No substantial excavation had yet been undertaken in the royal chapel of Saint-Pierre-aux-Liens, the parish church of the Tower of London where the bodies of the most famous individuals have been imprisoned and then executed: Thomas More, Cromwell, the ephemeral queen of England Lady Jane Gray… In the middle of these illustrious burials to exhume much older remains, which would go back to the epidemic of black plague having ravaged Europe in the middle of the XIVe century.
The site, one of the most important in decades, is supervised by the Historic Royal Palaces, an independent charity taking care of the unoccupied castles in the country. He comes to shed new light on the living and death conditions of the inhabitants of the famous London fortress in medieval times, details the national magazine Geographic.
Completed in 1520, the chapel as we know it today came to add to a first structure dating back to the XIIe century, and perhaps even IXe century. Under the architectural stratification, it is a whole social and political history to dig even which is offered to researchers.
Diving three meters from depths on almost sixty square meters of cuttings, in a place where it is rare to excavate beyond thirty centimeters, archaeologists have found, in addition to jewelry, textiles and fragments of stained glass, twenty-two whole bodies and substantial mass graves, dating from the 13the XVIe centuries.
Tombs and bubbles
For Katie Faillace, dental anthropologist and bioarchaeologist at the University of Cardiff, although several bodies were buried in coffins, most “People buried here are not part of the elite”but would rather belong to “A middle class that we rarely meet in archeology”.
At least seven burials, dating from the XIVe Century and visibly carried out in a hurry, could well be those of people who died of the black plague during the terrible epidemic initiated in 1348. It is a research theory exposed by Alfred Hawkins, the curator of historic buildings of the Tower of London, which more advanced analyzes, aimed in particular to identify traces of the Yersinia Pestis bacteria, could confirm or invalidate.
In fact, the Londoners of the Middle Ages had created emergency cemeteries for the victims of the plague, who could well correspond to this type of burial. The dates indicate that these tombs could date from the first waves of the bubonic plague in the British capital, so they would provide valuable information on the life of the time.
These excavations pursue experimental work started in 2019, which had made it possible to identify with relative precision two bodies probably dating from the hinge of the XVe and XVIe centuries.
