The York 113 History Cold Case

At the University of Dundee's Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification

the History Cold Case team is about to embark on a remarkable new investigation.

We have got 113 skeletons. All male.

Signs of unusual conditions.

We're not talking about one or two skeletons,

we're talking about hundreds, so it's a very big story.

The case will be led by forensic anthropologist Professor Sue Black.

Dr Xanthe Mallett will gather historical evidence,

while Professor Caroline Wilkinson will rebuild the faces of the dead.

In York, more than 100 skeletons have been found in ten mass graves.

It's an extraordinary archaeological find and the biggest case the team has ever had to deal with.

Why did so many people die here?

It's very, very unusual, this.

-I've never seen a grave like that, to be honest with you.

-No.

The trail will transport us back 350 years

to one of the most traumatic, pivotal events in British history...

You just lunge forward, straight into the faces of the enemy there. Aargh!

..to a time when medical intervention could be as dangerous as life on the battlefield...

If I take it off at the shoulder, the chances are you will die.

..when men believed they were caught up in Armageddon...

They thought that they were fighting in the last battle between Christ and the forces of anti-Christ.

..and to one man's surprising story...

Oh, boy. That is outrageous!

..that will not only change our views on how

the English Civil War was fought, but provide a unique window into the birth of democracy itself.

In the heart of York the History Cold Case team

has set up its mobile forensic unit near where the remains of 113 people were recently excavated.

This is the biggest case the team has ever taken on.

Members of the local archaeological community lay out a selection of remains from ten mass graves

discovered in 2008, just beyond the city walls.

Every single skeleton is male.

But there are also the boxed remains of two further bodies that have

especially troubled archaeologists since excavation.

Their bones show signs of puzzling abnormalities.

Why did 113 men end up buried together?

And what's the truth behind the disfigured bodies?

There's a lot of dead people here and so there needs to be an explanation

for why you've got so many in one place.

Every single one of those people will have a story.

Some of them are going to have a really interesting story to tell.

Professor Sue Black and Dr Xanthe Mallett fly in from Dundee HQ.

Together they will carry out a preliminary examination of the recovered bones.

There's a lot here.

Immediately they find many signs of healed trauma and bone breaks.

Oh, look, now look, there's a problem in the elbow.

Whether it's a dislocation... It's really hard to dislocate that joint.

Really, really hard to dislocate it.

It looks as if there's a bit of remodelling going on at the wrist.

I wonder if that's a previous fracture?

And there are signs of serious infections.

Oh, oh, oh. Look at this.

-Ouch!

-Look at the amount of bone that's been laid down.

-That is nasty.

That's very nasty. That's very painful for the time that it's been active.

-Which is a while.

-Whether it's still active or not, I don't know.

There's a lot of bone been laid down.

That's infected. You've got nerve endings that are inflamed.

You've got the pus formation. Oh, it's just not nice at all!

That goes literally all, look it goes all the way through.

-But it's localised. A simple course of antibiotics today and that's gone.

-Yeah.

Yet all the bones are of strong, young and middle aged men...

I think we're looking at male, quite well defined chin.

-Quite robust.

-Yeah, I'm OK with that.

..with no obvious cause of death.

They've got previous fractures and

-they've got trauma associated with their previous life.

-Yeah.

But how did they die?

-Don't know. Don't know.

-There's no evidence of a cause of death on here either.

-There's no obvious disease process, there's no obvious trauma process, there's nothing.

-No.

So whatever killed him may have killed them, but it hasn't left a mark.

-We're not seeing it.

-And there's lots and lots of things that don't leave a mark.

They turn their attention to the two boxes that the archaeologists have marked out

as being particularly strange.

Inside the first the skeleton of an incredibly muscular male.

At first glance, consistent with the rest of the group.

-We're talking about quite a big, robust adult.

-Yeah.

But I tell you what I think is interesting is that that clavicle's

being bound down onto there really, really tightly.

-So there's huge muscle mass going on up here.

-And this is pretty robust as well.

-It's not only robust, what you've also got within that bone is a huge amount of torsion...

-Yes.

.. because you can see, and that's the muscle attaching on to there.

You can see the movement of bio mechanics.

Trying to get more of a grip. He's very well built.

But he has one highly unusual feature that sets him apart.

Oh, wow!

His hand bones are fused together.

OK, see that's interesting. OK, I'll tell you why that's interesting

because that is a congenital

fusion of the carpals, congenital carpal fusion. Really, really rare.

But there's not going to have been much in the way of disability.

You know, all you're losing is a little bit of movement like that.

So, you know, his little finger gets stuck out there, it doesn't ever come across here.

Then there is the final set of remains for Sue and Xanthe to examine.

Oh!

This man has an even more dramatic bone defect.

Oh, my!

Well. Well, well, well.

Oh, this is very, very, very unusual.

His elbow AND knee are both fused.

The bones have grown together.

To Sue, this does not look like the trauma found on the other bodies.

Oh, boy. You know, it could be

so many things.

