Angela
Elite member
- Messages
- 21,823
- Reaction score
- 12,329
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- Ethnic group
- Italian
Well, they obviously did mutilate them, but there could be other explanations, although I can't think of any right now.
See:
http://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/1.790889
"Wharram Percy was a small farming town, consisting in the medieval period of just two facing rows of dwellings. The archaeologists found 137 bones, "representing the substantially incomplete remains of a minimum of ten individuals," they note drily. The bodies were of both sexes and ranged in age from two years to over 50.After death, the bodies were decapitated, dismembered and burned. "
"Belief in, and fear of, the walking dead, was very real in the Middle Ages. Images abound from the Middle Ages of living people being pursued by skeletons. It is true that there is no consensus about what those images represented, but that said, stories of the undead abounded.
Orderic Vitalis, a 12th century Benedictine monk, wrote in Book 8 of his “Ecclesiastical History” about a priest named Walchelin, who, in 1091 C.E., was returning from visiting a sick parishioner when he was confronted with what seemed to be an army of the dead. “Now I do indeed see the shades of the dead with my own eyes,” Walchelin thought, according to Orderic."
"Soon after, in the late 12th century C.E. a Yorkshire monk and historian named William of Newburgh wrote about a walking corpse in Berwick. The corpse only rested when locals dug the body up and dismembered it. For all that, according to his own biographers, he took great pride in relying on accurate sources, William was renowned for his descriptions of "revenants", namely the living dead of various sorts, including vampires."
I suppose it could have been cannibalism because of starvation in the era of the Black Death, but why burn them afterwards?
See:
http://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/1.790889
"Wharram Percy was a small farming town, consisting in the medieval period of just two facing rows of dwellings. The archaeologists found 137 bones, "representing the substantially incomplete remains of a minimum of ten individuals," they note drily. The bodies were of both sexes and ranged in age from two years to over 50.After death, the bodies were decapitated, dismembered and burned. "
"Belief in, and fear of, the walking dead, was very real in the Middle Ages. Images abound from the Middle Ages of living people being pursued by skeletons. It is true that there is no consensus about what those images represented, but that said, stories of the undead abounded.
Orderic Vitalis, a 12th century Benedictine monk, wrote in Book 8 of his “Ecclesiastical History” about a priest named Walchelin, who, in 1091 C.E., was returning from visiting a sick parishioner when he was confronted with what seemed to be an army of the dead. “Now I do indeed see the shades of the dead with my own eyes,” Walchelin thought, according to Orderic."
"Soon after, in the late 12th century C.E. a Yorkshire monk and historian named William of Newburgh wrote about a walking corpse in Berwick. The corpse only rested when locals dug the body up and dismembered it. For all that, according to his own biographers, he took great pride in relying on accurate sources, William was renowned for his descriptions of "revenants", namely the living dead of various sorts, including vampires."
I suppose it could have been cannibalism because of starvation in the era of the Black Death, but why burn them afterwards?
