A woman was tortured for days, killed and then put on display at the side of the river Thames in central London around 1200 years ago. The case is thought to be one of the only examples of a judicial execution of a woman in medieval England in the archaeological record.
“This isn’t the story of one blow, and it’s not clandestine,” says at the University of Toronto in Canada. “It’s the story of purposeful violence, and possibly keeping somebody in an injured and painful condition alive for a certain period of time, and then displaying the body on the foreshore.”
While working on her PhD at the London Museum in 2014, Mant came across thousands of old remains from skeletons that had been uncovered during urban development and stored at the museum. Among those, she found one body particularly intriguing: a woman’s skeleton that had been pulled from the Thames, just next to Southwark Bridge, in 1991.
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żěè¶ĚĘÓƵs had already and carbon-dated the moss, reeds and bark surrounding her, describing the case as an execution in the early Middle Ages.
Mant wondered if modern technology could tell more of the woman’s story. Over the next decade, she and her colleagues re-examined the skeleton’s trauma patterns in detail with a high-powered microscope and carried out chemical analysis of her teeth.
Partially healed fractures on the woman’s shoulder blades suggest she endured beating or flogging about two weeks before receiving fatal blows to her jaw and skull. Her body was left on the muddy sediment surface and surrounded by tall wooden posts for all to see – even at high tide.
The time gap between the beatings and death was particularly shocking, says Mant. “It was cruel, and it was unusual, and it was meant to be witnessed,” she says.
Analysis of the types of chemical elements in her teeth revealed that the woman had lived in London long-term. “This wasn’t a xenophobia problem,” says Mant.
Why the woman received such treatment remains a mystery, however. While laws at the time allowed for capital punishment for serious crimes like major theft and murder – including murder by witchcraft – most of the people executed were men, usually by beheading, and their remains haven’t shown evidence of extended suffering or repeated assaults. Those criminals were generally buried in criminals’ cemeteries outside the city.
at the University of the Highlands and Islands, UK, says the findings strongly support the idea of a judicial execution. “This woman’s death may have been intended as a warning to others,” she says.
She might even have been left to drown under the rising tide following the blow to the head as a ritual of “multiple death”, she says. While the case shouldn’t be confused with later witch trials, it is also possible that she was considered a witch.
For Mant, the findings point especially toward gendered violence – and the importance of unravelling women’s stories through modern bioarchaeology.
“Gender violence through time is often so private and hidden,” she says. “These women lie in wait for hundreds of years to be found again, and talked about. And now we can keep them alive by studying them and speaking about them. That evidence is really important, because it gives us a little bit more history of violence against women – no matter what they did.”
World Archaeology
