The Bone Chests: Unlocking the Secrets of the Anglo-Saxons

WINCHESTER, 1642

Wednesday, 14 December, between 9 and 10 a.m.

In the early winter light, the city of Winchester is quiet. Inside the cathedral, the clergy are calmly going about their business, in this hour of the day set aside for administration. The looming threat to their community has not escaped them and the atmosphere is tense: two days ago, at noon on Monday, 12 December, Sir William Waller’s Parliamentarian soldiers entered the city. The country has descended into civil war, a conflict that has divided all levels of society between those who support the king, Charles I, and those who are for Parliament. Power and religion lie at the heart of the conflict, leaving religious institutions in danger. The clergy can only put their faith in God’s ability to keep them safe.

By now they know that their prayers are sorely needed. After passing through the gates of the city, the troops snatched horses belonging to the cathedral’s estate; verbal threats were enough to seize them. Later that night they broke into the clergy’s houses and the following day was filled with looting of the town at large – it would only be a matter of time before the cathedral fell victim too. So, on this Wednesday morning, there is little hope of defence when, in a sudden attack, invaders force their way into the six-hundred-year-old stone building through its great west door. The assault the soldiers have planned is more than just looting. Instead, it is a statement, their intent clear as they storm through the doors with colours flying, drums beating and torches lit. Some even ride their horses down the central nave of the vast cathedral, with its arcade of arches either side, all the way to the choir, stopping only at the altar. Here the destruction begins in full force: the altar itself is broken apart and the wood carried to a nearby alehouse, along with prayer books and hymnals, torn from their shelves, later to be burned to ashes. The precious organ is smashed, the carved and carefully decorated Old and New Testament stonework flanking the stalls of the choir shattered. With the holiest centre of the cathedral defaced, the soldiers turn to their next target: the mortal remains of the ancient, venerated dead.

The cathedral is filled with tombs, statues and memorials, and the soldiers are thorough. Monuments are wrecked and defaced in acts of wanton vandalism, in order to send a clear message. Finally, they turn their attention to the top of the finely carved stone screens that surround the central presbytery, the cathedral’s beating heart, where religious ceremonies have been performed for nearly seven centuries. There, on a ledge, sit ten neatly spaced wooden chests, five on each side; placed up high to save them from ‘rude and profane hands’ by Richard Fox, the 57th Bishop of the See, in the 1520s. Cnut, Emma, William Rufus, Egbert and numerous other West Saxon kings lie within the chests; as do venerated ancient bishops. On this day in December, the soldiers clamber up the stone arches of the screens to reach their goal, the nimblest among them scurrying up the columns. When they get to the top, cheers and roars of success ring through the din.

Unceremoniously, the sacred chests are ripped open. Inside, bones reverently collected and curated by Fox and his predecessors are callously rifled through. But this is not enough. On the north side of the choir, the soldiers throw down the chests, smashing their contents onto the hard stone floor.

Yet this is a step too far for some of the onlookers. Voices cry out, compelling them to stop, and soon the Parliamentarian commanders take action, restraining their men from throwing down the rest of the chests. Still, the damage is done. The bones of the ancient kings of Wessex lie scattered on the floor of the cathedral, where they are deliberately trampled upon. The remaining chests may be saved but these bones will not be. As the destruction of the building resumes, observers watch in shock as the soldiers pick up the bones and hurl them at the beautifully crafted stained-glass windows that adorn the cathedral. The sacred remains of kings, queens, bishops and saints are used as missiles, shattering the artworks until nothing more than fragments are left on the floor below. Before the soldiers finally leave, they take with them items of silver and gold, anything they can find that is of value and portable: everything that is not, they have defaced or destroyed. The residents of Winchester can but watch as the troops ride through the streets carrying their spoils, some of them even dressed in the priests’ vestments. The desecration of the cathedral is complete, and their message delivered.

