Excavations at Pontefract Friary in 2011 (courtesy of Simon Tomson)
St Richard’s Dominican Friary in Pontefract was one of 56 Dominican friaries in England by 1300, but, as our speaker told the audience, it was not known precisely where it was until very recently. The opportunity to locate the missing friary arose when the A & E department of the local hospital was demolished. Pontefract Castle dates from the 1080s and Pontefract was laid out as a planned town by the de Lacys in front of the castle along an east west ridge. The present town centre overlies the medieval suburb. A number of place names clues suggest that the friary had once been nearby: Friar Wood and Friar Wood Lane. Pontefract Friary Action Group (PFAG) gathered 2000 signatures in just a fortnight to press for the site to be explored archaeologically. The hospital authorities planned to reduce the ground surface by a metre. WYAS conducted a desktop assessment which showed there was a high likelihood of there being archaeology beneath the hospital estate. Balfour Beatty Heathcoe provided £10,000 to fund the excavation.
Friaries came late (from the 1250s) on the medieval monastic scene and, having to set up where they could, tend to be extra-mural and Simon showed a map of medieval Bristol for comparison. The friaries were outside the town on the flood plain. Beverley Friary set up over the town sewer! In Pontefract Eric Holder and Pontefract and District Archaeology society excavated pits at the bottom of the hill where it was thought the friary might lie. Joining up dots from the exploratory trenches enabled the excavators to tentatively mark out the plan of the cloister. Drought marks in a garden suggested a possible guesthouse on the west side of the cloister. It appears the friary garderobe flowed into a duck pond.
The society had to meet a number of health and safety requirements in order to dig but within 10 days of coming back off holiday, the Chairman supported by the society had mobilised 30 volunteers and were ready to start digging. They sank a number of 2m square sondage pits but they only revealed an undifferentiated five feet thick grey garden soil which had been turned over repeatedly. It had been the dumping ground for the contents of privies mixed with ash and contained lots of clay pipe fragments and broken pottery. Black and white photographs of the site showed how it had been used to grow liquorice, which requires deep well-drained soils, during the early modern period.
Liquorice from Manchester Museum Botany collection (courtesy of Claire Miles)
The grey layer rested on top of the local coal measure sandstone. The surface of the sandstone contained one burial: that of a man who had been hanged. The radiocarbon date suggested he’d lived between 1283 and 1394. Simon speculated he might be a veteran of the Battle of Boroughbridge (1322) in which Thomas of Lancaster, who had risen in rebellion against King Edward II, was defeated. Afterwards the Earl was brought back to Pontefract, tried and executed.
The site where the skeleton was found lay against an 8 metre vertical sandstone cliff face which had been quarried extensively for the stone from which the friary had been constructed. A rock-cut foundation trench was found providing the footing for the North wall of the friary church. The friary was extensively robbed when Pontefract was being rebuilt after three destructive sieges during the English Civil War. However, the excavators found a major east-west wall with three buttresses and an impressive but unfinished broken grave cover incorporated into a buttress. It had been damaged by the stonemason during manufacture and had been re-used. Against the wall a line of whitewash could be seen. Black and white floor tiles had butted up against the wall. On the inside of the east wall was found what was believed to be part of the base of the altar. The dating of the tiles suggests they were made prior to the founding of the friary and may have been used and re-used several times before being given to the friary.
Head niche of Purbeck marble (courtesy of Simon Tomson)
The head niche of a sarcophagus of Purbeck marble was found near a rebate in one side of the chancel. This sarcophagus would have been expensive and shows that the person buried there was of high status. Unfortunately most of the sarcophagus appears to have been made into lime for mortar after the Dissolution in 1536. Several brass letters dating from the early to mid-15th century were also found. Nevertheless there are a couple of candidates, whose last resting place this might have been. The battle of Wakefield took place in 1460. Richard Duke of York and his son Edmund Earl of Rutland both lost their lives. There is historical evidence that they were buried at Pontefract Friary. In 1476 Edward IV and Richard Duke of Gloucester arranged a funeral cortege to take their father’s remains for re-burial at Fotheringhay. Pieces of window tracery dating from about 1375 were found. There is also historical evidence that John of Gaunt provided wood for rebuilding the friary roof after 1365.
