Some English medieval villagers would mutilate the bodies of the dead to stop them rising and haunting the living, according to a recent scientific study.

A joint project from Historic England and the University of Southampton has published its findings of villagers in Medieval Yorkshire who dismembered, shattered and burned the skeletons of the dead, fearing they might otherwise rise from their graves.

The teams found that many bones, from 10 bodies dating from the 11^th-13^th centuries had suspicious knife marks, evidence of being broken after death and being burned. They discounted previous theories about the marks, which included the possibilities of cannibalism or a mistrust of outsiders. The bodies came from the once thriving and later deserted village of Wharram Percy in North Yorkshire.

'The idea that the Wharram Percy bones are the remains of corpses burnt and dismembered to stop them walking from their graves seems to fit the evidence best,' said Simon Mays, human skeletal biologist at Historic England.

He added: 'If we are right, then this is the first good archaeological evidence we have for this practice.

'It shows us a dark side of medieval beliefs and provides a graphic reminder of how different the medieval view of the world was from our own.'

The scientists and archaeologists studied 137 fragments of broken bones, found in the remains of the village. Their findings were published yesterday in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

The bones belonged to both male and female persons, aged 2 to 50 at death. The bones, originally discovered in the 1960s, had not been properly investigated until recently.

The belief in the reanimated dead, known as 'Revenant corpses' was popular in medieval northern and Western Europe.

Christian clerics of the day were able to accommodate such an idea in Christian theology, with Satan as the cause of the haunting reanimation. Revenant corpses were believed to be 'malevolent, spreading disease, and physically assaulting the living'.