32 UNRECORDED DEANS OF WIMBORNE MINSTER. 



The Church must have been standing half a century later : 

 for it is recorded that " in the year 962 King Sifferth killed 

 himself and his body lies at Wimborne." 11 Who this King 

 Sifferth was is a mystery. Freeman thinks that he may have 

 been a Danish prisoner. 12 It is just possible that he was a 

 Welsh king. A namesake, Siferd, a Welsh sub-regulus, was one 

 of the tributary kings who, a few years later, did homage to 

 King Edgar, and whose name appears, with those of six of the 

 other tributaries, as witnessing a charter of King Edgar's in the 

 year 966. 13 Could it be possible that the date of Sifferth's 

 death, as given by the Chronicler, is a few years wrong, and 

 that the Welsh tributary king, one of the monarchs who rowed 

 King Edgar's barge upon the river Dee, is the same King 

 Sifferth who was buried at Wimborne ? At any rate his 

 must have been a case of death by accident and not by suicide, 

 for, as has been pointed out, in a letter to the writer of this 

 paper, by one of the principal officials of the Royal Historical 

 Society, if he had intentionally taken his own life, he would 

 not have been allowed to be buried within, the walls of a 

 consecrated building. 



The monastery appears to have been destroyed by the 

 Danes in one of their incursions into Wessex. When next we 

 hear of the Church it belonged to a " secular " community, 

 and not to a " religious " one. The Abbess, with her Sisters 

 and Novices and Postulants, &c., had given place to a Dean 

 and Canons, with their Sacristans, Vicars, Chaplains, Clerks, 

 and other Ministers. 



(2) This brings us to our second period, which commenced, 

 it is said, in the time of Edward the Confessor, and lasted 

 until the dissolution of the College in the year 1547. But 

 of this anon. 



11. A. S. Chronicle A. v. 962. 



12. E. A. Freeman, Old English History, London, Dent (Every- 

 man's Library), p, 175. 



13. KemblVs Charters No. 619 (Vol. II., p. 413). 