To the north lay the cemetery. The society sampled one of the skeletons. Simon thought the radiocarbon date obtained for the skeleton (1283-1394) was suspiciously close to that of the skeleton of the hanged man. He suspected that radon gas seeping up out of the coal measures might be blurring the precision of the results. The partial plan revealed by the excavation enabled Simon to overlay onto it a plan of a surviving friary, such as that of Norwich to give an impression of the complete plan of Pontefract Friary. This enabled him to predict the line of the south wall and he tested the theory by digging in a narrow piece of land between the children’s ward and the public road. The south wall of the church was found and it was the buttress was only half a metre out! Simon showed a photo of the Blackfriars Theatre in Boston which gives an idea of how the building next to the cloister might have looked.
Simon Tomson is Excavation Field Director, Pontefract and District Archaeological Society. Our sincerest thanks to Simon for giving his lecture and providing images for use in this blog post.
Plan of Monk Bretton in the light of recent excavations (courtesy of Dr Hugh Willmott).
The speaker at April’s lecture meeting is interested in the end of the monasteries, and, as Monk Bretton is close to Sheffield and has an interesting Post-Dissolution history; it was the perfect site for fieldwork. But why bother? Don’t we know it all anyway? There are a lot of historical records, including suppression records, with which to map the process of destruction and rebirth that takes place on such sites. However, archaeologists have generally been more interested in the story of how the abbeys were founded, and how the architectural styles changed over time, rather than what happened after their Dissolution. The fact that the majority have a Post-Dissolution life that may be longer than the duration of the monastic occupation is often ignored. Simon Thurley in his 2007 Gresham Lecture ‘The Fabrication of Medieval History’ referred to the policy of the Office or Ministry of Works (M.O.W.) under the guidance of Sir Charles Reed Peers (1868-1952), which was summarised as “Our job is to throw up the distinctive character and individuality of the medieval constructor”. So it was that Monk Bretton was turned into a lovely ruin with a beautifully manicured lawn during the consolidation work carried out there from the 1930s to 1950s. In keeping with the M.O.W.’s policy the Post-Dissolution phases were seen as an inconvenience and swept away during the tidying up of the site. During the recent archaeological work, which the speaker directed, the aim was to explain how the functioning farmhouse created out of the monastic buildings was turned into a picturesque ruin. It is easy to blame people in the past, however, and there is still today the feeling that the Middle Ages are the ‘real’ or ‘pure’ past and that all the other interventions are to be regarded as unfortunate. This leaves us with a rather black-and-white picture of the dedicated religious in their abbeys and priories and the unprincipled secular determined to exploit the situation at the Dissolution. In advertising its annual conference, the Society of Church Archaeology has stated “In Yorkshire the avarice and greed of those who sought to benefit from the Dissolution came into stark conflict with the piety of those who aimed to retain vestiges of the Old Religion” (2010) but this is a simplification of a relationship that was more complex, as our speaker aimed to show in his presentation.
Founded in 1153, Monk Bretton was a Cluniac house under the jurisdiction of Pontefract. In 1281 it became an independent Benedictine house (although there was bloodshed over this when an armed group led by the Prior from Pontefract disputed control of its wealth!). It was dissolved on 39th November 1538. Its estate was valued at £246 19s 4d. It was granted to William Blithman, one of the assessors. He grew up locally and was one of Cromwell’s key agents in Yorkshire, which would explain Blithman’s interest in Monk Bretton. The priory was purchased at the suggestion of Bess of Hardwick for her stepson Henry Talbot in 1580. It left the possession of the Talbot family during the early 17th century and then slipped into historical obscurity. The site was cleared by land owner John Horne during the 1920s and taken into guardianship by the Office of Works in 1937 and turned into a public monument. The last owner, John Horne, corresponded with the President of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Dr Walker. Literature published about the site explains Monk Bretton was a Talbot residence. The residence was in the west range, where a stair case and gateway represented the core of the Tudor mansion but there is little that is Tudor in the present predominantly medieval range. Other Talbot mansions are known. The Earl of Shrewsbury was one of the richest noblemen in the country and the Talbot family owned Rufford Abbey (Nottinghamshire, 1540) where the main range was turned into a fancy house; a new build at New Hall Pontefract (1591), which was demolished to make way for the M62 motorway; and Worksop Manor (1590s).
