Cold Case - The York 113
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00:00At the University of Dundee's Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, the History Cold
00:08Case team is about to embark on a remarkable new investigation.
00:13We have got 113 skeletons, all male, signs of unusual conditions.
00:21We're not talking about one or two skeletons, we're talking about hundreds, so it's a very
00:28big story.
00:30The case will be led by forensic anthropologist Professor Sue Black.
00:34Dr Xanthi Mallett will gather historical evidence, while Professor Caroline Wilkinson will rebuild
00:42the faces of the dead.
00:45In York, more than 100 skeletons have been found in 10 mass graves.
00:51It's an extraordinary archaeological find, and the biggest case the team has ever had
00:55to deal with.
00:58Why did so many people die here?
01:01Very, very unusual.
01:02I've never seen a grave like that, to be honest with you.
01:06The trail will transport us back 350 years to one of the most traumatic and pivotal events
01:13in British history.
01:15You just lunge forward, straight into the faces of the enemy there.
01:19To a time when medical intervention could be as dangerous as life on the battlefield.
01:25If I take it off at the shoulder, the chances are you will die.
01:29When men believed they were caught up in Armageddon.
01:32They thought that they were fighting in the last battle between Christ and the forces
01:37of Antichrist.
01:39And to one man's surprising story.
01:41Oh boy, that is outrageous.
01:45That will not only change our views on how the English Civil War was fought, but provide
01:50a unique window into the birth of democracy itself.
02:19In the heart of York, the History Cold Case team has set up its Mobile Forensic Unit,
02:24near where the remains of 113 people were recently excavated.
02:32This is the biggest case the team has ever taken on.
02:36Members of the local archaeological community lay out a selection of remains from ten mass
02:41graves, discovered in 2008 just beyond the city walls.
02:47Every single skeleton is male.
02:52But there are also the boxed remains of two further bodies that have especially troubled
02:56archaeologists since excavation.
03:01Their bones show signs of puzzling abnormalities.
03:05Why did 113 men end up buried together?
03:09And what's the truth behind the disfigured bodies?
03:14There's a lot of dead people here, and so there needs to be an explanation for why you've
03:18got so many in one place.
03:21Every single one of those people will have a story.
03:25Some of them are going to have a really interesting story to tell.
03:34Professor Sue Black and Dr Xanthe Mallett fly in from Dundee HQ.
03:39Together they will carry out a preliminary examination of the recovered bones.
03:43There's a lot here.
03:46Immediately they find many signs of healed trauma and bone breaks.
03:50Oh, look, look, there's a problem in the elbow.
03:53Whether it's a dislocation, it's really hard to dislocate that joint, really, really hard
03:58to dislocate it.
03:59It looks as if there's a bit of remodelling going on at the wrist.
04:02I wonder if that's a previous fracture.
04:05And there are signs of serious infections.
04:08Oh, ho, ho, look at this.
04:12Ouch.
04:13Look at the amount of bone that's been laid down.
04:16That is nasty.
04:17That's very nasty.
04:19That's very painful for the time that it's been active.
04:22Whether it's still active or not, I don't know.
04:24It's a lot of bone being laid down.
04:25That's, that's infective.
04:27You know, you've got nerve endings that are inflamed.
04:29You've got the pus formation.
04:31Oh, it's just not nice at all.
04:33Look, it goes all the way through.
04:35But it's localised.
04:37It's a simple course of antibiotics today and that's gone.
04:40Yeah.
04:42Yet all the bones are of strong, young and middle-aged men.
04:46I think we're looking at male, quite well-defined chin.
04:49Quite robust.
04:50Yeah, I'm OK with that.
04:51With no obvious cause of death.
04:54They've got previous fractures and they've got trauma associated with their previous life.
05:00But why did they die?
05:02Don't know.
05:03Don't know.
05:05There's no evidence of a cause of death on here either.
05:08There's no obvious disease process.
05:10There's no obvious trauma process.
05:12There's nothing.
05:13So whatever killed him may have killed them, but it hasn't left a mark.
05:18And there's lots and lots of things that don't leave a mark.
05:21They turn their attention to the two boxes that the archaeologists have marked out
05:26as being particularly strange.
05:29Inside the first, the skeleton of an incredibly muscular male.
05:34At first glance, consistent with the rest of the group.
05:37We're talking about quite a big, robust adult.
05:41But I tell you what I think is interesting is that that clavicle is being bound down
05:45onto there really, really tightly.
05:47So there's huge muscle mass going on up here.
05:50And this is pretty robust as well.
05:51It's not only robust, what you've also got within that bone is a huge amount of torsion.
05:57You can see it's twisted.
05:58Because you can see.
05:59And that's the muscle attaching onto there that's just trying to get more of a group.
06:04So he's very well built.
06:06But he has one highly unusual feature that sets him apart.
06:11Oh, wow.
06:13His hand bones are fused together.
06:16OK.
06:17See, that's interesting.
06:18OK.
06:19I'll tell you why that's interesting, because that is a congenital fusion of the carpals.
06:26Congenital carpal fusion.
06:28Really, really rare.
06:30But there's not going to have been much in the way of disability.
06:34You know, all you're losing is a little bit of movement like that.
06:38So you know, his little finger gets stuck out there.
06:41It doesn't ever come across here.
06:44Then there is the final set of remains for Sue and Xanthi to examine.
06:49Oh.
06:52This man has an even more dramatic bone defect.
06:56Oh, my.
06:58Mm. OK.
07:00Well. Well. Well, well, well.
07:03Oh, this is very, very, very unusual.
07:07His elbow and knee are both fused.
07:11The bones have grown together.
07:14To Sue, this does not look like the trauma found on the other bodies.
07:18Oh, boy.
07:19You know, it could be so many things.
07:24If you take the left limb, so there's the humerus, sitting like that,
07:29fused at right angles at the elbow, but look how it's fused.
07:34And the fused knee joint is even more debilitating.
07:37I have to say, that is outrageous.
