Peak District Teeth Date the Return of Lead Mining and Show Its Toll on Children

Radiocarbon-dated tooth enamel from 15 medieval burials places the restart of lead production in the Peak District in the mid-7th century. The exposure pattern points to communities divided by status, though the sample is small and the authors keep their conclusions cautious.

Researchers have dated the restart of lead production in the Derbyshire Peak District to the mid-7th century by measuring lead in the tooth enamel of people buried there. The earlier evidence was later and thinner. Lead weights found at Birka in Sweden pointed to fresh smelting between about AD 760 and 860, and a charter summary attributed to AD 835 records a nobleman, Humberht, paying rent on an estate at Wirksworth to the monastery at Repton in lead, and being obliged to arrange its carriage to Canterbury. The new study, led by the University of Nottingham and published in Antiquity, puts radiocarbon dates on the people themselves and moves the firm evidence back by roughly a century.

Enamel forms between about four and 12 years of age and does not remodel afterwards, so it keeps a closed record of the lead a person absorbed while growing up. The team sampled 15 medieval individuals: five from the 7th-century cemetery at Wigber Low in the White Peak, five from Joule Yard at Castleton (7th to 11th centuries) and five from Spital Field at Castleton (12th to 15th centuries, linked to a medieval hospital). Two Iron Age individuals from Eldon Hole gave a comparison from before large-scale mining. Lead above roughly 0.6 to 0.7 ppm is read as human-caused, and the Iron Age adult sat at 0.66. All but one of the medieval individuals exceeded 10 ppm, and four exceeded 40.

The 7th-century picture at Wigber Low was uneven. A man buried with a sword recorded 2 ppm, comparable with Iron Age and Roman cemeteries in regions that produced no lead. An unfurnished man, possibly an incomer from western Britain, recorded 29.5 ppm. A woman who died at 17 recorded 69.1 ppm, a level otherwise found only at Castleton and in Coventry and Chelsea after the 1750s. The authors suggest the armed local men may not have worked the lead but may have benefited from controlling it, while the unfurnished man and the younger woman may mark lower-status households producing lead for estate owners. They also link the sudden wealth of mid-7th-century Peak District burials to demand for lead in Christian church building, an idea that is contested in the wider literature.

By the Joule Yard burials, dated mostly between the 680s and 880s, exposure had spread across the community. All five individuals exceeded 25 ppm, and three fell between 30 and 54. The authors suggest a specialist community of lead-mining and smelting families, and conclude that by about 750 to 850 the whole Castleton sample had taken up very high levels between the ages of four and 12. At Spital Field all five recorded between 25 and 68 ppm. The two highest share near-identical dates of 1175 to 1270, which the authors note may not be coincidence: the Pipe Rolls place the industry’s medieval peak between the 1180s and 1215, and Alpine ice and Swedish lake sediments show lead pollution peaking around 1200, attributed mainly to British sources. Two individuals cannot establish a peak, but they fit both records.

The documents show who held the stake. In 1066 the manors of Ashford, Bakewell and Hope each owed five cart-loads of lead in tax, and William Peverel built Peveril Castle before 1086 beside a settlement called Pechesers, probably named after a lead mine. That settlement became Castleton, administrative centre of the High Peak.

On women, the paper is more cautious than the coverage. Three women in the sample died between 17 and 25, and both Wigber Low women were buried close to young children, aged about two and five. Pregnancy remobilises lead stored in bone, which may have endangered mother and child. The authors call the link tentative, citing modern research that finds only a “direction of association” between childhood lead and age at death. The data do not follow a simple dose pattern either. The Spital Field woman had the lowest lead in her cemetery (25.2 ppm, still high) yet died at 18 to 21, while the men there had higher levels and appear to have lived longer. In the paper’s comparison the median lead levels for women and men sit close together, so what separates the women is how young they died, not how much lead they absorbed.

Isotope analysis points to little immigration, which the authors read as lead production being a long-term, inherited tradition. They contrast it with Sala in Sweden, where 16th-century silver-lead mines used forced prisoner labour. One Sala cemetery shows much lower enamel lead because those workers had grown up in uncontaminated landscapes.

The authors stress that the legacy of this pollution is carefully managed in the Peak District today. A temporary display in the region over autumn and winter 2026 to 2027 will show the results beside finds from the Castleton excavations.

Source: Loveluck et al., “Social dynamics of toxic metal industry in medieval Europe: Peak District lead production, AD 600-1500”, Antiquity 2026 (doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2026.10416); University of Nottingham press release, 13 October 2026.

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