The Human Remains Digital Library

This open access library called 'HRDL' (Human Remains Digital Library) aims to assist church stakeholders, archaeologists, and researchers. It provides heritage advocates and policymakers much-needed evidence to inform their strategies and responses at local and national levels. The Human Remains Digital Library is the first historical collection of material relating to the management of human remains in Britain from the early medieval period through to the end of the Victorian era. It has extracts from a wide variety of genres, forms of writing, and media, spanning thirteen centuries of history. It reveals for the first time the complex attitudes towards different types of burials over time and around Britain; from saints and royals to military members, ordinary people, criminals and more. The extracts in our library have been sourced from a number of archives, libraries, and repositories. Most of these are digital collections and the extracts are from documents that are out of copyright or under Creative Commons Licence. We have also included extracts taken from physical documents as well, providing the first digital version. We do not provide the original full text as it usually contains significant amounts of irrelevant information for this project. However, the bibliographic entry for each extract allows users to find the original sources themselves. Where an extract was not available in modern English, we have translated the extract ourselves and the translator is credited in the library.

The digital library was funded by a 7-year UKRI Future Leader's Fellowship awarded to Dr Ruth Nugent in the department of Archaeology, Classics & Egyptology at the University of Liverpool from 2019 to 2026. 

Digital Library Stats (as of April 2025). 
Records: 2,551
Total Words: 972,587
Unique Words: 43,150

Digital Library URL: https://hrdl.liverpool.ac.uk

Project Website: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/archaeology-classics-and-egyptology/research/projects/human-remains/

GitHub repository for the digital library: https://github.com/HumanRemainsDL/