King Alfred the Great. Wikimedia
Archaeologists believe they have uncovered the bones of Alfred the Great, or his son Edward the Elder, in a cardboard box in storage at Winchester City Museum.
In March last year, the researchers exhumed a grave at St Bartholomew’s Church in Winchester, Hampshire, which was thought to be the final resting place of the ninth-century English “warrior king”, but forensic examination found those remains to be of someone else. However, their investigations also uncovered a right os coxa fragment of pelvis bone from a previous exhumation that had been stored at Winchester City Museum since the 1990s.
This pelvis bone was carbon dated to between 895 and 1017, a period which covers the deaths of both King Alfred the Great and his son, and the bone is unlikely to have come from someone else who died in that period.
A BBC documentary, The Search for Alfred the Great, followed the project team throughout and airs on BBC2 at 9pm on Tuesday 21 January.