If you take the left limb,

so there's the humerus, sitting like that,

fused at right angles at the elbow, but look how it's fused.

And the fused knee joint is even more debilitating.

I have to say that is outrageous!

-That is a very odd angle.

-But look at that buttress that you've got on here.

Huge amount of muscle that's reorganised.

You're not talking somebody who is kind of wasting and not moving.

-Right. Functionally, that would be better if it was fused vertical.

-Yes.

Sue has found what she thinks might be a rare congenital condition in two different men.

Her first thought - could they be related?

That is the singularly most unusual set of carpal coalitions that I have ever seen

and right next door to it is the most outrageous fusion of an elbow at 90 degrees and a knee at 90 degrees.

-I'd really like to know if they're related.

-Yeah.

The condition suffered by these two

men is entirely unexpected, given the nature of the rest of the group.

He has a distinct disability.

A distinct disability.

It's now a two-fold investigation.

Firstly, the group as a whole, over 100 men.

Who were they and what killed them all?

But also what is the story of these two men with their dramatically fused bones?

The evidence at the moment, if we were looking at this in a purely

cold light of day forensic scenario, is we have two individuals, male,

of mature age, adult males, who have

got congenital abnormalities, or we suspect them to be.

We can't make any other link at this stage...but watch this space.

Testing gets underway immediately, including DNA sampling, CT scanning, isotopic analysis and carbon dating.

So what I'm going to do now is take some samples of this femur,

which is the right leg bone of the male with the strange development.

I'm going to take two different samples.

One's going to be used for the stable isotopes,

looking at the provenancing.

Possibly telling us about diet and maybe where they were.

The other one's going to be used for dating the sample, so that's going

to really pin down when these people died.

The team will need to wait some weeks for results to come back.

In the meantime, Xanthe needs to gather evidence from the area.

So next morning she meets local archaeologist Graham Bruce, who supervised the excavations.

Graham had been excavating a site just 100 yards or so outside York's

city walls - defences that have stood since Roman times.

OK, here we are. This is the site where we found all the mass graves.

Back in the Middle Ages, there was a church on this site

and Graham expected to find a traditional medieval graveyard.

But instead he was shocked to uncover large pits

containing the bodies of over 100 men.

We've got some pictures of the graves themselves in here.

-See in this one, where you've got...

-I see.

And they're all lined up?

They're lined up within the graves.

Where were the mass graves within here?

They were predominantly within the church itself,

respecting the main boundary, main wall lines.

So the walls must've still been standing, at least partially, when the graves were cut into.

The mass graves were dug inside the church

and Graham believes this must have been some time after records show it fell into ruins in the 1580s.

And Graham also believes the graves must date from before the 1700s.

By the 18th Century in York as well you've got better cartographic sources,

and the maps show this area as open agricultural land with no other buildings on it.

-So you haven't got anywhere you'd be wanting to put a major 18th century burial ground here.

-Yeah.

Carbon dating will confirm whether Graham's theory is correct,

but if the mass graves do date from around the 1600s,

what does Graham think could be the cause?

Looking at the actual way in which they've been buried, what are your theories on this?

When we started finding mass graves, you do start, obviously trying to work out why.

It's clearly a major, fairly cataclysmic event that has created all these people

dying the same time and in the mid-17th century you have the English Civil War.

Graham's theory is that these bodies could have been victims of the English Civil War.

With no women and children amongst the group, could they in fact have been soldiers

dating back to one of Britain's most brutal and savage periods of conflict?

Back at Dundee HQ, Xanthe and Sue get Professor Caroline Wilkinson up to speed,

using computer graphics of the burial site and the two most curious bodies.

Now what you can see here is the church.

-The church was in ruins...

-The church was in ruins.

-..when they were buried. Yep.

So after...

But they've observed the lines of the ruins.

-Yes.

-I understand.

-And these are our two individuals.

But not treated any differently. They're buried in exactly the same way.

-Yep, exactly the same way.

-There's such a lot of them.

-113.

You can say the number really quickly,

but then when you actually see it, it looks like an awful lot of people.

-And somebody's taken care putting them all in like that.

-Mm.

We'll be getting carbon dates, but we don't have those yet

so they can help us pin point it but really we're looking at the Civil War,

simply because of where they are and also the number of people in that type of demographic of population.

We'll know more, but this is helpful, contextually.

The team agrees that the obvious starting place

for the larger investigation is to gather more

details on the Civil War and how it might have affected The City of York.

I'm absolutely happy that we can explain it in terms of potential military

because that fits - that you've got a lot of men of fighting age together.

And how is it the man with severely fused knee and elbow

came to be buried amongst what might be a group of soldiers?

We've got a lot more to find out about this guy.

What he would have been doing in this population for a start.

Yeah. Cos he is disabled.

Yeah, absolutely. There is no getting away from the fact that he's got a physical disability.

What does a disabled man do in military services?

And like the others he was strong, sites of muscle attachments.

-So he was active.

-Yeah.

-It's a big story.

Even thinking about the occupations that he might have been involved in

is quite exciting because why on earth is he buried

with all these men, who I suspect, you know,

are relatively healthy, if you can be when you're dead.

