The last battle of Anne of Brittany - Siege of Rennes 1491

[Imperial Dave]

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.22.432237v1.full

very VERY detailed investigation into a mass grave associated with the Siege of Rennes

[Erpingham]

Thanks Dave.  Always good to get a new bit of battlefield archaeology.

[Duncan Head]

Very interesting, thanks.

[Erpingham]

One of my vague interests is to look at these burials to get an idea of how common non-lethal battle casualties were.  It is not uncommon for these graves to have bodies with healed prior wound trauma (7 out of at least 32 here).  When we realise these are wounds that are significant enough to have reached bone, we have to allow for lots of people receiving wounds of varying severity which they survive.  Obviously, it can only be an impression - we can't control our sample, nor can we know how many battles an individual had been in without being wounded.  But enough to guess that, at least on the winning side, there would be plenty of men, even with severe injuries, who were patched up and returned to the colours later. 

[Imperial Dave]

I did see a demo of non-lethal blows recently to kind of demonstrate that Anthony. If I find it I'll post it