Digging for Richard III

by Mike Pitts

  She put away the mattock and continued working by hand. She didn’t want to scratch the bone, so she used sterilized wooden clay-modelling tools, rather than a metal trowel. As Mathew watched, he thought to himself, ‘We don’t do that in commercial, we just don’t have the time to be that careful.’

  They’d begun by trying to come down on to the skeleton in plan, so they could see it fully laid out and perhaps outline the grave pit. Instead, Jo now worked from the known to the unknown. First she cleared the legs, slowly peeling away the red-brown, stony soil with the tip of her modelling tool. She was able to follow the right leg into undisturbed clay, and find, as with the left, that there was no foot. She was not displeased to see that the feet had been removed before the dig had begun.

  ‘Bone is a composite material,’ she explained. ‘It has an organic part and a mineral part. After you die, the organic part gradually deteriorates, and that changes how the bone behaves. When you’re alive or you have recently died, if you have a fracture it has a very smooth edge. When you’ve been dead for a long time and your bone is degraded, then a fracture is raggedy, it’s very distinctive.’

  The lower leg bones of Skeleton I had that raggedy break.

  ‘My money would be on the Victorian builders,’ said Jo. ‘They may not have realized. Even if they had, they would not necessarily have owned up. Builders don’t in our experience.’

  Next she cleared the arms, and then the pelvis and the hands. It was now obvious that the skull and the legs were parts of the same individual. The body must have been laid with the head propped up in an unusual way.

  Excavation in 2013, showing Richard III’s grave (ringed), Greyfriars church (shaded pale) with presbytery (outer lines to right/east) and choir (inner lines) as shown by floors and foundations, and sites of infilled Trench 1 (wider vertical lines) and removed wall between council car park and school playground (narrower vertical lines). (Mike Pitts)

  When she had held the skull and looked at the gaping hole on the base where there shouldn’t have been one, she had wondered if Richard Buckley might have been wrong when he told her that Skeleton I wasn’t Richard III. Now it all seemed quite normal, with arms and legs in the right place, and she began to relax. Maybe they hadn’t found Richard III. Maybe he was somewhere else. Maybe at the bottom of the River Soar.

  Mathew was yet even to entertain the notion that they might have found a known individual. The trauma to the head, however, gave the skeleton a special interest. ‘This is going to be a really interesting analysis and write-up,’ he thought.

  Philippa came over for a look. All this time she had been in a parallel world to the one inhabited by the archaeologists. Though she hadn’t yet taken in the significance of the head wounds, she was just as convinced that Skeleton I was Richard III, the body under the R (or at least, it had to be said, near the R), as the archaeologists were convinced it was not.

  Now, as she looked down at the bones in the freshly dug trench, she saw something that challenged her belief. ‘It was really odd,’ she said later. ‘He looked to have no battle wounds and he seemed to be quite tall. I’m 5 ft 9 in, and you could see his leg bone was pretty much the same length as mine. I thought, “Maybe this isn’t him.”’

  From the start of the excavation, Philippa had always referred to Skeleton I as ‘him’. Darlow filmed a sequence with Simon Farnaby and Philippa watching Jo and Turi remove soil on the Tuesday, when only the leg bones had been exposed. Earlier, Philippa had told Farnaby that Skeleton I was Richard III. ‘I just thought she was insane,’ he said. ‘This is ridiculous, it’s the first thing that was found. What’s the chance of the trench being cut in the right place? I mean it was bizarre.’

  ‘Are you nervous about this?’ he asked her. ‘Strangely, I am,’ she said. ‘I feel sick.’

  ‘I suppose it’s a weird thing digging up dead bodies,’ said Farnaby.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Philippa. ‘It is. The whole point of this journey, this project, was to try and honour this man.’ She paused, and looked from Farnaby down into the trench. ‘I mean it might not even be him.’ And her voice broke.6

  Now, with the whole skeleton exposed but for the torso, that momentary doubt seemed to have been confirmed. Jo read her thoughts. ‘This just looks like a well-nourished friar,’ she said. ‘It’s not him.’7

  Philippa was devastated. It seemed that everything she’d worked for since the day she stood and shivered in that same car park nine years before; her dreams and the hopes of the people she’d inspired to come along with her: all these might have been for nothing. She left the site and went for a walk. She was away for a good two hours.

