Archeologists may have discovered a medieval-era Welsh cemetery — underneath a department store

For a century, people in the Welsh town of Haverfordwest shopped at the Ocky White department store with no idea what lay beneath them.

After the store shut down in 2013, the local county council bought the plot for redevelopment. And now, archeologists have found hundreds of human remains underground that could date back to the medieval period. 

"We suspected that [with] what little evidence we have about the medieval friary of St Saviour's, the Dominican friary … it was in the vicinity, but we didn't exactly know its location," Fran Murphy, an archeologist who has been working on the site, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

Murphy is confident that her team at Dyfed Archaeology Trust discovered the friary's cemetery. 

"We're about 282 graves so far in quite a small area," she said. BBC News reported that about 100 children are among the ruins.

A hidden history

Haverfordwest was established 1,000 years ago in southwestern Wales, along the Western Cleddau river. A castle is at the centre of the town, just steps away from what would have been the friary.

"It has a long history … [and] there are these big monuments, but between them there's not much known," Murphy said.

The dig at the old department store has some stories to share.

"If we work from the top downwards, as we do, first of all there was a 19th-century iron foundry on the site for at least 100 years," she said.

"Beneath that, we had some earlier industrial sort of 18th-century remains. And then beneath that, we had a lot of demolition material, which must have come from a friary building. A lot of worked stone and a beautiful medieval floor tile, which I'm sure comes from a church … that seemed to seal a lot of the graves." 

Murphy saw the bones of a mixture of young infants to fully grown adults. Most were wrapped in a simple shroud with their arms crossed and heads facing west. Some showed signs of severe arthritis, while others had injuries to their heads and limbs. 

Her colleague Andrew Shobbrook theorized that some of the bodies could belong to the victims of an attack against the English occupation of Wales. In 1405, French and Welsh forces fought together under Owain Glyndŵr, the last native Welsh person to be Prince of Wales.

As for the numerous infants and children, Murphy attributed their deaths to the high mortality rates in the medieval period due to illness and disease.

She said that it looked like the cemetery was used from the end of the 13th century to the end of the 16th century. Further study using radiocarbon dating and isotope analysis will help researchers build the story of what was happening at the site and who was living there.

The talk of the town

The people of Haverfordwest always hinted at an old friary in their midst, without knowing where it was. There is a street named Friars Lane and a pub that goes by Friars Vaults.

The county council bought Ocky White to redevelop the site into a "food emporium, bar and rooftop terrace." But once they demolished the department store, a rich history began to emerge.

"Many, many people in town remember shopping there and sitting in the cafe … having some tea, little knowing that beneath [their] feet were all these burials," Murphy said. 

"So people are really interested and we have a lot of volunteers who help us wash the finds."

The archeologists have a shop nearby where they process their findings and discuss them with people who visit. The excavation site is not accessible to the public.

By the end of their research, Murphy hopes to learn more about who the townspeople were during the medieval period.

"Where did they come from? You know, what was their health like?"

She noted how this excavation is the first of its kind in Haverfordwest — or in any town so far into the southwest of Wales. 

"Sometimes we feel a little bit out on a limb, far away from everything else. And so I think it reminds us that these events in history ... happened right in the far corners of the United Kingdom," she said.