Archaeologists have long known that beneath the streets of modern Cambridge was a medieval cemetery of “poor scholars and other wretched persons”. What they didn’t know was that the city produced quite so many of them (Tom Whipple writes).
Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of more than 1,000 bodies dating from between the 13th and 15th century, all burials from the Hospital of St John the Evangelist, on the site of the current St John’s College.
The cemetery, one of the largest of its kind in Britain, was unearthed during the installation of basements in the Old Divinity School, a Victorian building in the centre of Cambridge.
Dr Craig Cessford, who led the archaeological investigation, said: “We came to the gradual realisation over several weeks