Digging for Richard III

by Mike Pitts

  He had a good start: the dig was to begin on the anniversary of Richard III’s funeral. The whole event had a surreal touch, especially for those journalists only half awake before seven in the morning. The cast list included men in convincing medieval armour wielding convincing pikes, others in luminous yellow jackets spraying yellow lines on the tarmac, a historian, a scriptwriter, a forensic psychologist (research interest: psychology of love and destruction), a geneticist, an archaeologist, a cabinetmaker and a woman slowly pushing up and down a bicycle-like contraption wired up to a life-support system, as if there was no one else there. There was even, standing in his white hut despite the exclusion of all but a few cars, a parking attendant. As Mirza said to me, he had brought in ‘all the academics who the media might possibly want to talk to’.

  Philippa Langley was there, to explain the mission. Richard Buckley described the archaeological strategy. He was expecting that maybe Radio Leicester and the Leicester Mercury would come to see what they were doing, and was looking forward to it, but loads of people came: he was blown away, and not happy. ‘There was so much interest,’ he told me, ‘we were being set up to fail and look very silly when we didn’t find the grave.’

  John Ashdown-Hill talked about genealogy, clutching a copy of his recently reprinted book and a polyester Richard III flag (you can buy them on eBay for £5.99). Stratascan had sent Claire Graham to demonstrate ground-penetrating radar, though this wasn’t quite what it looked. Graham is a GPR specialist and had worked with Robbie Austrums on the survey, but is also their Sales Manager. She had brought a simpler piece of machinery than the one they had used almost exactly a year ago to do the actual survey, when fortunately it appeared not to have found a grave or the drama might have been wiped out at a stroke. Turi King, a geneticist at the university, stood under a luxuriant fig tree – a reminder that the car park had once been gardens – with Michael Ibsen, a Canadian-born woodworker who carried genes from Richard III’s family. King took a DNA swab. Believing that matters of personal genetics were private, however, she would not have done that for purposes of analysis in front of a camera.2

  A former journalist who had started out on the Leicester Mercury, Mirza had presented what he would have wanted on that first day. It worked. All the national media came. There was a sense of promise, of what might be found, and the press were enthusiastic. ‘Wow,’ thought Mirza, ‘this story’s got legs, it’s going to run.’ They’d set the stage. Now, as the dig progressed, they would create the narrative.

  Mathew Morris had thought it would be simple.

  Leon Hunt, who wrote the desk-based assessment and was site supervisor for the dig, marks out Trench 1 on 24 August 2012, watched by Claire Graham, knights and world media. (Rui Vieira/Press Association Images)

  His jobs at the launch were to erect the gazebo, a pop-up white barbecue tent for the journalists’ buffet in case it rained, and then to get the trenches laid out. Richard Buckley was tied up with all the interviews, allowing Mathew to focus on preparing for the excavation. They wanted to cut the tarmac on the Friday, so they could save time on the Saturday and bring in a mechanical digger straightaway.

  He tucked the gazebo round the corner by the council staff bike shed, and secured it by tying sandbags round the legs. It stayed there for the rest of the dig, a lunch hut and a shelter for sudden rain. Then he and Leon Hunt could prepare for the road cutter, which was due to arrive after lunch. The council had wanted the trench sides to be clean and straight to facilitate resurfacing, so they started marking out guide lines with a can of yellow aerosol paint.

  But there were media everywhere, wandering all over the place, with their unmovable satellite trucks parked where they were trying to put the trenches. ‘They wanted to film us spraying out lines,’ said Mathew, ‘the press wanted footage. We got through two cans of spray paint, when one would have been more than enough.’

  He worried about the cutting. This circus had to be out of the way by two o’clock, when the man with the powered circular saw would arrive. They didn’t know how hard the asphalt would be. It might take half an hour or half a day – and then he’d have to come back the next day. In the event, the vans went, they checked for live electricity cables with a hand-held CAT scanner, and it was all done in an hour. ‘The tarmac turned out to be really crap,’ said Mathew, ‘he went though it like butter.’