But, you know, relatively healthy young men of fighting age,

perhaps in a military background. What's he doing there?

Professor Caroline Wilkinson is going to reconstruct the faces

of the two men with the puzzlingly fused bones.

She starts with the man in his early '40s with just the fused hand.

Hey.

That might be a nasal bone.

Excellent. So we've got quite a prominent nose,

but it doesn't look underdeveloped.

At this early stage,

this man's face seems unaffected by his bone condition,

though Caroline spots something that will affect his appearance.

He's lost one of his front teeth at the top.

And that's before he died, so it's well-healed.

This appears consistent with him being a soldier.

Losing your front incisors is something that's common with people who fight.

The teeth next to it look pretty healthy.

They're not showing signs of decay, so, you know,

maybe it being knocked out would be the most likely option.

But what of the more severely affected man with fused elbow and knee?

Looks significantly younger.

That's a frontal bone, very pronounced frontal bossing.

So in other words, this brow ridge - very male characteristic.

Big nasal bones there,

similar to the last man.

And with this skull,

there are possible signs of abnormal bone development.

That goes there.

So the height of the orbit looks very small.

That is quite a short distance, as well

between the nose and the mouth.

It's going to be interesting to put this together

to see what happens to the rest of the face.

Caroline scans in the fractured pieces of both skulls

using a 3D laser scanner.

Final re-building will happen using computer software.

Then the full effects of any disorder

on their faces will start to emerge.

But how did these two men and 111 others

end up in mass graves in York?

And how involved was the city in the Civil War?

The first English Civil War was fought from 1642 to 1646

when supporters of parliament rebelled against the tyrannical rule

of King Charles I.

At the outset, England was divided

with Parliamentarian forces controlling the South

and the North under Royalist control.

York was seen as the key

to controlling the entire North of England.

And historical records recount that in the spring of 1644,

parliamentary forces pushed North and laid siege to the city.

So, what impact did this have on York and its population?

High up on the city's walls,

Xanthe meets Civil War historian Martin Bennett.

-Who was fighting?

-Inside the city you've got the Royalist army

of the Earl of Newcastle,

about 4,000 of his soldiers inside the city.

So this side, where we are?

-Yes.

-OK. Who's outside?

Outside are three Parliamentarian armies.

When all three armies are gathered around

there's about 30,000, at the most.

But surely it would be easy then to take the city with 30,000 men?

There are two ways to take a city -

one is to storm and the other is to starve it out.

Both of them carry their risks

and Parliamentarians initially attempt to starve the garrison out.

But that wasn't going to be easy.

It seems that the Royalist soldiers had swept up all crops

from the surrounding areas and were well prepared.

For the people inside, in York, it's not as bad as it could be.

They don't get to the stage of eating dogs and cats and rats

because there's plenty of food, plenty of water,

plenty of breweries in town making beer,

which was safer to drink than water.

Effectively, they have enough to survive the 11 weeks of this siege.

30,000 Parliamentarian soldiers

spent three months camped outside the city walls.

It seems that this was the critical moment for York's involvement in the Civil War.

Were our 113 part of this besieging force?

Amazingly, the siege is particularly well documented.

At nearby King's Manor, Martin talks Xanthe through who took part.

Inside you've got the Earl of Newcastle's troops.

With the Royalists retreating inside the walls,

Parliamentarian forces gathered around the city.

What happens first is that the Scots arrive in this area between

the Ouse as it flows in to the city and the Ouse as it flows out.

So all this sector here is occupied by Scots' forces.

And Fairfax's forces occupy this side -

from the Ouse here, right round to the River Foss.

What happens is towards the end of May, is the Earl of Manchester's

army arrives and occupies the Northern territory.

-Now the city is completely ringed.

-Yeah.

And as soon as that is achieved,

they move inwards on the walls.

So the suburbs begin to fall into the hands of Parliament.

And Martin has a theory about which of these armies our men could have come from.

Fairfax's forces begin to take over the suburbs outside Walmgate.

A-ha! So does that mean that our mass grave is over here?

-It's in this area here, not far from the city walls.

-That is close, isn't it?

Martin believes our men could have been soldiers

from one very particular part of the Parliamentarian army -

6,000 men under the command of Lord Fairfax.

It's remarkable progress so early in the case,

but it will take the results from the isotope testing

to tell the team exactly where our soldiers came from.

But what of the injuries to the bones Sue and Xanthe saw in the forensic tent?

Are these consistent with soldiers fighting in the Civil War?

Xanthe goes to Heslington Hall where Lord Fairfax

set up his camp during the siege.

She meets Graham Webb and Richard Hawes from the Sealed Knot

to learn about the weaponry,

roles and injuries typical of 17th century warfare.

So here we have muzzle loading musket.

OK, mainly used for firing a lead ball.

It was inaccurate, so you're unlikely

to hit anybody with it, although that's no comfort

to anybody that's standing in front of it.

