Digging for Richard III

by Mike Pitts

  The discovery was undeniably good for publicity. But if things went wrong, it could prove a public relations disaster, and undo years of effort by Richard Taylor and his team, striving, with some success, to convince people to respect the university for the quality of its research and teaching. There were genuine and some might say intractable dilemmas.

  Firstly, from the start the university had insisted that it would not support the project unless it could be seen to be good research. ‘With things like this’, Richard Taylor told me, ‘one’s always seeking to mitigate risk. We couldn’t do this for a publicity stunt, or people would quite rightly have said, you’re not a proper university, you’re doing this for PR spin reasons. So it was really important that the university had valid research questions that needed to be answered.’ Those questions – to seek the friary and find out more about early Leicester – were provided by Richard Buckley. They were also questions that, before the dig began, could not justify an investment of over £10,000.

  No one, however, aware of how the world works, could doubt the university’s need to ensure that people knew it had done the excavation, and was about to fund a new research programme. The dilemma here was simple: could the public – and the press – be trusted to engage with a sensational news story, while understanding that the ubiquitous presence of Leicester’s brand did not in itself indicate that anything had been hyped?1

  The second dilemma was more interesting and, at least in the field of archaeology, unprecedented. The sense among everyone involved that they had probably found the remains of Richard III was impossible to miss. Yet the project to establish whether or not those remains really were the king’s had not yet begun. Concealing that human remains had been found would have been impossible – any attempt to do so would have been exposed and held to ridicule. They had to explain why they were suddenly pouring resources into their study, where typically a few days’ work would have sufficed. Yet, by definition, they could not say that the skeleton they had found, in the course of looking for Richard III, was Richard III’s. All this led to some distinctive press statements.

  ‘I need to be very frank,’ said Richard Taylor to a packed and pin-silent Guildhall. ‘We are not saying today that we have found King Richard III. What we are saying is that the search for Richard III has entered a new phase. Our focus is shifting from the archaeological excavation to laboratory analysis. This skeleton certainly has characteristics that warrant extensive further detailed examination.’

  Nonetheless, he added, ‘We have all been witness to a powerful and historic story unfolding before our eyes. This is potentially a historic moment for the University and City of Leicester.’

  Leicester’s City Mayor, Peter Soulsby, echoed the mood. ‘This is truly remarkable news,’ he said. Further investigation was needed, but this was ‘a potentially staggering find. If the experts finally conclude these are indeed the bones of King Richard III, this will have enormous implications for our city.’

  Everyone was excited, and hopeful. ‘I would like to say to anybody watching this or listening to this,’ said Philippa, ‘if you have a dream, fight for it. But more than that, instil in others your belief and your passion, and by doing that you’ll create a team.’

  As they spoke, from a panel that also included Jo Appleby, Richard Buckley and Lin Foxhall (head of the university’s School of Archaeology and Ancient History), a large reproduction of a portrait of Richard III rose up behind them. Experienced journalists asked questions that challenged the distinction between remains that could be Richard III’s, and remains that were. In their answers, it was apparent that Philippa and Richard Buckley were pretty confident the king had been found. Yet as Foxhall emphasized, the research had not yet begun. The bones had not been cleaned (no photos were shown), the DNA analyses would take ‘up to 12 weeks’, and there was a small artifact in the grave they had not yet had the chance to look at. There was work to do.2

  After all, they might have said, perhaps Skeleton I was a knight called Mutton.

  After the Dissolution of the Monasteries, John Leland, an antiquary and poet favoured by Henry VIII, travelled around England and Wales, staying in Leicester around 1540. He noted that, at Greyfriars, ‘there was byried King Richard 3. and a knight caullid Mutton, sumtyme Mayre of Leyrcester’. This is likely to have been Sir William de Moton of Peckleton, who died around 1360, and about whom we know little else.3

  Suppose that Mutton suffered from scoliosis, and died in battle, either of which is possible. How do we say which of Mutton or Richard III was Skeleton I – if either of them? Not least because reburial in the near future seems a high probability, we also need to learn as much about the man from the remains as possible, as this will be the only opportunity to do so.

