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Finding Richard III: The Official Account of Research by the Retrieval and Reburial Project
Their task was to locate a lost grave in an obliterated church. The ‘Looking For Richard’ team of historians and researchers spent many years amassing evidence. Now for the first time they reveal the full story of how that evidence took them to a car park in Leicester.
Reports of the dig and DNA fingerprinting were shown world-wide and won awards.
But the years of prior detective work have never before been recognised.
Latin texts, mediaeval priories, old maps, long-lost memorials, misleading tales of grave desecration ... not a Dan Brown novel, but a sober account of how painstaking studies of historical records achieved the goal of finding Richard III.
Informed by Dr John Ashdown-Hill’s sound knowledge of the Franciscans (Greyfriars) and their architecture, together with his discovery of Richard III’s mtDNA, the LOOKING FOR RICHARD PROJECT launched by Philippa Langley rested on solid foundations. It rested equally on her own exhaustive research into the Greyfriars site, and her indomitable determination to see it through.
Other members made up a team that until now kept a low profile, combining to facilitate, raise the money (the search cost some £40,000), and cultivate an ethos that laid emphasis on respect for a king who fell defending crown and country. Historian Dr David Johnson and his artist wife, Wendy Johnson, proposed a tomb design that won approval from the Richard III Society, whose members overwhelmingly financed the search.
Edited with the sure touch of writer and author Annette Carson, this publication reveals how scholarship and research into 500 years of history underpinned an enterprise of which the world saw only the triumphant end result.
Reports of the dig and DNA fingerprinting were shown world-wide and won awards.
But the years of prior detective work have never before been recognised.
Latin texts, mediaeval priories, old maps, long-lost memorials, misleading tales of grave desecration ... not a Dan Brown novel, but a sober account of how painstaking studies of historical records achieved the goal of finding Richard III.
Informed by Dr John Ashdown-Hill’s sound knowledge of the Franciscans (Greyfriars) and their architecture, together with his discovery of Richard III’s mtDNA, the LOOKING FOR RICHARD PROJECT launched by Philippa Langley rested on solid foundations. It rested equally on her own exhaustive research into the Greyfriars site, and her indomitable determination to see it through.
Other members made up a team that until now kept a low profile, combining to facilitate, raise the money (the search cost some £40,000), and cultivate an ethos that laid emphasis on respect for a king who fell defending crown and country. Historian Dr David Johnson and his artist wife, Wendy Johnson, proposed a tomb design that won approval from the Richard III Society, whose members overwhelmingly financed the search.
Edited with the sure touch of writer and author Annette Carson, this publication reveals how scholarship and research into 500 years of history underpinned an enterprise of which the world saw only the triumphant end result.
96 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2014
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August 7, 2022
Finding Richard III: The Official Account of Research by the Retrieval and Reburial Project
By J Ashdown-Hill, D Johnson, W Johnson, & P J Langley, edited by A J Carson
Reviewed August 5, 2022
This book was never meant to be a top 10 bestseller. It was never intended to be a page turner. It was, however, meant to be the official record of the research and work that went into finding the grave of King Richard III and as such is an excellent book.
One of the myths surrounding Richard’s death and burial is that he was not given a proper burial. Some have even suggested that he was given no funeral rites whatsoever. However, such assumptions are most likely untrue.
As the authors write, “The brothers would of necessity have given Richard proper Christian burial in accordance with the rites of the Catholic Church, therefore Vergil’s comment should be taken to indicate that no solemn ceremonial took place, such as would have been appropriate to the rank of an anointed king. This omission was germane to the ethos of the retrieval and reburial project.”
In short, he would have been given a basic Christian burial, but not the kind an anointed king would have expected to receive.
As for where he was buried? Again, until the Looking for Richard Project came around, there were numerous hunches, guesses, and theories, many often disregarding the earliest records by John Rous and others that clearly said he was “buried in the choir of the church”.
Rather than given a medieval pauper’s grave, Richard was buried in a place “reserved for only the most high-status occupants” and that this was a “signal honour.” In spite of the haste of his interment, Richard was laid to rest in a holy area that was “entirely appropriate, from every point of view...”
Did Henry Tudor agree to this? Was he showing his own version of magnanimity to a fallen foe? Or was this place of burial decided upon by the abbot and the friars, by which point Henry did a shoulder shrug and say something like, "Whatever," before riding off to London? I guess we will never know, but it's obvious he knew where Richard was buried, because about ten years after Bosworth, Henry VII softened his attitude toward his fallen foe enough to commission a royal tomb of alabaster to be erected over Richard’s grave, and that tomb appears to have remained intact and undisturbed until Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in the late 1530s.
