(mellow music) (metallic clanking) (Dr. Tori Herridge) Human bones can hide the most shocking of secrets.

Oh my God, she's been killed.

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

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

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

(Tori) 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--that's absolutely bonkers.

(Tori) Across the length and breadth of the UK, we'll reveal how 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... (Carla) It makes you wonder what brought her here.

(Tori) ...until now.

(soft music) ♪ An industrial estate just outside the small market town of Andover in Hampshire.

♪ An incredible discovery happened here in 2016 in a car park.

Three years ago, all this was a brownfield site waiting to be developed into a supermarket car park.

♪ Archaeologists were given a chance to dig it, and what they found was sinister.

♪ Dozens and dozens of bones, human bones, over a hundred individuals in all.

Very shallow graves, some have been tossed in face-down, some are in twos and threes.

It looked like no one cared about these people.

It looked like they were outcasts.

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

That is the mystery we need to solve.

-This site's in Hampshire.

-That's right.

It's at the west of the county just outside of a town called Andover on the way to a place called Weyhill.

(tranquil music) We're examining three key skeletons from this site with osteoarchaeologist Sharon Clough.

So this is one of the skeletons from Weyhill.

(Sharon) Yes, that's correct.

♪ (Tori) This one in particular, I mean, these long bones are very big.

This looks to me like a male skeleton.

(Sharon) Yes, that's right.

(Tori) And can you say how old he is?

(Sharon) Yes, we can estimate the age at death.

He was probably between 20 and 25 when he died.

(Tori) So, early 20-something male, but when did he die?

I mean, that's the question, isn't it?

(Sharon) Well, the graves didn't have any particular grave goods.

There was just no indication, however, until we excavated a grave where we found a coin.

(Tori) The face on this coin is Ethelred II.

He was an Anglo-Saxon king ruling England from 978 AD.

It dates at least some of the graves in this burial ground to the late 10th century.

Anglo-Saxon England was a land of small, rural communities, and most of the population had converted to Christianity.

(Carla) So they should've really all had Christian burials, I mean... (Sharon) Yes, they should've been in a churchyard.

-Right.

-And we've no knowledge of a church immediately adjacent.

(Tori) And what about this individual here?

(Sharon) So normally you'd expect someone to be laid on their backs neatly with their arms by their sides and their legs straight.

He was laid on his back, but what was a bit odd was his hands were tied behind his back.

(dark music) -Oh.

-So they weren't as we would expect them, you know, by the side.

(Carla) Okay, so straight away, something a little bit sinister.

(Tori) There is no sign of fatal damage or disease on this skeleton, but, based on Sharon's experience, she thinks the tied hands are evidence for a particularly brutal execution method.

Hanging is probably what's happened to him.

(Tori) If he'd been hung, would you not expect some kind of breakage?

(Carla) In some of the cases that I've dealt with, particularly with a long-drop hanging which is when somebody's dropped from a really big height, you'll get fractures, and that really kind of means an instant death, but with a sort of lack of damage to the hard tissues, are we to infer that maybe damage to the soft tissues, maybe a short-drop hanging?

Yeah, so, from contemporary images at the time, we can see pictures of the gallows, and there were just two uprights with a crossbeam, and the individual hanging in the middle, likely to have stood on a stool, on the back of a cart or something like that, which would then be taken away, so it would be a short drop.

(Carla) And with a short-drop hanging in comparison, it's damage to the soft tissues, it's compression of the vessels, it's asphyxiation, and that's really what gives us that very typical image of a hanged man, you know, eyes bulging, tongue lolling out, purple, congested face.

Just a really horrible way to go, yeah.

(Tori) And also, it would've taken a long time, right?

It's not an instant death, it's a long, drawn-out, gruesome death.

(Sharon) There is something on the skull that I'd like to show you that, in all my years of thousands of skeletons I've looked at, I've not really seen before.

Here on the left parietal, the left side of the head, there's a bone with a cut mark on it, and I think this cut mark's probably from where they were cutting him down off the gallows and cutting through the rope or the noose.

(Tori) That's a very, very brutal image because, you know, to chop someone down, because it feels like they're chopping them down, to go with enough force to go through the rope, through the flesh, and into the skull...

It's so careless as well, just to cut like... Yeah, just like, whoomph, down.

It feels very careless, very disrespectful, definitely.

Were there others like him?

