Digging for Richard III

by Mike Pitts

  The phrenologist thought the stupid man had thrown himself into the river less than a century before. Another observer objected that the skeleton was truly ancient – not just medieval, but prehistoric, perhaps not even a modern human, and thus of immense value to science (Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had been published less than three years before).9

  The bones are now lost, so we cannot examine them ourselves. Lone skulls were also said to have been taken from the river, and sometimes attributed to Richard III; most of these too are lost. The completeness of the skeleton suggests a grave, and the best guess is that it was medieval. Close by, on the east side of the River Soar, there had been a friary, one of four in medieval Leicester.10 Like the friary where, according to history, Richard had been buried, at least for the first time, this one – an Augustinian foundation known as the Austin Friars – had been demolished at the Dissolution in the 16th century. But beneath the ground, wall trenches and drains still survived, as did rubbish pits and cellars, and hundreds of graves. As the braided River Soar eroded its banks, it had probably undermined some of these burials.11

  A century later, archaeologists were alert to the promise of this old friary site. It was in a triangle formed by two channels of the Soar, north of the road between Bow Bridge and West Bridge – the point where King Richards Road, crossing the river into Leicester, becomes St Augustine Road, the friars’ road. It had never been a fashionable part of town, outside the walls, low-lying and wet. It was a place of factories, and one of the country’s earliest railway terminuses – built to move coal, not people. After the Soar had been cut into a canal in 1889, drainage improved and new housing spread rapidly – this was when Tudor Road was laid out, with branch streets named Bosworth, Tewkesbury, Warwick and Vernon. But no houses were raised over the old friary.

  By the 1960s, the railway had closed, the factories were running out of steam and developers were eyeing the land. It was the opportunity archaeologists had wanted. They knew there were remains of great potential interest, remains that would be destroyed if new works occurred. The threat released funds from central government, and in 1973 an excavation began, looking for the Austin Friars.

  And down there, among the roads named after battles, dynasties and kings, where Richard III had marched out to Bosworth and where Henry VII had entered Leicester, where myth blended with record to create a unique memorial to momentous events and unforgettable men, came a schoolboy on his first-ever dig.

  His name was Richard Buckley.

  Half an hour’s walk across town is a proper memorial. Built in the 1920s and designed by Edwin Lutyens, it is a beautiful and elegantly austere, monumental arch faced with pale Portland stone. Inspired by ancient Roman architecture and mythology, it bestrides the axis of the rising sun on Armistice Day, honouring the 12,000 Leicestershire men who died in the First World War.12

  It is near this arch, among a group of buildings on Peace Way, that Richard Buckley today has his office – the land for the University of Leicester was a gift, another memorial to the dead of that great war. The university’s School of Archaeology and Ancient History is one of the country’s largest and most popular departments of its kind. It is home to the independent University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS), a group of professional field archaeologists who work across the UK, turning over three quarters of a million pounds a year – over a million US dollars – in contracts to businesses and public agencies, from one-man builders to supermarket chains, airports and the BBC. ULAS has two directors: Patrick Clay and Richard Buckley.

  If not on its present scale, nor by these institutions, archaeology was taught and practised in Leicester when Richard Buckley was at school. His first experience of digging, where he learned to use his first trowel, was with the predecessor of the organization he now co-directs, the Leicestershire Archaeological Unit. As we sit and talk in the university office, there’s little around us – apart from the scuffed black computers – that would have been out of place in the 1970s: tightly packed tables, piles of typed reports, bags and boxes on every surface, posters on the walls and dirt on the floor. A striped black and yellow parking ticket stuck to a desk, and Richard’s well-used coffee mug bearing a portrait of Richard III, remind me why I’m here. But though the way digs are now run has changed radically – more professional, concerned with clients as well as finding things – inside this office, discussing a schoolboy’s first brush with archaeology, I am transported back to another age.

