Bones Unearthed in English Church Likely Belong to Seventh-Century Saint

When workers excavating the Church of St. Mary and St. Eanswythe found a lead container filled with bones in 1885, locals suspected they belonged to the Anglo-Saxon saint whose name the Kent parish bears. Now, archaeologists have all but confirmed this theory, using radiocarbon testing to date the remains to the middle of the seventh century—approximately the period when St. Eanswythe, a princess whose grandfather Ethelbert was the first English king to convert to Christianity, reportedly died.

“It … looks probable that we have the only surviving remains of a member of the Kentish royal family, and one of the earliest Anglo-Saxon saints,” says archaeologist Andrew Richardson in a statement quoted by the Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood. Eanswythe—patron saint of Folkstone, the southeastern coastal town in which the parish is located—probably died in her late teens or early 20s. Her cause of death is unknown.

In life, Eanswythe would have witnessed the beginnings of English Christianity firsthand: Her grandfather was the first English royal to convert from Anglo-Saxon paganism to Catholicism, opting to embrace the new religion after marrying a Frankish Christian princess and welcoming visits from missionary St. Augustine.

Around 660 A.D., Eanswythe founded one of Britain’s first monastic communities for women, establishing a religious center in Folkestone. There, she is said to have performed several “standard” miracles, including making a stream flow uphill to the monastery, resurrecting a goose and ordering a flock of birds to leave the community’s crops alone. Many of the archaeologists who worked on the project grew up in the town and were familiar with the legends surrounding its patron saint, according to the Art Newspaper.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bones-found-english-church-probably-7th-century-princess-saint-180974370/