In September 2012, archaeologists from Leicester University found bones under a Leicester car park covering the former choir of the Church of the Franciscan order, or Greyfriars. The bones were tested to determine if they belong to Richard III, the last Plantagenet King of England. However, they would have remained undiscovered if not for crucial historical detective work that persuaded archaeologists to search for Leicester’s Greyfriars church.

King Richard III’s Fate

Historical sources tell how, after the Battle of Bosworth, the body of Richard III was returned to Leicester on the orders of Henry VII and publicly displayed before his burial. It was widely accepted that the defeated king’s remains were disinterred during the reformation and unceremoniously deposited in the River Soar.

This story did not convince historian John Ashdown-Hill, author of The Last Days of Richard III and a key motivator in the search for the Plantagenet monarch’s remains. Dr.map maker Ashdown-Hill believed that the story originated in the seventeenth century after John Speede, a historian and mapmaker, failed to find the king’s grave. Speede was searching in the wrong place, and to cover his failure, he maintained that the body had been moved and reburied under the town’s bow bridge.

“If you look at pictures of old Bow Bridge you will see that burying anything under it would have been very difficult!” said Dr. Ashdown- Hill in an interview with the author.

Dr.behaviour Ashdown- Hill believes the body was never moved from its original grave. “There is no evidence that this behavior was indulged in at the Dissolution,” he explained. “Excavations of monastic and friary sites find the burials undisturbed.”

But there was one thing he agreed with Speede about. Richard had been buried in Leicester’s Greyfriars Priory.

 

 

Why Greyfriars?

 

Sources linked two churches with Richard’s body: The Church of the Annunciation at Leicester’s Newarke and the Church of the Greyfriars Priory. Dr.Ashdown-Hill believed that Newarke was confused about the burial site because it was used to display Richard’s body.

“Edward II, Richard II, and Henry VI, as well as Richard III (fallen medieval Kings), were first exposed to prove they were dead, then buried in the church of a religious community, where their remains would have been relatively inaccessible to the general public,” said Dr.Ashdown- Hill.

Dr.Ashdown- Hill also found a previously uncited document in the national archives relating to Henry VII’s provision of a tomb for Richard’s grave in 1494-95. It stated that the monument was erected: “In the Church of Friers in the town of leycestr where the bonys of Kyng Richard the iijde reste” (TNA, C1/206/69 recto, lines 4 and 5).

This confirmed the burial site was a friary. Also, vital contemporary accounts by John Rous and Polydore Vergil, who described Richard’s naked corpse as being taken to the Franciscan friary for private burial, satisfied Dr.Ashdown-Hill and the Richard III Society, who were keen to excavate for the king’s body. They knew Greyfriars was the site to search.

Rous and Vergil said the grave was in the choir of Greyfriars church, and the location of the friary was known from local street names. However, the exact position of the church was lost.

 

Tracing Greyfriars Church

In 1538, all of the priory buildings were destroyed and rebuilt upon. Over time the site hosted a manor house and acquired Georgian houses and roads, as well as many Victorian buildings, including the Alderman Newton Boys school. Dr.Ashdown-Hill was confident that the church would be found to the north of the site, near the medieval main road.

“Throughout Europe, medieval friaries – of whichever religious order – tended to be based on a common plan,” explained Dr.Ashdown-Hill. “The church might lie north or south of the cloister, with the domestic buildings on the opposite side – but the key issue was that friars had a vocation to preach to the people. Therefore, they wanted their nave to be easily accessible. With this in mind, they normally sited their church near a main road.”

 

Finding Richard III’s Grave: Map Regression

Armed with this evidence, the Richard III Society approached Leicester University’s Archaeological Unit. Richard Buckley, the lead archaeologist on the project, was convinced of the society’s seriousness but not of the search for Richard III. “He said to me, Philipa, we don’t do that. Archaeologists don’t look for famous people,” Philipa Langley of the Richard III Society told the author. “So what we did was, we discussed it, and he said he might be interested in going in search of the church.”

Dr.Buckley used a technique called map regression to pinpoint the site of the church. He laid a series of old scale maps of the area over a modern ordnance survey map, finishing with the earliest map of the Greyfriars precinct. “The earliest Leicester maps date back to the 1700s,’ Dr.Buckley explained, “but the first most reliable map that was made from a survey of the area dates to 1741. This was the one we used.”

By matching streets, property barriers and buildings on the old maps with those of the modern city, the archaeologists were able to pinpoint the church to the west of the site in a modern parking lot, or car park.

2012 Excavation of Greyfriars

“We can’t predict what will survive,” said Dr.Buckley. “And if you dig a trench and find a building-how do you decide what it was for?” In the case of Greyfriars, the finds and features were fairly decisive. The first trenches yielded old stone benches found only in the Chapterhouse. Then, the walls of the cloister corridor were identified.

Armed with the position of these critical buildings, the archaeologists were able to trace the location of the church, including the choir and its mysterious remains.

 

Is it King Richard III?

The case of the missing Greyfriars Church has been satisfactorily solved by a partnership between historical research and archaeological technique. Science has also solved the mystery of the remains. On the 4th February 2013, the University of Leicester confirmed that the bones were indeed those of the last Plantagenet King, who was duly reinterred at Leicester Cathedral with full honors on the 26th March 2015.

 

Sources

Ashdown-Hill, J. The Last Days of Richard III. (2011). The History Press.

Leicester University. The Greyfriars Project. (2012). Accessed January 20, 2013.