A Second Missing King Of England May Be Buried Underneath A Car Park, According To One Enthusiast. We've Been Down This Road Before.

Back in 2012, archaeologists in Leicester discovered the first king of England that had been parked on.

"We begin excavating in the City Council car park, and it's got a section for social services and child  protection which – given that Richard III is supposed  to have killed his two nephews to come to the throne – there's a certain irony," Professor Turi King, who led the genetic analysis of the king, explained to IFLScience's We Have Questions.

"Six hours, 34 minutes in, as the trench is going in, Matthew Morris, who's our site director, spots a little bit of bone. He wants to make sure if this is just a random bit of bone or if it is attached to anything – and it's actually attached to a skeleton. There's an articulated skeleton under there. So, Jo and I, we start uncovering it on the 4th of September 2012."

After excavations were complete, historical records were scoured, and a genetic analysis was carried out using living descendants along the maternal line, it was revealed in 2013 that King Richard III's corpse was indeed interred in what later became a social services staff car park. 

Back then, it had been a friary, and not too bad of a resting place after his death in the Battle of Bosworth. At least, compared with being parked on.

Now, according to one historian, there may be a second king spending their corpse years serving as a place to put your car. According to author Graham Phillips, Alfred the Great, whose bones have been presumed lost for centuries, is buried beneath a car park in Winchester.

Phillips – who has previous form when it comes to making unusual claims – told BBC Radio Solent that he was at the University of Cambridge researching King Arthur (rather than Alfred) when he found an article in an archaeological journal printed in 1800. According to Phillips, the article described exactly where Alfred, King of the West Saxons from 871 to 886 CE, was slung.

"They built a prison on the site where the abbey was, and when the warden was building the prison in the late 1700s, he ordered the prisoners to prepare an area where his garden was going to be. That's where the original tomb was, and they found these bones in this coffin," Phillips told the station.

"The best part of it, as far as they were concerned, was that it was a lead-lined coffin. So they sold the lead off and chucked the bones, and the remains of the coffin, just a few yards away."

According to Phillips, the author of the article even produced a handy little map of where the bones were interred, marked with an Indiana Jones-esque X over the spot. Also, again very much according to Phillips, the site has now been turned into a car park.

Phillips says that he has taken the evidence to the appropriate authorities in an attempt to conduct a search of the area using ground-penetrating radar but has so far not received permission. The University of Winchester, which Phillips approached, told the BBC it continues to work with Hyde900, a community historical project that investigates Hyde Abbey, and added that attempts to find the king's remains were "complex."

"Our medieval past is filled with meaning for today's world. It is always great to see people excited about medieval history, and doubly so when it comes to Alfred here in Winchester."

While it certainly sounds like an interesting and exciting paper for Phillips to find, particularly when researching an unrelated king, there is a good chance that Hyde900 is already aware of the document in question. 

On its website, the group discusses extensively an account written by antiquarian Captain Henry Howard in around 1798. Howard had been there to record the layout of the church and was informed by the keeper of the bridewell (prison) of coffins that had been dug up during construction.

“A great stone coffin was found, cased with lead both within and without, and containing some bones and remains of garnets," Howard wrote. "The lead, in its decayed state, sold for two guineas; the bones were thrown about and the stone coffin broken into pieces. There were also two other coffins and no more found in this part, which were also broke for the sake of the garden in which they lay, broken up and buried as low as the spring.”

Later, in the article Enquiries etc. concerning the Tomb of King Alfred at Hyde Abbey, Howard expressly placed Alfred under the prison.

 “You will lament with me the failure of my researches, and feel some share of the same indignation, when I inform you that the ashes of the great Alfred, after being scattered about by the hands of convicts, are now probably covered by a building erected for their confinement and punishment," he wrote. "And when you are told that this occurred so lately as the year 1788, and that no-one in the neighbourhood , led either by curiosity or veneration for his remains, attempted to discover or rescue them from this ignoble fate, your surprise will not, I think, be any less than my own.”

Though Phillips could be talking about a different document, they sound remarkably similar, and Howard's writings will not have gone unnoticed by historians looking into where the king was buried. For now, there are no plans to excavate the car park, and it is unclear whether this is an avenue that has already been explored by researchers. 

Previous researchers have made separate claims of finding the remains of King Alfred. In 2013, one team of archaeologists from the University of Winchester was intrigued by bones found in an unmarked grave, but they dated them to between 1100 and 1500 CE and determined they belonged to at least six individuals. 

Unless he was a time-traveller made of six smaller kings in a trench coat, this was probably not Alfred either.