This led to another myth surrounding King Richard’s final resting place, that his tomb was destroyed by an angry mob during the Tudor Protestant Revolution, and his bones thrown into the nearby river. This, however, appears to have been an early confusion with the desecration of John Wycliffe’s bones in 1428, but that didn’t stop the story from taking on a life of its own. In the end, the story of the desecration of Richard III’s bones turned out to be nothing more than an early urban legend.
In fact, the tomb deteriorated not because it was torn apart by angry mobs, but because many of the now-empty buildings that resulted from the Dissolution were left roofless, and this allowed the elements to play havoc with what remained. With no one willing to remove Richard’s remains to a new, safer resting place, the alabaster, which is a soft stone that does not cope well with exposure to the weather, crumbled away.
Again, from the authors, “despite later reports that Richard III’s tomb was destroyed there is no contemporary evidence to show that it was deliberately damaged in any way. The probability is that the tomb simply deteriorated slowly due to rain and frost.”
And so with this history in mind, we come to the Looking for Richard Project and the determination of Philippa Langley and company in insisting that Richard’s remains were still waiting to be found.
Among the things I found of interest had to do with what I can only call a power play by the University of Leicester to take more credit than it deserved for discovering Richard’s grave.
As avid a Ricardian as I am, at the time when these events were playing out, I paid only scant attention to what was going on in Leicester as I was caring for an ailing parent, so reading about the goings on in this book was new to me. (Before I go any further, I would like to set the record straight. I’m the one suggesting this to be some kind of power play, not the authors. Rather, the authors of this book have gone out of their way to keep things factual and have not resorted to whining and hand wringing.)
I won’t go into detail about every such instance, but will use just one example discussed in this book, that of the University of Leicester’s citing a 1986 article titled “King Richard’s Grave” by Leicester-based historian David Baldwin as the key source for all the information leading to the 2012 Greyfriars excavation. Apparently they were oblivious to the fact that numerous others up to and including Philippa Langley had over the years suggested King Richard’s grave was still to be found under a car park.
The authors of this account point out that in the 1970s, a number of articles in The Ricardian, the publication of the Richard III Society, discussed this topic and speculated as to where in modern Leicester the site of the Franciscan Priory Church might be located. People such as Audrey Strange of the Richard III Society and Dr. William J. White, osteoarchaeologist with the Museum of London, opined that King Richard’s remains were still residing where the Greyfriars once stood, and that this location was now under one of the council parking lots. Later in 1983, Jeremy Potter, also of the Richard III Society, wrote in his book Good King Richard? that “all trace of the house of the Greyfriars where [Richard] was buried has been obliterated, his place of interment now a car park.”
If this is the way representatives of the University of Leicester ignored or dismissed the work of earlier historians (especially, it appears, if they were connected with the Richard III Society), and later, Philippa Langley (who was the driving force behind the Looking for Richard project), I can understand why there are still more than a few hurt feelings on the subject.
I won’t even touch the whole Leicester/York dispute over where Richard should have been reburied, but I do have some thoughts about the present tomb. While I don’t hate it, it wouldn’t have been my choice for the tomb of a medieval king. Leicester Cathedral had the last word on the matter, though, and for reasons of their own opted for this modernistic design.
In the end, what matters most to me is that his original grave was found and that at long last, he was given what had been denied him on August 25, 1485 – a burial appropriate for an anointed king and the last Plantagenet.
I enjoy books like this. For me, they are a kind of real-life historical detective story, and as an armchair archaeologist since my early teens, I find even the smallest details fascinating. That’s right, even those details that can drive some general readers to tears of boredom. And in this day when misinformation on just about any subject is rampant, an official record of events is a valuable resource.
For me, this is a 5-star book. Others may not agree. They may say it is dry reading, but I guess like with all things, it comes down to a matter of taste. So 5 stars it is!
By J Ashdown-Hill, D Johnson, W Johnson, & P J Langley, edited by A J Carson
Reviewed August 5, 2022
This book was never meant to be a top 10 bestseller. It was never intended to be a page turner. It was, however, meant to be the official record of the research and work that went into finding the grave of King Richard III and as such is an excellent book.
One of the myths surrounding Richard’s death and burial is that he was not given a proper burial. Some have even suggested that he was given no funeral rites whatsoever. However, such assumptions are most likely untrue.
