Selected projects
4.19.27 St Mary Magdalen's Hospital, Colchester
By comparison with other types of religious institution, the medieval hospital has received surprisingly little attention from historians and archaeologists. Over 800 hospitals are believed to have been established in England at various times between 1080 and 1530, yet relatively few standing remains now survive and the corpus of archaeological research material on hospitals is small. An opportunity to examine a small urban hospital arose when the site of Colchester's St Mary Magdalen's Hospital came under threat from a scheme for new housing to be built over a redundant churchyard and adjoining former almshouse grounds. Founded as a refuge for lepers in the early twelfth century, then later accommodating the poor and infirm, St Mary Magdalen's stood a half mile beyond the walled town and was the earliest and longest-established of Colchester's four medieval hospitals. By the mid thirteenth century the hospital's master also acted as rector of St Mary Magdalen's church, from where he conducted services for the local community. Both the medieval church and the last of the hospital buildings were demolished without record in the nineteenth century.
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The land was excavated in two stages. The first took place in 1989 in the churchyard and was funded by the Diocese of Chelmsford. This revealed a twelfth-century building at the core of the much altered parish church, but also posed questions about the purpose of the earliest remains and the developing relationship as a place of worship for hospital inmates and parishioners. The rest of the site lay to the north of the churchyard in grounds belonging to a dormant almshouse charity, which was not in a position to fund any extension of the investigation onto its land. By 1994, plans for a community housing association development covering both the churchyard and almshouse land were well advanced, but still there was no prospect of obtaining conventional developer funding to examine the almshouse grounds where most of the hospital buildings were believed to lie. English Heritage became involved at that point, commissioning the Colchester Archaeological Trust to carry out excavations in the remainder of the threatened area, together with the subsequent analysis of the structural record and finds.
The second stage of excavation revealed a group of buildings spanning the medieval and post-medieval phases of the hospital's history. From the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries the hospital's main quarters for inmates were centred in a substantial stone building, later joined by a block to the east, which was put to variety of uses, including workshop activity. From the seventeenth century the eastern block was maintained as 'almspeoples' housing until its demolition in 1834. Prior to the thirteenth century, the hospital's principal building stood to the south, on the site where the parish church was later to be established. Here, a complex group of early foundations appear to represent an infirmary hall incorporating a chapel. Aspects of this building's subsequent conversion from hospital to parish use remain obscure owing to the badly damaged state of the early foundations. By the late thirteenth century, however, the church had been established as a result of major structural alterations to the earlier building, which included a western extension to form a nave, and possibly the addition of a side chapel for the use of hospital inmates.
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Even from its beginnings the hospital was not occupied exclusively by lepers. As well as possible instances of leprosy, the pathological conditions noted among the individual human remains from graves associated with the earliest phase of the hospital included a rare archaeological example of a hydatid cyst, a serious condition resulting from the ingestion of tapeworm eggs. Preserved in the abdominal area in the form of a thin calcified shell measuring 60mm by 30mm, the slow-growing cyst might have been the cause of death, although this cannot be determined with certainty. No medically associated artefacts were found in the medieval phases of the hospital. While this might simply be fortuitous, it is at least consistent with a current view that the majority of hospitals made little or no attempt to administer physical cures to their inmates.