A Roman coffin, a medieval abbot: Westminster Abbey's 200-year-old skeleton mystery, solved

When a limestone sarcophagus was dug up beside Westminster Abbey's nave in 1869, it posed a riddle: the coffin was late Roman, inscribed to a wealthy man named Valerius Amandinus — so whose bones were inside? When the lid finally came off in a laboratory in 2018, the skeleton was still there, matching 19th-century drawings: a man of 5ft 9in, aged 35 to 49. Radiocarbon dating placed him not in Roman Britain but in the late 10th or early 11th century. Now the abbey's consultant archaeologist, Prof Warwick Rodwell, writing in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association, has put the clues together — the reused Roman coffin, the powdered-lime burial, the great late Anglo-Saxon cross carved across the lid — and concluded the man was a medieval abbot, most likely Ælfwig, who died around 1020 after some 27 years leading the abbey. A 200-year-old 'who-is-it', answered.