As the authors write, “The brothers would of necessity have given Richard proper Christian burial in accordance with the rites of the Catholic Church, therefore Vergil’s comment should be taken to indicate that no solemn ceremonial took place, such as would have been appropriate to the rank of an anointed king. This omission was germane to the ethos of the retrieval and reburial project.”
In short, he would have been given a basic Christian burial, but not the kind an anointed king would have expected to receive.
As for where he was buried? Again, until the Looking for Richard Project came around, there were numerous hunches, guesses, and theories, many often disregarding the earliest records by John Rous and others that clearly said he was “buried in the choir of the church”.
Rather than given a medieval pauper’s grave, Richard was buried in a place “reserved for only the most high-status occupants” and that this was a “signal honour.” In spite of the haste of his interment, Richard was laid to rest in a holy area that was “entirely appropriate, from every point of view...”
Did Henry Tudor agree to this? Was he showing his own version of magnanimity to a fallen foe? Or was this place of burial decided upon by the abbot and the friars, by which point Henry did a shoulder shrug and say something like, "Whatever," before riding off to London? I guess we will never know, but it's obvious he knew where Richard was buried, because about ten years after Bosworth, Henry VII softened his attitude toward his fallen foe enough to commission a royal tomb of alabaster to be erected over Richard’s grave, and that tomb appears to have remained intact and undisturbed until Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in the late 1530s.
This led to another myth surrounding King Richard’s final resting place, that his tomb was destroyed by an angry mob during the Tudor Protestant Revolution, and his bones thrown into the nearby river. This, however, appears to have been an early confusion with the desecration of John Wycliffe’s bones in 1428, but that didn’t stop the story from taking on a life of its own. In the end, the story of the desecration of Richard III’s bones turned out to be nothing more than an early urban legend.
In fact, the tomb deteriorated not because it was torn apart by angry mobs, but because many of the now-empty buildings that resulted from the Dissolution were left roofless, and this allowed the elements to play havoc with what remained. With no one willing to remove Richard’s remains to a new, safer resting place, the alabaster, which is a soft stone that does not cope well with exposure to the weather, crumbled away.
Again, from the authors, “despite later reports that Richard III’s tomb was destroyed there is no contemporary evidence to show that it was deliberately damaged in any way. The probability is that the tomb simply deteriorated slowly due to rain and frost.”
And so with this history in mind, we come to the Looking for Richard Project and the determination of Philippa Langley and company in insisting that Richard’s remains were still waiting to be found.
Among the things I found of interest had to do with what I can only call a power play by the University of Leicester to take more credit than it deserved for discovering Richard’s grave.
As avid a Ricardian as I am, at the time when these events were playing out, I paid only scant attention to what was going on in Leicester as I was caring for an ailing parent, so reading about the goings on in this book was new to me. (Before I go any further, I would like to set the record straight. I’m the one suggesting this to be some kind of power play, not the authors. Rather, the authors of this book have gone out of their way to keep things factual and have not resorted to whining and hand wringing.)
I won’t go into detail about every such instance, but will use just one example discussed in this book, that of the University of Leicester’s citing a 1986 article titled “King Richard’s Grave” by Leicester-based historian David Baldwin as the key source for all the information leading to the 2012 Greyfriars excavation. Apparently they were oblivious to the fact that numerous others up to and including Philippa Langley had over the years suggested King Richard’s grave was still to be found under a car park.
The authors of this account point out that in the 1970s, a number of articles in The Ricardian, the publication of the Richard III Society, discussed this topic and speculated as to where in modern Leicester the site of the Franciscan Priory Church might be located. People such as Audrey Strange of the Richard III Society and Dr. William J. White, osteoarchaeologist with the Museum of London, opined that King Richard’s remains were still residing where the Greyfriars once stood, and that this location was now under one of the council parking lots. Later in 1983, Jeremy Potter, also of the Richard III Society, wrote in his book Good King Richard? that “all trace of the house of the Greyfriars where [Richard] was buried has been obliterated, his place of interment now a car park.”
If this is the way representatives of the University of Leicester ignored or dismissed the work of earlier historians (especially, it appears, if they were connected with the Richard III Society), and later, Philippa Langley (who was the driving force behind the Looking for Richard project), I can understand why there are still more than a few hurt feelings on the subject.
