{"id":5187,"date":"2025-06-09T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-09T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/medievalstudies\/?p=5187"},"modified":"2025-06-06T10:30:21","modified_gmt":"2025-06-06T10:30:21","slug":"a-troubled-centenary-for-king-aethelberht-archaeology-and-absence-in-1925","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/medievalstudies\/2025\/06\/09\/a-troubled-centenary-for-king-aethelberht-archaeology-and-absence-in-1925\/","title":{"rendered":"A Troubled Centenary for King\u00a0\u00c6thelberht: Archaeology and Absence in 1925"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In an article for this month\u2019s issue of\u00a0History Today<\/em><\/a>, I wrote about the way in which the discovery of a sarcophagus at Sherborne Abbey on 4 June 1925 was misidentified\u2014certainly on very limited evidence, and possibly intentionally\u2014as that of King\u00a0\u00c6thelberht of Wessex (d. 866), in order to generate publicity and boost support for the restoration of the abbey\u2019s medieval Lady Chapel. This is a subject I\u2019ve also been exploring in an exhibition and lecture series<\/a> that I\u2019ve curated at Sherborne Abbey to mark the centenary, and it\u2019s an offshoot of my PhD research into heritage, modernity, and historical culture at Sherborne Abbey over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based on the evidence I\u2019ve uncovered, I\u2019m convinced that the account I\u2019ve offered in History Today <\/em>is accurate: the discovery of a relatively unremarkable sarcophagus was <\/em>hijacked in support of the Lady Chapel campaign. But something that I didn\u2019t have enough space to get into in the magazine article, and which I\u2019ve tried to pick apart slightly more in the exhibition and lectures, is that this was not the whole story. It cannot have been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is to say: in the first place, why was \u00c6thelberht considered worth \u2018rediscovering\u2019 in the first place? And moreover, given that the \u2018rediscovery\u2019 didn\u2019t actually succeed in precipitating game-changing support for the Lady Chapel restoration\u2014which wasn\u2019t completed until 1934\u2014how and why has the story stuck for so many years? The Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England barely gave the sarcophagus a second glance in 1952, noting that it was \u2018probably 13th-century\u2019 before moving on. And yet the misidentification of the sarcophagus has been repeated a number of times since, and not just in \u2018popular\u2019 literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In answering these questions, there\u2019s no skirting around the fact that the 1920s were an odd time for archaeology and Anglo-Saxon history in particular. The Victorians\u2019 long-standing fascination with the Anglo-Saxons culminated with the \u2018Alfred Millenary\u2019 of 1901 in Winchester, celebrating (roughly) a thousand years since the death of King Alfred \u2018the Great\u2019. But in the decades leading up to this event, the Anglo-Saxons had become increasingly implicated with ideas of race and ethnonationalism in popular and academic discussion, and were frequently deployed in attempts to justify British colonialism. After WWI, the association of the Anglo-Saxons as a \u2018race\u2019 with political and military strength became fraught, and inter-war invocations of King Alfred, for example, were characterised by an ambivalence over quite what the \u2018Anglo-Saxons\u2019 now meant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exeter\u2019s Professor Joanne Parker<\/a> has identified Robinson Jeffers\u2019 poem,\u00a0Ghosts in England\u00a0<\/em>(c. 1929), as representative of this ambivalence. Jeffers\u2019 Alfred haunts the Wessex downs in confusion\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cWho are the people<\/em> \/ And who are the enemy?\u201d He says bewildered,<\/em> \/ \u201cWho are the living, who are the dead?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

And this same sense of lack, of something missing, also characterised the rediscovery of Alfred\u2019s brother, \u00c6thelberht, at Sherborne in 1925.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It didn\u2019t help that no one knew who \u2018King Ethelbert\u2019 was. The press reports on the discovery were saturated with historical information about \u00c6thelberht\u2019s reign to fill the gap because, as The Times<\/em> conceded, \u2018Ethelbert hardly lives in history, and not at all in popular memory like Alfred\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this was ultimately a blessing in disguise, because it gave the journalists something to write about, distracting their readers\u2019 attention from the fact that there was almost nothing to say or see of the sarcophagus itself. Unlike the rediscovery and opening of Tutankhamen\u2019s tomb in 1922\/23, which was mediated to the British public through a series of carefully-curated photographs, only one image of the find at Sherborne appeared in the press: a single, blurry photograph in\u00a0The Times<\/em>, which crucially, and bafflingly, doesn\u2019t actually show the sarcophagus supposedly at the centre of it all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
