Archaeologists May Have Solved the Mystery of a Roman Sarcophagus Excavated at Westminster Abbey in 1869

New research suggests that the ancient coffin was repurposed in the 10th or 11th century to hold the remains of an abbot who had overseen the London monastery

Meilan Solly | Senior Associate Digital Editor, History

October 21, 2026 4:34 p.m.

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When Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, the dean of Westminster Abbey, returned home after an 1869 trip to Italy, he was surprised to learn that in his absence, workers at the centuries-old London church had stumbled upon a limestone sarcophagus “belonging to the same epoch and nation as the great city which I had just quitted.”

The find presented a mystifying puzzle: How did a seemingly ancient coffin end up in a medieval abbey? And whose body was buried inside it?

Stanley detailed his study of the sarcophagus in an 1870 journal article. Although the coffin bore a Latin inscription apparently dated to the Roman occupation of Britain, its lid featured a large cross that was more consistent with the early medieval period, hundreds of years later. As the dean wrote, “There was nothing to indicate the rank of the person, nor in fact anything but the skeleton, with the exception of a few fragments of brick, apparently Roman brick, and a piece of dark gray, slag-like substance.” Still, Stanley concluded that the skeleton itself likely wasn’t Roman, instead dating to a later era.

In the century and a half since the coffin was first excavated, scholars have offered varying explanations for its presence in the abbey, where only a few other Roman artifacts have been found. Now, archaeologist and architectural historian Warwick Rodwell has seemingly solved the mystery, drawing on radiocarbon dating and a skeletal analysis conducted by colleague James Langthorne to identify the sarcophagus’ occupant.

In a paper published in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association, Rodwell argues that the skeleton likely belongs to Aelfwig, a monk who served as Westminster’s abbot (equivalent to a dean) prior to his death around 1020. Another possible candidate is Aelfwig’s successor, Wulfnoth.

“We have two viable contenders for the occupant of the sarcophagus,” Rodwell says in a statement. “We do not know the date of birth of either. But either would fit equally well if we assume the abbot was in his early 20s when the appointment was made and close to 50 when he died.” (Langthorne’s assessment identified the skeleton as a roughly 5-foot-9, 35- to 49-year-old man, contradicting earlier analyses that suggested he was slightly shorter and no older than 30.)

Stanley and his contemporaries looked to an inscription on the coffin for insights regarding its original owner. Translated into English, the message reads, “To the memory of Valerius Amandinus. Valerius Superventor and [Valerius] Marcellus made [this] for [their] father.”

Based in part on this eulogy, Victorian scholars dated the sarcophagus to between the second and fifth centuries. Rodwell, for his part, agrees with a theory put forth by Martin Henig, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford. As Rodwell notes in the paper, Henig argued that the coffin “was a Christian burial, probably of the Constantinian era,” in the early fourth century. Although the inscription’s “high quality” implies that Amandinus was “a significant figure in Roman London … nothing is known about his career,” Rodwell adds.

As for the coffin’s Roman origins, Rodwell notes that ancient sarcophagi were sometimes reused centuries after their initial interment. The English monk Bede, for instance, wrote that the body of the seventh-century saint Elethdreda was buried in a “white marble coffin, most beautifully wrought,” that was found “near the city walls” of Grantacaestir, a Roman town near Cambridge, and brought back to the monastery where she’d served as abbess.

Rodwell tells the Guardian’s Nicola Davis that Westminster “was not [the coffin’s] original place of burial.” Instead, he suggests that the sarcophagus was taken from the wall recess of a mausoleum located elsewhere—a theory that would account for the absence of decorations on all but one of its sides. “Almost certainly, it was housed in a recess in a wall, so that only the inscribed front and the lid were visible,” the archaeologist writes in the study.

Exactly what happened to Amandinus’ skeleton, as well as how his coffin was selected to hold the abbot’s body, remains unclear. But radiocarbon testing of the skeleton that ultimately replaced Amandinus’ dated it to between 987 and 1052, offering a clearer sense of when the sarcophagus was repurposed.

Around this time, the Roman-era lid was recut to feature a relief carving of a long cross, which distinguished it “as an important Christian burial,” Rodwell writes. The coffin was then buried beneath the floor of Westminster Abbey, where it likely remained until the mid-13th century, when the English king Henry III rebuilt the historic church in the Gothic style. Medieval builders moved the remains to the abbey’s sacristy, an L-shaped structure used to house sacred vessels and vestments.

Workers removed the sarcophagus from the ruins of the demolished sacristy’s courtyard in 1869—but they weren’t the first to uncover the medieval burial. An oft-overlooked pencil sketch indicates that workers “wantonly broke” the coffin’s lid in 1820, removing the slab in search of treasures buried alongside the deceased. “The disarray recorded when the sarcophagus was next opened in 1869 is typical of looting, but we will never know whether any metal or other intrinsically significant objects were present and pilfered,” Rodwell explains in the paper.

Since the coffin’s rediscovery in the 19th century, it has been moved multiple times, most recently to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries, which opened at the abbey in 2018. Although Rodwell writes that its occupant’s identity “cannot be answered with certainty,” he maintains that “the fact that he was honored with a fine sarcophagus, topped with a lid displaying a [5.9-foot-tall] Latin cross, should imply that he was almost certainly an abbot.” As the archaeologist tells the Guardian, “Nobody of lower rank would have been buried in anything like that. The Latin cross again points to a major ecclesiastic.”

Meilan Solly is a senior associate digital editor at Smithsonian magazine, where she oversees the online history section and writes about everything from archaeology to the British royal family. Solly’s specialties are Tudor England, Renaissance and modern art, and World War II.