Mystery Skeleton in Roman Sarcophagus Beneath Westminster Abbey May Be a Medieval Abbot, Study Says

For two centuries, Westminster Abbey has harbored a mystery: Whose skeleton was discovered within a Roman sarcophagus unearthed beneath its foundations? Two Anglo-Saxon abbots are in the running, according to a new archaeology study.

The limestone sarcophagus was discovered in 1820 and officially excavated in 1869 from what is now a grassy strip along the north side of the abbey’s nave. In the Middle Ages, it was the yard of the Great Sacristy, built during the reign of Henry III. How, then, did a fourth-century Roman sarcophagus end up beneath the yard? Deepening the mystery, no Roman artifacts were found in successive investigations of the site, even though the sarcophagus bears a Latin inscription to one Valerius Amandinus.

“That was not its original place of burial,” Warwick Rodwell, a consultant archaeologist at Westminster Abbey, told the Guardian. In the Journal of the British Archaeological Association, he argues that the sarcophagus was originally entombed in a recess in a mausoleum wall, an honor reserved for wealthy and important individuals. “When Henry III began to rebuild the abbey in the 1240s, this was one of the burials exhumed for relocation, and it was reinterred in the newly constructed sacristy courtyard in c. 1258,” the study reads.

The sarcophagus has been on display at Westminster Abbey for more than 150 years, with occasional breaks for expert analysis, most recently in 2018, when the abbey was preparing to display it in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries. It was taken to a laboratory, where its lid was removed to reveal a skeleton whose skull lay by its feet. Rodwell attributes the disturbance to curious grave-diggers employed by St. Margaret’s Church.

“They were doubtless the culprits who extracted the skull and long bones, out of macabre curiosity, and carelessly put them back without regard to their correct locations,” he writes, rejecting the suggestion that this was a ritual decapitation of the kind found in some Romano-British cemeteries.

Analysis of the remains found a man who stood 5 feet 9 inches (about 1.75 meters) and died aged 35 to 49. Researchers sent a sample of bone from the skeleton to the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre for carbon dating, which placed it between 987 and 1052 CE, in the late Anglo-Saxon period. “The deceased was undeniably of high status—almost certainly an ecclesiastic,” he continued, pointing to the large cross carved across the lid as further support.

Rodwell concluded that the skeleton likely belonged to one of two abbots: Ælfwig, who died in about 1020 after a 27-year tenure, or his successor, Wulfnoth, who died around 1049. If forced to pick, Rodwell favors Ælfwig, writing that “the fact that Ælfwig was already a monk of Westminster might favour him.”