07:42That is a very odd angle.
07:45But look at that buttress that you've got on here.
07:47So muscle. Huge amount of muscle that's reorganised.
07:50This is not a waist. You're not talking somebody who is kind of wasting and not moving.
07:54Right. Functionally, that would be better if it was fused vertical.
07:57Of course, straight. Yeah.
07:59Sue has found what she thinks might be a rare congenital condition in two different men.
08:06Her first thought, could they be related?
08:09That is the singularly most unusual set of carpal coalitions that I have ever seen.
08:16And right next door to it is the most outrageous fusion of an elbow at 90 degrees and a knee at 90 degrees.
08:27I'd really like to know if they're related. Yeah.
08:31The condition suffered by these two men is entirely unexpected, given the nature of the rest of the group.
08:38He has a distinct disability. A distinct disability.
08:45It's now a twofold investigation.
08:49Firstly, the group as a whole, over 100 men.
08:53Who were they and what killed them all?
08:57But also, what is the story of these two men with their dramatically fused bones?
09:05The evidence at the moment, if we were looking at this in a purely cold light of day forensic scenario,
09:11is we have two individuals, male, of mature age, adult males,
09:17who have got congenital abnormalities, or we suspect them to be.
09:22We can't make any other link at this stage.
09:27But watch this space.
09:29Testing gets underway immediately, including DNA sampling, CT scanning, isotopic analysis and carbon dating.
09:44So what I'm going to do now is take some samples of this femur,
09:50which is the right leg bone of the male with the strange development.
09:54I'm going to take two different samples.
09:58One's going to be used for the stable isotopes, looking at the provenancing,
10:02possibly telling us about diet and maybe where they were.
10:06The other one's going to be used for dating the samples.
10:09That's going to really pin down when these people died.
10:17The team will need to wait some weeks for the results to come back.
10:23In the meantime, Xanthi needs to gather evidence from the area.
10:28So next morning she meets local archaeologist Graham Bruce, who supervised the excavations.
10:40Graham had been excavating a site just a hundred yards or so outside York City walls,
10:46defences that have stood since Roman times.
10:50OK, here we are. This is the site where we found all the mass graves.
10:54Back in the Middle Ages, there was a church on this site,
10:58and Graham expected to find a traditional medieval graveyard.
11:02But instead he was shocked to uncover large pits containing the bodies of over a hundred men.
11:08We've got some pictures of the graves themselves in here.
11:13Let's see on this one where you've got...
11:16And they're all lined up? They're lined up within the graves.
11:19Where were the mass graves within here?
11:22They were predominantly within the church itself, respecting the main wall lines.
11:28So the walls must have still been standing, at least partially, when the graves were cut into.
11:34The mass graves were dug inside the church,
11:37and Graham believes this must have happened some time after record show it fell into ruin.
11:43And Graham also believes the graves must date from before the 1700s.
11:48By the 18th century in York as well, you've got better cartographic sources,
11:52and the maps show this area as open agricultural land with no other buildings on it.
11:58So you haven't got anywhere you'd be wanting to put a major 18th-century burial ground.
12:04Carbon dating will confirm whether Graham's theory is correct.
12:09But if the mass graves do date from around the 1600s, what does Graham think could be the cause?
12:15Looking at the actual way in which they've been buried, what are your theories on this?
12:20When we started finding mass graves, you do start obviously trying to work out why.
12:25It's clearly a major, fairly cataclysmic event
12:29that has created all these people dying at the same time.
12:33And in the mid-17th century, you have the English Civil War.
12:36Graham's theory is that these bodies could have been victims of the English Civil War.
12:42With no women and children amongst the group, could they in fact have been soldiers?
12:48Dating back to one of Britain's most brutal and savage periods of conflict.
12:55Back at Dundee HQ, Xanthi and Sue get Professor Caroline Wilkinson up to speed
13:01using computer graphics of the burial site and the two most curious bodies.
13:07Now, what you can see here is the church.
13:11The church was in ruins.
13:13Now, what you can see here is the church.
13:17Now, what you can see here is the church.
13:21The church was in ruins when they were buried.
13:24The church was in ruins, I understand.
13:26But they've observed the lines of the ruins, I understand.
13:32And these are our two individuals.
13:34But not treated any differently, they're buried in exactly the same way.
13:37Yep, exactly the same way, because there's such a lot of them.
13:40113.
13:42You can say the number really quickly, but then when you actually see it,
13:46it looks like an awful lot of people.
13:48And somebody's taken care, putting them all in like that.
13:51We'll be getting carbon dates, but we don't have those yet,
13:54so obviously they're going to help us pinpoint it.
13:56But really we're looking at the Civil War simply because of where they are
13:59and also the number of people in that type of demographic population.
14:03So we'll know more, but this is quite helpful contextually.
14:06The team agrees that the obvious starting place for the larger investigation
14:11is to gather more details on the Civil War
14:14and how it might have affected the city of York.
14:17I'm absolutely happy that, you know,
14:19we can explain it in terms of a potential military,
14:22because that fits that you've got a lot of men of fighting sort of age together.
14:27And how is it the man with severely fused knee and elbow
14:31came to be buried amongst what could be a group of soldiers?
14:35We thought a lot more to find out about this guy,
14:37I suppose, what he would have been doing in this population for a start.
14:40Yeah.
14:42Because he is, I mean, he's disabled.
14:44Yeah, absolutely, there's no getting away from the fact
14:46that he's got a physical disability.
14:48What does a disabled man do in military services?
14:51And like the others, he was strong sites of muscle attachment,
14:54so he was active.
14:56Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's a big story.
15:00Even thinking about the occupations that he might have been involved in,
15:03it was really quite exciting,
15:05because why on earth is he buried with all these men who I suspect,
15:09you know, are relatively healthy, if you can be when you're dead,
15:13but, you know, relatively healthy,
15:15young men of fighting age, perhaps in a military background,
15:19what's he doing there?
