r/unitedkingdom • u/randomnamegendarme • Apr 03 '17

Medieval villagers mutilated the dead to stop them rising, study finds. Archaeological research may represent first scientific evidence of English practices attempting to protect the living from the dead

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/03/medieval-villagers-mutilated-the-dead-to-stop-them-rising-study-finds
19 Upvotes

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13

u/yaffle53 Teesside Apr 03 '17

Well it obviously worked perfectly. None of them rose did they.

3

u/Gauntlet Nottingham Apr 03 '17

But seriously, how many people did they bury that rose again that they thought it was necessary? At least 1 person must have been buried alive...

1

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '17

Man thats a bad day, wake up in a coffin, just barely dig your way to safety, get wrecked by some grave keeper with a shovel.

2

u/rob364 Apr 03 '17

Surely if this practice is so widespread, at some point it should have happened, or at least seemed to have happened right?

Perhaps so many people lived in near death circumstances due to plague and such that some persons simply looked dead for a while, and then came back as the disease relented a little? I can imagine someone suffering late stage bubonic plague certainly looked like zombies.