of good relationship with his physician, something like that, maybe his doctor said, "Oh, you have these symptoms.

If only there was some way that I could find out more about this."

It might be one of those things where he said, "Yeah, have at it when I die," the medieval equivalent of, "Have a look at my body for science."

(suspenseful music) ♪ (Raksha) Have a look at this.

Piers sent me this, it is brilliant.

(laughing) (Tori) No!

(Raksha) So this is a diagram by an anatomist called Vigevano, he's Italian.

He's residing in France.

That drawing dates to 1345.

(Tori) That is bang on the right time period, isn't it?

(Raksha) That's right, and he's really interested -in neuroanatomical structures.

-Yes.

They're the cutting edge of science.

(Tori) Yeah, but this is happening on the continent, but we've got archaeological evidence of something that looks almost exactly the same happening at the same time in Ipswich.

And it's really revolutionary, isn't it?

(Tori) It is unusual just from an anatomical point of view, and now when you place it into the context of the history of science, then you're looking at something which could potentially be really unusual.

The first example of a postmortem in England.

This is at the forefront of what's going on in the world.

♪ (Carla) To me, this is the most fascinating find.

We know from diagrams such as this Vigevano drawing that postmortem dissection was occurring in Europe, it was occurring in the continent around the 14th century, but it was unheard of in England until the 16th century.

I mean, I know medical professors that would say it began in the 16th century in England.

We can now say, "Actually no, we've got evidence of postmortem dissection in England in the 14th century."

I like to think that somebody maybe came over from the continent, as we've got such a huge amount of different people from different countries, and sort of wanted to impart their ideas.

And maybe there was a small intellectual hub in Ipswich for, you know, underground anatomy, who knows?

But this is just the first time that we've found anything like this, which really does fly in the face of everything we thought that we knew about the history of postmortem dissection!

(solemn music) (Tori) When we began this journey into St. Augustine's Parish Cemetery, we didn't imagine we would discover such fascinating cases of murder, knife crime, and early immigration.

And then, making a radical discovery of international medical significance surpassed all our expectations, changing medical history for good.

♪