The recent work began with an intensive resistivity survey of the core of the monastic site. It proved to be surprisingly empty of archaeological features, apart from a collapsed mine shaft that runs underneath the site. Apart from patches of debris showing where buildings were cleared by the M.O.W. there was little to be seen. However, an anomaly beyond the church seemed to show a set of walls. Test pits were dug in Easter 2010. A test pit dug north of the North Transept revealed walls and a piece of early to mid-16th century German stoneware was found, as well as an area of puddled clay in which there were lots of broken edges of window glass. These were the trimmings (never leaded) or offcuts from creating windows. They were not monastic but were 16th or 17th century in date.
This work was followed by further documentary research and the digging of a larger trench. When the old M.O.W. files were inspected a piece of graph paper dated 31st May 1950 was found on which there was a sketch plan of a building that was recorded near the North Transept wall. It had been recorded accurately but in rudimentary fashion before being back-filled because it didn’t fit the prevailing contemporary interpretative narrative that focused on the monastic rather than the Post-Dissolution archaeology. Further excavations in July 2010 dug up an area of the lawn and the area where window glass had been found. The latter revealed a boundary wall with puddled clay on one side and medieval garden soils beneath. It was not the intention to excavate a medieval garden and the trench was closed.
The trench north of the Transept was more complex because it revealed lots of walls and features. Here was evidence of Tudor building and Post-Medieval material culture but the more the excavators dug the less it seemed to make sense! The chief obstacle was the M.O.W.’s excavation technique which consisted of following walls to create a plan of the buildings on the site. Unfortunately this divorced the walls and buildings from their archaeological contexts and associated dating evidence, leaving them ‘floating’. However some nice pieces of a carved stone syncopated arcade from the Cloister were found.
The garderobe at Monk Bretton (photo courtesy of Dr Hugh Willmott)
Later building work appears to have respected an earlier feature that had been left in situ. This was interpreted as a ‘furnace’ during the 1950s but it turned out to be a closed-shaft garderobe built against a wall, complete with an exit chute. The M.O.W. excavators found pottery here and this was traced and turned out to be an almost complete urinal. Urinals are often found down reredorter drains. This suggests whatever was going on in the area was of a domestic nature but just north of the North Transept seemed like a strange place for a substantial building of this kind. However, Castle Acre Priory had a similar building running away from the North Transept.
Medieval urinal found in garderobe at Monk Bretton (courtesy of Dr Hugh Willmott).
The recent excavations also revealed late medieval coarse wares amongst the 1950s back-fill. The most interesting pieces turned out to be industrial wares. A 14th or 15th century drinking jug was badly corroded. Perhaps it had been used for boiling something acidic as part of a metal-working. A pot with greenish-blue deposit proved to be unexpectedly dangerous because the analysis revealed it contained copper arsenate! It had probably been used as a dye pigment. Similar vessels were discovered at Pontefract Priory. Clearly some interesting activity was going on at the Priory in the 15th century. However, the finds also reveal high status activity too. The current excavations uncovered a Germanic drinking glass or beaker as well as window glass, decorated with grisaille and lead canes. Nice windows and imported glass may suggest this was the early guesthouse.
Most of the walls related to the mid-16th century phase before the site came into the possession of the Talbot family. A lot of medieval stone was reused making dating the activity difficult. A large fireplace was reused and incorporated pieces from different fireplaces to create two water tanks. The edges of the tanks were chipped. The timber frame building resting on stone sleeper walls appears to have been a smithy and there is evidence of burning. Lots of good ceramics were recovered from the drain including so-called Cistercian wares and Blackwares as well as a decorative stone crocket (a decorative architectural element probably from a pinicle on the monastic church). Another metalwork sample proved to copper alloy containing significant traces of zinc and tin. This is the composition of bell metal and it is interesting that five bells are mentioned in the Suppression document. There was a lot of lead work too that had been cut off and twisted ready for melting down and recycling.