It is only hours later, recovering from their terror, that the cathedral clergy begin to pick through the detritus of the onslaught, attempting to return what remains of those sacred bones to a safe place once again.

WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL, 2012

In the southern corridor of the cathedral, a group of people has assembled. Half of them are clad, top to toe, in white paper overalls, with plastic goggles covering their eyes, masks over their mouths and nitrile gloves protecting their hands. For the first time in decades, the six mortuary chests that sit on top of the cathedral choir screens will be opened and their contents forensically analysed, using the latest scientific methods. A metal scaffold has been erected along the length of the stone choir, with a platform running around the narrow ledge where the chests now sit. The gentle voice of the cathedral’s vice-dean travels across the space as he prays for the success of the project and in memory of the deceased. Two members of the forensic team carefully climb the ladder, the sound of metal against stone echoing around the quiet cathedral. When they reach the platform, they move to either side of the central chest, the one inscribed with the name of the eleventh-century king Edmund Ironside. Gently holding on to its sides, they lift the elaborately carved, painted lid and place it on the platform where they stand. Inside the chest, another, simple and unadorned wooden chest is revealed. Using the handles on its short ends, they lift this out too and put it on the platform. Here more members of the team wait with rolls of tin foil; gingerly, they wrap the chest to seal it, securing it with tape, taking every precaution to make sure the contents within are not contaminated. From the ground, a red mechanical cherry-picker slowly lifts a wide pallet towards them; they place the inner chest safely on the pallet and it is lowered to the ground. The process is carefully repeated with the remaining chests, each of them labelled before they are taken, one by one, to the far eastern end of the building. Here the Lady Chapel beyond the retrochoir, one of three smaller spaces usually reserved for quiet worship, has been turned into a temporary laboratory. The bones in the chests cannot leave the cathedral, their home for more than nine hundred years.

Inside the chapel, the team of anthropologists gets to work. The first chest is lifted onto a central table and the tin foil gently removed. Raising the lid, they see bones lying neatly laid out inside, clearly those of several individuals. Before a single bone is touched, the chests are photographed and drawn by hand in intricate detail, so that the exact position of each individual item is known and recorded. Afterwards, the bones are removed one by one and placed in a labelled bag ready to be described, documented, measured and identified. The team’s aim: to catalogue and analyse the remains in an attempt to confirm whether, as they proclaim, the chests really contain the bones of the men and women who, in the space of five hundred years, witnessed and orchestrated the creation of England, fuelled and fortified by the actions of invading and settling Vikings and their descendants.

CHEST I

KINGDOMS

Cynegils d. 643

Æthelwulf d. 858

JUNE 2019

Iwalk down the side aisle of Winchester Cathedral on a blustery and wet summer’s day, jostling for space with locals and tourists taking shelter from the weather. A choir is practising for an evening performance, while a guide points out the tomb of Jane Austen to a group of Americans; a red rose lies wilting on the slab of her grave set into the floor beneath us. Walking across to the centre of the nave, I look up, taking in the vast scale of the stone structure. Winchester Cathedral was once the longest church north of the Alps: when first built, it measured a full 162 metres from end to end.

The current cathedral, like most of its kind, is a patchwork of architectural iterations that only a trained eye can tease apart; each generation has added its enhancements to the eleventh-century structure commissioned by the new Norman elite, as led by the newcomer William the Conqueror. At the time the cathedral formed part of the Normans’ extensive architectural reform of the nation’s churches, a symbol of their desire to make an indelible, physical mark on his new territory. Before London began to play a leading political role around the turn of the eleventh century, Winchester had been highly significant for centuries: a key political and religious centre, first in the kingdom of Wessex, then in the fledgling country of England.

I turn to look towards the broad western front of the cathedral, with its three doorways and vast stained-glass window above, nine frames, or lights, wide. The frontage itself dates to the fourteenth century, its construction having been completed after the Black Death temporarily interrupted progress in the 1340s.

