We can study history over a few years, a century or two, or thousands of years. Historians and archaeologists often refer to the longue durée: the big sweep of history. To investigate this, the project looked at samples from different periods from the Neolithic through to the ninteenth century; the goal was to see the changes in the medieval period in the context of wider history. If late medieval people are a centimetre taller or shorter than earlier medieval people, is this a big change or a trivial one? It helps to compare it with changes over a much longer period.

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For example, using skeletal data, it is relatively straightforward to track changes in stature. In the Neolithic period people are relatively small, and they generally increase in size through time. But the process is not a constant increase; it has ups and downs. The tallest people before modern times were the early Saxons, who have a big jump in stature over preceding Roman populations. After the Saxon period, heights reduce again until the late medieval period, when people are at their shortest. Since there is strong genetic continuity in our samples from Anglo Saxon times through to the present, this implies that people in later medieval periods are not actually doing as well nutritionally and health-wise as they may have been earlier.