What became of Thomas Becket’s bones?

The St Brice’s Day Massacre? I must admit I hadn’t heard of this ‘most just extermination’ of Danes in Oxford at the instigation of King Aethelred the Unready in 1002, perhaps because the teaching of history in this country tends to kick off in 1066. You certainly don’t think of Oxford as a place that pioneered techniques of ethnic cleansing.

Crypt is a collection of seven essays that unearth details about how certain people lived and died in the past. If you didn’t already know Alice Roberts’s background as an anatomist and biological anthropologist, you’d have a good chance of deducing it from this book. The old jibe that archaeology is about ‘stones and bones’ holds true; but bones have pulled ahead in recent decades, as new scientific techniques can now extract a wealth of information from previously uncooperative skeletons.

Roberts focuses on the discovery in 2008 of at least 35 skeletons ‘slung into a mass grave’ beneath St John’s College, Oxford.