Medieval Bristol bustled with merchants and sailors selling cloth to Ireland, France and Portugal and importing wine from Bordeaux and Gascony.
That’s well known, but archaeologists delving into the latrines of Europe have found a previously unknown link with the centre of the Hanseatic League, the powerful 13th-century Baltic trading bloc.
The first genetic study of intestinal parasitic worms across multiple archaeological sites revealed that Bristol and Lübeck, the league’s founding centre in north Germany, are the only places found to share a genetic variety of the human whipworm between the 12th and 14th centuries.
Patrik Flammer, a molecular biologist at Oxford University who led the study, said that it was unexpected. “You could think it’s not surprising — they are both important ports in