I've found myself reaching for more history books lately and this was a great read.
The facts about bone dating and mapping are fascinating and I enjoyed the stories about the chests.

Oh my goodness, what a fascinating book! It was quite cooincidental that only a few weeks before I heard about this book that I happened to be in Winchester cathedral and had, by chance, glanced up and seen the chests that she writes about. There is a brilliant exhibition at the cathedral too where the story of the bones are told and even more thrilling the recreated face of a young man - may be the young son of William and Matilda? So eciting. So when I read this book I was thrilled. Cat Jarman talks not only of the bones but of the whole living person and their times. If you are in the slightest bit interested in this period of history I cannot recommend this book more highly. Brilliant.

A first rate history of the development of England during the so called dark ages, told through the medium of the Bone Chests in Winchester Cathedral. These chests contain the remains of Anglo-Saxon and Viking Kings and Bishops, and one Queen, Emma of Normandy. After the scattering of the contents of the chests in 1642, during the English civil war. the bones were collected and replaced somewhat randomly. In 2012 the chests were reopened and examined with the latest forensic anthropology techniques revealing many secrets.
The story feels like a detective story with information from past documents linking up with carbon dating and radio isotope analysis to try to find out whose bones we have. The stories of these royal houses were told in an engaging and fascinating way. As someone who knows little of this period of history I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

I found this book as exciting as a good historical mystery even if it's not a whodunit. A well written and intriguing story that made me learn a lot and I found fascinating.
Well written and compelling.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

In Winchester Cathedral sit a set of bone chests, boxes supposed to contain the bones of a series of Anglo-Saxon monarchs. Over the past ten years, archaeologists have used cutting edge techniques to try to discover whose bones these are and in this book Jarman relates the story of these searches alongside the history around each person.
I loved this book as it can be read a a simple history of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy but it is interspersed with wonderful facts about the science of bone dating, mapping injuries and looking for familial links. Then this is also overlaid with stories about the bone chests themselves, from their inception and movement between the churches of Winchester and beyond, to their destruction during the Civil War to more modern tales. Altogether it make for a multi-layered exploration of the subject from a knowledgable writer.

The Bone Chests is a well-researched and compelling nonfiction book, if on occasion I found it a little hard to follow (so many similar sounding names! Though that was hardly Jarman's fault). The period between the departure of the Romans from the British Isles up until 1066 and the Norman Conquest is hardly covered in history lessons (or, at least, not when I was in school), so I only had the vaguest idea about most of what this book contained. Jarman presents it all in a very readable text, one that keeps you fascinated throughout. What's equally fascinating is how much it's possible to discover about the eponymous bone chests through modern methods. Combined with sources from around the time (or, in some cases, a few hundred years after), Jarman pieces together an engrossing story, and one that convinces me to keep an eye on all her output.

My knowledge of the Anglo-Saxons from school history lessons is very basic – little more than Alfred the Great on the run from the Vikings and letting the cakes burn, and King Canute, sitting in his throne placed at the water’s edge and trying unsuccessfully to forbid the waves from advancing and wetting his feet.

So I was looking forward to learning more in The Bone Chests: Unlocking the Secrets of the Anglo-Saxons. In her Author’s Note Cat Jarman clarifies that her intention with this book is to tell the stories of the chests, and of the tumultuous times that they and the people interred in them, lived through. She has concentrated on the south and south-west of England to consider why Wessex and Winchester took on such significance in the history of England in the early medieval period. So, the main emphasis in this book is on the history, on the kings and politics of the period rather than on the forensic archaeology and the modern scientific techniques.

Having said that there is enough about the use of DNA and isotopic analysis of teeth to investigate the diet and origins of the owners of the bones for me as a non scientist to understand. I found it all fascinating even though in places I was left wondering what century I was in, having moved from the 11th to the 21st century (when Richard III’s remains were discovered under a Leicester car park), via various Viking raids and the 17th century. At times I had to keep reminding myself which chest was being described.

The mortuary, or bone chests, themselves, are most interesting and I would love to visit Winchester Cathedral to see them for myself. There are six chests, painted wooden caskets which are displayed high on stone screen walls on either side of the high altar area. The bones are the remains of many kings and bishops who were originally buried in the Anglo-Saxon cathedral known as Old Minster, north of the present cathedral.

Jarman describes the chests in, vaguely, chronological order and has relied on the Mortuary Chests Project, a research project led by archaeologists from Bristol University in collaboration with Winchester Cathedral that began in 2012. She is not involved in the Project but has incorporated details of the team’s partial results released in May 2019 in her book.

The book is very detailed and well researched and I learned so much, bringing the medieval period to life as I read. I had never heard of Queen Emma and the details about her life stand out for me. She was the daughter of Richard I, Duke of Normandy, wife of two Anglo- Saxon kings – Æthelred the Unready and Cnut (Canute) – and the mother of Edward the Confessor and Harthacnut of Denmark. She was given the name Ælfgifu and in 1017 she married Cnut. I was fascinated to read that the Project team has put together a set of bones that they confidently determine to be a female that could be the body of Emma.

