Gone Medieval - The Search for Alfred the Great's Tomb

Episode Date: February 15, 2022

Alfred the Great (r. 871-899) is without a doubt one of the best-known and most admired kings of early medieval England. We know quite a lot about his life, not least because he had a biography written about himself while he was still alive. However, we know very little about what happened to his remains after he died. The search for King Alfred's remains has involved some highly dubious antiquarians and quite a bit of detective work. Now, modern methods may have made a breakthrough. In this episode Cat discusses what may have become of Alfred's bones with Dr Katie Tucker, the osteoarchaeologist who has led a new search for the tomb of Alfred the Great.Don’t forget to leave us a rating and review while you're here!For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to the Android or Apple store 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. Hello and welcome to today's episode of Gone Medieval by History Hit. My name is Dr. Kat Jarman. Alfred the Great is without a doubt one of the best known kings of early medieval England. We know quite a lot about his life, not least because he had a biography written about him during his lifetime. However, we know very little about what happened to him, or rather what happened to his body, after he died. The search for his remains has involved some highly dubious antiquarians and quite a bit of detective work, and now modern methods may well have made a breakthrough. In this episode, I'm very excited to find out more about this,

so I've invited along Dr Katie Tucker. Katie is an osteo-archologist, so a specialist in the study of human skeletons, She's a research associate at Sores at the University of London and was formerly with the University of Winchester where she led a new search into some graves that may just contain the body of Alfred the Great. Thank you so much for joining me today, Katie. Thank you very much for having me off.

So very briefly, and we're not really going to go into Alfred and his career because that's a different episode and a different story. What I really want to get to is your detective work, really, to try and find out what happened to him. him. But sort of very briefly, just in case some of our listeners aren't that familiar, can you sort of, in a very simple terms, tell me who was Alfred de Great? And what happened to him? OK, yeah, because this is always something that I say to people. It's like, I always say that

I really know very little about Alfred the Great when he was alive. As soon as he died, then I'm fine on that. But when he was alive, don't ask me all the intricacies, because I don't know. But basically, he was, I think he's the only English king. to have been given the name the Great, and he was a late-Saxon king of Wessex, and he died on the, this I can be very specific about, on the 26th of October in the year 899, and that's who he was, famous for burning the cakes, but whether he actually did or not, he said on the story entirely. Yeah, it's definitely a man of many myths and legends, isn't he?

Yeah, definitely, yeah. But so let's go then to what we really were here to talk about, which is what happens, from that point on when he dies. So we know the date he dies. Do we know where he was buried or what happened to his body when he died? Originally, he was buried in the old Minster in Winchester, which had been built in the 7th century, I believe.

And he was buried in a tomb of porphyry marble, apparently. And it said that once he was buried, that he was not happy because it was said that monks were reported to see his ghost walking around the old minster that he didn't want to be buried in the old minster at all, because he wanted to have like a new church that would be his kind of family mortuary church. So eventually he didn't actually build any a part of this church, but his son, Edward the elder, did build a new church right next to the old minster, actually,

which appropriately enough was called the new minster. and when that church was built then Edward had his father's body removed moved out of the old Minster and re-buried in the new Minster and then Edward himself was also buried there and Alfred's wife

when she died in various other members of the family were also buried in the same place and they were very close the New Minister and the Old Minster were very very close to one another and it was said kind of right from the beginning that there were arguments between the two groups of monks, because the buildings were so close that they would have choir practice at the same time,

and it would be kind of the noise of the two choirs practicing together would be really harsh and horrible, and the bells would be ringing at the same time out of tune with each other, and there was just apparently kind of lots of arguments between the two groups of monks, which kind of got worse, really, when the old Minster was replaced by William the Conqueror with the new Norman Cathedral, which was even bigger than the old Minster had been, and that encroached even further onto New Minster. So eventually it was decided that kind of something had to be done.