There was many more like him, yes.

So we found 27 individuals with the hands tied at the front or the back.

(Tori) So we've got 27 men, all probably hanged like our guy here, but that's just 27 out of 120-plus other individuals, and what about the others, what happened to them?

(Sharon) I'll show you over here, we've got-- this individual is the one on the lower part of the screen.

(Tori) So this is our guy here.

(grim music) -Lying on his back?

-So he's lying on his back, but as you can see, next to him, in the same grave, there is another male, he's lying on his front.

♪ (Tori) The other thing that strikes me here is, look at that, you say, yes, clearly, we've got two people here, two men here together, but then you just look-- you look very closely and you see, okay, there's another thigh bone there that can't belong to these guys because they've got all their legs and there's a fragment-- it's actually a skull and a little bit of pelvis.

There's more than just two people even in this one single pit.

(Sharon) Yes, that's right.

So what we think's happened here is that when they interred these two and they dug the grave into the ground, the previous occupant of that grave was just disinterred and then thrown back in afterwards when they filled it in.

(Carla) So there's just no care at all, is there, really?

It's all very sort of haphazard, very quickly done, very disrespectful.

-Were they all males?

-Well, what we found was that 97 percent of the individuals that could be sexed were male.

Most of them are young men, so we're talking 18 to 25, which is quite unusual.

Normally you'd expect a cemetery to be a fairly good mix between male and female.

You really do start to ask, what kind of cemetery was this?

(mellow music) ♪ It's hard to imagine what this would've been like a thousand years ago when you look around here -and you see cars, cars, cars.

-That's right, yeah.

(Tori) A cemetery without a church, a cemetery of many young men who appear to have been hanged.

♪ (man) We're actually walking right now on what was this holloway cutting through the site at this point... (Tori) You say holloway, that's like a well-worn path?

(Jeremy) That's right, yeah, a well-worn lane just coming through here that skated round to the execution cemetery that we found in this corner.

Skated around this area, which I walked into in 2016.

(dramatic music) ♪ I'd been asked to come down here and have a look at some bone that the contractors had found.

♪ I was just expecting there to be a bit of animal bone in one corner.

You know, maybe they just found some, and just to say, "Don't worry, carry on," but anyway, I got down here and I walked onto the site and there was just human bones sticking out of the chalk.

♪ And they'd just taken off the concrete and the stuff on the surface... -It was just below the surface?

-Just below the surface, there was all of this human bone.

And the guys that were running the site were saying, you know, "Do we need to call the police?"

♪ I mean, from our perspective, you could see quite clearly, these were archaeological bones that had been there for some time.

No sinews or anything like that.

So, for us, it was a process of letting the coroner know that we'd found this old cemetery.

Clearly, when this field was plowed, they must have gone through bone elements then and had bones coming up in the field.

-And no one mentioned this?

-No, no one at all.

(Tori) You'd think they might've called it Dead Man's Corner or something.

(Jeremy) Yeah.

There were post pits here as well.

(Tori) You say post pits, that is literally a pit that a post went in.

(Jeremy) A very large post hole, if you like, yes.

And we had one post pit here, we had another post pit in the middle here, and then, effectively, we had two more, one that was cut by later graves as well about this point, and another over on the far side here.

So effectively, you could've had maybe two or three structures that existed over this period, and they were clearly burying the people where they'd hung them or displayed them.

Effectively, we've got potentially two gibbet-like structures.

(Tori) Gibbet is kind of like a gallows where you'd hang someone but also display their body.

(Jeremy) So the gallows is kind of the means of execution whereas the gibbet is the structure of showing an executed victim, whether by a chain or a cage.

(grim music) (Tori) This is clearly more than just a cemetery.

It's the execution site as well.

And despite finding over a hundred bodies in the initial excavation, Jeremy thinks there may be many more.

(Jeremy) The graves continued under the fence on this side, so we had bodies disappearing under the garage area as well, and also disappearing under the pavement here.

These are real people.

There's the immediacy to that narrative right in front of you.

♪ (Tori) We think we know the fate of at least 27 of the men buried at Weyhill, but what about the others?

Do they add any more evidence to the grisly picture we are starting to build?

(Sharon) Let me show you this one here.

So he looks a little bit odd, it looks like he's almost squashed in, but what it is is that skull has been decapitated and then placed back in on the side there where the head may have been.

