Digging for Richard III

by Mike Pitts

  Nonetheless, he was surprised to see evidence in the first week for what looked like the cloister walk, and then the chapter house, and then, blimey, they’d found the church. A few days’ digging had unsettled a year and a half of complete conviction that they could never, ever find Richard III.

  Next week they would start looking. They would excavate Skeleton I.

  Scene 2

  A grave

  ‘It looks to be two legs parallel with each other,’ explained Mathew, as he and Philippa stood up to their shoulders in the bottom of Trench 1. ‘That to me suggests it’s an articulated human burial rather than just loose bones knocking around in the soil. So now that we know it’s articulated, we can’t touch it until we get the licence to deal with the human remains.’

  However, what they could do, he continued, is clear around the bones, remove all the free rubble and dirt, and see if there were any more burials or other features to indicate a graveyard. It had been a good first day.

  In the event, as we have seen, they found no other burials or human remains in Trench 1 or Trench 2. The discovery of that first grave, however, was the sign they needed that they were in the right place, and the moment for Richard Buckley to apply for an exhumation licence under the Burial Act of 1857. He considered the budget. Allowing for each grave a day to excavate, a day to wash anything recovered and a day to analyse it, they could manage six. He filled out a simple, three-page form, in which Section 3 asked what he expected to find. Against ‘Estimated age of remains’, he wrote ‘Medieval 13th–16th century’; and against ‘Estimated number of set[s] of remains’, ‘6’.

  You might think that archaeologists like to find graves: ancient burials can be extremely informative about the worlds and lives of people from the past, and occasionally they offer fine artifacts that make popular museum exhibits. Yet excavating and analysing burials can be time-consuming and costly. Human remains found unexpectedly on excavations – as many are, especially when they are older than historically documented cemeteries – are not always welcomed. Their discovery can add significantly to budgets and cause delay, especially in the type of commercial projects ULAS normally takes on, where schedules are tight. Archaeologists do not excavate graves lightly.

  Archaeologists are also of course aware that long-forgotten graves were dug by mourners and celebrants who knew the buried individual; that what might be incomplete, damaged and delicate remains are the real physical traces of someone who was once alive. Many archaeologists think a great deal about death. When you excavate ancient graves, and handle remains that tell personal and intimate stories of individuals who have no voice but yours, you cannot avoid it. The complex ethics of how ancient human remains are studied, published, conserved and, perhaps, displayed, are major topics of debate around the world.

  Yet how archaeologists as ordinary people deal with the experience of revealing the remains of another person is not something they often discuss. There is no training in emotional issues at an archaeological dig. We might see analogies between excavating an ancient grave and working in a morgue or at a recent crime scene (indeed some archaeologists specialize in the latter, and can make important contributions to human rights abuse investigations). Rarely does an excavating archaeologist have to handle remains as complete as those in typical modern situations. Their behaviour, however, can be telling, often characterized by long periods of silence as they pick at the delicate exercise of forensic exhumation, punctuated by clinical descriptions of their progress and occasional expressions of gallows humour.1

  Practically speaking, to dig people up, you need permission from the authorities. In recent years there has been a bit of a tizz about this among archaeologists in England, as the responsibility for issuing licences passed from one national government department to another. The new section (the Ministry of Justice) treated archaeological remains as if they were modern, so that questions of supposed cross-infection became an issue, excavation needed to be screened from the public, and, at first, all excavated remains had to be reburied within a given time limit, typically a few months. Archaeologists were not impressed. The new rules created much new paperwork for an outcome that could see the remains they wished to study being taken away before they had even begun.2

  Around the time that Richard Buckley handed Philippa the desk-based assessment for the Grey Friars Project, the Ministry of Justice, lobbied publicly by archaeologists, conceded that reburial should be an option, not a requirement. For Philippa there was never any doubt that once found and excavated, Richard III’s remains would be reburied – and that this would happen in Leicester (as Richard Buckley said to me, ‘If Philippa had gone to see the City Council and said, “I want to rebury Richard at St George’s Windsor”, they wouldn’t have supported her’).3 For the archaeologists, however, any other remains they might excavate in the search for Richard III – which, as they envisaged it, would be all the remains – would be important evidence for Leicester’s early population. These should be kept for future studies.