15:26Professor Caroline Wilkinson is going to reconstruct
15:29the faces of the two men with the puzzlingly fused bones.
15:35She starts with the man in his early 40s with just the fused hand.
15:43OK, that might be a nasal bone.
15:48Excellent.
15:50So we've got quite a prominent nose,
15:54but it doesn't look underdeveloped.
15:57At this early stage, this man's face seems unaffected by his bone condition,
16:02though Caroline spots something that will affect his appearance.
16:06He's lost one of his front teeth at the top,
16:12and that's before he died, so it's well healed.
16:16This appears consistent with him being a soldier.
16:19Losing your front incisors is something that's common with people who fight.
16:25The teeth next to it look pretty healthy.
16:29They're not showing signs of decay,
16:31so, you know, maybe being knocked out would be the most likely option.
16:36But what of the more severely affected man with fused elbow and knee?
16:42Looks significantly younger.
16:44That's frontal bone.
16:46Very pronounced frontal bossing.
16:50So, in other words, this brow ridge, very male characteristic.
16:54Big nasal bones there, similar to the last man.
17:00And with this skull, there are possible signs of abnormal bone development.
17:05Goes there.
17:08So, yeah, the height of the orbit looks very small.
17:14That is quite a short distance as well between the nose and the mouth.
17:21It's going to be really interesting to put this all together
17:24to see what happens to the rest of the face.
17:27Caroline scans in the fractured pieces of both skulls using a 3D laser scanner.
17:33Final rebuilding will happen using computer software.
17:39Then the full effects of any disorder on their faces will start to emerge.
17:52But how did these two men and 111 others end up in mass graves in York?
17:58And how involved was the city in the civil war?
18:04The First English Civil War was fought from 1642 to 1646
18:09when supporters of Parliament rebelled against the tyrannical rule of King Charles I.
18:16At the outset, England was divided,
18:19with parliamentarian forces controlling the south
18:22and the north under royalist control.
18:25York was seen as the key to controlling the entire north of England.
18:30And historical records recount that in the spring of 1644,
18:35parliamentary forces pushed north and laid siege to the city.
18:41So, what impact did this have on York and its population?
18:46High up on the city's walls, Xanthi meets civil war historian Martin Bennett.
18:51Who was fighting?
18:53Well, inside the city you've got the Royalist Army of the Earl of Newcastle,
18:57about 4,000 of his soldiers inside the city.
19:00So this side, where we are? Yeah.
19:02OK. He's outside? Outside are three parliamentarian armies.
19:06When all three armies are gathered around, there are about 30,000 at the most.
19:11But surely it would be easy then to take the city with 30,000 men?
19:15There are two ways of taking a city.
19:17One is by storm and the other is to starve it out.
19:19Both of them carry their risks
19:21and parliamentarians initially attempt to starve the garrison out.
19:26But that wasn't going to be easy.
19:28It seems that the Royalist soldiers had swept up all crops
19:31from the surrounding areas and were well prepared.
19:35The people inside, in York, it's not as bad as it could be.
19:39They don't get to the stage of eating dogs and cats and rats
19:42because there's plenty of food, plenty of water,
19:45plenty of breweries in town making beer,
19:48which is, of course, safer to drink than water,
19:50and, effectively, they have enough to survive the 11 weeks of this siege.
19:5530,000 parliamentarian soldiers spent three months
19:59camped outside the city walls.
20:03It seems that this was the critical moment
20:05for York's involvement in the civil war.
20:09Were our 113 part of this besieging force?
20:15Amazingly, the siege is particularly well documented.
20:18At nearby King's Manor, Martin talks Xanthi through who took part.
20:24Inside, you've got the Earl of Newcastle's troops.
20:28With the Royalists retreating inside the walls,
20:31parliamentarian forces gathered around the city.
20:34What happens first is that the Scots arrive in this area,
20:38so in the ooze it flows into the city and the ooze it flows out.
20:41So all of this sector here is occupied by Scots forces
20:44and Fairfax's forces occupy this side from the ooze here,
20:49right round to the river Foss.
20:51What then happens is, towards the end of May,
20:54is the Earl of Manchester's army arrives
20:57and occupies the northern territory.
20:59So they kind of spread out now.
21:01Now the city is completely ringed.
21:03And as soon as that is achieved,
21:05then they begin to move inwards on the walls.
21:07So the suburbs begin to fall into the hands of parliament.
21:11And Martin has a theory about which of these armies
21:14our men could have come from.
21:16Fairfax's forces begin to take over the suburbs outside Wormcade.
21:21Aha, so does that mean that our mass grave is over here?
21:24It's in this area here.
21:26Right, OK, that is close, isn't it? Not far from the city walls.
21:29Martin believes our men could have been soldiers
21:32from one very particular part of the parliamentarian army,
21:366,000 men, under the command of Lord Fairfax.
21:41It's remarkable progress so early in the case.
21:44But it will take the results from the isotope testing
21:47to tell the team exactly where our soldiers came from.
21:52But what of the injuries to the bones Sue and Xanthi saw in the forensic tent?
21:57Are these consistent with soldiers fighting in the Civil War?
22:02Xanthi goes to Heslington Hall,
22:04where Lord Fairfax set up his camp during the siege.
22:08She meets Graham Webb and Richard Hawes from the Sealed Knot
22:12to learn about the weaponry, roles and injuries
22:15typical of 17th-century warfare.
22:18So here we have a muzzle-loading musket, OK?
22:22Mainly used for firing a lead ball.
22:25It was inaccurate, so you're unlikely to actually hit anybody with it
22:30although that's no comfort to anybody that's standing in front of it.
22:34Although there are no signs of musket ball damage on our men's bones,
22:38Richard thinks the musket could still be responsible.
22:42Occasionally somebody would get hit and you'd get horrific smash injuries
22:46and your friends would perhaps be falling down next to you.
22:49Eventually the morale of the group that you were firing at
22:53would perhaps break and they would run,
22:56and at which point you turn it round the other way and you go chasing after them.
