by Mike Pitts
Philippa remembers the dig in a book she has co-authored with Michael Jones. Richard Buckley, she reports, had ‘no interest’ in Skeleton I: but Philippa did, and at her insistence, she says, the archaeologists excavated the remains. Philippa would look after them, as she had protected them when it rained, alone in the trench, ‘soaked to the skin’, though (as described earlier) the archaeologists remembered these things differently.12
Like Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, who famously tweeted on the day of the February press conference, ‘But does it have any HISTORICAL significance?’ Like Paul Lay, editor of the magazine History Today, who thought ‘this episode tells us little new about the past’. Like Neville Morley, Professor of Ancient History at Bristol University, who asked, ‘What possible difference is the discovery and identification of this skeleton going to make to anything?’13 Like other experienced, qualified historians, doubtful scientists and cynical journalists – and, indeed, some archaeologists – Philippa Langley had not really understood what archaeology can do.
It cannot replace history. But neither does it just collect mute fragments: it finds stories, it tells us things we didn’t otherwise know, things we can debate and reinterpret, but not entirely dismiss – things, perhaps, we didn’t want to know. And all the while, regardless of what it tells about the past, it makes the concept of history tangible and present, part of our lives. ‘Here’s why it matters,’ blogged archaeologist Michael Shanks in February 2013, from Stanford University in California. The physical remains (even, he added, were they to turn out not to be Richard’s) ‘connect us intimately to great events in a story of back-then which still resonates now. It happened here, and there is what remains in the ruin of history.’14
The significance of the excavation will grow over time, a phenomenon one often sees with unexpected archaeological discoveries. Archaeology is a science. People construct elaborate stories about the past on extremely fragmentary but well documented evidence. When something unplanned comes along, by definition the dominant theories have not accounted for it, and may need adjusting or even abandoning. Archaeologists had never valued the excavation of known individuals for its own sake. But perhaps there are gains to be made from the practice. Aside from anything to do with the actual identity of Skeleton I, perhaps the concept of identification alone has significance. Here are remains with independently verifiable accounts to be set beside the anonymous scientific tests that archaeologists almost take for granted. Perhaps they need to be reminded that all human remains and artifacts were never just representatives, but are also the relics of real people, always unique.
In the meantime there are clear gains for anyone with an interest in Richard III. His diet, health and appearance, and the nature of his death and burial, inform us about both his life and the world in which he lived. The focus on Leicester Greyfriars, and the resources the grave unlocked, will make an important contribution to our knowledge of medieval friaries and the impact of the Dissolution on an urban community. We should remember that research is not complete. It will be months, at least, before all the work has been analysed and published. Future research inspired by the project – there will undoubtedly be some – cannot really get underway until that is done.
Musketeers in 2013 at the annual Bosworth Battlefield Anniversary Re-enactment on Ambion Hill. Gunshot fired in 1485 proved critical to locating the actual battlefield. (Mike Pitts)
In their first peer-reviewed article on the Grey Friars Project, the archaeologists signed off with an unexpected confession. We are not, they said, as concerned with some aspects of the work as our partners are – in plain words, finding Richard III was not a priority for them. ‘However,’ they said, ‘that does not mean that we as archaeologists should dismiss the questions of wider audiences as not worth asking.’ They could work together whatever their interests, to the benefit of all. Lin Foxhall is clear about this. The university and the Richard III Society might have ‘parallel research questions’, she told me, but ‘that is not a problem’: it’s a positive intellectual challenge.15
Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces, found ‘something admirable, indeed noble, about the people arguing over Richard III. They’re doers rather than naysayers, romantics rather than realists.’ Why are we all so pleased about finding a king, asked writer Hilary Mantel? ‘Perhaps because the present is paying some of the debt it owes to the past, and science has come to the aid of history. The king stripped by the victors has been reclothed in his true identity.’ By relinquishing our territorial claims, we open the field to greater understanding.16
In August 2013 I went to Bosworth to witness a battle. It was a sunny day. Glare flashed from curved and riveted steel, as men sweating in layers of bright-coloured leggings, undergarments, chain mail and plate armour laughed and joked. Decorated flags caught the breeze. Explosions interrupted the commentary, dutifully gunning for ‘good king Richard’.
