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.
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.
Bob’s lecture was followed by the Medieval Section’s Christmas buffet.
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 