23:01And this is the real damage that is done with the butt end of the musket.
23:05But how would this have actually worked in practice?
23:09Richard thinks a musket used this way round
23:12could be responsible for leg breaks, dislocated elbows
23:16and broken clavicle bones in the shoulder.
23:20These are exactly the kind of injuries
23:23Zanthi and Sue saw on the remains in the tent.
23:28But what of the large muscle attachments also found on the bones?
23:32Could this be explained by another weapon
23:35commonly used by soldiers of the time?
23:38The pike.
23:40The biggest and heaviest men carried these, right?
23:44Now, when you charge your pike,
23:46if you drop that pike straight down with your arm levelled behind,
23:50you can then charge your pike at the enemy.
23:53Don't worry, I'm right under it.
23:55Do you feel the weight of that?
23:56Keep that under your cheek and if you haunch back a bit
23:59and put your elbow on your hip there,
24:01you should be able to take the weight there.
24:02Do you feel that?
24:03Yes, I can feel that.
24:04You're straining there, aren't you?
24:06It's quite an awkward thing to hold.
24:08So what you have to do now is you just lunge forward
24:10straight into the faces of the enemy there.
24:13And again, I go...
24:15I would have gone straight for the eye.
24:17It takes a lot of strength to wield this,
24:19as well as balance and technique.
24:21So you'd expect quite well-built guys?
24:23Absolutely.
24:24The people that used them were particularly selected
24:26for their strength and height and stature.
24:28So the pikemen are really the brawn of the outfit?
24:30Absolutely, yes.
24:33All the historical evidence appears to indicate
24:36our men were soldiers from the Civil War.
24:39But will the carbon dating results confirm this?
24:431480 to 1687.
24:46Hold on, 1480...
24:48So that's fine?
24:49Yes.
24:50These dates cover a broad period,
24:53with the Civil War lying at the latter end.
24:56But the team know they can eliminate the earlier dates
24:59because of the archaeological evidence on the ground.
25:02The church, if you remember, was finished usage in 1580.
25:06That's why it was ruined when it looks like these men have gone in.
25:09So we're now 1580 to 1687.
25:11Mm-hm.
25:12And in the middle of that, right slap-bang almost in the middle of that,
25:16is the siege date.
25:17Yes.
25:18With the siege being the only time in this period
25:21when so many men were gathered together in York,
25:24dating the burial to the English Civil War now seems certain.
25:30What's important is that it supports what everything is telling us.
25:35So I think those large numbers, the regimentation of the burials,
25:38the fact that they're in the church, they're close to the city walls,
25:41everything is saying it's got to be the siege.
25:43Yeah.
25:44It's got to be.
25:47Are 113 men likely never lived long enough to see victory
25:51when the Royalists gave up and left York in July 1644?
25:56And whether they were definitely parliamentarian soldiers
25:59under Lord Fairfax's command
26:02will only be confirmed when the isotope results come in.
26:08The team also still don't know what the cause of death of the men was.
26:14Although the skeletons showed no fatal wounds,
26:17many did have healed injury and there were signs of infection.
26:22Could infections like these have killed all 113 of the men?
26:27To help understand what the cause of death might have been,
26:30Xanthi meets up with historian Rory McCready
26:33in a typical Civil War surgery.
26:38She starts by showing Rory some of the injuries from our men's bones.
26:44Here we've got a sharp force trauma to the elbow,
26:46so outside of the elbow, pretty deep, actually.
26:49Yeah.
26:50What would have caused this?
26:51Well, that was probably made by a surgeon,
26:53What would have caused this?
26:55Well, that was probably made by a sword, quite a deep cut.
26:58Probably in that sort of direction.
27:01So some sort of defensive injury?
27:03Yes.
27:04It seems the surgeons did have some understanding of infection
27:07and how to manage it.
27:09What we would do then is we would get something like oats...
27:16..and I'm going to get honey.
27:18I'm going to mix the two together to make it into a paste
27:22and then this will be put into the wound
27:24and then we'd sew the wound up with that inside the wound.
27:27Why did they leave that in?
27:29Because it helps to heal.
27:30The honey would be used as an antiseptic.
27:33We didn't understand that, but we knew that it worked.
27:36In fact, today, in some hospitals, when antibiotics don't work,
27:39they're using honey again to fight infections.
27:43But as these treatments were nowhere near as effective as modern solutions,
27:47if the infection continued to spread,
27:50the surgeons had one last resort.
27:53Amputation.
27:55If I take your arm off of the elbow,
27:57you have about a 50-50 chance of surviving the operation.
28:00If I take it off at the shoulder, the chances are you will die.
28:05Amputation was actually a highly sophisticated procedure
28:09surgeons were well versed in.
28:11What we do first of all is we get a dismembering knife like this one here.
28:15The cutting edge is on the inside.
28:17It's a pretty serious knife. It is.
28:19An assistant would hold your arm extremely tight,
28:22act like a tourniquet.
28:24The surgeon would then plunge the knife into the limb
28:28until he hits bone.
28:30And then in a very fast motion, go round in a circular motion
28:34till we come back where we started.
28:36Like opening a can.
28:37Tis.
28:38He or she would then yank the skin and muscle up the bone
28:42to expose the bone.
28:44Yeah.
28:45The bone saw would then be used
28:47and as high as possible I would saw through the bones.
28:52Hopefully I'm unconscious.
28:54Might not necessarily be.
28:56Okay.
28:57When you've sawn through the limb,
28:59we then cauterise the wound.
29:01This would then go on the end of the stump.
29:04Yeah.
29:05What happens then, if they've done it right,
29:09the skin and muscle should be longer than the bone.
29:12This should come down over the end
29:14and now I've got squidgy bits to play with.
29:16Yeah.
29:17This will be pinned through the wound
29:20and then put another pin the other way.
29:22Why?
29:23That way you can control the tightness.
29:25You'd put a figure of eight loop of thread
29:27over the two ends of the pin.
