According to a legend set in the year 869, the monks of Crowland Abbey in the Lincolnshire fens had fallen into a state of genuine debauchery and blasphemy, despite the repeated protests of their own Abbot, Theodore, a man apparently fighting a losing battle to hold his community to the vows they had all sworn. The Devil himself is said to have appeared directly to the whole community and told them something both hopeful and deeply ominous at once: that a new abbey would indeed, eventually, be built on this same site, but that every single monk then present would be dead long before that new building was ever completed, a prophecy delivered as much as a punishment for their sins as a genuine warning about what was to come.
The abbey today keeps, displayed in a glass case above the porch for any visitor to see, a skull said to be that of Abbot Theodore himself, the very man who had tried so hard to hold his community to its proper vows, a genuinely old and striking physical relic that gives this ancient legend an unusually tangible anchor in the present day, something visitors can actually stand in front of rather than simply hear described.
The skull carries its own considerably more recent story layered on top of the ninth-century legend: it was stolen from the abbey in 1982 and then returned anonymously almost two decades later, a strange, small, real-world postscript to a much older tale of prophecy and doom, as though even Theodore's own physical remains could not entirely escape one more unexplained disappearance and return, centuries after the original Devil's prophecy was supposedly delivered to his community.
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