This study explores the disease experience of children buried within the cemetery of St. Oswald’s Priory, Gloucester from AD1153 to 1857. Evidence for ages-at-death, infant mortality, and the prevalence of stress indicators, trauma, and pathology were compared between the early and postmedieval periods. The skeletal remains of these children provide evidence for child health spanning the economic expansion of Gloucester at St. Oswald’s, from a mostly rural parish to a graveyard catering for families from the poorer northern part of the town and the workhouse. Results showed that the children from the postmedieval period in Gloucester suffered higher rates of dental caries (38%) and congenital conditions (17.3%) than their counterparts from the early and later medieval period. This paper serves to highlight the value of nonadult skeletal material in the interpretation of past human health in transitional societies and illustrates the wide variety of pathological conditions that can be observed in nonadult skeletons. 1. Introduction The importance of studying nonadult skeletal remains from the archaeological context is gaining increasing recognition [1–3], but studies that focus solely on the diseases experience of children from past populations is still uncommon. Due to their rapid growth, children’s bodies react swiftly to environmental insults making nonadult palaeopathology a useful measure in our understanding of transitional populations. This paper explores the health of 137 medieval children buried at St. Oswald’s Priory, Gloucester between AD 1155 and 1857 [4]. Results of the skeletal analysis were originally presented by Rogers [5], but the palaeopathology of the children received little attention. St. Oswald’s parish extended over a large geographical area and those buried at the cemetery would have originally come from a number of outlying villages [5, 6]. Between the 1100 and 1500s the majority of the people buried at St. Oswald’s were living a rural lifestyle of subsistence agriculture, with children being employed in tending animals, lambing, and spinning wool [7, 8]. Tenant farmers rented their properties from a Lord and were allocated strips of land which they harvested. Tenants were also provided with common grazing land for their livestock and shared access to the surrounding meadows and woodland [9]. Gloucester itself was a middle-ranking market town that benefited from its position as an inland port situated along the River Severn [10, 11]. It received both raw and surplus goods for redistribution, and luxury items that were sold to
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