Digging for Richard III

by Mike Pitts

  There were a couple of concrete slabs that were just too big for the bucket to rip out, so at first the digger had to go over them. Now he worked one loose. As the beam rose like a lid opening, Mathew could see a bone sticking out of the section, the side of the trench: the concrete slabs had protected it at the first machine pass. That looks a bit human, he thought, watching from high up. Which, he soon confirmed, it was. He covered it with a plastic finds bag, and protected it with soil and bricks. They would return when the finer excavation began.

  They would have just carried on, working along the trench with the digger, taking out a bit more gravel and getting down into the earth where they hoped to find medieval remains. But while the muddle of the previous day’s press event had gone, with journalists tripping over each other’s cables and knights in armour sipping coffee at the gazebo, they were still not quite alone. Now they had a film crew with a director from Darlow Smithson. And Darlow Smithson, in on the project even before the archaeologists knew about it, were not about to miss anything.

  The Social Services car park, looking north towards the old school (right) and cathedral spire (left). Taken during excavations in 2013, this photo shows Trench 2 infilled with new tarmac. (Mike Pitts)

  The archaeologists had had no idea how much filming they were going to have to do, and how long it would take. This was not Time Team. From this first day, Mathew and Leon Hunt were doing pieces straight to camera. In the end it worked out fine. Mathew, Leon and Richard were the three main archaeologists, and they shared the work, one supervising the digger while another spoke to camera about a new find, and so on. Straight off, Darlow had wanted to film bits during the morning about finding brick walls. They hadn’t programmed that in. It was like the yellow lines, when they’d mark out the trench and get ready for the next job, but then have to go out and buy another tin of paint and spray it all again.

  So rather than have the digger driver sit there doing nothing while Mathew handled a brick with an air of studied curiosity for the thirteenth time, he let him take the rest of the gravel out on his own. They knew how deep it was then, there was just Victorian rubble underneath, and the digger could stop safely as soon as he hit brickwork. He could do stuff without supervision while they were mucking around with the filming.

  But that created a problem. The trench was cut 2 m wide, with a little give for the 1.6-m-wide bucket: they didn’t want to bash the edges with it. The digger’s rubber tracks, however, were about the width of the trench, and when Mathew brought Steve Stell back down to machine the top of the earth out, he had to drive inside the trench he had just excavated. It was a little bit too tight: a track caught on the side and popped off.

  They lost a couple of hours’ work over lunchtime, while they waited for the digger driver to collect some chains. They were hanging around for him to get the track back on, and Mathew began to wonder. Was that bone really human? Was it just loose, or could it be a burial? He had a spare moment, so he popped in for another look.

  He did exactly what he’d always do in such a situation. Working with gentle speed that belied his skill, like a production-line craft potter, he dug a slot across the bone, just 5 cm across, looking for another bone. The only difference was that this time he wore rubber gloves. If it did turn out to be significant, they would need to DNA test it. He couldn’t risk exposing loads of bone and contaminating it with his own DNA. It was a policy in the written scheme of investigation.

  And sure enough, as he scraped out his narrow cut in the soil, he found another bone, from a right leg, where it should be, parallel to the first. This was a burial, of an adult lying on his or her back. He labelled it Skeleton I.

  Mathew wasn’t surprised, but it was a good start to the dig. He knew human remains had been found when the cellars were dug next door nearly three centuries before. Another burial confirmed they were in the right area. It wasn’t going to be Roman, it was at a medieval level. There was no sign of a church at this stage (though the location up near the cathedral was quite badly damaged by the Victorian outhouses, so they hadn’t proved its absence there), and the ground looked like garden soil. They were probably somewhere outside the church. Richard Buckley was pleased, too. When he heard the news of the bone, he thought, good, we’re on the right track. We could be in the graveyard and missing the building, what we’d expect.

