Westminster Abbey. Photograph: Alamy
Posted on 09/26/2015 10:54:49 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The bones of men who may have witnessed the tumultuous events of 1066 in Westminster Abbey, when one king was buried and two were crowned in a year, have been discovered along with the skeleton of a three-year-old child buried under Victorian drainage pipes just outside the wall of Poet's Corner...
The skeleton, too small and poorly preserved to determine the sex without further scientific tests, appears to have been a person of some status, since he or she was buried in a wooden coffin, unlike some of the monks buried nearby. The child was far too young to be an abbey apprentice or servant, Rodwell said.
The remains of at least 50 individuals, all believed to date from the 11th or early 12th century -- including a man buried in a grand coffin made of Barnack stone from Northamptonshire, whose skull was stolen by Victorian workmen -- were found by the archaeologists after a 1950s lavatory block was demolished to make space for a new tower, which will eventually bring visitors up into the attics of the building.
Many of the bones, including skulls and leg bones stacked up into dense piles like firewood, were found under Victorian drainage pipes. These remains were placed there more than 500 years earlier by workmen building the great new abbey, which cost Henry III the then staggering sum of £45,000. Some skulls have square holes left by the pickaxes of Henry's workmen...
When Henry demolished Edward the Confessor's church and began his own massive construction project, the land was dug up, and they were all reburied in a layer under the surface of what was the 13th-century masons' yard, littered with chips of the stone used to build a platform to take the enormous weight of the new building.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Westminster Abbey. Photograph: Alamy
Interesting.
Remains of King Richard found under a parking lot recently.
Now a well-to-do child, ID unknown, is discovered, its eternal resting place invaded by a sewer pipe?
There have been so many changes in population and regime, I guess it’s not surprising that the memorial (whatever it may have been) was lost.
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