Founded around 1195, the hospital of Saint John the Evangelist, in Cambridge (England), was an institution that was dedicated to helping especially “the poor and the sick” – and even some prisoners – along with a handful of clergy and lay servants. for 300 years, until it was replaced in 1511 by St. John's College.
The site, excavated in 2010, housed the remains of many of the hospital's inhabitants. But being from a lower social class, little was known about their lives. That's why archaeologists from the Universities of Leicester and Cambridge combined bone, isotopic and genetic data to examine up to 400 skeletons.
Their results, explained in an article published in the magazine Antiquity, reveal that the center cared for the poor and the sick although it did not have the space or sufficient financial resources to do so. Hence, a series of criteria were applied to prioritize cases.
It was a limited and small-scale 'Social Security' that focused on helping those who had the least resources. Evidence obtained by Dr Sarah Inskip and Professor John Robb suggests that, to ensure the institution survived for three centuries, its rectors chose to select patients from different backgrounds.
"Like all medieval cities, Cambridge was a sea of need," explains Robb. “Some of the luckier poor got room and board in the hospital for life. The selection criteria would have been a mix of material need, local politics and spiritual merit,” he adds.
The work of the team led by Sarah Inskip and John Robb analyzes the mechanisms on which this "medieval benefits system" was based and the criteria that were applied to assess the types of people who were prioritized for help.
"We know that lepers, pregnant women and the insane were prohibited from the hospital, while mercy was essential," says the researcher. The inmates had to pray for the souls of the hospital's benefactors to speed up their passage through purgatory. "A hospital was a prayer factory," he notes.
The prisoners were on average two and a half centimeters shorter than the townspeople and were more likely to have in their bones the marks of a childhood ruined by hunger and disease. However, they also had lower rates of bodily trauma, suggesting that hospital life reduced physical difficulties or risks.
The children buried in the cemetery were small for their age, with an average growth of five years. "The little ones were probably orphans," Robb says.
Beyond the poor, some adult skeletons showed few signs of hardship, suggesting they were people who had good nutrition and did not do manual labor. Specialists believe that "they were the first scholars of the University of Cambridge."
They also found up to eight hospital residents who had isotope levels that indicate a lower quality diet in old age, and may be examples of the "ashamed poor": those who fell from comfort to destitution, perhaps after being unable work.
“Theological doctrines encouraged aid to the shamed poor, who threatened the moral order by showing that one could live virtuously and prosperously but still fall victim to the twists of fortune,” Professor Robb continued in a statement.
Archaeologists have wanted to highlight that this is a reflection that medieval poverty was not homogeneous. People from different backgrounds and with diverse life experiences needed charity. It also indicates the reason why the hospital was able to survive for 300 years.
“They chose to help a variety of people. This not only fulfilled its statutory mission, but also provided cases to attract a variety of donors: the pity aroused by poor and sick orphans, the spiritual gain for benefactors in supporting pious scholars, the assurance that there will be restorative aid. when prosperous and honest individuals, similar to the donor, suffered misfortunes...,” the authors state.
The research comes from the After the Plague project at the University of Cambridge. Coinciding with the publication of this study, the project publishes a website with sixteen “osteobiographies” that tell the life stories of medieval residents of Cambridge – including some from St John’s Hospital – based on detailed analyzes of skeletal remains.
