Execution Cemetery
Item
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Name
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Execution Cemetery
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Location
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Andover
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Type
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Cemetery
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Description
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In 2016, a medieval execution cemetery was discovered on Weyhill Road between Weyhill and Andover.
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The cemetery contained the graves of 124 people, and the remains of 35 others. These people were primarily men aged 18-25, with only three confirmed women found, and zero young children. This is not consistent with a typical cemetery, but rather of an execution gravesite for the bodies of the condemned between the tenth and fourteenth-centuries.
Given the dates of the burials, and the presence of a small Jewish community in Hampshire between these dates, it has been suggested some of these graves may belong to Jews. Hundreds of Jews were executed between 1278-1279 in the ‘coin clipping pogrom’, where many were falsely accused of clipping coins to melt down the silver into new coins or other items.
Historian Dean Irwin explores this question and discusses medieval Jewish executions in a blog post for Canterbury Christ Church University. You can read the article at the link below.
