St Leonards Church
House of Bones, but nobody is quite sure who they belong to.
Category Ossuaries
Church basements are usually pretty benign places containing casseroles, bake sales, and perhaps a few extra hymnal books. Not so in the basement of St. Leonards church in Hythe which has in place of casseroles, thousands and thousands of human bones.
The bonehouse of St. Leonards church contains around 2000 skulls -- some showing interesting dental and medical conditions as well as evidence of trepanning. Altogether it contains the remains of around 4000 men, women and children.
The bones have been bringing people, and money as the church as visitors pay a small fee, into the church since medieval times. The start of the story begins in an equally macabre manner.
Around 1200, the Archbishop Becket was murdered, and pilgrims began visiting his shrine. The church capitalized on the visitors, asking them to donate in exchange for seeing the shrine. This caused jealousy from other local churches as St Leonards became rich.
So where then did the the other 3,999 skeletons come from? No knows for sure. Some believe they are the bones of soldiers killed in battle, some that they were victims in the black death. The likely explanation is that they were simply the result of a church expansion into a burial site and so were, for lack of a better solution, dug up and kept in the church. Recent studies have also indicated that they were of probably mostly Roman decent and came to Hythe during the Roman occupation, settling, and eventually being buried in the area.
Currently the bones are being studied by a Bournemouth University graduate to determine a disease which so far has been evident on at least 40% of the 250 skulls studied.
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- Website http://www.stleonardschurchhythekent.org/History/HouseofBones.html
- Address Oak Walk, Hythe, CT21 5DN
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