  Learning about Skeleton I was one of the key topics at the first post-excavation team meeting, held at the University of Leicester on 25 September, just 11 days after the dig had ended. As they sat in a circle in a small, clinically functional room decorated only with banners proclaiming their institution’s world-class teaching and research, the archaeologists already knew there was unheard-of interest in what they were doing.

  Heavy press coverage of the Guildhall conference had been accompanied immediately by a request for a debate in Parliament (‘That this House … praises the work of the archaeologists and historians … [and] calls on the Government to arrange a full state funeral for the deceased monarch’). A petition had been launched on Her Majesty’s Government’s website asking that the king be buried at a Catholic church. The Times had soon reported that the Queen did not wish for a royal burial – she thought Leicester Cathedral would be a nice place. York had responded with another Government petition, seeking the reburial ‘with due dignity and respect in York Minster’.4

  In Leicester, local journalist Peter Warzynski found Year Two children had their own views on the topic – mixed with some city tradition.

  Petra (age six): ‘He fell off a bridge and hit his head and then died. I think he floated down the river.’

  Ihsan (seven): ‘When he was killed, they built a car park over him and forgot where he was.’

  Petra: ‘We should keep the bones here because King Richard III school is here.’

  Senior archaeologists had written to The Times – more excavation was needed before the scientific analyses could begin – and The Guardian: ‘The identification of bones found in Leicester as those of Richard III may be supported by the telling absence of any trace of a horse.’5

  It was exactly a month after the dig had started, and it seemed that already the world knew more about Skeleton I than the archaeologists who had dug it up.6

  The meeting was chaired by Lin Foxhall, sharing a table with the manager of the School of Archaeology, Sharon North, taking minutes. Foxhall, tall and thin with shoulder-length white hair, retains her Pennsylvanian accent long after she left university there to study at Liverpool. She taught at Oxford and University College London before arriving in Leicester, where she is Professor of Greek Archaeology and History. Her research has sought to move understanding of classical antiquity beyond a masculine perspective, and she is involved in fieldwork projects in southern Italy and the wider Mediterranean; to put Richard III into perspective, in 2008 her trading networks project was awarded a £1.73 million grant ($2.75 m).

  Around her sat Mathew Morris, Richard Buckley, Jo Appleby and Turi King. Also from ULAS were Anita Radini (their archaeobotanist, who would be dealing with environmental analyses), Nick Cooper (Post-Excavation Project Manager – with his dog, Max) and Debbie Sawday, a consultant on medieval pottery. Further academic staff included Ian Whitbread, who would be helping with artifacts, and Deirdre O’Sullivan, who would advise on friary archaeology. Kevin Schürer, an experienced local history and population statistics researcher and now Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research and Enterprise) at Leicester, would be conducting the essential genealogical work to back up Turi’s genetics.

  They brought an extraordinary am
ount of sense and skill to discuss a small archaeological evaluation – and in the coming months specialists from other institutions would be drawn into the project as well. Neither was it typical for such a meeting to be filmed, or witnessed by the university Press Office, but Carl Vivian and Ather Mirza were not to be left out. Yet the discussion was calm and focused, a sign of something that would become almost as important as the quality of the research itself. This was a high-profile project, but they were going to work together to solve the questions the dig had thrown up. No amount of the often publicity-seeking arguments that would rage around them would distract them from their purpose.

  Because of the project’s small scale, the work on the excavation itself resolved mostly into just two themes. They needed to establish the site narrative, how and when the grave and the friary buildings had been laid out, and how the different parts related to each other – Mathew would be doing that over the next few weeks, explained Richard. And they would see what light the tiles and architectural fragments could throw on those structures. They also discussed what other work they might do (further investigation of the friary site was now clearly a priority) and how and when it would all be published – already they were proposing articles for prestigious peer-reviewed journals Antiquity, Genetics and Nature. Which left the burial itself, with the DNA and genealogical research. The bones had not been touched since they left the site. Which was a good thing, for, as Jo explained, she wanted the first studies to take place with the dirt still on. Skeleton I’s last journey had begun.

