For centuries, their bones lay forgotten in a pit deep beneath the ground in North Yorkshire.

Then they were uncovered in an archaeological dig, according to Tees Heritage, while building work took place to extend a school.

Now the 19 Christians, women, men and children who lived and died in Anglo-Saxon Britain, are to be reinterred in a service at St Cuthbert's church, Kirkleatham on Saturday.

The Bishop of Whitby, Paul Ferguson, will be among those attending the reinterment of the bodies.

Tees Heritage said in a press release that the bodies were believed to have been buried in graves forming part of an Anglo-Saxon "community cemetery".

The archaeologists were monitoring the extension to Kirkleatham Hall School on the site of the 17th century Kirkleatham Hall, demolished three years earlier. On the last day of the dig, an archaeologist spotted a human skull and several long bones lying within a sandy deposit.

Over the next few weeks, more graves were discovered. There were more adults than children, thought the adults survived no longer than middle age. Most suffered from joint disease, especially arthritis in their spines.

Diggers also found a copper-alloy pin with a round head thought to be be a shroud pin, a small iron annular brooch and a small hexagonal stone plaque.

The cemetery was carbon dated to between 682 and 875 AD and indicates a pre-Conquest settlement and possibly the site of the first Christian Church in Kirkleatham. It makes it likely that St Cuthbert's church is of late Anglo-Saxon foundation.