Westminster Abbey's Roman sarcophagus mystery remains have been identified!
Finally!
If you’re like me, you’ve been waiting with bated breath to find out just who is inside the Roman sarcophagus inscribed as carrying Valerius Amandinus that was unearthed at Westminster Abbey in 1869. And folks… we finally have an answer!
This late-Roman/fourth-century limestone sarcophagus was discovered on the grounds of Westminster Abbey, near the nave (the west wing of the Abbey that contains many graves) in 1820 but not dug up for forty-nine more years. (If you’re wondering why anyone was shocked to find a coffin in a churchyard, in the first place, I get that… though bodies buried at Westminster are not buried in the ground; furthermore, the area where the sarcophagus was found had been the yard of a sacristy during the reign of Henry III, who ruled from to 1207 to 1272, and not a traditional burial ground of any kind. So okay, I get why they may have been surprised.)
But it was dug up, and it was discovered to be late-Roman, thanks to the Latin words and the Roman symbols carved on the side. There was just one problem… the body inside it definitely wasn’t the original one that belonged in there. There was nothing Roman about the burial, at all, and no other Roman items were found nearby. (Modern scholars, researching the sarcophagus in 2018, were surprised by the body, as well, considering that the 19th century records said that the body was lost after it was discovered.)
So, who was put in that coffin? And why?
Radiocarbon dating allowed researchers to determine that the corpse was from the late 10th century or early 11th. Scientists further determined that the body was male, and, when he died, stood at 5ft 9in tall and and was between 35 and 49 years old. Prof Warwick Rodwell, an archaeological consultant at Westminster, said there are two candidates for who the body could belong to: an abbot named Ælfwig, who died in 1020, or an abbot named Wulfnoth, who died in 1049. Rodwell told The Guardian that “the re-used sarcophagus was most likely interred in the eastern arm of the abbey church, with the lid as a floor slab, before being dug up and reburied during the construction work of Henry III.”
It’s thrilling to have this mystery come to a close.
Olivia Rutigliano
Olivia Rutigliano is an Editor at Lit Hub and CrimeReads. Her other work appears in Vanity Fair, Vulture, Lapham's Quarterly, AirMail, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Baffler, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Politics/Letters, The Toast, Truly Adventurous, and elsewhere. She has a PhD from the departments of English/comparative literature and theatre at Columbia University, where she was the Marion E. Ponsford fellow. She hosts the podcasst "Culture Schlock" at Lit Hub Radio. She is on instagram at @oldebean, twitter at @oldrutigliano, and bluesky at @oliviarutigliano.bsky.social.
