I always like to say hello to King Canute’s tomb chest on top of the stone wall round the high altar at Winchester cathedral when I’m there, so it was with some surprise on Monday that I found it missing. It had gone, along with the painted wooden chests containing the bones of King Alfred’s father, Canute’s wife Emma, Archbishop Stigand and Saxon kings from as far back as the seventh century.

This was not a case of tomb robbery, for the chests had been taken to the Lady Chapel at the far east end of the cathedral, where, behind a hoarding, a sort of laboratory has been set up. The chests are to be restored and conserved. Up-to-the-minute technology will attempt to find out whose bones are whose and what the other contents of the chests signify.

There are six chests, four of them from the late 1520s, with lovely Renaissance lettering on them. I’d grown so accustomed to the sight of these royal tomb chests set up on high in the cathedral that when I first saw the Chest of the Cid in Burgos cathedral, I took it for his burial place too. In reality it is a chest resembling one mentioned in the medieval poem about the Spanish hero, but far too late even to be that.