Mr Hawkins said: “We prepared for the fact that there may be complete burials, but we weren’t expecting them to be there because historic records show that the burial site was in a different location.The remains of an adult female and a young child have been discovered beneath the floor of one of the entrances to the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower of London. The aim of archaeology is leaving as much of the site intact as possible.”Īrchaeologists only excavated the area because work was taking place to improve disabled access into the chapel.
Mr Hawkins said: “We’ve never even considered testing them. These two individuals were discovered within remnants of a medieval floor just outside the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula, the burial place of some of the most famous Tower prisoners, including ‘traitors’ beheaded on nearby Tower Hill.Īlmost 1,700 bodies were exhumed in 1876, because the sheer number of burials was making the floor unstable, but the Victorians reinterred them in the crypt without assessing them. “The significance is that we’ve never had the opportunity to assess skeletons that have come from the Tower.” It’s the home of people who worked and lived here over 1,000 years. But the Tower is not just a palace, a fortress and a prison. He added: “We’re all allowed to get carried away with the prison and the traitors who are buried here. Tests reveal that they were badly nourished and that the woman had suffered chronic back pain.Īlfred Hawkins, a curator of Historic Royal Palaces, which oversees the Tower, told the Sunday Telegraph that the discovery is all the more exciting because these were ordinary people who are otherwise forgotten by history but who enabled the Tower to function: “Getting the potential to learn about the people who lived there is absolutely amazing. It was not the healthiest period to have lived. The skeletons - the first from the historic site to be assessed scientifically - have been identified as a woman aged between 35 and 45 and a child of about seven.Īpparently in unconnected burials, they date from between 14, between the Wars of the Roses and the reign of Edward VI, the much longed-for son of Henry VIII. They appear to have been ordinary people who had lived at the Tower during the late medieval and early Tudor era. Now an archaeological dig at the 1,000-year-old site has made a remarkable discovery - two normal burials whose skeletons bear no axe and sword marks of executions or any signs of violent death. As the infamous royal fortress and prison, the Tower of London is synonymous with the bloodiest of executions and torture, with Henry VIII’s wives Ann Boleyn and Catherine Howard among so many who met a grisly end there.
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