123 bodies found in Leicester died of mystery disease which tore through population, expert thinks

Dozens of corpses from the 12th century found in Leicester city centre were probably the victims of a disease that tore through the population. That's the view of Mathew Morris, project officer at the University of Leicester’s archaeological services, who said the bodies had been found just a few metres from Leicester Cathedral during recent excavations.

The dig took place ahead of the current work going on at the cathedral, where a new heritage learning centre is being built in the cathedral garden. The bodies were all found in a narrow shaft and it is one of the largest burial pits ever found in the UK, The Guardian website reported.

Mr Morris, who was also involved in the 2012 discovery of Richard III, said: “Their bones show no signs of violence – which leaves us with two alternative reasons for these deaths - starvation or pestilence. At the moment, the latter is our main working hypothesis.”

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He said the evidence suggested the bodies were all buried within a short time as if a disease had wiped out about one in 20 people some time in the 12th century. He said: “It looks as if successive cartloads of bodies were brought to the shaft and then dropped into it, one load on top of another in a very short space of time.

“In terms of numbers, the people put in there probably represented about five per cent of the town’s population.”

The burial pit corpses are among 1,237 bodies found in the dig at the cathedral, which has been the site of churches for hundreds of years. Many of the bodies were buried in the church grounds in the 19th century and the oldest date back to the 11th century.

The dig at Leicester Cathedral, which only received cathedral status about 100 years ago, has shed new light on Leicester's history. Mr Morris said: "It’s a continuous sequence of 850 years of burials from a single population from a single place, and you don’t get that very often. It has generated an enormous amount of archaeology.”

The team initially assumed the 123 people in the shaft had died in the Black Death, which arrived in Europe in the 1340s. But after carbon dating the bodies, they found they had been put there more than 150 years before the Black Death arrived, probably killed by some other disease.

Researchers are now exploring viruses, bacteria or parasites that might have triggered the blight that struck Leicester. They suggest a “devastating outbreak” which may have had similarities to the Covid pandemic but research remains ongoing.