OPINION - Crypt by Alice Roberts review: An addictive picture of medieval Britain from a cutting-edge perspective

The past was not a good place to die in Britain. Frightening diseases that are essentially vanquished in modern times were rife, deadly, and untreatable. Think syphilis, leprosy and the Black Death. Then there was the endemic violence. Readers of Alice Roberts’s Crypt, the third in her trilogy of books on life in Britain told through bones (after Ancestors and Buried), have the treat of meeting these monsters again. This time they’re not under our beds — they’re under our feet.