What became of Thomas Becket’s bones?

The St Brice’s Day Massacre? I must admit I hadn’t heard of this ‘most just extermination’ of Danes in Oxford at the instigation of King Aethelred the Unready in 1002, perhaps because the teaching of history in this country tends to kick off in 1066. You certainly don’t think of Oxford as a place that pioneered techniques of ethnic cleansing.

Crypt is a collection of seven essays that unearth details about how certain people lived and died in the past. If you didn’t already know Alice Roberts’s background as an anatomist and biological anthropologist, you’d have a good chance of deducing it from this book. The old jibe that archaeology is about ‘stones and bones’ holds true; but bones have pulled ahead in recent decades, as new scientific techniques can now extract a wealth of information from previously uncooperative skeletons.

The old jibe that archaeology is about stones and bones holds true; but bones have pulled ahead recently

Roberts focuses on the discovery in 2008 of at least 35 skeletons ‘slung into a mass grave’ beneath St John’s College, Oxford. They are mostly those of young men who met a brutal death. The scientific examination is fascinating, but ultimately resolves nothing – as is often the case with Roberts’s other investigations. The dead may well have been Danes butchered on St Brice’s Day, but we cannot be sure.

Sainthood, leprosy, Paget’s Disease, the Black Death, the drowned archers of the Mary Rose and anchoresses are all given thoughtful scrutiny, and Roberts’s reflections on Thomas Becket and Canterbury cathedral are especially entertaining. It was a pity that Henry II, who probably had the services of a top-drawer jester like Roland the Farter, couldn’t have relaxed to the extent of fashioning a modus vivendi with Becket. The conflict between the king and the archbishop backed by Rome has a hint of Brexit and the EU.