  Section 4 of the licence application form asked what it was intended would happen to any excavated remains. The options given were ‘Reinterred’, ‘Cremated’ (a very odd thing for an archaeologist to contemplate for historic material), ‘Left in situ’, and ‘Wish to retain’. Richard ticked the last box, noting that any remains would be deposited at Leicester’s Jewry Wall Museum around July 2014. This is the city archaeology museum, with some of the country’s largest standing Roman walls, not far from Bow Bridge but the other side of the Holiday Inn, where it offers a rival attraction to the narrative of Richard III in street furniture and memorials. Then he added a qualification.

  ‘Please note,’ it read. ‘In the unlikely event that the remains of Richard III are located, the intention is for these to be reinterred at St Martin’s Cathedral, Leicester within 4 weeks of exhumation.’ To emphasize how very unlikely this was, a further comment pointed out that though Richard III was buried in the area in 1485, his remains ‘may subsequently have been exhumed and thrown into the nearby River Soar after the Dissolution in 1538’. Richard was taking nothing for granted.

  The licence came through on 3 September, the second Monday of the dig. By then, apart from the burial, they had largely finished in the first two trenches, and had opened the third in the school playground. They had found enough wall foundation trenches to show where parts of the friary’s cloister, chapter house and church were, but not enough yet to establish which part of the church they were in.

  Philippa and Darlow Smithson were keen to film at least one skeleton, even if it turned out not to be Richard III. The archaeologists didn’t know whether or not Skeleton I was in the choir, where they believed Richard had been buried, but it did seem to be inside the church, a good place. So they decided to make this the first set of human remains to exhume. Both Turi King, project geneticist, and Jo Appleby, project osteologist, were free to be at the dig on Tuesday. Mathew had been there continuously for two weeks. He took Monday off, and prepared to return the next day to supervise the excavation of Skeleton I.

  The body’s lower legs were inside Trench 1, but the rest of it was still under the tarmac. So the first task was to extend the trench, by opening up a square on the west side. Darlow Smithson wanted to shoot them cutting the tarmac, machining it off along with the upper layers of gravel, and then excavating the skeleton, so they could edit the sequence to make it appear it had all happened in one simple process. Mathew knew from experience this would take too long. So they got the man in early with his diesel-fuelled circular saw, pre-cut the tarmac and covered it up so no one would notice they’d done it.

  The film crew arrived, with the presenter Simon Farnaby, a tall, curly-haired comedy actor at that moment best known for his regular appearances in the popular children’s television series Horrible Histories (‘That’s the man’, exclaimed my young daughter as we watched him at the dig on Channel 4, ‘who got pooh in his face!’). His Spotlight CV notes that he is ‘highly
skilled’ at golf, pool and snooker.4

  Steve Stell immediately set to, with the wide ditching bucket on his digger, and prised up the tarmac, which came away leaving remarkably straight edges. Mathew stood in the trench, keeping an eye on the carefully packed dirt and bricks that concealed a sheet of blue plastic protecting the body’s two legs. Immediately below the tarmac, the ground was tough. Stell had to hammer through red bricks and concrete. At length he was able to scoop out the gravel and edge down to the level where Mathew knew they would have to start working by hand, about a foot above the grave.

  September 2012 press photo, looking south down Trench 1, with spoil against school wall; the small extension bottom right was made to allow full excavation of Skeleton I. (Gavin Fogg/AFP/Getty Images)

  Despite Mathew’s precautions, however, the filming took so long that by lunchtime Jo and Turi, who had been hanging around all morning, were still in their coats and jeans. Eventually they were able to don protective white hooded overalls and start the excavation. From above the trench you could make out two anonymous white figures, crouched down in the hole, working with trowels, hand shovels and white plastic buckets. By two o’clock they were still digging. They hadn’t even reached the level of the skeleton.

