Digging for Richard III

by Mike Pitts

  With a high degree of probability, Skeleton I died between 1455 and 1540. Mutton was even further out of the picture. But Richard III was in.20

  So who was Skeleton I?

  The improbably curved spine at once distinguishes Skeleton I, but this isn’t the only feature to mark it out. While the scoliosis might tell us something about how the man looked and felt, there are other conspicuous indicators that tell us something even rarer in the archaeology of human remains. We know how Skeleton I died.

  The research team were able to identify at least 11 wounds in the bones. All of them are perimortem – they could not have been inflicted after the burial, and none show any signs of healing, so the blows that caused them must have been delivered around the time of death. Nothing in the wounds themselves can say whether this means immediately before, after or at the actual moment, but as two would have caused almost instant death, and at least four others were potentially fatal, there can be no realistic doubt that this man was killed with razor-sharp steel blades. It is quite likely there were other blows that inflicted flesh wounds but did not contact bone, and any of these might also have been potentially fatal. Skeleton I’s end was brutal, quick and extremely bloody.

  Almost certainly he died in battle. The radiocarbon dates say this very likely happened between 1455 and 1540, a range that entirely captures the Wars of the Roses, from the first Battle of St Albans (May 1455) to the Battle of Bosworth (August 1485), the Battle of Stoke (June 1487) and even beyond to the Battle of Blackheath (June 1497).1 Realistically, of course, the proximity of Bosworth makes it more than likely that Skeleton I met his death there, 24 km (15 miles) to the west. On this basis, then, we can hypothesize that he died in 1485, on (or perhaps earlier, as there are suggestions some skirmishing occurred a day or two before) 22 August.

  As is typical for the period, there are no precise figures for how many died at Bosworth, with contemporary estimates ranging from three hundred to ten thousand. Charles Ross thought a further 15th-century ‘speculative estimate’ of one thousand dead ‘may not be too wide of the mark’. Some of these men were probably left on the battlefield, ‘buried in a ditch like a dog’, as some said of Richard III’s body.2 But many of them would have been given at least a perfunctory ceremony, mostly in mass graves nearby. Which begs the question, what was it about Skeleton I that caused his body to be carried to Leicester and treated to a burial, however hastily conducted, in a privileged area of a friary? Clearly this was no ordinary soldier. The potential candidates for Skeleton I must be significantly less than one thousand.

  No mass graves have yet been found at Bosworth. Nor are there records of any, apart from a rather ambiguous reference to ‘the bodies or bones of the men slain’ on Bosworth field, in a document in which Henry VIII gave permission for the nearby church at Dadlington to raise alms, the better to ‘pray for the souls of them that were slain’.3 We do, however, have the remarkable evidence of a grave, part of which was meticulously excavated and studied by archaeologists, from another Wars of the Roses battle, at Towton, Yorkshire. How do the wounds described for Towton compare to those on Skeleton I? Did he die like a common soldier? Or was his death, like his burial, something altogether different?4

  There is no doubt that Towton was an exceptionally cruel battle; historians have accepted that 20,000 men or more may have died.5 Emotionally, one resists thinking of a mass grave as a statistical sample, faced with the evident pain and fear experienced by individual, often young, human beings. But it would be wrong to treat the remains of 38 men, from a pit that was dug for at least 50 bodies – the others had been exhumed by a construction company before archaeologists became involved, working under a Ministry of Justice Licence, and were soon reburied – as if they were representative of that slaughter. Other graves might look different. The battle began, for example, with an exchange of arrows, so we would expect a grave close to an army’s position at that moment to contain people killed or wounded by projectiles; in the excavated grave, arrowheads accounted for only two wounds. At Bosworth, on the other hand, it seems gunpowder weapons were more common than at Towton, and we might expect to see shot wounds in some of the dead.6 Yet the types of weapons indicated by both the Towton grave and Skeleton I are mostly sharp blades. A specific comparison between the two sets of remains does seem valid.

