Grisly discovery of headless bodies gives insight into justice Saxon style
By Alexandra Wood
ONCE they were spectacular resting places to honour the dead.
But with http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2646 burial mounds came to be regarded with suspicion as places where devils and dragons lurked.
It was at one such http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2454 in East Yorkshire that the Anglo-Saxons chose to bury the worst kind of criminals, away from hallowed ground, leaving their heads to rot on stakes.
The latest archaeological techniques have now thrown a new light on an eerie cemetery – the only one so far discovered north of the Humber – where the decapitated bodies of executed criminals were laid to rest.
The dozen skeletons – 10 without their heads – were discovered by archaeologists in the late 1960s in a Bronze Age barrow at Walkington Wold, sparking
theories that it has been the site of a massacre, a series of executions or even a Celtic head cult.
But a new study by two Yorkshire archaeologists, involving radiocarbon dating and a re-analysis of the bones, has uncovered gruesome new evidence about how the victims – all men – met their deaths.Following their re-evaluation, Jo Buckberry, from Bradford University and Dawn Hadley, from Sheffield University have confirmed the site was an execution cemetery, maybe used for as long as 200 years.
Radiocarbon dating places the cemetery at a date several centuries later than originally thought, in the early 11th century.
The men would have been tried by a court, their execution excluding burial in consecrated ground.
Some skulls were found without their jaws, suggesting they were displayed on poles – Anglo Saxon records refer to head stakes or “heafod stokkan” – as a warning to other inhabitants.
http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/Grisly-discovery-of-headless-bodies.3629080.jp