Richard III burial: From the Council of the North to the hole in his skull – 7 things you didn't know about the Plantagenet king
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Version 0 of 1. The procession to bring the suspected remains of Richard III to his final resting place in Leicester Cathedral has seen thousands turn out across the county – proving once again that it takes a good death to bring history to life. But while he has come under renewed interest since archaeologists discovered his remains under a council car park in 2012, there are still plenty of facts you might not know about King Richard and his reburial. Richard III wasn’t exactly a hunchback In Shakespeare’s Richard III, the titular character is a heavily disfigured hunchback whose speeches make much of this fact. The remains of Richard III, found under a car park in Leicester two years ago Yet the discovery of his skeleton showed that this wasn’t really fact at all. Richard did suffer from scoliosis or curvature of the spine, but that would only have been visible as one shoulder being higher than the other. He would have been about 5ft 8in tall – around average for the time – and only a bit shorter as a result of the scoliosis. He wasn’t just killed in battle Richard was famously the last king of England to die in battle – the only other being King Harold who apparently took an arrow to the eye in 1066. But Richard was not just killed – he was hacked down with several blows, including eight to the head, appearing to show definitively that the king lost not just his horse but also his helmet at Bosworth in 1485. Richard was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 - ending the Wars of the Roses and the Plantagenet dynasty. Historian Richard Knox said Richard then suffered “about as undignified an exit from a battle as you could possibly imagine”, stripped naked, thrown across a horse and paraded through Leicester to let it be known that he was truly dead. But not all those skull injuries were from the time While archaeologists were admittedly “incredibly lucky” finding Richard’s remains at the first point where they dug down at the former Greyfriars monastery in Leicester, the exercise was not without its hiccups. A Channel 4 documentary following the dig, entitled “Richard III: The King in the Car Park”, revealed that one of the apparent wounds that was shown in images of Richard’s skull actually came from an archaeologist’s axe. The mattock used by University of Leicester archaeologist Jo Appleby to, accidentally, cave in Richard III's skull The University of Leicester’s osteoarchaeologist Jo Appleby told the programme: “I was taking [the dig] down with this mattock here and unfortunately that’s gone into the top of the skull… So that’s what caused that one.” His reign was incredibly short Part of the reason archaeologists misjudged where Richard’s skull would be was because he was so hastily buried – practically bundled into a modest grave, with his head not resting flat. And that haste was in keeping with his entire reign as king – at just two years and two months, it was the shortest of all ruling monarchs since the Norman Conquest. Richard III Society member Philippa Langley stands besides a facial reconstruction of King Richard III before it is unveiled by the Richard III Society on February 5, 2013 in London, England. At the time of his death, negotiations were apparently taking place for him to marry Joanna, the sister of Portugal’s John II and a descendent of Lancaster’s John of Gaunt – a match which would have made for a formidable claim to the throne. He was quite the drinker Further studies of Richard’s bones and teeth have revealed that he drank up to a battle of wine a day in the last years of his life. Kevin Spacey as Richard III The University of Leicester research showed that he also ate exotic meats including swan, crane, heron and egret – a diet “far richer” even that the highest-status individuals of the time. He was actually strong on rights for the poor Despite his own diet and apparent Tudor attempts to smear his name in the years after his death, Richard’s parliament had a pretty good record on protecting the rights of the poor. Benedict Cumberbatch dresses ominously as Richard III During his brief reign, significant advances were made in the expansion of rights to justice and freedom of expression, including his insistence that the poor should have access to the laws in their own language. He had some very forward-thinking notions Probably Richard’s finest, if little-known, legacy was his innovation for a “Council of the North”, which was to meet quarterly in York as an effectively autonomous branch of the king’s council. Martin Freeman as Richard III Despite their condemnation of his reign, the Tudors quietly held on to this idea and the council kept maintaining the peace and punishing criminals until it was disbanded in 1641. |