Trauma in Medieval Ypres: Preliminary Results and Implications

Throughout the high and late medieval periods, Flanders was renowned across Europe for its thriving cloth production industry. In the earlier period, the three major centres of cloth production were Ypres, Bruges, and Ghent. With this prosperity came political strife as specialist workers formed guilds, which in turn came into conflict with each
other and with the ruling elite both of the city and the county. Due to the destruction of city archives during the First World War, little detail is known about medieval Ypres, despite its status in the European cloth market. The Make-Up of the City project studies human skeletal remains excavated from Ypres in order to illuminate the lived experiences of the people who made Ypres an industrial boom-town. In this poster, preliminary results of the incidence of trauma within the sample population are presented. The traumata found are consistent with heavy physical labour and accidental injury and are more suggestive of an active population with an elevated chance of accident rather than a particularly
violent population as the historical sources may imply. As further data is accumulated, interpretations will grow more sound and comparisons will be made with archaeological populations from both urban and rural settings to better situate Ypres in its medieval European context.