Seventeen Bodies In A Well: A Norwich Mystery
Seventeen Bodies In A Well: A Norwich Mystery
Jewish bodies found in medieval well
The picture above is a horrific one. The bodies of seventeen individuals, eleven of them children (the youngest two years of age) who were, at some point in the Middle Ages (dating 1150-1300), thrown down a well in the East Anglian town of Norwich. To date, the Norwich well burial is a spectacular discovery, literally one of a kind.
However, a find this horrifying and this fascinating was bound to assert its own narrative and that happened in 2011 when History Cold Case, a British television series looked into the affair and claimed that the bodies were victims of a pogrom.[1] Here is their very powerful version: imagine parents being hurled down the well and being followed by their screaming children; imagine how long it would have taken to die… But, through all this there are serious doubts about the ‘official’ story.
The bodies were discovered in 2004 during an excavation of a site in the centre of Norwich, ahead of construction of the Chapelfield Shopping Centre.[2] A backhoe operator saw a skull in a foundation hole over 16 feet below ground level, far deeper than normal burials even from the ancient layers.[3]
No other burials in wells have ever been found in Britain. At that time, the well was located between two rows of houses, in their backyards, right in the middle of the community.[4] The remains were put into storage and have only recently been the subject of investigation.
Jewish bodies found in medieval well
Archaeologists are quite certain that the feature was indeed a well, although the top of it was damaged by the foundation works before the rest was excavated so it could have been deeper/contained further bodies. There was no indication how the top of the well was capped off.
A tight mass of human skeletons had been dumped into the well. They were shoved in so tightly that at first archaeologists believed there were only three or four bodies.[5] It was only after further excavation that 17 bodies were accounted for. Eleven of the 17 skeletons were those of children aged between two and 15. The remaining six were adult men and women.[6]
Pictures taken at the time of excavation suggested the bodies were thrown down the well together, head first.[7] A closer examination of the adult bones showed fractures caused by the impact of hitting the bottom of the well. But the same damage was not seen on the children's bones, suggesting they were thrown in after the adults who cushioned the fall of their bodies.[8]
The most likely explanation is that those down the well were Jewish and were probably murdered or forced to commit suicide, according to scientists who used a combination of DNA analysis, carbon dating and bone chemical studies in their investigation.[9]
One question researchers attempted to address, concerned determining if individuals were alive at the time they were thrown into the well. Excavation reports mention four fractures on seventeen bodies: one greenstick, two healed and one possible; nothing suggesting injuries from a fall while alive.[10] In fact, there is no evidence at all that they were thrown into a well while still breathing or that any had suffered the kind of violence that one might expect from a pogrom leading up to death, being beaten through the streets etc. The bodies were intact and flexible when they went into the dry well – so not as a result of burial ground clearance or something similar.
At first the remains suggested a plague burial, but carbon dating had shown that to be impossible as the plague came much later.[11] And as noted by historians who pointed out that even during times of plague when mass graves were used, bodies were buried in an ordered way with respect and religious rites. [12]There was a consecrated cemetery within view of the well and the Jewish neighborhood a few steps away, so why had these people been thrown away like trash instead of buried according to religious custom?
Next archaeologists considered the possibility of death by disease- perhaps typhus or diphtheria. Osteological examinations revealed no signs of leprosy or tuberculosis on the skeletons, two diseases that leave marks.[13] But then there are lots of other diseases that do not leave marks on bone. Why not, for example, some plague passing through the urban population? This would, according to that hypothesis, have been a messy burial by some neighbours who had to get dead bodies out of the way.
Norwich well (https://steemit.com/history/@arvydas/a-norwich-mystery-seventeen-bodies-found-in-a-well)
Alternatively, this could have been an act of mob violence, though, physical markers of mob violence would be expected to have shown up on the remains of the seventeen. Some of the bones did show signs of malnutrition and non-fatal trauma like healed minor fractures and arthritis.[14]
Researchers then considered if the discovery was related the practice of Jewish heroic martyrdom, as had happened at Masada in 73AD.[15] Jewish heroic martyrdom is a tradition in which Jews take their own lives when they believe the end has come, rather than die at the hands of the mob.[16] The father of each household was to kill his own family, and then the rabbi was to kill the men and finally himself. The method was the taking of a knife to the throat. Such a method leaves no mark on the bones, and provides another plausible theory why children were in the well. In 1190, such a massacre had previously happened at Clifford's Tower in York.[17]
Seven skeletons were successfully tested and five of them had a DNA sequence suggesting they were likely to be members of a single Jewish family. The only ‘strong’ evidence for this claim is their DNA.[18] Five of the bodies had retrievable DNA and these five came from the same family. Two were directly related, either as father and child or as uncle and nephew/niece.[19]
The problem is proving that the DNA in question is ‘Jewish’. The five bodies were judged to have DNA ‘consistent’ with Ashkenazi Jews (30%), but that is DNA also found (though to a lesser extent) among the general European population (7%).[20] Note that two other bodies had typical European DNA sequences. The mitochondrial DNA — DNA that remains the same transmitted down the female line — of all five people matched, so they were family members. Stable isotope analysis, which uses the trace elements found in the bones to determine diet and migration patterns during their lifetime, indicated that the skeletons were from the Norwich area.[21]
Norwich had been home to a thriving Jewish community since 1135 and many lived near the well site. The Jewish population had been ‘investigated’ for supposedly murdering a Christian child in 1144, William of Norwich: one of the first and best documented cases of the blood libel.[22] In 1190, there is contemporary evidence of massacres against the Jews of Norwich: this was the year of perhaps the worst British pogrom, the deaths of 150 Jews in York.[23]
Jewish people had been invited to England by the King to lend money because at the time, the Christian interpretation of the bible did not allow Christians to lend money and charge interest.[24] It was regarded as a sin. So financing for big projects came from the Jewish community and some became very wealthy - which in turn, caused friction.[25] There was a resentment of the fact that Jews were profiting and doing it in a way that doesn't involve physical labour, things that are necessarily recognised as work . . . similar to how people feel about bankers now.
