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Seventeen Bodies in a Well: A Norwich Mystery July 11, 2015

From Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog - (strangehistory.net)

The picture above is a horrific one. The bodies of seventeen individuals, eleven of them children (the youngest two years of age) who were, at some point in the Middle Ages (dating 1150-1300), thrown down a well in the East Anglian town of Norwich. The bodies were discovered in 2004 and various years of careful research followed. However, a find this horrifying and this fascinating was bound to assert its own narrative and that happened in 2011 when Cold Case, a British television series looked into the affair and claimed that the bodies were victims of a pogrom. Here is a very powerful story: imagine parents being hurled down the well and being followed by their screaming children; imagine how long it would have taken to die… But, through all this there are serious doubts about the, let’s call it, ‘official’ story.

First doubt: were the seventeen alive? The original excavation report mentions four fractures on seventeen bodies: one greenstick, two healed and one possible; nothing suggesting injuries from a fall while alive. In fact, there is no evidence at all that they were thrown into a well while still breathing or that any had suffered the kind of violence that we might expect from a pogrom leading up to death, being beaten through the streets etc. Some mutterings about suicide during a pogrom are, meanwhile, simply bizarre. The children were thrown in last…

Second doubt: were the seventeen Jewish? The only ‘strong’ evidence for this claim is their DNA. Five of the bodies had retrievable DNA and these five came from the same family. The problem is proving that the DNA in question is ‘Jewish’. The five bodies were judged to have DNA ‘consistent’ with Ashkenazi Jews (30%), but that is DNA also found (though to a lesser extent) among the general European population (7%). Note that two other bodies had typical European DNA sequences.

Seventeen bodies, dead or alive, were thrown down a well: should we assume that the well was little used or dry? There were no signs of leprosy or tuberculosis on the skeletons, two diseases that leave marks. But then there are lots of other diseases that do not leave marks on bone. Why not, for example, some plague passing through the urban population? This would, according to that hypothesis, have been a messy burial by some neighbours who had to get dead bodies out of the way. Alternatively, we could be looking at some kind of act of mob violence, though, as noted above, mob violence might be expected to have shown up on the remains of the seventeen. There was a Jewish population in the city. The Jewish population had been ‘investigated’ for supposedly murdering a Christian child in 1144, William of Norwich: one of the first and best documented cases of the blood libel. In 1190 there is contemporary evidence of massacres against the Jews of Norwich: this was the year of perhaps the worst British pogrom, the deaths of 150 Jews in York.

But while archaeologists continue to scratch their heads, the rest of society has moved on. In 2014, after long negotiations, the local Jewish community took possession of the seventeen bodies and buried them in consecrated ground. Even during these burials there was an understanding that the bodies might not be Jewish but as Bishop David Gillett (previously of Bolton), who attended the ceremony, commented: ‘ Whatever the DNA research reveals, the discovery of the bones has raised awareness of some of the real injustices inflicted on the Jewish community in medieval times.’ This is the spirit in which a plaque has now been erected to their memory at the shopping mall, the Chaplefield Centre, where these dead or alive bodies were dropped down a well. Let is artfully and perhaps sensibly ambiguous: particularly when it is remembered just how indifferent to historical facts many history plaques are.