by Mark Ellis
London Times, August 13, 1989
MEDIEVAL man, it can be revealed, was not short, fat, and hairy, with warts on his face and a leering grin.
The picture of our forefathers, passed down through imperfect history books and impressionistic paintings, is entirely false, according to archaeologists at the Museum of London who are working on one of the biggest finds of skeletons from the period.
The typical medieval Briton was similar in stature to many of today's workers in City of London offices near the spot where hundreds of people were buried in in mass graves during the bubonic plague in 1349.
Only his fuller mouth, a legacy of coarser foods needing prolonged chewing that stimulated jaw bone growth, would look rather strange to us. He did, however, have teeth largely free from decay.
The discovery of a cemetery from the time of the Black Death on the old Royal Mint site, near the Tower of London two years ago has excited archaeologists, who say the find is more important than tbe collection of sailors' skeletons found on the Mary Rose, Henry VIII's flagship that sank in the Solent in 1545.
The cemetery gives the finest example of a cross-section
of medieval British life with rich, poor, young and
old buried together within 18 months of the plague
reaching London in September 1348. The archaeologists
have found that our ancestors
Duncan Hawkins, one of three archaeologists who supervised the one-million pound dig, said: "It will provide a unique picture of medieval man. The general picture of medieval man is a cross between something out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and a figure in a Bosch painting--pretty ugly"
The skeletons will be subjected to DNA tests to take genetic fingerprints from the bone for researchers working on sex and racial groupings. Oxygen isotope analysis will be taken to measure the carbons laid in the bones by various foods to determine diets.
Fiona Kelly, 26, a human osteologist at the Museum of London, is cataloguing the skeletons and taking measurements to assess whether the victims had broad faces, high foreheads, back problems or iron deficiencies.
She said: "This could demythologise the Middle Ages. We think of them as being 4ft nothing and dying at 35. I think this is inaccurate."
Dr Tony Waldron, a consultant physician at St Mary's Hospital, west London, said half the skeletons he had seen showed signs of arthritis, but it affected people less than he had expected.
One of the most extraordinary finds is the case of the man who was stabbed in the back with a huge downward blow which embedded the knife-end in two vertebrae, narrowly missing the spinal cord. Amazingly, he survived, only to die in the plague a few years later.
The last of the 700 skeletons to be excavated was found with a hoard of 100 silver coins, but other wealthy victims of the plague were not so lucky. Many were stripped of virtually everything except their shrouds. Gravediggers of the period, the archaeologists noted, could become very rich.