  Mathew made the mistake of saying to Philippa, yes, it’s a grave. So they spent the next 40 minutes or so filming the whole thing. Then quite suddenly, the sky darkened. The cathedral spire glowed briefly as the sun shone on to thunderous clouds. The temperature dropped. Lightning flashed. It rained.

  ‘They all legged it’, said Mathew, grabbing coats and heading to the gazebo or corners in old buildings around the car park. He climbed out of the trench to fetch something to cover the bones. When he got back, he found Philippa in his waterproof jacket; she left him there and ran for shelter. Turi King, the project geneticist, had just turned up to see what was going on. She’d brought cookies, so they sheltered from the storm nibbling comfort food. The Darlow crew ducked under cover as well, from where they could film Mathew getting soaked, while Leon Hunt, holding an umbrella, supervised the digger at the other end of the trench.

  Mathew was concerned that the water would wash out the burial. He stayed there to cover it up, laying down clean plastic finds bags, padding them with soil and holding them down with bricks, nursing the bones while the storm rumbled and flashed over Leicester.

  The idea that the grave might be Richard III’s hadn’t entered his head.

  ‘Once you say you’ve found human remains,’ Ather Mirza told me, ‘you distort the whole story.’ At the University Press Office, they made it very clear that the focus of the narrative should be on the archaeology – finding the friary, the next bit of pottery, the next tile. ‘I used to tell the archaeologists,’ said Mirza, ‘if you don’t want the world to know, don’t tell me.’ He learned that they had found a burial over a week later, on the day the Ministry of Justice gave the archaeologists permission to dig it up.

  Fortunately, there was plenty to tell in the meantime. They’d always said that the fifth and final objective was, in Richard Buckley’s words, a long shot. However, there were four others to meet before they searched for ‘the mortal remains of Richard III’. They achieved the first of these on the first day. This was no ordinary excavation.

  As they dug down from ground level, they learned what they had to get through before they reached any possible remains surviving from medieval times. At the northern end of Trench 1, and as they were soon to find, occasionally also elsewhere in both trenches, there were 19th- or 20th-century brick foundations or demolition rubble. There was a deep deposit of gravel that had built up across the whole area since it had been in use as an early car park; there seemed to be little Victorian garden soil beneath the gravel, so most of it had probably been carted away. Below of all of that, as they entered what they called ‘the archaeology’, they started to encounter thick layers of building debris. These were not further accumulations of red brick, but random chunks of pale coloured stone, several obviously shaped with the smooth curves of fluting and beading indicative of door or window frames, or perhaps stone ceilings.

  Before the sensation became dissipated somewhat by interviews for Darlow Smithson and poses for the university cameraman, Richard Buckley had started the day with a spring in his step. With a year and a half of discussion and planning behind them, now they could at last get on with some new archaeology, and find out what was really there beneath the car park. By the end of the day, when Richard returned to catch up with progress, his early optimism was more than renewed.

  About two thirds of the way down from the top end of Trench 1 they had found an east–west wall, exactly as the project design said they might. To be more precise, they had found an excavation that had once held a wall foundation, what they called a robbed wall, with part of a low stone wall still surviving alongside and large quantities of rub
ble. It looked as if there had been an important, high-status medieval building in the vicinity. They didn’t yet know where they were, but they’d found the friary. Within hours, they had met objective one.

  Because of the delays caused by the filming, the thunderstorm and the digger throwing a track, they were unable to complete Trench 1 on the Saturday. On Sunday morning, however, they knew what to expect as they dug down, and they got the rest done in half an hour. They found another robbed wall, parallel to the first and near the southern trench end, though a live cable prevented further investigation there with the digger.

