The body in the brook - a Saxon skeleton in Marshfield
In early June 2002 three schoolboys on a walk in Marshfield discovered a human skeleton. What made the discovery so unusual was that the bones were under water, in a brook. The bones lay across the brook, aligned ENE-WSW and thus perhaps roughly in the supposedly christian east-west alignment. The body had been deliberately placed on its back, in a grave and it was in an extended position.
The bones were surrounded by sticky blue/grey clay, which differed considerably from the yellow grit of the bed of the brook. This clay constituted the fill of the original grave cut. Our individual had been deliberately placed in a grave, on his back and the grave was then filled in. Over the years the brook changed course, eventually to wash open the burial. The grave was cut down some 20cm into the bed of the stream and the surface of the water was a further 30cm above in places. Radiocarbon dating of the bone showed that the individual died about 884 plus or minus 34 years before the present (roughly 1089-1157) - the early Norman period of English history. The grave also contained a small fragment of pottery by way of a grave good. Vince Russett, the archaeologist for North Somerset was able to date this shard as being late Saxon. It is quite possible that our individual had lived through one of the most tumultuous phases of English history - the Norman Conquest, witnessing the end of the Saxon dynasties.
The area of burial had been owned by Queen Edith (the wife of King Edward the Confessor, and sister of King Harold – vanquished in the Battle of Hastings) in the Anglo-Saxon period, but there is little other information about Marshfield in this period. Some shell-tempered and gritty Saxon pottery has been recovered, but mostly to the west of the parish. Wiltshire Sites and Monuments Record (SMR) also mentions the presence of early mediaeval field terraces nearby. The skeleton was taken over to Angela Boyle, the palaeopathologist for Oxford archaeology and she pronounced that the body was male and was aged between eighteen and twenty-five when he died, around 5ft 5 inches (165cms) in height, that he suffered from 'shin-splints' (a condition suffered by modern runners) and had a spell of vitamin deficiency as a child. The person also had a condition consistent with having habitually squatted in life. The pathology of the individual could not, however, tell us how he died.