Researchers have discovered that a small silk bag attached to a document at Westminster Abbey matches Charlemagne’s burial shroud. It is woven in a pattern of white hares and floral motifs and dates to the early 12th century. The textile was not the first shroud used in the burial of the first Holy Roman Emperor who died in 814, but rather the one that wrapped his body when his body was reinterred in the Karlsschrein, an ornate shrine decorated in gold, silver, enamel and gemstones, in Aachen Cathedral in 1215. The same textile was used in 1267 as a bag to protect the wax impression of the Great Seal of King Henry III on a document relating to Westminster Abbey’s shrine of Edward the Confessor. The cloth was sewn into a pouch to protect the wax impression of Henry III that the king had affixed to an inventory of items from Westminster Abbey’s shrine to Edward the Confessor that Henry had pawned to pay his war debts. In the document, the king promised to replace the jewels and precious objects he’d put in hock within 18 months. It seems he made good on this promissory note. Seal bags were used to cover the wax seal impressions that were affixed to charters and other documents to authenticate the identity of the signer. Wax impressions were soft, and as legal signatures of kings, queens, nobles, bishops and other august personages, they were not only legally important, but also inherently authentic relics. The signatories held those blobs of wax when they were still warm; they left physical impressions of themselves like fingerprints and oils alongside the impressions of their official seals. Because of their layered significance, the wax impressions were bagged for their protection, and the textiles used to make the bags were precious too, often panni tartarici (Islamic silks dyed with plants imported from as far away as China and woven with gold and silver threads). Charlemagne’s shrine was opened in 1988 and photos taken at that time documented the burial shroud. The shroud is intact, so the piece in Westminster Abbey was not cut from the wrap itself, but it had to have been made by the same weavers on the same looms. The sumptuous textile was created by specialty weavers in Islamic Spain or the eastern Mediterranean, and the pattern would not have been available from any other source; there were no knock-offs floating around or mass-produced inventory stacked in warehouses. As the textile that wrapped the body of an emperor who was venerated as a saint in the territories he once ruled (hence the translation of his bones into a reliquary by Emperor Frederick II), the silk held great significance. It may have even been deliberately chosen by Henry III to make an iconographic association between the well-established cult of the German king Charlemagne and the nascent cult of the English king Edward the Confessor. It remains a mystery about how the Abbey received such a piece of high value silk but a possible theory offered by Matthew Payne, Keeper of the Muniments, who oversees the Abbey’s archives, is that the silk could have been a gift from Henry III’s brother, Richard Earl of Cornwall who is known to have given precious cloths to the Abbey. Richard was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1257 which was over 400 years after his predecessor Charlemagne. The bag (and the document it is attached to) is on display ​at Westminster Abbey in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries through Easter 2025.