  So when, finally, Jo started on the ribs and torso, she was completely alone in the car park, with Mathew, Carl Vivian the silent cameraman, and Skeleton I. ‘When I’m excavating skeletons,’ she said, ‘I always try to do the ribcage and vertebrae last. Otherwise the ribs tend to get dislodged by other bits of the excavation.’

  Meanwhile, in Trench 3, Leon Hunt had opened a larger area between the two robbed walls of the church, and the archaeologists were cleaning it up, finding chunks of carved stone tracery from Gothic windows. When he returned to the university at night, Richard Buckley would often go to see Deirdre O’Sullivan, to chat about some of the things they’d found. Another illustration of the remarkable way in which the university seemed to be able to offer almost all the expertise they might need at the dig, O’Sullivan is a lecturer in the School of Archaeology with considerable excavation experience, specializing in early Christian archaeology. Her current research focuses on the Dissolution and friaries.

  In Trench 3 they’d found inner walls parallel with the main ones. Deirdre O’Sullivan wondered if these might be the bases of choir stalls. They thought it would be a good idea to get another opinion, and had invited Glyn Coppack down from the University of Nottingham. Coppack is researching early medieval religious houses, including the analysis of old excavations at Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, one of the greatest Cistercian foundations in Europe. He knew all about friaries and monasteries, and they were expecting him to visit the site that afternoon. Then he, Richard and O’Sullivan could come to some conclusion about where the different parts of the church had been.

  The human spine is a tough, flexible tube that both protects the spinal cord, a central nervous system that connects the rest of the body to the brain, and provides a key part of the skeletal structure. It is composed of 33 interlocking vertebrae. The upper seven form the neck (cervical); the next 12 connect with the ribs (thoracic), followed by five in the lower back (lumbar); at the end are five sacral bones, fused into one in older adults, and the coccyx, four more-or-less-fused bones that in many other mammals would be the beginning of a tail.

  As Mathew watched Jo at work on Skeleton I, he could see a few vertebrae going down from the skull, and a few vertebrae going up from the pelvis. You could draw a straight line between the two. Jo was following the spine up from the bottom, delicately cleaning away with the tip of her wooden knife.

  And then something very strange happened. The spine disappeared. Jo was digging around, slowly widening a hollow in the earth, and there seemed to be no more vertebrae. Had they dissolved? That seemed very unlikely, as the rest of the bones were well preserved. Neither was there any sign that someone had dug them away at an earlier date, in the fashion of the feet. Then she found the twelfth thoracic vertebra. It very clearly was not where it should have been.

  She cleaned the bone, and followed the line up to the eleventh vertebra. There it was, firmly against the twelfth, but continuing in an arc that veered away from the centre of the body. It wasn’t supposed to do this. The spine was severely curved.

  Jo had a huge adrenalin rush. She didn’t speak, but said to herself, ‘I think this is Richard III.’ She sat back. ‘This is not how it happens. Archaeologists don’t go looking for things and find them!’ Her hands were shaking. ‘I can’t go and tell them’, she thought in shock, ‘until I’ve uncovered al
l the spine, right up to the neck.’

  Mathew had been watching as Jo tried to find the back bones. They weren’t there. And then they were. ‘Hang on a minute,’ he thought. It was so blatantly curved. It wasn’t something caused by the way the body had slumped in the ground, it was so blatantly…. They sat together in silence, Mathew looking down at it from above, Jo looking at it from inside the trench.

  ‘Good grief,’ thought Mathew. In the church. Curved spine. Battle trauma. Male skeleton, in his thirties – Jo seemed to be happy that it was a youngish male. Good grief, thought Mathew, it’s ticked every single box you’d ever want if you came up with a checklist before you started the excavation. This is Richard III.

