What's Really Buried Under St. Paul's Cathedral?

When workers began clearing the ruins of St Paul's Cathedral after the Great Fire of 1666, they expected to find rubble, melted lead and ash. They did not expect to find a perfectly preserved human body. Bishop Robert Braybrooke had been dead for 262 years. He had been buried inside the cathedral in 1404, sealed in his tomb while the Wars of the Roses, the Reformation and the English Civil War passed above him. The fire cracked his tomb open and the men who pulled him out found him complete and undamaged, looking as though he had been buried that morning. But Braybrooke was not the only thing hidden beneath the cathedral floor. Beneath the bishop lay a Saxon king. Beneath the king lay Roman cremation urns. Beneath the urns lay seashells from an ancient sea. And beneath the legend of a Roman temple that everyone still repeats, there was nothing at all. This is a building that has been built, burned and rebuilt five times on the same hill and each time it fell it revealed a little more of what was underneath. The question is not what St Paul's Cathedral looks like, the question is what it is standing on. Ludgate Hill is the highest point in the city of London. It rises from the north bank of the Thames on a foundation of clay over sand and gravel and beneath all of that at the lowest stratum sit ancient seashells. Geological evidence that this ground once lay beneath the sea. Long before any human being set foot here, long before London existed as a concept, the hill that would one day carry five successive cathedrals lay underwater. When Christopher Wren's builders eventually dug down to find solid bearing ground for the foundations of the present cathedral in the late 17th century, they cut through those shells. They chose to found the building on the clay stratum itself. The shells were the final layer, the full stop at the bottom of the sentence. Above the shells the Romans arrived. Londinium was founded around 47 AD, a few years after the Emperor Claudius invaded Britain. The settlement grew rapidly from a bridgehead on the Thames into the largest city in Roman Britain with a population reaching perhaps 60,000 at its peak in the second century. Defensive walls were built encircling the settlement around 200 AD. Temples rose, an amphitheatre stood where the Guildhall Art Gallery sits today and Ludgate Hill sitting inside those walls at the highest elevation became one of the most prominent positions in the entire city. This is where the myth begins. From the 16th century onward, antiquarians including William Camden and William Dugdale, who published his History of St Paul's Cathedral in 1658, popularised a claim that has persisted ever since. A Roman temple dedicated to Diana, goddess of the hunt, once stood on Ludgate Hill. On the exact site where St Paul's Cathedral stands today, the evidence they cited was intriguing. During the reign of Edward I, large quantities of ox skulls had been found in the cathedral churchyard. The antiquarians interpreted these as remnants of tauropolia, Roman sacrificial rites associated with the worship of Diana. Nearby buildings in medieval cathedral records bore the label camera Dianae, Diana's chamber, and a curious custom survived well into the 16th century in which a stag's head mounted on a spear was carried into the cathedral and presented to priests wearing garlands of flowers. It had all the ingredients of a compelling historical argument. Ox skulls suggesting sacrifice, a name suggesting dedication, a ritual suggesting continuity. A parallel legend, drawn from the pseudo-historical tradition of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britannia, went further still, claiming that the mythical Trojan exile Brutus had founded a temple to Diana on this hill around 1000 BC and that the London stone was a surviving fragment of its altar. There is just one difficulty with all of this, none of it can be substantiated. A 1996 scholarly paper published in the Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society traced the belief entirely through antiquarian writing, not through any physical evidence. The paper demonstrated that the myth was a product of 16th and 17th century speculation, built on interpretation and assumption rather than excavation. Arthur Henderson's speculative reconstruction drawing from 1937 did much to lodge the image of a grand Roman temple in the popular imagination, but it was a work of artistic imagination, not archaeology. The ox skulls were real, their connection to Diana worship was a 16th century guess, not an established fact. There is also the testimony of the one person who actually dug through the site with his own hands. Christopher Wren, while preparing the foundations for his new cathedral in the 1670s, investigated the ground directly and methodically. He found Roman era domestic material, pottery shards, cremation urns decorated with images of greyhounds and stags. A kiln discovered roughly 26 feet, about eight meters below the surface, documented