Although there are no signs of musket ball damage on our men's bones,

Richard thinks the musket could still be responsible.

Occasionally, somebody would get hit and you'd get horrific smash injuries

and your friends would perhaps be falling down next to you.

Eventually the morale of the group that you were firing at

would perhaps break and they would run.

And at which point, you turn it round the other way

and you go chasing after them.

This is the real damage that is done with the butt end of the musket.

But how would this have actually worked in practise?

Richard thinks a musket used this way round

could be responsible for leg breaks, dislocated elbows,

and broken clavicle bones in the shoulder.

These are exactly the kind of injuries

Xanthe and Sue saw on the remains in the tent.

But what of the large muscle attachments also found on the bones?

Could this be explained by another weapon

commonly used by soldiers of the time? The pike.

The biggest and heaviest men carried these.

Now, when you charge your pike, if you drop that pike straight down...

-Do you want to move?

-..with your arm level behind,

you can then charge your pike at the enemy.

Don't worry I'm right under it. You feel the weight of that?

Keep that under your cheek and if you haunch back a bit

and put your elbow on your hip,

you should be able to take the weight there.

-Yes, I can feel that!

-You're straining there.

It's awkward to hold.

So what you have to do is you just lunge forward,

-straight into the faces of the enemy there.

-Argh!

And again. Try going, "argh!"

I would've gone straight for the eyes.

It takes a lot of strength to wield this,

as well as balance and technique.

So you'd expect quite well-built guys.

The people that used them were particularly selected for their strength, height and stature.

-The pike men are the brawn of the outfit?

-Absolutely.

All the historical evidence appears to indicate

our men were soldiers from the Civil War,

but will the carbon dating results confirm this?

1480 to 1687.

-Hold on. 1480 to... So that's fine.

-Yes.

These dates cover a broad period,

with The Civil War lying at the latter end.

But the team know they can eliminate earlier dates

because of the archaeological evidence on the ground.

The church, if you remember, was finished usage in 1580.

That's why it was ruins when it looks like these men have gone in.

So we're now 1580 to 1687, and in the middle of that,

-right slap bang almost in the middle of that is the siege date.

-Yes.

With the siege being the only time in this period

when so many men were gathered together in York,

dating the burial to the English Civil War now seems certain.

What's important is that it supports what everything is telling us.

So I think those large numbers,

the regimentation of the burials, the fact that they're in the church

they're close to the city walls,

everything it's saying, it's got to be the siege. It's got to be.

Our 113 men likely never lived long enough to see victory

when the Royalists gave up and left York in July 1644.

And whether they were definitely Parliamentarian soldiers

under Lord Fairfax's command

will only be confirmed when the isotope results come in.

The team also still don't know what the cause of death of the men was.

Although the skeletons showed no fatal wounds,

many did have healed injury, and there were signs of infection.

Could infections like these have killed all 113 of the men?

To help understand what the cause of death might have been,

Xanthe meets up with historian Rory McCreadie

in a typical Civil War surgery.

She starts by showing Rory some of the injuries from our men's bones.

Here we've got sharp force trauma to the elbows.

So outside of the elbow, pretty deep, actually.

What would have caused this?

That was probably made by a sword. Quite a deep cut.

Probably in that sort of direction.

-So some sort of defensive injury.

-Yes.

It seems the surgeons did have some understanding

of infection and how to manage it.

What we'd do then is we would get something like oats...

..and I'm going to get honey.

I'm going to mix the two together to make it into a paste

and then this will be put into the wound

and then we'd sew the wound up with that inside the wound.

-Why did they leave that in?

-Because it helps to heal.

The honey would be used as an antiseptic.

We didn't understand that, but we knew that it worked.

In fact, today in some hospitals when antibiotics don't work

they're using honey again to fight infections.

But as these treatments were nowhere near as effective as modern solutions,

if the infection continued to spread,

the surgeons had one last resort - amputation.

If I take your arm off at the elbow,

you have about a 50/50 chance to survive the operation.

If I take it off at the shoulder, the chances are you will die.

Amputation was actually a highly sophisticated procedure

surgeons were well versed in.

What we do first of all,

is we get a dismembering knife like this one here.

-The cutting edge is on the inside.

-That's a pretty serious knife!

-It is.

My assistant would hold your arm extremely tight, act like a tourniquet.

The surgeon would then plunge the knife into the limb

until he hits bone and then in a very fast motion

go round in a circular motion till we come back where we started.

-Like opening a can.

-It is.

He or she would then yank the skin

and muscle up the bone to expose the bone.

The bone saw would then be used

and as high as possible I would saw through the bones.

Hopefully, I'm unconscious.

-Might not necessarily be.

-OK.

When you've sawn through the limb, we then cauterize the wound.

This would then go on the end of the stump.

What happens then, if they've done it right,

the skin and muscle should be longer than the bone.

This should come down over the end

-and now I've got squidgy bits to play with.

-Yeah.

This would be pinned through the wound

and they'd put another pin the other way.

-Why?

-That way you can control the tightness.

You'd put a figure of eight loop of thread

-over the two ends of the pin.