I won’t even touch the whole Leicester/York dispute over where Richard should have been reburied, but I do have some thoughts about the present tomb. While I don’t hate it, it wouldn’t have been my choice for the tomb of a medieval king. Leicester Cathedral had the last word on the matter, though, and for reasons of their own opted for this modernistic design.
In the end, what matters most to me is that his original grave was found and that at long last, he was given what had been denied him on August 25, 1485 – a burial appropriate for an anointed king and the last Plantagenet.
I enjoy books like this. For me, they are a kind of real-life historical detective story, and as an armchair archaeologist since my early teens, I find even the smallest details fascinating. That’s right, even those details that can drive some general readers to tears of boredom. And in this day when misinformation on just about any subject is rampant, an official record of events is a valuable resource.
For me, this is a 5-star book. Others may not agree. They may say it is dry reading, but I guess like with all things, it comes down to a matter of taste. So 5 stars it is!
August 2, 2022
I note that other reviewers have criticized this as being dry, and others that it is one-sided and filled with sour grapes. What I read was a very business-like explanation of the research and preparation that were done and the hurdles that had to be overcome before the actual dig began. I don’t think the authors are being snide in recounting in the postscript that some parties did not act in accordance with prior agreements with the LFR project—like University of Leicester not allowing Richard’s remains to be held in a religious site prior to the reinternment. Or, the Cathedral unilaterally deciding on the tomb design . (And here, I neither loathe nor love either the one that was used nor the Society’s design.). I didn’t follow all the various controversies, but the University did try to claim most of the credit, saying that they always thought the remains were in the car park and excluding John Ashdown-Hill from the announcement regarding the DNA results confirmation. Anyway, I thought it was informative read.
April 4, 2025
Inspiring!
December 18, 2018
I liked this book for the information on the "Finding Richard III" project, but the details could be overwhelming at times. However, I am thankful for the thoroughness in explaining the step-by-step process of such an undertaking. And in the end, I came to realize what a monumental effort this project was --- researching old maps and manuscripts, seeking input from various Richard III experts, dealing with government bureaucracies and of course funding the project. Eventually everything came together and Richard's grave was uncovered. I am grateful for everyone involved and their perseverance.
May 6, 2018
The title is self-explanatory really. This is a very brief look at what was needed to undertake the archaeological dig and how they found the mtDNA to identify the remains of the Yorkist king. It was rather dry and academic so for anybody wanting to know more about the search for Richard III, I would recommend Philippa Langley's book on the subject.
January 4, 2024
Awful book, much intellectual flapping of gums, hard work trying to understand...that it gave me a head ache.
May 31, 2015
More conflict around Richard lll
Richard lll has been a figure of controversy for 535 years. It's not over! This book tells the tale of the turmoil around the recent discovery and exhumation of his remains. Scoffers became credit grabbers. Human beings remain flawed. In the midst of this ( and some rather snide remarks) lots of fascinating tales - history, archeology, persistence. All in all a good read for a Ricardian. If you don't know anything about all this I don't recommend it. If you are a Ricardian you will love it, as I did.
Richard lll has been a figure of controversy for 535 years. It's not over! This book tells the tale of the turmoil around the recent discovery and exhumation of his remains. Scoffers became credit grabbers. Human beings remain flawed. In the midst of this ( and some rather snide remarks) lots of fascinating tales - history, archeology, persistence. All in all a good read for a Ricardian. If you don't know anything about all this I don't recommend it. If you are a Ricardian you will love it, as I did.
August 24, 2015
Perhaps a bit dry, but that is to be expected with an official account of an archaeological dig. The reading was absolutely fascinating, and truly made me admire the work of the Richard III society, particularly Phillipa Langley, who worked so hard on a project that seemed like a very long shot. Bravo to them for not giving up, despite significant external challenges. Their passion for the project and subject is obvious and I wish that more of their outlines and wishes had been respected in the end.
May 13, 2015
High praises to Philippa Langley, I have a huge respect for her, she kicked start the whole things and it was amazing to learn how much she has to deal with behind the scenes with the research, university , council etc.
October 5, 2016
The actual work done before the dig started is the focus here. Some interesting minutiae, and also a little twitch of the curtain that falls over political posturing when something like this is successful. There are some sour grapes.
July 31, 2014
Review at Nerdalicious http://nerdalicious.com.au/books/find...
March 29, 2015
Amazing what science can prove today.
September 23, 2017
Had to read this when I was working on my thesis. It was okay, but of course this book gives a very one-sided perspective.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews