The skeletons were found in two separate mass graves next to the Dunham Cathedral in 2013 when construction began on a new café for the University’s Palace Green Library, on the City’s UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Archaeologists were present at the site all through the excavations. Senior archaeologist Richard Annis told the BBC that following the removal of the skeletons, the researchers dated them to 1650 and believe them to be the remains of Scottish soldiers captured during the Battle of Dunbar.
The Battle of Dunbar
The Battle of Dunbar was quite possibly the shortest, and bloodiest battle of the 17th-century Third English Civil War. The brutal battle lasted less than an hour, with the English Parliamentary Army, under the command of Oliver Cromwell defeating the Scottish Covenanting army, under the command of David Leslie, who supported the claims of Charles II to the Scottish throne.
Leslie’s army was ill-prepared for another battle, having fared badly after the 1648 invasion of England. But Leslie was able to engage an army of 12,000 men and boys, mostly untrained, to go up against Cromwell’s well-trained and battle-hardened force of 11,000 soldiers.
In the early dawn of September 3, 1650, Cromwell deployed a large number of his troops to a position on the Scottish army’s right flank and shouting “The Lord of Hosts,” the English launched a surprise attack. It didn’t last very long, especially with Cromwell’s horsemen scattering the Scottish cavalry.
Cromwell estimated that 3,000 enemy soldiers were killed, while Sir James Balfour, a senior officer with the Scottish army, noted in his journal that there were “8 or 900 killed.”
Almost immediately after the battle, Cromwell’s forces rounded up about 5,000 prisoners of war, and thus started the “march of shame.” The Scottish prisoners were forced on an eight-day, 118-mile march from the South East of Scotland to the English cathedral city of Durham, in North East England, with no food or water, other than what could be scavenged along the side of the road.
Roots and raw cabbages were pulled from the sides of the road, just to give sustenance, but this only succeeded in giving the men dysentery. By the end of the march, only three thousand prisoners were left, and they were in very poor health. Those who had managed to make it were imprisoned in the then unused Durham cathedral and castle.
It is estimated that over 1,700 prisoners died during the winter of 1650-1651 due to malnutrition, illness and the cold, and were buried at Durham. Annis says, “This is an extremely significant find, particularly because it sheds new light on a 365-year old mystery of what happened to the bodies of the soldiers who died.”
Annis also points out the burial of the dead was a military operation: “the dead bodies were tipped into two pits, possibly over a period of days. They were at the far end of what would have been the Durham Castle grounds, as far as possible from the castle itself – they were out of sight, out of mind.”
What became of the survivors?
Possibly the most fascinating part of this story is what happened to the prisoners who managed to survive the horrible imprisonment. It is believed that about 1,400 men who endured the march of shame were still alive at the end of the year. Of that number, 900 were sold in the New World, mainly in Virginia, Massachusetts and the Barbados colony in the Caribbean.
The rest, about 500 by the spring of 1651, were shipped off to France to serve in the French army. In a strange footnote to history, the Scottish soldiers forced into the French army fought alongside Cromwell’s troops against the Spanish in 1659. Seeing as England didn’t abolish the slave trade until 1807, someone made a fortune selling off all those prisoners.
It is also good to know that the remains of those Scottish soldiers will be re-interred in a proper burial ground, and It is hoped by many that an appropriate and inscribed memorial be erected at the Durham Cathedral commemorating the Scots who perished there.