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The Leper Hospital,
Winchester
25 March 2001
About a mile outside Winchester, just outside the city boundaries, is a field which, 900 years ago, was home to the city's outcasts. The people who lived there were united by a terrible bond – a disease that disfigured their bodies and condemned them to a life of exile. The disease was leprosy and their home was the St Mary Magdalene leper hospital. Time Team set out to discover what was left of it under the grass in what the locals still know as Hospital Field.
Read about it
Leprosy in Britain
A history of leprosy in Britain; its arrival and extent; Church and public attitudes; the rise of the 'leper houses'; entry conditions and rules; and the eventual decline of the disease.
Find out more
Quiz
How much do you know about the history of leprosy?
Victor's head
Take a virtual trip around Victor Ambrus's clay reconstruction of the head of a leprosy sufferer, excavated at another leper hospital. Zoom in or out and examine his sculpture from all sides and angles.
VR gallery
Take a virtual trip around the excavation with our 360-degree panoramic VR clips.
Photo gallery
Photos from the dig.
Ticket to heaven
In the 12th century, when the St Mary Magdalene leper hospital was built, Winchester was one of the most important cities in Norman England. The hospital itself had living quarters, a master's house, a large cemetery and a beautiful vaulted chapel. All were provided and sustained by rich patrons, who saw their support of the hospital – and construction of the chapel – as their ticket to heaven through good works.
Time Team started its investigations with a geophysics survey of a long strip cutting across the site, and with a field-walking survey that revealed huge quantities of building material lying on the surface. Bernard Thomason and Chris Gaffney, meanwhile, were trying to find the exact locations of some test pits that were dug a few years ago, which uncovered evidence of buildings on the site.
Robin Bush's research found references to the hospital from 1148 onwards; he reckoned it was most likely to have been built in the 1130s. He also produced illustrations of the hospital chapel made in 1788, just before it was demolished. Together with Stewart Ainsworth's map research, which showed the hospital within a five-sided boundary wall that shows up as crop marks in aerial photographs, this helped to determine what the Team was looking for and where to put the trenches.
The almshouses
Trench 1 was positioned where the 'geofizz' revealed indications of a building and where Bernard Thomason and Chris Gaffney located the position of one of the test pits from the earlier excavation. This also tied in with Stewart's assessment of where the buildings were most likely to have been and the large amount of building materials found by the field walkers.
Sure enough, given such unanimity about exactly where to start digging (almost unheard of on Time Team!), the trench almost immediately revealed traces of a wall. Trench 2 was then opened nearby to try to pick up the other end of the building. As the excavation progressed, it became apparent that the two trenches were uncovering the remains of the almshouses where the lepers lived.
The well
Trench 3 was opened in an area adjacent to Trenches 1 and 2. An army camp had been built on land next to the old leper hospital site during the First World War, and had made use of the hospital's well, which stood alongside the almshouses. The well was necessary because lepers were forbidden to use public water supplies. The army put a metal wind pump on top, the foundations for which geofizz was able to locate.
It turned out to be more difficult to gauge the depth of the well. First, Katie Hirst and Tony Robinson estimated it at about 100 metres by dropping an object into it and timing how long it took to reach the bottom. This seemed far too deep, so Mick 'the Dig' Worthington and Katie set about measuring it more accurately by dropping a tape measure into the void. The first wasn't long enough; nor were the second or the third. In fact, even after tying every measure on the site together, they still didn't reach the bottom. The leper hospital well must have been more than 180 metres deep.
The chapel
More unanimity among the surveyors saw Stewart and the geofizz team agreeing that Trench 4 should be opened on a line that they both felt should uncover the north wall of the chapel. Trench 5 was located along the line of the east wall and soon provided confirmation that they were correct, when it produced the first piece of carved stone. Over the next days, many more pieces of moulded stone were excavated here, which architectural historian John Crook was able to match up with features shown in the 1788 illustrations.
Father and daughter?
John Crook was also able to provide a tentative identification of a burial inside the chapel, which was excavated by Phil Harding. The grave contained a puzzling jumble of bones, some still articulated (connected to each other via joints) and some scattered apparently randomly. Time Team's regular bones expert, osteoarchaeologist Margaret Cox, identified them as belonging to one female and probably one male.
Both would have been quite old when they died. As well as being able to judge this from the overall condition of the bones, Margaret Cox also identified one of the finds as an ossified cartilage. The cartilage in question protects the larynx and effectively turns to bone as its owner grows older. Margaret also pointed out the striking similarity between the two skulls found here – so similar that some sort of genetic relationship between the two seems highly probable.
This fitted with John Crook's tentative identification of who the bones might have belonged to. Records show that a Mrs Elizabeth Symonds, who died on 12 September 1695, was buried here, as was her father, John Ebdon, the one-time canon of Winchester and master of the leper hospital. According to the records, Ebdon died in 1614, aged 98 – making him 90 when his daughter was born!
The cemetery trench
While Elizabeth Symonds and her father were enjoying the fruits of long – and in Ebdon's case, at least, clearly active – lives, the residents of the hospital would have had very different tales to tell. Trench 6, positioned in the leper cemetery to the south of the chapel, uncovered a male in the early stages of leprosy. Had he lived longer, he would have been subject to same sort of disfigurement as the man whose skull was used as the basis for Victor Ambrus's clay sculpture of a leper's head.
Trench 7, meanwhile, which was looking for the master's house, found its back wall with an alleyway going between the house and the almshouses to the chapel. Trench 8 sought out the hospital boundary wall and gatehouse, which turned out to have been almost entirely robbed out.
A wretched continuity
By mid-afternoon on the third day, heavy rain forced the abandonment of any further digging. But Stewart's map research had added a final touch to our knowledge of the site. Long after the leper hospital had gone, in 1887, Winchester Council used an adjacent piece of land to build the Royal Victoria Isolation Hospital for Infectious Diseases. And the First World War army camp also built disinfection houses on the site. It's a continuity going back almost 900 years to the wretched outcasts who were first housed here so long ago.
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