No infants and lack of young women suggest hospital cemetery refused pregnant burials, focusing on "poor scholars" and "wretched persons"

No evidence of disease or mass burials from the Black Death, the pandemic which swept through Britain between 1348 and 1350 and killed millions across Europe, was detected in a set of more than 400 burials found beneath one of the largest medieval hospital cemeteries, say archaeologists.

Up to 1,000 individuals were excavated at the St John’s College Cambridge’s Old Divinity School during a refurbishment of the Victorian building between 2010 and 2012.

Releasing images of the well-preserved skeletons for the first time, experts say the scale and extent of the burial ground, which had been known to historians for at least 60 years, had been unclear until they began the work.

Cambridge Archaeological Unit says the cemetery was created during the early 13th century and would have contained the bodies of around 1,300 people, covering six generations in neatly laid-out rows or buried in a charnel house.

Gravel paths, a water well and the seeds of flowering plants suggest people would have visited their late loved ones at the grounds.

Only a handful of the burials included grave goods such as jewellery, with the vast majority buried without coffins or shrouds, indicating a cemetery for the poor.

“Evidence for clothing and grave goods was rarer than at most hospital cemeteries”, said Dr Craig Cessford, who led the dig for the Cambridge University Department of Archaeology and Anthropology.

“This was a purely lay graveyard with no clerics present. Items were found in graves that might represent grave-goods, but their positions were ambiguous.

“It is equally possible that they represent residual material from earlier activity at the site.”

Archaeologists were surprised to find no infants and a “relative lack” of the remains of young women at the graveyard, which faced and served the Hospital of St John the Evangelist until 1511.

They believe the hospital’s Augustinian ordinance from 1250, focusing on “poor scholars and other wretched persons” and specifically excluding pregnant women from its care, could account for the age balance of between 25 and 45 years of age.

Plague victims in the area would probably have been buried on local grazing land, according to researchers. Originally merely a small building on a patch of waste ground, the backing of the church allowed the hospital to become a noted place of hospitality and care for academics and local people.

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