IT HAS taken greater than a decade of painstaking work, but 1300 bones ascribed to early-medieval bishops and royalty — which were returned to 6 mortuary chests at Winchester Cathedral after its ransacking throughout the Civil War — have been tentatively matched to individuals and are to be reinterred.
The stays, a lot of them believed to have been buried originally within the cathedral’s precursor, the Anglo-Saxon Old Minster, date from the late Anglo-Saxon and early-Norman periods. Names in Latin on the edges of the painted chests are Cynegils, Cynewulf, Æthelwulf, Eadred, Edmund, Cnut, William Rufus, Bishop Wine, Bishop Alwine, and Queen Emma.
WINCHESTER CATHEDRALWINCHESTER CATHEDRAL
A up to date chronicler on the time of the Minster demolition recorded that “kings were mixed with bishops and bishops with kings”. An 1685 account of Oliver Cromwell’s ransacking of the cathedral in 1642 describes how soldiers “threw down the Chests, wherein were deposited the bones of the Bishops, the like they did to the bones of William Rufus, of Queen Emma, of Hardecanutus and [. . .] all the remaining of the West Saxon Kings.”
Several chests were destroyed. Four survived, and two were later recreated. Their contents were reported to have been scattered across the pavement of the cathedral. Having smashed all of the windows that they may reach, soldiers were then reported to have thrown bones at those out of reach, “with their swords, muskets or rests”.
The Mortuary Chests Project began in 2012 and has involved specialist academics, conservators, cathedral staff, and volunteers, including a team of biological anthropologists from the University of Bristol.
By 2019, a minimum of 23 partial skeletons had been reconstructed, and there was a suggestion that one among these was Queen Emma, daughter of Richard I, Duke of Normandy, the wife of two successive Kings of England, Ethelred and Cnut, and mother of King Edward the Confessor and King Hardacnut.
Professor Kate Robson Brown, who led the investigation, told the Church Times at the moment: “We cannot make sure of the identity of every individual yet, but we’re certain that this can be a very special assemblage of bones.” (News, 17 May 2019)
The curator at Winchester Cathedral, Eleanor Swire, said that the project demonstrated “the combined power of science, the study of human stays, and historical research to find latest information in regards to the six mortuary chests and their occupants which might not have been available to us a generation ago”.
Radiocarbon dating has guided the reinterment: individuals from broadly similar periods have been placed together in the identical chest. The project’s findings on the individuals within the chests are expected later this 12 months, and will probably be “highly significant within the fields of archaeology, history and genetics”, a cathedral statement suggests.
