Mystery Skeleton in Roman Sarcophagus at Westminster Abbey Identified as Likely Abbot

A skeleton found inside a Roman sarcophagus beneath Westminster Abbey belonged to a high-status Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastic, most likely the abbot Ælfwig, who died around 1020. That is the conclusion of Warwick Rodwell, consultant archaeologist at Westminster Abbey, published in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association.

The limestone sarcophagus has puzzled the abbey for two centuries. Workers discovered it in 1820, and archaeologists officially excavated it in 1869 from what is now a grassy strip along the north side of the nave. In the Middle Ages, the spot served as the yard of the Great Sacristy, built during the reign of Henry III.

How did a fourth-century Roman coffin get there?

The mystery ran deeper than mere location. The sarcophagus bears a Latin inscription to one Valerius Amandinus, yet successive investigations of the site turned up no Roman artifacts at all.

"That was not its original place of burial," Rodwell told the Guardian. He argues the sarcophagus was first entombed in a recess in a mausoleum wall — an honor reserved for the wealthy and important. "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.

In other words, Henry III's masons moved a Roman coffin to make way for a new church. The medieval relocation record explains the odd placement; it does not explain the bones inside.

Whose bones are they?

The sarcophagus has been on display at the abbey for more than 150 years, with occasional breaks for analysis. The most recent came in 2018, ahead of its installation in the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries. Conservators took it to a laboratory and removed the lid.

They found a skeleton with its skull lying by its feet. Rodwell attributes the disturbance not to ritual decapitation of the kind found in some Romano-British cemeteries, but to clumsier hands: 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.

Analysis of the remains showed a man who stood 5 feet 9 inches (about 1.75 meters) and died between the ages of 35 and 49. A bone sample went to the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre for carbon dating, which placed the man between 987 and 1052 CE — the late Anglo-Saxon period, centuries after Valerius Amandinus.

"The deceased was undeniably of high status—almost certainly an ecclesiastic," Rodwell said, pointing to the large cross carved across the lid as further support.

So which abbot is it?

Rodwell narrows the field to two candidates: Ælfwig, who died in about 1020 after a 27-year tenure, or his successor, Wulfnoth, who died around 1049. If forced to choose, he backs Ælfwig. "The fact that Ælfwig was already a monk of Westminster might favour him," he writes.

A definitive identification may never arrive; carbon dating cannot split a century finely enough to separate two men who died 29 years apart. The Diamond Jubilee Galleries, at least, now display a Roman coffin with a considerably more Anglo-Saxon occupant than its inscription promises.