by the antiquarian and apothecary John Conyers, who kept a shop on Fleet Street and made it his daily business to collect finds from the excavation. Wren found ordinary Roman occupation, he found burials, he found evidence of daily life stretching back centuries. He did not find a temple, he did not believe the legend, and no subsequent archaeological investigation across multiple campaigns stretching from 1969 to 2006 has found one either. The Diana Temple is a ghost, an idea that refused to die, sustained by repetition and romantic appeal rather than evidence. What is actually down there, the pottery and the urns and the cremation remains, tells a quieter story. Romans lived on this hill. They worked here, cooked here, buried their dead here. That, on its own, is already remarkable enough. The first cathedral appeared on Ludgate Hill in 604 AD. Seven years earlier, in 597, Pope Gregory the Great had sent the monk Augustine from Rome to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons. Augustine had founded the mission that became Canterbury Cathedral. Now the mission reached London. Augustine consecrated a man named Meletus as the first Bishop of London, serving King Seybert of the East Saxons. Seybert's uncle and overlord, King Ethelbert of Kent, funded and built a wooden church on the hill dedicated to St Paul. It was Meletus's cathedral seat, the first St Paul's. No physical trace of this building survives today, not a plank, not a nail, not even a confirmed footprint on the hill. It is assumed to underlie the later cathedrals, but its exact position has never been proven. Around 616, Seybert died. His sons, who had never accepted Christianity, expelled Meletus from London. The East Saxons reverted to paganism and the fate of that first wooden church is simply unrecorded. It vanished as completely as the people who built it. Christianity returned to the East Saxons by the late 7th century and with it came a second cathedral. The wooden church had burned down around 675 AD. Bishop Erkenwald rebuilt it in stone between 675 and 685. Erkenwald was buried in his cathedral when he died in 693 and his shrine became one of the most important pilgrimage sites in medieval England, credited with numerous miracles. Pilgrims travelled from across the country to pray at his tomb. King Sebi of the East Saxons was also buried here. The hill was becoming what it would remain for the next 13 centuries, a place where kings and bishops were laid in the ground and remembered. In 961, the Vikings ended all of it. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that Norsemen sacked and destroyed the cathedral that year. A third cathedral, again in stone, was rapidly built in its place in 962. King Æthelred the Unready, who reigned from 978 to 1013, and again from 1014 until his death in 1016, was buried in the choir of this third building. His tomb location was later recorded on a 1658 plan of the cathedral by the engraver Wenceslaus Holler, marked on the north side of the choir. The physical tomb itself was lost in the great fire of 1666. A king's burial, mapped and documented, then erased by flame. That pattern of building and destroying and building again was becoming the defining rhythm of this site. In 1087, a major fire swept through London and destroyed the third cathedral, along with much of the city. William the Conqueror donated stone for a new, much larger building, some of it shipped across the channel from Caen in Normandy. Bishop Maurice, formerly William's chaplain, began the project. He died in 1108 before its completion. A further fire in 1135 damaged the partially built structure and delayed the work by years. Construction shifted over time from the heavy Romanesque style of the Normans to the lighter, more vertical early English Gothic. The building was consecrated in 1240, then further enlarged between 1256 and 1314. Total construction time from first stone to final completion stretched well over two centuries. The finished building was immense. Old St Paul's, as it came to be known, was one of the largest churches in Europe. Roughly 178 meters long, with a spire reputed to reach around 149 meters above the ground. For a time, that spire was among the tallest structures in the medieval world, surpassed in some accounts only by the spire of Lincoln Cathedral. This was not a modest parish church tucked into a corner of the city. It was a statement of ambition, visible for miles across the flat Thames Valley, towering above a city of timber and thatch, dominating the skyline as completely as the dome does today. Then the centuries began their work. In 1561, lightning struck the spire, starting a fire that destroyed the roof and the spire itself. It was never rebuilt. The cathedral thereafter stood truncated, its skyline permanently diminished. Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s had already stripped the medieval interior of its shrines and ornaments. The great shrine of Bishop Erkenwald, which had drawn pilgrims for eight centuries, was dismantled and its treasures seized. By the late 16th century and into the 17th, the nave had acquired a new identity entirely. Known locally as Paul's Walk, it had become a Merchants conducted business deals between the pillars. Lawyers met clients near the font. Beggars, pickpockets and prostitutes worked the crowds alongside the traders and gossips. The cathedral had become, in effect, a covered high street with an altar at one end. Architect Inigo Jones carried out restoration work from 1621, adding a classical Corinthian portico to the west front in the 1630s, an attempt to impose Renaissance order on medieval chaos. During the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell's soldiers reportedly stabled horses inside the building itself. The cathedral, that had taken two centuries to build, was falling apart in a fraction of the time. One man who served this declining cathedral left behind a monument more enduring than most of its stones. John Donne was appointed Dean of St Paul's in 1621 and served until his death on the 31st of March 1631. Donne had been one of the finest poets and preachers in the English language and he approached his own death with the same intensity he had brought to his writing. In his final weeks, gravely ill and knowing he was dying, Donne did something that is difficult to forget once you have heard it. He posed for his own memorial. Wrapped in his burial shroud, standing on a wooden mock-up of a funerary urn, he held the pose while the sculptor Nicholas Stone modelled a marble effigy from life, a man rehearsing his own death so that the stone version of himself would be accurate. The finished marble monument was installed in the cathedral within about 18 months of his death. This decision, quiet and deliberate and unnerving, would prove to be among the most consequential acts of preservation in the building's entire history. But that was still 35 years away. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, King Charles II ordered repairs to the decaying cathedral. Christopher Wren was asked to survey the building in 1666 and proposed replacing its truncated central tower with a dome. Before those plans could be acted upon, a far larger catastrophe arrived. The Great Fire of London began in Thomas Farriner's bakery on Pudding Lane in the early hours of Sunday 2nd September 1666. It spread rapidly through London's densely packed timber and pitch buildings during a summer drought, driven by a persistent easterly wind. By Monday it had consumed whole streets. By Tuesday it was unstoppable. On the evening of Tuesday 4th September, the fire reached St Paul's. Refugees and booksellers from nearby Paternoster Row had moved their stock and possessions into the cathedral's crypt, believing the thick medieval stone walls would protect them. It was a reasonable assumption. The walls were immense, but wooden scaffolding erected for Wren's planned repairs stood against the exterior, and the scaffolding gave the flames a ladder straight to the roof. Evelyn's account of what followed remains one of the most vivid eyewitness descriptions of destruction in English literature. The stones flew outward like grenades. The melted lead ran down the streets in a stream. The pavements glowed with heat. Inside the cathedral, the acres of oak roof timbers caught and burned with a ferocity that the stone walls could not contain. When the vaulted ceiling collapsed, it crashed through the marble floor into the crypt, which was still packed with paper and leather-bound books. The fire down there burned for a full week. The collapse cracked open tombs and monuments, and scattered bones across the ruins. It was during the clearing of this wreckage that workers found the body of Bishop Robert Braybrooke, dead since 1404, perfectly preserved in his sealed tomb. 262 years underground, and the fire that destroyed everything around him had merely set him free. Of the many monuments in the medieval cathedral, only one survived essentially intact. John Donne's shrouded marble effigy, the statue he had posed for on his deathbed, fell into the crypt during the collapse, and was later dug from the ashes and rubble. It still stands in the present cathedral today. If you look closely at the base of the funerary urn, you can see visible scorch marks from 1666. The fire scorched the stone, but did not break it. A handful of other effigies survived as well, but badly damaged. Burnt black by the heat, their carved detail transfigured almost beyond recognition. They remain on display in the crypt today, silent witnesses to the night the cathedral died. John Evelyn returned to the site five days after the fire, on the 7th of September, and described clambering over heaps of still-smoking rubble, the ground hot enough to burn through the soles of his shoes. The great fire had destroyed roughly four-fifths of the walled city. Around 13,200 houses and 87 parish churches were gone. St Paul's was among them. What followed the destruction was one of the most revealing episodes in the cathedral's long history. Wren's 1666 