London, Aug. 4 (AFP): It has been in continuous use for almost 1,000 years, and for a long time people believed ? wrongly ? that it was covered in flayed human skin.

Today, a battered door inside London’s famous Westminster Abbey was officially named as the oldest door in Britain.

Research on the innocuous-looking door, funded by historic preservation body English Heritage, was completed last week and concluded that the door had survived so long because it is indoors and has been used constantly.

A spokeswoman for the Abbey, the church near the parliament in central London, said the door had been dated back to the 1050s, during the reign of the Abbey’s founder, King Edward the confessor.

This makes it the only remaining Anglo-Saxon era door in Britain, an archaeologist who took part in the study said. “In the 19th century it was noticed that there were fragments of hide adhering to the door and a legend grew up suggesting that these were human,” the spokeswoman said.

“It was supposed that somebody in the Middle Ages had been caught committing sacrilege in the Abbey, had been flayed and his skin nailed to the door as a deterrent to other would-be felons.” However, modern analysis had identified the skin as cow hide.