The outlines of a medieval village near Braunston, Northamptonshire. Photograph: Adrian Warren / Last Refuge Ltd.

While investigating Stonehenge in the late 1920s, archaeologists came across a body buried at the center of the complex. They assumed that it dated, like the megaliths themselves, to the Neolithic period, but radiocarbon dating showed that it most probably dated to the eighth century. The remains were of a short adult male about 30 years of age. He had something called Schmorl’s nodes on his vertebrae, a lesion common in people who performed hard, physical labor as children. The muscle insertions for his upper limbs suggest that he was powerfully built and provide further evidence that this was a man who had done back-breaking work. He had periostitis, too, marked by plaque on the outer surface of his bones, so he suffered from some kind of chronic, low-grade infection. In sum, we have a small, muscled, not very healthy man, who worked hard most of his life. He died, however, neither from disease nor from exhaustion, but because he had been decapitated with a single sword blow from behind. He was probably kneeling when it happened: It looks like an execution.

This man’s burial was clearly an anomaly, not least because it was carried out at the center of perhaps the most uncanny site in Britain. It deviated from standard burial customs in other ways. The vast majority of people in eighth-century Britain were buried with their kith and kin, in well-dug graves, and they were placed in the ground with care. Our man lay alone in this eerie landscape, having been dumped into an indecently shallow, horrifyingly short hole in the ground. His ribs may have been broken post mortem, when his corpse was stuffed into its inadequate grave. The burial, moreover, took place in a kind of no man’s land. Stonehenge, by the 11th century, lay on the border of two administrative districts known as hundreds, and many scholars have argued that it marked an important territorial boundary even earlier. It would have been a site known to everyone in the region but inhabited by no one.

Other deviant burials dating to the seventh and eighth centuries have the look and feel of this one. Take, for example, a solitary grave found in north Wiltshire, near Broad Town, some 85 miles west of London. Here, another man had been put in the ground without grave goods (e.g., personal adornments, food, or weapons) and buried in an isolated, shallow grave. Like the Stonehenge burial, this one lay on the boundary of two hundreds; and, although it was nowhere near a stone circle, it sat in a spot that could be seen from afar—next to a crossroads—yet was remote from human habitation or a proper cemetery. This skeleton was poorly preserved, so it is uncertain how the man died, but the archaeologist who undertook the excavation thinks he too was executed.

Many early cemeteries yield an anomalous burial or two that hint at acts of stoning, amputation, or beheading. Behind these may lie stories of communal violence against local outcasts: group killings committed after an agreement struck among local heads of households. The occasional punishment burial found in fifth- and sixth-century communal cemeteries suggests that settlements did away with deviants on their own, without aid or encouragement from outsiders. The killings of the two men found at Stonehenge and Broad Town, however, feel different. Their two dramas played out far from settlements and communal cemeteries. Both graves were in dramatic landscapes, and the forces of punishment seem somehow less cozily communal, more like the work of powerful men, even kings or their surrogates, in charge of whole regions—people who claimed for themselves the right to keep the peace and punish wrongdoers, to the borders of the territories they controlled. The habit of more distant authorities killing outcasts at their territorial margins is one of the earliest manifestations we have of the arrogation of the power held by families and neighbors to regulate their communities. This move by elite men to monopolize violence took hard work and centuries to effect, but, by the 10th century, state-sponsored executions along political or administrative boundaries had become a standard feature of the landscape and a commonplace of royal power.

Well before the 10th century, though, as early as the eighth century, particular places became designated sites of judicial killing. A dramatic example is found at the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Sutton Hoo, near England’s eastern coast, site of a famed early seventh-century ship burial, and, as it happens, much more. When Sutton Hoo was systematically re-excavated in the 1980s, archaeologists found that the ship mound was surrounded by other graves, some contemporary and others not, some elaborate and others downright grotesque. Seventeen people in the cemetery had been laid to rest under great mounds of earth with extraordinary grave goods and doubtless awesome ceremony as well. There were, however, 39 others buried at Sutton Hoo who had been given neither grave goods nor burial mounds. All but one died at least a century after the locals had ceased to use the cemetery for elite burial, and the deaths of most probably date to the 10th and 11th centuries.

Corpses in the acidic soil of this region survive not as skeletons, but as “sand bodies,” three-dimensional stains in the soil formed by decomposition, from which casts can sometimes be made. Most of the late sand bodies at Sutton Hoo preserve the shadowy outlines of people who were decapitated, hanged, or otherwise mutilated and then buried in weirdly staged tableaux. One burial, for example, contained two decapitated men, one on top of the other. Another, this one a triple burial, held a decapitated man lying on his back and two women whose bodies had been thrown on top of his. The positions of other sand bodies suggest that some are the remains of people killed while kneeling in their graves. About half of Sutton Hoo’s anomalous burials radiate out from a single seventh-century, high status mound; the rest lie on the eastern edge of the cemetery near the remains of what, at one time, had been an enormous tree. It fell sometime in the early Middle Ages, only to be replaced by a set of posts, which probably supported a gallows. Many of the people found here had broken necks and lay with their hands behind their backs, suggesting that their wrists were bound. It looks as if they were hanged.