From a distance, there is nothing unusual about the window. The brightly coloured glass set within lead framing seems typical of its kind, and it’s only when you walk up close that you notice that each of the fifty-three separate lights is a mosaic, made up of unevenly sized fragments: occasionally you can see a figure, a head or even a coat of arms, but mostly the glazing is more of an abstract composition. Here you get a glimpse of what the medieval visitor would have seen: an ornate depiction of the life of Christ, with apostles and prophets alongside him. The window is one of the few reminders left of the cathedral’s fate during the Civil War, its original having suffered terribly in the Parliamentarian attack of 1642. After the onslaught all the glass that could be salvaged was diligently collected and kept, until a new mosaic was created some time after 1660.

Although they may be subtle, echoes of the past are all around me in this space. If you look carefully enough, you will no doubt find every century represented, with its religion, history, politics and sentiments, either through the architecture or more directly through the names, graves and actions of people whose lives were entwined with Winchester’s past.

Today, I’ve come here specifically to see the mortuary chests. Turning my back to the window, I walk down the central nave again and just before the north and south transepts could take me either to the left or right, I reach the presbytery and the choir (or quire). A carved wooden screen divides the choir from the nave, separating clergy from worshippers. This is the oldest of the medieval choirs in England to survive largely intact: its elaborately carved wooden screens and furniture depicting foliage and figures, including so-called green men and a falconer, among many figures of a non-biblical nature. Up a few steps, the space is bounded at the other end by the Great Screen rising behind the high altar, an exceptionally intricate stone carved screen originally installed at the bequest of Cardinal Beaufort, one of Winchester’s fifteenth-century bishops. The stone edifice centres on the figure of the crucified Christ, with tiers of statues all around representing the Company of Heaven. The current statues are just over a hundred years old, the originals having been systematically removed and destroyed in the reforms that took place in 1547: in acts of iconoclasm, devout Protestants demolished depictions of religious figures lest they encourage idolatry.

Today, however, with all this lavish craftmanship on display, it is easy to miss the bone chests. On either side of the presbytery are further stone screens separating it from the aisles to north and south. If you look up, you see a ledge several metres up, and here, in each of the six stone arches, a carved, painted and decorated wooden chest has been placed. Those six chests are the last to survive. Of the original ten that were commissioned in the 1520s by Bishop Fox, six were smashed by the Parliamentarians and four remain; the final two are replacements made around 1661.

The chests’ history is an extraordinary and at times tragic tale; their story like something out of a Dan Brown novel. The bones within have survived – just – more than a millennium’s worth of remarkable events, including the raid that left bones scattered and commingled on the cathedral floor. Each chest has a painted, Latin inscription, giving the names of the people allegedly interred within: people who made an indelible mark on the country’s history. Thanks to these mortuary chests, Winchester is the only location in England where so many pre-conquest royals have been buried together in one place.

As I move closer and study each in turn, I see names that I recognise well: William Rufus – son of the Norman conqueror, notoriously described as ‘the evil king who indulged unashamedly in unspeakable debauchery’. There’s Eadred, a tenth-century king who expelled the Norwegian ruler Eric Bloodaxe and brought Northumbria under final English control; King Cynewulf, an eighth-century ruler who secured West Saxon independence on the eve of the first Viking attacks. Cnut the Great, the Viking ruler responsible for England’s neglected invasion, is here too: he is the oft-forgotten king who for nineteen years included England in his Scandinavian empire. Remarkably, a woman is listed among the names as well: Queen Emma, wife first of King Æthelred the Unready, then of Cnut. The daughter of the Duke of Normandy, a powerful queen and mother of kings, who ultimately helped her great-nephew William the Conqueror stake his claim to the country. Ironically, Ælfwine, a bishop famously accused of having an illicit affair with Emma, is named here too.

