NHER 65490 (Monument record) - Post-Roman burials, probably within churchyard of St Mary’s Church

June 2012. Watching Brief.
Monitoring of groundworks associated with installation of replacement fire hydrant.
The small trench excavated exposed the lower portion of an east-to-west aligned human burial, which had been severely truncated by the installation of the original fire hydrant. The backfill of these earlier excavations and the fills of several service trenches produced a number of disarticulated human bones likely to represent the remains of at least two additional individuals. These burials were presumably Christian and lay relatively close to where additional in situ burials had been disturbed in 1955 (NHER 1869). It is likely that these were associated with the now demolished church of St Mary (NHER 1887), suggesting that its churchyard was much larger than that now associated with St John the Baptist’s Church (NHER 65491).
See report (S1) for further details.
The archive associated with this work has been deposited with Norwich Castle Museum (NWHCM : 2017.155). The human remains were collected for reburial within the churchyard of St John the Baptist’s Church.
P. Watkins (HES), 21 March 2022.