The bodies of more than 250 were found in a mass grave beside St. Wystan’s church in Repton, England – at the time of the burial a major royal and religious center of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. The adults and children found there were first believed to be Vikings when the mass grave was found decades ago. But the carbon dating did not make sense, putting some of the burials at 600 CE, much too early to be Vikings. And there were a lot of women. Nearly one in five adults were women, which did not match image of hulking, male berserkers. So it was thought that the mass grave was more like a very tightly packed cemetery, with people being interred there over multiple centuries.
But modern re-analyses suggest that the bodies were, in fact, all buried at one time. In the winter of 874 CE to be precise. And the women? Well, modern understandings of Viking culture and gender roles has shifted. It is now widely accepted that Viking women fought and died in foreign lands, alongside Viking men. The modern analyses suggest the Repton mass burial contains the remains of members of the Viking Great Army, and moreover, confirms the written chronology of the Viking use of St. Wystan’s church and its surroundings for burial.
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