Digging for Richard III

by Mike Pitts

  Yet when Richard Buckley, Mathew, Jo and Philippa gathered round the remains they knew as Skeleton I, and together saw, for the first time, what it was, their every word was recorded. By three cameras.

  ‘So what we’re actually seeing here’, says Jo, ‘is that this skeleton in fact has a hunched back.’

  Philippa’s jaw drops. That is not a turn of phrase, her jaw actually drops. ‘No,’ she says, quietly. She straightens up. ‘No,’ again.

  Then she looks round at Farnaby. ‘Now I know why you wanted to ask me that question. You blighter!’

  Farnaby laughs. ‘Well, we don’t know for sure,’ he says, striving to return to script, ‘there would have been plenty of hunchbacks.’

  Jo, prompted by Farnaby, continues.

  ‘There’s a bit more. When you were questioning me earlier about the skull I was a bit evasive about it. There is actually a wound, it’s not very visible on the surface of the skull, but inside the skull you can see that some of the bone is broken away and he’s actually been hit in the head with something. And when you turn over the skull there’s also some damage to the skull base.’

  As Jo talks, Vivian has a tight facial close-up on Philippa. Her eyes raise. You can see profound shock.

  The last time she saw the skeleton, she thought it couldn’t be Richard III. Now she is being told it is, and it’s not what she had wanted to find. The physical quest has become a triumph, but the personal one a disaster. Despite everything the Ricardians had said, despite years of believing that Tudor historians had created a fantasy of a deformed and evil king, Richard III was deformed. That knowledge is the legacy of her project. There in front of her is his distorted back; and there is his head, brutally attacked.

  Philippa asks if the wounds occurred before or after death? Jo says she can’t tell, but they certainly date from at or around that time.

  ‘OK, don’t get me wrong, here, right?’ says Philippa, ‘But that curvature is major curvature, I mean that’s seriously something going on. So, how do you get armour on that? It goes against everything that the specialists have been telling me, the guys that fight, the guys that do combat, the guys that wear armour, the guys that do medieval horsemanship, they’re saying there’s no way if he had a hunchback and a withered arm he could do it.’

  Jo is describing her immediate reaction to what she can see, which is substantially less than half the skeleton – some bones are still buried, and apart from the skull, only upper-facing surfaces are exposed – and none of the detail. Handling the remains later in the lab, when they are cleaned and under bright light and magnifying lenses, with comparative material, reference works and other specialist opinions to hand, she concludes the man in fact did not have a hunched back; he suffered from scoliosis, which gave him a badly curved spine, but left his profile reasonably straight and his head facing normally.

  ‘I haven’t spotted a withered arm,’ says Jo. ‘The arms are OK.’

  ‘The arms are OK?’ repeats Philippa. ‘Ah, some good news then.’ She pauses. ‘You know what, I feel really weird, I feel I’ve got to sit down.’ She sits down.

  At a staged conference in February 2013, Jo Appleby tells the world’s press about wounds on Skeleton I’s skull, the first occasion on which images of the remains were released. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

  ‘It’s circumstantial evidence at the moment,’ says Jo, smiling beneath her white face mask, ‘but I think just to be on the safe side, we might do a DNA test on this one.’13

  When the filming was over, and Mathew had sent all the archaeology staff home, it quietened down again. Turi had texted Jo from Innsbruck.

  ‘Skellie up? 90 yr old friar?:)’

  Now Jo could reply.

  ‘Youngish man with head injuries and hunch back. I’m not kidding. Think we might take some samples for you!’

  ‘No way!’

  Later, Turi texted her husband. ‘I think we’ve found him.’

  ‘Found who?’ he replied. No one had expected this outcome.14

  Jo lifted the skeleton, transforming it into a collection of loose bones. Any relationships between these would need to be reconstructed from the dig photos and her knowledge of anatomy. It made sense to package them in body parts. As the sun fell and the light falling across the car park grew rich and warm, Jo, kneeling in her white overalls beside the grave, prised out the body bone by bone. Mathew sat above, in face mask and rubber gloves, completing an anatomy chart on a clipboard. Here comes the left leg in a clear polythene bag; here’s the right leg, here are the hands – lying together, so difficult to separate, with all those muddy little bones; the lower arms, left and right, the right pelvis, the left pelvis, the upper arms. The head had already gone.