29:29Right.
29:30I'll come along the next day and what I'll do is
29:32I'll make that figure of eight tighter and tighter and tighter
29:35to draw the skin and muscle over the end of the stump.
29:38That's very clever.
29:39Very clever.
29:40They may not have had today's medical expertise and equipment
29:43but Civil War surgeons were certainly competent enough
29:46to stop all our 113 men dying in one go.
29:51Simple infection can't be our cause of death.
30:04Back in Dundee, Sue is taking a closer look
30:07at the two skeletons with the extraordinary fused bones.
30:11This individual was exceptional
30:13because this is the one where we had the most outrageous fusion
30:18that occurred at the elbow.
30:20So the hand permanently fixed in that position
30:23and then as if that wasn't enough, quite frankly,
30:26the absolute and utter piece de resistance.
30:30Look at that.
30:31It's just the most outrageous specimen I think I've ever seen.
30:35So that we've got the long shaft of the femur, the thigh bone,
30:39we've got the tibia, the shin bone, at right angles.
30:43And where there should be a knee, there isn't a knee.
30:46It's fixed bone.
30:49Sue's research has led her to believe
30:51that this could be a condition with the rarest classification possible,
30:55occurring in a maximum one person in every 200,000
31:00and best illustrated by the other man's fused hand.
31:04They call it carpal coalition syndrome
31:06because that's the most common bits that fuse together,
31:09all of these little bones.
31:11When bone forms, before it becomes bone,
31:14it's a big mass of cartilage.
31:16And if you think of it like cheddar cheese,
31:18that big lump of cheese was never cut.
31:21And so we think that this is about a malformation of the joints.
31:26This is a rare genetic condition.
31:30To find one of those is rare.
31:33To find two individuals that may be displaying the same thing
31:38can't be a coincidence.
31:40It absolutely can't be a coincidence.
31:42Sue has discovered that the man with the dramatically fused knee and elbow
31:47also has fused bones in his wrist.
31:50It's significant new evidence to link the conditions of the two men.
31:55He has a carpal coalition too, but it's only two of the bones.
31:59And the bones that it is
32:01are the bones that are sitting down at the base of the thumb.
32:04So this one that's called the trapezium and the trapezoid.
32:07These two little bones have fused together.
32:11Carpal coalition syndrome is a genetic condition
32:15that's passed from parent to child.
32:18It's inherited.
32:20If it's in your family, it stays in your family.
32:24And what's the likelihood of that occurring randomly
32:28alongside somebody else with that?
32:30Yeah, I don't like coincidences.
32:33I don't believe in the tooth fairy and I don't believe in coincidence.
32:37But Sue has to be sure.
32:44So the bones are put through a CT scanner,
32:48which looks inside the bones to give detailed images
32:51viewable from any angle.
32:54Will the results confirm or disprove Sue's diagnosis?
33:02Along with her colleague, Dr Ruz Aizmah, she scours the images.
33:09These are the whole tray laid out as a ventral scanner.
33:12Look at this. Isn't that amazing? Look at that knee.
33:15And look at that elbow.
33:17This is the knee.
33:20Go back, go back, go back.
33:23Look. Isn't that interesting?
33:26When you've got the two pillars of the joint, they're continuous.
33:30All the other bits of the bone are formed.
33:32All the normal growing bits are there.
33:34What isn't there is the joint.
33:36There's no joint space.
33:38Now, that isn't trauma.
33:41That isn't disease.
33:43That's embryological.
33:47That's our multiple synostosis syndrome.
33:51That's the most amazing image.
33:54Sue's instincts are confirmed.
33:57The only question now is, OK, we know they've got that syndrome,
34:02we've diagnosed the syndrome, are they related?
34:07DNA samples have been taken from the bones of the two men
34:10under sterile conditions.
34:13These results could confirm any familial link between the two soldiers,
34:17but the results are still some days away.
34:27What is already clear is that the man with the fused arm and leg
34:31would have had to live with his disability from birth.
34:37But how would he have coped with such severe disability
34:40350 years ago?
34:42And what function could he have served in a civil war army?
34:46Xanthe heads to Kent University to meet Julie Anderson,
34:50specialist in the history of disability.
34:54Julie has brought along a range of wooden replica crutches and supports
34:58the disabled soldier could have used.
35:01They look pretty simple.
35:03Just whatever's going to help somebody get around.
35:05Yes, crutch design remains very important.
35:08Yes, crutch design remains very simple until the 20th century.
35:12They were generally pieces of wood, carved,
35:15with some padding put on the support area under the arm.
35:19So how mobile would the man have been?
35:22To find out, Julie's assistant, Jack, is given replica crutches
35:26and a knee support the man would likely have used.
35:29Now, let's see if you can not fall over, I guess.
35:34We'll go for it.
35:36Now, imagine if you were like this all the time,
35:38you'd obviously get a bit more efficient,
35:40but he's moving all right, isn't he?
35:43We're not looking at somebody who would have just, you know,
35:45had to sit down and not do anything.
35:47He's still got use of this hand, even though...
35:49So, literally, it's here that's fused,
35:51so you could still use all the movement at the shoulder,
35:53and you've still got a viable wrist joint.
35:55He wouldn't have fought, but Julie is sure
35:58there were plenty of other jobs he could have done.
36:01His job would have perhaps been an ancillary worker, perhaps a cook,
36:04or maybe even, as he was a big man, guarding the ordnance,
36:08where all the munitions and the muskets and things like that were kept.
36:11Despite a permanently fused elbow and knee,
36:14he could have functioned quite well.
36:16You're standing at a bench. Right.
36:18Balancing now. What do you think?
36:20Have you managed to be a cook or a guard or something?
36:22I'd imagine the balance might have been an issue,
36:24but you get used to it, so... Yeah.
36:26..with the right arm, you can obviously do a lot of things, so...
36:29I'd imagine so. Yeah.