In the final phase dating to the late 16th century, much was demolished and filled-in. This is about the time when the site was acquired by the Talbot family. In addition to the construction of the smithy there had been some reconstruction at Monk Bretton under Blithman’s ownership elsewhere on the site. Parts of the Church Nave were demolished. Part of the North Aisle went to Wentworth where it was built into the Parish Church. Our speaker pointed out that one of the first things that Post-Dissolution owners did was to slight the church to ensure that the monks did not return. This was only prudent at a time when the political wind was blowing both ways. The eastern end of the church that was left appears to have been retained as a barn.
In order to better understand what happened at Monk Bretton in the late 16th and 17th centuries and before the M.O.W. tidied up the site, Ordnance Survey maps were consulted. One edition of 1931 was published just before the M.O.W. acquired the site. Another of 1906 shows a west range. Part of the farmhouse and medieval masonry were incorporated to create a long gallery. Photographs in Barnsley Archives Office show this as a long gallery with a timber-framed top hall, and with Tudor chimneys coming off it. People reused the stone from this Post-Dissolution building. The Tudor House seems to have had an inserted stairwell and a long gallery. In a letter from the last owner Mr Horne to Dr Walker of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society, a series of investigations are described: ‘In the centre refectory wall is a circular structure which may have been a fireplace. There is a wall going through the centre of the building put in at the time of the 16th century…’ The circular structure must have been a bread oven. Another building described as the ‘administration building’ has been dated to the 13th century on the basis of some rather fine columns but archival research shows that the M.O.W. made extensive changes to this structure in the 1930s and ‘medievalised’ what probably started out as a stable or coach house in the Post-Medieval phase of Monk Bretton. During the 1930s Monk Bretton was ‘fossilised’ as a medieval monument even though by this time it had been transformed into a working farm.
The lecture showed that life at Monk Bretton went on long after the closure of the priory in 1538 and indeed the Post-Dissolution phase lasted as long as the duration of the monastic occupation. The recent archaeological work showed what happened to a site at the Dissolution and what was involved in the transition from an ecclesiastical estate to a secular one. Life went on the and to the peasant working the land there would not have been much, if any, difference. Sadly this continuity is often overlooked in the traditional narrative of the Dissolution being about the destruction of the monasteries and the expulsion of the monks. In this Monk Bretton is not on its own. There must have been hundreds of Monk Brettons in the landscape after the Dissolution. About one third of religious sites were destroyed; between a third and a half were converted into a house or farm; and about a fifth remained in parochial religious use. The situation is slightly different in Wales and very different in Scotland.
The Section is very grateful to Dr Willmott for kindly commenting on the text (though any mistakes that remain are the Hon.Secretary’s responsibility) and for providing photographs. Dr Willmott was planning to publish the more detailed report on the 2010 excavations in the YAJ, but is currently finalising the ‘grey’ report for English Heritage.Dr Willmott has also offered to speak to the Section about his work at Thornton Abbey in North Lincolnshire at a date to be confirmed.
Close up of burnt lime and other burnt material on kiln floor.
In 2013 members of the Ingleborough Archaeology Group investigated what proved, by a suite of radiocarbon dates, to be two early medieval sites in Crummack Dale in Austwick parish on the southern flanks of the Ingleborough massif. Within one of the sites – dated to cal AD 760-900 – a circular pit-like feature on the edge of the complex showed strong magnetic anomalies. Given that raw iron ore, from the Millom area, and a range of iron artefacts had been logged from the two sites, it was felt important to investigate the pit to determine if it had been in any way connected to iron production. In fact, it proved through excavation to have been a sow kiln, a type of clamp lime kiln formed by cutting a bowl-shaped hollow into a natural bank. Unusually for excavated sow kilns in the Dales, this one was intact – all other excavated examples had had the lintel and perimeter capstones removed at some point after abandonment.
