Outline

In 1820 workmen put a spade through the lid and broke it in six. Forty-nine years later it was found again, officially, and mended, a Roman's name cut in the side: Valerius Amandinus, a man of means in the three hundreds, or the four.

The bones were not his. Somewhere near the year one thousand somebody reused the stone, cut a cross across the old lid and set a wooden box inside the box.

Then the skeleton was written off as lost. In 2016 they raised the lid and he was there, nearly all of him, two left ribs knit back from a fall nobody wrote down.

The wood is gone. Seven centuries in the courtyard saw to that. What's left is a white line on the floor of the stone where the lime lay along the boards: the coffin drawn by what was packed around it.

Aelfwig, perhaps. Or Wulnoth. Either fits. The side still gives the other man's name.