The memorial in Bosham church. Photo: Leonora Enking / flickr CC.
King Canute’s daughter
Ernest Hall recalls a story associated with the ancient church at Bosham
The village of Bosham, (pronounced Bozzum), lies beside an inlet from the sea near Chichester. Part of its ancient church dates back to Roman times, but the greater part was built towards the end of the Dark Ages, in the Anglo-Saxon period.
King Canute (or Cnut) and his family lived here and it is believed to have been at Bosham that Canute demonstrated, to flattering courtiers, that neither he, nor any other man, could stem the course of the tide. Canute is said to have had a well-loved eight-year-old daughter, who was accidentally drowned in the millstream that still runs through the village. Her body was buried in the nave of the church at Bosham.
There was no written record of this event, nor even of the eight-year-old child’s existence, but the story of her death and burial was passed on by word of mouth within the village from generation to generation. In 1865 some building work was carried out on the church and the then vicar instructed the builders to excavate the nave where the little girl’s body was said to have been buried. There they found a stone coffin, dating from the tenth/eleventh centuries, that contained the skeleton of a eight-year-old child.
The remains of the little Anglo/Danish princess were reinterred and the children of the village collected money to provide a memorial for her, complete with an engraved Danish raven, inside the church. It is there to this day.
Whenever I am told that this, that or the other story from the gospels cannot possibly be true, because there was no record of it until two, three or four centuries after the events were said to have taken place, I remember Canute’s daughter, whose story was passed on by word of mouth for generation after generation for over 800 years before its accuracy was established.
