Chop! How medieval folk tackled the walking dead

THEY were already dead. But that didn’t stop their neighbours snapping their thigh bones in two, cutting off their heads and burning them.

Now, nearly 1,000 years on, the ten skeletons have become big news in the archaeological world. They are thought to offer the first concrete evidence that Medieval people hacked apart corpses to stop them returning as the undead.

The remains have been unearthed in a pit near the abandoned village of Wharram Percy in north Yorkshire.

For centuries it was believed that the best way to stop those

who had been wicked in life from returning as restless corpses or ‘revenants’ was to butcher their corpses.

Until now no remains had been found to have been disposed of in this way, but a team from Historic England and Southampton University believe their find to be the ‘first good archaeological evidence of the practice’ in the UK. They say the evidence suggests the victims had not died in battle and were not victims of cannibalism.

Their study, in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, shows the victims were aged from four to 50 and were buried over a 100-year period between the 11th and 14th centuries.

‘First good evidence’