Gone Medieval - Mysterious Anglo-Saxon Bone Chests with Cat Jarman

Episode Date: September 28, 2023

In 1642, a Parliamentarian army smashed up Winchester Cathedral, including ten beautiful, 7th century mortuary chests, that housed the mortal remains of West Saxon kings, saints and bishops. In 2014, a team of forensic archaeologists, using the latest scientific methods, attempted to identify the contents, finding an elaborate jumble of bones, and making some surprising discoveries. In this episode, Matt Lewis catches up with Gone Medieval's former co-host Dr. Cat Jarman to talk about her new book The Bone Chests, which untangles the stories of the people within the desecrated tombs.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. I had the great honour and pleasure of speaking at the Gloucester History Festival this autumn. That's not really anything to do with this episode. I kind of just wanted to brag. It's a bit of a massive personal highlight for me. Thank you for the applause that I'm imagining right now. On the last day of the festival, though, there was one speaker I really wanted to get a chat with for the podcast. I also wanted to find out what she's up to now because that speaker was the brilliant Kat Jarman, former co-host

right here on Gone Medieval. Cat's new book, The Bone Chests, is newly released into the world to tell fascinating stories of the birth of England and of history and science meeting to go further than either could alone. Cat agreed to sit down with me just before her first ever talk on the new book to get to the bottom of the real mystery. Why on earth did she leave us? And we talked a bit about those incredible bone chests too. Welcome back to gone medieval cat. It's so nice to have you here again. Yes, I'm absolutely delighted to be back.

It feels like a lifetime since I left the podcast. So I'm delighted you'd have me again. Really excited about the new book. So that's the perfect excuse to have you back here to talk to us about the bone chests. What are the bone chests? Sounds cool. Yes, I hear it with the title pretty much first, really.

People that they're not really, but almost. So the bone chests are these absolutely incredible chests in Winchester Cathedral, six wooden chests. So if you go into Winchester Cathedral today, you walk down the nave, you get to the choir and then to the presbytery, and there are these huge big stone screens, and you could quite easily miss these chests,

but if you look up and you can see high up on a ledge on either side of you, six carefully carved and painted, decorated chests, you can sort of possibly just about makeups and writing on them. But these chests, actually contain some of the most illustrious royals of early medieval England. They've got, according to the outsider news, inside them,

there are eight kings, two bishops, and a formidable queen all buried inside. And we actually know that they've got much more of an exciting history than that. But yeah, that's the core of it, really. Amazing. I feel like I just heard a sharp intake of breath from everyone who's been to Winchester Cathedral and not notice these things hidden away and it's now got to go back and have a look at these. Yeah, easy to miss. How long have they been at Winchester Cathedral if they're kind of Anglo-Saxon, presumably the cathedral wasn't as it is now?

So they must have been moved around a little bit. Yeah, so the current cathedral is a Norman cathedral. So that was built in the 11th century. But that was built, and this is part of the big story. It was built after two other churches. So there was two former churches there, one of them dating way back to the 7th century. So you have Oldminster and Newminster. And then when the Normans came in, they sort of essentially replaced everything with their own work.

So the current cathedral has only been there for that long. So the bones inside, some of these royals actually date back to the 7th century as well. So they've been around for a very, very long time. But the chest themselves, the current chests that you see now, dates really from the 16th century, mainly. But they are replacing earlier chests. There are certainly some that were made in the 1400s, some early 400 understood these that are still in the cathedral as well. And we know that there are other even earlier ones that go back to the 12th century. So possibly even before that.

So we know that there's an idea of having these mortuary chest housing these remains goes back practically at a millennium. And those remains have had an incredible story of their own then if they've been moved around all of that much. But the book focuses, at least in the beginning, around the 14th of December 1642. So we're horribly in the future here from a medieval point of view. So what are those terrible future people up to in Winchester Cathedral? Yeah. So this is a really key moment in the history. It's interesting because in some ways it's the story starts there.

My story starts there. Somebody actually asked me in another interview recently, where does this start? And you think, well, which one? Which start? But what happens? So this is during the Civil War, the English Civil War. So the whole country really is that threat all there, especially churches, places like that, know that they are in danger, really.