Sutton Hoo is not the only pagan-period cemetery reused in later centuries for execution. Similar sites have been found from Sussex in the south to Yorkshire in the north. A run-of-the-mill sixth-century cemetery at Guildown, for example, located on a summit overlooking Guildford, south of London, contained just under 40 burials of men, women, and children with all the usual grave goods—spears, brooches, buckets, and glass beakers. But almost 200 later bodies also lay buried here, mostly dating from the 10th and 11th centuries. Like the anomalous burials at Sutton Hoo, many of the later Guildown burials were in double, triple, or even quadruple graves. Large numbers of these dead had been mutilated. One triple grave, for instance, contained two people whose legs were cut off at the knees and a third whose arms, head, and feet were removed. Some bodies faced downward.

Ritual surely played a part in this punishing violence. After one man, found at a cemetery at Roche Court Down, in Wiltshire, had been decapitated, his skull was smashed and buried separately, surrounded with a ring of flints. Another man, whose face-down skeleton was excavated at Meon Hill, in Hampshire, was buried with a heavy boulder weighing down his corpse, out of a niggling fear, perhaps, that the reluctant dead might not lie quietly in their graves. At the turn of the millennium, the monk and homilist Ælfric of Eynsham described how witches consorted at “heathen burial sites with their dark rites, and call upon the Devil, and he arrives in the form of the person who lies buried there, as if he had risen from death.” No wonder people were uneasy.

As we might expect from reading the law codes promulgated by 9th-, 10th-, and 11th-century kings, with capital sentences affixed to commonplace crimes such as cattle rustling and housebreaking, most of the skeletons found in execution cemeteries are those of adult males. (King Athelstan stipulated in the early 10th century that execution was proper only for persons 12 years or older.) Nonetheless, there is some evidence that women were put to death differently than men, and this might explain their small numbers in execution cemeteries. We know, for example, that women were sometimes drowned rather than hanged, especially when suspected of witchcraft. One such killing is described in an 11th-century charter: “And a widow and her son had previously forfeited the land at Ailsworth because they drove iron pins into [a wax image of] Wulfstan’s father, Ælfsige. And it was detected and the murderous instrument dragged from her chamber; and the woman was seized, and drowned at London Bridge, and her son escaped and became an outlaw.” There is no archaeological evidence for the judicial drowning of women, but during the excavation of the ancient banks of the River Thames at Bull Wharf Lane in London, archaeologists uncovered the skeleton of a woman killed by a blow to the head and then staked to the riverbank. Was this “grave” meant as a warning to others?

What can we learn from these broken bodies and desecrating burials of the early Middle Ages? In the sixth century, punishment killings seem to have happened now and again, carried out by members of local communities. As elites and kingdoms formed, however, execution came to be the business of kings and their agents. Criminals were mutilated and subjected to hair-raising physical tortures, and they were killed and buried in choreographed ways. By the 10th and 11th centuries, Christian ideology also permeated these gruesome killings. Criminals were executed and buried deliberately at sites with pagan associations, driving home the point that crimes were sins as well, and that condemned criminals were being not only put to death but sent to hell.

For most of us, the men, women, and children who lived 10 or 11 centuries ago are mere abstractions, faceless and buffeted by historical forces similarly anonymous and impersonal. Bones betray the human cost of the changes it was their lot to live through. When we look at cemeteries, the story of the rise of urban communities is about more than the birth of a commercial economy. It is about sick children, fast-moving illnesses, and farmers who lived less healthy lives in consequence. Similarly, the rise of the state did more than organize taxation and create a well-regulated currency; it led to the institutionalization of terrible killing places, where the power of the state was cloaked in Christianity and manifested in shocking ways.

The human costs of the period’s grand trends can sometimes be recovered, if look we at bones. And we begin to discern that some people paid a high price indeed. The texts that survive from this time tell us, for the most part, about men, about monks, about the holders of land. Yet the vast majority of people in early medieval Britain could be placed in none of these categories. If we limit ourselves to what was written down, as medieval historians have long been apt to do, we would know nothing of the little man buried at Stonehenge, and little about the unremarked lives of the flesh-and-blood people who passed their years and died in early medieval Britain.

Robin Fleming is a professor of history at Boston College. Her essay is draw from Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070 (copyright © 2010 by Robin Fleming), by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.