Alfred the Great’s remains ‘located under car park’

The long-lost remains of Alfred the Great are buried under a car park, investigators have claimed.

As the first ruler of a united England, Alfred is regarded as one of the country’s greatest kings, yet the location of his final resting place has long been a mystery.

But Graham Phillips, an author and historical researcher, claims to have discovered the site of Alfred’s grave after a 13-year hunt.

He believes the remains are 18m away from a slab in Winchestermarking where Alfred was once buried.

“Bizarrely. Like Richard III, the bones are under a car park,” Mr Phillips added.

Richard III’s skeleton was found during an excavation of a car park in Leicester in 2012 and he was reburied in the city’s cathedral in 2015.

Alfred the Great was best known for defending Wessex against Viking invaders and laying the foundations for a unified England.

He won a decisive victory against Guthrum, the Viking leader, at the Battle of Edington in 878, forcing the Vikings to accept Christianity.

Alfred, who was also a champion of education, law and literature, died in 899, but his bones were repeatedly moved.

He was buried in Winchester Cathedral, where his bones remained until 1110, when they were moved to Winchester’s Hyde Abbey. They were interred before the high altar between the bodies of his wife and son.

In 1866, during the construction of a workhouse on the site, John Mellor, an English antiquarian, excavated the area, finding what he thought were Alfred’s bones and had them reburied at nearby St Bartholomew’s Church.

But in 2013, when archaeologists exhumed and carbon dated the bones from St Bartholomew, they proved to date from more than 200 years after Alfred’s death, prompting Mr Phillips’s interest and search.

He said: “Whoever’s bones they were, they weren’t Alfred’s. So, I decided to discover what happened to them.

“The quest has taken me 13 years.”

With the assumption that Alfred’s bones perished during the building of the workhouse in the 1860s, Winchester city council turned the Hyde Abbey site into a scenic garden, with the locations of what had been Alfred’s grave and that of his wife and son, marked with stone slabs.

Mr Phillips, however, believes he has found evidence that the bones of all three had been moved a few decades before the 1860s.

He added: “I discovered that in 1788 a prison was built next to the area, and the site where graves were was turned into a garden for the warden’s house.

“I’m convinced the original bones were moved at that time.”

In the late 1700s, Henry Howard, an English historian, visited Richard Page, the warden responsible for the work at the Hyde Abbey site, to obtain plans of the ruins that existed before the prison was built.

It was while Mr Phillips was searching for a copy of that plan in the archives of the University of Cambridge that he made what he described as an “astonishing” discovery.

He said: “Howard had written an article about Hyde Abbey published in Volume 13 of Archaeologia, the journal of the London Society of Antiquaries, in 1800.

“In it, he refers to prisoners employed to landscape the warden’s new garden, unearthing bones which were reburied nearby, even including a map.”

The exact location will be revealed in an episode of the television series Weird Britain, on Blaze TV, on Wednesday, July 8 at 9pm.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]