St Mary Spital (Spitalfields ramp project SRP98)

11 February 2008

The Augustinian priory and hospital of St Mary without Bishopsgate (later known as St Mary Spital), East London was one of about two hundred hospitals founded in 12th-century England. It became one of the largest hospitals in the country in the medieval period, providing shelter for the sick, the poor, elderly and homeless. The momentous efforts of Brian Connell, Amy Gray Jones, Rebecca Redfern and Don Walker of MoLAS in recording some 5,500 medieval burials from the cemetery of St. Mary Spital, have come to fruition with the production of the text for an osteological monograph, currently in review.

Open cemeteries are frequently problematic to phase, but at St. Mary Spital, an unprecedented accuracy of dating and phasing has been achieved using a targeted programme combining relative and absolute dating: stratigraphic and radiocarbon techniques. The project provides a unique insight into the lives of medieval Londoners from the 12th to the early 16th century.

This will be the first purely osteological publication by MoLAS containing a comprehensive results section and discussing themes such as the environment of the city and its surroundings, urban life-ways and treatment and well-being. It is part of a four volume series which also covers the Roman cemetery (most well-known for its stone sarcophagus), the archaeology of the medieval priory and the archaeology of post medieval Spitalfields.

The team, who worked for more than three years on this project, made a number of significant discoveries including the largest archaeological sample of individuals with skeletal evidence of tuberculosis and the earliest cases of syphilis in Europe. Dating of the many mass burial pits enabled them to be linked to catastrophic famine events in the mid 13th century.

The database holds records for all the burials examined. Further information on accessing these records will be posted here following publication of the monograph.