Ninth-century England was a bad place to be a criminal, new findings suggest.
The skull of an Anglo-Saxon teenager discovered in Hampshire shows that she had her nose and upper lip cut off and may have been scalped too.
The study, by British experts, sheds new light on punishments for which archaeological evidence has been lacking. Written evidence of the 10th and 11th centuries indicates that facial mutilations were inflicted as punishment for female adulterers, thieving slaves and others.
However, proof had not been discovered before recent analysis of the cranium, found near an Anglo-Saxon estate boundary at Oakridge in Basingstoke, in the historical kingdom of Wessex. The skull was excavated in the 1960s during efforts to rescue remains from the site before a housing
