A 1000-year-old secret is revealed.
One of my favourite books is Laurie Lee’s “Cider with Rosie” This is an autobiography of Laurie’s childhood in a remote Gloucestershire village in the early part of the twentieth century.
The book chronicles the slow transition of village life that had hardly changed for hundreds of years and gave us a glimpse of the world the later twentieth century was to bring to the countryside.
But this book made me think of a story that I believe came from Laurie Lee, and may have been in Cider with Rosie, and I have just forgotten about it.
The story concerns a small overgrown mound of earth and grass that had been part of village life for centuries. Nobody knew what it was, but it had always been referred to as “the young prince’s grave” and it had been called this for as long as anyone who had lived in the village could remember.
Old people would say they had heard it called that by their grandparents, and they from their grandparents before them. It was simply known as the young prince’s grave and had been for years. And no one knew why.
Then sometime in the twentieth century, the mound was excavated. In it was found the remains of a young male, probably of Celtic or early Anglo-Saxon origins. He had been buried with weapons and jewellery that indicated he was of some importance, a nobleman or a son of a nobleman.
This youth had been at rest in his grave for close to a thousand years. The knowledge of his tomb had been verbally passed down over the centuries. Who he was, and how he got there, had been lost in history. But people knew the grassy mound was “the young prince’s grave”, an echo from the distant past.
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