Bristol and Lubeck

The people of medieval Bristol were so closely linked to a German port in the Baltic Sea that the two populations shared a unique type of worm living in their guts.

The bizarre discovery has shed a fascinating new light on just which places around Europe Bristol had close ties with in centuries past, and revealed that the city has always been a cosmopolitan and international place since at least the 1300s.

Molecular biologists at Oxford University decided to study medieval Europe not through traditional archaeological routes like dug up bones, jewellery, coins or pottery.

Instead, they dug into medieval latrines, and found preserved eggs of parasitic worms that would have lived in the stomachs of the people going to toilet there back in the 1300s.

They studied the worm eggs found at the sites of medieval latrines all over Europe, and discovered that the genetic type of parasitic worm found in Bristol was only found in one other place in Europe – the Baltic port of Lubeck.

That has raised eyebrows among scholars of medieval history, because until now there had been nothing really to link the most important port in the Hanseatic League and the port of Bristol.

A view of Finzels Reach (Image: High Level Photography Ltd)

The Hanseatic League was a medieval association of city states and kingdoms that stretched along the coast of northern Europe from Belgium to Poland – a sort of Middle Ages version of the European Union.

But trade between England and the Hanseatic League was thought to have been done through ports on the eastern side of England, mainly London, or King’s Lynn or Boston, with negligible records of ships going from Lubeck to Bristol or vice versa.

In the 1300s, Bristol was booming on trade with the Atlantic Fringe of Europe – with Ireland, Spain, France and Portugal,
But no, Patrick Flammer, a molecular biologist who led the study, said it was unexpected but unmistakable – Bristol and Lubeck were the only places found to share a distinct genetic variety of the human whipworm between the 12th and 14th centuries.

The latrines studied in Bristol were discovered in what is now the Finzel’s Reach area of the city. Then it would have been just across the river Avon from the city itself, and would soon have been enclosed with the city walls.

Medieval maps of Bristol – John Speed’s map in 1611 (Image: Bristol Live)

Back then in the 1300s, it was an area that had been drained by the Knights Templar, who built homes and churches there – hence the area known now as Temple Meads.

Archaeologists in 2017 discovered all the usual stuff you’d find from medieval Bristol – but because it’s pretty marshy ground there, the wood-lined latrines were well-preserved, and with it, the genetic type of whipworm already and only found in Lubeck.
“You could think it’s not surprising — they are both important ports in the Middle Ages,” he told The Times.

“But when you look at the history of the Hanseatic League in Lübeck they trade mostly with the east coast in London, King’s Lynn [in Norfolk] and Boston [in Lincolnshire]. There are no real records of them going to Bristol.

“We now know people must have moved from Lübeck to Bristol, because people didn’t trade in human waste.

“Bristol was probably more important for the trade to the east and Baltic than we have ever thought,” he added.

Mineralised poo from the medieval period (Image: Publicity Picture)

Another interesting aspect is that the site where the worm eggs were found in Lubeck was in a posh bit of the medieval city, while the latrines at Finzel’s Reach were where the artisans and sailors would have done their business.
Whether it was just a fluke and the result of one German sailor having a particularly bad case of whipworm evacuation when he sampled Bristol’s medieval cider for the first time, or whether there was a sustained link, we’ll never know.
Because whipworms and their eggs can survive in medieval latrines to be studied by 21st century archaeologists, and because people with whipworms didn’t let it stop their travels around the world, they’ve long been seen as a good way of following the movements of people around the medieval world.

The dig in Bristol was managed by Ben Ford, from Oxford Archaeology. “The interesting thing is what are the sailors doing who have come from Lübeck?” he said.

“It could be a merchant doing deals in Lübeck or a jobbing sailor coming to London from Lübeck and changing crews and jumping on a ship to Bristol.

“It’s very interesting and it opens up this little detail that we would never normally see in the archaeological record,” he added.