  How did they decide where to put the trenches? ‘It was a little arbitrary,’ said Mathew. They had the strategy, one here, one here, within half a metre. But then you’d get on site, and find an overhanging tree, or an unmapped fence post, things like that, and they’d jiggle them about; there was always a little bit of flexibility. The guiding principle on that day was the orientation of Christian churches.

  A typical church plan is a crucifix. The vertical stem forms the nave, the place where the congregation gathers (and in medieval friaries, where the wider public were welcomed); the top the choir (where the clergy sit) and beyond this the presbytery or chancel (holding the high altar); the horizontal bar is the transept, separating the nave and choir/presbytery at the crossing, and often containing chapels in its protruding wings.

  At a friary there would be other buildings around the church, such as an infirmary, kitchens and a library; the all-important chapter house, where the friars would meet daily, sitting on a bench that ran round the edge; and a square garden or courtyard (garth), enclosed by a walk (cloisters), typically south of the church where it could catch the sun. The church, however, was the key structure, and with its spire or tower rising from the crossing, the one that dominated the streets around. All other church buildings followed its alignment, which was approximately east–west, so the transepts ran north and south. A Franciscan friary such as Greyfriars would be expected not to have had protruding transepts, but just the crossing separating nave and choir, known as a walking-place.

  The church faced east, in the sense that you worshipped facing the church’s east end. So most attention to the architecture and decoration at the west end was devoted to the outside, which you would see as you entered through the largest doors. Inside, you would look east towards the altar, beyond which the church’s east end was designed to impress mostly from the inside. Hence this was where, often, you would see the grandest stained-glass windows, through which the rising sun might shine.

  When Leicester Greyfriars was built in the 1220s, the astonishing achievements of European Gothic architecture were approaching their peak. One of humanity’s great triumphs of design, engineering, craftsmanship and sheer genius of artistry was well expressed in England in Salisbury Cathedral, whose Lady Chapel was going up at the same time as Greyfriars, soon to be followed by the entire breathtaking building. As well as finding indications of the friary’s plan, the archaeologists hoped they might retrieve fragments of masonry and glass, and gain some insight into the quality of its architecture. Salisbury would have commanded master builders and materials beyond the resources of Leicester’s friars, but what did their home look like?

  Because the church would have been long and narrow and aligned roughly east–west, the best hope of picking up any of the friary walls in small trenches was to make these long and narrow and aligned north–south. They would need to find more than one bit of wall or they wouldn’t know what it was, but if they were in the right place, north–south trenches should cut through several. The plan was to dig two trenches and then, as Richard described it to me, think, ‘Where on earth are we in the friary?’ They would then decide where to put their third and last trench.

  The medieval Greyfriars precinct, indicated after Thomas Roberts’s 1741 map, and modern streets; the three car parks and Trenches 1–3 are outlined in black (see hypothetical Greyfriars plan). (Mike Pitts/Drazen Tomic after ULAS)

  The private owner of the New Street car park, the largest of the three, had preferred not to interrupt its service. By good fortune, the two parks left for them to excavate were aligned largely north–south. So aided by the GPR s
urvey – which finally proved very useful in suggesting where not to dig, avoiding service pipes and what might be disturbed ground – Richard had proposed two partly overlapping 30-m-long (98 ft) trenches in the longer space, the Social Services car park. Together they would give a 50-m (164 ft) slice through Leicester’s history.

  They had to leave a foot passage through the site in case of emergency. They couldn’t undermine the buildings on the sides, or cut off any fire escapes, and they had to avoid the underground services and leave enough room for their excavation spoil. There was not a lot of jiggle space for those two trenches. Looking around, Mathew could see an array of painted white lines, the parking grid that packed cars in against the walls running down either side of the lot. There in front of him were two long straight lines. For Trench 1, to the east, Mathew and Leon set out the edges a metre either side of the white line. To the west and mostly further south, they used the white line there for the eastern edge of Trench 2. Somehow it all fitted.