So the monks of New Minster were given some land on the north side of Winchester, and in around 1110, 1111, there was enough of the building, the new building had been built where the New Minster was moving to, an area called Hyde in Winchester, so they were then able to move over the community of monks to the new building. And it's debated or not whether the bodies of Alfred and Edward and everybody else was moved over at the same time. There aren't really any medieval sources to support it, but we kind of have to presume that if they were going to move the Abbey to Hyde to Hyde, as it now became Hyde Abbey, they were not going to leave the bodies of Alfred and Edward and everybody behind

because they were demolishing the new Minster. So they weren't just going to leave them kind of in a demolished building. They'd have to take them all with them. But unfortunately, there really aren't many medieval sources about whether they did or not, but we kind of have to presume that they did. There is one later medieval source that does put at least Alfred within the new Hyde Abbey. I think that's a 15th century saw. But then kind of the next we really hear about the tombs actually being in Hyde Abbey

and the bones having been moved there was after the dissolution. So the Hydaivia was obviously destroyed in the dissolution, a lot of damage was done. And Layland, when he did his kind of tour around the antiquities of Britain a few years later, went to the site of Hyde Abbey and said that he saw the tomb. There were two tombs. There was a tomb of Alfred and a tomb of Edward. And he said that at the time of the dissolution, the tombs had been opened

and two little lead plaques had been removed from the graves. So there seems to, certainly by the 1540s, I think it was, that the tombs are definitely located there. Then kind of nothing really seems to have happened for a couple of hundred years. But presumably the tombs were still kind of there. maybe falling down a bit or whatever we don't really know, but then for whatever reason, they decided to use the site of Hyde Abbey

to build a new Bridewell, a new prison. And there's quite a lot of documentation about the building of this prison. There's newspaper reports saying that they found a tomb which had two skeletons lying next to one another in this. They said they were kind of lying permissible. on top of one another, quite what that means, I don't know, and that they were wrapped in some sort of rich fabric. There was also a local soldier. I think he was a colonel or something called Henry Howard, who was stationed in Winchester, which was obviously a very kind of military town.

And he was also a kind of antiquarian. He was very interested in the archaeology, particularly of Alfred. And he was very interested in this work that had been done at the building of the prison. So he went and he spoke to the superintendent who'd been in charge of the work when the prison was built. And basically he produced a report for the Society of Antiquaries. And this report said that there'd been this excavation that when they were building the governor's house, which was supposedly in the east end of the Abbey Church, and they'd found a sarcophagus that was covered on the inside and the outside. with lead and that within this sarcophagus they'd found some bones and some fragments of fabric and gold and various other bits and pieces.

And they said that they'd thrown the bones about, that the lead had been stripped off and sold, and that they'd broken the sarcophagus down and re-buried it in the hole where they'd found it because they said they wanted to bury it as low as the spring, which presumably is there's no spring. there's just quite a high water table on the site. So presumably that's what that meant, because they wanted to get rid of all this stuff, because that was where the governor's garden was going for the new governor of the prisons. And they wanted a nice garden. They didn't want all these bits of stone in the way.

So then kind of you think, right, okay, that's it then. That's the remains of Alfred and Edward and anybody else destroyed. So that's kind of the first part of the story. You think, okay, gone. Yeah. So that seems like almost impossible to go anywhere from there. And I think an important part of this story, I suppose, is that we don't quite know for certain if he was there, but it does seem very likely. If we're going back to some of those early things, he said, he was definitely there in Winchester buried.

But also, I think where he isn't is another key point for arguing that he was moved there. So this is probably the topic of another episode entirely, but a lot of these bones were moved into and later buried in Winchester Cathedral. And there were lots of remains in that location as well. But Alfred has never mentioned there. He's never mentioned really as being buried anywhere else, is he? There isn't a record of him being anywhere else. I mean, as you say, there's a lot of these records about who was re-buried in Winchester Cathedral. He's never mentioned.

And you would have thought that if there was some claim that Winchester Cathedral could have had on the remains of Alfred and his family, they would have made that claim. Yeah, absolutely. Because it would have obviously been a very important person to say was buried in the cathedral. But they never claimed he was there. So presumably that means that he definitely was not. They had no reason to think that he was there. So presumably that would mean he would have been taken out to hide. They wouldn't have just left them in an abandoned, demolished building right next to the cathedral.

