Volunteers Are Helping Unearth One of England's Oldest Leprosy Hospitals, Giving a Glimpse Into How Victims of the Disease Were Treated in Medieval Times

Researchers are digging up the remnants of one of England’s largest and oldest leprosariums, a bygone quarantine zone for people infected with leprosy. Located in what is now a grassy park in the city of Lincoln, the medieval-era Hospital of the Holy Innocents was likely founded during the reign of Henry I and stayed active for around five centuries, according to a statement from Lincoln’s city council. Last year, more than 100 volunteers participated in a pilot excavation of the site.

Led by Samantha Tipper, an archaeologist at Anglia Ruskin University, they unearthed evidence of the hospital’s boundary walls and building surfaces, as well as medieval artifacts. Last weekend, a visit from the British archaeology television series “Time Team” kicked off a years-long extension of the dig. Beginning in the late 11th or early 12th century, up to 20 people at a time checked themselves into the Hospital of the Holy Innocents when they contracted leprosy, an infection of the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae.

Also known as Hansen’s disease, it attacks the skin, eyes and nerves, manifesting externally in sores and lesions. Leprosy emerged in England in the fifth century, possibly imported from Scandinavia, and became endemic about six centuries later. Modern experts know leprosy isn’t actually very contagious, but a thousand years ago in England, its sufferers were quarantined for life and “declared legally dead.” Societies around the world exiled lepers to island colonies.

Many English people considered the disease a punishment for sins. As Tipper told the BBC’s Sarah-May Buccieri and Scott Dalton in April, lepers were believed to be living “their own purgatory on earth.” Scientists discovered that red squirrels in medieval England had leprosy, making them the earliest known animal hosts of the disease. Last weekend, researchers from “Time Team” performed a geophysical survey of the Lincoln site, including X-ray scans of the ground and several test pits, per the BBC’s Emma Petrie and Jake Zuckerman.

Volunteers also helped dig a nearly 100-foot-long trench connecting previously dug pits. The trench contains the remnants of one long wall. She says they’re likely remains of lodgings for people with leprosy.

The organization of the ruins so far “implies they’re separate little buildings—little houses with a little yard, perhaps.” The Hospital of the Holy Innocents was among the earliest institutions of its kind in England. It likely contained a church, as well as spacious lodgings for the sick, and it was probably run by chaplains and a warden. Such privilege was not afforded to all sufferers of leprosy, though.