In search of Alfred

I sat behind the bicycle shed of Winchester’s Historic Resources Centre, holding a fragment from what was probably the coffin of the greatest of all our monarchs, the king who founded our nation and gave it a moral purpose and direction: Alfred, surnamed by posterity the Great. Labled ‘HA99 22041’, the fragment was visually unimpressive: no inscription, no painting, simply a small piece of light-coloured stone, evidently broken from a larger mass. But it had solved a centuries’ old mystery, for it told us where Alfred had finally been buried.

Alfred died in 899 and was buried, together with his wife and son, in the Old Minster in the heart of Winchester. The remains were transferred to the New Minster and then, in 1110, were removed, in a splendid procession, to a great new abbey that had been built in the village of Hyde just outside the northern walls of the city. With Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries, the abbey was totally destroyed. Leland, Henry VIII’s historian, recorded that during the demolition of the church three lead tablets were found, bearing the names of the royal family, in coffins near the high altar. But these tablets were of a later date than the coffins. Thus Alfred’s grave disappears from history.

In 1788, a bridewell (or prison) was being constructed in part of the abbey grounds. The governor wanted a garden and ordered that the huge lumps of masonry which littered the area be removed. The easiest way to do this was to dig a series of pits and simply push the lumps into them. During the digging, three stone coffins were found, one of which had been completely — and expensively — encased in lead.