On a recent visit to Winchester we saw a stain glass window in a chapel showing St Ethelwold. Ethelwold was Abbot at Abingdon Abbey before becoming Bishop at Winchester in 963.

There was also an image of Ethelwold on the large Cathedral Screen.

He would have been Bishop before the current Cathedral was built and so we could not find his tomb. Even if St Ethelwold was buried at Winchester his bones would not be easy to find. During the time of King Henry VIII all the bones and relics from saints and others had been dug up and dumped in a pit.

The large stain glass windows at Winchester Cathedral were deliberately smashed by Cromwell’s forces, some time later, during the Civil War. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the broken glass was gathered up and assembled randomly, and now looks like a modern art window. A guide told us that historians are still trying to identify some of the old bones using DNA.