  It began when he was just six or seven, forcing his parents to visit castles, and collecting coins. They’d go to the Tower of London, and he’d notice the money in his mum’s purse included Victorian pennies. He’d sort them all out into different heads, study the wear patterns, and feel a connection to the past. It was fascinating, and he aimed to find a century of pennies – he still has a collection.

  ‘It’s rubbish,’ he says. ‘I didn’t care about the condition, it all came out of change, nothing bought.’ These were intimate little things, intercepted as they passed from hand to hand, stamped with the year their journeys began: stories from rubbish.

  When he was 12 he had an inspiring history teacher, who is now doing archaeology himself, he tells me: he got his doctorate studying prehistory. They’ve been in touch recently.

  ‘Is he pleased with the way things turned out?’, I ask. Richard laughs. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘He may be.’

  Mike Billinge, a relaxed, popular teacher who played music by Barclay James Harvest and The Who, was a classicist. That’s what I’d like to do, thought Richard. He took O and A level Greek and Roman Civilization with Mr Billinge.

  Richard heard there was a dig going on in Leicester. He was a bit shy, and didn’t feel he could just turn up, but as luck would have it, there was a girl called Lynne who lived across the road and was a volunteer on the site. So in 1973 the 15-year-old Richard Buckley went along with Lynne, and started digging on Sundays.

  He made friends and acquaintances then that would last longer than he ever imagined; archaeology was a social affair, and a small world. He met Patrick Clay, who was already working for the field unit. Lynne went on to become an archaeologist, and married another digger on the site, John Walker. While later Richard and Patrick would come to lead Leicester’s archaeological field practice, John – who has just retired as I write – moved first to Manchester and then north to York, where for over a decade he was Chief Executive of the York Archaeological Trust, with offices from Sheffield to Glasgow. Funny, that – the future excavation leaders in York and Leicester started off together here at a dig on a medieval friary.

  Greek and Roman Civ, as Richard calls it, was mostly literature, politics and history rather than archaeology. But Mr Billinge allowed him to go to the Austin Friars dig on Wednesday afternoons, as an alternative to general studies. It was a long-running excavation – rare now, and opportunities to volunteer are even rarer – so he was able to keep up the experience for a couple of years.

  He’d read archaeology books. Leonard Cottrell’s Lost Cities had got him hooked – tales of ancient Babylon and Turkey, of Pompeii and Peru, of men driven by a love of travel and adventure.13 But this was different. There was something here at home he hadn’t found in Cottrell.

  There were massive spoilheaps around the dig, which had a stone-lined medieval drain running dramatically through the middle. Because the ground was wet, there were rare waterlogged remains, including wooden bowls and scraps of decorated leather shoes. The sheer complexity of it all was amazing. How did they make sense of it?

  ‘I’m a practical person,’ says Richard. ‘I like doing practical things, engineering, woodwork, that sort of thing. I really like the process of excavation, the fact that you create’ – he coaxes the thought into words – ‘that shapes emerge from what you’re doing, pits and wells and ditches, the physical side of things.’

  This was what was missing in Cottrell: the process, the organization, the puzzling out as everything changed
even as you looked at it. And it was tough.

  ‘When you work on a site for the first time,’ says Richard, ‘you’re quite shocked at what hard work it is. But it’s really nice working with other people as a team, working towards a common goal.’

  And while they dug out the detritus of medieval religious lives, trains rumbled over the great iron bridges crossing the river down from Central Station. Cars and buses revved and beeped along King Richards and St Augustine. The weather was hot in summer; in winter they’d sit in the hut, watching the rain pour down.

  ‘I’d like to do this,’ thought Richard. ‘If I’m to become an archaeologist, I need a degree.’

  So one day he went home and said he wanted to go to university and do archaeology. Neither his father, a production engineer at Rolls-Royce, nor his mother, who later worked as a secretary, had been to university. He’d be the first in the family.

  He went to Durham, impressed by the sight of the floodlit cathedral and castle as he arrived by train for his interview. It was those castles again. He loved castles. Wales was full of castles, and the family had a lot of wet Welsh holidays, staying in cottages where there was at least one castle nearby – coming home to Leicester was a disappointment as there was no decent castle (so later that became a goal, to show that Leicester really had had a proper castle).

