‘Black Death’ Pit
March 15, 2013 by staff
‘Black Death’ Pit, For seven centuries they have lain beneath the feet of commuters in one of the busiest parts of central London.
Thirteen skeletons, lying in two neat rows, 2.4m beneath a road in Farringdon, have been unearthed by excavations for London’s Crossrail project.
The remains, which were found in a 5.5m-wide shaft at the edge of Charterhouse Square in Farringdon, are thought to be victims of The Black Death.
Builders working on the £15bn Crossrail project uncovered the bodies alongside pottery dating from the mid-14th Century.
Experts believe that the skeletons’ arrangement in two neat rows suggests they date from the earlier period of the plague, before it became a pandemic and before bodies were thrown randomly into mass graves.
Scientists now hope that analysis could shed some light on the virus that led to the Black Death – helping chart the development of the bacterium that caused the plague.
The skeletons were discovered in an area of London where experts believe many more bodies were buried.
John Stow, the 16th century historian, wrote in his 1598 Survey of London that 50,000 bodies were buried in what was then “no man’s land”.
Although that number is now widely believed to have been an exaggeration, the discovery of further remains has not been ruled out.
Nick Elsden from Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) says that further discoveries are likely.
“The short answer is we don’t know just how many skeletons are out there,” he said.
Tests will be carried out on the skeletons but experts are linking the discovery with the Black Death as it is known that a burial ground for plague victims was opened in the Farringdon area.
A similar skeleton formation was found in a Black Death burial site in nearby east Smithfield in the 1980s. The skeletons are being carefully excavated and taken to MOLA for testing.
But Mr Elsden was quick to reassure the public that there was no longer any health risk from the plague which killed over a quarter of the British population in 1348.
“It’s not something that stays in the soil. You have to actually meet someone who has it in order to catch it.”
The bodies are not the first to have been uncovered by the Crossrail excavations.
Archaeologists have already uncovered more than 300 skeletons near Liverpool Street station.
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