-Right.

I'll come along the next day and I'd make that figure of eight

tighter and tighter and tighter to draw the skin and muscle

-over the end of the stump.

-That's very clever.

-Very clever.

They may not have had today's medical expertise and equipment,

but Civil War surgeons were certainly competent enough

to stop all our 113 men dying in one go.

Simple infection can't be our cause of death.

Back in Dundee, Sue is taking a closer look at the two skeletons

with the extraordinary fused bones.

This individual was exceptional because this is the one where we had

the most outrageous fusion that occurred at the elbow.

So the hand permanently fixed in that position,

and then as if that wasn't enough, quite frankly,

the absolute and utter piece de resistance - look at that.

It's just the most outrageous specimen I think I've ever seen.

So that we've got the long shaft of the femur, the thighbone.

We've got the tibia, the shinbone at right angles.

and where there should be a knee, there isn't a knee. It's fixed bone.

Sue's research has led her to believe

this could be a condition with the rarest classification possible.

Occurring in a maximum one person in every 200,000,

and best illustrated by the other man's fused hand.

They call it carpal coalition syndrome as

that's the most common bits that fuse together, all of these bones.

When bone forms, before it becomes bone,

it's a big mass of cartilage and if you think of it like cheddar cheese,

that big lump of cheese was never cut

and so we think that this is about a malformation of the joints.

This is a rare genetic condition.

To find one of those is rare.

To find two individuals

that may be displaying the same thing can't be a coincidence.

It absolutely can't be a coincidence.

Sue has discovered that the man with the dramatically fused

knee and elbow also has fused bones in his wrist.

It's significant new evidence to link the conditions of the two men.

He has a carpal coalition, too,

but it's only two of the bones and the bones that it is

are the bones that are sitting down at the base of the thumb.

So this one that's called the trapezium and the trapezoid,

these two little bones have fused together.

Carpal coalition syndrome

is a genetic condition that's passed from parent to child.

It's inherited. If it's in your family,

it stays in your family.

And what's the likelihood of that occurring

randomly alongside somebody else with that?

You know, I don't like coincidences.

I don't believe in the tooth fairy and I don't believe in coincidence.

But Sue has to be sure.

So the bones are put through a CT scanner,

which looks inside the bones

to give detailed images viewable from any angle.

Will the images confirm or disprove Sue's diagnosis?

Along with her colleague Dr Roos Eisma,

she scours the images.

This is the whole tray laid out as it went through the scanner.

Isn't that amazing? Look at that knee and look at that elbow.

This is the knee.

Ooh! Go back, go back, go back, go back, go back, go back.

Look. Isn't that interesting?

When you've got the two pillars of the joint, they're continuous.

All the other bits of the bone are formed.

All the normal growing bits are there.

What isn't there is the joint.

There's no joint space.

Now that isn't trauma, that isn't disease.

That's embryological. Yep.

That's our multiple sinostosis syndrome.

That's the most amazing image.

Sue's instincts are confirmed.

The only question now is OK, we know they've got that syndrome,

we've diagnosed the syndrome. Are they related?

DNA samples have been taken from the bones of the two men under sterile conditions.

These results could confirm any familial link between the two soldiers,

but the results are still some days away.

What is already clear is that the man with the fused arm and leg

would have had to live with his disability from birth.

But how would he have coped

with such severe disability 350 years ago?

And what function could he have served in a civil war army?

Xanthe heads to Kent University

to meet Julie Anderson - specialist in the history of disability.

Julie has brought along a range of wooden replica crutches and supports

the disabled soldier could have used.

They look pretty simple.

Just whatever's going to help someone get around.

Yes, crutch design remains very simple until the 20th century.

They were generally pieces of wood,

carved with some padding put on the support area under the arm.

So how mobile would the man have been?

To find out, Julie's assistant Jack is given replica crutches

and a knee support the man would likely have used.

Now, let's see if you can...

-not fall over, I guess.

-I'll go for it.

Yeah, yeah. Now imagine, if you were like this all the time,

you'd obviously get a bit more efficient.

But he's moving all right, isn't he?

-Yes.

-We're not looking at somebody who would have just had to sit down

and not do anything, and you've still got use of this hand,

so literally it's here that's fused -

you could still use all the movement at the shoulder,

and you've still got a viable wrist joint.

He wouldn't have fought, but Julie is sure there were plenty of other jobs he could have done.

His job would have perhaps been an ancillary worker,

perhaps a cook, or maybe even, as he was a big man,

guarding the ordinance, where all the munitions and muskets and things like that were kept.

Despite a permanently fused elbow and knee,

he could've functioned quite well.

All right. You're standing at a bench, balancing now,

what do you think?

Could you have managed to be a cook or a guard?

I imagine the balance might have been an issue, but you'd get used to it,

so with the right arm you can obviously do a lot of things.

So I imagine so.

Yeah. It's great to see it first hand, how this could have looked,

because when you just see the remains,

you think this guy would have been pretty much stuck doing nothing.