Because if that was the case, then presumably the cathedral would have stung them up and taken the bones. Yeah. No, exactly. So I think that's a really, really important part of it. So maybe back in the two stories. So this was the first part. So we have the early, you know, what happened in the medieval period itself, everything that happens later and all this sort of potential throwing around of bones. But then there's quite an interesting character who comes in next, isn't it? Another sort of antiquarian investigating and trying to get to the bottom of this puzzle. Tell me about him. Yeah, he is a rather interesting character indeed. His name is John Meller. And he kind of turns up unannounced in Winchester in about 1816. The first we really know about him is some letters that were written to the Hampshire Chronicle by somebody just calling themselves Q, we don't know who this person is, who was complaining about John Meller

and that he'd taken upon himself to conduct all these excavations at the size of Hyde Abbey and that he was basically just violating tombs and throwing remains about and treating these remains incredibly badly and that really it needed to stop. This is what he said. John Meller then actually replied to this letter. So we have his letters in the Hampshire Chronicle as well, saying that, no, he was doing everything with the utmost respect and reverence for Alfred.

And that actually, now you're saying it, I have found the remains of Alfred. And I actually found them on Alfred's birthday on the 26th of October. So there you go. I have the remains of Alfred. I found them. They were in a tomb undisturbed.

And I also have the remains. of Edward and the remains of Alfred's wife and the remains of Edward's wife and some other people as well, and the remains of Grimboldt, who was a monk kind of confidant of Alfred, whose remains had also been supposedly taken to Hyde Abbey, though probably as relics, actually, rather than kind of as a complete skeleton. And he also said other things like he'd found the head of St. Valentine, who was also one of these relics that were supposedly moved to Hyde Abbey, And also embers from the fire that supposedly Hyde Abbey was very badly damaged in the anarchy in the rout of Winchester.

So he said he found embers from the fire of that and he found all these other things. And yeah, he found these skeletons and he knew that this particular skull that he had found was definitely Alfred because he compared it to a coin of Alfred and it looked exactly the same. Scientific. So this is how he said he knew he had Alfred. So he's quite a character. There's a lot of other... These kind of backwards and forwards went on for a bit in the newspaper

between Q and John Meller. Q accusing him, for example, of trying to sell the remains to some wealthy gentleman in Winchester and turning up at their door set with bones, seeing if they wanted to buy them from him. And there's one tale that he turned up with some bones. The gentleman of the house was not at home.

so a housemaid very reluctant and then they were thrown away the next morning by another housemaid disgusted and there were these bones thrown away into the dustbin quite whether that actually happened or not we don't know and then he was supposedly also trying to

get the people to take these bones to be exhibited and I think he was just basically trying to make money in any way that he could from the remains that he'd supposedly found well did find at Hyde Abbey and eventually then the vicar of St. Bartholomew's church, which was just outside Hyde Abbey.

It was kind of the parish church for Hyde and had been built there at the same time as Hyde Abbey. Took it upon himself to kind of gather up all the bones so they could be given a decent re-burial. And there's actually a record in the church register of five shillings being paid, which presumably refers to him giving John Mellar five shillings to actually take all the boat. So then he was given all the bone and the idea was originally that they wanted to put them into a niche. They wanted to build

a new niche in the church wall. A bit like the mortuary chest that you have in the Winchester Cathedral to have the same idea. They would be buried in a nice kind of wooden chest in a niche in the wall in St. Botholomew. That didn't have also reported by John Mellar slightly later on when he

wrote a pamphlet kind of defending his work, that they were re-buried in a brick vault just outside the east end of St Bartholomew's church with a stone slab placed over the top of it. If you went to St. Bartholomew before our project to actually excavate that grave, that's what you would have seen. A small stone slab with a little inscribed cross on it. So everything kind of matches. Okay. And so, and this is what became known as the unmarked grave, isn't it?