Flue lintel with burnt lime in flue passage entry to kiln bowl.
Large quantities of burnt lime were found within the flue and lining the base of the bowl as well as significant amounts of charcoal. Though many of the samples were from long-lived species (ash and oak), several were from short-lived smallwood species (willow/poplar and blackthorn-type) Two of these, from different parts of the bowl, were submitted to SUERC for radiocarbon dating.
The dates that came back were totally unexpected. One sample (SUERC-49564, GU-32195) came out at cal AD 1026-1162 at 95.4 % confidence level (1039-1153 at 68.2%); the other (SUERC-49563, GU-32194) at cal AD 1043-1225 at 95.4% (1117-1225 at 74.1%).
Radiocarbon dates from a sow kiln excavated in the Forest of Bowland in 2009, also supervised by the undersigned, were thought to be incredibly early, namely cal AD 1185-1280 at 95.4%, and cal AD 1205-1280 at 93.2% (SUERC-26208, GU-19814). The dates from the Crummack Dale kiln are even more astonishing and, thus far, a literature trawl has failed to locate any earlier examples from remote, rural examples.
General view of the kiln on completion of the excavation.
Once work on the complexes has been completed later this year, a full report on the early medieval sites and the kiln will be compiled and published.
My sincerest thanks to Dr David Johnson for sharing this with the Medieval Section.
Yesterday’s Medieval Section AGM was one of the best-attended and longest-lasting AGMs that I can remember in all the years that I have been a member. Twenty-one people were present. Unfortunately Axel Muller (Chairman), Jo Heron (Treasurer) and Steve Moorhouse (Hon. Editor) could not come so I read their respective reports to the gathering. Janet Senior kindly stepped in to chair the meeting which meant I was not talking all of the time.
Basically we are in much better shape than we were a year ago.The twin strategy of reviving the Saturday afternoon monthly lectures and creating a section blog has stimulated interest so that once again members are offering themselves for election to committee. Craig Fletcher has joined the committee and replaces Marta Cobb who has stepped down. Thanks to them both for serving. It was the absence of volunteers willing to stand for committee that prompted last year’s proposal that the section be wound up. The membership is about the same at 130, although there are still subscriptions outstanding.
The main point of discussion was the Section journal Medieval Yorkshire. David Asquith kindly offered to facilitate the production of the journal. Whilst David has not said he will become Hon. Editor this is a most welcome step that hopefully will enable us to resume publication of Medieval Yorkshire. Sadly due to the ill-health of Stephen Moorhouse there has not been any progress with the catch-up volumes 38 and 39/40.
Dr Hugh Willmott addressing the section about Monk Bretton Priory.
The AGM was followed by Dr Hugh Willmott (University of Sheffield) who talked to us about recent work at Monk Bretton Priory. I’ll put a summary of this talk on the blog in due course.
I’ve been very interested to follow the recent press coverage of the re-attribution of Offa’s Dyke, said to have been built by the famous Mercian king to keep out the Welsh. Offa’s Dyke runs for 177 miles from Prestatyn in North Wales to Chepstow near the River Severn in the south, much of it following the Wales-England border. It is eight feet high and 65 feet wide in places. It was thought to have been was built between 757 and 796 AD. However, it now looks as though Offa’s claim to be the instigator rests on, well, shaky foundations.
Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust has radiocarbon-dated samples taken from turf at
Chirk, near Llangollen, in North Wales, and the results suggest that the Chirk section, which runs along the Shropshire border, at least, was built between 430 and 652 AD, making the dyke up to 300 years earlier than was thought. It looks as though some of the dyke had already been constructed by the time of Offa (757-796) and that the eponymous king may have simply built upon earlier work.
Whoever was responsible the dyke certainly said something about the power of Mercia. Kings Creoda (584-593) and Penda (626-655) are now in the frame as possible claimants to the honour of having started the Dyke. Paul Belford, Director of Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust, is quoted as saying that “It is now clear that it was not the work of a single ruler but a longer-term project that began at an earlier stage in the development of the kingdom.”