And Julie has rare illustrations of how people affected by disability

may have lived around that time.

I've got some images here of a range of disabled people from the period.

They've got musical instruments and things.

Well, they would have been working people.

You have to remember that there was no institutionalisation

really before the 19th century,

so people had to just go out and make their own living,

which a lot of people did as best they could.

Some of these are in pairs.

This person looks blind and is being led by somebody else.

Yes, that was common, too. They would get together in bands

and look after each other.

It's the same for our man in the military.

He would have been part of a group and they would have looked after him.

They wouldn't have seen him as unusual?

No, not at all. In fact the word "normal"

doesn't really come into common usage in the English language

until the early part of the 19th century.

Was there just no purpose for it?

No. It wasn't necessary, people were just who they were.

But despite this apparent tolerance, relatives often suffered.

Extreme religious beliefs saw disability as a sign that the person's family had committed a sin.

They would be ostracised,

they would be shunned by their communities and it was difficult.

Some families had to move away,

but often when the disabled person grew up, they would leave home.

And the military could prove useful in these circumstances.

Would disabled people actually have gone into the military

to relieve their families of that burden?

Absolutely, and because unemployment was a problem

amongst disabled people,

often the military provided a haven for them

in order for them to be paid at a job.

So it's not a surprise to have found the disabled in the army,

even holding down a key job.

Nor is it a surprise to find two disabled men grouped together for support.

Back in Dundee, Caroline and her colleague Chris Rynn

are close to reconstructing what our two men may have looked like.

The older man is missing his front tooth from the blow to the face he took, likely in battle.

But the more severely disabled man's face has been more complicated.

It's been a really challenging process for me with this one.

This was very definitely asymmetry that was extreme

and it's just been really interesting to try and show

the face of someone with a congenital condition.

And we're seeing some dysmorphia, some changes to the facial structure

that may be connected to this condition.

What I've done is to take in a nose...

from a database and then try and distort that to fit with the bones.

You can see that we've got quite a bent shape

to the lateral nasal bones, the bones on the side of the nose,

which is suggesting this shape here.

And one of the things I've noted a lot in the literature for this condition,

we may have to consider giving him cross eyes,

because that seems to be a likely option.

But were these two men really related, as their shared rare condition suggests?

To find out, the team gather to hear the results of the DNA analysis,

with Sue especially on tenterhooks.

A bit frustratingly, they came back as having...

You see, I don't even like that now. You've already gone too far.

They don't have the same mother.

But we've got DNA out of them?

Yes. DNA was viable. It does not appear to be contaminated.

OK.

But..?

Apparently though, looking for the male lineage on the Y chromosome is much...

You've got to go right down to the nuclear level and the DNA is not viable at that level.

Don't look at me like that!

Well, that's just rubbish, quite frankly! That's unacceptable.

It's absolutely unacceptable!

We can't say that they're NOT brothers, fraternal brothers,

but we can say that they... We can't tell and they're not maternally related.

Frustratingly for Sue, the DNA shows the two men aren't related by mother

and it isn't good enough quality

to prove whether they were related by father or not.

But Sue's not going to give up on her theory easily.

So it is possible that they could still be related,

but we just can't show it.

I think the chances of having this condition

in individuals who are not related and are in the same,

pretty much almost the same grave at same time,

would be stretching it a bit far.

They could still be cousins or half brothers, but where were they from?

The isotope results are also in.

Will these help to determine whether the men were part of Lord Fairfax's Parliamentary army?

-The two do have the same isotopic signature.

-Good.

And I've got some interesting data for the diet,

which is quite specifically interesting to these guys.

They had a 20 to 25% fish intake in their diet, which is really high.

Normally we'd be looking at 0 to 5%.

In York, you're going to have... Unless it's freshwater,

but these have got a really high fish, both of the brothers.

So it has to be coastal.

This is a fascinating discovery for the team.

The isotopes say both our men had high marine diets.

But how does this fit with the theory

they were part of Fairfax's army in York?

Civil War expert Andrew Hopper thinks he has the answer,

and has invited Xanthe to the Yorkshire port of Hull to explain.

Hull was the most important Northern port town

held by Parliament during the Civil Wars.

Prior to siege of York,

it was also the base of the Parliamentarian commander in Yorkshire, Lord Fairfax.

Quite a large proportion of Lord Fairfax's Parliamentarian army

from Yorkshire came from Hull and the parishes around it.

There was a large merchant fleet based here,

and many of the seamen volunteered to fight for Parliament.

So you're saying that these guys I've been looking at, that I presumed were soldiers,

would actually originally have been sailors?

It's very likely that they had been, yes.

But why would sailors be useful to Lord Fairfax in the siege of York?

Hull's sailors would all have been experienced cannoneers,

experienced artillerymen.

They would have served on merchant vessels that had been armed

and they'd also been probably quite hardy folk,

having sailed across the North Sea.

So they would have been prized commodities in a siege situation.

So our men's experience with cannon on board ship

could have made them highly useful in a siege war.