36:31I mean, it's great to see it first-hand, how this could have looked,
36:33because when you just see the remains,
36:35you think this guy would have been pretty much stuck doing nothing.
36:37Exactly.
36:38And Julie has rare illustrations
36:40of how people affected by disability may have lived around that time.
36:45I've got some images here... Oh, look at that.
36:47..of a range of disabled people from the period.
36:50Some of them have got musical instruments and things.
36:53Well, they would have been working people.
36:55You have to remember that there was no institutionalisation,
36:58really, before the 19th century,
37:00so people had to just go out and make their own living,
37:03which a lot of people did, as best they could.
37:05Some of these are in pairs.
37:06This person looks blind and they're being led by somebody else.
37:09Yes, that was common too.
37:10They would get together in bands... Yeah.
37:13..and look after each other.
37:15It's the same for our man in the military.
37:17He would have been part of a group and they would have looked after him.
37:21They wouldn't have seen him as unusual?
37:23No, not at all.
37:24In fact, the word normal doesn't really come into common usage
37:28in the English language until the early part of the 19th century.
37:32Was there just no purpose for it?
37:34No, it wasn't necessary. People were just who they were.
37:37But despite this apparent tolerance, relatives often suffered.
37:41Extreme religious beliefs saw disability as a sign
37:44that the person's family had committed a sin.
37:47They would be ostracised, they would be shunned by their communities,
37:52and it was difficult. Some families had to move away.
37:55But often, when the disabled person grew up, they would leave home.
37:59And the military could prove useful in these circumstances.
38:03Would disabled people actually have gone into the military
38:06to relieve their families of that burden?
38:08Absolutely.
38:09And because unemployment was a problem amongst disabled people,
38:13often the military provided a haven for them
38:16in order for them to be paid at a job.
38:20So it's not a surprise to have found the disabled in the army,
38:24even holding down a key job.
38:26Nor is it a surprise to find two disabled men grouped together for support.
38:37Back in Dundee, Caroline and her colleague Chris Wrynn
38:40are close to reconstructing what our two men may have looked like.
38:46The older man is missing his front tooth from the blow to the face he took,
38:50likely in battle.
38:53But the more severely disabled man's face has been more complicated.
38:58It's been a really challenging process for me with this one.
39:02This was very definitely asymmetry that was extreme.
39:05It's just been really interesting to try and show the face of someone
39:09with a congenital condition.
39:11And we're seeing some dysmorphia, some changes to the facial structure
39:15that may be connected to this condition.
39:18What I've done is to take in a nose from a database
39:22and then try and distort that to fit with the bones.
39:26You can see that we've got quite a bent shape to the lateral nasal bones,
39:32the bones on the side of the nose, which is suggesting this shape here.
39:36And one of the things that I've noted a lot in the literature for this condition,
39:41we may have to consider giving him cross eyes
39:44because that seems to be a likely option.
39:48But were these two men really related, as their shared rare condition suggests?
40:00To find out, the team gather to hear the results of the DNA analysis,
40:05with Sue especially on tenterhooks.
40:10A bit frustratingly, they came back as having...
40:12Honestly, I don't even like that now. You've already gone too far.
40:15They don't have the same mother.
40:17But we've got DNA out of them.
40:18Yes. DNA was viable. It does not appear to be contaminated.
40:23OK. But?
40:26Apparently, though, looking for the male lineage on the Y chromosome,
40:29you've got to go right down to the nuclear level
40:32and the DNA is not viable at that level.
40:36Don't look at me like that.
40:38Well, that's just rubbish, quite frankly.
40:41So we can't say that they're not brothers, fraternal brothers,
40:46but we can say that we can't tell and they're not maternally related.
40:53Frustratingly for Sue, the DNA shows the two men aren't related by mother
40:58and it isn't good enough quality to prove whether they were related by father or not.
41:04But Sue's not going to give up on her theory easily.
41:08So it is possible that they could still be related.
41:12Yeah.
41:13But we just can't show it.
41:14I think the chances of having this condition in individuals who are not related
41:20and are in pretty much almost the same grave at the same time
41:25would be stretching it a bit far.
41:30They could still be cousins or half-brothers.
41:33But where were they from?
41:35The isotope results are also in.
41:38Will these help to determine whether the men were part of Lord Fairfax's Parliamentary Army?
41:44The two do have the same isotopic signature.
41:47Good.
41:48And I've got some interesting data for the diet,
41:52which is quite specifically interesting to these guys.
41:55They had a 20% to 25% fish intake in their diet, which is really high.
42:01Normally we'd be looking at 0% to 5%.
42:04In York, you can have, unless it's fresh water,
42:08but these have got a really high fish, both of the brothers.
42:12So it has to be coastal.
42:15This is a fascinating discovery for the team.
42:18The isotopes say both our men had high marine diets.
42:22But how does this fit with the theory that they were part of Fairfax's army in York?
42:28Civil War expert Andrew Hopper thinks he has the answer
42:32and has invited Xanthi to the Yorkshire port of Hull to explain.
42:37Hull was the most important northern port town held by Parliament during the Civil Wars.
42:43Prior to the siege of York, it was also the base of the Parliamentarian commander in Yorkshire, Lord Fairfax.
42:49Quite a large proportion of Lord Fairfax's Parliamentarian Army from Yorkshire
42:54came from Hull and in the parishes around it.
42:57There was a large merchant fleet based here
43:00and many of the seamen volunteered to fight for Parliament.
43:04So you're saying that these guys I've been looking at, that I presumed are soldiers,
43:08would actually have originally been sailors?
43:10It's very likely that they had been, yes.
43:13But why would sailors be useful to Lord Fairfax in the siege of York?
43:19Hull's sailors would have all been experienced cannoneers, experienced artillerymen.
43:24They would have served on merchant vessels that had been armed
43:27and they'd also been probably quite hardy folk, having sailed across the North Sea.
43:33They would have been prized commodities in a siege situation.
43:38So our men's experience with cannon on board ship could have made them highly useful in a siege war.
