They were found not beneath open countryside or a ruined church in a field, but in a built-up urban street, a reminder that the living city has been quietly resting on top of its dead for the better part of eight centuries.

The burials belong to the graveyard of the Augustinian priory of St. John the Evangelist, a house of canons regular founded in the thirteenth century. The walled graveyard, roughly half an acre in extent, occupies the ground to the south and east of the priory church, bounded today by Michael Street to the east, Barrack Lane to the west, and John Street to the south. In 2019, archaeologist Claire Walsh excavated a narrow north-south corridor along Barrack Lane and encountered the skeletal remains of approximately 150 individuals. Every burial followed the same orientation, east to west with the head placed to the west, the standard Christian funerary practice of the medieval period, which positioned the body to face east towards the rising sun and, symbolically, the resurrection. All were interred in simple pits, with no evidence of elaborate grave goods or coffin fittings. The remains have been dated to the medieval period, most likely the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, placing them squarely within the early life of the priory itself.