  They left the back till last. Clearly this might become one of the most considered spines in the history of human archaeology. It needed to be treated with great care, the delicate vertebrae with all their undue wear and deformity raised from the grave without the slightest damage. We can only guess what sympathy and attention Richard might have received for his condition in life. In death, there was no lack.

  The skeleton had one more surprise for them. As before, Jo worked from the base of the spine towards the neck. They had all but finished when she lifted two vertebrae, the second and third thoracic, to reveal a slug of corroded iron. The layers of corrosion concealed its true form, so it could have been almost anything, but its position, in the back of the neck, was undoubtedly suggestive of an arrow tip.

  Before Richard Buckley had left the site, Philippa had asked him a favour. She wanted to carry out a little ceremony. John Ashdown-Hill stood at a respectable distance, and listened, hands in pockets, his head to one side.

  ‘The remains that we’ve uncovered,’ she said tentatively to Richard. ‘I know we don’t know a hundred per cent if they are Richard, but when we put the bones in the box, I’d quite like’ – she glanced across at Ashdown-Hill – ‘John has a Richard III standard, and I’d quite like to just put it over the box to get it into the van, if you’re OK with that.’

  ‘Absolutely fine,’ cut in Richard, nodding with a smile. ‘Particularly as there’s good indication that they’re the right ones.’

  For Richard, who had been working with Philippa on this project since her phone call early in 2011, seeing the bones in the ground had a rare poignancy. These were not just anonymous remains, perhaps, but a real person, one whose name and face he knew, whose deeds he’d learned about at school.

  ‘That’s fine,’ he said, ‘absolutely fine.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Philippa. ‘We’re never going to do this twice, are we? I’d just like to mark it. It just seems right, to put his colours over it.’

  The confusion, shock and sheer astonishment that swirled around the precise, scientific rigour of the excavation, like a storm trying to penetrate a well-sealed house, was about to turn to farce.

  In the melee, Richard left unaware that he hadn’t told Mathew about Philippa’s request. Most of the bones were now in a standard brown cardboard box with removable lid – known to archaeologists as a longbone box because of its size and shape. Philippa wanted Jo to load it into the university’s white van draped in a bright blue, red and gold flag, the one that Ashdown-Hill had photographed beside the R on the tarmac long before the dig had begun. And Darlow Smithson wanted to film it.

  Mathew and Jo were by the van, hot, dirty and emotionally drained and getting ready to leave, when Philippa shouted across the car park.

  ‘Jo, do you want to come and do this?’

  Jo did not.

  They had all had a moment of adrenalin-fuelled excitement when they saw the complete skeleton in the ground, and realized they were probably looking at the remains of King Richard III. In scientific and popular discourse, however, ‘probably’ has quite different meanings. For the Richard III Society, by and large it meant their king had been found. As Annette Carson put it at the Society’s conference in February 2013, soon after the key scientific conc
lusion was announced: early in September 2012, before the intensive research had begun, ‘We knew it was Richard III’.15

  For the archaeologists, it meant they now had a testable hypothesis, a quite different position, and one we will follow in the next two chapters: were these bones those of Richard III? It signified the beginning of a completely new research project, and one that would consume vastly more funds and time than the excavation – which is to say, much more than anyone had imagined would be needed.

  So having experienced the shock and thrill of discovery, the archaeologists rapidly focused back on to the scientific goals. This was not Richard III. It was not a 90-year-old friar (or as Simon Farnaby had put it, ‘One unlucky monk’). It was Skeleton I.