43:47Lord Fairfax invested the city from the south east between the rivers Foss and Ouse
43:52and set up his gun batteries on Lamell Hill
43:55and from there they would pour down fire where the Royalist defences were.
43:59Well that's really interesting because the mass graves and specifically these two brothers in arms,
44:03they were buried very near there.
44:05So they were probably actually part of this actual military operation, weren't they?
44:09Yes, I should think it's very likely.
44:12Do we have any documentary evidence available from the time?
44:16Well, the garrison accounts of Hull in 1642 and 1643 survive.
44:22And they're very detailed and they give us the names of three of the gunners.
44:27Really?
44:28Three of the cannoneers in Hull.
44:30Oh, is this actually from the original document, a copy of it?
44:33Yes, we have here Thomas Coatsworth and the cannoneers at the blockhouse,
44:38James Hunter and the cannoneers in the town
44:41and another gentleman here, Cowling the gunner, mentioned in the accounts.
44:46It's a bit of a reach, but theoretically one of these men could be one of the men I've been looking at.
44:53Well, if they weren't one of the men you were looking at,
44:56it's very likely they would have been very well known or personally known to them.
45:00That's pretty close, isn't it?
45:03But why would a group of sailors give up their livelihoods
45:06and sign up to fight in Fairfax's land army?
45:11Was there a greater motivation behind their actions?
45:18Xanthi meets Civil War specialist Diane Perkis at Holy Trinity in York,
45:23a simple church she believes the parliamentarian soldiers would have approved of.
45:28They felt this was what God wanted, absolute plainness and spareness.
45:33Anything else was an insult to Him.
45:36This plainness permeated people's whole lives.
45:40You'd live the right way, you'd be chaste, you'd be abstinent, you'd read the Bible every day.
45:46Many ordinary Englishmen joined the parliamentarian cause
45:50because they hated the elaborate, ritualistic church King Charles I stood for,
45:55as well as his belief he was appointed by God to rule by divine right.
46:01He tried to impose on the Church of England
46:05a much more posh, hierarchical, glittering, bishop-driven kind of model
46:13of what the Church of England ought to be, and these people didn't want a bar of it.
46:17But they also thought that was actually icon worship,
46:20something that pretended to represent God,
46:23but actually broke the second commandment where God says,
46:26thou shalt not make unto thyself a graven image.
46:29How do we go from religious fervour to war?
46:32Well, some of these guys actually thought that they were fighting in the last battle
46:37between Christ and the forces of Antichrist.
46:40Some of the more radical ones believed that if they acted rightly,
46:44it would actually inspire Christ to come down from heaven and rule the world.
46:49And save the world.
46:50And save the world.
46:51And create an ideal world.
46:52Well, that's worth dying for, then. It's a massive cause.
46:55Yeah, exactly.
46:57And Diane has written evidence of the soldiers' religious fervour.
47:02This is actually a letter that was sent to London.
47:05This man plainly thought he was God's soldier.
47:08It's actually headed,
47:09A Relation of the Great Victory Obtained by God's Assistance by the Parliament's Forces.
47:14And the letter itself says,
47:17So each and every man thought he was God's soldier?
47:20Yeah, and they thought the army was the church of God.
47:23So now the opposing royalists in the field are God's enemies.
47:27They're radicalised. That's how we see it today.
47:30That's right, yeah.
47:31So the experience of serving in this army,
47:34the experience of serving in this army,
47:36the experience of serving in this army,
47:38the experience of serving in this army,
47:40the experience of serving in this army,
47:42the experience of serving in this army,
47:44the experience of serving in this army,
47:46and thinking these kinds of religious thoughts has radicalised this man.
47:51Was it this same religious conviction that drove our men to the siege of York
47:55and their eventual demise?
47:58The team believe they now know where the men were from.
48:01They know who they were fighting for
48:03and what their motivation was.
48:06But they still don't know how they died.
48:10There is evidence of having fracture occur to bone,
48:15but it's very well healed.
48:17There's an evidence of infection to bone,
48:20but again, it's very well healed.
48:23All of this is consistent with them being a fighting force,
48:27but it's not consistent with what caused their death.
48:30And if you can rule out the infection side and the trauma side,
48:35the only thing that's really left as a feasible cause of death
48:39is going to be disease.
48:41It has to be disease as the most likely cause of death for so many individuals.
48:51How would doctors have dealt with disease back in the 17th century?
48:57Xanthi goes to the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford
49:01to meet medical historian Dr Erica Charters.
49:06Intriguing little box.
49:08Do we need the gloves?
49:09So we need the gloves on to touch some of this.
49:12Erica has a remarkable device
49:14used to treat disease and fever until the late 19th century,
49:18and similar to those doctors would have used during the English Civil War.
49:23This is actually to let blood.
49:26Right.
49:27Now, this is where the exciting bit happens.
49:31This would go right up against your skin.
49:33Yeah.
49:34Before you know it, it would cut into your skin.
49:36It would make very small incisions,
49:38and this would allow you to let some blood out.
49:41And, of course, bloodletting was...
49:43Well, it's been very popular for a long time,
49:45so definitely in the 17th century they would have been doing this.
49:48So you just press the button there.
49:50Hold it.
49:51Oh.
49:52It's quite powerful, isn't it?
49:54It is quite powerful.
49:55And you can see...
49:56Oh, yeah.
49:57...where it's cut into the paper.
49:58Yeah.
49:59So was there an idea that there were poisons in the blood
50:01that you actually wanted to release by bloodletting?
50:03Very much so.
50:04And what we do see, especially for fevers,
50:06remembering if you think of how someone looks who has a fever,
50:10they're flushed, they're very warm,
50:12their pulse is beating very quickly,
50:14so it almost looks like they have an excess of blood.
50:16So it's not surprising that some people felt that
50:19letting out some of that excess of blood would return you to health.
50:23Does it actually have any benefits?
50:27Not that we know of, no.
