508 Skeletons exhumed at Elsdon, By Dr. E. C. Kobertson. 



foTindation, shallower tlian tlie soutli Nave and Transepts' walls, 

 and that the north Nave wall was built over and upon skeletons. 

 These bodies were lying E. and W., and were completely under 

 the wall of the church. I dug very carefully and with difficulty 

 under the foundation of this north wall, and found the skeletons 

 so laid, that the head of one was lying between the knees of its 

 fellow. I examined under the deeper foundations of the corres- 

 ponding south Nave wall, and also under those of the Transepts 

 and Chancel, but under none of them did I discover any bones. 

 In Hodgson's History of Nothumberland, in describing Elsdon 

 Church, the Historian of the 7 parishes writes, " In removing a 

 great accumulation of earth, against the north wall of the church, 

 some short time before our visit here, in Sept., 1810, the bones 

 of 100 or more (we have since been told only about 30) persons 

 were discovered in double rows, with the skidls of one row within 

 the thigh bones of the other, packed, as the labourers said, in the 

 smallest possible compass." These skeletons mentioned by 

 Hodgson had been discovered outside the church exactly opposite 

 the wall, under which I traced bodies buried in exactly the same 

 manner. "Within the Nave it was impossible to determine how 

 the bodies had been buried, but on examination of the bodies, I 

 came to the conviction, that they were mainly the remains of men, 

 and chiefly of young and middle aged men. From the close 

 packing of the skeletons, I think it may be inferred that these 

 dead men had been buried at one time and in all probability 

 were the remains of men slain in battle. From the facts I have 

 just brought before the Club, viz., that the foundations of that 

 one wall, under which human skeletons were found, were shal- 

 lower than the other foundations of the church, it seems to me 

 fair to infer — I. That the bodies so found were buried before the 

 Nave was built, II. That the bodies had only shortly before the 

 erection of the wall been consigned to the earth ; and that it was 

 to avoid the disturbance of these closely packed and not yet de- 

 composed bodies, that the foundations of the church were in that 

 part not so deeply laid, as in the rest of the church. 



If I am correct in my inferences, and we can by its architec- 

 ture discover when the church was built, we shall have a clue as 

 to when these bones lived, moved, and had their being. Hodgson 

 judges from its architecture that the church belongs to the period 

 immediately after Richard II., or very early in the fifteenth cen- 

 tury, Eichard being deposed in 1 399. Mr Wilson the well-known 