Lord Fairfax invested the city from the South East

between the Rivers Foss and Ouse, and set up his gun batteries

on Lamel Hill, and from there they would pour down fire where the Royalist defences were.

Well, that's really interesting, because the mass graves, and specifically

these two brothers in arms, they were buried very near there.

So they were probably part of this actual military operation, weren't they?

Yes, I should think it's very likely.

Do we have any documentary evidence available from the time?

Well the garrison accounts of Hull in 1642 and 1643 survive.

Wow!

And they're very detailed, and they give us the names

of three of the gunners, three of the cannoneers in Hull.

Really? Is this actually from the original document? A copy of it?

Yes. We have here Thomas Coatsforth in the cannoneers at the block house.

James Hunter in the cannoneers in the town and another gentleman here -

Cowling the gunner mentioned in the accounts.

It's a bit of a reach, but, theoretically, one of these men

could be one of the men I've been looking at.

Well, if they weren't one of the men you were looking at, it's very

likely they would have been very well known, or personally known to them.

That's pretty close, isn't it?

But why would a group of sailors give up their livelihoods

and sign up to fight in Fairfax's land army?

Was there a greater motivation behind their actions?

Xanthe meets Civil War specialist Diane Purkiss

at Holy Trinity in York -

a simple church she believes the Parliamentarian soldiers would have approved of.

They felt this was what God wanted.

Absolute plainness and spareness.

Anything else was an insult to him.

This plainness permeated people's whole lives.

You'd live the right way, you'd be chaste, you'd be abstinent,

you'd read the Bible every day.

Many ordinary Englishmen joined the Parliamentarian cause

because they hated the elaborate, ritualistic church King Charles I stood for,

as well his belief he was appointed by God to rule by Divine Right.

He tried to impose on the Church of England

a much more posh, hierarchical,

glittering, Bishop-driven kind of model

of what the Church of England ought to be,

and these people didn't want a bar of it.

But they also thought it was icon worship -

something that pretended to represent God,

but actually broke the second commandment where God says,

"Thou shalt not make unto thyself a graven image."

How do we go from religious fervour to war?

Well, some of these guys actually thought

that they were fighting in the last battle between Christ and the forces of Anti-Christ.

Some of the more radical ones believed that if they acted rightly,

it would actually inspire Christ to come down from Heaven and rule the world.

-And save the world.

-And save the world, and create an ideal world.

-That's worth dying for, then. It's a massive cause.

-Yeah, exactly.

And Diane has written evidence of the soldiers' religious fervour.

This is actually a letter that was sent to London.

This man plainly thought he was God's soldier. It's actually headed,

"A relation of the great victory obtained by God's assistance

"by the Parliament's forces."

And the letter itself says,

"Sir, by God's blessing I can tell you I am alive

"and so are you, and by God's victorious arm,

"the Church of God is alive."

So each and every man thought he was God's soldier.

Yeah, and they thought the army was the Church of God.

So now the opposing Royalists in the field are God's enemies.

-They're radicalised. That's how we'd see it today.

-That's right, yeah.

So the experience of serving in this army

and thinking these kinds of religious thoughts has radicalised this man.

Was it this same religious conviction that drove our men

to the siege of York and their eventual demise?

The team believe they now know where the men were from.

They know who they were fighting for and what their motivation was.

But they still don't know how they died.

There is evidence of having fracture occur to bone,

but it's very well healed.

There's an evidence of infection to bone,

but again, it's very well healed.

All of this is consistent with them being a fighting force,

but it's not consistent with what caused their death.

And if you can rule out the infection side and the trauma side,

the only thing that's really left as a feasible cause of death

is going to be...disease.

It has to be disease is the most likely cause of death for so many individuals.

How would doctors have dealt with disease back in the 17th Century?

Xanthe goes to the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford

to meet medical historian Dr Erica Charters.

Got an intriguing little box here.

-Do we need the gloves?

-So we need the gloves on to touch some of this.

Erica has a remarkable device,

used to treat disease and fever until the late 19th Century

and similar to those doctors would have used during the English Civil War.

-This is actually to let blood.

-Right.

Now, this is where the exciting bit happens.

-This would go right up against your skin.

-Yep.

-MACHINE CLICKS LOUDLY

-Ooh!

Before you know it, it would cut into your skin,

it would make very small incisions and this would allow you to let some blood out.

And blood letting was... Well it's been very popular for a long time,

so in the 17th Century they would have done this.

Just press the button there and hold it.

-Ooh! It's quite powerful, isn't it?

-It is quite powerful,

and you can see where it's cut into the paper.

Was there an idea there were poisons in the blood that you wanted to release by blood letting?

Very much so, and what we do see, especially for fevers -

remembering if you think of how someone looks who has a fever,

they're flushed, they're very warm, their pulse is beating very quickly -

so it almost looks like they have an excess of blood.

So it's not surprising that some people felt that letting out

-some of that excess of blood would return you to health.

-Does it actually have any benefits?

Um...not that we know of, no.

With little more than blood letting as a treatment,

and with thousands of men camped closely together during the siege,

Erica believes she knows what could've killed the 113 men.

