I think we want to find Richard III really because he's the last king to have died on
the field of battle in Britain. He's one of the few monarchs where we have no idea
precisely where his burial place is and also I think in terms of particularly the people in
the Richard III Society, they consider that the king was much maligned and was done an injustice
particularly in the following Tudor period, so it painted this image of the king as a sort of evil
hunchback. And I think, you know, everybody likes the idea of righting an injustice.
But I think for me as an archaeologist, I think my prime motivation originally was
because we would learn more about a site in Leicester -
The Greyfriars - that we didn't know anything at all about previously.
We definitely have a plan of action when coming to start digging holes. We start really by looking at
the map evidence - looking at the boundaries of The Greyfriars that are known from the
1741 map of Leicester, which is quite a reliable map. That shows very clearly where the precinct is,
although all the friary buildings by then have disappeared. Then we can look at the
present plan and see whether areas of ground which perhaps haven't been disturbed. So for example,
here there were gardens on the site in the 17th and 18th century and then later the gardens became
a car park serving the city council offices. So we decided then to go for two long trenches
right through the middle of the car park, the aim of them being to try and pick up crosswalls of the
friary buildings because the church and all the other buildings of the friary have a trend of east
west. So east west church, a cloister and then other ranges of buildings on a similar alignment.
So the idea was that these trenches would then pick up these walls and we could start to identify
which particular buildings we were looking at. And amazingly those two trenches came
down straight away onto a high-status medieval building. We know it's high
status because it's got good solid masonry walls and it's got evidence for tiled floors.
Now trench two revealed evidence for a passageway with walls two metres apart and with a floor of
terracotta tiles originally laid in a diagonal pattern. They'd all been robbed away - or mostly
had - but they left the impressions in the ground. So that immediately made us think
that perhaps we were dealing with a cloister walk. so that's quite a breakthrough because it
immediately pinpoints where you are in the friary. We then start to look for where the church could
be and further along in this trench too there's a massive robber trench running through, which is a
wall that's had all this stone removed and then just rubble thrown back in again, so we get the
line of a massive wall running east west - which was a very good candidate for the church. So we
then dug a third trench in the adjacent car park with the aim of trying to pick up this wall going
east and also to find its counterpart, because you need two walls to make a building at least.
We did find that and then we ended up with two parallel walls about seven and a half metres apart
and we were getting more and more confident that we were looking at the church on the north side
of the cloisters. And then we also found a sort of hint of something crossing the tile floor,
which suggested a division in this part of the building as well.
So in view of that we decided to extend the trench slightly to see if we could reveal a
bit more of the interior of the church to see if we could pin down where the choir was precisely
and that's paid off very well because the area of longitudinal tiles now looks as though that's
probably at the very east end of the choir and we're getting walls running just inside
the main walls of the church here, which may be the foundations for the choir stalls themselves.
The choir is of particular interest to us because of this historical account that suggests that
Richard III was actually buried in the choir. So in terms of our search for Richard III,
to actually have identified what we think may be part of the choir
is a really major breakthrough. We've already had a pretty good break through finding the church,
but to actually find the choir as well is quite something.
And as we were discussing that, a burial was being exhumed by Dr Jo Appleby - she's a human
osteologist. We thought we ought to excavate that burial because it had been revealed during the
initial machining of the trench and then very carefully covered up, because we weren't sure
exactly whereabouts it was in relation to all the friary buildings. So as she was excavating that
burial she was coming to the conclusion that this burial could well be the one we were looking for.
Having now planned the location of the walls that we've found
and plotting them out, you can see then that the cloister walk the chapter house opens off,
heads up towards the church and would normally have provided access to a central place,
usually beneath a tower known as the walking place - which is accessible only to the
friars. And so they would then go from this walking place through a doorway or through
a screen into the choir - and the burial that we found is located just inside that doorway.
So in other words, the position of the burial means that if you were then going from the
walking place into the choir, the first thing you would see will be the location of this burial.
So it's placed in a very important position and it's considered that burials are often placed
where people would walk over them, because it adds impact to them
and increases sort of reverence, I mean there are some churches where burials are actually put
right by the doorway so that everybody walking to the church is walking over the burial.
And so it is a very high status position, so it's sort of compelling
evidence when you take all these little threads and put them together that we're looking in the
right place and we've got somebody who is the right sort of candidate to be Richard III.
The remains that Jo was uncovering was actually in an area that was rather unprepossessing I have to
say. It was very badly disturbed by adjacent Victorian foundations just a matter of a few
centimetres away. There were no floor levels to speak of surviving - just this skeleton. But
then as Jo excavated it she discovered that the spine had some quite significant curvature to it.
I think she originally thought maybe it's just the remains were placed in the ground, but as it
turned out it was actually a definite curvature of the spine. She also looked at the skull and found
evidence for trauma on the skull, consistent with somebody who'd been killed in battle.
Burial had to be excavated very quickly under controlled conditions wearing a full body suit,
latex gloves and so on to ensure that there's no contamination for
future DNA testing to try and really confirm whether this is the burial we're looking for.
I still can't really quite believe that this project has taken place and come to fruition.
I feel deeply honoured to have been involved in it and I never thought I'd be standing here
talking to you about the friary, let alone all the other discoveries. So yes, in terms of the
work I've done in Leicester over the past 30 odd years this is really quite something.
It's very unusual to do archaeology which you can associate with a known individual and actually I
think for many people, probably including me if I'm honest, that really sort of brings it to life.
Usually we dig up many, many burials who will always remain nameless and you can't relate to
them in quite the same way. So because this could be Richard III, it humanises the story
and I think we're all very moved by the fact that we were digging potentially a named individual.