Tyne and Wear HER(11970): Newcastle, Blackfriars, human remains - Details
11970
Newcastle
Newcastle, Blackfriars, human remains
Newcastle
NZ26SW
Religious Ritual and Funerary
Funerary Site
Human Remains
Medieval
Find
Grainger's workmen had been digging up the foundations of some old buildings, and an ancient burial ground where the new markets and streets were intended to be laid out in the Nuns' Field. They found a stone coffin, lead coffins, and the decayed wood of others, 3-4' deep, most embedded in clay. They were clearing a lot of bones, thought to indicate the regular burial place of the nuns of St Bartholomew's Priory. Several entire skulls were supposedly found, together with the fragment of a tablet which has been transcribed. The report gives no precise location.
[See the reference to stray finds from the 1834 campaign which gives more detail of the inscription in Richardson 1844, 200 (Event Rec. No.475)].
[Caution: the incident was reported second-hand in the newspaper, and may be classified as circumstantial evidence.]
244
642
NZ244642
NEWCASTLE COURANT, 21st March, 1835, p.4, col.4.