  Outside the dig, no one knew they had discovered human remains. They’d hung thick sheets of blue tarpaulin over the wire fence around that end of the trench, which would otherwise be in plain view from the street over the car park wall and gates. But Mathew was adamant that they couldn’t leave anything exposed overnight. ‘It was just obvious’, he said, ‘they weren’t going to get anything done that day. So I called a halt to it.’

  Mathew still didn’t know where in the church Skeleton I lay. He had taken advantage of having the digger driver on site to widen Trench 3 over the wall. The archaeology there was looking good, and he had every hope they might learn more about the church layout. And then human remains turned up in that trench as well.

  So Mathew sent Jo and Turi over to see if this was another articulated skeleton. It turned out to be charnel, disturbed remains that had been reburied at a level higher than the church floor in a small pit. It was impossible to say exactly where these remains had come from, but one possibility was a raised tomb: all the tombs at floor level inside the church had been demolished. The important bits were all there, about half of the skeleton, the longbones, an intact skull, a few pieces of rib and the pelvis – enough for Jo and Turi to say they came from a female. Of their six potential sets of human remains, they had one female and one as yet uncharacterized individual. The odds on finding a king were shortening.

  On Wednesday Turi had to fly to Innsbruck, in Austria, to attend a forensic conference. With most of the action in Trench 3, that would leave Mathew and Jo alone in the council car park to find and excavate Skeleton I. This time, things should be simple.

  If Skeleton I’s discovery was marked by a thunderstorm, its excavation was on the hottest day of the dig, effectively Leicester’s brief summer in a long, wet season. Jo suffered the full get-up over her clothes: a disposable white suit and hood, face mask and white rubber gloves. Mathew hung around above, emptying her buckets of spoil, helping to record and bag finds, and offering moral support. When they came to lift the bones, he wore a mask and gloves, but he was pleased not to be in the trench. After Jo, he was the team member with the most experience of human remains, but the prospect of cooking in the sun in a white onesie – ‘I’m a cold weather man’ – had no appeal. Anyway, he said, there were no suits tall enough for him.

  They would not finish until half past seven, a long, hot day. They were always in sight of the trench, though they had the odd break because of the heat. Then Jo would have to put on another suit. During the afternoon she didn’t take many breaks because of having to take everything off and put things back on again. ‘I did get overwarm at one point,’ she told me, ‘it really was genuinely very warm.’

  Mathew put everybody else in Trench 3, and left Simon Farnaby and his crew to get on with it – they had three days of filming, this was their second day, and they had a lot of shots to get. In a week’s time, what the archaeologists were to uncover would become the centre of a media firestorm. On that Wednesday, 5 September 2012, people would come and look, and talk, and film. For most of the time, however, around that small square extension to the trench there were just Mathew, Jo and some bones, concealed behind high walls and a blue tarpaulin screen, as oblivious to what was happening elsewhere as the world was ignorant of the scene at a grave in a small Leicester car park.

  The week before, Jo had been away on holiday, sitting in Suffolk in the rain. She’d gone in to work on Monday morning to find Richard Buckley standing outside her office. ‘Oh, Jo,’ he said, ‘by the way, we’ve found some human bones. You needn’t worry, because they’re not going to be Richard III, but if you could just pop down to the site and excavate them, that would be hugely useful.’

  Jo Appleby had only joined the University of Leicester School of Archaeology that January, as Lecturer in Human Bioarchaeology. It was her first proper university job. She grew up in Essex, then studied for a degree at Cambridge, a second degree at Southampton, and a doctorate back at Cambridge. She then spent a year and a half working for the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, and four years as a research fellow back at the university again. Tall, with long dark hair tied at the back of her head and a crystal-elocuted diction – which she puts down to having to speak English to that part of her family descended from a Danish grandparent – she will make a strong mark on the busy lecture circuit to which all the team are to become accustomed.

