An cemetery of Saxon burials lies hidden beneath a Dorset village – and it is revealing stories reaching back more than 1,200 years
It’s not often that a modern housing development opens a window into the seventh century – but that is exactly what’s happened in Iwerne Minster, where archaeologists local company Context One Heritage and Archaeology, working ahead of a small housing project, have uncovered one of Dorset’s most significant Anglo-Saxon Christian burial grounds.
‘We expected perhaps 20 graves,’ says lead archaeologist Richard McConnell. ‘We’re now over 60 – and we’re still counting.’
The site, tucked behind the village church, was once the cemetery of a Saxon minster. The original minster church is long gone, but its memory remains written in the land – in hundreds of burials spread far beyond the current parish church.
A sacred centre
The cemetery was probably started in the late seventh century, during a time of re-Christianisation across Wessex. While the current stone church dates from the 12th century, its Saxon predecessors may have stood just metres away – probably wooden at first, then formalised in stone.
For three to four centuries, this site served not only Iwerne Minster (a Saxon charter dated 871 refers to it as Ywen, and the village’s name indicates an early church or minster), but five nearby dependent settlements whose dead were also brought here to be laid to rest. ‘Not only did they bury the dead from the village itself, but they had five dependent settlements nearby that also had to bring their dead here. So over the 300 or 400 years the minster was active, you can imagine that’s a lot of people. We think probably 6,000 people, all told, and that’s a conservative guess.
‘The Saxon period starts from when the Roman administration broke down, so in the early fifth century, and then goes right up to 1066 and the Norman Conquest. So it’s against this backdrop that the cemetery was in operation – the time of King Alfred and the Vikings and all of that. It’s an exciting period, but this appears to be a fairly sedate, lay cemetery, just for the general population. We have a mix of adults, juveniles and infants – rather too many babies. You can imagine, infant mortality was very high at the time, and we tend to see those being inserted into the foot of adult graves, both male and female.’
Ordinary lives
‘None of the bodies were placed in coffins but were instead wrapped in shrouds, and then probably stitched in or tied with twine or rope – as we’ve found no shroud pins, no fastenings that might have held it together.
‘So over time, of course, the body decomposes, as does the shroud. The limbs will then just find their own natural resting places.’
Though no grave goods have been found – Christian burials of this period typically contain none – the bones themselves offer clues: ‘There is nothing to suggest any trauma, other than perhaps things that have happened to people during their lives – we’ve seen badly-mended broken bones, for example. We’ve seen growths on bones which are a bit odd, and some curvatures of the spine … all the sort of things that we might suffer from even today. But nothing that would suggest a nasty end for any of them.
‘What’s striking is how robust many of them were – especially the adult males. Some were over six feet tall, and clearly well-built. We think of early medieval people as small and undernourished, but that’s obviously not always the case.’
Graves aligned to memory
‘What we have found is that there seem to be two distinct sides to this part of the cemetery: there’s a whole section which is facing a slightly different direction.
‘We’re in the time of a re-emergence of Christianity, so most burials are traditionally laid resting west-east – but we’ve got a whole set, the furthest away from the current church, which are facing south-east. These might be the earliest graves – tthey certainly all respect each other, but they follow a different alignment. ‘It’s possible that they are focused on something else, possibly an earlier church or another structure.
‘Then we have a gap, before a real congestion of burials, all aligned west-east, but all intercutting each other.
It’s very crowded. Over time, once memorials or gravemarkers disappeared, the plots got dug over again and a new burial was added. So we end up with a layering of burials in a very small space – the closer we get to the church, the more congested it is – it was a common desire to be buried as close to the church (and God) as possible.’
’The shallowness of the burials is visually striking as you walk the site, compared with modern graves. ‘They’re not that deep at all,’ says Richard. ‘And you can see that the present ground is probably a good 50 centimetres higher than the Anglo Saxon ground surface, so they were even shallower than they look now. And they get shallower still as we go across towards where all the burials are congested.
‘In fact, there’s one individual who was buried, and they then dug out that grave later on, probably years later – perhaps a family group – and they tried to lay another individual on top. But there wasn’t enough headroom for the soil too. So they actually removed the head of the one underneath in order to get the new one to lay flat on top, and then covered it over!
‘We’ve also got quite a lot of rodent activity on the shallower graves, which would suggest that rats came in shortly after burial and had a nibble away at some of the extremities of the person inside. I know. I know…’
The living above the dead
As the centuries turned, the cemetery fell out of use – likely around the time of the Norman conquest. As neighbouring settlements built their own churches, they no longer needed to bury their dead at Iwerne Minster. The new parish church, built in the early 12th century, had only a small churchyard, and the old Saxon cemetery land became part of the medieval village. ‘We can see the dark lines of soil cutting through some graves – these are the boundaries of medieval burgage plots,’ explains Richard. ‘Small houses would have stood nearby, with long garden strips running through the former cemetery. They were growing vegetables here, unaware they were cutting into ancient burials.’
Pottery found on the site dates from the 10th to 12th centuries, confirming the transition from sacred ground to village plots at the point when the cemetery passed out of memory.
What next?
The dig began in June 2025 and is expected to continue just a few more weeks. Everything is photographed in situ, 3D modelling of each grave is created, and then every individual is carefully lifted by element – left leg, right leg, skull – and boxed for washing and detailed osteological analysis.
Radiocarbon dating will help map the different phases of burials to within around 30 years –especially needed as very few artefacts or pottery have been found to assist dating. ‘It’s the only way to pin down timelines for what we’re seeing here,’ says Richard.
The remains will eventually be reburied. But before then, they will be able to tell us an awful lot about this part of Wessex and the population here … the quiet echo of thousands of lives beneath our feet.
by Courtenay Hitchcock
