for their father

A Roman coffin at Westminster Abbey was dug up in 1869 with the wrong man in it. This week, a hundred and fifty years later, we got the best guess yet at who he was, and the coffin’s own inscription turns out to describe him.

In 1869 a limestone sarcophagus was dug up beside Westminster Abbey. The base was Roman, with a Latin inscription on the side:

To the memory of Valerius Amandinus. Valerius Superventor and [Valerius] Marcellus made [this] for [their] father.

Two brothers burying their father, sometime around the fourth century. Martin Henig, an archaeologist, later read it as probably a Christian burial of Constantine’s era.

The lid didn’t match. Someone had recut it with a large Latin cross in the late Anglo-Saxon style, six or seven hundred years after the brothers. Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, who ran the abbey at the time, couldn’t explain what a Roman coffin was doing in a medieval church with a Saxon lid on it, and neither could anyone else.

There was a skeleton inside. The Victorians called it a robust young man of no more than thirty, and that was more or less where things stayed until 2016, when the coffin was opened again for conservation.

The new results were published on 20 October in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association. Warwick Rodwell led the study, and James Langthorne did the bones. Langthorne found a man of 35 to 49, about five foot nine, so not young after all. A pale rectangle on the coffin floor suggests he was first laid in a timber coffin, covered in lime, and set inside the Roman stone. Radiocarbon puts his death between 987 and 1052.

That window holds two candidates. Ælfwig was a monk of Westminster before he became its abbot, and died around 1020. Wulfnoth succeeded him and died in 1049. Rodwell leans toward Ælfwig, who was already a monk of the house. Either way, he says, the rank isn’t in doubt: “Nobody of lower rank would have been buried in anything like that.” A Roman stone coffin was something you gave the head of the house.

So from the day the new lid went on, the name on the coffin was the wrong name. Anyone who could read the Latin was told it held Valerius Amandinus. It held somebody else, and the somebody else was Saxon, not Roman.

Except the inscription doesn’t only give a name. It says what the coffin was for: for their father.

Abbot comes from the Latin abbas, which comes through Greek from the Aramaic abba: father. Ælfwig’s own English had it as abbod. The head of a monastery was, by title, the father of the monks in it.

So the Roman lettering was right again. The man in the coffin was a father to the community that buried him, and his sons, in that sense, put him there. Nobody can say whether the monks who carved the cross read the side first, or whether they thought about it if they did. The stone doesn’t care. It was made for one father and it got a second one, and the sentence on it fit both.

Valerius Amandinus himself is gone. Nobody knows where. His sons’ line about him has outlived him by sixteen hundred years and turned out to be true twice.

Sources: Archaeologists may have solved the mystery of a Roman sarcophagus excavated at Westminster Abbey in 1869, Smithsonian ↗ · Mystery of Westminster Abbey skeleton in Roman sarcophagus may be solved, Ancient Origins ↗ · Who was buried in a Roman sarcophagus at Westminster Abbey, ThePrint ↗ · Case of mysterious medieval skeleton buried in Roman-era sarcophagus at Westminster Abbey finally solved, Live Science ↗ · abbot, Wiktionary ↗ · Abbot, Wikipedia ↗