Yet when you dig into the history of these chests, it is clear that the list of names cannot tell the full story. Written records dating back centuries before the chests were made tell of other names, whose remains may also have become jumbled up inside: more kings and several bishops. By the time of the Norman conquest in the eleventh century, Winchester had become the burial place for the rulers of England, with more recorded in this single place than anywhere else. But why here?

I walk out of the presbytery and into the northern aisle, to take a closer look at the chest in the far corner, inscribed with two names. One, I know well: Æthelwulf, the father of Alfred the Great, who laid the foundations for his son’s immense success. The other I am less familiar with: Cynegils, who died in 648, at a time when there was no cathedral here and not even an England.

A church – likely its first – was built in the city in the seventh century, during the rule of Cenwealh, Cynegils’ son. Emerging from the ruins of a former Roman town, that church was built during Winchester’s fledgling years before it emerged as a major religious and political centre only a few centuries later. The church, later to transform into a minster – a church that was the focal point of a monastic community – then a cathedral, was the jewel in its crown; the city, for a while, the nucleus of the country.

As I stand in the aisle that bustles with tourists, I’m struck by how few people stop to look up at the chests and how, among those few who do glance up, so few seem to appreciate their importance. Are they, I ask myself, really as significant as I think they are? Are such old bones still relevant in the twenty-first century? There is so much we don’t know about these chests’ histories: we’re not even sure if the remains within have anything to do with those who are named on the outside. But perhaps, by untangling the bones, we might get closer to understanding not just who they were but also, why their remains have been preserved, and how their unique life stories fit into broader historical narratives – not least, the creation of England, and the stories we have told about that in the succeeding centuries. But to do so, we need to go back to where this all really began: the story of the kingdom of Wessex.

KINGDOMS

In 611, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle , [1] a king by the name of Cynegils succeeded to the throne in Wessex. In the time since the fall of the Roman empire two centuries earlier, what we now recognise as England had begun to materialise as a series of separate units, one of which was Wessex, the kingdom of the West Saxons, where Winchester is located. The realms’ borders would wax and wane tumultuously over the centuries until England, as a country , began to take shape in the tenth century.

Yet the starting point for these kingdoms following the collapse of Roman rule is still unclear to us. After four centuries of Roman prosperity, in which Britain saw enormous growth in the number of towns, in industry, in agricultural productivity, and significant social and cultural change, the fall of Rome had an abrupt impact. By the end of the fourth century, towns and villas start to be abandoned across Britannia; coins are no longer minted; the production of pottery ceases. Cities such as the once prospering Londinium turn into veritable ghost towns. Life changes for the inhabitants of Britain: with the regular Roman army and members of the civil service either withdrawn or no longer paid in cash, the industries that propped up the economy become unsustainable and subsistence farming returns.

There were a few exceptions. Recent discoveries have challenged the view of an entirely desolate country: at the well-known Roman villa at Chedworth in Gloucestershire, a mosaic has been radiocarbon dated to the middle of the fifth century, well after the production of such crafts [2] was thought to have ceased. It seems some of the people in the south-west were still living in luxury. Overall, however, the change was sudden and severe. Continental sources describe pagan raiders on the shores of Gaul, across the English Channel, in the fifth century and other sources depict the Britons being ravaged by Pictish and Irish attacks from the north. Then, if the sixth-century writer Gildas is to be believed, the real tragedy begins: the Saxons arrive on British shores and bring considerable misery in their wake. Gildas’ tract, known as On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain ( De excidio et conquestu Britanniae ) , states that the Saxons arrived as mercenaries to help fight against attackers from the north and west but later revolted against their allies.

