Many visitors to the crypt are puzzled as to where the bodies lay. The average Anglo-Saxon was only slightly shorter than the average today, and certainly not as short as the recesses which housed them. The explanation is that the mausoleum held not the bodies of the royal family but their bones. After death, the bodies were buried. Only when the flesh had decayed were the skull and long bones recovered and placed in caskets of wood or iron on shelves in one of the four recesses along the walls of the crypt.