The Girl in the Grave

My adult life has been wrapped up with reading, writing or speaking about women in medieval Ireland. I explain (across various media) of how difficult life could be for them, of the often war-torn and unsettled conditions of life for both them and their children. I have cited massacres of them and been appalled sometimes by what they lived through.

My concern though has been academic because, after all, how could I really relate? I know VAWG has been perpetrated since time began and sometimes what I have read has hit hard and stopped me in my tracks for a while but, gradually, while the empathy lingers the sharp feeling which engendered it slowly disappears. I push the sadness to one side. I get on, with being a mum and a wife and everything else. I keep busy, the mind moves on to new shores. But I recently read about a young woman in late medieval/early modern Ireland and both she and the story of her death has stuck with me since.

Why her? Hard to tell. Perhaps it is because she was a young woman and I, a mother of a teenage daughter, have been struck recently by the sheer, bubbling, joyous vitality of my daughter. The way she chats and laughs and lights up a room. I look at my daughter and while I rejoice in her I also feel (as all women do) that endless, creeping fear – of someone who can and will choose to hurt her.

We try to manage the dread as best we can. ‘Text me when you get there’ I say. ‘Where are you going?’ I ask as she throws casual answers back at me. We try not to frightem them too much about the world they are launching themsleves into. In 2022 we can ring our children, text them, even track them but all young women are, as they ever have been, at risk of having those beautiful lights they carry inside them snuffed out at will. When I look into my child’s face as she grows into young womanhood I fear what all women do. That this joy, this life will be broken, ended and they themselves be discarded and forgotten just as the young woman that I can’t stop thinking about was.  

She is eternally a 'young woman' because she is anonymous, our girl in the grave, we will never know her name. We have an idea of how old she was though, she died between the ages of 18-25. Her body was uncovered during an archaeological dig in 2012 in county Kildare, Ireland. She had died sometime in the later medieval/early modern period (during the timespan 1459-1637) which is the era I specialise in so that immediately caught my eye.  It is a period in Irish history that is extraordinarily violent. It includes the viciousness of the Tudor reconquest and the many, many battles, genocides, ongoing and incessant violence of (at least part of) the seventeenth century too. Life was cheap then and, as ever it seems, the life of a young woman was worth less than most.

Her grave was isolated (i.e. not in a burial ground), shallow, undersized and she was not buried in a way that indicated any care had been taken. She was not carefully wrapped in any sort of shroud, for example, and her grave orientation was south-north when the body should be oriented west to east. A change in orientation like this indicates that the person buried this way will stay trapped in the ground, unable to rise on Judgement Day. It would have been a terrifying thought for people then– to be condemned forever to moulder in the grave when everyone else resurrected. It is a form of eternal punishment.

Her burial is therefore, what archaeologists and historians would term ‘deviant’. That is, it does not conform to the usual standards of burials at that time. It is theorised that by burying individuals in such a manner that deviates from the standard burial, the community is solidifying a similar type of deviance that occurred in the person’s life or death. So, behaviour that acts against common social values is punished in death by setting the individual apart. Deviant individuals can include witches, criminals, suicides, disabled individuals, diseased individuals, or someone who suffered an unusual or violent death. Isolated burials (like our girl’s one) are signs of deviance due to their placement outside of sacred burial grounds. They may have been specifically isolated or buried in a hurry in a convenient area such as a ditch. 

Did she suffer a violent death? That is unknown but she does appear to have suffered some soft-tissue trauma before burial. She would also seem to have been buried in a hurry which doesn’t bode well. Whoever buried her didn’t spend too long digging and wasn’t bothered about making sure her face was turned towards the sun and resurrection. Perhaps she was the victim of a crime and hurriedly buried to cover it up? Maybe no-one cared that she had died because she was an outsider? Or perhaps she wasn’t killed but died in such another way that her body had to be disposed of outside of accepted norms.

 However, her life ended, whatever happened to her we do know that in death she was ostracised. Her damaged body was thrown into an unsuitable grave. Condemned not only to be an outcast in life but also one for eternity. Buried like this she had no chance of God’s grace and seemed destined to lie in the damp earth for all time. There is a carelessness to her treatment, a distinct lack of tenderness which reaches down through the centuries and catches me as I rejoice in my own girl, growing up as protected as much as we her parents are able.
 

So many women through history have been forgotten. Their sad stories hidden in shallow graves which when they are uncovered only tell partial stories of a life. A life once filled with so much potential and the unlimited capacity for joy I see in my girl but which, for our girl in the grave, ended with darkness and the hope that she would be forgotten forever.

The time though, she won’t be.

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A short report on the grave is here - https://www.iac.ie/a-deviant-burial-at-shanraheen-co-kildare/

Great article on deviant burials in Ireland here https://trowelucd.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/trowel_xiii_combined.pdf

 Great short blogpost on them here too https://bonesdontlie.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/deviant-burials-in-early-medieval-ireland/