A decapitated body, cracked skulls and charred limbs strewn everywhere: WHO were the 37 young men dumped in a pit beneath a prestigious Oxford college? New podcast from The Crime Desk lays bare the sinister secrets of the St Brice’s Day massacre

A new podcast from The Crime Desk forensically unpacks historic crimes, working to solve the unanswered questions that still linger over them centuries later.

Hosted by historian Rebecca Rideal and Time Team archaeologist Professor Raksha Dave, Buried Evidence will take you inside the lives of victims of the most barbaric crimes whose names have been mostly forgotten by time.

In the first episode, available on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts, Rideal and Dave dissect the St Brice’s Day massacre and its connections to a sinister archaeological discovery.

In January 2008, a routine dig at St John’s College, Oxford, carried out so new student accommodation could be built, uncovered a horrifying scene.

The bodies of 37 men and boys, aged between 12 and 45, dumped in a ditch over a thousand years ago. As Professor Dave explained, it quickly became obvious to archaeologists at the scene that this was no ordinary burial site.

‘Normally, when we look at burials, they are kind of uniform,’ she said.

The bodies of 37 men and boys, dumped in a ditch over a thousand years ago. As Professor Dave explained (L), it quickly became obvious that this was no ordinary burial site

‘People are laid to rest really nicely. They’re either put in certain positions or prone, straight on their backs. But this was a higgledy piggledy mess.

‘We had a decapitation, skulls and arms everywhere. I mean, you name it, it was a mess… it’s what we would call a deviant burial. Things were not quite right, and it looked as though these men were literally just tipped in there like rubbish.’

Archaeologists were struck by another detail. Many of the men’s wounds were to the back, suggesting they were running from something when they were killed.

Some of the bones had also been burned. It was the fire, more than anything else, that would eventually point investigators towards a single night in Oxford’s history.

Documented in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, on 13 November 1002, King Ethelred the Unready ordered the deaths of all Danish people in his realm, having been warned they were plotting to kill him and seize his throne.

Townspeople turned on the Danes living among them, hunting them through the streets and killing them where they stood. The event became known as the St Brice’s Day massacre, because the king’s order fell on the saint’s feast day.

In Oxford, a group of Danes broke into St Frideswide’s church and barricaded themselves inside, believing sanctuary would save them. It did not. Unable to force them out, the mob set fire to the roof and burned the building down with them inside.

Many of the men’s wounds were to the back, suggesting they were running from something when they were killed

Although matching the bodies to the massacre seems plausible, some details don’t quite fit the historical record

Although matching the bodies to the massacre seems plausible, some details don’t quite fit the historical record, as Dave explained.

‘Oxford was very much a wild west town in the early medieval period,’ she said.

‘There were groups of mercenaries living there… if we actually look at who’s buried there, there are no women or children, not a single one.

‘It could have just been an act of mob violence. All the injuries are to the back, so they’re obviously being chased.’

The bones themselves also hint that these men were soldiers, not Danish townsfolk rounded up on the orders of a fearful king.

Dave added: ‘When they actually did more analysis on the bones in a lab later, they discovered older wounds.

‘If you break something, you actually see where the bone mended itself. It’s almost like an extra bone growth on top of it… they found a lot of these trauma wounds where the bone had been reworked.

‘So from that evidence, it’s highly likely that these were trained, professional soldiers… the bones were also very robust, compared to the Anglo Saxon population. So, they appear to have been big beefcake fighters with huge muscles.’

Whatever happened at Oxford, the pattern did not end there. In Dorset, a second mass grave was discovered a year later. Radiocarbon dating placed it in the same period as the St John’s College massacre, and these men, too, were likely Scandinavian soldiers or mercenaries.

Two mass graves, hundreds of miles apart, both filled with slaughtered Nordic men from the same narrow window of history.

Listen to Buried Evidence in full to hear Rideal and Dave’s verdict on what really happened. Subscribe to The Crime Desk to access new episodes one week early.