'Amazing find': 1400-year-old skeleton of one of UK's first Christians
Scientists have discovered the remains of what is thought to be one of Britain's first ever Christians after unearthing an "excessively rare" 1400-year-old Anglo-Saxon burial site in Cambridgeshire.
Yahoo! UK reports the grave contains the skeletal remains of a 16-year-old female Catholic lying on an ornamental bed clutching a gold and garnet cross – suggesting she was one of Britain’s earliest Christians.
Quite how the 16-year-old Anglo Saxon girl died remains a mystery but it is believed that she was a member of nobility and persuaded to join the Christian faith after the Pope dispatched St Augustine to England in 597AD.
Dr Sam Lewsey, an expert on the period, told Yahoo! UK: "This is an excessively rare discovery. It is the most amazing find I have ever encountered.
"Christian conversion began at the top and percolated down. To be buried in this elaborate way, with such a valuable artefact, tells us that this girl was probably nobility or even royalty.
"This cross is the kind of material culture that was in circulation at the highest sphere of society."
