by Mike Pitts
9 Darlow Smithson’s Simon Young later gave as one of his three ‘tricks of the trade’ – a few days before the public announcement of Skeleton I’s identity and the first broadcast of the film he executive produced – ‘Never give up – but never guarantee a commissioner that you’ll find the bones of Richard III’ (Richard III: The King in the Car Park, C4, Broadcast 31 January 2013).
10 Carter and Mace 1923, 95–96.
11 T. G. H. James, Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun, Kegan Paul, London 1992 (reprinted 2001 Tauris Parke, London), 478.
12 That was certainly Thomas Hoving’s view. The one-time head of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art (who described his own collecting style as ‘piracy’) found ‘discrepancies’ between Carter’s text and the many photos taken at the time, leading him to call Carter’s entire published account ‘a lie’ (Tutankhamun: The Untold Story, New York: Simon and Schuster 1978, 89). Another theory has it that Carter entered the tomb years before he said he had found it, and ‘unearthed a secret so potentially damaging to world order that a string of murders were instigated to ensure the truth never saw the light of day’ (G. O’Farrell, The Tutankhamun Deception, London: Sidgwick and Jackson 2001, 93). For the proper record see Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation. Howard Carter’s Diaries and Journals, Griffith Institute, Oxford, at http://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/gri/4sea1not.html. I have no doubt that Skeleton I’s excavation will inspire conspiracy theorists to elaborate heights, but the site record will make it hard for them to be taken seriously.
13 These words are transcribed mainly from Carl Vivian’s unedited sequence, from which we realize, even as we listen to what was truly said, that the exchanges were being skilfully manipulated.
14 Not least Darlow Smithson. Executive producer Simon Young received a text from the location director: ‘You’re not going to believe this folks, but the skeleton in Trench 1 is a male hunchback with head injuries … you couldn’t make this up!’ When the news was relayed to Channel 4, the broadcaster finally awarded the full programme commission (Richard III: The King in the Car Park, C4, Broadcast 31 January 2013). Persuading broadcasters to take on adventurous archaeology projects has never been easy.
15 A. Carson and P. Langley, The Greyfriars Dig – A new Richard III, The ‘Looking for Richard Project’, March 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f60CyRdCXls#at=11.
Act IV
1 When the dig began, the budget had been £33,000, of which the Richard III Society had contributed a little over half. By 31 December costs stood at £142,000, the additional funding coming from the university, which by then was supporting 80% of the entire project. See http://www2.le.ac.uk/news/blog/2013/february/the-search-for-richard-iii-statement-of-costs-up-to-31.12.12.
2 Search for King Richard III – Press Conference 12 September 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8mk1Kcgyh0.
3 Toulmin Smith 1907, 17. From the context, it seems likely that Leland did not see their tombs, though whether this is because he failed to visit the Greyfriars site, or because they were no longer there, is impossible to tell.
4 State Funeral for Richard III, Early Day Motion 527 tabled 13 September 2012 by Chris Skidmore; Burial of King Richard the III at a Catholic Burial Site, e-petition created 13 September 2012 by Thomas McLean; Ben Macintyre, Queen rejects royal place of rest for Richard III’s troubled spirit, Times 15 September 2012; Richard III to be Re-interred at York Minster, e-petition created 24 September 2012 by Mark Cousins.
5 P. Warzynski, Richard III dig: What Leicester pupils think about the Greyfriars discovery, Leicester Mercury 19 September 2012; M. Biddle, Times 9 September 2013; P. Turnbull, Guardian 17 September 2012.
6 A month later, Lin Foxhall felt she had to ask for ‘restraint in discussions about … where the remains ought to be buried … As archaeologists we go where the evidence takes us, but we have not yet proven that these remains are Richard III, because we do not yet have the evidence to do so’ (University of Leicester press release, 26 October 2012). The day before, ‘Richard III’ was the name given to a debate in Parliament. Arguing in the House of Commons over the king’s ‘mortal remains’, said Hugh Bayley, Labour MP for York Central, ‘is more like medieval cathedrals fighting over saints’ relics. I do not think it is appropriate’.
7 Stirland 2000.
8 The figure of 206 is a conventional number that relies on counting in a particular way; we might, for example, think of the skull as one big bone, but it figures as 21, including six curving plates which protect the brain, and in older life more or less fuse together. For general archaeological study of human remains see Mays 2010 and Roberts 2009.
