Hello and welcome to the Irish History podcast. My name is Finn Deweir. Now, today's episode is a listener

favourite originally broadcast over two years ago. And there's a somewhat unusual backstory as to why

I'm reposting it today.

So I'm actually off sick at the moment with pneumonia.

I've been feeling a bit run down for the last few weeks.

And to make a long story short, basically, last week I ended up in hospital feeling like death warmed up.

I was running a really high fever and felt awful.

Anyway, after they ran various tests and identified it as pneumonia,

I was given a shot of penicillin and I immediately started to feel better. And weirdly, this episode that you're about to hear right now is what I start to think about as I spent the following

few hours in the hospital. It's an insight into what medieval life was really like with Dr. Eileen Murphy.

And while it's a fascinating exploration of the medieval world,

it also gives you an appreciation for many things that we take for granted,

not least modern medicine.

Now, my guest on the episode is, as I say, Dr. Eileen Murphy.

She works in Queen's University, Belfast.

Eileen is an archaeologist, and a few years ago, she published her findings after she analyzed

the remains of hundreds of bodies excavated from a graveyard at Rannala in County Ross Common.

She used the latest technology, including genetic analysis, and she was able to reconstruct

what life was really like in the early Middle Ages, and it is pretty shocking. In a nutshell,

it was probably not as violent as you might think, but far more difficult in every other way

imaginable. Over the course of the next 40 minutes or so, Eileen talks you through how

people lived and the many, many ways in which they died. Now, this show is always worth a re-listen,

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