Yes, correct. So, I mean, this sounds like such a mad story and it sounds like a completely lost course for archaeology and for trying to work at what's actually happened. And unfortunately, this is actually reasonably common, isn't it, for these things to happen over the years. As you listen to this, me and team history hit are on our way down to the Weddell Sea, joining the expedition mounted by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust to the place where we believe the endurance lies on the seafloor. If we find it, it'll be the greatest underwater discovery since the Titanic. So get ready.

Dan Snow's History Hit podcast is the exclusive place to follow in real time the search for the lost endurance shipwreck in Antarctica with regular episodes and updates dropping in the feed throughout the month. When you come into the story as a modern 21st century scientist trying to see if there's any way of getting to the bottom of it looking at those remains and the backstory? So you were part or you led a team actually taking this unmistory. marked grave excavating it to look at the bones, didn't you, to see if there was any way you

could back up the story that this might be Alfred the Great. So tell us what happened when you did that. Yeah, it was actually under the auspices of a group called Hyde 900. We'd been set up as a community group to kind of celebrate the 900th anniversary of the founding of Hyde Abbey. One of the things they wanted to do was investigate this grave because it was popularly believed that the remains of Alfred and his family were in this grave. but obviously nobody knew, and the grave was getting a bit kind of battered around. Every time the grass was cut in the churchyard, the stone on the top would get knocked a little bit. So they kind of also wanted to kind of properly honour and work out who was in the grave,

so they could be properly recorded and also then restore the slab because it wasn't kind of stable anymore. Nothing really happened for quite a long time. They got in contact with the University of Winchester to see what could be done, but kind of it was progressing very, very slowly. I wasn't involved right at the beginning. I think I got involved three years after kind of the project has been thought about. And then, actually, an interesting point. It was, I remember watching the press conference on the identification of the remains of Richard B.

I think it was in 2012, I believe, September 2012 or something. And then one of the people who was involved with Hyde 900 was a journalist for the times, I believe, and he then kind of let it be known to his journalist friends that there was this similar possible story in Winchester of the remains of Alfred the Great Being in this tomb. So then it went a bit crazy in terms of press interest about the unmarked grave and what we were going to do and everything else. So then we had to kind of very hurriedly think about what exactly we were going to do because there was this massive press interest. interesting. We were actually slightly worried that people might try and disturb the grave themselves

because it's kind of hidden away behind the church. People could possibly have gone in the night and actually tried to open the tomb up themselves. So we got an emergency church faculty grave and remove the remains so they could be protected. So we did a one-day excavation of the tomb, removed all the bones from it. There was quite a lot of quite well-preserved human remains within the tomb. They were then taken to winter. at the university. Then we had to wait again to get the official permissions to actually be able to examine the remains and take samples. We did a full skeletal analysis of all of the remains, managed to re-associate them into five individuals and then an extra leg. And there were five skulls.

So we could put five individuals back together pretty well because there was good differences in bone colour and size and obviously age and everything else that we could use to determine who belongs to who. But obviously the kind of the main question was, who were the remains of the remains before they were put into the tomb in the 1860s? So there was a very nice photograph of the five skulls laid out next to one another on the table top. So we were able to compare the skulls with that photograph. So we could see, yes, these are definitely the same skulls. So at least we're definite that these are the same remains that went into the grave in the 1860s. Those remains, which you have to presume they are, they are the remains that were excavated from Hyde Abbey.

We know they're the same ones that went into the tomb. So, okay, that's one good piece of information. So then, of course, who are they? So kind of the best evidence that we could get was to do a radiocarbon date. Because obviously we know Alfred died in 899, Edward died in 924. So if we're talking about our Friedian royal family, we're talking about kind of early to mid-10th century. Whereas with Hyde Abbey, founded in it like 11-10,

there wouldn't be any burial then until 11-10 and then onwards. So we're talking about quite a big gap between the two sets of dates that you would expect. We also know there was kind of very little activity on the site in between, or should I say, before Hyde Abbey was built on the site. So there shouldn't be human remains just that were kind of from earlier activity on the site of Hyde-Aby. There was pretty much not in there. It was water meadows. It had not really been used for hundreds of years.