The Editorial in The Telegraph today (9th April 2014) asks “Does it matter? Only if visitors feel disappointed that the Devil’s Dyke on Newmarket Heath was not built by Satan, or Wiltshire’s Wansdyke by Woden.” Of course anyone familiar with mural archaeology would have guessed this was unlikely to be true. Wasn’t what we now know as Hadrian’s Wall for a long time attributed to the Emperor Severus?
More in the Telegraph and the Daily Mail (9th April 2014). Thanks to Keith Sugden, Curator of Numismatics at Manchester Museum, for sourcing the image of Offa’s penny.
Facial reconstruction of Richard III recently on display at the Yorkshire Museum
The life of Richard III (1452-1485) is a mixture of history and story-telling. One example of the latter is William Shakespeare’s play of 1592 but Richard has been interpreted by many writers. Lawrence Olivier’s portrayal of Richard III has been especially influential in the popular imagination but how accurate are these interpretations? Since the public announcement on 4th February 2013 of the identification of human remains in a Leicester car park as those of Richard III, what does it mean historically? What does this discovery tell us about the last Plantagenet King, the last king of England to die in battle?
Finding Richard’s remains was the final piece in an intriguing jigsaw. Another piece of this puzzle, the discovery of the location of the site of the battle of Bosworth by Glenn Foard, some distance away from where the battlefield interpretation centre stands today at Ambion Hill, slotted into place in 2010. Discovering Richard’s remains was an unbelievable stroke of luck and featured a number of remarkable coincidences. In fact University of Leicester mathematicians worked out the chances of finding Richard were just 0.84%! However, he was found, and, because the skull was preserved, a facial reconstruction could be made. Our speaker commented that he thought the facial reconstruction bears a striking likeness to Quentin Tarantino!
Was Richard a villain? Did he kill the princes in the Tower? Since the discovery, archaeologists, anatomists and historians have been reassessing Richard’s physical life and going back to the documentary sources. This may reveal further information but it won’t tell us what happened to the princes in the Tower. What we do know is that in 1483 Richard was made Lord Protector after his brother Edward IV died. Edward’s eldest son, Prince Edward, was being escorted back to London when Richard intercepted the party and took the prince back to the Tower. The prince’s younger brother joined him there. Arrangements were made for the coronation of the prince as King Edward V but his claim was suddenly declared to be invalid and it was announced that the children were illegitimate. What happened to the princes after August 1483 isn’t known but Bob said that Richard had to be held responsible because they disappeared on his watch.
There were two major rebellions against Richard’s rule. In August 1485 Henry Tudor landed with a small force at Pembroke and marched through Wales, receiving contingents from the Talbots and the Thomases. Richard moved his army toward Tudor from Nottingham to Leicester. On 22nd August Richard with perhaps 8-10,000 men fought Henry Tudor with 5000 men on land where there was a waterlogged meadow. Bob siad that over the last 200 years various historians had fumbled around trying to find the site. One thing all the historians were agreed on is that there was a marsh. Glenn Foard of the Battlefield Trust located evidence of the battlefield near Fenn Lane in 2010, two miles south of the traditional location at Ambion Hill. The investigators recovered artefact assemblages dating from the mid to late 15th century, comparable with material from Towton (1461), including roundshot (the largest concentration of shot yet found on a late Medieval battlefield) apparently confirming Jean Molinet’s account that Richard’s artillery fired upon Henry Tudor’s army. A boar livery badge was found at Fenn Hole next to Fenn Lane, and also part of a gilt sword hilt dating from the late 15th century, which must have been carried by someone of high status.
Richard III livery badge displayed at the Yorkshire Museum
After the battle Richard’s body was taken to Leicester and displayed publicly before its hasty burial in the church of the Greyfriars. Henry Tudor had an effigy set up above the burial in 1495. With the demolition of Greyfriars at the Dissolution in 1538 the location of the body was lost. However, in 2010, in the first trench of the excavation in the car park on the site of Greyfriars, Richard’s remains were discovered. Bob said that Philippa Langley, the President of the Richard III Society, has taken a lot of criticism for her part in a documentary about the discovery but it was thanks to her determination and the support of the Richard III Society that the excavation took place. Bob said that sometimes a bit of obsessiveness is needed to find things. In what he described as a neat piece of Fortean synchronicity Bob said that Richard’s body was found three feet beneath the tarmac under the part of the car park marked with the letter ‘R’! It was a truly amazing discovery and Bob has no doubt that it really is Richard III.