Around the field were white tents, perhaps as many as served the Yorkist army in 1485. Phil Stone and the Richard III Society were at pole entrance position. There was a new stall this year, in a large marquee down by the jousting and combat. A familiar banner hung outside, proclaiming ‘[Leicester] University’s Search for Richard III’ (this was no place for nuances of project design).
The effort and enthusiasm of thousands made this event. If it was entertainment and escapism, a hobby, a laugh and a get-together, it was also more than that: it would have had little meaning had not real armies met here over five centuries before, and men died, and one in particular whose story caught Shakespeare’s imagination. But where exactly had they fought? The Battlefield Visitor Centre had opened in 1976, here on Ambion Hill, because that was then the favoured location, fixed by an 18th-century antiquarian called William Hutton. Most had followed his reading of history and landscape, yet there were rival sites. By 2003 there were three, while Ambion had its new champion. The others were down by the Roman road in what would then have been flat, open country. Then Leicestershire County Council, planning to refurbish its visitor centre, launched a hunt for the true site.
It took six years. Six years of lonely, intermittent searching across the cold, wet fields, men patiently finding heaps of old iron with their metal detectors, but not the evidence they sought. Until, at ten o’clock in the morning on 1 March 2009, when the money had run out and the quest was to be abandoned, they found a lead ball. It was the size that convinced them: 3 cm, or a little over an inch across, it could only have been fired at Bosworth. The next week they found another one, and then another, which brought in a final year’s grant. By the end of 2010 they had mapped the place where Bosworth was fought, even picking up a silver-gilt heraldic badge shaped like a boar with an arched back, lost by a man ‘at least of knightly status’.
The site fitted exactly the scraps of historical detail, including a lost marsh to match the one that Henry’s army was said to have bypassed and in which Richard III had been trapped. It was a new site. History alone had failed to find it.17
Richard, say the chroniclers, fought there ‘like a noble soldier’, refusing a replacement horse, his small frame ‘pierced with numerous and deadly wounds’. The final blow came from a Welshman, who beat him down with a halberd as he struggled ‘in the dirt and mire’. His stripped body was thrown over a horse like a sheep, a rope round his neck. As with the details of battlefield topography and of Richard’s appearance, the fragmentary and easily questioned historical sources in fact stand up remarkably well in comparison with the evidence from archaeology. Far from offering an alternative narrative, archaeology encourages a new openness towards history, a sense that records must be read carefully, but not whimsically dismissed. Archaeology and history gain strength from the company.
As preparations continue for the burial of Richard’s remains, perhaps in Leicester, it becomes clear that archaeology can achieve something else. Richard’s tomb is set to become a place of international concern and of c
ontinuing controversy. His grave will be a draw for modern pilgrimages, a place where people come to reflect on Shakespeare and history, and on the nature of absolute power and the indignities of personal pain. A man whose reputation has been argued over and whose body was lost, has been found. People are talking about Richard III.
And soon he will talk to us.
On February 11 2014, a year after world media jostled for space at Leicester University, a dozen journalists gathered quietly in London to hear Turi King announce a new project. It would take well over a year, she said, but if all went well, by the end she and Michael Hofreiter, at Potsdam University, would have sequenced the entire genomes of Richard III and Michael Ibsen. In contrast to his mitochondrial DNA, the king’s genome will tell us much about the man – his hair and eye colour, for example, or the origins of his scoliosis. What other medical conditions had he suffered or was he carrying? Was he lactose tolerant? We should know more about Richard III in respect of such questions than any named historical person, endowing his story – and his discomforts – with a universal quality.
Bosworth revealed by archaeology. Round shot and gilt objects are from the battle, bullets are more recent; the area of 1485 combat is away from sites proposed by historians (further fields were surveyed to the east, and no round shot found). Data from Foard and Curry. (Mike Pitts/Drazen Tomic)
That, perhaps, will finally offer a match for the myth.
Silver-gilt boar from the Bosworth battle site; thousands of Richard III’s followers owned heraldic badges, but only the highest status would have displayed precious metal (27 mm long). (Courtesy of Dr. Glenn Foard FSA)
NOTES
Prologue
1 P. Langley, 2013. ‘This dig is not normal.’ British Archaeology, July/August 2013, 12.
Act I
1 Siemon 2009.
2 Such are the genealogical and political complexities of these times (to say nothing of the disagreements of interpretation), they can barely be contained within a single book, let alone a chapter. For what follows I found especially helpful Ross 1981, Hipshon 2011, Hicks 2010, Baldwin 2013 and Skidmore 2013. Wikipedia is useful for charting genealogies, though like any analytical source it needs to be read with caution and checked against others. The complexities are doubtless part of the reason why so many incidents appear different whenever they are described, sometimes significantly so.