So there shouldn't be just earlier activity. So we thought, right, okay, we've got these two sets open for. Well, kind of what I was hoping for was, are we going to get 10th century? But we did the radio carbon date. And all of the remains were medieval. So the earliest skeleton was probably one of the earliest burials at the site of Hyde Abbey. I think the date was something like 1050 to 1150 or something. They were probably one of the first burials made at the site.

But then the dates went on up until the 15th century. Right. So we know for a fact they are not Alfred and his family. So then we thought, okay, that's another end point. They are medieval people who were buried at Hydaabbe, but they're not Alfred in his family. So that sounds like that might have been it, doesn't it in a way? But actually it wasn't quite.

because I know you then didn't want to quite give up on it and find out what happened to all of these remains from the site. So you went to have a look in Winchester Museum, I believe, and looking at some other collections of bones. Is that right? Correct. Yeah. And what did you find there? Yeah, there's been a community project in the 1990s

to investigate kind of everything that had happened at the site of Hyde Abbey post-dissolution. So the plan was not that they would excavate any intact medieval context. from the site, just that they would look at all the disturbance that had happened. And obviously, one of the things they were interested in was looking at the disturbance in the east end of the church at the time when the prison was built and everything else. So they found these large pit features in the east end of the church, actually three different picking at the evidence, it would seem to suggest that one of them dated to the time when they

were building the prison. One of them dated to John Mellor's excavations in the church. church and one of them was actually a later mayor of Winchester who was also interested in Alfred because he was also called Alfred so he did some excavation at the site of Hydavi as well in the late 1890s so they had these three kit features they've also done quite a lot of work in the rest of the site as well so if they've done this work there must be human remains surely and i was originally told no we just there was just one piece of pelvis that has been bound and they'd had it radio carbon dated and it was 17th century and there wasn't anything else and I thought that seems very strange to me like really this is a abbey site with a big cemetery what do you mean there's no human remains

so I actually went to the curator and said do you have any human bone from these excavations and she was like oh yeah we've got two boxes full of it I was like oh can I have a look then so I was able to then kind of map human bones had been found in and then I was really interested in the remains that had been found in any features that have been excavated in the east side of the church. So there were a few kind of scattered about, because if we're talking about these bones from the house, our freedom or family being thrown about at the time that the prison was built, I thought, well, maybe they'd ended up in other features that had been in there in the 1990s and then have been excavated. So I picked these particular bits of bone, and we had them radiocarbonated. I think there were

at five or six. Again, we got the same results, apart from what, which was a relatively small part of an adult male pelvis, probably a male in his 40s, maybe early 50s. That radio carbon date was ninth to tell you. It was exactly the right date for either Alfred Edward, or another male member of the family. Interestingly, actually, in terms of the fact that John Meller was very adamant that he'd found remains. of Alfred and the 18th, Elvis, was actually in the backfill of his pit. He may well have

in the whole project, but it's interesting in terms of, if you're looking at who it could belong to, you can narrow it down quite well because we have a list of the people who we think are the ones, the members of the family who were buried in Hyde Abbey, and really the

only ones who match in terms of the age and the sex, the else is either the wrong sex or either completely the wrong age. So we're talking like other members of the family who were buried, they were in their late teens, early 20s. I mean, there's definitely no way that this was... Is there any other way of working out?

So one of the things that... As a kind of a byproduct of doing the radiocarbon dating, you get isotope data on the carbon and nitrogen as taken as kind of standards. And I got a colleague at Durham University, Corey Filippeck, to have a look at the results for... And I'd talk to some people, and they seem to be very, very strange these results.

The ratios for the carbon and the nitrogen seemed a bit odd. They weren't really consistent with other ones that I'd see. And then she was thinking, well, seems to be that this person was not eating very much animal protein at all. But the nitrogen seems to have an influence from kind of fresh water or brackish water fish, so something like eel. In the late Saxon period, eel was kind of a high-status food. The person was eating a lot of eel, but not much animal protein. A lot of the historical sources, medieval sources, talk about Alfred is having had some very severe gastrointestinal problems that he suffered with really kind of most of his life. And it's been suggested maybe that was Crohn's disease.

