‘Pinned to the ground’: Badly-fractured 700-year-old skeleton could be first ever casualty of giant medieval catapult

He was catapulted to fame 700 years later.

A 14th-century skeleton with 167 fractures could be the first recorded casualty of a powerful medieval catapult known as a trebuchet.

“It looks like he was hit from behind by something traveling at a great velocity,” Jo Buckberry, a bioarchaeologist at the UK’s University of Bradford told Science Magazine. “It’s likely the individual was killed by a siege engine.”

She reportedly unveiled this so-called first ever instance of “trebuchet trauma” at the biannual European meeting of the Paleopathology Association in Berlin.

Dubbed Skeleton 150, the body was discovered alongside seven other casualties of war in Stirling Castle in 1997. Carbon dating revealed that five of them, including the skeleton in question, harked back to the 1300s, a tumultuous time period when Edward I, King of England, was trying to take control of the Kingdom of Scotland, Livescience reported.

Better known as Edward Longshanks, the ambitious leader was perhaps best known for suppressing the uprising by Scottish hero William Wallace and ordering his execustion — a series of events immortalized in the 1995 Mel Gibson epic “Braveheart.

While all the skeletons sported evidence of war wounds — including stab marks, impact from blunt instruments and more — only Skeleton 150 had this specific set of fractures.

Closer analysis revealed that the victim’s skull had been smashed in 61 places and that he sustained a deep, zigzagging break to a shoulder, as well as nearly 60 bizarre, zigzagging rib fractures.

This indicated that he was struck at a great speed and then “pinned to the ground quite quickly afterwards,” according to anthropologist Patrick Randolph-Quinney, who helped with this archaeological autopsy.

However, the body’s extensive injuries and the shape and texture of the fractures eliminated the possibility that he took a header off the castle walls or was trampled by horses post-mortem.

“The most similar cases I was finding were car crashes and people hit by trains,” Buckberry said. “But how do you get from there to a guy in medieval Scotland? What is large and moving very, very quickly in 1304 [C.E.]?”

A lightbulb went off after, while perusing historical literature, she learned that Edward I had deployed a massive catapult called a trebuchet during his 1304 siege of Stirling Castle.

Equipped with a counterweight and sling, these long-necked war machines were capable of flinging 220-pound boulders hundreds of meters into enemy ramparts.

King Edward’s catapult, called “War Wolf,” was the largest ever built up to that point and could send its payload through two stone walls “as an arrow would fly through a piece of cloth,” per one historical account.

It’s difficult to determine if said casualty was the victim of a “Wolf” attack, but “it is likely that it was a siege engine similar to that that caused his demise,” Buckberry said. “The trebuchet is the most likely.”

She posited that the defender, believed to be in his 20s, was reportedly looking the wrong way when he was struck by the catapult’s projectile — an impact that killed him almost instantly.

“He certainly had his back to whatever was going on,” Buckberry told Live Science. “He went from standing to the floor extremely rapidly.”

The researcher told the Daily Mail that this was the most likely explanation given that these rock launchers didn’t have “particularly precise aim.”

After all, the target was a castle, not a person.

It would appear that the fallen soldier was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.