3 And Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy opens with Wolf Hall just 15 years after Bosworth: Cromwell was born in the year of the battle.
4 Ross 1981, 63.
5 Hipshon 2011, 3.
6 According to the Ordnance Survey, the centre of mainland England is at Lindley Hall Farm, 1.5 km east of Fenny Drayton. http://mapzone.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/mapzone/didyouknow/whereis/q_16_36.html.
7 Notwithstanding this plot summary, the film is widely recognized as one of the greatest comic films of British cinema.
8 Gairdner 1878, 4–6.
9 Hipshon 2011, 10.
10 Wheatley 1891, 353–54.
11 First Battle of St Albans, 22 May 1455.
12 Skidmore 2013, 26.
13 Battle of Blore Heath, 23 September 1459. Most (but not all) of the battles and their locations are well documented in the English Heritage Register of Historic Battlefields, and the Battlefields Resource Centre maintained by the Battlefields Trust. As both organizations maintain websites with many relevant downloads, it seems appropriate to refer only to their main online sites, from which details of specific battles are easily found. The Battle of Blore Heath is described at English Heritage 2013 and Battlefields Trust 2013.
14 Battle of Ludford Bridge, 12 October 1459. Battlefields Trust 2013; English Heritage 2013.
15 Hipshon 2011, 30. There is an appealing story that the king found Cecily and her children standing bravely at Ludlow’s market cross, like figureheads on a storm-tossed ship. Sadly, a historian made this up (Kendall 1955, 37 and footnote 15, 517).
16 Battle of Northampton, 10 July 1460. Battlefields Trust 2013; English Heritage 2013.
17 Battle of Wakefield, 30 December 1460.
18 Henry VI part 3, act 1, scene 2, set in Sandal Castle.
19 Battle of Mortimer’s Cross, 2 February 1461. Battlefields Trust 2013.
20 Second Battle of St Albans, 17 February 1461.
21 Battle of Towton, 29 March 1461. Battlefields Trust 2013; English Heritage 2013; Fiorato et al. 2007.
22 Battle of Hedgeley Moor, 25 April 1464; Battle of Hexham, 15 May 1464.
23 Battle of Edgcote, 26 July 1469. Battlefields Trust 2013.
24 Battle of Losecoat Field, 12 March 1470.
25 Battle of Barnet, 14 April 1471. Battlefields Trust 2013; English Heritage 2013.
26 Battle of Tewkesbury, 4 May 1471. Battlefields Trust 2013; English Heritage 2013.
27 Clarence’s death by wine was recorded by contemporary historians, but they do not implicate Richard, an addition by later writers adopted by Shakespeare in the opening act of Richard III.
28 The story that the boys’ bodies were concealed by a heap of stones under a staircase inside the Tower (like all such details, first written down some time after the event) encouraged people to imagine that two child skeletons found in such a location in 1674 were those of the princes. The urn in which the bones were reinterred was opened in 1933 (Tanner and Wright 1935), and the evidence then published reconsidered by Molleson (1987). Molleson (perforce like almost all commentators, using secondhand observations) judged the remains to be consistent with what we might expect to see if they were of the two princes: the individuals both seem to be male, there are indications that they were related, and their approximate ages were such that if they were the princes (with known birth dates), they would most likely have both died in 1484. She also noted that the younger boy was unusually tall for his age, as would befit a son of Edward IV; and that they were related to Anne Mowbray (whose known remains had recently been analysed: Warwick 1986; Watson 2013), the young, related wife of Prince Richard.
29 Ross 1981, 128–32; Hipshon 2011, 167.
30 Hipshon 2011, 155.
31 Not the Fosse Way (pace Hammond 2010, 72), a major Roman route driving southeast from Leicester that follows the current Narborough Road out of the city (not Fosse Road).