♪ There were about 20 decapitations identified in total.

(Tori) So, you've got 27 hangings, 20 decapitations.

We've got some more interesting things going on yet.

We found skeletons like this.

So you've got somebody laid sort of slightly on the back with the knees bent, but you can see there are three other skulls in there.

(Carla) So what do we think has actually happened with them skulls then?

Why would they go in at a separate time?

(Sharon) Well, they were found without their mandibles.

If you found these skulls without those mandibles, without the jaw bones, that means that they're somewhere else.

What possible kind of scenario can you think -that would explain that?

-Well, I'm guessing, if we've got a lot of what looks like punishment, mutilation... -heads on spikes.

-Heads on spikes?

♪ -Can you say that, Sharon?

-We can't say that for certain, and we're not 100 percent if this was done at this time, but it was definitely done in later periods.

Heads were put on display as a deterrent to other people.

Bringing it all together, what you have is this very, very macabre situation where you've got 27 hangings, 20 decapitations, and then you've got the possibility of these severed heads.

All those things together scream punishment, visible punishment.

♪ A cemetery full of young men.

A theater of execution and punishment.

♪ Raksha Dave is investigating why they are buried at this exact spot.

What was this part of Hampshire like a thousand years ago?

♪ (Raksha) Hi, David.

-Pleased to meet you.

-Lovely to meet you too.

I'm trying to place our cemetery in the Anglo-Saxon landscape.

So could you tell me what it would've looked like back then?

(David) What we have here is, obviously it's a modern map with the Historic Environment Record data on it, and you can see, our cemetery site is out here on the main road in from the west to the contemporary Saxon center of Andover.

You're on a high ridge in what would've essentially been open countryside.

(Raksha) You can't really visualize, can you, on this modern-day map, what it would've looked like.

Do you have an earlier map to show how isolated it actually was?

(David) Yes, if we go to the first edition ordnance survey map, that'll show you a little bit better.

You can see, here's Andover over here, and our cemetery is right out here in the countryside.

(Raksha) So it just seems to be the back of beyond, really, doesn't it?

It's like in the middle of nowhere.

(dark music) (David) In one sense, it's in the middle of nowhere because it is at the edge of everywhere.

♪ If we have a look at this map here, which is an older map, it shows us the hundred boundary.

(Raksha) The hundred, that's a kind of justice system, isn't it?

(David) Well, the hundred is a subdivision of the shire, the county, and it's the subdivision that administers the king's justice.

(Raksha) So this circle here, that's the hundred boundary.

(David) That's the hundred boundary, and if you see the distance between Andover and Weyhill, it sits approximately halfway, and this is where our Saxon cemetery site is.

And this is a very visual way of demonstrating that your hundred is a place where the king's peace is in power, that as you approach the hundred settlement, the ne'er-do-wells have been dealt with and visibly so.

♪ (Tori) The executed young men are buried in a significant location, at the very limits of two neighboring territories.

♪ Weyhill is a cemetery on a border.

It's got a lot of people buried there.

There's a minimum number of individuals of 124 but possibly many, many more, and the majority of those, 97 percent were male.

And we know their causes of death involved hangings.

(Tori) Twenty-seven of those, and then there was maybe around twenty decapitations.

And then, Jeremy told me at the site, there was evidence for these post holes which could've been for a gallows or maybe even a gibbet.

Very dramatic punishment equipment.

(Tori) It's screaming displays, screaming punishment beyond death.

(Carla) "Beware, this can happen to you."

(Tori) Exactly, and that punishment beyond death goes beyond the actual execution display.

It goes right through to the burial because they aren't given Christian burials.

(Carla) Absolutely, no way that they're entering Heaven.

(grim music) ♪ (Tori) So, is this strange cemetery full of executed Saxons unique?

(Raksha) Andrew, you dragged me all the way up this hill.

-Why am I here?

-Well, the reason we climbed all the way up here today, Raksha, is because an archaeological excavation in the 1930s up here revealed an execution cemetery of the Anglo-Saxon period.

♪ (Tori) This hill is known as Stockbridge Down, and it's also in the county of Hampshire.

Andrew Reynolds believes the cemetery found here shares similarities not only with our site at Weyhill but many others.

They have a really quite clear range of characteristics.

I mean, they're located on major territorial boundaries.

♪ So you have a community, and they have people that they see as outcasts or others.

