Reading Abbey is reopening, but without the remains of Henry I having been found. He’s there somewhere, having definitely been buried there after his “surfeit of lampreys”. Well, they found Richard in Leicester, so there’s still hope of locating Henry.
[…] Reading Abbey was a highly important place in the Middle Ages. Not only was it the burial place of a King (Henry I–lost and still waiting to be found) and a child of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine (a boy who died of a seizure and was buried at his great grandfather’s feet) but it contained a great many relics, including bits of the True Cross, Christ’s sandal, Christ’s foreskin (apparently 17 of these existed, ahem), crusts from the ‘Feeding of the Five Thousand’, head hair from the Virgin Mary, pieces of Mary’s tomb and so on. These appeared to have been shipped in from Constantinople. The abbey became a great draw for pilgrims and it was here Edward IV first publicly presented Elizabeth Woodville as his “wife” and guided her to a chair of estate as Queen of England. […]
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[…] Sun article, which originally confused Richard’s Leicester with Henry I’s Reading, lists what they consider to be Britain’s top burial sites, although there is no detail on […]
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[…] its name suggests, the Hidden Abbey Project is a research initiative to uncover the hidden story of Reading Abbey. The project began with a Ground Penetrating Radar survey of the Abbey Church site (completed in […]
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[…] spoke to Charles Spencer about his latest book, The White Ship. We chatted a fair bit about Henry I and his early life and it really offers a different perspective on the man he became. No White Ship […]
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[…] includes a lot of hypotheses based upon the survival of William the Atheling, the tenager who was Henry I‘s only surviving legitimate son but was the most prominent casualty of this maritime […]
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