[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/GettyImages-1036112882.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tFor 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThat was not its original place of burial,\u201d Warwick Rodwell, a consultant archaeologist at Westminster Abbey, told the Guardian<\/em>. 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. \u201cWhen 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,\u201d the study reads.<\/p>\n \n\tThe 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\u2019s 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\u2019s Church.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThey 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,\u201d he writes, rejecting the suggestion that this was a ritual decapitation of the kind found in some Romano-British cemeteries.<\/p>\n \n\tAnalysis 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. \u201cThe deceased was undeniably of high status\u2014almost certainly an ecclesiastic,\u201d he continued, pointing to the large cross carved across the lid as further support.<\/p>\n \n\tRodwell concluded that the skeleton likely belonged to one of two abbots: \u00c6lfwig, who died in about 1020 after a 27-year tenure, or his successor, Wulfnoth, who died around 1049. If forced to pick, Rodwell favors \u00c6lfwig, writing that \u201cthe fact that \u00c6lfwig was already a monk of Westminster might favour him.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/skeleton-roman-sarcophagus-westminster-abbey-study-1234803556\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/GettyImages-1036112882.jpg?w=1024″] 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2212941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2212941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2212941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2212941\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2212941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2212941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2212941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}