The furthest to which they can physically place them within the territory is at the limit of the territory.

You can't sort of give your outcasts to your neighbors because they won't want them either.

(Raksha) So, they belong to you, but you want them right on the edge.

(Andrew) Yeah, that's correct.

Then you have the relationship between execution cemeteries and routes of communication.

They've gotta be highly visible and you've got to ensure that people aren't seeing these places on a regular basis.

It's amazing the distance at which you can see the silhouette of a human body, for example.

So if the location is carefully chosen, then you're sending out a very powerful message over an extremely wide area, as is the case up here at Stockbridge.

(Raksha) And what about those burials as well?

They're not the norm, are they?

Just people kind of unceremoniously chucked into a shallow grave.

(unsettling music) (Andrew) You don't have to look very far into kind of folklore from various societies, for example, some material from Ireland which tells us that one of the reasons that people might be buried face-down is that if they started to become animated again and they start to attempt to escape from the grave... -Like a zombie.

-They start digging-- like a zombie-- if they start digging, then they're going to go down and not back up into the world of the living.

So you should see a burial practice like this as a kind of insurance measure.

(Raksha) Do we have any more locally in this area?

(Andrew) Well, they are much more widespread than many people might like to think.

It's rather depressing, I think, really.

But if you look, for example, to the southeast and you can see the line of the Roman road as it tracks to the southeast towards the city of Winchester, just on the borough boundary, there's an execution cemetery there, and it's at a place which is called Harestock, and the place name is derived from the Old English word "heafod stocc," which means a head stake or a pole with a head on it.

So then, we look a bit further to the north, down into the river valley, and then a mile the other side of Stockbridge, another execution cemetery on the top of the hill there.

We go up sort of six or seven miles further on to the county boundary between Hampshire and Wiltshire, and there's another execution cemetery again.

So, much of this sort of study of the past through written evidence or through archaeology, it is concerned with things like cathedrals and castles and bishops and kings and so on.

So studying these sites, you're uncovering the archaeology of the underdog, and I think this is one of the things that makes these sites so fascinating.

(Raksha) So how do Saxon execution sites come about?

The earliest ones begin in the 8th century AD, and we know that the 8th century AD is the period when the first English kingdoms are consolidating.

So, before there was an England, there was a multiplicity of small kingdoms in the landscape.

So, we should see these gallows sites as one of those kind of instruments used by people who were trying desperately to maintain the authority over extensive regions and territories.

(vibrant music) (Tori) Not far from Andover is the city of Winchester, former capital of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England and center of the early English legal system.

♪ Raksha is meeting Katherine Weikert there to find out more about Saxon justice.

♪ (Katherine) So these bricks are roughly where the Old Minster would've been in the 7th century when... (Tori) How did our young men end up in our 10th-century execution cemetery?

What did they do wrong?

(Katherine) When you hit the 10th century, under Athelstan, the different types of crimes that were punishable by death suddenly explodes.

You have a number of things that were then punishable by death.

He's trying to consolidate the kingdom that has been left to him.

He's trying to hold things together, politically speaking.

So he definitely is in a situation of having to flex a strong muscle to make certain that he's holding the country together.

(Raksha) What kind of crime would you have to commit to be executed?

One of the crimes that you see most frequently and most consistently in the law codes is theft, and theft especially if you're caught red-handed.

If you're caught in the act of stealing something, it's practically indefensible.

There's nothing that you can say in your defense about that.

(Raksha) So you're caught red-handed, how would you then be tried?

The hundred court would meet at least once a month, once every four weeks, and it would be a gathering of the men and the women of the hundred.

There would be a king's representative there, generally speaking, the reeve would be the one there, and you would essentially state your case, and you'd call people to take oaths on your behalf, to swear that you didn't do this, to justify your character, to testify to who you were and why this was all right.

(Raksha) And then, do the community collectively then dole out the punishment or is it up to an individual?

(Katherine) It's up to the individual, so especially in capital punishments, that's in the king's hand, that's in the hands of the royal jurisdiction or the representative of the royal jurisdiction.

(somber music) (Tori) Weyhill fits the classic Saxon execution cemetery model as outlined by Andrew Reynolds.

-It's on a border.

-It's the one hundred border.

(Tori) Yeah, and it's got majority of male.

-Yeah, predominantly 18 to 30.

-Yeah, yeah, and of course, they've all been executed.