  If you watch the Channel 4 films of the dig, you might notice, as the bones are bagged and boxed, that the containers are labelled R III, SK 1. This was not because the archaeologists were then calling the body Richard III. It was their name for the dig. But neither was that, as you might imagine, because they were expecting or even hoping to find the king – this was the Grey Friars Project, and their key goal was to learn about the friary. However, for the first two weeks of the excavation, the woman at ULAS who gives out site codes was on holiday. It would later become A11/2012, but Mathew needed a temporary code for the finds bags, which would be going up to the university to be washed. The choice was simple, a bit of a joke. Now they had the near-complete skeletal remains of a real person, but it was still Skeleton I.

  Mathew was a little uncomfortable about the flag idea. ‘We didn’t know it was Richard,’ he told me. Jo was adamantly against it, as we see in the film, when a quick cameraman caught her reaction to Philippa’s shout. ‘I’m not sure I’m very happy about doing that, given that we don’t know for sure it is him yet. I mean if we get the DNA and it turns out not to be, it just feels a bit of an inappropriate thing to have done.’ Her body language was less measured.

  Mathew felt he had to support Jo, and he found a compromise. ‘It doesn’t seem right Jo should do it,’ he told them, ‘but I’ve got no objection to you doing it.’ Philippa can do it!

  But Philippa doesn’t want to do it.

  ‘I don’t think it’s right for me to do it, somehow,’ she says, clutching the folded flag, watching Mathew and Jo from a distance.

  ‘Do you want to do it, John?’

  Ashdown-Hill stands beside her, his arms in a curious echo of Richard III’s in the grave, wrists crossing at his waist, one hand hanging limp.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Would you like to carry the box to the van?’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ he says gently.

  ‘Where’s the box?’ asks Philippa.

  ‘Over there,’ says Ashdown-Hill, pointing.

  She hands him the bright bundle of cloth, and walks off behind the blue screen. Then, clutching the flag at two corners, Ashdown-Hill gives the camera a grin that blends nerves, perplexity and triumph, and unravels it with a flourish.

  And so, late on a Wednesday afternoon in September, the remains of a then anonymous and undated man were carried across a car park in Leicester in a recycled cardboard box, draped with the flag of late medieval English royalty, and laid on the floor through the side door of a small white Citroen van.

  Some of the remains, that is.

  The day before, Turi King had brought a big roll of tinfoil to the site. No one knew what it was for, so when she’d rung around lunchtime to check on progress, Mathew had asked her. It was to wrap bones selected for potential DNA analysis, to protect them while minimizing the risk of condensation – ancient DNA being susceptible to damage from moisture. As Mathew drove from the dig to begin the short journey up to the university, Jo, sitting beside him, had the skull and the leg bones safe on her lap, wrapped in foil like culinary parcels.

  As the van sweeps out of the car park in the Channel 4 film, past the high, fading green-painted wooden gates and round the red-brick wall into New Street, it is possible, perhaps, to discern a faint smile on Jo Appleby’s face. About to enter its third phase, the project was now firmly in scientific hands.

  Jo put Richard III in the fridge.

  They had left the site unguarded. Though the grave wasn’t fully excavated, the trench was just dirt, and you couldn’t see it from anywhere. The weather was going to be fine overnight, so Mathew had decided there was no need to cover it over. Jo’s job had been to recover Skeleton I, and she had other work to get back to. The team would excavate and record the grave the next day.

  Up at the university with all the digging gear, the records and Skeleton I, Jo and Mathew carried the foil-wrapped bones upstairs to where the samples that might be analysed for DNA could be put immediately into cold storage. Then they hid the rest of the remains behind a mass of other things in Mathew’s ground floor office, made sure everything was well locked up, and went home.

  For Mathew this was a 20-minute drive to his girlfriend, and for Jo an hour’s train journey east to Peterborough, where she lived with her boyfriend, also an archaeologist. For both, it was their first chance to reflect in private. They’d excavated and studied many human remains, and despite the odd drama, exhuming Skeleton I had been mostly a routine exercise. Yet as they travelled out of Leicester and the tension drained from their bodies, it began to sink in that the work was no longer routine. ‘Hang on,’ thought Mathew, ‘we’ve actually probably done this. Against all the odds. We’ve just found a king of England.’