And a couple of days before, Winchester had been targeted by parliamentarian troops. So they'd come into the town, started raiding and looting. And on that morning, this is all according to an eyewitness account, between the hours of nine and ten, suddenly the parliamentarians burst through the west doors, these huge big doors, into the church, storming in, some of them on horseback. They come with flares lit, with colours flying, riding down the nave, and essentially starting a complete scheme of destruction of the inside of the cathedral. And they just destroy absolutely everything they can find. And then at one point, some of them find this sort of spot at the presbytery with their stone screens, clamber up them up to these chests. Now, at that point, there were actually 10 chests, or 10 mortuary chests. They start to rifle through them, finding these remains, these bones inside, throwing them to the floor.

Several of the chests themselves were pushed to the floor. And then apparently, allegedly, the bones themselves were hurled at the stained glass windows in the cathedral used as missiles, essentially. to shatter the glass. And in fact, the entire, this huge, big, beautiful stained glass on the western front, everything was shattered. So if you go there today, if you look up and see the replacement, that was actually the pieces of the glass that was broken and set back up as a mosaic. So you can see the fragments in this direction. But at one point, some of the leaders called out, according to this item and this account, told them to stop when they were targeting these bones. So some of the chest remains, four of them remain, the rest were broken, so two of them are

replacements made just after. And whatever bones could be found were essentially just gathered up and placed back in. It's terrifying from a historian's point of view, whatever the political and religious motivations and beliefs behind that, the destruction is absolutely shocking, really, isn't it? It really is. I mean, and to think that these had been there since the seventh century. So at that point, we're talking already about a thousand years. people had preserved and protected them and kept them safe. So, yeah, this idea that you would do

that. It's like what we've noticed with things like Palmyra Arch being destroyed or something like that. It seems so alien to us that anybody would do that. Yeah, those are the things that were playing in my mind. And, you know, it's still happening to some extent today, that destruction of history for whatever reason is equally horrific today as it was 500 years ago. But getting back to the book, let's not get too morose about 17th century history. You divide the story of the chess into six. So each one tells kind of roughly the story of the chest and the remains that may be inside them, because if they've been disturbed, we're not entirely sure. So does each one of those chests managed to tell its own individual story within that greater narrative of Anglo-Saxon England?

Yeah, to a degree. Now, this was a little bit difficult when I was trying to tell the story, because unfortunately, when they were named on those chests, they weren't put into chronological orders. They were quite mixed up, and that is actually part of the big story that I'm talking about, how they got mixed up, and, you know, who might be in there. But, the individuals themselves do really tell that story very much from the seventh century. So we've got them right from really the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon period, the beginning of the Kingdom of Wessex right up to the Normans. So the latest burial is William Rufus, son of William the Conqueror, who died in 1100. So you have this incredible span. These individuals, through the chests,

are actually telling that entire story, which I think is just so wonderfully fascinating. Yeah, it's incredible. In the book, they provide a framework to tell the story first of the emergence of the kingdom of Wessex and then how Winchester becomes kind of dominant within Wessex, Wessex becomes dominant within England, and then kind of England becomes a single entity. To be able to tell that through the stories of individual people who were within these mortuary chests, it must have been incredible to find those individuals and follow them around. Absolutely. And I really enjoy that, actually. I mean, it's hard work because there's so many people involved and think, well, you can't really tell the

entire story of every single person who was involved in all of that. But by picking those and focusing on those and trying to think, why are they there? You know, what's the reason why they've ended up, why they've been kept, what's their sort of significance, but also thinking about who's not there. I do also go into who's missing and who are we looking for really still and who's part of the story. But actually what we do see when you entangle it all, everything that's happened to the bones, everything that's happened to the chest sins is really quite deliberate. It's not accidental. It's not completely random. So in that same way that in the 1640s in the Civil War,

they were targeting these chests. They were doing this for a very specific reason. It wasn't just random looting. It was done deliberately. And over time, both in the more modern period and back in the early medieval period itself, people were using these bones strategically. And it's actually, when you look at it quite carefully,

you see that the way that we tell that whole story of the history of England, actually. and how it's created who was involved, who they fought against, especially. That's all tied up in those chests and the bones within them. Yeah, and sometimes in the grand narrative, you can lose that kind of granular idea that this is happening to real people. But following those individuals is a really nice window to look on that whole span of history and say these were the people or some of the people who helped craft it. And following their journey through that period, I think it builds a real picture of the emergence of England as a country through the whole book.