  In a detached sort of a way, he suddenly realized that Skeleton I was going to be really important. They had to dot every i and cross every t, do everything so carefully, make sure that every last detail was properly documented, that all was correct. ‘I didn’t have time on the emotional level’, he later told me, ‘to think about what we’d found.’ Neither of them could afford to let their feelings interfere with their work. Jo leaned forward and carried on digging, gently prising the earth away from the bones, uncovering the ribs and following the spine up to the shoulders, so that it lay there exposed from the earth, looking like some curious fossil serpent entombed in rock.

  Skeleton I as it lay in the ground after Jo Appleby had removed soil from above; feet are missing, hands are together over the right hip, and the spine curves away from the centre. (Aman Phull)

  The situation, as Richard Buckley put it, was slightly bizarre. They were only allowing certain people to see the burial. The Ministry of Justice insisted the remains be screened from the public gaze. There was also always the possibility that they couldn’t complete the excavation in the available time, and they’d have to temporarily fill it in. So they had to be very careful to make sure that it wasn’t public knowledge that they’d excavated a burial.

  Ather Mirza’s team had been issuing press releases almost daily. They all seemed to end with Richard Buckley saying that finding Richard III was ‘still a long shot’, but they left little doubt that everyone was very excited about progress. In the previous week they’d found medieval remains (Tuesday), it had rained (Wednesday), and they’d found more medieval remains (Thursday). On Friday they’d held a press briefing in the old Guildhall opposite the cathedral, fronted by Philippa, Richard Buckley and Richard Taylor, and Leicester City Councillor Piara Singh Clair. ‘First week of search for Richard III exceeds expectations,’ said the release. They’d found the friary.

  The notices were picked up by the national UK media, and the dig was being closely followed by local press and radio. That morning Mirza had fired out the strongest message yet. In a ‘huge step forward’, the team had found the friary church – the burial place of Richard III. The dig would be opened to the public on Saturday, but it was the best day of summer, and there was little traffic in the semi-pedestrianized streets, so why wait? There was a crowd outside, along St Martins and New Street, trying to get a peek at what was going on.

  Mathew had been popping backwards and forwards all day, to keep an eye on what they were doing in Trench 3. The only way to do this was to walk round the streets, out through the car park gates into New Street, round the corner and down St Martins, and through the gates into the Alderman Newton’s playground. There were hordes of people watching activity at Trench 3: because no human remains were being excavated, unlike Trench 1, it was not screened.8

  The rest of the team needed to know what they’d found, but they were all on the other side of the wall. The main spoil from Trench 1 was piled up against this wall, and they’d got in the habit of climbing up it for a quick look at Trench 3, and to pass tools across. But Mathew couldn’t just stand on the spoilheap and yell out that they’d found human remains: it would be around the world in minutes. So he had to walk calmly out through the crowds, nonchalantly enter the other car park and sidle up to Richard Buckley to deliver a quiet but potent message.

  Richard wasn’t interested.

  He’d spent much of the afternoon at Trench 3 with Glyn Coppack and Deirdre O’Sullivan, talking about friaries. Unknown to either Mathew or Jo, they’d come to a momentous conclusion. Coppack had approved their theory that they had uncovered remains of the church’s choir and presbytery, and agreed with O’Sullivan that they could see the actual footings of the choir stalls. They had formally achieved their fourth objective: to find the church choir. Skeleton I was exactly where it should be if it had any chance of being Richard III.

  Unaware of all this, Mathew was trying to tell Richard that there was something in Trench 1 he ought to come and see. Richard, Coppack and O’Sullivan were standing in Trench 3, looking at the mortar bedding for the floor tiles, the choir walls and the architectural fragments. ‘Yes,’ Coppack was saying, ‘I think it’s Early Perpendicular masonry. Yes, I’m happy with that idea.’

  Mathew tapped Richard on the shoulder. ‘You really need to come and look at the skeleton.’

  ‘Look,’ Richard said to Mathew, ‘I really am a bit busy, I’ve got guests. I’m having a discussion with Glyn Coppack, he’s come all this way from Nottingham, I can’t talk now.’

