For centuries, guests at The Old Bell Hotel in Malmesbury checked in, dined by the stone fireplace, and slept above ground they walked across every day without knowing what lay beneath it. When archaeologists finally cut into the hotel garden ahead of a planned building project, they found 24 skeletons and additional bones from several other individuals. The remains date from 670 to 940 AD.
The dead were men, women, and children. The hotel, which opened in 1220 to house dignitaries visiting the library at the adjacent abbey, is old by any measure. But the graves under the garden predate the building by roughly 500 years. The find gives Malmesbury its first physical record of a period that had survived only in documents.
The dig started as a routine machine-watching brief, the kind of archaeological monitoring required when construction is planned on ground with known historical sensitivity. It exposed a burial ground that had sat sealed and silent for more than a millennium.
Paolo Guarino, Assistant Publications Manager at Cotswold Archaeology and a resident of the town, said written sources had long described a monastery on the site during that period. No one had ever turned up physical proof. “We knew from historical sources that the monastery was founded in that period, but we never had solid evidence before this excavation,” Guarino said. He called the remains “the first confirmed evidence of 7th to 9th century activity in Malmesbury.”
A Burial Ground Tucked Next to the Abbey
The Anglo-Saxon graves were not where the team expected to find them. The known medieval cemetery sits south of Malmesbury Abbey. These burials lay west of the former cloisters, a placement that surprised the archaeologists. A Cotswold Archaeology spokesperson told Fox News Digital that no Saxon remains had ever been identified in the town before this excavation.
The same spokesperson noted that the medieval builders who put up The Old Bell probably struck bones while digging the foundations and kept working. “There is plentiful archaeological evidence that medieval walls were constructed directly over, and sometimes even through, burials,” the spokesperson said. “It’s likely that The Old Bell’s builders encountered some human remains while laying the foundations but chose to proceed with their work regardless.”
The hotel still carries marks from every century it has stood. A hooded stone fireplace in the bar dates to 1220, the year the doors first opened. The builders who laid those stones had no way of knowing they were setting walls on top of a burial ground far older than anything they would have recognized.
Not Just Monks
A monastic burial site would normally hold the bodies of monks. This one held men, women, and children. That fact immediately changed how local historians read the site and its connection to the abbey.
Tony McAleavy, a Malmesbury Abbey historian who lives in the town, told the BBC he was “off the scale excited” by what the team uncovered. “What we’ve got here is not a collection of the bodies of monks,” McAleavy said. “It’s men, women, and children. It looks like we’ve found traces of the community of people who helped the monks here.”
McAleavy said the bones add hard physical evidence to the written record of the abbey during its golden age, when it operated as one of the leading centres of scholarship in western Europe. The site traces its origins to an Irish monk who established a hermitage for teaching local children around 637 AD. That hermitage became a Benedictine monastery in 676 AD. King Athelstan, the first king of all England, chose to be buried at the abbey in 941 AD, a decision that locked the town’s place in the early story of the kingdom.
A Discovery That Landed During a Town Anniversary
The excavation results went public while Malmesbury was deep into Athelstan 1100, a programme of events marking the 1,100th anniversary of Athelstan’s crowning. The town was already turning over its Anglo-Saxon past when the find surfaced, which gave the announcement a ready audience and an immediate public context.
Cotswold Archaeology later returned to The Old Bell for the Big Athelstan Dig, a community archaeology project that put volunteers to work on 15 test pits across Malmesbury. What began as a single hotel excavation expanded into a wider effort to recover the town’s early medieval record, with residents doing some of the digging themselves.
Kim and Whit Hanks, who own The Old Bell, described the discovery as “a rare insight into the lives of Middle Saxon period Malmesbury residents.” In a statement released through Cotswold Archaeology, they added: “We are honored to act as stewards of local history, a responsibility we take very seriously. It’s fitting that the earliest remains have been found near the abbey, on the grounds of England’s oldest hotel.”
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