This week a historical researcher claimed to have located Alfred the Great’s grave, not in a cathedral or an abbey, but under a car park in Winchester. If the phrasing sounds familiar, it should: it is almost exactly how Richard III was found in Leicester in 2012. The story was reported by the BBC.
Have they really found Alfred the Great’s grave?
Not yet, and it is worth being careful about that. The claim has not been reviewed by any archaeologist, university, or heritage body. It was revealed on a television programme rather than in a journal, and the researcher himself has called for a ground-penetrating radar survey before anyone digs. So this is a claim, not a discovery. The University of Winchester, which has spent years on the same question, has been notably careful not to endorse it.
The honesty matters to me, because it is the same honesty I try to bring to my fiction. A record that thin cannot carry more weight than it holds. But the story is a good one, and it points at something I find myself thinking about constantly.
Alfred’s bones have been moved, lost, misidentified and argued over for more than a century. We care that much about where his body lies. We have spent lifetimes and radiocarbon labs on it.
We do not know where his mother is buried at all.
Who was Osburh, mother of Alfred the Great?
Her name was Osburh. She was the first wife of King Æthelwulf of Wessex, and by most reckonings the mother of all his children, Alfred among them. The monk Asser, Alfred’s biographer, describes her as a woman of religion and learning who taught her children to read.
That is almost the whole of the record. No charter names her. No chronicle records her death. There is no slab, no car park, no thirteen-year hunt. She simply stops appearing on the page.
It is a strange asymmetry. The son becomes the only English king ever called “the Great,” and men will dig up car parks looking for his skeleton. The woman who raised him vanishes so completely that we cannot even say what year she died.
Writing Osburh into the silence
That silence is where my novel lives. The Garnet Inheritance imagines Osburh’s life out of the few fragments Asser leaves us: the Jutish bloodline of the Isle of Wight, the Wessex court she married into, the book she is said to have pressed on her sons. I have tried to imagine only in the direction the record points, and to be honest with readers about where the history ends and the invention begins.
So by all means, let them survey the car park. I hope they find him. But while everyone is looking for Alfred the Great, it seems worth remembering that there was a woman before him, and that history did not think to write down where she went.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Alfred the Great’s mother? Alfred the Great’s mother was Osburh, first wife of King Æthelwulf of Wessex. She was descended from the Jutish leaders of the Isle of Wight and, according to the monk Asser, taught her children to read.
Was Osburh a real person? Yes. Osburh is named in Asser’s ninth-century Life of King Alfred, though the surviving record of her is very brief. Her birth and death dates are unknown, and her burial place has never been recorded.
Where is Alfred the Great buried? Alfred was first buried at Winchester’s Old Minster in 899, later moved to the New Minster and then to Hyde Abbey. His remains have been lost, misidentified and searched for repeatedly. No burial site has been conclusively confirmed.
The Garnet Inheritance, a novel of Osburh, mother of Alfred the Great, is out now.
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