It’s not every day a medieval graveyard containing hundreds of skeletons is found buried beneath a university.

NBC News Reports:

Hundreds of Medieval Skeletons Found Under Cambridge University

Hundreds of skeletons from a medieval graveyard have been discovered beneath Cambridge University in England.

Archaeologists got a rare chance to excavate one of the largest medieval hospital burial grounds in Britain, amid a project to restore the Old Divinity School at St. John’s College (part of Cambridge University). The researchers unearthed more than 400 complete burials among evidence for more than 1,000 graves.

Most of the burials date to the period spanning the 13th to 15th centuries, according to Craig Cessford, an archaeologist at Cambridge University who led the excavation and published the results in the latest issue of the Archaeological Journal.

The graveyard was used by the medieval Hospital of St. John the Evangelist, which was established in 1195 and closed in 1511. The Old Divinity School was built on top of the burial site in the late 19th century.

Historical sources indicate that the townspeople of Cambridge founded the hospital to care for “poor scholars or other wretched persons,” while pregnant women, lepers, the wounded, cripples and the mentally ill were explicitly excluded, Cessford wrote. Those rules are reflected in the study’s findings.