A version of Gildas’ narrative features in most subsequent early English writers’ accounts of their history, taking his words more or less at face value. Somewhere from this point on, then, that origin story, the adventus Saxonum, became an indelible part of English history. But is the story true? Perhaps the most influential early English historian is a monk known as the Venerable Bede, who wrote the Ecclesiastical History of the English People in the eighth century. Living in Jarrow, Northumbria, Bede worked on his history of England for several years before its completion in 731 or shortly thereafter. It has proved one of the most influential and significant early medieval historic accounts ever since and it is, indeed, one of our most valuable sources for this period of English history. In it, Bede elaborates on the arrival of the Saxons, describing the three powerful Germanic tribes – Angles, Saxons and Jutes – that would later become the English people. In the year 449, according to Bede, the Angles or Saxons were invited to come to Britain by a king named Vortigern: they arrived in three longships and were granted lands in the east of the island on the condition that they protected it. However, Bede continues, this disguised their real intention. Instead of guarding the new territory, the newcomers sent word home summoning substantial new forces, which arrived with the aim of subduing the land of the Britons.

Bede’s account is now understood to be deeply problematic: the idea of Germanic settlers arriving with fully formed identities relating to the continental tribes from which they originated is much too simplistic. For one thing, although some other groups were mentioned, Bede failed to mention groups such as the Franks, who are known to have come across the English Channel. More importantly, all the evidence now points to a situation in which identities were far more complex; those early migrants were a melting pot of people and origins. Writing several centuries after the time he describes, Bede was more likely reflecting a desire to explain the emergence of the strong identities that he understood from his own time, to give them a legitimacy by drawing them back into a past that was largely imagined.

There is now widespread agreement that these accounts are at best incomplete and at worst mythical and entirely fanciful. Similarly, the manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which provide a year-by-year account of events going back to the Roman invasions, began to be compiled from the end of the ninth century in the court of King Alfred, with the deliberate intention of creating a unified identity and a legitimisation of the Wessex ruling house.

As origin stories, they must therefore be taken with a pinch of salt. If we look to the archaeological evidence, however, we see this: there are, indeed, correlations between material culture in parts of England and that on the continent. Yet on the whole, in the late fifth century, identities and origins were clearly mixed and multi-faceted. By the time we reach 600, however, the situation had changed considerably and larger, regional identities had been formed, a key aspect of which was the creation of elites: newly minted high-status families operating within social networks where material culture, gift exchange and marriage were all key components.

Identities were, in particular, expressed through the costumes of women. In Norfolk and on either side of the Humber, for instance, starting around 475, well-dressed women wore distinctive metal wrist-clasps sewn to the ends of their sleeves. The clasps hooked together a particular type of cuff, indicating that these women were wearing long-sleeved undergarments of a type known to be fashionable in western Norway. This implies that a certain number of Norwegian women – likely men too – had migrated and within a short space of time the fashion had spread and been widely adapted. Similar trends sprang up elsewhere: in Kent especially, inspiration could be drawn from fashions across the Channel, from the territory of the Franks. Within a few generations, such trends began to solidify into regional social markers. Jewellery and material culture, of course, formed only a small part of a much larger set of practices that altogether composed patterns of sameness and difference; patterns that were recognised as markers of identity. However, how the actual kingdoms that we later recognise came into being still requires some thought. There are two main views on this. The first suggests the idea of continuity, with kingdoms developing from the territories that existed in Roman Britain and areas like the Roman civitas – which had been a form of local government administration – being taken over by new warrior bands. The other view considers the process as being something entirely new, with no continuity and new kingdoms instead forming from the coalescence of smaller units, completely detached from pre-existing territories. There are certainly cases where one or the other makes sense, but it is hard to prove anything either way. However, numerous seventh-century kingdoms appear to map onto the Romano-British civitates and in some parts of the country, place names also suggest continuity: the name Devon relates in some way to the Dumnonii and Cornwall to the Cornovii.

The question of to what extent migration was involved in the making of what later became England remains contentious; some still argue that this Englishness was an entirely internal innovation while for others Bede’s perspective – or something very much like it – is considered the gold standard.