50:30With little more than bloodletting as a treatment,
50:33and with thousands of men camped closely together during the siege,
50:37Erica believes she knows what could have killed the 113 men.
50:42Something like typhus fever,
50:44the incubation is probably around three weeks,
50:46and very commonly what we see in diaries of sieges
50:50is that after about three weeks during a siege,
50:52we see outbreaks of disease.
50:54How does it spread?
50:55Well, it's very contagious.
50:57It's interesting because it's spread through body lice,
51:00and they actually live in the seams of your clothing.
51:03So it's a particular kind of insect which is a vector for the pathogen.
51:07And what's interesting about it is
51:09the lice only like living at the temperature of your body,
51:12so they will only stay in your clothes when you're wearing your clothes,
51:15which is why we often see it in sieges.
51:17It's very common in wintertime when people keep their clothes on.
51:20So it could possibly have been there even during the summer in York.
51:24What are the symptoms?
51:26It's a general fever, a kind of weakening,
51:29very often a very intense headache.
51:31Sometimes you see a rash.
51:32How many people died of typhus?
51:34Well, it depends.
51:36We know that when we look at case fatality rates,
51:38so if you catch it, what the chances are that you will die.
51:41We've seen during the First World War it reached rates such as 70%.
51:45And because it's so contagious, if you're in a small area together,
51:48there's a good chance that almost everyone will catch it.
51:50Because it was so contagious, did they die from this more so than from fighting?
51:54It would be much more likely that you might die of disease.
51:56And, of course, it's not a very glorious death.
51:58It's one thing to die on the battlefield.
52:00It's another thing to die of something like diarrhoea or a fever.
52:04It's not exactly the way that you want to go.
52:08The team finally has a plausible, if tragic, explanation
52:12for how the men in the mass graves died.
52:16A virulent outbreak of typhus fever,
52:19a disease that has afflicted besieging armies from ancient times
52:23right up to Stalingrad in the Second World War.
52:40With the final part of the puzzle in place,
52:43it's time for the story the Bones have told
52:46to be relayed back to the local community.
52:54The cold case team has returned to York.
53:00There, to hear their findings,
53:02are those who originally excavated the site
53:05and experts who have assisted the team.
53:09I'm hoping to find out more of why they died,
53:11more about why they were buried in that particular spot,
53:14and who buried them and at what period of the civil wars they were buried in.
53:18All those questions that purely the historical evidence isn't able to answer.
53:22The facial reconstructions are something I haven't been involved with before,
53:26and hopefully that will give us an insight,
53:29a closer insight into the people who we're dealing with.
53:33Ghoulishly exciting.
53:36Sue reveals the bigger story of the civil war.
53:40It's reasonable to suspect that they're going to be fighting men.
53:44She unpacks how the men would have died.
53:47What do we find in terms of a cause of death?
53:50Well, we don't find trauma.
53:52What we've been told is that, in fact, more people died as a result of disease.
53:57The more intimate story of disability.
54:00His right leg would have been fixed that way.
54:04A condition that is so rare, we don't have an incidence for the rarity of it.
54:11And how the science tied two remarkable men's lives together in death.
54:17So now what we've got are two individuals, buried in the same location,
54:22with the rarest of genetic conditions, not with the same mother,
54:27hopefully their father had a bike, but not with the same mother,
54:30with exactly the same stable isotopes in terms of where they've come from,
54:35and with exactly the same unusual marine-based diet of a very high proportion.
54:41They have got to go together.
54:46The final part of the investigation is to bring these two soldiers back to life,
54:51beginning with the man with just a fused hand.
54:59It's a strong face, it's a very strong face.
55:02It's actually quite a pleasant face.
55:05He would fit in amongst us, wouldn't he?
55:11Then there is the more severely affected man.
55:17Now I don't know whether his squint eye was inward-pointing or outward-pointing,
55:29and when we looked at the literature, inward-pointing seemed to be more common.
55:35These guys would have been used to seeing people who'd had much more major battlefield wounds,
55:40like your face cut in half by a cavalry sabre, you're losing an eye to a pike.
55:47That asymmetry is relatively slight in comparison with what they would have seen.
55:52And for Sue, it's this man's story that has been the greatest revelation.
55:58He was active, so he's not a passive person.
56:02He's been with the rest of them, treated the same way as the rest of them.
56:06Whether we now might think of him differently in terms of a disability,
56:10that disability wasn't being recognised as him being an outcast.
56:14He was treated very, very much like the others.
56:17It is an absolutely unique set of remains.
56:21It is fascinating.
56:31They give us that opportunity to bring the science in,
56:35use the historical background, and it really fleshes out those people
56:40that we're dealing with during that quite tumultuous period of English history.
56:44The science gave me everything I was hoping for.
56:46It gave you that element that the historical document can't deal with.
56:50It gave us something beyond the paper, beyond the page and beyond the text.
56:54The guy with the disabilities, I was just fascinated that such a guy could find a place in Fairfax's army.
57:01I think that tells us something so important about the way this war was developing and the way people were thinking.
57:07Because, plainly, we've got an evolving meritocracy here.
57:11Every man was supposed to be good for their job, and if they were good for their job, that was good enough.
57:16And that was what led, really, to the modern parliamentary democracy that we all enjoy.
57:23The Cold Case team has uncovered two remarkable tales.
57:26The larger story of the 113.
57:30Strong, committed men fighting for a cause,
57:34tragically cut down by disease before their victory was assured.
57:40But also the personal story of two men, likely closely related,
57:45who, despite huge disadvantages, stayed together in life and death,
57:50forever brothers in arms.
57:55The story complete, their remarkable bones are now handed back to the community.
58:00This has been such an amazing story because it brings so many different elements together.
58:05It is a huge historical story, but it's also an incredibly important story.
58:10I'm not aware in the literature of anywhere of this type of remains ever having been recorded before.
58:17I think this is a first. I may be wrong, but I think it is a first.
58:30The Cold Case
58:35The Cold Case
58:40The Cold Case