Fred Hogge

INCREDIBLE: Bones hidden in a church wall matched England’s earliest saint. The builders were preparing the sanctuary wall when they noticed that its stones had shifted. Behind the plaster was a sealed cavity. Beneath a slab, almost buried in rubble, sat a battered lead box. Inside were pieces of skull, limbs, ribs and teeth from a young woman. It was 1885, in St Mary and St Eanswythe’s Church, Folkestone. The vicar, Matthew Woodward, believed the workmen had found the town’s lost patron saint. Eanswythe had lived more than 1,200 years earlier. A Kentish princess and granddaughter of King Æthelberht, the first English king to embrace Christianity, she chose a life of faith and founded one of England’s earliest religious communities for women near this spot. She died young. Her shrine drew prayer and pilgrimage for centuries. Then the Reformation swept away saints’ shrines across England, and her remains were believed lost. But someone may have saved them. The crushed shape of the old box and its hiding place suggest it was pushed into the wall when destruction threatened. Woodward’s claim was moving. It was not proof. For another 135 years, the bones stayed behind a brass grille while one question hung over the church: was Eanswythe really still there? In 2020, the church took a brave risk. It closed its doors for three days and let archaeologists and bone specialists examine the relics. Every bone belonged to one person, probably a young woman aged about 17 to 22. Radiocarbon dating placed her death in the middle of the seventh century. Tests of her diet pointed to someone of high status who had grown up away from Folkestone. No single test could print Eanswythe’s name on a bone. But the age, sex, date, status, place and centuries-old tradition all aligned. The team concluded that the remains were almost certainly hers, making them the earliest identified remains of an English saint and the only known surviving remains of Kent’s Christian royal house. Then the old lead box began failing. The parish needed £9,000 for a safe new reliquary. It raised more than that in ten days, with over half coming from Orthodox Christians in America who also honour this saint from before the Church divided. At the service of return, local schoolchildren told her story. The glass-and-brass reliquary was carried through a packed church, blessed with incense and placed back inside the wall. That wall is not part of a museum. Sunday Eucharist, baptisms, bells, prayer and care for neighbours continue around it. Nearly 1,400 years after Eanswythe’s little community began, Folkestone’s living parish still gathers beside the young woman it refused to forget.