When Florence Hurley opened twelve trenches along the line of the planned Northern Relief Road on St. Francis Street in 1996, she found 465 articulated human burials packed into the footprint of a church that had, by most accounts, ceased to exist centuries earlier. The dead had been laid down in phases, each generation of burials sealed beneath a deliberately introduced layer of material before the next began. Shroud-pins scattered throughout the deposits confirmed that most of the deceased had been wrapped before interment, while traces of coffins appeared only in the later graves. A cluster of infant burials concentrated along the northern wall of the nave. A few individuals, found outside the aisle, had been placed face down or oriented north-south rather than the conventional east-west, a detail that archaeologists note without easy explanation.

The site had belonged to the Franciscan friary founded here in 1267, sitting just outside the eastern stretch of the medieval town wall. The friary was dissolved sometime between 1540 and 1548, and its structures fell into ruin over the following generations. What the dissolution left standing, the construction of the county courthouse, built around 1732, largely consumed: the courthouse walls were founded directly on top of the friary walls, truncating them severely and obliterating most of the floor levels. The courthouse itself was demolished in the mid-twentieth century. Despite this compounded destruction, the excavation recovered a 13-metre section of the southern aisle wall with five blind arches, each roughly 1.5 metres wide, built in brown sandstone. A compound pier base survived intact only because it had been encased within a later wall. One stone-lined grave yielded part of a lead coffin bearing an incised cross on its lid, its lower half cut away by a courthouse foundation. A virtually intact timber coffin was also found.

The site is not accessible in the way that a standing monument would be; the excavation was a rescue dig ahead of road construction, and there is nothing to see at street level today. The interest lies in knowing what the ground contains, or contained. St. Francis Street runs through what was the medieval Englishtown, and the general area repays a slow walk for anyone curious about the layering of a city that has repeatedly built on its own past. The excavation archive and summary are available through the national excavations database, which records the licence number as 95E0218, and that record is the clearest route into the detail of what was found.