Horner's Corner

The Ossuary at St Leonard’s, Hythe

by on Jul.11, 2009, under environment, history, places

The Ossuary

The Ossuary at St Leonard's, Hythe

The crypt of St Leonard’s Church in Hythe contains one of only two ossuaries in the UK (the other is in Rothwell, Northants). It holds over 2,000 skulls arranged neatly along the walls and 8,000 bones in a huge pile stacked almost to the ceiling – like a macabre game of Jenga. When death is such a taboo these days it’s a shock to see so much of it staring you in the face.

Seeing so many skulls in one go makes them less of a sinister object and more of an anthropological souvenir. They come in all shapes and sizes, some with axe wounds and congenital deformities – a sign of the times. One even shows a trepanning wound, where a hole was drilled in the skull and miraculously, the patient survived. A table of jawbones shows rows of teeth in surprisingly good shape. In those days refined sugar wasn’t part of the diet and the greatest dental hazard was tough bread.

This collection is gold dust for those want to know more about the health and genetic make-up of our predecessors. The numbers stamped on to each skull are signs of a study that took place in the 1930s. When I visited, a forensic anthropology student from Bournemouth University was working away with a craniometer, measuring the skulls one by one. The owners hope that new technology will reveal more about the lives of the people who came to rest here.

There have been many theories about how such a large collection got here – as the result of a Saxon battle or a wave of the Black Death. The mostly likely explanation is less dramatic, simply that an existing burial ground was disturbed during the building of the new church in the 13th Century.

At that time ossuaries were relatively commonplace. Bodies were only buried for a short while before being dug up again. The skulls and femurs (thigh bones) were kept as they were the two strongest bones and it was thought that their preservation was enough to guarantee passage into the afterlife. This might seem horribly disrespectful by today’s standards but it was a sign that the physical body wasn’t important. The soul had already ascended to heaven and so the body returned to dust.

Read more at:

Nothing To See Here: The Ossuary at St Leonard’s, Hythe.

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2 Comments for this entry

  • Mike Horner
    July 11th, 2009 on 2:23 pm

    Hi Chris,

    Did you mean to go to find the bones or did you come on them when browsing a country church?

    X

    Mike

  • Chris
    Chris
    July 11th, 2009 on 2:57 pm

    I found this via following up hyperlinks to a website called ‘Nothing to see here’ – click on the link to see.

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