just through that little window. Yeah, precisely. And I think what was really interesting to me was that how much south-west of England and Wessex and especially Winchester was such a key part of that. And I think there's something that people don't necessarily realize, unless you know that history already. You don't necessarily learn it at school that actually the southwest was really the focal point for such a long time.

And Winchester was essentially the capital, really, for a really long time and for such a sort of essential part of the story. Yeah, and the fact that William the second, William Rufus, buried there, to suggest that Winchester's importance remained long after the conquest and after we assume London was the centre of everything. Absolutely. And it's interesting because there's a shift towards the end of this where at the beginning with these earliest kings, as I go through in the book, it's got political importance, it's got essentially logistical importance and religious importance. But over the years, that changes. So when you do have that shift, it's very much a

political shift towards London, but it still retains a very strong, what, historical importance, religious, important, and sort of symbolic as well. So it's not coincidence that this Norman elite has this sort of focus on Winchester, and they are quite deliberately trying to connect themselves to that past. And that's something we see again and again. People are using the place. They're using the bones to connect themselves to this sort of important, formative part of England's history. Yeah, so I guess in that sense, it's almost like attaching these people to your family tree. you tie yourself back to those people because they represent something absolutely in the origin story of England, I guess.

Absolutely. And if you can show that you have a link to them and to that story, then that's crucial. And especially for those whose grasp of power of the country was actually quite fragile. It was very easy to lose it, especially for anyone coming in. So someone like William McConqueror coming in, he's actually making some really quite clear statements and some quite clear links, especially to one of their people in there, and that's Emma of Normandy, who is his what great aunt, I think, or great great aunt, and she's buried there. And part of the reason why she remains is because of the significance that was

placed on her link to William himself and the fact that he then had a physical link to the sort of former royals, essentially. Yeah, our September special month was on queenship, and we managed to get Emma of Normandy in there because she's such an important figure who doesn't get talked about anywhere near enough. So yeah, so you go and listen to a bit more about Emma if you haven't listened to that episode too. Some of the remains you mentioned in the book were buried elsewhere, potentially even outside of Winchester and eventually translated to there. So I've got a bit of a chicken and egg question just to be completely unfair to you to welcome you back to Gomedele. Thanks. Were these people then interred at Winchester because it was emerging as a seat of government

or did the presence of that many significant people make Winchester more important? I mean, you're talking in the book a bit about the idea that Southampton or Hamwick, as it was called then, was in many ways more important, but yet Winchester overtakes it. So did those people gravitate to Winchester because it was important, or did Winchester become important because they went there? Yeah, so it seems to be a bit of both, actually. So in some ways there's not actually an answer to that chicken and their question.

They're sort of always at the same time. No. So I think Hamwick certainly starts. Certainly from the kind of eighth century, we have these wicks, these emporia really around the North Sea, going all the way up to Scandinavia. And Hanwick was one of the really important ones. We don't quite know the royal links to Hamburg. There's lots of things about it. We don't know that much about it. We don't know that Winchester emerged as a city around about the same time. So this really early stage of Wessex, we don't have that much. We know that Winchester starts out as a Roman town. And in the Roman period, that was really important. It was important. It was important. because it was a nodal point, so there were lots of roads going through it, it was really near the coast. And then in the post-Roman period,

something continues there, seems like how being on the coast is much more important. So you have two places seemingly emerging, but then at one point, certainly from the 650s, that seems to be when the first church is established there. And that's really crucial because the earliest of the individuals in the Mochoo chest, so one of the kings called Coonergills,

one of the early kings of Wessex, he actually introduced Christianity, to Wessex. So that's a really crucial point as well. So from that point on, it starts to have this religious importance. And so the political importance, religious importance, seem to go hand in hang to a degree really. So with that, we then have the burials as well. But then over time, it's already established as an important place in itself. You then get more and more burial because it's an important place. And then, yeah, it just sort of follows on. It comes like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, it does. Yeah. The bit about Wix, I'd never heard before. That was news to me.

