The Bone Chests

Lads on tour...

On 14 December 1642, Parliamentarian soldiers fighting in the early stages of the English Civil War stormed into Winchester Cathedral, wreaking havoc.

Like many cathedrals in England, and indeed throughout Europe, Winchester was a repository of accumulated objects and human remains, imbued with historical and sacred significance. Among its most prized possessions were ten wooden chests placed on top of the finely carved stone screens that surrounded the central presbytery.

In the 1520s, Bishop Richard Fox had placed them there and they were reputed to contain the remains of various pre-Conquest kings and bishops, as well as one queen and one post-Conquest king (William Rufus).

For the soldiers that day, the cathedral and its sacred objects represented everything they had been told to despise: a Popish temple to superstition and idolatry.

Or perhaps they were just drunk young men who had been given an excuse to let off some steam by smashing stuff up. Either way, they managed to clamber up the screens to the boxes, throw them to the floor, and scatter the contents. Eventually they were stopped by outraged onlookers and their own commanders, but not before the damage had been done.

Today, we are left with six chests. If there was any ordering to the original ten chests, that is long gone. Attempts to examine the contents of those boxes demonstrate that each contains a mixed collection of bones from various persons.

What is the book about?

The book interweaves a narrative history of West Saxon and then English history, corresponding roughly to the persons purported to be contained in the mortuary chests, with a history of the chests themselves. It is an effective narrative device – the changes of perspective add a poignancy to the stories told and raise interesting questions about the continued relevance of physical remains to the modern world.

The mortuary chests

The chests themselves purport to contain:

• the remains of seven pre-Conquest kings of the West Saxons and then England (including Cynegils, the first Christian King of Wessex),
• one post-conquest King (William II 'Rufus'),
• one queen (Emma of Normandy),
• and two pre-conquest bishops (including Wini, the first Bishop of Winchester).

The book is roughly structured around those individuals. In part, it is a reasonably conventional narrative history of pre-conquest Anglo-Saxon England (with a focus on the West Saxons). I enjoyed this aspect of the book as a useful recap on a period of history that I often struggle to get my head around.

But, in a broader sense, this book is about old things, where they end up, and whether those things matter.

Pillaging Swedes

At the start of the book, the author tells the story of a gospel book originally given to Christ Church Canterbury by an ealdorman named Alfred and his wife Waerburg; from the inscription it can be inferred that the book was then stolen by the Vikings, then ransomed back by Alfred and Waerburg. It is now owned by the National Library of Sweden.¹

Knowing where the bodies are buried

The chief focus of the book though is on the remains of bodies rather than things, and dead people can be surprisingly mobile.

In the book's epilogue, we're told that the rediscovery of the body of Richard III in 2012 lead to an increase in visitor numbers to Leicester Cathedral from 30,000 to 160,000, with all the associated benefits to the local economy that brought, in a curious parallel to the medieval economics which drove monastic communities to compete for saintly and historic relics.

It was exactly this type of economic and political one-upmanship that resulted in bodies being continually chopped up, parcelled out, and moved about in what can appear, to modern readers, as a little ghoulish.

St Swithun's Day

We know remarkedly little about the life of St Swithun, Bishop of Canterbury, but rather a lot about his afterlife: he died in 863 and was buried outside the Old Minster. There appears to be little indication that his original burial was anything out of the ordinary for a former Bishop. But by 971, he was a saint and posthumous miracle worker. So, on 15 July (thereafter designated as St Swithun's Day), his body was transferred² as part of an enormously elaborate procession, to a more befitting site inside the Old Minister, with a gold and silver reliquary to contain his remains.

We know this because of detailed accounts of the day which survive, including a 3,400-line poem, the longest surviving pre-Conquest Anglo-Latin poem. In recounting these events, a great deal of emphasis was put on making sure everyone knew that: (i) his body was in great shape when it was dug up (apparently it smelt nice); and (ii) his remains were treated with care and solemnity, including giving him his first wash for 108 years.

Who cares (about the remains of an eighteenth-century Russian military commander) wins

In medieval England, where and how a person was buried mattered a lot (and the more important/saintly the person, the more important the burial needed to be).

In case we think that we have moved on from this, the author provides interesting modern parallels. I've already mentioned the re-discovery of the remains of Richard III in 2012.

But even more topical is the example of Russian special forces who, in 2022, the author tells us, launched a raid on St Catherine's Cathedral in Kearson with the sole objective of stealing the remains of eighteenth-century Russian commander Grogory Alexandrovich Potemkin, who annexed Crimea in 1798, and was a lover of Catherine the Great. The current whereabouts of Potemkin's remains are now unknown. What is clear is that belief in the power of physical remnants of the past to confer political power and legitimacy endures.

Who is in the chests?

The book also includes some investigative work on trying to work out the contents of the six remaining mortuary chests of Winchester Cathedral. The author recounts the various attempts which have been made over the years to examine the contents of the boxes and try and work out whose remains are contained within them.

What has been clear for some time is that they are now a jumbled collection of odds and sods from various individuals (the Parliamentarian soldiers obviously did a fairly good job of creating havoc with them on that December morning, although they were probably in a bit of a mess even before that).

Since 2012, the University of Bristol has been involved in a project to examine the contents of the chests using the latest DNA and radiocarbon methods of analysis, and that project remains ongoing. DNA analysis can help establish the relationship of the remains to one another and radiocarbon dating can give an indication of when they died.

At least 23 partial skeletons have been reconstructed, and the researchers are confident that one of those is likely to be those of Emma of Normandy (wife, not at the same time, of both Æthelred the Unready and the Cnut the Great, and great-aunt of William the Conqueror). The chests have also been found to contain two young men aged between 11 and 15, who the author speculates could be a son and grandson of William the Conqueror, both called Richard.

As for the others, there is less certainty, but the age of the bones roughly matches the period for the kings and bishops claimed to be included in the chests.

What did I think of the book?

This book combines a straight narrative history of West Saxon England with a story of the mortuary chests themselves.

Layered over that are reflections on the significance of physical remains and their continued relevance today.

The book is also a work of detection, using a combination of historical sources and modern scientific techniques to reach tentative conclusions about whose remains may be contained in the chests.

The author combines all these different elements very successfully. Rather than being confused, the changes of perspective are thought-provoking and enhance the book's readability.

Conclusion

This book is a fascinating insight into how Anglo-Saxons treated important remains, saintly and secular, and how those remains have survived (or not) the vicissitudes of historical disruption ever since. Having read this book, my conclusion is that if you were an Anglo-Saxon who wanted your remains to be left in peace, you were better off being a peasant.

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