1.5 Hours of Historical Mysteries, Legends and Lore Explained

Alfred died on October 26th, 899, six nights before the Feast of All Saints, and he was somewhere around 50 years old.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes the date and says he'd ruled for 28 and a half years as king of all the English who weren't under Danish control, and then moves on.

It doesn't say what he died of, but his Welsh biographer, Asser, who knew him personally, wrote years earlier that the king had been sick for most of his adult life.

He explained that Alfred had an illness no doctor could name, one that reportedly first struck him at his own wedding feast.

Modern writers have guessed that Crohn's disease or something similar, though that speculation stacked on a 9th century description.

He was buried in the Old Minster, the cathedral church at the heart of Winchester, and that was meant to be temporary.

Alfred had been planning a new church of his own, the New Minster, right beside the Old One, and it wasn't finished when he died.

His son Edward, later called Edward the Elder, completed it.

William of Malmesbury, writing in the 1120s, added that Edward had to buy the land from the bishop and canons of the old minster, and they charged him an exorbitant fee.

The two churches ended up so close together that when the monks in one were singing, the monks in the other could hear them, and the rivalry between the two houses curdled for generations.

It's in that context that William tells what I can only classify as a medieval zombie story.

He reports it as something people said, rather than something he believed, and he's openly contemptuous of it.

The canons of the old minster, in his telling, were raving when they claimed the royal corpse was walking at night.

Edward removed his father's remains and gave them a quieter resting place in the new minster, which was consecrated in 903.

Whether the cannons actually believed in the zombie or just wanted the body and its pilgrim traffic out of their building is the kind of question you can argue about forever.

Alfred's wife, Elswith, joined him there after her death in 902, and Edward himself followed in 924, and a younger son, Ethelward, was buried there too.

In 1109, Henry I ordered the new Minster out of the city, and William of Malmesbury says the move gave the monks a healthier and more conspicuous home.

The new abbey went up on Hyde Mead, a stretch of low, wet ground just north of the city walls, and in 1110, the monks carried their treasures out through the gates in procession.

That included their relics, a great gold cross given by King Canute, and the bodies of Alfred, Aelswith, and Edward.

The royal remains were reburied in front of the high altar of the new church, and there they stayed for four centuries until Henry VIII dissolved the Catholic monasteries.

In the spring of 1538, the last abbot of Hyde signed the surrender of his house to Henry VIII's commissioners.

Thomas Rithesley picked up some of the abbey's richest manors and a lease on the site itself, and the buildings were stripped for their stone and metals with remarkable speed.

Notably, there's no record that anyone disturbed the royal graves at that point.

The church came down around them, but the tombs in the floor seemed to have been left alone, and within a generation the whole site was a field with lumps in it.

The King's antiquary John Leland passed through around the time of the dissolution and found little but the site, and the graves themselves slipped out of memory.