The last section of the book is made up of Notes of the sources used, an extensive Bibliography, and an Index. There is also a List of Illustrations; the illustrations were not included in my review copy.

The Bone Chests has a great concept - there are old wooden chests in Winchester Cathedral with pre-Norman Conquest names on them and bones inside. Do the bones match the names? What are the stories of the people inside? Can modern archaeological techniques shine a light on the truth?

I really enjoyed Cat Jarman's previous book about the Vikings, River Kings, and this book is a good follow-on read. I think before reading Jarman's work I was under the impression that the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans were three completely separate groups of people. But actually, there were centuries of movement and intermarriage between the groups and each group had legitimate claims to rule (at least parts of) England. The residents of these islands were a cosmopolitan bunch around the turn of the first millennium!

A recommended read for lovers of history.

Without a doubt this is a well-written and researched book about the early kings, queens and families of what would become England. I feel cheated, nonetheless. There is so little overall about the scientific techniques used to determine possible origins and so much about the history of specific high status people. Yes there are mentions of isotopic analyses of teeth to investigate diet and origin, radiocarbon for dating (but most dates these days will give errors of plus or minus 35 years not the typical plus/minus 100 years suggested) and so on. The techniques discussed are well done and should be easy to understand by lay people and there are good examples used - the Richard III in car-park story, The author also tells us about the limitations of these techniques which is always useful. There is very little on the details of the chests' contents in terms of scientific work but I suppose that it is still a work in progress and will be published by the investigators in due course. I was relieved when I got to the end and found a bibliography of at least some of the modern sources of information; I'd been getting frustrated at the lack of these throughout the book but then, I'm used to reading more formal pieces of research where citations are included in the text to distinguish between one's own and others' work. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy.

Cat Jarman does a thorough job of research on these chests, and the people whose remains may or may not be in them. She starts with the earliest known Wessex king, Cynewulf, and ends with the last one named on the chests: William Rufus (son of William the Conqueror). This is not a period of history I know much about. Frankly most GB school history mentions Egyptians, Romans, Edward the Confessor, William the Conqueror, and moves on to the Wars of the Roses. In fact I don’t know whether it does that much, except kids seem to know about Pharoahs, and they spend a lot of time on the history of World War 2.

So a narrative about the kings and politics of pre-1100 has the potential to be interesting. In The Bone Chests, the author takes the supposed contents of one chest at a time, and maps out the who, what, why and wherefore, based on research and records down the ages. The best thing about this book is that it adds in modern science and use of DNA, which is fascinating, revealing as it does where people came from based on their diet and chemical make-up and who they are related to once possible matches have been found in those areas. Like the discovery of Richard III in a Leicester car park, we cannot be 100% certain. But we can be pretty sure that it isn’t anyone else without a huge coincidence involved.

As a result, the book keeps your interest. This is despite some shortcomings, some of which can’t be helped. The number of names that look alike, and in many cases are the same for entirely different people — AEthelstan, AEthelgifu, AElfgifu and all those other Saxon names beginning with AEl…

This was an ARC, so it is possibly not the final version, but I found myself getting confused with the way the author jumped from contemporary to the king under discussion, to contemporary to the Reformation, interspersed with commentary from writers of ages in between. When we were back to later archaeological findings, it seemed fine, but some of the narrative got very confusing. There were also several places where she repeated herself, telling us the same thing twice as if she hadn’t said it before. Some tighter editing would do it the world of good.

There is a good reference section (the last 10%), covering notes as well as extensive bibliography, a list of illustrations (only the drawings of the chests were in my ebook version) and an index, which is pretty redundant in the ebook, but a goldmine for a paper copy–or a reviewer checking name spellings!.

It’s a great hook on which to hang a history of the first millennium in the British Isles, so if you’re remotely interested, take a look. Thank you to the publishers and netgalley for the opportunity to expand my knowledge!

What an interesting book! Very readable - you don’t need too much background knowledge to get to grips with the period as there’s a huge amount of historical context. Really fascinating viewing it from an forensic archaeological point of view.

Using the investigations into the contents of the Winchester Cathedral bone chests to unravel the twists and turns of England’s rulers during the so-called Dark Ages, this is an impeccably researched, gripping and wide-ranging narrative. The careful balancing of just the right level of detail with illuminating tales of intrigue, war fare and politics bring the lives of the likes of Alfred, Emma of Normandy and Cnut into as sharp a focus as historical sources allow, making for a beautifully paced excursion through some of the most pivotal periods of English and Northern European history.

I was really looking forward to reading The Bone Chests as I expected a forensic examination, in great detail, of what said chests contained and the travels of those bones and chests.