  The written scheme of investigation (WSI) gave Mathew five goals, each contingent on the one before. The first was to find some remains of the medieval friary. Within those, he would try to identify the orientation and position of buildings. With that information, he hoped to work out where the church had been. Then he would try to locate the choir, that part of the church east of the crossing where John Rous had recorded that Richard III had been buried. Finally, having got that far, he would search for human remains that could be identified as those of the king.

  The WSI judged the likelihood of each goal. Objective one was ‘a reasonable expectation’. Two was ‘a probability’. Three was ‘a possibility’, and four was ‘an outside chance’. Five, the only one that really mattered to the Richard III Society who had initiated the project and put up half the money to get started, was ‘not seriously considered possible’ – or, as another version had it, ‘not realistically considered’. All along, the archaeologists had said that looking for a king was not the sort of thing they did. Which was just as well. If they’d approached sponsors with their research strategy, the project would never have happened.

  Philippa’s approach was a little different. A year before almost to the day, she and her fellow Ricardians had arranged a photograph in the council car park. On the ground, they propped up a little framed reproduction of one of the many surviving portraits painted of Richard III after his death. In front of this they spread out Ashdown-Hill’s bright new flag, the late medieval royal standard, split into quadrants of which two contained three gold lions passant on a red field, and two, three fleurs-de-lys on a blue field. They arranged the portrait and the flag so that, in the space between them, could clearly be seen, though faded and scuffed, a white-painted capital letter R. For Philippa and her supporters, there was only one objective.

  ‘It’s bone.’

  They’d barely started, up at the north end of the first trench, the cathedral end, and Mathew had stopped the shiny red digger and climbed in. He shovelled away the loose rubble and dirt, then reached with his left hand into his back trouser pocket, took out his trowel, and crouched down into the shade, so that his white hard-hat was two feet below the level of the tarmac above him.

  ‘I think it may be human bone.’

  They’d arrived on site at eight o’clock in the morning. The confusion and distractions of the previous day, as they’d tried to mark out their trenches around – and under – TV satellite vans and a zoo of wandering journalists, academics and medieval knights, had moved on. Sometimes the details might be haggled over, but they were all now broadly agreed about strategy towards the media and the general public: they stayed outside the car park.

  Philippa and Darlow Smithson needed some exclusivity for their film, so that it had some original content – though it had still not been formally commissioned. Like all broadcasters, Channel 4 knew well how far they could string along an independent production company without committing money, and still get the story if they wanted it (and at no point would they contribute funds to the excavation).

  The archaeologists were expecting to disturb human remains; not Richard III’s, but there would have been graves both inside and outside the church, and they would have been surprised if they found none at all. The Ministry of Justice, who issue licences for the excavation of human remains, require their removal to be screened from the public. There was a further need for concealment at the far south end of the excavation, where the council retained a small parking area. Taxis would stop there to drop off and collect vulnerable children and their carers, clearly not something to be splashed around the world. Which left, with just the two small trenches, very little that could safely be opened to uncontrolled viewing.

  Finally, the University Press Office wanted to create a meaningful narrative from what was likely to be a random set of discoveries. If allowed to go public as they occurred, poorly understood finds and half-digested ideas could have caused confusion, and dissipated the story’s power. That would have been in the interests of neither academic reputations nor publicity for the university.

  The downside for the archaeologists was that this meant they couldn’t open the site to the public during the dig, which was always a shame. ‘It would have been nice’, Mathew said, ‘to have had more public interaction.’ Still, perhaps they would find something interesting, and in the end people would be able to see it.