And animal proteins in the diet actually exacerbate the symptoms of Crohn's disease. So could avoiding eating meat and he was eating eel instead? He was able to choose his diet. so he could kind of like pick the things he wanted to eat that would not exacerbate his symptoms. Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely possible, isn't it? And that is one of the things that the sources make quite clear and that he was quite a sickly person, especially towards the end of his life. And things like carbon and nitrogen isotopes can definitely show it's not just diet,

but sometimes also the impact that health conditions have had on that diet. So that's absolutely a really intriguing perspective on that, I think. So you have quite a lot there. So you've got the right location. you've got the right history of it, you've got the right date, and you've got some of these other clues. Would something like ancient DNA be able to solve this, do you think? I mean, the problem with ancient DNA is you're always talking about who do you compare it to

because we don't, obviously we don't have any other close members of his family to compare the DNA to. I mean, I've had quite a few emails from people over the past few years since this project has become in the public eye saying, oh, I'm good. 23rd great grandson of King Alfred, can you take a DNA sample from me? I'm like, well, I don't think that would really help. So the way it has to go would be to be able to take a comparative sample from another archaeological skeleton who would know to be related to Alfred, but then who is that? Like, we don't really have them.

There was some work done on the supposed skeleton of Alfred's granddaughter, Eidgis in Magdeburg a few years ago by the University of Bristol, actually it was. we've had suggestions in the past that we could compare the two individuals and approaches have been made to actually do that but nothing has actually come of it up to the present time. I mean, if there are any other individuals that could be compared if there's individuals within the Morchby chest, maybe that are relations, then there's always the possibility of doing that,

whether it would produce results or not, I don't know. No, I think that would definitely have to be the only way, hasn't it? So, I mean, but it's an exciting one because we are starting now to be able to do much more with these family relationships. So it is possible that in another 10, 20 years, I mean, we can now do things we couldn't do 20 years ago. So perhaps move fast forward another 20 years, maybe we will be able to put those connections together and see it's quite an exciting one. But for now, it does seem, I mean, I think all your work is definitely bringing us much closer to solving that puzzle of what happened to him. But we're still still a little bit uncertain, aren't we? Yeah, I mean, the only other possibility.

is there more of him to be found is that when I was revising my report on the remains and the work on the unmarked grave, I actually went into the archives in Winchester and I found what I first thought was just a reprint of the Henry Howard paper to the Antiquary Society about the work that had been done at Hyde Abbey during the time of the building of the prison. And I, so I initially wasn't interested, but then I flipped through it and I found that the, end of it, there was a little note that had been appended to it by the vicar at the time. He was called, well, the delightfully, William Williams. And he said that, actually, no, Henry Howard was wrong when he said the bones had been thrown about. He'd actually been able to ascertain that a pit had been dug. Just in the corner of the grounds of Hyde Abbey, it said just where the bridge went over the mill stream, the bridge is still there.

and he said that all the remains had been reverently reburied in this pit. And interestingly, that pit is now under the gardens of some of the houses that were built in the 19th century in that area. So there's a possibility that if such a pit does exist, that maybe there are more remains of Alfred and Edward and other members of the family to find at some point. Fantastic. I very much look forward to following that story and seeing if anything comes out of it.

Katie, that's absolutely brilliant. This is such an amazing detective story and I think for one of the, somebody who's hailed as one of England's greatest kings of the early medieval period to end up like this, it's rather odd but I think there's, there is some promise there for the future, isn't there? Yeah, there's avenues of inquiry still

that could be open. Maybe one day we'll find more of him than just a little bit of his pelvis. Fantastic. Well, I certainly hope so. Katie, thank you so much for joining me today and telling me about your work. It was a real pleasure to have you here. Yeah, thank you very much for inviting me

and it's been really good to talk about it again. It's been a while. Thank you so much, everyone, for listening today. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman, and this has been an episode of Gone Medieval. If you enjoy the podcast, do remember to subscribe, and feel free to leave us a review if you like to. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter Medieval Mondays. Just look at the episode notes in the place you've got this podcast,

and that will tell you exactly how to do that. Thank you again for listening.