9 The origins of this R had seemed mysterious to some, so I can exclusively reveal that it was painted for Age Concern. The whole park was marked out for cars for council staff and for others renting spaces, including – as it was then – Leicester Age Concern, which had offices facing St Martins at the north end. AGE CONCERN was painted across the corner, and one of the spaces was singled out with an R (for this information I thank Liza Kozlowski, Admin Manager and PA to the Executive Director of Age UK Leicester Shire & Rutland).
10 A huge backfilled pit, whose excavation at some time in the past had removed the northwest corner of the choir and what might have been the church walking-place, reached close to Richard III’s head, leaving the grave isolated and suggesting that something was in the way; even a wall of the outbuilding above came down to within 9 cm of the knees. This is a topic of continuing research. News, British Archaeology 133 (2013), 6–7.
11 Shona Campbell, Consultant Radiologist at the UHL Trust, on Inside Health, BBC Radio 4, 6 February 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qdw0r.
12 The information in what follows about Skeleton I comes mostly from Buckley et al. 2013, and conversations with members of the Leicester team.
13 It was medieval practice to bury priests with their feet to the west (continuing, perhaps, the privileged relationship with God they had in life).
14 Contrary to popular belief, medieval European adults were not that much shorter than their modern counterparts. A study of 2,800 skeletons ranging from the 10th to 19th centuries from the burial ground of a redundant church in Barton-upon-Humber, Lincolnshire, revealed that typical medieval men were 5 ft 7 in. (171 cm) and women 5 ft 2 in. (158 cm) tall, both of which are 2 in. (5 cm) shorter than today. S. Mays, A community united in church, British Archaeology 96 (2007), 40–41.
15 M. H. Young, Richard III doubts, Times 14 September 2013. I quote this as an illustration, from a man with a scientific training, of something commonly expressed with less logic and courtesy: that the archaeologists and other scientists researching Richard III’s burial and remains did not consult with each other or anyone else, and generally had no idea what they were doing. Many people seem to lack a basic understanding of how academic research works, making it difficult to follow debates about everything from where we park our cars to climate change, which must be seen as a failing in our education system.
16 New Richard III 3D printed skull presented to Guildhall exhibition, http://www.lboro.ac.uk/service/publicity/news-releases/2013/114_New_Skull.html.
17 Tobias Capwell, Curator of Arms and Armour at the London Wallace Collection and an active jouster, has described how Richard III’s personal armourer (whom he calls a ‘biomechanic’) could have fitted armour to accommodate the asymmetric torso while minimizing visual signs of this, which would have been further concealed by a loose surcoat bearing the royal arms – thus his back condition could have been entirely hidden on the battlefield. T. Capwell, How Richard III’s armour would have been adapted to cope with his scoliosis, talk at a conference organized by the Richard III Society, 2 March 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sn9F0VHTjY.
18 Mitchell et al. 2013.
19 Things get a little more complex in Europe once tropical foods become commonplace, but that was not, quite, an issue in 1485. Renfrew and Bahn 2012, 302–04.
20 Hamilton and Bro
nk Ramsey 2013; this 95% probability result supersedes that published in Buckley et al. 2013.
Act V
1 See Act I and Hicks 2010.
2 Ross 1981, 140.
3 Foard and Curry 2013, 60–61, 100–01.
4 The Towton grave is described in Fiorato et al. 2007, the wounds in particular by S. Novak, Battle-related trauma, 90–102.
5 Hipshon 2011, 52; A. Boardman 2007, The historical background to the battle and the documentary evidence, in Fiorato et al. 2007, 15–28.
6 Foard and Curry 2013, 148.
7 In the descriptions that follow, bodies are described from the perspective of the individual not the viewer, so, for example, ‘right arm’ might refer to Skeleton I’s right arm, ‘on the left’, his left side, etc.
8 For the latter, see Langley and Jones 2013, 272.
9 Langley and Jones 2013, 175, 272.
10 Richard III: The Unseen Story, Darlow Smithson Productions 2013.
11 Mancini 1969, 99.
12 Ackroyd 1998, 155–59. See Act I.
13 J. Pincott, What’s in a face? Psychology Today 5 November 2012, http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201210/whats-in-face.
14 Prag and Neave 1997; Wilkinson 2004; Wilkinson and Rynn 2012.
15 C. Wilkinson, Craniofacial analysis of Richard III, talk at a conference organized by the Richard III Society, 2 March 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uwsBvebPP0.