  Machining out Trench 2 also went really easily, finishing on schedule by mid afternoon. They spent the rest of the day cleaning up, removing loose rubble and overburden to expose the medieval layers. At the top end of Trench 2, where it overlapped with the bottom end of Trench 1, they could see the same east–west robbed wall they’d found on Saturday. Intriguingly, there was another robbed wall attached to it at right angles, disappearing under the tarmac as it ran south on a slightly different alignment from the trench edge. Meanwhile, on the other side of the trench and further down was a second north–south wall, parallel to the first. If these two walls had been standing at the same time and continued opposite each other, they would have been separated by quite a narrow space, 2 m across. Whether that indicated two buildings side by side, or an indoor passage, might be resolved by what lay between them, presently covered by stone rubble.

  Looking for Richard III: three excavation trenches in 2012 to locate the friary (T1–T3), and a larger area in 2013 to establish details of the choir and presbytery. (Mike Pitts/Drazen Tomic after ULAS)

  Hypothetical Greyfriars plan based on evidence from the excavations and typical friary layouts; identifying the chapter house was a key moment in unveiling the story. (Mike Pitts/Drazen Tomic after ULAS)

  Monday was the August public holiday, and Mathew, Leon Hunt and Pauline Carroll, an experienced volunteer, continued digging and cleaning alone. The others arrived on Tuesday, and they were set up for the rest of the project, with a small but extremely skilled team of men from ULAS: Mathew, Leon Hunt, Tony Gnanaratnam (who had directed the dig across the road at the NatWest bank, delighting Philippa by finding no evidence there for Greyfriars church) and Jon Coward. Three other ULAS staff, Tom Hoyle, Steve Baker and Neil Jefferson, would put in a few days. They would also be joined by eight volunteers, who between them worked for 24 days. Among these were Martyn Henson, a school teacher who had once worked for ULAS and still wanted to be a professional archaeologist but couldn’t afford the pay; Kim Sidwell, a former administrator of the university’s School of Archaeology; and Ken Wallace, a retired teacher who found fame after he discovered vast quantities of prehistoric coins on a hill in Leicestershire in 2000. Karen Ladniuk, a Brazilian lawyer and member of the Richard III Society who had heard about the dig, flown to England and presented herself on site, was the only volunteer without previous excavation experience. The other volunteers were Paul Finnigan, Pauline Houghton and Andrew Mcleish.

  ULAS usually worked Monday to Friday, but they didn’t stop for Greyfriars. They already had a tight three-week window, with the prospects looking tighter still thanks to the intensity of the filming. ‘When you’ve got a project you’re interested in,’ said Mathew, ‘it’s very hard not to be there when it’s still going.’ Over the whole three weeks he took only one day off.

  Mathew set up Jon Coward and Tony Gnanaratnam in Trench 1, Leon Hunt and Martyn Henson in Trench 2, and prepared himself to keep the film crew off their backs. They spent a couple of days cleaning up, working out what they had and removing rubble. As the week went on, they started emptying out medieval pits and robber trenches, lifting all the loose stone off the floors, and getting a handle on where they were – which bits of the friary they had found.

  On Wednesday it rained. They tried to keep going until lunchtime, but spent most of the day sitting in the gazebo, and by two o’clock they gave up. This was the only day they lost to weather, a curious piece of luck. That summer was one of the wettest the UK has ever experienced, beating various records back to 1776 (before which comparisons become harder). Archaeological trenches across Britain were filled with water, and with August sunshine 95 per cent below normal, there were few of the usual bronzed diggers.

  Once they’d removed the debris between the wall lines running down either side of Trench 2, it was clear they had found a corridor. There had been a floor there, now marked by mortar bedding with impressions of tiles which had been prized out for reuse. Surprisingly, as the eastern wall disappeared out of the far southern end of the trench, a small part of actual wall survived intact above floor level, a very rare find in stone-poor Leicester; a stub of stone moulding, with wall plaster still attached, was a jamb from a doorway giving access from the east.

  In Trench 1 they cleaned up the two parallel east–west walls, which appeared to have belonged to a 7.5-m-wide (25 ft) building. Here too there was some low upstanding masonry. At first they thought this had survived from the building, but as they emptied the tops of the robber trenches and removed rubble from the interior, they realized they were dwarf walls raised against its inside; perhaps, thought Mathew, some kind of refacing or repair work, although they looked a little like benches.

  That took them all of the first week, and by Friday afternoon they were ready to begin Trench 3. Where they’d dug in the north end of the Social Services car park, the remains had been badly damaged by outhouses. So rather than put the new trench up there beside Trench 1, they looked over the high wall to the east. This might be the last opportunity to excavate in the Alderman Newton’s playground. The derelict late Victorian building had been on the market since 2007, its lower windows boarded up. The estate agents had allowed them to excavate there, but once it had sold they might never get permission again.3

  So they laid out Trench 3 in the playground, another strip 30 m by 2 m (98 ft by 6.5 ft), and cut the tarmac. On Saturday morning they machined it out. There was no accumulation of parking gravels here, and they hit the archaeology sooner, no more than 75 cm (2.5 ft) down, as they had expected it to be in the earlier trenches, where they had had to go down twice that depth before they hit medieval layers.

  Straight away they found a nice medieval tiled pavement: it just popped up. But as they cleaned it, they could see a real mix of tiles, all of them very badly worn, and it didn’t look right. Then they found an east–west robber trench, and another, showing where two large walls had been, with really good floor surfaces in between. How did these fit with what was in the car park, which was invisible from where they stood? It was time for a proper survey. So on Sunday they cleaned up the new trench, and surveyed everything they had done in the past week with an electronic distance measuring device (EDM).

  ‘I legged it up to the university,’ said Mathew, pointing at the computer in front of him in the ULAS office where we were talking, ‘and downloaded it all on here. I dropped the EDM plan on to an Ordnance Survey map, and coloured in the bits where we knew the walls were.’ He paused, and gazed at the black screen before turning back to me.

  ‘I was sitting there looking at the computer, and it dawned on me that we knew where we were in the friary – and we’d found the church. So I rushed back down in the minibus to show Richard, thinking he wouldn’t still be there.’

  But he was, talking to people, catching up on the day’s events, and they carried the plan around the site, fitting it all together. The corridor in Trench 2 was the western cloister walk, with two walls of the rectangular chapter house showing in Trench 1. ‘Then the benches,’ said Mathew, ‘the little bits of dwarf wall, fell into place. They were the benches around the edge of the chapter house.’

  Impressions in the floor showed that tiles there had been laid in a diamond pattern; building material among the debris suggested the walls had been of local grey sandstone, and the roof of local slates, with glazed pottery tiles on the ridge. This was critical evidence. Kno
wing where the chapter house had been was an important part of planning the friary.

  Then at the top, continuing beneath the high brick wall that separated the car park and the playground, was the church. The southern of the two large robbed walls indicated in Trench 3 lined up with a deep pit in Trench 1, confirming their suspicion that that might too have been a large robbed-out wall. The church was a little over 10 m (33 ft) across, and there was evidence for the base of at least one substantial buttress.

  They had identified a cloister walk, the chapter house, and the church: objectives two and three achieved. As a bonus, they seemed to have found one of Robert Herrick’s garden paths, made from medieval tiles he’d collected, perhaps, from the undergrowth, where they’d been abandoned by scavengers looking for better things.

  Now they had found the church, they needed to narrow their search, to learn more about its layout and see if they could define the presbytery, the choir and the crossing. There were likely to be graves inside that part of the building, one of which could contain the remains of Richard III. Indeed, they had already found a grave. They could now see that Skeleton I was inside the church’s eastern half. It could be in the choir.

  On the first day, Richard Buckley had watched Mathew supervise the digger, and seen them hit Victorian foundations as anticipated. ‘I’ll leave them to it,’ he said to himself. ‘I don’t want to interfere, they’re running the site. I trust them, they’re all very good archaeologists.’ They’d cut their teeth on some huge excavations in Leicester, up to ten years before. They’d dug up 1,300 burials. They were good at machining, good at recognizing things.