Thirty-seven skeletons found in a mass burial site in the grounds of St
John’s College in Oxford may not be who they initially seemed, according to
Oxford University researchers studying the remains.
When the bodies were discovered in the grounds of the college in 2008 by
Thames Valley Archaeological Services, archaeologists speculated that they could
have been part of the St Brice’s Day Massacre in Oxford – a well documented
event in 1002, in which King Aethelred the Unredy ordered the killing of ‘all
Danes living in England’.
However, a new research paper, led by Oxford University, has thrown up a new
theory – that the skeletons may have been Viking raiders who were captured and
then executed.