16 The 18th-century British artist began by studying human anatomy, but moved to horses after 18 months of intensive dissection and recording.
17 As part of a continuing major project at the National Portrait Gallery, Making Art in Tudor Britain, Catherine Daunt and Sally Marriott have analysed the gallery’s Richard III portrait, which they ascribe to the late 1580s or 90s; the tree that supplied the wooden boards is estimated to have been felled after 1577. The king’s outlines are ‘more or less identical’ to those in the Royal Collection portrait, the effect, they suggest, of copying from a standard pattern. See http://www.npg.org.uk/research/programmes/making-art-in-tudor-britain.php and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj0XsvbI578.
18 Tudor-Craig 1973, 80.
19 More left two unfinished versions of his history, one in English, one in Latin; in the latter he does not specify which is the higher shoulder (Knight and Lund 2013). It may be, as most believe, that the older Society of Antiquaries portrait’s shoulders are also even (Gaimster et al. 2007, 84–85). Full analyses of these paintings have yet to be published, so it is difficult to know what to make of reported dendrochronological studies (attempts to age them by looking at growth rings in the wood) or X-rays. To my uneducated eye, the X-ray images of the Antiquaries portrait (preserved with reports in the Society’s archives) do not prove a consciously altered shoulder. The 1954 X-ray shows nothing. The 2007 X-ray shows an apparently augmented shoulder, but all the images (including a UV image made in 2007) reveal a painting that has been badly damaged, and unskilfully restored and overpainted. It seems quite possible that a raised shoulder resulted from a restorer’s attempt to make a botched arm have some semblance of being attached to the body (if so, success was elusive). See J. Fletcher, 1974, Tree ring dates for some panel paintings in England, The Burlington Magazine 854 (May 1974), 250–58.
20 Jones 2002, 37.
21 Carson 2013, 330ff. Of course, if a writer is swayed by one monarch to say unpleasant things about his predecessor, there is no reason why he should not have been similarly encouraged to flatter the other king when he was alive. If we really seek a ‘balanced view’, we need to treat all sources as if they were in quotation marks, not just those we don’t like.
22 Tudor-Craig 1973, 93. Catherine Daunt tells me that in their unpublished study of the Royal Collection picture, she and Marriott found that while ‘it is clear that the shoulder line has been altered at an early stage [becoming the prototype for later portraits], there was no evidence that any other changes, such as a narrowing of the eyes, had been made’.
23 Tudor-Craig 1973, 80.
24 For the arm, Ross 1981, 81–2, and the leg, Knight and Lund 2013, who suggest Shakespeare got the idea from More’s reference to ‘unequal and unformed limbs’. ‘As far as I know,’ says Siemon (2009, 3), ‘the limp begins with Shakespeare’; as most did until now, Siemon traced Richard’s ‘spinal curvature’ to More (2009, 5).
25 Baldwin 1986, 120; Knight and Lund 2013. The dog in the ditch reference noted earlier, quoted at a court case in York in 1491, also contains the first known mention of Richard III’s ‘crookback’; the speaker was accused of slander, and retracted the description of an ignominious burial, but ‘crookback’ seems to have gone unchallenged (Tudor-Craig 1973, 80). Knight and Lund (2013) argue that Shakespeare’s introduction of ‘bunch-backed’, indicating a hump rather than just a raised shoulder, derived from a linguistic misunderstanding of ‘crookback’, a crooked or twisted back.
26 Baldwin 1986, 123–24; Knight and Lund 2013.
27 Tudor-Craig 1973, 80.
28 Ross 1981, 140.
29 Ashdown-Hill 2006; see Act II Scene 2.
30 http://www2.le.ac.uk/news/blog/2013/february/the-search-for-richard-iii-statement-of-costs-up-to-31.12.12.
31 Ashdown-Hill 2010, 123.
32 This was the ‘new’ Mauretania, launched in 1939; film on board in the year of Joy Ibsen’s journey can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeUCbBjkOtE.
33 Most of the genealogical information is taken from Kevin Schürer’s presentation at the February 2013 press conference, and a public talk at the University of Leicester on 29 June 2013. See http://www.le.ac.uk/richardiii/science/genealogy.html.
34 The mtDNA was amplified using conventional PCR, and sequenced using the Sanger method: C. Cole, The discovery of King Richard III: SelectScience interviews Dr Turi King, 12 February 2013, http://www.selectscience.net/product-news/selectscience/the-discovery-of-king-richard-iii-selectscience-interviews-dr-turi-king/?artID=27523.