But there are yet more remains to examine from Weyhill.

♪ And the second skeleton turns our neat theory into something much more complicated.

(Sharon) This individual was found in its grave lying on the side in a sort of flex position, and the head was found down by the feet.

-And no jaw?

-No mandible there either, no.

(Tori) That brings to mind the idea of a potential... -Head on spikes.

-...head on spikes situation, but who knows?

So far, basically what you've got here is, looking at the skeleton, is another case of a skeleton that's been decapitated.

So far, same same.

But that's not the end of the story.

Radiocarbon dating on these bones revealed something unexpected.

This individual died after 1066, the famous date when the reign of Saxon kings came to an abrupt end and England had a new Norman ruler, William the Conqueror.

This is an astonishing discovery and takes our investigation into a completely new period of history.

♪ William the Conqueror comes in, he's flying the papal banner.

The Normans come along and they start building cathedrals.

Winchester Cathedral was being built and consecrated.

1093 it was consecrated.

So this is a time of increasing moves towards churches and burials in churchyards.

So you'd think that we should be dealing with an increasing tendency towards sort of piety and Christianity, burials in Christian cemeteries, yet what we see here is something that breaks the mold.

And there's another surprise.

Once I started to look at the bones, I realized that this one was female.

(Carla) Oh.

How did you come to that conclusion?

What made you realize that this skeleton was female?

(Sharon) Well, if you look at the pelvis, there are differences between males and females.

This is called the sciatic notch, and in women, it's much wider than men.

(Carla) So, where my hand is here, in a man, this notch might come around my hand, whereas with this one, it's a much wider angle.

-Yeah.

-I mean, you're confident this skeleton is female then?

Yeah, well, I've been looking at skeletons a long time and estimated the sex of many of them.

Our techniques are generally 85 to 95 percent accurate, so I'm fairly confident.

(Tori) And decapitation, normal for women?

(Sharon) Well, no, at this time, we know from documentary evidence that women were treated differently to the men, so they were more likely they were maybe drowned or thrown off a cliff.

So we wouldn't expect, necessarily, to find a woman in the cemetery.

(Tori) Because this is one of only two female burials in the entire cemetery, Sharon was keen to double-check the analysis.

A cutting-edge test developed just two years ago can be done on teeth to confirm the sex of the remains beyond doubt.

(Carla) It's all part of this intrigue of Weyhill, isn't it, really?

I feel like we just don't know enough about the Normans and punishment.

(Tori) Well, it's so weird because what we have here is not only this aberrant nature of it being a female, a decapitated female at that, but also a lack of Christian burial.

It doesn't make sense.

It's just not fitting together.

Weyhill, as a cemetery, is getting weirder and weirder.

(gloomy music) ♪ (Raksha) So, Alyx, the Normans came and conquered England and they've left an indelible mark on the landscape.

We're sat in front of this beautiful Norman church, but what about the laws, did they change those?

(Alyx) Well, the laws, they actually are the one place where the change is a lot more subtle, certainly not as bold as castles and churches.

The Anglo-Saxons actually had quite a developed legal system.

William makes a big deal about saying that he wants to follow the traditional laws of the Anglo-Saxons, and partly this is for ease because they didn't themselves have written legislation as such but also it's to show that he's ruling over the Anglo-Saxon people but nothing's really-- nothing's really changed, it's--it's fine.

(Raksha) But what about the punishments?

The Normans are really big on corporal punishment.

Do you have any examples of how hideous they were?

(Alyx) Well, it's more just how different they were from the Anglo-Saxons.

So, the Anglo-Saxons, they had very specific corporal punishments for specific crimes.

What we see in the Norman period is largely that corporal punishment becomes much less specific to crimes, so they tend to favor blinding and castration-- I know--as a more merciful punishment to execution.

It becomes part of a system of punishment rather than having been very specific to crimes.

William actually bans execution.

We have very few skeletons who were decapitated who might be datable to the Norman period, and it seems like that's not really a punishment they used very much.

The historical sources suggest that they found it barbaric and, you know, possibly beneath them.

When William bans execution, there's one clause that states it's a symbol of justice, and one actually says it's for the preservation of the soul.

If you can keep the body alive, that gives them time to atone.

It gives them a chance to do some penance on Earth.

(Raksha) So it's for God to judge you, not for a king.

Yes, exactly.

