Alice Roberts (Simon & Schuster)
ANOTHER year, another really good book from archaeologist Alice Roberts. Part of me almost wants to find that the quality has slipped, just for the sheer surprise 鈥� but no, her standards are as high as ever.
Roberts may be the UK鈥檚 best-known archaeologist, in part due to her many TV appearances. She has also written a string of books, including Wolf Road, her first children鈥檚 novel. Her specialism is osteoarchaeology, the study of bones and what they can tell us about how a person lived and died.
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Crypt is the final instalment in a loose trilogy about what we can learn from graves. The first book 鈥� Ancestors, in 2021 鈥� was about prehistoric Britain. The following year came Buried, which focused on the country in the 1st millennium AD. Now, the final instalment tackles the 2nd millennium, examining Britain鈥檚 Middle Ages in particular.
As before, each chapteris a self-contained look at a particular grave with a specific story to tell. You can read them in any order, although they do proceed roughly chronologically.
The first chapter is about the St Brice鈥檚 Day Massacre of 13 November 1002, when England鈥檚 aptly named King 脝thelred the Unready (typically judged to have been a very incompetent monarch) ordered the killing of Danes living in the country.
脝thelred described the Danes as 鈥渃ockle amongst the wheat鈥�, implicitly describing them as weeds 鈥� a vicious form of othering language that we have seen repeated in many subsequent genocides. Roberts explains the geopolitical situation that inspired 脝thelred鈥檚 vile actions, and examines whether a set of bones found in Oxford might be from some of the victims.
This illustrates a key point about Crypt: it gets pretty dark. It isn鈥檛 so much that you鈥檒l need a strong stomach for gruesome details, though there is a bit of that, but rather that you should be prepared to read about epidemics, mass murder and suffering. The front jacket goes so far as to warn readers that the stories 鈥渁re not comforting tales鈥�. But then history isn鈥檛 comforting: the whole point is to learn lessons from it.
As Roberts explores the Middle Ages, she tackles the killing of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket, the sinking of the Mary Rose and the practice of walling oneself off inside a church to become an anchorite 鈥� in one story, a woman who may well have had syphilis walls herself off in a church in York. In her retelling, Roberts draws on a host of sources: not just the bones themselves, but historical documents, ethnography and anything else that is relevant.
For me, the chapter on the Black Death was a highlight. Roberts weaves together historical accounts of the epidemic with the more recent research that uncovered the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis.
She also takes the time to explain why some epidemiologists argued up to the early 2000s that the Black Death wasn鈥檛 really an outbreak of plague, and how more recent ancient DNA evidence has shown that Y. pestis was indeed involved. But the epidemic still didn鈥檛 play out exactly as we thought, with transmission by humans as well as rats.
I was also fascinated by a chapter on medieval hospitals. Modern hospitals are secular and clinical institutions, but early ones were religious in nature. With few actual treatments to offer, they were more like monasteries, where people with severe illnesses could live away from the rest of society.
The hospital on which Roberts focuses, St Mary Magdalen, east of Winchester, UK, seems to have mostly housed people whose appearances were affected by leprosy, and she has a lot to say about how society understands disability and appearance.
When I reviewed Buried in 2022, I compared the way Roberts writes about long-dead people to Oliver Sacks鈥檚 books about people with neurological and psychiatric conditions 鈥� which I meant as high praise. My point was that both writers excel at weaving together many different kinds of knowledge to create a rich tapestry. They help you understand the facts on a technical level, but they also make you feel them in your bones.
Michael Marshall is a writer based聽in聽Devon, UK
New Scientist video
Watch Alice Roberts discuss how graves shed light on ancient societies
