Beneath Holy Trinity Church in Rothwell lies one of England's few surviving medieval bone crypts, an ossuary chamber holding a vast stacked mass of disarticulated human remains, now estimated at around 1,500 individuals. Unlike most of the entries in this collection, the crypt itself is not folklore but a genuine, physically surviving structure that can still be visited on organised tours, its contents a matter of documented archaeological record rather than legend.
What folklore does surround the crypt concerns its rediscovery. Local tradition holds that the chamber was found entirely by accident around the year 1700, when a gravedigger cutting a new grave in the churchyard broke through the ground and fell eight to ten feet into the pit below, landing directly on the pile of bones, which is said to have broken his fall and quite possibly saved his life, though the experience reportedly left him scarred for the remainder of his years.
No single explanation for who the bones actually belonged to has ever been settled, and folk tradition has offered several competing theories across the centuries since: that they are the remains of Danes killed by the Saxons in the region's earlier history, that they belong to soldiers from the nearby battlefields of Naseby or Bosworth, or that they are victims of the Great Plague. Modern archaeological opinion favours a considerably less dramatic explanation, that the crypt was simply Rothwell's ordinary medieval charnel house, used in the standard practice of the period to store bones cleared from the churchyard to make room for fresh burials at a busy parish church before the Reformation ended the custom.
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