(Tori) What do you make of that idea that Alyx put forward, you know, that people were making less use of these execution cemeteries as you come into the Norman period?

(Sharon) Well, we have 33 individuals in the 11th and 12th century at Weyhill cemetery, so, you know, that's not an insignificant number.

(Tori) It's not insignificant, is it?

You wouldn't sort of go, "33, oh, that's a massive dip in executions in that cemetery."

You've also got that unusual issue of the fact that some of them seem to be female.

Well, we did get the result back from the peptide test on the teeth, and the individual came back as male.

(Carla) But then, by the bone morphology, by the features that you pointed out before, you said you were 85 to 95 percent confident that that was female, so what sort of conclusion could we draw?

Well, as I said, the test is on the teeth, and that came from the skull which was found down at the bottom end of the grave near the feet.

-So, skull's male.

-So the skull is male.

-But the body's female.

-But the body's female.

What you have there, you then have to explain the fact that that female skeleton was buried with no head, and instead, the severed head of a male was placed between her legs.

I mean, that underlines-- I mean, if that doesn't say deviant burial, I don't know what does.

(dramatic music) Over half of the skeletons sent for dating analysis turned out to be post Norman Conquest.

If execution was banned by the king, why are they in this cemetery?

Did old Saxon habits die hard?

♪ That really surprised me, you know, what Alyx said about William the Conqueror.

The idea that, actually, things became less barbaric after the conquest was not something I would've predicted, especially when we know that we've got decapitation, Norman decapitations, and yet they didn't go in for capital punishment.

(Raksha) No, but I think that he was playing a bit of a clever game myself.

He's looking at Anglo-Saxon law, he just lets them continue with their own system.

He's seen as a very pious individual, so he lets the church create the laws as well.

So, what you're saying is happening is that he's saying, "No, no, no, no, no, it's very, very bad to execute somebody.

We don't do that here, but, uh, carry on.

Should you do it, I'm not gonna stop you."

(Raksha) Yeah, absolutely, so it's very much him turning a blind eye to what's happening locally.

If you just read kind of the official history of William I, he's hit the biography with a tick.

You'd be like, "Oh, no, everything's become less barbaric in England," but the reality, which the archaeology shows, is that actually it's a story of continuation.

They're still executing people by hanging and beheading, and there's still this attitude towards disrespect or at least a lack of care over those people that were executed there.

(mellow music) It seems that, in Hampshire, at least, local legal tradition carried on despite the orders of the new king.

Contrary to what the general opinion is, Weyhill is still being used and used fairly often into the Norman period.

(Sharon) And, to top it all off, we have a 13th-century burial.

(Tori) So that's way beyond Norman period.

(Sharon) Way beyond Norman period.

So this individual here has been radiocarbon-dated to the 13th century.

(Tori) Is the story still the same?

What do we know about this person?

(Sharon) So this individual is also male and he's also very young, and I can tell that from his bone over here.

This is his clavicle, and the center area here, the little bit of a bone that sits on the end, hasn't fused yet, and also here, on the sacrum, again, it hasn't fused together, so it means he's still growing.

So this would age him somewhere between 18 and 25.

(Tori) Was he executed?

Well, unfortunately, again, we can't tell from the bones whether he was executed or not, but he wasn't found with a decapitation or his hands tied.

(Carla) So again, we've got a young male in the prime of his life.

Any indication at all of a sort of a disease, something natural that might have killed him?

(Sharon) No, he seems to be in very good health.

He's very robust, he's got no indications on the skeleton of any ailments.

(Tori) He could be just a one-off example.

-Is he one-off?

-Well, he's not, no.

We've radiocarbon-dated a number of other individuals, and there's probably about 17 altogether that date to this 13th century.

-All males?

-All males.

-All young?

-All young.

-All fitting that bill?

-Yeah.

(Tori) And then add to that the fact that this, you know, the Weyhill cemetery itself seems to have been in use all the way through from the Saxon period through the Norman period and into the 13th century.

(Sharon) Well, except there was a small gap of maybe 40 to 100 years where the cemetery seems to have not been used.

(Carla) So it's even stranger.

Why was it being used in the first place, and then why this gap?

(Tori) A century separates our Norman woman and this 13th-century man.

So who is he?

Who are the others buried at Weyhill?

How did he earn his place in this macabre cemetery when its days as an execution site seemed to be long over?