  Tradition says that many of the Bosworth dead were buried in the churchyard at Dadlington; in 1886 it was reported that local farmers frequently ploughed up ‘skeletons and rusty armour’. (Mike Pitts)

  The contrasts are striking.7

  Taken as a group, the Towton men look like professional soldiers, or at least men who had seen battle before. Of 28 skulls examined, nine bore well-healed trauma from earlier physical conflict. The most extreme of the 16 wounds was to a jaw, where a slice of bone and the root of a tooth had been cut away, and the chin fractured – all of this had successfully healed. There may have been further soft tissue wounds, leaving scarred flesh but no indications on bone.

  The perimortem wounds, the unhealed impact of Towton, are not spread evenly over the bodies. Of a little over 150 injuries, over three quarters occur on the head and neck. Of the rest, most are on arms and hands, with a scatter down the legs. There is not a single wound in the chest, back or hips. Neither are the injuries found equally on all sides. There are more cuts on the left side of the head than the right, and on the right arm than the left. Crushing blows to the skull are mostly on the left of the face and head.

  These wounds were studied by Shannon Novak, an American bioarchaeologist who specializes in skeletal injury patterns and is currently at Syracuse University, New York – but who happened to have taken up a post in England, at the University of Bradford, the year the Towton grave was excavated. The evidence suggested to her predominantly face-to-face combat by right-handed assailants – more or less well-armoured men slugging it out with staffs (a variety of viciously tipped poles), swords, daggers and clubs. Arm and hand injuries resulted when men tried to parry blows. Far from the romanticized image of heroism and honour in battle, concluded Novak, the grave revealed the truth of medieval warfare: scenes of ‘frenzied killing that involved numerous blows to the head, often after [the victims] were incapacitated and unable to defend themselves’. These men had not died easily.

  In two respects, Skeleton I exhibits the same pattern: most of the wounds are on the head, and the number falls within the range seen for individuals at Towton. Otherwise, however, we seem to be looking at different deaths. On this evidence, Skeleton I was no common soldier.

  He has no visible wounds on his arms, legs or hands, in his shoulders or in his neck. There are two or three wounds on his face. These consist first of a small cut on the right side of his mandible (lower jaw) near the base, and perhaps an even smaller nick a little higher up the chin.8 In the upper skull is a further wound where a sharp instrument, perhaps a dagger, went into his right cheek, leaving a small rectangular hole and passing behind his nose. These would have been messy – though in the adrenalin-swamped moment perhaps unfelt – but no threat to life. They are slight and subtle compared to the gaping holes and fissures left by cutting and crushing that disfigure many of the Towton faces; the archaeologists spent considerable time rebuilding skulls from smashed fragments.

  Bob Woosnam-Savage, curator of European Edged Weapons at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, says these facial injuries might all have been inflicted from behind: an attacker, or perhaps two in succession or simultaneously, grabbed Skeleton I’s head, stabbed him in the cheek and released his helmet (a right-handed man thus attacking the right side of his face) – the cut on the jaw is where the chinstrap on a sallet, the sort of all-enveloping helmet Skeleton I might have worn, would have been found.9

  All other wounds are actually on the back. He had been hit on the top of his head. The blow was focused enough to leave a small, ragged depression – breaking the bone and opening two little flaps like trap doors on the inside – but not so hard as to pene
trate the brain. Woosnam-Savage thinks this was made with a rondel dagger, a weapon with a thick, needle-like blade designed for two-handed stabbing – perhaps the same one that had been thrust into his face. It would not have killed him, but would have left him dazed and vulnerable.

  Lower down are three shallow scars, where a very sharp bladed weapon, probably a sword (or three) shaved off slivers of bone. In the largest of these, a circular dished depression towards the left side, you can see the spongy inner bone, and there are striations where the blade whistled through. They look almost innocent on the skull, but any of these cuts would ultimately have resulted in fatal blood loss if not quenched.

