Graham Phillips says he has traced Alfred the Great’s long-lost remains to a parking lot in Winchester, Hampshire. He says the bones are there now, around 60 feet from a slab marking the site of Alfred’s interment.
The exact spot will be revealed in an episode of Weird Britain on Blaze TV at 9 p.m. on July 8. Phillips has spent 13 years searching for the king’s final resting place.
Cambridge University archives
Phillips said he found an article from 1800 in the archives of Cambridge University last summer. He said the article pointed him toward a prison built next to the former Hyde Abbey in 1788 and described the former gravesites of Alfred and his family as the prison warden’s garden.
That paper gave Phillips a route from the later prison site to the modern car park. He said the documentary trail, not a dig, led him to the spot he now identifies.
Hyde Abbey and the bones
Alfred the Great was born in 849 in Berkshire, routed a force led by Guthrum at the Battle of Edington in 878, and died in 899. His bones were first buried at Winchester Cathedral, moved to Hyde Abbey in 1110, and later caught up in the destruction of Hyde Abbey after Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539.
The remains stayed hard to follow after an English antiquarian dug up bones in 1866 during construction of a workhouse and reburied them in Bartholomew Church. Archaeologists later carbon-dated those bones and found that they were from 200 years after Alfred’s death. Phillips said after that result, “Whoever’s bones they were, they weren’t Alfred’s.”
Winchester parking lot claim
Phillips said he is “100 percent confident” about the Winchester site. He told the Sun, “I am 100 percent confident the car park site is where the bones were, and I’m confident they are there now.”
The unresolved issue is physical, not archival: Phillips says the bones are at the car park site, but the account does not show that the remains have been excavated or independently checked there. The July 8 program will put his claim in public, and the unanswered question is whether anyone has yet gone beneath the parking surface to test it.
