Porpoise Burial by Medieval Monks Creates Puzzling Grave Mystery

A porpoise from the medieval period was found buried in what appears to be a formal grave on the island of Chapelle dom Hue in the English Channel.

Folklore holds that the little island of Chapelle Dom Hue, in the English Channel west of Guernsey, was the location of a scenic retreat for medieval monks from the Benedictine priory of Lihou, which is a slightly larger island just to the south. Guernsey archaeologist Philip de Jersey and his colleagues are currently excavating the site to determine, in part, what the monks might have left there.

Recently, de Jersey and his team spotted the outline of a feature in the soil that looked like a grave.

“It certainly resembled medieval graves we have excavated in several sites on the island, and it was only a little way off the east-west orientation, as one would usually expect,” de Jersey told Seeker from the site.

A few days later, he and his team started to excavate the feature and uncovered a skull, which he initially thought was the top of a human skull. While dirt was removed, however, the skull grew ever larger in appearance.

As it turns out, the skull and other remains belonged, not to a human, but to a porpoise. The discovery is the world’s only known porpoise burial from the medieval era or earlier.

The archaeologists were astonished.

“It was entirely consistent with a human burial, which is one of the most puzzling aspects,” de Jersey said. “The grave cut has been dug very carefully, with vertical sides and a flat base cut into the underlying bedrock. This has taken some considerable care and effort.”

The buried porpoise as it was first being uncovered.

Like the beginning of a great murder mystery — the porpoise does appear to have been killed — there is a collection of clues and other information, some of which may have nothing to do with the burial.

So far, de Jersey and his team on the island have uncovered the ruins of a building there erected on an east-west alignment, which supports a religious function, according to the researchers.

“It was quite a substantial structure, small in size, but with thick walls,” de Jersey said.

He added that they have also found a lot of old pottery known as Normandy gritty ware, which was imported to the Channel Islands between the late 10th and early-15th centuries. A priory on Lihou was in use from the mid 12th to the early 14th or early-15th century, but the Chapelle Dom Hue pottery suggests that this smaller island was only occupied by the monks for a relatively short time, probably in the later-14th century.

A photo taken from west of the site, with the medieval building at Chapelle Dom Hue visible in the foreground

Evidence for an even earlier occupation of Chapelle Dom Hue was also found, with flint tools going back to the Neolithic Period (15,200 BC–2,000 BC). The porpoise burial, though, is at the medieval level of the site.

The researchers suspect that the animal was butchered before it was put into the ground.

“The bone preservation, apart from the skull, is very poor in our acidic soul, but it appears as though there are various articulated portions in the grave, not in the association one would expect if it was a complete body,” de Jersey explained.

The monks may therefore have viewed the porpoise more as food than as a revered, sentient being.

“One possibility we have considered is that the ‘grave’ is not a grave at all, but a pit carefully cut in which the butchered porpoise was buried in salt, in order to preserve portions of it,” de Jersey said. “There is contemporary literary evidence of porpoises, or parts of porpoise, being around for longer than it would have been fresh, therefore it must have been preserved somehow, whether through drying or salting.”

Researchers excavating at Chapelle Dom Hue, with Guernsey in the distance

Salting of fish and other edible marine life at the time was normally done in barrels, though. The researchers wonder if the large size of the porpoise might have necessitated a different approach for preparing it.

“If that’s true, then obviously it was never recovered, for some reason — or perhaps it just didn’t work as a technique, so they left it in the ground,” de Jersey said.

Medieval cookbooks do include dishes with porpoise as an ingredient. The late-14th century chef’s tome Forme of Cury, for example, contains such a recipe.

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