Alfred the Great died in AD 899 and was buried in the Old Minster in Winchester. Four years later his remains were moved to the New Minster, which was built in 901 very close to the Old Minster. (Alfred had intended to buld a new minster, and his death may have prompted the building of it to receive his remains.)
Cnut died in 1035 at Shaftesbury, in Dorset, and was buried in the Old Minster at Winchester.
In 1079, Walkelin, the Norman Bishop of Winchester, began work on a completely new cathedral. The building was consecrated in 1093, and the previous burials, including Cnut's, were set in mortuary chests there.
In 1110, the New Minster moved to Hyde, a little north of the city, and the monks were transferred to Hyde Abbey along with Alfred's body and those of his wife and children. Soon after the dissolution of the Abbey in 1539 (during the reign of Henry VIII) the church was demolished but the graves were left intact.
During the Civil War, Roundhead soldiers scattered Cnut's bones on the floor of the new cathedral, along with those from the various other chests, notably that of William Rufus. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the bones were collected and replaced in their chests, although somewhat out of order.
King Alfred's bones, along with those of many others, were probably rediscovered by chance in 1788 when a prison was being constructed by convicts on the site of Hyde Abbey. Prisoners dug across the width of the altar area (where Alfred's remains are presumed to have been buried, along with those of his wife and children) in order to dispose of rubble left at the dissolution. Coffins were stripped of lead, and bones were scattered and lost.
The prison was demolished between 1846 and 1850. Further excavations in 1866 and 1897 were inconclusive. In 1886, amateur antiquarian John Mellor claimed to have recovered a number of bones from the site, which he said were those of Alfred. These later came into the possession of the vicar of the nearby St Bartholomew's Church, who reburied them in an unmarked grave in the church graveyard.
Excavations of the Hyde Abbey site conducted by the Winchester Museums Service in 1999 located a second pit dug in front of where the high altar would have been located, which was identified as probably dating to Mellor's 1886 excavation. The 1999 archeological excavation uncovered the foundations of the abbey buildings and some bones. Bones suggested at the time to be those of Alfred proved instead to belong to an elderly woman.
In March 2013, following the rediscovery in Leicester of the remains of King Richard III, the Diocese of Winchester exhumed the bones from the unmarked grave at St Bartholomew's. The diocese made no claim that they were the bones of Alfred; they were radiocarbon–dated, but the results showed that they were from the 1300s and therefore unrelated to Alfred. In January 2014, a fragment of pelvis unearthed in the 1999 excavation of the Hyde site, which had subsequently lain in a Winchester museum store room, was radiocarbon–dated to the correct period. It has been suggested that this bone may belong to either Alfred or his son Edward, but (as of April 2018) this remains unproven.
© Haydn Thompson 2018