Chad's grave-the evidence

Summary. A 2003 archaeological excavation at the east end of the nave revealed the foundation to a shrine tower and within it a grave. Eight reasons are given for accepting this was Chad’s grave. Surely, it should be marked.

Context for Chad and the early church of Mercia.

King Wulfhere took overlordship of Mercia, c. 657-9, possibly by paying tribute to King Oswiu of Northumbria.[1] He then was involved in the appointment of the third and fourth bishops of Mercia who most likely had a timber church.[2] The churches might have been close to the Early Medieval[3] (Anglo-Saxon) settlements along the Trent washlands. Bishop Wilfrid, acting as bishop of Mercia, and Wulfhere, between 667 and 669, selected the site beside a stream on a Mercian mudstone slope as the centre for their new diocese. They called it Licitfelda, meaning the approved location. Bede 17–19 years later repeated the event in his book of ecclesiastical history.[4] See the posts, ‘Wilfrid, creator of the first cathedral’ and ‘Reasons why Lichfield (Licitfelda) had approval’. Bede recorded when Chad died in 672 one, possibly two, churches were present.[5] See the post, ‘Understanding Chad’s grave site’.

          In 2003, an octagonal hole, 7.5 m across, was dug in the floor at the east end of the nave[6] and a foundation for a building c. 7 m wide north to south[7] and possibly the same length east to west was found. The widths of the walls were mostly a metre wide suggesting the building was relatively tall.[8] The east end had a tongue of natural clay and it was thought these might have been steps into the shrine. Inside was a sunken, possibly lined, pit, 0.8 m deep, c. 2 m wide and slightly longer[9]; clearly a burial pit or hypogeum. Possible alternatives to a hypogeum or small burial crypt were considered, such as a baptistry, but dismissed.[10]  Rodwell published the outcome of the dig for the cathedral library and later in a magazine.[11] Since the dig there have been implausible suggestions on whether the chamber was much longer and did it attach to a church.[12]

 

Reconstructed diagram of the shrine tower enclosing the sunken chamber and showing how it was offset to the north. Only the left half of the shrine tower foundation (brown) was uncovered. Only three-quarters of the left side of the pit was excavated. 

 

 

Photograph of the excavation area and the grave (outlined in red). Foundation wall is outlined in blue. The midline of the chamber is in yellow.

 

                  Position of the grave in the current cathedral, 3.5m from the north pillar of the second bay.

 

The sunken burial pit was offset to the north side of the foundation building which accords with the 7th century traditional understanding of the layout for Christ’s tomb. A similar overall layout occurred in the Hexham and Ripon crypts.[13] The size and shape led Rodwell to describe it as a shrine tower. It resembled shrine towers known in Ireland and dated to the eighth to ninth-century. Such buildings were well under twelve metres square and usually had a west-facing door.[14] Carver said they were narrow and tall, employed megalithic construction for the walls, enclosed a single room rarely larger than 6 x 4 m and had a single western door with an east window.[15]

St Kevin's shrine tower at Glendalough, County Wicklow, Ireland.

 

Summary of evidence for the east end of the nave being Chad’s burial site.

1.     Every aspect of the archaeology suggests a shrine tower built to house the grave of someone special.[16] The shrine tower, as far as can ascertained, resembles those, at least 4, in Ireland[17] each dedicated to hold the remains of a saint. The archaeologist made the suggestion that burial offset to the north in a small room 5m square had some resemblance to Christ’s tomb chamber (2.5m long, 1.2m wide and 2.5m high) reconfigured in Constantine’s church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

 

                                     Adomnan’s 7th-century drawing of the church of the Holy Sepulchre.

