The Parish of St Leonard, Hythe and The Ossuary

Although I have visited St Leonard's church in the last few months I last stepped in the Ossuary in May 2011. I have borrow some of the blurbs from their website and put below the pictures but I'd suggest you also visit their website here. I think my stance on the place has changed now since I've taken more of an interest in "tombstone tourism" - this feels like people have been deprived of a full and proper memorial. This is probably a naive view as most taphophiles, I'm sure, would point out that few people through history have had a good gravestone that has lasted. 

The origin of the remains are uncertain with an estimate being that there are 4,000 souls here and they could be local people, victims of the Black Death or even slain Danish pirates. 

St Leonard’s Church has the largest and best-preserved collection of ancient human skulls and bones in Britain. The collection consists of shelves in four arched bays that contain 1,000 skulls in total, and a single stack of bones and skulls measuring 7.5m in length, 1.8m in width and just over 1.8m in height. The stack of bones was reassembled on its brick base in 1910.

Size of the collection

Past historians indicated that the collection represents the remains of some 4,000 people, but it is impossible to verify the number of bones in the stack. Our latest estimate is a maximum number of 1,200 skulls in the crypt and the total number of individuals represented as 2,000.

Earliest written and pictorial evidence

The earliest references to the collection are 1678 by Samuel Jeake, then Town Clerk of Rye, and 1679 by Rev Brome, Chaplain to the Cinque Ports, both of whom described ‘an orderly pile of dead men’s bones’ in the ‘charnel house’ on the north side of the church. The earliest known drawings are dated 1787 depicting piles of skulls and bones inside the crypt’s entrance door, and 1820 showing the south-west bay and stack similar to its present appearance. Postcards in the early 1900s with photographs of the crypt show the layout much the same as it is today.

The crypt as a charnel house

The crypt has been referred to as ‘the bonehouse’ and ‘the ossuary’. One suggestion is that it had been a charnel house or chapel, to house de-fleshed, separate bones and that St Leonard’s is one of a number of English medieval charnel chapels underneath churches, as the Hythe crypt resembles the attributes of other such chapels.

Origins of the collection

There have been many theories over the years as to who the people were and how their remains came to be resting in the crypt. These include Danish pirates slain in a battle (from a footnote on the 1787 drawing mentioned above); men who fell in the 1066 Battle of Hastings (handwritten footnote on a 1860s illustration); and Anglo-Saxons killed in battle. Another suggestion refers to the people being victims of the Black Death, but such bodies were usually hastily disposed of in quicklime.

However, these theories have been rejected by an osteologists’ project from 2009 to 2012 involving analysis of all the skulls on the shelves, which found a higher proportion of females than males, and nearly 10% of sub-adults (juveniles).

Our conclusion now is that they were Hythe residents who died over a long period and had been buried in the churchyard (evidenced by the deposits of soil within the skulls), and that the earliest of the remains were dug up in the 13th century when the church was extended eastwards over their previous graves. However, this number of individuals is high for ‘Hythe only’ residents, and the collection probably includes bones from four graveyards in the Hythe area that are said to have fallen out of use and closed by 1500.

No accurate evidence for the date of death of the people has been determined, and estimates range from 12th to 15th centuries, though more likely to be 13th century if it coincides with the building of the chancel.

Origins of the people

There is no clear evidence of where the people originated. Studies, of which the earliest was in 1908, have been undertaken by measuring up to 30 different dimensions of each of a group of skulls (a technique known as craniometry). The 1908 study, based on just the ratio of the maximum breadth of a skull to its maximum length, indicated a number were of Italian descent. This could have been a possible link with the Romans in view of the nearby Roman port at Lympne (Portus Lemanis), or with traders visiting Hythe when it was an important medieval trading port.

The more detailed studies in the past five years indicated that some people could have been of Scandinavian descent, and one or two skulls appear to show African origins. It is hoped that more definitive evidence of origin can be obtained by a possible future isotope analysis study.