Whilst the contents are covered in that way and parallel forensics of other relics too, the book really is more conventional history than forensics.

As, to me at least, most of the book was historical rather than analytical I can only offer 3 stars but feel sure that, for readers more interested in the historical, their star rating will be higher. Certainly an interesting read.

Never before have I read a non-fiction book that I haven’t wanted to put down! This had everything for me - Winchester (my favourite UK city), its cathedral, history, archaeology, some Richard IIi and mystery. Such a well written account of the history of the ‘bone chests’ high up in the cathedral and the remains that they may or may not contain. I could picture myself in the cathedral, I could imagine the city a millennium ago. I learned so much about medieval history. I discovered new facts about the human body ( did you know that your collar bone is the last bone of your body to fully fuse at approximately 30 years of age?) .I had explained to me the latest methods of dating a skeleton and how examination of teeth can tell you about a person’s diet and where they lived. I found the whole book totally fascinating and will be looking for the bone chests next time I visit the cathedral. My thanks to the author, 4th Estate and William Collins and Netgalley for allowing me early access to a digital copy of this book.

I greatly enjoyed The River Kings so I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this one! Nor was I disappointed. This shows the same painstaking forensic archaeology that the author displayed in the previous instance. It was fascinating to see a vision of Saxon England come to life based on the jumbled bones – vandalised by players in a much later historical event. Jarman’s books are always intelligent and accessible. Highly recommend.

Using old bones and science to answer historical questions and, perhaps, ask new some ones.

This book tells the story of Wessex, Mercia and then England in the five centuries or so leading up to the reign of William Rufus, through modern attempts to literally unscramble bones mixed up by an act of sacrilege another five centuries after that, in THE English Civil War. Along the way, reference is made to other English civil wars and numerous Viking raids, occupations and two actual conquests. Which by itself shows how much more complex our history is than our general understanding of our own history.

As well as showing us what science can tell us about the fairly distant past, this well written and well-researched work shows us which kinds of historical question science cannot answer: science can tell us whether a traditional account or even a contemporary record is possibly true and it can sometimes tell us when it definitely isn’t true. But that isn’t the same as knowing what really happened in any detail not evident in the long-term consequences of an historical event.

Whilst nearly all of the evidence cited here was found in Winchester, the case cited to best exemplify the limitations of forensic science as well as its power comes from the discovery of the bones of King Richard III under a car-park in Leicester. Because, even though the DNA evidence (popularly supposed to be the gold standard of forensic evidence in modern criminal cases) is actually a bit open to question, pretty well ALL the circumstantial evidence favours the bones discovered in Leicester being those of Richard III, not least the fact that the body was more or less exactly where one researcher had already predicted it might be (and the first place she looked), based on years of work with available records. The body was on its own, it had been buried with no reverence whatsoever, the deceased had suffered from the right sort of long-term skeletal health problems and had died in battle not wearing a helmet and suffering more than one potentially-lethal injury. Possibly several enemy soldiers had gone for the same man at the same moment, which suggests that either they were running out of targets, or he was the target that would end the war!

Despite all that, this work does tell us which Saxon and Norman-era legends and myths might well be actual history and gives some clues as to which might well be fabrications. What it does NOT do, is apply the same patient methodical analysis to the Civil War-era accounts of the desecration of the bone chests and Winchester Cathedral, upon which the whole narrative is hung. That’s not so much a failing as an opportunity for further study and further questions:

If you chuck bones that are between two and five centuries old at stained-glass leaded lights of any quality, do those bones retain anything like the mass and density (“ballistic coefficient”) to actually wreak anything like the destruction claimed?

If men inside the cathedral break the windows by any means whatsoever, how does the glass end up mingled with the bones, also inside the cathedral?

Parliamentary soldiers systematically and habitually desecrating OTHER cathedrals and churches hurled (and shot) much more effective projectiles than very old, almost certainly lightweight and friable human bones!

Wouldn’t a more likely scenario have been something more like the Parliamentary soldiers doing what they had some considerable practice at doing: smashing the windows and doors in from the outside in order to concentrate the broken glass in the space used by (kneeling, if non-Puritan) worshippers before coming inside to see what else needed to be smashed?

How likely is it that the bone chests were actually the LAST thing the Parliamentary soldiers set out to desecrate (definitely the hardest objects to reach, not immediately obviously important), thus explaining why their officers became impatient and called a halt before ALL the bone chests were broken up and their contents thrown around inside the cathedral to mingle with the broken glass?

Might the old and friable bones have done so little damage that soldiers simply got bored with throwing them at things which didn’t break in a spectacular way? Or had they already broken every available glass object by other means?

Using old bones to answer long-standing questions is applied science.
Real science is using the evidence (old and new) to ask new questions.

Another well researched and very readable historic whodunit (sort of) from Cat Jarman. Fascinating in its breadth and depth and so well described. A great follow up to River Kings.