Something like typhus fever, the incubation is probably around three weeks

and, very commonly, what we see in diaries of sieges

is that after about three weeks during a siege,

we see outbreaks of disease.

-How does it spread?

-Well, it's very contagious.

Typhus is interesting because it's spread through body lice

and they actually live in the seams of your clothing.

So it's a particular kind of insect which is a vector for the pathogen.

And what's interesting about it is the lice only like living at the temperature of your body,

so they will only stay in your clothes when you're wearing them,

which is why we often see it in sieges.

It's very common in winter time when people keep their clothes on.

-So it could possibly have been there even during the summer in York.

-What are the symptoms?

Well, it's a general fever, a kind of weakening,

very often a very intense headache. Sometimes you see a rash.

How many people died of typhus?

Well, it depends. We know that when we look at case fatalities rates -

so, if you catch it, what the chances are that you will die -

-we've seen during the First World War it reached rates of 70%.

-Wow!

As it's so contagious, if you're in a small area together,

there's a good chance almost everyone will catch it.

Because it was so contagious, did they die from this more so than from fighting?

It would be much more likely that you might die of disease, and it's not a very glorious death.

It's one thing to die on the battlefield -

it's another thing to die of something like diarrhoea or a fever.

It's not the way that you want to go.

The team finally has a plausible, if tragic, explanation

for how the men in the mass graves died.

A virulent outbreak of typhus fever -

a disease that has afflicted besieging armies from ancient times

right up to Stalingrad in the Second World War.

With the final part of the puzzle in place,

it's time for the story the bones have told to be relayed back to the local community.

The Cold Case team has returned to York.

There to hear their findings are those who originally excavated the site

and experts who have assisted the team.

I'm hoping to find out more of why they died,

more about why they were buried in that particular spot

and who buried them and what period of the Civil Wars they were buried in.

All those questions that purely the historical evidence isn't able to answer.

The facial reconstructions is something I haven't been involved with before

and, hopefully, that'll give us an insight - a closer insight - into the people who we're dealing with.

Ghoulishly exciting.

Sue reveals the bigger story of the Civil War.

It's reasonable to suspect that they're going to be fighting men.

She unpacks how the men would have died...

What do we find in terms of a cause of death?

Well, we don't find trauma.

What we've been told is that, in fact, more people died as a result of disease.

..the more intimate story of disability...

His right leg would have been fixed that way.

A condition that is so rare,

we don't have an incidence for the rarity of it.

..and how the science tied two remarkable men's lives together in death.

So now what we've got are two individuals,

buried in the same location,

with the rarest of genetic conditions,

not with the same mother -

hopefully their father had a bike, but not with the same mother -

with exactly the same stable isotopes in terms of where they've come from,

and with exactly the same unusual marine-based diet of a very high proportion.

They have GOT to go together!

The final part of the investigation is to bring these two soldiers back to life,

beginning with the man with just a fused hand.

It's a strong face, it's a very strong face.

It's actually quite a pleasant face.

He would fit in amongst us, wouldn't he?

Then there is the more severely affected man.

Now, I don't know whether his squint eye was inward-pointing or outward-pointing.

When we looked at the literature, inward-pointing seemed to be more common.

These guys would've been used to seeing people

who'd had much more major battlefield wounds

and, you know, like your face cut in half by a cavalry sabre,

losing an eye to a pike.

That asymmetry is relatively slight in comparison with what they would have seen.

And for Sue, it's this man's story that has been the greatest revelation.

He was active, so he's not a passive person.

He's been with the rest of them, treated the same way as the rest of them.

Whether we now might think of him differently in terms of a disability,

that disability wasn't being recognised as him being an outcast.

He was treated very, very much like the others.

It is an absolutely unique set of remains. It is fascinating.

They give us that opportunity to bring the science in,

use the historical background, and it really fleshes out

those people that we're dealing with during that quite tumultuous period of English history.

The science gave it everything I was hoping for.

It gave it that element the historical document can't deal with.

It gave us something beyond the paper, beyond the page and beyond the text.

The guy with the disabilities -

I was just fascinated that such a guy could find a place in Fairfax's army.

I think that tells us something so important

about the way this war was developing and the way people were thinking

because, plainly, we've got an evolving meritocracy here.

Every man was supposed to be good for their job,

and if they were good for their job that was good enough.

And that was what led, really, to the modern parliamentary democracy that we all enjoy.

The Cold Case Team has uncovered two remarkable tales.

The larger story of the 113 -

strong, committed men fighting for a cause,

tragically cut down by disease before their victory was assured.

But also the personal story of two men, likely closely related,

who, despite huge disadvantages, stayed together in life and death.

Forever brothers in arms.

The story complete, their remarkable bones are now handed back to the community.

This has been such an amazing story -

it brings so many different elements together.

It is a huge historical story, but it's also an incredibly important story.

I'm not aware in the literature anywhere of this type of remains ever having been recorded before.

I think this is a first. I may be wrong, but I think it is a first.