repair proposals were now obsolete. The medieval ruins could not be saved, and it was decided that a wholly new cathedral would be built on the same hill. While clearing the rubble-strewn site before construction could begin, Wren asked a labourer to bring him a flat stone to mark the exact centre point of his planned dome. The nearest broken fragment the man could find, picked from the surrounding debris of the building, had a single word carved into it. Resurgam. Latin for I will rise again. Of all the thousands of shattered stones lying on that hillside, the one that came to hand bore the one word that mattered. Wren later had a stone phoenix rising from flames carved into the pediment above the cathedral's south door, with that same word inscribed beneath it. You can still see it there today. In preparing the new foundations from 1675, Wren's crews dug down through the accumulated layers of the site's history. The antiquarian and apothecary John Conyers, who kept a shop on Fleet Street and made it his daily business to collect finds from the excavation, documented what came out of the ground with the care of a man who understood he was watching something that would not be repeated. The layering was extraordinary in its clarity. First, a row of Anglo-Saxon graves lined with chalk stones. Beneath those, older coffins containing ivory and wooden shroud pins. Deeper still, Roman-era pot sherds and cremation urns decorated with greyhounds and stags. Conyers recorded a Roman kiln located roughly 26 feet below the surface, and at the very bottom, the seashells. The ancient seabed. A complete cross-section of London's history, compressed into a few metres of earth beneath a single hill. This was the excavation in which Wren found no trace of a Diana Temple. He was cutting through the exact ground where the temple was supposed to have stood. Roman kilns, yes. Domestic pottery, yes. Evidence of a monumental religious structure, no. The myth died in the trench, even if it refused to stay buried in the popular imagination. Wren made another decision during this period that is easy to overlook. He deliberately realigned his new cathedral's footprint to avoid the old medieval foundations rather than building directly on top of them. The dome of the present St Paul's rises on ground that old St Paul's had never physically occupied. The old building and the new one overlap but do not precisely coincide. They are two structures sharing a hill, not one replacing another on the same footing. Not everything from the old cathedral was discarded. Workers salvaged scorched Roman tiles, Anglo-Saxon grave covers and a Hogback grave cover, possibly belonging to the 10th century King Athelstan. A Viking-era grave marker, dug up in the churchyard in 1852 and dated to roughly 1125 to 1150, was later placed in the triforium of the new building where fragments remain today. Most of the old stone though was broken up and reused as structural infill for Wren's walls. The medieval cathedral did not so much disappear as become invisible, absorbed into the fabric of its successor. If you are finding this worth your time, subscribe. We cover stories like this every week and there are centuries of London still waiting to be told. Construction of the present cathedral began in 1675. The design Wren wanted most, his great model, had been rejected by the cathedral commissioners. They found it insufficiently cathedral-like in appearance. Its echoes of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome sat uncomfortably in a Protestant country still sensitive about its break from the papacy. The design that was accepted and built proved to be an astonishing feat of structural engineering. Beneath Ludgate Hill the ground posed genuine problems. Soft clay over sand and gravel, with 17th century understanding of soil bearing capacity still primitive by modern standards. Wren chose to found the building on the clay stratum itself and designed accordingly. A large area was excavated to create what would become the largest cathedral crypt in Europe, with massive stone piers built within it to distribute the immense weight of the dome above. Most dome designs of the period sat on four central piers. Wren used eight, spreading the load more broadly at foundation level. It was a cautious methodical decision. And it worked. Wren's dome, inspired by Saint Peter's in Rome, consists of three separate shells nested inside one another. A visible plastered brick inner dome, which is what the congregation sees when they look up from the nave. A concealed brick cone nearly twice the height of the inner dome, which provides the real structural support for the lantern above. And an outer dome of leaded timber topped by a stone lantern, which creates the silhouette familiar to anyone who has ever seen the London skyline. Three structures doing three different jobs, none of them fully visible to the observer at the same time. The engineering is hidden inside the architecture. That was the point. The first service was held in the still unfinished cathedral on the 2nd of December, 1697. Construction continued for over another decade. The building was topped out in October 1708, the final stone set in place by Wren's own son, Christopher Wren Junior, who had been born in the same year construction began. 