So that was something I learned amongst many other things from this book, that Wix were like trading ports on the coast kind of thing, markety sort of places. I found that absolutely fascinating. I love little bits of nuggets of information like that. So part of what research has been going on with these mortuary chests, it was done by the mortuary chess project. What did they aim to achieve when they started this kind of 10 years ago?

Why were they looking to examine these remains again? Yeah, so this is such a brilliant project. This one I haven't been directly involved in myself, but it's one that started in 2012. And the idea was really to try to understand who actually is inside these chests. Because we have these names on the outside. And they have been looked at and examined at different times. I described that a little bit in the book as well by antiquarians, opening them with great

excitement, trying to identify people. And we've known for a long, long time that there's certainly more people than those who are just written on the outside. There's other records recording about 15 people at least. So part of it was to look at the remains and see with modern forensic methods, coming now with the methods we got available to us, everything from isotope analysis, so things like looking at diets and geographical origins and DNA, proper radio carbon dating, actually established who's really there.

And interestingly, this all happens around the same time as Richard the third identification is taking place as well. And there's a bit of a sort of revolution going on in archaeological science of what we suddenly could do at that time. So the idea was really to try and establish who was in there if it was those people, because quite often you get relics and things in churches and they're said to be saints such and such from the 7th century or whatever. And actually it turns out to be 15th century, complete fake. So this could have been the case with these as well. So that was part of what the project was. When I talk to people about you, I always say you're a Viking bioarchologist

is probably the coolest job title I've ever heard in my life. This seems like a really good example of where history and science can, I was going to say collide, but not collide, work together to come up with information that helps both parties so that the science can inform the history, but the history can also inform the science. Is that fair? Absolutely. It's one of those where neither of them can answer it all on their own. So you can't just have a team of complete just scientists with no historical knowledge or anything like that. They will never be able to give you those answers. So none of these bones, you know, you can't just do DNA. And analysis and get the answer and that won't just tell you who it is. So you have to really look at all the

other evidence. I mean, in these cases, for example, we don't have any known descendants. So you can't actually take that eighth century king or nine century individual and actually try and match it to somebody else. It just doesn't work. And also, anyone who was alive in the seventh century who had descendants is going to have millions of them. So it's meaningless. Pretty much everyone will be related to them fuel from northwestern Europe. So that on its own won't work. There's other things we need to know. So if you look at things like geographical origins, you need to know that. You need to know about age. So one of the things that they identify was things like age of these individuals. And they need to have that historical knowledge and say, okay, well, who was at that age when they died in the 11th

century or whatever, who could potentially be in Winchester. So you need to have all that context and that knowledge, both of those basics, but also things like family relationships. So that's, I think, one of the most promising things for the future is looking at the family relationships between these individuals. But yeah, that in itself as well isn't enough. So you need to have the science to help inform those questions. Yeah. And I think one of the interesting things that I found coming out of all the rich of the third stuff in particular was being able to tell his diet and how his diet changed and how that affect his bone formation and all of that kind of stuff. Because that's something as a historian, I mean, apart from looking at maybe receipts for buying food, which we don't have for the

seventh, eighth, ninth century at all, really. But that's an insight that you would never be able to get in any other way. Precisely. And also, you know, those records that we do have, especially further back you go in the early medieval period, we don't know anything, really. We don't have much written evidence at all of what people ate. I try to look at that as I'm doing for the research of this. What do we actually know? And from Britain records, it's practically nothing. And again, archaeology, some more traditional archaeology, is also quite difficult to know. But actually, the bones tell you something very different. And then you can look at things. like difference between sex. So men and women, are they eating different things, are adults and