  The adult human body has 206 bones and 32 teeth. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, a child has more: the skeleton alters while we age. As we grow up, separate bones fuse together and harden, some change shape in different ways depending on whether we are male or female, and, of course, overall they get bigger; fewer teeth are visible in a young child’s mouth, but growing permanent teeth already lurk within the jaws. It’s easier to age a younger individual from their bones than an older, as most regular changes occur in the first two decades of life, but it needn’t stop there. If we live long enough, our bones may show signs of degeneration. Injury and infection can leave their marks. Persistent rigorous activity can change bones as they accommodate more developed muscles – some of the men whose remains were retrieved with the wreck of the Mary Rose (which sank 60 years after Richard III died) had atypically large left shoulders and right forearms, possible signs that they were practised longbowmen.7 Teeth, too, change, and may wear and decay.8

  Such things help to make well-preserved remains particularly informative. Complete skeletons are rarely recovered: we have three bones inside each ear, for example, which are too small to survive most conditions. By losing both feet, however, Skeleton I had got off to a bad start – farewell to 52 bones. The discovery on the first day of the dig came about when the mechanical excavator took a soft slice from the left tibia, one of the two longbones in each leg; the left fibula, the slighter bone, had already gone, and likewise the three surviving leg bones lost their lower ends to the Victorian navvy’s spade. Most of the small bones from the tips of the fingers and thumbs (the distal phalanges) had dissolved. The left wrist was all there, but a few of the small carpal bones were missing from the right. The rest of the skeleton, apart from a few absent teeth, was complete, if occasionally damaged: most of the softened, fragile ribs were broken, and there were two small areas of loss where Jo’s mattock found the skull – fortunately not where there was anything of great interest.

  Overall, though reduced to around 135 bones and 29 teeth, Skeleton I was in a good state and able to tell us a great deal about the person to whom it once belonged. Much of this information would come from examining and measuring the bones themselves. In addition, 12 samples would be taken for scientific studies, including six teeth, five small parts of rib and part of a femur (thigh bone). That this could be done was fortunate. In many other soil conditions common across Britain, little would have been left. I have worked on excavations where bones were mechanically as well preserved, but where ancient DNA would be unlikely to have survived. I have worked on others where no bones were found at all.

  One of Europe’s great treasures was excavated just before the Second World War at Sutton Hoo in southeast England. A king had been buried in a ship with gold and jewels of fabulous artistry and wealth. We can guess he might have been Raedwald, who died around AD 625: but his remains had vanished, and we know nothing about his appearance, his health, his battle wounds or any of the other details we would long to know. Under the car park in Leicester, with nothing so much as a finger ring and only a shallow, irregular pit with one end dug away, if Skeleton I had entirely dissolved it’s unlikely we would have known there was a grave there at all. You certainly wouldn’t be reading this book.

  If Robert Herrick hadn’t acquired Greyfriars for his garden four centuries ago, perhaps there would have been no Skeleton I. If New Street had been laid out 25 m (82 ft) to the east in 1740, there would be no Skeleton I. There would be no Skeleton I if a large building had been erected in the wrong place. If in the few months before Philippa returned to the car park for her second visit in 2005, a workman had not painted a white R on the tarmac, perhaps no one would have searched for Skeleton I.9 If Mathew Morris had decided to lay out his first trench with the white parking line on the left instead of down its centre, he would not have found Skeleton I. When the archaeologists returned to the site in 2013 to learn more about the friary church, they wondered if there might also have been no Skeleton I if a small building had not been raised right over the grave – the king could have been saved by a privy, and all who sat in her.10

  Yet after everything, if Leicester’s geology had been different – the same geology that led to the city’s builders digging up old stone wherever they could find it, and removing almost all trace of the medieval friary – Skeleton I would not have been found. Unconcerned, perhaps, about Richard’s fate at Bosworth, and later accused of defiling his grave, the truth is that, deep down and out of sight, Leicester held on to its king.