  Mathew waited a bit, then he persisted. ‘You really need to go and look at it now.’ In the end he realized he had no option but to tell him there and then. ‘The burial’s got curvature of the spine,’ he said, ‘and trauma to the head.’

  Richard had not expected that. He swore. He stamped his feet. He swore again. He just could not believe it. He swore, again.

  On his way in, Mathew had passed the Darlow crew, and said quietly, ‘You’re going to want to film the skeleton now – but don’t all rush back at once and make it look like something important’s been happening. Just trickle back.’ While he was talking to them, Jo had jumped out of the trench, run up the spoilheap, and stuck her head over the wall. There was a Darlow man close by, and she told him, ‘I think we’ve found Richard III.’ Which, as Jo said, ‘Got a bit of reaction.’

  As I listened to people telling me about their memories of that day, it was usually at this point that things started to become confused. While Mathew was trying to get the attention of Richard Buckley over in Trench 3, Carl Vivian was filming the body in the ground. He shot the slow pan up the skeleton, the legs, over the hips and up the curved spine to the skull (sequence 16) fifteen times. He knew that that was what every television programme in the world would use (as indeed they did). His hands were shaking. Once everybody came back, it would be a circus again, he just wanted to take his final shots, in the quiet, him and Skeleton I. ‘Then’, he said, ‘it all becomes a bit of a blur. Things were moving very quickly.’

  Philippa had returned from her solitary walk, her pink and blue GBR 93 Crew shirt changed for a blue and green check and her long blond hair tied back, to find the atmosphere at the dig had transformed. The skeleton had a curved back.

  Darlow set Simon Farnaby up beside the grave, then brought Philippa in to film her reaction; they had co-opted Vivian as their third camera. This moment when Jo described the complete skeleton to Philippa, broadcast around the world, is easy to mock, when the originator of a scientific project succumbed to emotional shock. Yet remarkable as the discovery of Richard III is, it is also extremely rare, possibly unprecedented, for any major research breakthrough to be recorded in such detail as it actually took place.

  Early in 2012, when Philippa and Darlow Smithson were trying to persuade Channel 4 to commission a film, the broadcaster said they’d love to do it – provided they could guarantee that they would find Richard III. Of course, research never works like that, which is why all the great stories are told after the event, are recreated from records and memories, often mixed with a good part of ‘this is how it must have felt’.9

  The closest comparable moment I can think of to the archaeological discovery of Richard III’s remains is the uncovering of Tutankhamun’s tomb, almost exactly 90 y
ears before. It came at the end of years of fieldwork in which Howard Carter, supported by Lord Carnarvon, was determined to find the boy king’s grave, a quest that seemed futile to almost everyone else. As it became apparent that they had succeeded, world media interest was huge. This was by far the greatest archaeology story ever told in modern times, and there is almost no limit to the imagery and verbiage recording it all. But what really happened, when Carter first entered the tomb?

  The archaeologists left us a wonderfully atmospheric description, recording how they slowly cleared sand and rubble, following steps down, until they met a sealed doorway. ‘With trembling hands’, says Carter, ‘I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner.’ They tested for ‘foul gases’, and finding it safe, Carter ‘inserted the candle and peered in, Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn and Callender standing anxiously beside me to hear the verdict’. It goes on. The candle flickered as air rushed out of the chamber. It took time for Carter’s eyes to adjust to the feeble light. Then, finally, the famous exchange.

  ‘Can you see anything?’ asks Carnarvon.

  ‘Yes’, replies Carter, ‘wonderful things.’10

  This passage is based on a carefully composed journal entry for 26 November 1922, in which Carter records, ‘Lord Carnarvon said to me “Can you see anything”. I replied to him Yes, it is wonderful.’ Carnarvon apparently remembered the answer as, ‘There are some marvellous objects here.11 The dig diary for that day notes, in total, ‘Open second doorway about 2pm. Advised Engelbach.’ Truthfully, it is impossible to be sure what actually was said.12