  It began in Edinburgh, if not in Waterstone’s in 1998, then at the Cramond Inn in 2009, when Philippa announced that she was going to find the body of a king. Her quest became the Looking for Richard project, a relatively simple, emotive affair, which relied on historians and archaeologists to make her vision real. The excavation run by the University of Leicester had been the Grey Friars Project, a more complex, open-ended inquiry that hoped to locate a friary and learn about medieval Leicester, with five objectives. As much as was possible at this stage, all these goals had been achieved.

  Now there were new projects. For the Richard III Society, there was the prospect of a reburial, with issues of design, ceremony, ritual and more to think about. For the archaeologists the future lay in the opposite direction, towards pure science. The dig had brought together the Richard III Society and the university in a unique partnership of innocence and experience, of high emotion and practised caution, and of historians and archaeologists – each with their often quite different ways of seeing things. Objectively establishing the identity of Skeleton I was a project on its own, in which the Society would not be involved. Like the Looking for Richard project, this one had a simple goal; but it would become one of the most intensive and wide-ranging exercises in modern archaeological science, beyond anything anyone could yet conceive.

  On Thursday 6 September very few people knew that they had excavated a skeleton. Even most of Mathew’s team, and visitors such as Glyn Coppack, had left the site the day before without seeing the remains laid out in the ground, and were unaware of the find’s potential significance. Later Leon Hunt, site supervisor, told how he remembered Thursday. Mathew arrived in the van, screeched to a halt, got out leaving the door hanging open, and, looking as if he had not been to sleep that night, said, ‘Did you actually understand what I was telling you yesterday?’

  He described the remains and the exhumation. Then Richard Buckley arrived. ‘I think we’ve found him,’ he said. ‘It was an astonishing thing,’ said Hunt. ‘Shock and bewilderment, knock me down with a feather.’ And they got on with the dig.

  Mathew brought Tony Gnanaratnam back over from Trench 3 to excavate and fully record the rest of the grave. He emptied out the soil and traced the edges of the grave pit. They’d already taken samples, but partly for environmental analysis and partly, as Mathew put it to me, ‘out of not having other people nicking it’, they bagged up the entire grave fill and took it back to the university.

  In Trench 3 they confirmed that what looked like more graves were
indeed more graves (or, in one case, a machine-excavated trench with modern bricks in it), but with such a strong candidate for Richard III in the first grave, there was no need to investigate another one. They had a lot of recording to do. With approval from the City Council to continue on site for a third week, they finished the excavation on the following Monday, returning on the Friday to begin the process of backfilling over a geo-permeable membrane, and final resurfacing. The grave for Skeleton I would remain open, though well protected.

  Meanwhile, on the previous Saturday, three days after Skeleton I had been removed, they had a planned public open day. Nearly 2,000 people queued in the sunshine along St Martins and Grey Friars to see the dig. The archaeologists printed display diagrams and stuck explanatory labels in the trenches. They anticipated that they would be asked about human remains – the stated goal of the project was, after all, to find Richard III – so they prepared carefully worded answers that would give away nothing without actually being dishonest. To their surprise, however, no one asked; the dig itself was of sufficient interest.

  At a press conference on the following Wednesday, however, everyone asked. The Grey Friars Project, said a university statement, had excavated the remains of an adult male, with significant perimortem trauma to the skull ‘consistent with an injury received in battle’, an arrowhead in the upper back, and severe scoliosis, a form of spinal curvature. Within minutes the news went round the world. Quite suddenly, the car park dig was international public property.

  For the University of Leicester this was the ultimate public relations opportunity. The astonishing story brought together traditional research and – as was now clear it would – cutting-edge forensic science from across many of the university’s departments, involving large numbers of academics. As if this weren’t enough, it combined the research with one of fiction’s great characters, Shakespeare’s ambitious, devious, cruel and deformed king, based on a historical figure now apparently brought to life in the most unexpected way. The press event happened to be less than three weeks before the start of the new university year, when families across the UK were already focused on higher education; Leicester was particularly keen to attract overseas students.