A kneecap belonging to an Abbot at a medieval British abbey has been returned by the widow of a person who stole it from an excavation website on the premises as a baby.
George Field, who died final yr, was 11 when he swiped the bone whereas on a faculty journey to Glastonbury Abbey in the summertime of 1956, based on an announcement from the abbey.
Throughout the means of sorting by way of his belongings and arranging to carry his ashes again to the U.Ok. to unfold them the place he grew up, his spouse additionally deliberate to return the bone to its authentic resting place.
“Whereas visiting the abbey, George had observed a big archaeological excavation happening. As nobody was round, he managed to choose up a bit of medieval flooring tile and a bit of bone (a kneecap, actually) from an opened tomb,” the abbey stated in a information launch.
Get breaking Nationwide information
Get breaking Canada information delivered to your inbox because it occurs so you will not miss a trending story.
As a baby, George by no means advised anybody he took the bone or the tile, or that when he moved to Australia within the Nineteen Seventies, he introduced each gadgets with him.
In Australia, he displayed the artifact and the tile in a glass cupboard alongside fossils and different gadgets he had collected throughout his lifelong fascination with archaeology.
George married his second spouse in 2000, and when she caught wind of his childhood antics, thought the gadgets needs to be returned to the abbey, its assertion says. Field agreed that they need to be taken again to England after he died.
They’re now again within the arms of the abbey’s museum division and are on show for public viewing.
“The abbey may be very grateful for his or her return, and to have learnt their fascinating story,” it stated, including that its data present a dig was happening on the north transept of the Abbey Church, the place a number of abbots’ tombs had been opened up, some close to the stays of tiled flooring when Field pocketed the patella as a boy.
Glastonbury Abbey, which underwent dissolution in 1539 below Henry VIII throughout his efforts to train full management over the church, is the burial website of a number of abbots who oversaw the institution and died greater than 800 years in the past.
“Which means that the kneecap might belong to both Abbot Amesbury, Abbot Petherton or Abbot John of Taunton, who all died within the thirteenth century and had been buried in that a part of the abbey.”
“All three stay at relaxation on this space,” the information launch says, noting that they’re buried a number of metres beneath the bottom.
Lucy Newman, an worker on the abbey, advised the BBC that workers are usually not positive which abbot the bone belonged to, and joked that in the event that they had been to excavate the burial websites to match it with its proprietor, considered one of its three potential homeowners might find yourself with “three kneecaps.”
“How stunned would they be to know that considered one of their kneecaps had travelled to Australia and again” — a land utterly unknown to medieval monks of their time.
© 2026 World Information, a division of Corus Leisure Inc.
