Review of Crypt: Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages: Alice Roberts, Simon & Schuster 2024

[sheenaghpugh]

This is the third in a trilogy of books on osteoarchaeology and related disciplines and how they are changing our view of history. This time the focus is very much on disease; what the bones of the dead can tell us about the pathogens that killed them and, through that, about the conditions they lived in. These studies can also have a surprising contemporary relevance.

Many relatively new research techniques have revolutionised our ideas about the past – palaeopathology, the study of diseases and injuries of the past, archaeogenomics, the extraction and analysis of entire ancient genomes, not only human genomes but those of diseases themselves. And things are moving quickly; not long ago it was almost impossible to sex the bones of juveniles, because sexual differences like pelvis size were not yet evident. Now we know that the amelogenin gene appears on both the X and Y chromosomes, in slightly different forms on each, which means this gene can be extracted from teeth to help sex juvenile bodies. The term “osteobiology” has been coined for what we can learn about people’s lives and deaths from their bones, and while there will always be frustrating lacunae, there is more information to be found there than one might think.  Isotope analysis can show diet (and by extension social status), and where the person lived in childhood. The localised wear and tear on the bones of the sailors who sank with the Mary Rose has much to say about the work they did while alive. In a mass grave in Oxford, where at least 35 people had plainly died by violence, the absence of “the type of wounds you might expect when someone is defending themselves – often on forearms” suggests this was not a battle but a massacre, possibly of people who were running away at the time. And though all the bodies where sex could be determined were male, there was also an absence of old, healed wounds on the bones, meaning they were unlikely to have been professional fighters.

The chapter on the Oxford mass grave postulates a connexion with Ethelred’s infamous decree of 1002, more or less inciting mob violence (the St Brice’s Day massacre) against those of his subjects who happened to be Danish, or descended from Danes, or who looked as if they might be. Like most suggested answers to archaeological puzzles, this one is not certain, though it does sound plausible, but it is the techniques used, rather than any positive solution, that provide the interest, particularly when they turn out to have a personal, human application. One of the Oxford bodies, that of a young man with ten horrific skull injuries, turned out to be “closely related to another man, buried in the cemetery of Galgedil on the Danish island of Funen. That man – who was probably around the age of fifty when he died – also seems to have suffered a violent death, with a stab wound to his pelvis”. They were second-degree relatives; the older man would have been the grandfather, uncle or half-brother of the younger.

The chapters on researching the genomes of disease were the most fascinating. The plague pathogen, Yersinia pestis, turns out to have been with us at least since the Late Neolithic. The leprosy pathogen, Mycobacterium leprae, would seem at first sight to be intent on putting itself out of a job; it is a parasite which can only live in a host (it cannot be cultured in a lab), but which all species quickly reject except two: the nine-banded armadillo and homo sapiens. And even most of the latter are resistant to it; only one in twenty is susceptible. Its saving grace, however, is the remarkably long time it takes to incubate, show symptoms and kill its host, giving it plenty of time to pass on to a new one.

In the chapters on Paget’s disease and syphilis, we meet both a pathogen and an individual person – in the latter case, even possibly a named one – which naturally increases the interest. The Paget’s chapter is also interesting for what it shows about the relevance of palaeopathology to modern medicine; research has shown that the disease was far more severe in mediaeval times than it is today and has isolated a particular protein that might give clues as to why.

There’s much to like about this book, also a few downsides. One is her determined quirkiness. Her humour does sometimes work, as in the description of modern pilgrims to the tomb of Becket, who sound every bit as gullible as their mediaeval forebears: “a man who wanted to re-frame negative experiences he had at sites that would be visited, a woman who was there as part of her shamanic training, a raver who had been up clubbing the previous night and had stumbled upon the group, a banker who wanted to reconnect with nature, and an American cyclist and university administrator with a penchant for history”. But she can sound irritatingly arch, and though it is less of a problem than in the first of the trilogy, there are still instances: “Eighteen of the relatively complete skeletons showed evidence of ossification of the ligamentum flavum (OLF). I know – sounds painful, doesn’t it?”. That makes this reader wince rather than laugh. There is also the occasional carelessness; she mentions “a minstrel at the court of King Henry” without specifying which of the eight she has in mind, and it isn’t evident from the context. And she is sometimes inclined to overdo the background information, never more so than in the chapter on Becket, which has very little to do with the book’s theme and certainly didn’t need his well-known life story rehearsing. Most of that chapter strikes me as padding.

However she does make a good case for the role of non-verbal history in conjunction with (and sometimes as opposed to) the written variety. “The testimonies etched, cut and burned into bone have one important advantage in that they are not skewed by politics, not managed as propaganda, not favouring one version of events over another. They are simply oxygen and strontium, carbon and nitrogen, the shape of a male pelvis, the mark of a blade cutting into bone. They do not obfuscate, deceive or embellish. They are just there.” They are of course still subject to human interpretation, but to be fair, she is scrupulous about mentioning alternative versions.

One interesting thing: she several times points up contemporary parallels, as in “We learn of an episode of terrible brutality, when hate speech unleashed a tide of violence against an ethnic minority in multicultural England; of life-changing disease as incurable epidemics swept through medieval Europe”. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it has been a feature of nearly every history book I have read in the past few months, by widely differing authors, and I wonder if publishers in this genre are demanding an awareness of “contemporary relevance” from their authors. (The exception among said authors was Jonathan Sumption, who in his final volume on the Hundred Years War seldom acknowledged the existence of any century after the fifteenth.)