A syphilitic skeleton in Newbury

By Linda Serck
BBC Berkshire

One of the 59 burials found by accident following road works in Newbury

For the past few centuries Newbury pedestrians have been walking over the graves of syphilitic skeletons.

The bones were discovered in 2004 when West Berkshire council ordered some road enhancement works on the corner of Pound Street and Newtown Road.

Council archaeological officer Duncan Coe says: "When they lifted the existing surface, they realised they were finding human bones."

The archaeological investigation unit found 59 medieval burials in total.

Mr Coe says the unearthing of the skeletons did not come as a big surprise, as the council's archaeological department knew that there was a medieval cemetery in that area.

Duncan Coe gave an archaeological tour of Newbury in August 2009

But amid the bones they made a landmark discovery that disproves a theory about Christopher Columbus, who travelled to the American continents in 1492.

One of the skeletons has traces of syphilis, a disease that was formerly believed to have arrived in Britain after Columbus had arrived in the New World.

"These were burials that have been securely dated to two or three hundred years before Columbus went on his voyage," says Mr Coe.

"So we have clear evidence in Newbury that syphilis was in Europe a long time before the New World was discovered. Unsavoury but true!".

Medieval hospitals 'not particularly pleasant'

St Bartholomew's Hospital stood on the site from at least 1200.

"We have historical records from King John granting an endowment to the hospital and also granting the hospital the right to have a fair once a year as a way of keeping an income coming in," says Mr Coe.

He says that medieval hospitals were very different to the sort of hospitals today.

"They were really places where religious orders would look after people who were either sick, infirm, elderly or just poor"

"You lived by the religious order so you had to get up in the middle of the night to pray, no matter how sick you were.

"You had to get up very early in the morning and help out with duties around the hospitals.

"So they weren't particularly very pleasant places. If you were sick I'd imagine it was the last place you would really want to be."

During Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries between 1536 and 1541 the hospital actually escaped demolition, despite functioning as a religious foundation.

However soon after 1541 the hospital ceased to function and St Bartholomew School was founded on the same site.

Click here to take an archaeological tour of Newbury.