  Skeleton I, however, was dead before that could have happened. At the base of the skull are the two largest and most significant wounds. Either of these would have led to almost instant loss of consciousness, followed by rapid death. Which was delivered first cannot be determined, but what is clear is that this man died when he was attacked at the back of his head, just above his neck. The blows were clean and efficient, almost like an execution. He probably did not see them coming, and he may have felt nothing.

  Jo Appleby had discovered the larger hole as the skull lay in the ground. It’s big enough to put three or four of your fingers into, a massive wound that would have needed considerable force to inflict – Woosnam-Savage and Sarah Hainsworth (who, as part of her research into imaging and materials, works with the Forensic Pathology Unit in understanding stabbing and dismemberment) think a halberd is the likely candidate.

  Wielded by two hands, this was a pole with pitiless Swiss-army-knife aspirations: the heavy steel tip combined a thrusting spear point, an angled spike that could be swung at victims or hooked around armour to dismount or fell the wearer, and a razor-sharp axe blade. A halberd had sliced into Skeleton I’s skull, leaving two flaps of bone embedded in the brain that found their way into the grave, but taking more with it, almost entirely removing the base’s right side. ‘There’s going to be a lot of blood coming from those injuries’, said Stuart Hamilton, Deputy Chief Forensic Pathologist at the Forensic Pathology Unit, on the second Channel 4 TV film. ‘There is going to be brain visible. You don’t walk away from something like that, not even today with modern neurosurgery.’10

  The other basal wound is smaller, but no less vicious or potentially fatal. In fact, on available evidence, while the halberd could have caused instant death (it’s not possible to tell exactly how far the blade penetrated the brain), the sword thrust that left the second major head wound undoubtedly would have done so, had the man still been alive. The micro-CT scan shows a clear impact mark on the top of the skull opposite the wound at the back. The blade penetrated 10.5 cm of brain (4 in.) before the inner wall of the skull stopped it short.

  Anything else might seem superfluous, but there are two final wounds, significant for our understanding of Skeleton I’s treatment if not necessarily his death. Like his head wounds, and again unlike most of those on the examined Towton victims, these two were delivered from behind. They were inflicted on parts of the body where not one of the Towton victims was affected: the back and the buttocks.

  The first was caused by a sharp implement, a knife or dagger perhaps, and appears on the tenth rib in his right lower back; the rib did its job, and stopped the blade penetrating any deeper. The buttock wound, however, was altogether more vicious. The forensic team spent some time examining the scans, converted into a highly detailed 3D model of the pelvis, debating exactly what had happened. They decided a sharp blade, again possibly a dagger, had been thrust up into the right buttock, sufficient to penetrate the muscle, cut clean through the bone and perhaps pierce the skin on the opposite side. It was, says Woosnam-Savage, ‘a delicate wound in an indelicate place’. Chief Forensic Pathologist Guy Rutty said this too was potentially fatal, though they all agreed, because of its position, that the blow had been delivered after death.

  Woosnam-Savage – who followed a path from childhood fascination with castles, to medieval and Renaissance art history, to arms and armour and a museum career – told me that in attempting to understand these wounds, we should recognize that on the battlefield, ‘nothing is impossible’. Yet there are a limited number of reasonable explanations, and without evidence to the contrary, we can go with what makes best sense. He is confident that none of these wounds could have been inflicted through armour, including, if Skeleton I had been horse-mounted, the protective wood, leather and steel of a defensive saddle.

  In just about every detail, the wounds are different from those on the Towton soldiers. Skeleton I was attacked from behind, not the front. The face is cut and bloodied, not smashed beyond recognition. Postcranial wounds – below the head – are not on the arms or legs, but on the back and buttocks. It seems to me the contrast can be summed up in one word: narrative. The Towton men succumbed, in Shannon Novak’s phrase, to ‘frenzied killing’, seemingly random rains of blows that achieved their effect through sheer brutality as much as skilled intention. Not so Skeleton I. Here it is as if we can read a story, of capture, immobilization and efficient dispatch, and finally humiliation.