♪ Our last skeleton revealed that in the reign of Henry III, around 1220, this desolate cemetery reopened.

But why?

What happened in the 13th century?

I'm hoping to find some answers in the beautifully illustrated medieval chronicles of Matthew Paris.

Matthew Paris was a monk, and he chronicled the history of England from about 1235, and it gives a year-by-year account.

So if you go to, say, 1255, Matthew Paris writes about problems at home, and one of the problems at home at that time was that the king wanted money for all sorts of things.

To raise money, Henry is putting pressure on the people who he's relied on in the past, the Jewish community, who act as money lenders.

(mellow music) ♪ "How the Jews were despoiled of their money.

When Lent drew near, the king with great urgency demanded from the oft-impoverished Jews the immediate payment to him of eight thousand marks, on pain of being hung in case of nonpayment."

The only way they would be able to do this is if they called in their debts from other people, and those other people were quite often powerful men, powerful barons throughout the land, and that effectively places them in an impossible situation.

They could either displease the king "on pain of being hung" or they can call in their debts and make themselves more unpopular, more unwelcome in England.

If you then go forward to 1257, what you see is actually law and order in general seems to be breaking down.

Now, one of the sort of classical bases of Christian law is that you can beg for sanctuary in a church.

But in 1257, he writes this: "When any fugitive has had recourse to the privilege of seeking an asylum in a church, sometimes he," the fugitive, "is torn thence by violence; sometimes, after he has made an oath to go into exile within the next forty days, he is seized on the public road, by men placed in ambush, and then he is hanged, or sometimes killed in a damnable manner."

(dark music) Matthew Paris's chronicles are fascinating because the picture he paints of the 13th century, exactly the time period where that male died, is really vivid, and it's, I have to say, not great.

I mean, it's a time of famine, it's a time of civil war, and it seems like it was a time when people would've taken the law into their own hands, ignoring the laws of the church, and basically employing vigilante justice.

(Carla) It sounds like a period of real instability.

(Tori) Yeah, it was, I think.

And of course, the thing is, in that kind of situation, people look for scapegoats, and Paris definitely writes about anti-Semitism.

It seems like the Jewish community was being persecuted, and that makes me wonder how that would've played out in the area around Weyhill.

(mellow music) Could increased Jewish persecution explain why Weyhill was reopened?

♪ Dean Irwin has made a study of the impact of the 13th century on the Jewish community in Hampshire.

♪ (Raksha) So, Dean, we're sat here in the middle of the High Street, and somewhere over there used to be the Jews' Tower.

-Am I right?

-Yes, just behind that conveniently placed medieval tower that is the site of the old Jews' Tower which is where the Jews fled in 1265 when Simon de Montfort attacked the city of Winchester, including the Jewry.

(Raksha) I want to kind of like roll back and find out the context of this.

(Dean) The Jews were brought to England at the end of the 11th century shortly after the Norman Conquest, and by about 1200, there was a population of about 5,000 Jews in England, and there was a sizable Jewish community at Winchester, so about 200 individuals.

And why do they come here?

(Dean) They're dealers in luxury goods, they deal in plate, and they're also money changers.

So they're loaning money to the king, but then it all goes wrong.

-What happens?

-At the end of the 1270s, effectively the Crown starts attacking the Jews through legal methods.

You get the coin-clipping trials which see quite a lot of Jews imprisoned and executed -for that crime.

-But what is coin clipping?

(Dean) Well, in the 13th century, you have one coin, which is a silver penny, and basically, these are hammered coins so they're very thin, so you just snip the edges off the coin, and the excess you can melt down to make other coins, and it's treason because the king's face is on the coins.

I'm particularly interested in Andover.

It's very close to the site that we're looking at.

Are there any examples of persecution there?

(Dean) In 1275, Edward I's mother, Eleanor of Provence, basically asks her son for permission to expel the Jews from all of her dower towns, so places like Marlborough, Gloucester, and, crucially, Andover.

And this really anticipates what would happen 15 years later when Edward himself issued the Edict of Expulsion, basically commanding that the Jews leave England, and they wouldn't really return until Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s.

(gloomy music) (Raksha) So I have a bit of a wild theory that some of the individuals in Andover that were persecuted and executed are a couple of the individuals that we have in Weyhill cemetery.

-Do you think that's likely?

-Um, no.