33 years of his life had elapsed between the first foundation stone and the last. Parliament declared the cathedral officially complete on the 25th of December, 1711. Christmas Day. Wren was 79 years old. The total cost was recorded at roughly £736,752, funded substantially through a City of London tax on imported coal. 35 years from groundbreaking to completion. For a project of this scale, by the standards of any century, that was fast. Sir Christopher Wren died on the 25th of February, 1723, aged 90. He was the first person buried in the crypt of his own cathedral, at the East End. His grave is marked only by a plain black stone slab. There is no elaborate monument, no sculpted effigy, no ornamental brass. The epitaph on the wall above was composed by his son and reads, in translation from the Latin, Here in its foundations lies the architect of this church and city, Christopher Wren, who lived beyond 90 years, not for his own profit but for the public good. Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you. Those final words, lector, see monumentum requiris, circumspice, are also inscribed in the floor of the transept directly above. They remain one of the most quietly devastating lines ever written about any building anywhere. Around the same area of the crypt, a cluster of later burials established what became known as Painter's Corner. J.M.W. Turner was buried here. So were Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder of the Royal Academy of Arts, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Sir Edwin Landseer, Sir John Everett Millay and William Holman Hunt. The crypt became to painters what the nave of Westminster Abbey was to poets, a crowded, silent company of artists resting beneath the building many of them had painted. Admiral Horatio Nelson died at the Battle of Trafalgar on the 21st of October 1805, struck by a musket ball fired from the rigging of the French ship Redoutable during the engagement that destroyed Napoleon's naval ambitions. Before an earlier battle, the Battle of Cape St. Vincent in 1797, Nelson had famously declared Westminster Abbey, or glorious victory, expecting that the Abbey would receive his body should he fall. By the time of his death at Trafalgar eight years later, the Abbey's burial space was full. St. Paul's received him instead. Nelson's body was preserved for the long voyage home from the coast of Spain in a cask of brandy. His preferred drink lashed to the mast of HMS Victory. He was buried on the 9th of January 1806 in a state funeral directly beneath the centre of the dome. The sarcophagus that holds him has a history of its own that stretches back nearly three centuries before Nelson was born. It was originally commissioned in the 1520s by Cardinal Wolsey for his personal use. Wolsey, Henry VIII's chief minister, fell from royal favour before he could be buried in it, and the black and white marble sarcophagus sat in storage for roughly 200 years, unwanted and unused, until King George III presented it for Nelson's interment. A monument built for a disgraced churchman, repurposed for a dead admiral, Nelson's coffin itself was constructed from the timber of the French flagship Lorient, a ship his own fleet had destroyed at the Battle of the Nile seven years earlier. In death, Nelson was encased in his enemy's wreckage, inside his enemy's cardinal's tomb, beneath the dome of a Protestant cathedral. The layering of ironies is almost too neat. Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, victor over Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, and later twice Prime Minister, died in 1852. He was buried at St Paul's on the 18th of November that year, after lying in state for five days, during which an estimated half a million people filed past his coffin. His coffin was lowered through a hole cut in the cathedral floor. According to visitor accounts, it rested on top of Nelson's tomb for roughly a year before being brought fully down into its own position in the crypt. His granite sarcophagus now occupies a central position nearby, with original funeral flags still hanging above it. A sixth Prussian flag was removed during the First World War and never replaced. Nobody put it back. Quietly, the omission became permanent. Sir Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin, is also buried in the crypt, his ashes beneath a plaque near Wren's tomb. Other notable burials include the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan and the sculptor Henry Moore. Florence Nightingale is commemorated at St Paul's with a memorial, but is not buried there. Winston Churchill's state funeral was held in the cathedral in January 1965, but he chose burial elsewhere, in a churchyard in Oxfordshire, near his birthplace at Blenheim Palace. The cathedral's