  Most of the Towton men were probably protected by heavy padded jackets called brigandines. ‘The common soldiery … do not wear any metal armour on their breast or any other part of the body,’ wrote Dominic Mancini, an Italian traveller-cum-spy in the early 1480s, ‘except for the better sort who have breastplates and suits of armour.’11 Skeleton I was of the better sort. He has no defensive wounds, nor any from previous conflict, because – befitting someone treated to burial in a prestigious location in Leicester – he wore the best, all-protecting and expensive steel armour.

  This armour could be penetrated by metal-tipped arrows. Experiments by Sarah Hainsworth have convinced her that stories of arrows piercing armour, a knight’s leg and a leather saddle, to kill the horse beneath him, are ‘entirely realistic’. But Skeleton I died at close quarters, mugged from behind and his helmet ripped off, exposing his head and neck. He took a few glancing blows as perhaps he struggled and momentarily escaped, before a halberd felled him. Bone took the force of the strike, stopping the blade just short of the neck. Had it made contact a little lower, it might have swung clean through. Perhaps, even, decapitation had been the goal. As he fell mortally wounded to his knees, we might imagine, another man plunged a sword into his head.

  The Battle of Shrewsbury (1403) illustrated in 1485 in the Pageants of Richard Beauchamp; in the foreground a standing man in armour strikes an opponent on the head with a halberd. (British Library, London/Robana/Getty Images)

  His armour was then entirely removed, and his lightly dressed or even naked body was further attacked. The more determined of the two blows which we can see was probably delivered, because of its angle, to a buttock raised in the air. How could that have been achieved? In the circumstances, the most likely explanation is that the body had been thrown over a horse to be carried to Leicester. This confirms the impression that the man was important, that he had been recognized and targeted. The treatment of the face conveys the same message: it had apparently been necessary – as it had not for the victims at Towton – to preserve that face, so others could look into its dead eyes, and know.

  Of course, no one would have considered it at the time, but saving the face in that way means that we, too, can look. Up in Aberdeen, as the archaeologists, forensic scientists and weapons expert contemplated the bones, Caroline Wilkinson was doing just that.

  Richard III, Act 3, Scene 4. Men gather to choose a date for the coronation. They try to second guess Richard. You’re closest to him, the Bishop of Ely says to the Duke of Buckingham, but the duke protests: we know each other’s faces, he says, but what do we know of our hearts? Ask Lord Hastings, he says, he and the king are all but in love. Hastings is flattered. They haven’t discussed the date, he says, but he’s happy to pass on whatever they decide.

  Richard appears, and in an exchange taken directly from Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richa
rd III (written some 30 years after the real king’s death), asks the bishop to bring him strawberries from his garden in Holborn – a short walk from the rose garden where, in Henry VI, Shakespeare pictured Richard’s father launching the wars that culminated at Bosworth.12

  ‘His grace looks cheerfully and smooth today,’ says Hastings when Richard’s gone. ‘I think there’s never a man in Christendom, That can less hide his love or hate than he; For by his face straight shall you know his heart.’

  Richard suddenly returns. He is angry. He holds out a withered arm: my enemies have bewitched me! ‘Off with his head!’, he screams, blaming Hastings, and the despairing man is led straight to the block.

  This spectacular facial misreading exposes Hastings’ foolishness and Richard’s perfidy. Yet it also carries a wider message. We often judge by looks, taking instant – even unconscious – decisions about strangers. Are they trustworthy, sociable, promiscuous, gay, violent, dominating or aggressive? Psychological research suggests that in such judgments we are more often right than wrong, but not so often that we should rely on first impressions. Faces deceive as well as inform.13