  Her work concerns mainly prehistoric human remains. When she arrived on site that September morning at eight o’clock, she was planning to spend the winter writing a big grant application; she hoped to get funding for an excavation in Russia, working on Bronze Age burial mounds out in southwest Siberia.

  She looked down at the still half-buried leg bones that Mathew had exposed. Following their line up into the dark earth of the extension, she imagined the rest of the body. If people bury their unburnt dead (rather than one of the many other things people do with them, including storing them in boxes and bundles, feeding them to birds and animals, and publicly displaying them – the latter popular for Christian saints), they typically place the corpse on its side or back. Skeleton I was almost certainly an individual laid flat on its back, and Jo could see that its skull should be just within the trench. It could be male or female, and of any age other than very young. The previous day, however, Jo and Turi King had dubbed it the 90-year-old friar, an imaginary member of medieval Greyfriars who’d been laid to rest after a peaceful life.

  The plan now was to remove the remaining earth with a mattock down to just above the level of the skeleton, and then for Jo to change to small hand tools. When she began they were still quite high up, and it would have taken too long to continue working from the top by hand. She went carefully, letting the weight of the mattock head feel its way through the earth. ‘And then’, said Mathew, ‘there was that crunch when you know you’ve done something you didn’t really want to do.’

  Jo had found a skull.

  A quick sweep of the loose dirt with her hands revealed the top of a head, curving down at the front to the dark hollows of the eye sockets before it disappeared into the ground. It was time to call Darlow Smithson.

  Simon Farnaby, wearing a long-sleeved checked cotton shirt and faded jeans, stood over the trench, looking down. Philippa stood beside him, and Mathew watched, his high-vis jacket open over a black T-shirt.

  ‘I’m quite excited,’ said Farnaby, ‘because that appears to be a hole in the skull.’

  Jo looked up.

  ‘That’s not an old hole, that’s a hole that’s been there for ten minutes. I was just basically taking it down with this mattock here, and unfortunately that’s gone into the top of the skull.’

  Farnaby: ‘Rrrrrrright.’5

  At that moment, watched by
Philippa and Mathew, Jo was being interrogated for a television programme, and filmed with two cameras. This was no ordinary dig.

  ‘She’d just clipped the edge of a skull,’ Mathew told me. ‘We’ve all done it, and it’s really annoying, but there was no way she could predict it was going to be there.’ It was far too high to be linked to the legs. They assumed it was charnel, an extra skull, so they weren’t particularly worried. But as she removed more earth, Jo found it still had the lower jaw in the right place, which seemed a bit wrong, and vertebrae coming off, the start of a neck. ‘We were thinking,’ said Mathew, ‘this doesn’t seem like charnel.’

  He was getting worried again. The film crew kept interfering and asking Jo to do bits to camera, and by lunchtime she still hadn’t made much progress. So he told the others to go over to Trench 3, saying they’d call them back when the skeleton was uncovered and there was actually something to film. He wanted to let Jo get on with it for a couple of hours. Anyway, Carl would be there to record anything that happened.

  Carl Vivian is from the university’s IT department, where he makes films and videos and does a bit of teaching. Tall and lanky with short, dark hair, he looks like one of those sports shop assistants who would rather be up a mountain than advising you about a backpack that might be useful on the train to work. Asked to record the dig from start to finish, he was the perfect foil to Darlow Smithson. Partly out of diffidence, he just filmed and filmed, often with his camera on a tripod, standing on the sidelines, getting what he needed without interfering, asking no questions and waiting for something to happen. Darlow were filming entertainment; Vivian was creating a record.

  They were back on their own now, while Philippa watched from a distance, sitting in a chair at the end of the trench. Jo spotted some trauma, a small hole on the top of the skull. Because it was a little loose from the mattock blow, the face came away along a suture line that wasn’t fully fused, and she could see an extra hole, a large one, in the back of the head as well. It was time for a rethink.