The sole image of the discovery published in the British press.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Much like the medieval ship burial discovered at Sutton Hoo in 1939, which Dr Fran Allfrey has suggested<\/a> first \u2018[entered] the public arena as a lack, a hole in the ground, an obscured landscape\u2019,\u00a0\u00c6thelberht similarly made his way into the popular consciousness as an absence. However,\u00a0unlike\u00a0<\/em>the find at Sutton Hoo, which was politicised along ethnonationalist lines amid the outbreak of WWII, the re-discovery of\u00a0\u00c6thelberht is striking for how little it was interpreted in this way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, the endurance of the misidentification over the following decades may have been partly down to this precise lack of willingness to question the discovery at the time, to think too much about \u00c6thelberht, and to try to fill the emptiness at the centre of the find.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I\u2019ve been researching and writing about this subject over the last year, I\u2019ve returned several times to another interwar poem, written about Sherborne in the early 1920s by a \u2018C. M. M.\u2019 and published in a pamphlet advertising the Lady Chapel restoration. I keep coming back to it, mainly, because I\u2019m frustrated with my inability to make very much of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few lines about the abbey run\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u2018The preacher\u2019s voice re-echoes down the nave<\/em> \/ Bringing to mind those other far off calls<\/em> \/ Which have resounded in this sacred place,<\/em> \/ Year after year, for centuries complete\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

And so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s fair to say that it stands unfavourably next to Jeffers\u2019 poem. The content is banal, and the language is uninspired. But, whether intentionally or not\u2014in fact, possibly because <\/em>of this\u2014it seems to testify to the same confusion over, and reticence to really consider, what certain areas of the past meant in 1925.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this perhaps goes some way to explaining why it was relatively easy to misidentify the sarcophagus, and to sell the story as a means to revive interest in the Lady Chapel restoration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, at least\u00a0one<\/em>\u00a0person\u00a0was\u00a0<\/em>thinking about what the rediscovery of\u00a0\u00c6thelberht meant. The photo published in the\u00a0Times\u00a0<\/em>isn\u2019t the only one documenting the 1925 find that survives – it\u2019s one of two. The other was never published, and was stumbled across only a few years ago in the abbey library as a glass-plate slide. It shows the bones that the sarcophagus contained laid out on a black background and lit from above, as if for examination, with the caption \u2018King Ethelberts Bones Discovered in Sherborne Abbey 1925\u2019 scrawled across the bottom. Beyond this, we know nothing about the photograph, including when or why it was taken – no record of an official examination ever taking place survives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
The Abbey’s glass-plate slide.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For me, this photo is both the most fascinating and the most perplexing part of the story, which it seems to disrupt. The circumstances in which it was taken might come to light one day. But for now, it tumbles disembodied through space and time, as seemingly lost and questioning as Alfred and\u00a0\u00c6thelberht were in the 1920s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Francis Brown is a PhD student at Exeter. \u2018The Kings of Wessex Remembered\u2019 exhibition and lecture series runs 2\u201329 June 2025 in Sherborne Abbey. Francis\u2019s article about the supposed rediscovery of King\u00a0\u00c6thelbert, \u2018A Skeleton in the Chapel\u2019, is published in the June 2025 issue of\u00a0History Today.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why were King\u00a0\u00c6thelberht of Wessex’s bones worth ‘rediscovering’ at Sherborne Abbey in June 1925? 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