  Some of the earth still clung to the jaw as Jo and Turi, wearing white suits, face masks and double gloves in a sterile room in the university’s Space Research Centre, gently pulled out teeth. This was the first task, to get the essential DNA samples before the bones became contaminated. The next was to scan the entire skeleton, laid out as it had been found, to record it ahead of any possible damage. Then Heidi Addison, ULAS’s finds and archive specialist, cleaned the bones under a sink tap with a toothbrush, before they went back to the Radiology Department at Leicester Royal Infirmary for another full CT scan; this time the bones were positioned on a bespoke polystyrene template to facilitate building a virtual 3D model.

  You don’t often see crime drama autopsies conducted in an ordinary room with furniture round the edges. Yet post-mortem imaging, which dispenses with scalpels, spectacular eviscerations and the essential clunk of something heavy dropped into a steel bowl, is becoming so popular as an alternative to the traditional autopsy, there is talk that one day it may become the norm. Computed tomography (CT) scanning is quicker and cheaper than surgery, and can give detailed, accurate information without destroying the evidence (the corpse); sometimes it can even see things that surgery might miss.

  CT scanning is attractive to museum curators hoping to learn more about human remains in their collections – and a diversion for hospital staff when equipment is otherwise idle. Ramesses III, we have thereby learned, had his throat slit; Tutankhamun did not die from a blow to the head, though he did have a broken leg; and Ötzi, the 5,000-year-old remains of a man found frozen in the Alps, had broken ribs, a flint arrowhead in his back, a punctured artery and bad tooth decay.

  Scanning Skeleton I would greatly speed up its study while minimizing the risk of any damage, reason enough to do it. Yet there was a further, compelling case. If the remains proved to be Richard III’s, they would be reburied. While everyone celebrated, the bones might effectively be destroy
ed. CT scans could not match the real thing, but at least there would be an accessible record for future researchers.

  As it happens, the University Hospitals Leicester NHS Trust, serving a large Muslim population who typically find open post-mortems distasteful and want the body released as quickly as possible, has a longstanding research interest in post-mortem CT scanning.11 It works closely with the East Midlands Forensic Pathology Unit (EMFPU), a university department based at the Royal Infirmary. Skeleton I was scanned by Claire Robinson, Advanced Practitioner Forensics in the Radiology Department, and Guy Rutty and Bruno Morgan, Chief Forensic Pathologist and Lead Consultant Radiologist respectively at the EMFPU; both men are qualified doctors and university professors. ‘It was the best bone CT we have ever done,’ Rutty later said of the results.

  Yet Sarah Hainsworth, Professor of Materials Engineering at the university’s Department of Engineering and another member of the EMFPU, took the scanning to another level, with the first known archaeological application of micro-CT (micro-computed X-ray tomography). This created exceptionally high-resolution images of the injuries and scoliosis-affected bones – at a cost. Recording each bone took six to eight hours, slightly less than was needed to do the entire skeleton with conventional scanning; for more typical engineering uses, the scanner could be left largely to get on with it, said Hainsworth, but this case involved ‘skeleton sitting’. And the resultant digital files were enormous.

  The scanned skull, a series of flat digital slices that software could combine to make a 3D image, went straight to the University of Dundee, where Caroline Wilkinson would start on building a facial likeness. In Leicester, Kevin Schürer addressed genealogy, hoping to prove that Ashdown-Hill’s identification of Joy Ibsen’s children as possessors of the same mitochondrial DNA as Richard III was correct – and also perhaps to find other living holders. And Turi King began what was likely to be the longest process of the project, seeking and if possible characterizing Richard’s own DNA. Which left Jo to look at the bones.12