The trauma on the skeleton indicate that this was someone who was killed in battle. The injuries include eight cranial and two post-cranial trauma. The ten wounds represent an incidence of injury higher than that of Towton, and, it must be remembered, we are not seeing flesh wounds, which have not left any evidence. This picture is consistent with historical accounts that say Richard fell in the field, covered in wounds, hacked and hewn at the hands of his enemies. The skeleton shows he suffered from scoliosis or curvature of the spine. This is likely to have started at puberty and this grew worse with age. Richard may have stood 5’6” tall. According to Tudor propaganda Richard was a hunchback but the evidence of the skeleton is real evidence. The condition may not have been as pronounced as Sir Thomas More would have it but Richard’s close family, his armourer and tailor would have known the truth. It did not impede Richard, however. He was admiral of the fleet and took part in three battles. Sampling of the earth inside the grave revealed a different aspect of Richard’s health. He suffered from roundworms but apparently not from fluke, pork or beef tapeworm. His meat must have been well-cooked. At a time when human fecal waste was used as fertiliser, Richard could have acquired the roundworm from eating vegetables that had not been properly washed. Alternatively poor hygiene was the cause because people didn’t know to wash their hands after using the garderobe, if indeed they had access to one.
The Classicist Mary Beard has questioned the excitement about the discovery of Richard, claiming that the excavation of a peasant would tell us more about life in the past but the opportunity to study a king and to examine the wounds he suffered at the time of death is an amazing opportunity. The discovery that he also suffered from worms, creates a picture of Richard in life that we do not get from Medieval chronicles.
The study of the skeleton shows that Richard’s body was hacked about, although the feet are missing because of the later building of a toilet close to the site of the burial. This doesn’t affect the interpretation of Richard’s remains because his thigh bones survived, from which his height could be calculated. Richard was cut down by a bill or halberd. Skeletons from the battlefields of Visby (1361) and Towton (1461) provide comparable material. Bob illustrated a wide range of wounds known by Medieval doctors with a trauma identification chart. We know that Richard was wounded at the battle of Barnet (1471) from a letter written by a Hanseatic League merchant but the team didn’t find any healed injuries from that earlier encounter. All the injuries visible on the skeleton are consistent with ante-mortem trauma. It is known that people could recover from very severe injuries. For example, one of the casualties of Towton suffered a severe wound to the side of the jaw but the man recovered.
The narrative of the battle suggests Richard’s attack was a last-minute decision. Richard charged Henry Tudor and killed his standard bearer, Sir William Brandon, but was stalled by the marshy ground. His horse became stuck in the soft ground. Richard must have come within a few feet of Henry who can have been no more than 10 feet away from his standard. It was at this point that Stanley’s forces intervened and Richard was killed.