survival through the Second World War was not a foregone conclusion. It came closer to destruction between 1940 and 1941 than at any point since the Great Fire. On the 12th of September, 1940, early in the Blitz, a one-tonne delayed-action bomb, described in press reports as the largest yet dropped on London, landed in Dean's Yard near the cathedral's west steps and buried itself nearly eight and a half metres into the London clay, fracturing a gas main as it fell. A Royal Engineers bomb disposal team, working for three days in conditions that could have killed them at any moment, dug the device out of the ground. Had it detonated where it landed, it would likely have destroyed much of the cathedral. The bomb was loaded onto a lorry, driven through the streets of London to Hackney Marshes, and safely exploded there, leaving a crater 100 feet across. Two members of the disposal team, Lieutenant Robert Davies and Sapper George Wiley, were awarded the George Cross for the operation. Throughout the Blitz, a volunteer civilian group called the St Paul's Watch, including a number of architects recruited through the Royal Institute of British Architects, patrolled the cathedral's roofs and internal passages around the clock, ready to smother incendiary bombs with sand and water before they could take hold. These were not soldiers, they were ordinary Londoners who understood what the building meant, and refused to let it burn without a fight. On the 10th of October, 1940, a high explosive bomb struck the east end of the cathedral directly and destroyed the high altar. The damage was severe. The cathedral held. On the night of the 29th to the 30th of December, 1940, the raid, later called the Second Great Fire of London, in which more than 160 people died across the city, St Paul's was struck by 29 separate incendiary bombs in a single night. Watch volunteers fought fires across the roof. One incendiary lodged in the dome itself, and had to be dealt with at height, in smoke and darkness, before it could melt through the lead and ignite the timber structure beneath. The bomb eventually fell outward onto the stone gallery, rather than burning inward. It was during this raid that photographer Herbert Mason, standing on a rooftop at the offices of the Daily Mail, captured the image that became one of the defining photographs of the 20th century. The dome of St Paul's Cathedral, rising intact above a sea of smoke and fire, surrounded by destruction, untouched. The image was published under the headline, St Paul's Survives. It became a symbol of British resilience that has never lost its hold. On the 17th of April, 1941, a further direct hit struck the north transept, punching a hole clean through the cathedral floor into the crypt below and, according to structural assessments, shifting the entire dome laterally by a small but measurable distance. The cathedral survived the war standing, though visibly scarred. It had come closer to following old St Paul's into destruction than anyone outside the watch fully understood. Formal archaeological excavation around and beneath the cathedral fabric took place across several campaigns between 1969 and 2006, synthesised in English Heritage's comprehensive study St Paul's Cathedral Before Wren, published by John Schofield in 2011. No certain physical trace of the original Anglo-Saxon cathedral of 604 has ever been positively identified. A foundation of possible Anglo-Saxon or 11th century date was found in a test pit on the northwest side of the cathedral in 1932, suggestive but not conclusive. The first cathedral remains as invisible as the day it disappeared. Buried inside Wren's Portland stone walls are an estimated thousands of reused carved fragments of stonework salvaged from the medieval building, incorporated invisibly into the fabric. The medieval cathedral did not disappear. It was absorbed. It is still there, hidden inside the bearing weight it was never designed to carry. A 1996 tunnelling project near the site uncovered fragments of Inigo Jones' 1630s classical portico, still covered in soot from the Great Fire, 330 years after the flames went out. The soot was still on the stone. The fire had never been cleaned away. It had simply been buried. St Paul's Cathedral is not one building. It is five, stacked on a single hill. Wood, stone, stone again. Gothic giant. Baroque dome. And beneath all of them, beneath the Saxon graves and the Roman urns and the chalk and the clay, sit the seashells. Proof that this hill once lay beneath the sea, long before any cathedral, any city, any civilisation arrived to claim it. Each generation built on the ruins of the last. Each fire cleared the ground for something new. And each time, the hill held. Wren understood this better than anyone. He dug through the evidence with his own hands and built on top of it. His epitaph asks the reader to look around. But the real monument is not above ground. It is beneath the floor, compressed into layers, silent and still and completely invisible, unless you know where to look.