Most of the Jews that we know of that were executed in the 13th century tend to be transported to London.

So, in 1278-'79, 600 Jews are transported to the tower and then 269 are executed there, and that seems to be the standard pattern for the 13th century.

(Raksha) That's a no, then, right?

(Dean) It's, I think you're probably going to have to find a different explanation to that one, yes.

(Tori) The Jewish persecution angle is intriguing, but it's not conclusive.

(Carla) Absolutely, I mean, it's circumstantially relevant but I don't think we can take it any further than that.

(Tori) No, Dean doesn't think so, anyway, and, I mean, we are in the right time period.

Jewish people were being persecuted in the 13th century, but there was so much else going on.

Something had to have happened.

Whether it was Jewish persecution or not, something must have happened to cause that cemetery to be reopened.

(mellow music) ♪ (woman) So this is the Great Hall at Winchester, built by Henry III.

He was the son of King John, who also built Westminster Abbey.

♪ (Tori) Is there any truth in Matthew Paris's tales of lawlessness and vigilantism?

♪ (Raksha) It's really rather grand, but I want to know about the 13th century.

Everything seems to change.

It's a turbulent time.

There were two major civil wars in this period under King John and then, 50 years later, under King Henry III where there's a lot of lawlessness and crime, but there's also a lot of evidence in the legal records for ordinary people being asked by the Crown to take the law into their own hands.

(Raksha) And how does that work?

(Sophie) Well, essentially, there's no police force in medieval England, so the Crown can only apprehend criminals and, you know, essentially execute criminals if local communities do it for them.

Everything in this period was about community and reputation.

So you had to be part of a vill, you had to be in a tithing group if you were a man, so in like a sworn community with other men to keep watch on each other, and if you were an outsider, then you were a potential threat and you were in danger.

So this wasn't a system where people were encouraged to be friendly or hospitable towards strangers.

(Raksha) So do we suddenly see this system of people being outlawed then?

(Sophie) Outlawry was a very effective way of punishing and deterring crime, at least in the earlier 13th century, because it put people outside the boundaries of a community and it put people on the alert to watch out for somebody who was a known criminal.

-How do you become an outlaw?

-You become an outlaw if you fail to present yourself for justice, effectively.

If you were summoned to the county court and failed to turn up on four occasions, on the fifth occasion, if you failed to turn up, you could be declared an outlaw.

There was a very good system in the local law courts for publicizing offenses.

If somebody was suspected of a crime, their name would be proclaimed throughout this system.

So, although perhaps we have a romantic notion of outlaws that emerges from the Robin Hood legend, it was an incredibly dangerous situation to be in.

(tense music, dogs barking) (Raksha) I want to ask you, what do you think is going on at Weyhill?

We have these 17 individuals that date to the 13th century.

-What do you think?

-A criminal isn't automatically denied the rights of the church.

They can make confession before their execution and they could be buried according to church rights.

Now, why would they be denied that?

Communities know that they have a responsibility for law and order, and that empowers them to operate on behalf of the Crown, but they can also push it further where they feel they have the right to carry out a punishment as they see fit.

So we have legal records telling us, for instance, that local communities who apprehended and executed an outlaw might display their body and bury the body at an execution site, at a gallows, as a way of demonstrating to people that their killing of that person was legal because the gallows represent something official, even if the execution has been carried out by local people.

(eerie music) There's a strong sense that people who are outcast in life should be outcast in death.

♪ (Carla) It's strange, really, because we're never gonna really know what this individual did or the rest of them did to end up in this cemetery, but what we do know is that the thing they had in common is that they were all considered to be outcasts for whatever reason.

They could've been outlaws or excommunicated from the church, but what we do know is they were excommunicated from their village, from their people.

They may not have all been criminals.

Yes, they could've been criminals, criminal acts may have led them to this, we can't say for sure what they did, but equally, there could've been a whole raft of reasons why you could fall out with your community.

If justice is being exercised at a local level, it leaves it open for all kinds of, what would look like to us in the present day, as, I guess, abuse.

I think the story of Weyhill is the sheer time depth of it because it's not just these people in the 13th century that are telling this story, that story rolls back right the way to the Saxon period and Saxon execution cemeteries.

In that period, there's been regime change, different dynasties, national laws have changed, and yet local traditions seem to have persisted.

One thing you can say is it was a horrible way to end for 124 people.

(gentle music) ♪