In June 1925 a sarcophagus was found in Dorset’s Sherborne Abbey and broadly reported to be that of ‘Ethelbert’, a ninth-century king of Wessex. Many years of hypothesis adopted, earlier than, in 1952, the Royal Fee on the Historic Monuments of England dated the sarcophagus to the thirteenth century. This could have laid the difficulty to relaxation – however the custom continues to be alive and nicely immediately.
Æthelberht and his brother Æthelbald, each now overshadowed by their youthful sibling Ælfred (‘the Nice’), had been the third and second sons of Æthelwulf, king of Wessex. Each dominated briefly and comparatively uneventfully within the mid-ninth century. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle data that Æthelbald was buried ‘at Sherborne’, and Ælfred’s biographer, Asser, wrote that when Æthelberht too ‘went the way in which of all flesh’, he was ‘interred in honorable sensible at Sherborne, by the facet of his brother’. This a lot is never disputed.
What’s much less clear, nevertheless, is the place the kings had been buried. In his Itinerary, the Sixteenth-century antiquarian John Leland recalled that the brothers had been buried ‘yn a Place behynd the Excessive Altare of S. Marie Chirch’. John Hutchins, an 18th-century antiquarian, thought it ‘possible these princes had been first buried within the porch, and afterwards eliminated close to the excessive altar’. Certainly, it’s solely doable that the burials had been translated when the church was rebuilt, first below Bishop Ælfwold within the mid-Eleventh century, and once more below Bishop Roger of Salisbury within the early twelfth. Apart from these antiquarians’ testimonies, nevertheless, each written centuries after the brothers died, there’s little or no proof for the kings’ whereabouts immediately.
It was, subsequently, optimistic at greatest for the vicar of Sherborne in 1925, Reverend Canon Stephen Harold Wingfield Digby, reporting the invention of a ‘giant stone coffin’ to the editor of the Spectator, to think about it ‘extremely possible that that is one other Royal Tomb’. However whether or not or not his perception was honest, as a result of precarious funds of an interwar marketing campaign to revive the abbey’s medieval Woman Chapel, the ‘rediscovery of Ethelbert’ – or the same story – had nearly turn into a necessity to revive assist for the scheme.
The Woman Chapel had been bought to Sherborne College after the Dissolution, partially demolished, and the stays then transformed right into a dwelling for the headmaster in 1560. The concept to ‘restore’ it for worship doubtless originated within the mid-Nineteenth century, and was in all probability the brainchild of the Tractarian vicar from 1854 to 1868, Reverend Edward Harston. The Excessive Church journal the Ecclesiologist reported on the proposal from 1856, however the first concrete step was taken in 1860 when the native squire, George Wingfield Digby, repurchased the chapel from the varsity, in all probability below Harston’s affect. The scheme was deserted, nevertheless, and nothing extra was performed till 1917, when it was taken up once more as a struggle memorial and commemoration of the anticipated day of peace by Reverend Canon Digby, the then-squire, Main Frederick James Bosworth Wingfield Digby, and the verger, George King. However not everybody was supportive.
Not least of the opponents was Albert Reginald Powys, a brother of the writers John C., Theodore F., and Llewelyn, all of whom had attended Sherborne College. From 1912 Albert served because the secretary to the Society for the Safety of Historical Buildings, by which capability he effected a vigorous marketing campaign to discourage potential benefactors to the Woman Chapel restoration, which threatened to wreck a lot of the post-Reformation material. Regardless, the works started in September 1921, however the affect of Powys’ opposition is revealed by a letter of 1922 from Reverend Canon Digby to his parishioners, by which he wrote that progress was being ‘held up largely as the results of a marketing campaign mainly engineered and fortified by those that have little or nothing to do with … Sherborne’. By the summer time of 1925, £4,000 was nonetheless required for the completion of the chapel. It was fortuitous, subsequently, {that a} sarcophagus was found by development employees on 4 June.
Weeks earlier than Reverend Canon Digby’s letter appeared within the Spectator, the story had made worldwide information. The Irish Catholic Herald reported the invention of ‘a coffin which is meant to be that of Ethelbert, King of the West Saxons’, and scores of nationwide and regional papers adopted go well with. Sadly, the identification of the sarcophagus as Æthelberht’s had been made with none skilled opinion, and the extra particulars that got here to gentle, the tougher it grew to become to keep up. The bones contained in the sarcophagus, for example, had been evidently these of a person too tall ever to have fitted inside. It additionally grew to become clear that a number of medieval sarcophagi, together with one believed to be that of Æthelbald, had been discovered within the abbey all through the Nineteenth century. Certainly, it’s doubtless that the ‘Ethelbert coffin’ itself was a sarcophagus found and reburied in 1801, its conjectured identification with royalty having been publicly denounced on the time.
Nonetheless, echoing the recognized burial of Ælfred at close by Winchester, the 1925 discover struck a chord with an interwar public nonetheless captivated by the panorama and historical past of ‘historical Wessex’, popularised, for instance, by the novels of Thomas Hardy. Sherborne Abbey noticed a near-record variety of guests over the summer time that adopted, and the story rapidly filtered into journey literature, such because the Nice Western Railway’s guidebook, Abbeys (1925), by the medievalist and horror-writer, M.R. James.
The extent of the fundraising crucial to finish the Woman Chapel means that the ‘rediscovery’ finally did little to enhance the undertaking’s funds. Furthermore, whereas the misidentification endured nonetheless, it’s now clear that, wherever they’re, the royal brothers stay as but undisturbed.
Francis Brown is a PhD pupil within the Archaeology and Historical past Division on the College of Exeter.