  At Durham the focus was on Anglo-Saxon and Viking archaeology, and more Greek and Roman. He got to go on a training dig on a Roman fort in Wales, and he volunteered on more excavations in Leicester. One year, throughout September and October, he joined a small team of eight or nine at Sproxton – he pronounces it Sprowsun – where Patrick Clay was investigating a Bronze Age burial mound. They stayed in a derelict cottage on a private estate in the middle of nowhere. ‘It was the most amazing experience,’ says Richard. ‘It’s still my favourite excavation.’

  He was about to finish his degree, and nothing seemed more natural than to ring the unit in Leicester to see if anything was going on. They offered him work on an employment scheme – more excavation. Within a year they gave him a job, and before he knew it he was a field officer. ‘A bit lucky, to say the least,’ he says. ‘I must have had something going for me.’ And then, he can’t resist it, with a little laugh: ‘Maybe.’

  They were busy, working from temporary Portakabins on the city outskirts, at an old government decontamination training site. Much of their time was spent studying and reporting the work of earlier excavations; Richard tackled a mountain of painted Roman wall plaster. Then, in 1990, it all changed.

  Hitherto, as across the country, the archaeologists had got by with a mix of grants and government support, donations, helpful developers and volunteers. But always it was a struggle to match the pace of new building and the destruction below ground that was particularly strong in a historic city seeking to renew itself, like Leicester. National legislation transformed everything. New planning instructions obliged developers to employ archaeologists if their projects were going to damage historic remains.

  They had to work for businesses as a business. It gave them more to do, better conditions – although in archaeology that will always remain a relative thing (this is never a job you do for the pension) – and some spectacular digs. But it was a new world. ‘Overnight’, says Richard, ‘we had to learn to become project managers, to cost archaeological schemes. I was quite young,’ he adds. ‘I’d have preferred to have carried on digging.’ And five years later the council closed the unit.

  Able now to support themselves, however, and with a highly skilled and experienced team, the archaeologists were welcomed by the university. In July 1995 Patrick, Richard and an administrator moved into rooms in the university’s Attenborough Tower, while out in the wider world, the diggers carried on. A few years later the offices crossed over to where I am now with Richard, in the Archaeology and Ancient History Building.

  There was a huge development boom early in the new millennium. When building increased, the archaeological unit grew. Patrick looked after the rural sites, and Richard the urban. The big one for Richard was Highcross, expanding an old shopping centre – it affected an astonishing 12 per cent of the city’s entire historic core. For three years they ran three big excavations, with nearly a hundred staff out on sites and 15 of them in the university. One dig had over thirteen hundred graves; another a collapsed eight-metre-high (26 ft) Roman wall and medieval town plots; a third a complete Roman townhouse beneath a medieval church and cemetery. At the latter site, managed by Richard, they found remains of the Blue Boar Inn, where Richard III is supposed to have spent two of his last three nights. There’s a new Travelodge there now.14

  In 2008 came the crash. Apartment blocks stopped going up – most of the new units remain unsold – and for the archaeologists the work plummeted. They lost a lot of staff. Now they actively sought new work.

  While all this was going on, things were changing down at Bow Bridge too. Central Station closed, the tracks were ripped up and the iron spans, arching like a monster serpent over the river, were taken down. The elastic webbing factory – said in 1881 to be the busiest and most magnificent in the country – was demolished. The roads were widened. But the development anticipated as far back as 1973 never happened, not even in the boom. Now the area is mostly cheap parking (bringing new memorials in the form of a cul-de-sac called Richard III Road and its eponymous car park), a large open space surprisingly rich in grasses, flowers and trees, with blue dragonflies swarming in off the canal where lilies and reeds decorate the dark, still water.

