Face Mutilation of Young Women in the Early Middle Ages

If you can read this, you are not having a day as bad as the person here had, about 1,173 years ago, in the south of England. And we know this because of the multi-disciplinary approach to studying the Early Middle Ages. Scientists, archaeologists, and historians working together can tease out the stories of the dead like never before. And what we know is that the young woman featured here died with gruesome and deliberate facial mutilation — and after, she was deliberately buried all alone, on a boundary space that marked her exclusion from nearby communities.

Running through the evidence that produced the recent paper on this subject reveals how much expertise this person’s story required to uncover: radiocarbon dating showed that the skull was from around the ninth century; osteological analysis demonstrates her age, since portions of the skull had not yet quite fused. This sort of bone study also determined that this young person’s face had been cut — knife marks show that the nose was sliced away both from her lips above and from the left side — the wounds were deep enough that she would have died from them, perhaps by choking on her own blood, unless she had mercifully passed away shortly before. The cuts had not healed over at all, so if she had been killed before the facial mutilation, it was only just before.

And there’s more – the woman’s DNA was recovered and thus her gender determined. Additionally, analysis of the elements strontium and oxygen in her teeth showed that she was not a local of the area. Archaeological studies of the settlement area reveal that the skull (found without the body) was buried on a boundary, away from the Christian cemeteries that were for community members.

And, last but not least, historical study of things like law codes and other written texts gives more context to this picture — isolated burials were typical for outcasts, and mutilation as legal punishment was attested, although this burial is about a century before written sources document. Thievery was punished this way, but so too was adultery for women. Perhaps this was the crime which led to the mutilation shown here.

The 10th/11th century writer Lantfred recorded a law punishing a thief: he should be “tortured at length by having his eyes out out, his hands cut off, his ears torn off, his nostrils carved open and his feet removed; and finally, with the skin and hair of his head shaved off, he would be abandoned in the open fields.”