The skeleton keys to Britain’s history

Introducing our ancestors via their bones, Alice Roberts completes a compulsive, if overstuffed, trilogy

352pp, Simon and Schuster, T £18.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£22, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

In the introduction to Crypt, Alice Roberts points out that the overwhelming majority of historical documents – poems, charters, annals – tell us very little about ordinary people: most humans, for most of history, left behind nothing but their skeletons. And so, to gain a glimpse into these “missing” lives, skeletons are what Roberts turns to. She terms her endeavour “osteobiography” – biography “written in bone”.

Crypt is the last instalment in an osteobiographical triptych. The first, Ancestors (2021), looked at prehistoric tombs; Buried (2022) moved into the first millennium of the common era. By this final part, we’ve arrived in the later Middle Ages, the period between 1000 and 1500. Through a tour of seven burial sites across Britain, we hear about the victims of an 11th-century massacre; the patients in a rundown leprosy hospital; the devotees of the shrine of Thomas Becket; the people buried in a mysterious priory; casualties from the plague; sailors on the shipCRYPT wrecked Mary Rose; and, finally, an aristocratic anchoress with advanced syphilis.

These people’s bones, Roberts shows, can often reveal a surprising amount about how they lived. Take the victims of that massacre. From their remains, discovered under what is now St John’s College, Oxford, archaeologists managed to determine not only the ages of the victims (mostly between 16 and 25) and the circumstances of their deaths (“exceptionally vicious and violent”), but also that they hadn’t been professional fighters, and even, remarkably, that they’d had a propensity for eating fish. This last fact, it turns out, was unusual in 11th-century Oxford: very likely, the men killed were Norse immigrants, brutally murdered in retaliation for Danish incursions into Britain. It’s a wonderful display of how modern archaeology can bring hidden histories to life.

Crypt, in fact, is often as much a story about archaeological research techniques as it is one about the Middle Ages. As Roberts surveys the medieval graves, she deftly explains the processes through which the archaeologists working on them came to their discoveries, from isotope analysis to DNA sequencing. Along the way, she generously credits the scholars on whose pioneering work she draws. Often, she seems to know them personally – one really gets

the sense here of being at the vanguard of the discipline.

An unfortunate by-product of this dispersed focus, however, is a tendency to get lost in academic digressions. The chapter about the priory burial includes an 18-page aside on the biology of bone. The one about the Mary Rose contains a six-page detour into the muscles needed to operate an English longbow. These are not in themselves uninteresting, but they speak to a lack of narrative cohesion.

It’s not uncommon to lose sight of the medieval subjects for pages on end, as the author pursues a tangent about the discovery of the plague pathogen in 19th-century Hong Kong, or the physiology behind the injuries of Japanese baseball pitchers. Roberts expresses the hope that her portraits will help readers “feel a greater connection with all those generations of people who have gone before”. But ironically, these people can come to feel quite distant, flattened beneath the weight of extraneous information.

One feels this could have been remedied by a tighter editorial hand. That hand might also have pruned some of the book’s more banal statements. “One of the worst things that any leader can do is to stoke division”, Roberts writes at one point. “Religion was incredibly important in medieval European society”; “a violent attack with the aim of causing damage to the face is seen as an appalling act”.

It’s unfortunate, because there is a fascinating book here hiding just below the surface. Roberts is particularly engaging when she uses the archaeology as a starting point to probe the medieval lives she’s describing. When discussing the aristocratic anchoress, she speculates to great effect about whether her syphilis would have been public knowledge. Would laypeople have associated her symptoms with sinful behaviour, she wonders, or might her psychoses in fact have been seen as divinely inspired episodes? It’s fascinating to ponder. Crypt could have done with some more of it.

Make no bones about it: a skull found in the wreck of the Mary Rose