2.     Bede described Chad’s relics being in a ‘wooden house’ on (ibidem) the original grave.[18] It is entirely plausible the wooden house was exchanged later with a stone sepulchre-chest, see the post ‘St Chad’s shrine-chest.’ Within the grave and close by were found three pieces of stonework which fitted together to make what is now called ‘The Lichfield Angel’. The head of the angel Gabriel is very similar to the head of King Offa on his coins suggesting he ordered the shrine chest. Its fine painted detail and being best stone from Ancaster, Lincolnshire, suggests wealth typical of Offa and his archbishopric. The style of Gabriel, especially his Romanesque tunic, closely resembles the incised Gabriel on the left end of Cuthbert’s wooden coffin buried and now exhibited in Durham Cathedral. This equates the shrine chest for Chad with the shrine and coffin of Cuthbert. See the post, ‘Lichfield Angel.’

3.     A socketed sandstone block was found next to the sunken chamber and could have been the base to a standing cross.[19] Alternatively, it could have supported an eternal flame from an oil lamp; this has been noted elsewhere with saintly burials.

4.     Of the 22 people, some were priests, found above the shrine tower foundation in the 2003 excavation, some had requested burial near St Chad. For example. William Berford who died in 1450 requested burial near his uncle, Dean Stretton, and St Chad. The sunken chamber was not cut by later graves.[20] Rodwell noted broken fragments of incised floor slabs with indents of Purbeck marble and bluestone to show the high status of burials. This was a special grave site. It seems that even in medieval times there was an understanding where Chad was buried and this was largely forgotten, or perhaps ignored, until the discoveries of 2003.

5.     It makes sense that when the current cathedral was built the remains of Chad were removed from the nave area to be housed in St Peter’s Head Chapel on the south side of the choir. The nave then became an open area for the attendance of worshippers kept separate from the main church to the east of the crossing. Pilgrims and penitents could be ushered from the south door, along the south choir aisle and then returned to the doorway. 

6.     The sunken chamber had been infilled with soil and rubble and a tiled floor laid across. On top was a board, possibly a coffin lid, and on this was a little twisted skeleton of an aged man. He was thought to have been a pilgrim and the depth of burial suggested 15th century. Across his pelvis and legs was a tree branch around 3cm thick thought to have been his staff. By his right side of his thigh was the remains of a large round pouch or scrip and around his waist was a hint of a leather belt. It is either an odd coincidence or a deliberate burial of perhaps a distinguished pilgrim on top of Chad’s grave.

7.     The grave is positioned in the centre of the current cathedral and close to the centre of the Close and therefore the middle of the 7th century settlement. If the layout of the monasterium was a series of rings as seen in Irish-Celtic monasteries and thought to be at Iona, see the post ‘A sacred layout for the first cathedral,’ then it is central. Bishop Wilfrid was an initiator and developer of the early church at Lichfield and his buildings were based on his understanding from pilgrimages to Rome. The layout of the early minster would be planned.

8.     A recent review of features seen in the excavation has supported the notion this was an early grave.[21] Rodwell[22] in 2006 wrote, “We now have fair reason to believe we have found the secondary burial place, that is after translation,[23] and shrine of St Chad. No one has yet disputed this conclusion.

 A note to the cathedral managers

Surprisingly, the location of the grave has not been marked or noted in the cathedral. Visitors on a guided tour sometimes remark on this absence. Instead, pilgrims have finished their journey with prayers at the shrine at the east end of the cathedral. It would be fitting to have a portable cross or eternal candle above the site of the grave.

[1] No battle or skirmish is known. Three ealdormen proclaimed Wulfhere king of the Mercians. See F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, (Oxford: 1989), 84. Perhaps, Christian King Oswiu had an arrangement with Christian King Wulfhere.

[2] The cathedral seems fond of stating a church on the site since the year 700, but in fact there must have been a church on or close by in 659 and certainly one by 669. That is, over 1350 years ago.

[3] There is a problem with naming the people Saxon or Anglo-Saxon, the preferred title in older academic publications. Based on surviving texts, early inhabitants of the region were commonly called englisc and angelcynn. From 410 A.D. when the Romans left to shortly after 1066, the term Anglo-Saxon only appears three times in legal charters in the entire corpus of Old English literature and all in the tenth century. The now accepted term is Early Medieval.

