One of Britain’s largest medieval cemeteries containing the remains of more than 1,000 people has been unearthed under part of the University of Cambridge.

The hospital cemetery, which catered largely for scholars who had fallen on hard times, was found during excavations beneath the Old Divinity School at St John’s College.

About 1,300 burials and 400 complete skeletons were discovered there as part of the refurbishment of the Victorian building three years ago, but the details have only now been made public.

Historians had been aware of the existence and the location of the cemetery since the 1950s, but the scale of the burial ground was unclear until now.

The bodies, which are mostly from the period between the 13th and 15th centuries, are burials from the Hospital of St John the Evangelist, which stood opposite the graveyard until 1511, and gave St John’s College its name.

Dr Craig Cessford, from the university’s department of archaeology and anthropology, said it was one of the largest discoveries of its kind in the UK.

The vast majority of burials took place without coffins, while many did not even have shrouds, suggesting the cemetery was primarily for the poor.

Very few of the bodies belonged to women and children, perhaps because its main purpose was to cater for “poor scholars and other wretched persons” and pregnant women were excluded from this care.

Personal items such as jewellery were found only in a handful of burials.

Dr Cessford said: “Evidence for clothing and grave goods is rarer than at most hospital cemeteries.

This is principally because this was a purely lay graveyard with no clerics present.

“Items were found in graves that might represent grave goods, but their positions were ambiguous and it is equally possible that they represent residual material from earlier activity at the site.”

Originally a small building on waste ground, church support enabled the hospital to grow and become a noted place of hospitality and care for university scholars and local people.

Despite rumours linking it to the Black Death, no evidence of the disease was found on any of the remains and the team did not uncover any signs of large burial groups from that part of the 14th century.

In later centuries, plague victims in Cambridge were buried on local grazing land such as Midsummer Common, and it is likely that the same locations were also used in the medieval period.

Most of the bodies were buried in neatly laid-out rows or deposited in a building on the site. The team found six “cemetery generations” – defined as the time taken to fill all the available space before burying other bodies in the same locations.

The cemetery had gravel paths and a water well, along with seeds from various flowering plants, suggesting that people at the time also came to visit their deceased loved ones.

The bodies did not exhibit many serious illnesses and conditions that would have required medical attention. A report by The Archaeological Journal on the find said “this could reflect that the main role of the hospital was spiritual and physical care of the poor and infirm rather than medical treatment of the sick and injured”.