children? And these are the really very wealthy and very privileged people. What do they compare to the rest of the population? So all of a sudden you get answers to questions that you could never answer before. Do things like the mortuary chess, maybe not even them in particular, but does science and history working together have more secrets to tell us? Where else could it go? I think it absolutely can because even seeing, so not to want to give too many spoilers, because I love for people to actually buy the book and read it. But there were certainly, one thing I can say is that the preliminary results has come out of this project, there were certainly a hell of a lot more than 12 people

or 11 people in there. There were 23 in total, including some completely unexpected ones. So there were two adolescent boys actually in there, which we have no record of at all. Now, we do think we know who they might be, so there's some really important evidence. But the fact that we didn't know that, it's actually telling us quite. a lot and there's a lot more to come out of that. So things like women in this period, we know so little about the women. You have all these queens. Again, I mean, Emma is a pretty unique example actually, but there's all these other early medieval queens that practically just

disappeared from the books. But when we look at it, when we look at DNA, perhaps some of these fragments, there's 1,300 fragments in those chests in total. And as the technology progresses, all of a sudden we can start to find out more about them. So what is? say there happened to be lots more women there, just fragmented pieces that we didn't know about, who were they, why were they in there? And there's all of those sort of things. And I also write a little bit about some of the amazing new research that's gone into these early cemeteries from the earliest kingdom. So in the post-Roman period, periods we didn't know much about, on the so-called Anglo-Saxon migrations that we've got from Bede and places like that are very set in stone.

But the scientific evidence is actually really surprising. It's really different. And there are people coming into this country from places we had no idea they were coming from. So, yeah, there's so many surprises, I think. And what I really like to investigate and what I'm really interested in is those narratives that we have, what you're being taught at school and what's being perpetuated again and again and again, why are being told those stories? And are they actually true? And a lot of this new evidence is showing us that really, they weren't quite what we thought they were. Yeah, we definitely have in this country in particular, an odd idea about what Anglo-Saxon represents it gets co-opted for lots of things that are unpleasant, that it doesn't belong to

at all. But Anglo-Saxons just weren't English. Anglo and Saxon is something not English. It's strange how those things just take on a life of their own. So good to reclaim some of those things with scientific evidence to back up the history to help us understand it all a lot better. Precisely. And I think it understands the more modern period. It's what understands, you know, who's done that, you know, what have they done with that history? And why? Why are certain people like Alfred the Great? Hailed us this great big hero and what's that actually come from and what's it really true? So I think that's also really interesting to interrogate.

And as you mentioned about, not knowing who's not in the chess, who do we not talk about, that we ought to talk about a lot more. So it informs all of those kinds of narratives as well. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Kat. I mean, I've thoroughly enjoyed the book. I will recommend it to anybody. We're talking in launch week, so everybody go out and grab a copy of it now. And just before we finish, obviously you abandoned us here at Gone Medieval. Where can people find you now?

Sorry about that. I do miss you an awful lot. I miss doing this. So it has been great to be back. But yes, I do have a rival podcast. It's not a rival. It's very different. It's a friendly podcast. It's a very friendly. Yes, it's a different one. So my podcast I work on now is called the rabbit hole detectors, which is looking at the origins of historical objects, both real and metaphorical. So that's great. Fun is with me, Richard Coles and Charles Spencer. I can be found anywhere you find your podcasts. Perfect plug. And have you got another project lined up? What's next for cats? Yeah, there's lots of things going on, lots of things in progress, more books. But, yeah, I also work for the Council of British Archaeology. So I've got my own archaeological projects and British Archaeology magazine. So there's lots of things going on in the background.

Fantastic. It's been absolute pleasure to have you back. And I hope you'll come back and see us again when your next project is ready to be talked about with a gone medieval audience. It's been brilliant to have you back. Thanks, Kat. So thank you so much for having me. It was great to be back. I hope you enjoyed that chat about the fascinating bone chest.

Maybe it's wet your appetite to go and dig out Cat's brand new book, The Bone Chests, which is available everywhere right now. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please do join Dr. Ellen Arnaga next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcast from and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you have a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to podcast, It really does help new listeners to find this out.

Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hit.