[4] Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum. The ecclesiastical history of the English People, 731. Bede listed this work as Historiam ecclesiasticam nostræ insulæ ac gentis in libris V, which translates to, The ecclesiastical history of our island and nation in five books.

[5] Ibid, Book 4 chapter 3.

[6] A four-lobed shaped area of floor, 38 m², can be raised 300 mm in two stages to form a platform for the altar table to be higher and seen from the end of the nave. The eight-tonne floor uses six electrically operated, precision, screw jacks, not hydraulics. The perimeter stone is 170 mm thick, but the inner stone is only 20 mm thick. Manchester Cathedral copied the mechanism.

[7] Drawing shows a width of c .6.7 metres (22 feet or 1.5 short perches), see W. Rodwell, ‘Archaeological excavation in the nave of Lichfield Cathedral’. (unpub. report held in Lichfield Cathedral Library, 2003), 15.

[8] A modern term for such a building is a shrine chapel. However, a shrine in Medieval Latin was called a cappella, which translated to chapele and by the 13th-century became a chapel. The word is therefore relatively recent. It is not known what the shrine tower might have been called.

[9] A squarish grave was not thought to be unusual, especially if it was a crypt-shaped chamber like that at Repton.

[10] No lead lining was found. Often baptism used a large lead pot. The river south of the cathedral was probably more likely to be used for baptism,

[11] W. Rodwell, Archaeological excavation in the nave of Lichfield Cathedral. Lichfield, Unpub. report in Lichfield Cathedral Library. (2003). Also W. Rodwell, Revealing the history of the Cathedral. 4. Archaeology of the Nave Sanctuary. 67th Annual Report to the Friends of Lichfield Cathedral held in Lichfield Cathedral Library. (2004). Also W. Rodwell, ‘The forgotten cathedral.’ Current Archaeology, (2006), 18, 1 (205), 9–17.

[12] Rodwell thought the distance between the choir foundations and the nave foundations, c. 20m, was considerable and belonged to two separate buildings in an east-west alignment.[12] Sargent repeated the notion of one long church with the sepulchral of Chad at the west end and the altar of St Peter at the east end.[12] There is a difficulty with the alignment and the length of this church. Also implausible is the housing of a saint’s shrine at the west end of a church in the 7th-century; elsewhere the saint was buried in a porticus on the side of the nave and near the altar.

[13] R. N. Bailey, ‘St Wilfrid – a European Anglo-Saxon’ Wilfrid Abbot, Bishop, Saint. Papers from the 1300th Anniversary Conferences, ed. N. J. Higham (Donington, 2013), 122.

[14] T. Ó Carragáin, ‘The architectural setting of the cult of relics in early medieval Ireland’ The J. of the Royal Soc. of Antiquaries of Ireland, 133 (2003) 66.

[15] M. Carver, Formative Britain. An archaeology of Britain, fifth to eleventh century A.D. (London and New York, 2019), 569. Carver cites Iona (beneath St Columba’s House), Tighlagheany (Co. Galway), Teach Molaise (on Inishmurray) and St Columb’s (Co Meath) as examples, p. 570.

[16] Rodwell, ‘Lichfield Cathedral. Archaeology of the Sanctuary’, 4.

[17] Possibly also Patrick’s chaple at Heysham on the Morecambe coast.

[18] Were the dimensions those of Christ’s tomb chamber at Jerusalem, namely, 2.5m long, 1.2m wide and 2.5m high?

[19] Rodwell conjectured it was one of four uprights with a canopy on top, but this is very speculative. Finding one post-hole cannot justify claiming a canopy needing several supporting columns.

[20] Around half of the 22 graves found were 13th to 15th-century. The youngest grave was 1810.

[21] A. Sargent, Lichfield and the Lands of St Chad: creating community in Early Medieval Mercia (Hatfield, 2020), 117.

[22] See note 11, Rodwell (2006), 13

[23] Bede is clear the ‘constructa’ or wooden house was ‘ibidem’ on the same spot as the grave. Some Latinists of Bede have mis-translated this description. His relics would not have been taken into St Peter’s church, unless the church had side chambers and Chad was a minor saint.