  Yes, it looked human. The bone was lying horizontally. The digger’s bucket, with a clean, sharp edge selected to scrape a flat surface as it worked along the trench, had neatly sliced the top off the brown, stained bone, revealing pale lines against the dark brown soil. The driver wasn’t able to see it because the bucket was in the way, which was why Mathew had been standing in front, watching, in control, holding up his hand, and shouting. Hang on a minute.

  It was almost certainly part of a leg. But was it just a single bone? Perhaps it had been disturbed by an earlier excavation, scatter from a grave dug through by an unknowing Victorian navvy. Or was it connected to another bone, still articulated as would be the case if it was in a burial? It was close to the edge of the trench. As Mathew removed the loose earth with his trowel, he could see the knee end was out of reach, under the tarmac, and at the foot end there seemed to be nothing there. He wasn’t going to be able to find a joint.

  The digger was a red, six-ton Kubota KX161 with rubber caterpillar tracks and a bucket at the end of a hydraulic arm at the front, with a small white cabin for the operator. They’d hired it from an independent company based in Leicester called JoinPoint, which had worked with them on the Highcross site. Mathew didn’t know the driver, Steve Stell, but though he hadn’t done any archaeology before, he was really good; he could do exactly what was asked. He was a bit nonplussed by all the media attention. Later, after the weekend was over, he’d come in on the Monday holding up his newspaper. ‘Look at this,’ he’d say, ‘I’m in the bloody Sun!’

  Mathew had arranged for the digger to start at the top end of Trench 1 because of the needs of access. In normal times the narrow car park had a one-way through route. Drivers would come in off Grey Friars, take a cobbled passage through a red-brick arch around the side of the council offices, and in due course leave at the far end of the car park out into New Street. With the fence and screen across the south end of the excavation, however, what was left of the parking area could only be reached by driving back and forth through the arch. This was too narrow for the digger and the trailer needed to convey it. There had to be enough space for them to come and go at any time, which meant working from the top, piling the spoil between the trench and the wall to the side as it went down, then coming up Trench 2 from the bottom to end back up near the entrance from New Street. In the end, this proved not to be an issue, as it stayed there all through the dig. But JoinPoint could’ve come and picked up their machine at any time if they’d needed it elsewhere.

  The digger began with a narrow-toothed bucket, to break up the surface. In no time he was at the
bottom of the car park, having left in his wake a path of piled, broken tarmac with two very straight edges, as if the artist Richard Long had made an unusually rapid appearance. Back he came, switching to a wider, flat-bladed ditching bucket, and pulling the debris out to one side. Then back again to start digging.

  The Goad maps showed outhouses at the top, and sure enough, the first thing they found, right at the end and close to the surface, was a solid, modern brick foundation. That needed the toothed bucket. As Philippa and John Ashdown-Hill watched it hammer through the fresh red brickwork, the dust of white mortar clouding in the breeze, they thought, this isn’t the sort of wall we were expecting. Neither had they said anything to the archaeologists as, at the start, the shiny little red digger had parked its rubber tracks right over the R. Within minutes, the bucket had smashed through the symbolic letter and lost it in the pile of fragmented tarmac accumulating like breaking pack ice. They were meant to find a king there, not the foundations of a Victorian toilet.

  But mostly there was gravel. Mathew was expecting to find medieval archaeology no more than three feet down, 70 cm to a metre, but there was a further half metre of red-stained gravel. They were going quite deep. There wasn’t much Victorian garden soil, so perhaps it had been taken out and built back up again. Their journey through time had begun with a peek into the lost world of gravelled motor parks.

  They continued going down and down and not really finding anything, just lots of dark soil with very thin bands of mortar in it. Only with hindsight did they realize these were probably wispy remnants of church floor surfaces; at that stage there was no way they could tell. Mathew was starting to worry that the trench would be too deep before they hit medieval archaeology, that too much of it had gone. The night before, his great fear had been that both trenches would be done by lunchtime: there would be nothing in either of them, after all the hype of the press launch. What if they didn’t find anything? It wasn’t looking good. Then he had spotted the bone.