Various scientific methods have been used over the years in attempts to answer this question of migration and understand the relationship between incoming Saxons and native Britons. These have included cranial measurements (phrenology) – a method that fell out of favour after its extensive use in racial stereotyping in the lead-up to the Second World War – and attempts at detecting race in skeletal material. Height and stature, for example: large-scale studies of cemeteries have shown that so-called Anglo-Saxon weapon burials often contained the remains of taller men. These wealthy graves, holding men with one or more weapons, were believed to be those of ‘Saxons’, whereas graves without weapons were more likely to be ‘Britons’. However, there is no such way of detecting race or ethnicity. Height differences may well be genetically determined but equally, nutrition and access to a good diet will have a significant impact as well.

A DNA study recently tried to resolve the question of the size and type of migration events in Britain’s history through the use of modern genetic samples. The study involved analysing the DNA of people alive today, on a large scale, as variations in genetic markers can reflect the movement of people in the past. The work claimed to show clear evidence in England of Saxon migrations, but with only a limited proportion of Saxon ancestry: the researchers estimated [3] the maximum to be 50 per cent in central and southern England, and more likely in the range of 10–40 per cent. Yet this study has drawn criticism for a number of reasons, not least because it is difficult to untangle precisely when genetic changes took place in the past. Migrations from southern Scandinavia to England during the Viking Age, for example, would have seen people with the same genetic background arrive only a few hundred years later.

A more accurate result could come from the study of ancient DNA, the direct analysis of people alive at the time. There is great potential here, as around ten thousand graves [4] from the earliest years of the medieval period have been recovered. In 2022, a team published the results [5] of a large-scale, genome-wide ancient DNA analysis of 278 individuals from England dating to the early medieval period. The dataset was compared to DNA from skeletal remains from elsewhere in north-western Europe, as well as modern DNA, in order to investigate the extent of migration into England. The results were very clear: there had been a high degree of mobility, with up to 76 per cent of ancestry in eastern England deriving from the continental North Sea zone, from a migration that included both men and women of higher and lower status, identified from their gravegoods or other burial markers; in other words, people from all parts of society. There were, however, also individuals with little or no continental northern European (CNE) ancestry. Because the team could also identify family relationships, they found clear evidence, in several cemeteries, of mixing between ancestry groups. In one case, for instance, they showed that a family with several generations of CNE ancestry had integrated with a woman of ancestry they defined as ‘Western British and Irish’ (WBI), and had subsequent children with mixed CNE and WBI ancestry.

But while the team found high levels of migration throughout the sites they studied, there were variations between them; clearly no single pattern could fit all of England. The research showed, for example, more evidence of migration in cemeteries in south-eastern England than elsewhere, something that also fits with the archaeological evidence. When they compared the English dataset with those of other sites in Europe, it became clear that the likely origins of most migrants were to be found in the region that stretches from Denmark, south-western Sweden and northern Germany to the northern Netherlands. Intriguingly, however, they also found evidence of contact with Frankish territories, something that, again, matches the archaeology. The team was also surprised to discover that some of the migrations continued through the entire period, beginning very early on: some samples came from later Roman contexts. Elsewhere, sites like Sedgeford in Norfolk showed migration taking place as late as the eighth century, which has an impact on our understanding of the Viking Age migrations that began not long after.

Isotope analysis of human remains is another way of identifying first-generation migrants. We are, quite literally, what we eat, and our food and drink become the building blocks of all our tissues, from skin and bone to the enamel on our teeth that was formed during our childhood years. As we are constantly evolving organisms, our lunch today turns into the fuel of the cells that create the hair growing out of our scalps in a matter of days. This makes us walking diaries of our lives because what we consume carries with it subtle chemical signals that reflect not just the type of food we eat, but also where it was grown. All elements, such as carbon and oxygen, exist in different isotopes, which are simply atoms with different atomic weights. Variation in the ratios of these isotopes, however, can be specific to particular food types or environments, and those differences are passed up the food chain from soil to grain