Satan and the Jews of Norwich, from an Exchequer Roll, 1233 (The First Anti-Jewish Caricature?)
The tragic prosecution and vilification of one of Norwich's Jewish inhabitants illustrates the tension existing at the time the individuals were disposed of in the well. Isaac of Norwich or Isaac Ben Eliav was a Jewish-English financier during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.[26] He was among the Jews imprisoned by King John of England in 1210. It is possible that at this time a house of his in London fell into the hands of the king and was afterward (1214) transferred to the Earl of Derby. He was by far the most important Jewish money-lender it Norwich in the early years of Henry III, [27] the majority of the items of a day-book of that place now preserved at Westminster Abbey referring to his transactions. In the “Shetarot” Isaac is referred to as “Nadib” or “Mæcenas”.[28] He appears to have died before 1247.
A caricature of him appears in an issue of the Exchequer Roll, a document that lists tax payments made by the Jews of Norwich in 1233, during the reign of King Henry,[29] which represents him as being tortured by a demon and expresses the contemporary Christian view of his rapaciousness.[30] The accompanying caricature represents Isaac as three-faced, probably in allusion to the wide extent of his dealings. He is crowned with a coronet, and surveys a scene in which another Jew, Mosse Mok[31] , and a Jewess named Abigail, are being tortured by demons, seemingly under his direction. [Both were employed as debt collectors by Isaac.] The scene appears to be taken from a miracle-play, the drapery representing the stage, and the architectural adornment the cloister of a church, such plays generally being performed in churches.[32]
Unfortunately, investigations of the Norwich well may have been misguided from the start. The team was led by forensic anthropologist Professor Sue Black, of the University of Dundee's Centre for Anthropology and Human Identification.[33] Professor Black, who went to the Balkans following the Kosovo war - where her job was to piece together the bodies of massacred Kosovan Albanians - said this discovery had changed the direction of the whole investigation.
Regarding the nature of the discovery, Professor Black said: "We are possibly talking about persecution. We are possibly talking about ethnic cleansing and this all brings to mind the scenario that we dealt with during the Balkan War crimes."[34]
“In terms of the brutality of the ethnic cleansing, it was thought women and children quite frankly weren't worth wasting the bullets on," added Professor Black. Pregnant women were bayoneted because that way you got rid of a woman because that wasn't important and you got rid of the next generation because you didn't want them to survive. So I know what sort of pattern I am looking for.”[35]
DNA expert Dr Ian Barnes, who carried out the tests, said: "This is a really unusual situation for us. This is a unique set of data that we have been able to get for these individuals. "I am not aware that this has been done before - that we have been able to pin them down to this level of specificity of the ethnic group that they seem to come from."[36]
A second interim report on the initial results indicates that the analyst withdrew entirely his suggestion that the gene found was related to known ‘Jewish markers’,
Unfortunately, the identities of the Norwich 17 remain unknown, and we don’t know why they might have been killed or what led to their bodies being disposed of in such an unorthodox way. This is not by any means to say that they couldn’t have been Jews just that there is no particular reason, other than the creation of a dramatic story line, to assert that they were.
Reconstructed adult male and 5 year old boy found in well (https://jewishritualmurder.wordpress.com/2015/01/30/3/)
Two individuals were facially reconstructed. One is an adult male with a large and prominent nose; asymmetry around the eyes–one eye is higher and further back than the other; and strong supramastoid crests–lines above the ear which suggest that the person had large ears which stuck out from the side of the head.[37] His ears are adherent, that is, they have no lobes.[38] The child also has adherent ears. The feature is inherited, so the adult may be his father or uncle. The child is from five to seven years old.
It should be noted that while the proof that these were Jewish victims is circumstantial, there is a great deal of definitive evidence from twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe for the most bestial violence against Jewish innocents.[39] There is, in short, plenty of blood to be washed from Europe’s collective hands whatever the circumstances behind the burial or murder of these seventeen.
In 2014, after long negotiations, the local Jewish community took possession of the seventeen bodies and buried them in consecrated ground.[40] Even during these burials there was an understanding that the bodies might not be Jewish but as Bishop David Gillett (previously of Bolton), who attended the ceremony, commented: ‘ Whatever the DNA research reveals, the discovery of the bones has raised awareness of some of the real injustices inflicted on the Jewish community in medieval times.’ [41] This is the spirit in which a plaque has now been erected to their memory at the shopping mall, the Chapelfied Centre, where these dead or alive bodies were dropped down a well. It is artfully and perhaps sensibly ambiguous: particularly when it is remembered just how indifferent to historical facts many history plaques are.
The decision to do this, and the creation of the carefully worded plaque, all happened between the two DNA reports and because of the level of public interest it wasn’t really possible to ‘turn back the clock’ once it became apparent that there was no special justification for a Jewish identification.
The findings of the investigation represented a sad day for Norwich. One researcher noted: "It changes the story of what we know about the community. We don't know everything about the community but what we do know is changed by this."[42] However, Dr. Sophie Cabot, consultant with the documentary, stated that: Perhaps the saddest part of the whole thing to me is just how readily the media and the public accepted the narrative of an unknown anti-Semitic massacre in Norwich, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that people should do such things.”[43]
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