Richard’s skeleton tells us a lot about the last few minutes of his life. A cut to Richard’s jaw may suggest that his helmet chin strap was cut in order to remove his helmet. A penetrating wound to the right maxilla may have been inflicted from behind by the same attacker but it would not have been fatal. A scoop-like slice from the top and rear of skull would have bled profusely but would not have killed Richard. The same weapon – a long sword bill or halberd – was used to knock a hole in Richard’s head in the right occipital bone of his skull. Molinet mentions such a weapon in his account. He says a Welshman struck Richard dead with a halberd. It is interesting that a bedstead of 1505 shows the battle scene with a foot soldier carrying a halberd. This wound would not have caused instantaneous death. Casualties from the battle of Dornack in Switzerland (1499) show severe trauma. A casualty of Towton suffered a blow across the back of the head and another face was bisected. These trauma reveal that medieval warfare was vicious and nasty, not chivalrous. It has been claimed in some newspapers that Richard was poll-axed but it is not clear where this story originated. Richard certainly suffered a penetrating wound to the head and this would have brought him down immediately. The sequence seems to have been that he suffered a halberd wound to the head, at which point Richard was still alive, but then he received a penetrating wound to the left occipital and this is in fact what killed him. This is what one of the accounts, The Most Pleasant Song of Lady Bessy, says. An indentation in the surface of the skull may indicate that Richard’s opponents tried to push a rondel dagger into his head. A rondel dagger was used to kill Watt Tyler. An image in the Bibliothèque Nationale shows someone using the mushroom cap pommel of such a dagger to apply pressure to deliver a thrusting blow to the back of Tyler’s head. Towton 21 has a similar injury. The trauma enable us to see Richard’s death in great detail. The fact that there are no definite wounds on the arms, hands or fingers as at Towton where the dead suffered defensive injuries trying to ward off blows, suggest that at this stage Richard must have had the protection of armour.
Two other wounds must have been made after Richard’s armour was removed. These are the so-called humiliation injuries, which were inflicted after Richard’s body had been stripped naked, when he was subjected to indignities. The Crowland Abbey Chronicle of 1486 says that Richard’s body had insults heaped upon it. Richard’s body was lying over the back of a horse at this point, his hands and feet tied. Mutilation of the dead is shocking to us today but it must be remembered that this is a common occurrence in warfare. At the battle of the Little Big Horn (1876) General Custer’s body was mistreated. Bowdlerised versions of the battle circulated until the 1960s. One of the troopers who found the body stated that the Custer’s ears were pierced so he could hear more clearly in the afterlife and that his stomach was cut open to reveal his spirit. Richard, too, had all manner of things done to him. There is a thin line on the bone of the pelvis showing that a knife went all the way through. Perhaps this wound was inflicted using a ballock dagger. This seems to be an act of deliberate humiliation. The body was then taken the 16 miles back to Leicester where it was exposed for public viewing for several days before being bundled unceremoniously into a grave, the hands still bound. Some people have tried to explain away the injury to the hip saying that Richard must have fallen from his horse and landed on a pointed shield but the most likely explanation is mutilation of the king’s dead body by the victors. The skeleton of Towton 32 suggests that the man’s ears were cut off. Richard’s face survived intact either because he was lying face down or because Henry Tudor wanted to ensure that the face remained identifiable. He wanted Richard’s body to be recognizable. Exposure of the body to public view was not uncommon so that the reality of the king’s death would be widely known and accepted. Contemporary knowledge that Richard’s head had suffered damage may lie behind the story that Richard’s head struck the bridge as it was returned to Leicester.
Bob said that this was the first attempt to tell a coherent story about what happened to Richard and doubtless more will be discovered as the study progresses. Work will be done on plaque on Richard’s teeth and this will tell us what Richard ate and drank. Had the body been dug up at an earlier date before modern forensic techniques were invented this sort of work would not have been possible.
In the discussion after the talk a question was raised about Michael Jones’ claim that Richard’s charge failed to reach Henry Tudor because he was surrounded by a contingent of European mercenaries equipped with long spears or pikes. However, Bob discounted this interpretation because Richard spent time on the continent and would have been aware of this development in warfare. He did not think the charge was the last gamble of a desperate man. In 1484 Richard had placed orders for 168 suits of Italian armour for his household, suggesting that his household numbered 2-300 men. The deployment and charge of such a large number of mounted men was not last minute but planned and deliberate and is unlikely to have been frustrated by soldiers armed in this way.
Readers can find out a bit more about Richard’s part in the funerary procession to commemorate his father, Richard of York, who was killed at the Battle of Sandal in an earlier lecture to the Medieval Section.
References:
Michael K. Jones (2002) Bosworth 1485: Psychology of a Battle Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing
The most pleasant song of Lady Bessy : the eldest daughter of King Edward the Fourth, and how she married King Henry the Seventh of the House of Lancaster” (1829)
Medieval Section of the Yorkshire Archaeological and Historical Society 