35 Writing about Joy Ibsen’s mtDNA, Ashdown-Hill (2013, 118–19) describes ‘the seven clan mothers of Europe’ referred to by some genetic genealogists. These derive from simplifying complex statistics, and whatever they mean, there is little evidence that they would have been apparent to people living in ancient times. For related reasons, ‘mitochondrial Eve’, the most recent theoretical person to whom we can all trace a female line, while a useful research construct today, had no known genetic significance at the time she was alive; the attribution will shift to different women as generations continue to breed and die.
Epilogue
1 Lansdale and Boon 2013 (psychology); http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/press/press-releases/2013/february/how-did-richard-iii-sound (voice); Knight and Lund 2013 (literature); http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnyYLIdR3bc (Blue Boar).
2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWmNMHDQNak. As I write, the 2012 excavation has been described in one peer-reviewed article, with free online access in the international journal Antiquity (Buckley et al. 2013); within a week the website received twice its normal monthly activity.
3 Interview with Ather Mirza on the Search for Richard III, 1994 Group, 5 April 2013, http://1994group.co.uk/blog/interview-with-ather-mirza-university-of-leicester-on-the-search-for-richard-iii/#.UmYfWpR4ZLc; http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmcumeds/674/674we42.htm.
4 P. Warzynski, Richard III: Publicity is equivalent of £2m of advertising for Leicester University, Leicester Mercury 24 February 2013. If print was worth £2 million, one can only marvel at the value of broadcast and online coverage.
5 Richard III could bring £14 million tourism boost to Leicester, Leicester Mercury, 12 March 2013. The paper first reported this as £140 million, but adjusted its story after Evan Davis, economist and BBC Radio 4 Today programme presenter, tweeted that the sums did not make sense. It had in fact been suggested the city might benefit from ‘up to £140 million’ a year, a figure which duly appeared in the Times Higher Education Awards citation.
; 6 A late 2013 Nottingham Playhouse/York Theatre Royal production of Richard III paid close attention to the new archaeological evidence. ‘We now know exactly how he was killed,’ said director Loveday Ingram, adding with reference to the battlefield survey, ‘We have cannon and explosions because that is what would have happened.’ J. Brown, Car park’s cutting-edge evidence used to restage the death of Richard III – as it really happened, Independent 28 October 2013.
7 In a strong list, Requiem by Michael Sandle (which uniquely required a fundraising campaign to meet the gap between price and the County Council’s contribution) stood out for its power and personality; Sandle is an anti-war artist who guns for the establishment, an unsentimental, bombastic heir to Lutyens. The council chose an installation of decorative panels, called Towards Stillness, by architects Dallas Pierce Quintero. P. Warzynski, £75,000 Richard III sculpture is chosen to stand outside Leicester Cathedral, Leicester Mercury, 28 January 2014.
8 The Society had reportedly raised £30–40,000 for the tomb ($50–65,000): Richard III Society unsure on cash donation for king’s tomb, Leicester Mercury, 24 September 2013.
9 http://kingrichardcampaign.org.uk/r3wp/descendants-statement/.
10 P. Hammond, Richard III and York, Ricardian Bulletin December 2012, http://www.richardiii.net/6_4_1_ricardian_bulletin_archive.php; News, British Archaeology 133 (2013), 6–7. E-petitions to the UK government pleaded for the burial to be in Leicester (34,400 votes) and York (31,300), among other places. Reflecting public confusion, The Times opted in two leaders in 2013 for two sites: Westminster Abbey (Loser’s justice, 4 February), later changing its mind to Leicester (Royal rumpus, 27 November).
11 Dundee experts reconstruct face of Richard III 528 years after his death, University of Dundee press release, 5 February 2013.
12 Langley and Jones 2013, 100; 64–65; compare Act III Scenes 1 and 2.
13 M. Kennedy, Richard III’s scarred skeleton becomes a battlefield for academics, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/feb/04/richard-third-skeleton-confirmed-leicester, 4 February 2013; P. Lay, Digging up Richard III will not bury old arguments, http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/feb/04/digging-richard-iii-old-arguments, 4 February 2013; N. Morley, Bah. And Furthermore, Humbug, http://thesphinxblog.com/2013/02/04/bah-and-furthermore-humbug, 4 February 2013.