Act II, Scene 1
1 The 18th-century Watt’s Causeway was renamed King Richard’s Road around this time, a grammatically punctilious if descriptively optimistic appellation for a route over a branching river which regularly flooded into an area downhill of the town’s open sewers (an ambitious sewerage scheme was proposed by Joseph Bazalgette, saviour of London’s far worse situation, in the 1850s, but rejected by Leicester’s leaders); the road was described as a ‘disgraceful … quagmire’ in December 1869 (Correspondence: King Richard’s-Road, Leicester Chronicle 1 January 1870).
2 The Old Bow Bridge, Leicester, Illustrated London News 5 February 1861; Johnson 1906, 148; Billson 1920, 182. A visitor to Leicester around 1675 noted, ‘Here is also an old bridge over the river which they call Richard III’s bridge by which some say he is buried’ (McKinley 1958, 153).
3 Some historians (e.g. Baldwin 2013, 225; Hammond 2010, 71) guess that Richard in fact probably stayed at the castle, but this may have been a case of more room at the inn (for Richard’s large entourage). On the inn and the bed, see also Billson 1920, chapter 12; Ashdown-Hill 2013, chapter 7; and Baldwin 2013, 224–26.
4 In 1611 the coffin was in use as a horse trough, and was later spotted by pioneering travel writer Celia Fiennes at the (non-existent) Greyhound Inn; soon it was at the White Horse, and by 1758 it had gone, reportedly broken up (Baldwin 1986, 22–23). In the 1980s a new candidate was found in Earl Shilton, where it had been set up as a garden feature in 1903, improving on its former use as another drinking trough in Leicester. It was given to the Bosworth Battlefield Centre in 2009. ‘Has Reg [Colver] found the discarded coffin of Richard III?’, asked BBC-TV’s One Show. ‘The archaeologists can’t be sure.’ (bbc.
co.uk/blogs/theoneshow/onepassions/2008/11/is-this-the-coffin-of-richard.html). The tradition continues. In October 2013 a scrap of weathered fabric said to have come from Henry VII’s battle standard at Bosworth was auctioned for £3,800; curiously, an inscription in the 19th-century frame describes it as having come from Richard’s standard.
5 Local History: The old Bow Bridge, Leicester Chronicle 12 January 1861.
6 The original is Old French (in modern French, loyauté me lie), and often written ‘Loyaulte me lie’; but not here. York’s Lendal Bridge, which features a similar painted cast iron parapet with white roses and gold lions, is exactly contemporary.
7 Correspondence: The new Bow Bridge, Leicester Chronicle 2 May 1863; Correspondence: The proposed inscription on the new Bow Bridge, Leicester Chronicle 16 May 1863.
8 Discovery of a skeleton near the Bow Bridge, Leicester Chronicle 31 May 1862.
9 Correspondence: On the human skeleton in the bed of the Soar, near Bow Bridge, Leicester Chronicle 7 June 1862.
10 The four friaries were Franciscan (Grey Friars, founded before 1230), Dominican (Black Friars, founded before 1284), Augustinian (White Friars, founded before 1304) and the Penitence of Jesus Christ (Friars of the Sack), founded before 1283. The latter had disappeared before 1295, but the others all survived to be seized and destroyed by Henry VIII in 1538. See Hoskins and McKinley 1954, 33–35.
11 One skull is still in the possession of Henry Goddard’s descendants, and said to have been found by this Victorian Leicester architect while he was working on Bow Bridge; it was radiocarbon dated in 1983, and found to be 9th century or Anglo-Saxon – six hundred years older than Richard III (A. Wakelin, Is there a king under this bridge?, Leicester Mercury 8 October 2002). The county heritage environment record notes two skulls, one found during the construction of the Great Central Railway in 1895, the other near Bath Lane in 1896, that could have come from the Dominican or Augustinian friaries. Throughout the next century Leicester hung on to the idea that the king’s remains might be found. In one account a lead coffin and a skeleton were dug up when the School of Art and Technology was extended at the site of the church of St Mary of the Blessed Annunciation, in the Newarke; the skull exhibited ‘a receding forehead and projecting jaw,’ said the college principal, ‘attributes of King Richard’ (King Richard III, supposed discovery of his skeleton, Bath Weekly Chronicle & Herald 7 September 1935). Thanks to Chris Wardle, City Archaeologist, for help with these stories.