Holes in the Head: Medicine, Violence, and Survival Early Medieval Britain Brittany

When archaeologists opened an early Anglo-Saxon grave at Oxborough in Norfolk, one skull stopped them. It belonged to a woman who had reached old age, and someone had cut a clean opening into the left side of her head. The bone had healed around it. She lived for years with a hole in her skull, and no one wrote down why it was made. Holes in the Head is about wounds like hers, found across early medieval Britain and Brittany between the end of Roman rule and the eleventh century. Some were made by weapons. A few were surgery: skulls deliberately opened on living people, by operators who knew to keep clear of the vessels where a slip meant death, and closed over by scalp alone for the rest of a life. Popular writing turned this into "Celtic brain surgery," all druids and firelight and lost wisdom. Most of that was invented by Victorian antiquarians. What the bones and the surviving texts actually show is smaller and stranger: law codes that price a wound to the head, Welsh medical recipes, saints credited with cures, and cemeteries where a healed skull proves that someone was fed and sheltered through weeks of recovery. The writing is careful about proof. A healed rim of bone can show that a skull was opened while its owner still lived, but why it was done usually cannot be recovered. Reading graves, law, and medicine together, E L Hunter has written the fullest account yet of injury, treatment, and survival in the early medieval Brittonic world.