  Work on the Austin Friars dig had long been finished. In the report, published in 1981, the archaeologists – no less – noted that Richard III’s grave had been despoiled after the Franciscan friary was suppressed, and his remains thrown into the river. ‘According to one version of the story’, they added, the bones ‘were afterwards gathered up and reburied in the graveyard of the Austins’ – which if true, would raise the possibility that the skeleton found in 1862 really was the king’s.15

  That’s how Richard Buckley remembers it. Austin Friars, he tells me, was very close to the stone plaque by the bridge where Richard III was supposed to have gone over to Bosworth – ‘Near this spot’, he quotes with precision, ‘lie the remains of Richard III’.

  Yet though they were aware of the memorial, there was never any thought that they might look for the king. ‘You don’t set out to go and dig up a named individual,’ he says. ‘What we were really interested in was working on sites that tell us about the ordinary population. Or elucidating the plans of buildings.’

  Meanwhile, between the overlooked nature reserve north of Bow Bridge, and Castle Gardens – the neatly curated park on the good side of the canal to the east – another group of historical researchers had been at work. And they had thought very hard about the message of that plaque.

  The Richard III Society was founded in 1924 by a group of enthusiastic amateur historians who felt that posterity had been unjustly cruel to the king. They called themselves The Fellowship of the White Boar, adopting their current name in 1959. They now have 22 regional branches in England, one in Scotland and eight outside the UK (four of them in Australia), with ‘several thousand members worldwide’.16

  The society had been boosted in 1951 by a novel called The Daughter of Time. Written by Josephine Tey, it was a critical and commercial success, and still sells well. Inspired by a copy of an early portrait of Richard III, a police inspector is convinced the king was a kind man blackened by Tudor propaganda. He investigates Richard’s alleged misdemeanours and crippled appearance, and finds the case for both wanting. It is a warning to read evidence critically, and not to accept blindly all you are told. For Ricardians, aiming ‘to encourage and promote a more balanced view’, it was almost a manifesto, support in itself for Richard III’s innocence.17

  The society’s first public move in Leicester was to commission a bronze statue, unveiled by the Duchess of Gloucester in 1980. It was made by James Butler, a scul
ptor of great men and nude female models (and, in 1990, The Leicester Seamstress, an 18th-century hosiery worker fixing a stocking outside the City Rooms). Richard is depicted life-size, young, fit and handsome with flowing hair, in light body armour. He wields a sword in his right hand, and in his left brandishes a crown, looking wistful and a little pained (or, perhaps, as if he is dancing a jig with a tambourine). He stands high on a cast stone block, cresting a wave.18

  The statue was first erected in the centre of Castle Gardens, where repeated vandalism seemed to imply that at least one Leicester citizen still felt unhappy about this controversial monarch. It was moved to its present site at the garden entrance, closer to the road, and the damage stopped, though by then he had to be given a new crown and sword, the latter a shortened version of the original. When I stood at his feet at the end of my walk along King Richards Road and over Bow Bridge and West Bridge, the sun shone briefly through the cloud and humid air, and fresh scent lifted from the beds of white roses.

  It is a striking figure, but perhaps most remarkable are the bronze plaques around the base. Quoting historical texts, they convey the society’s message. ‘A good lawmaker for the ease and solace of the common people’, says one. ‘Piteously slain fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies’, reads another. Noble in sight, noble in deed.

  Life-size bronze of Richard III made for Leicester in 1980 by James Butler, whose other subjects range from Isambard Kingdom Brunel to former Kenyan president Jomo Kenyatta. (Mike Pitts)

  In 1990, on a street corner in the city centre, the society unveiled a further bronze plaque: ‘Near this site stood the church of the Greyfriars where the body of Richard III … was interred after his death.’ (A stone memorial slab, noting the same detail, had been set in the floor of nearby Leicester Cathedral ten years before.)19 And in 2005 they unveiled their final plaque, down at Bow Bridge, to correct the error of Benjamin Broadbent’s. The latter, after the demolition of the building where it had originally hung, had been moved into a modern brick wall above the pavement on the city side of Bow Bridge. Right beside it the society placed its own, small printed green plate.