Qualla: Exhumation and Reburial of Richard III

Exhumation and Reburial of Richard III: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit anonymous, Public domain. Philippa Langley walked into the Leicester City Council Social Services car park in 2004 and stopped. She had read the histories and the conjectured maps. She knew the rough position of the lost Greyfriars friary, where Richard III had been buried hastily by Franciscan monks after Bosworth in 1485. But standing on the asphalt she experienced something more pointed than reasoning - a near-physical certainty that the king lay beneath her feet, beneath a painted parking-space letter. Other people might have shrugged this off. Langley, a screenwriter and a member of the Richard III Society, spent the next eight years raising money, gathering archaeologists, fighting scepticism, and pushing for permission to dig. On 25 August 2012, the first day of excavation, a University of Leicester team broke ground. By the end of that day they had uncovered a human skeleton with a curved spine and a battle wound to the skull. The painted letter on the tarmac above the grave, the one Langley had stood on eight years earlier, was R.

Image: anonymous | Public domain

Exhumation and Reburial of Richard III: A Hunch with a Trench Behind It

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Searle, CC BY-SA 2.0. The dig that found Richard III was less a triumph of method than a triumph of stubbornness. Three trenches were cut across the car park; the first reached almost immediately into what turned out to be the choir of the dissolved friary church, the most likely place for a king to b...

Image: Mike Searle | CC BY-SA 2.0

Exhumation and Reburial of Richard III: The Court Case Nobody Expected

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter from Lincoln, UK, CC BY 2.0. What the archaeologists had not anticipated was the war over where to put him. York, on the basis of Richard's northern affinity and a contested claim that he had wished to be buried at York Minster, mounted a serious legal challenge to Leicester's plans for reinterment. The Plan...

Image: Peter from Lincoln, UK | CC BY 2.0

Exhumation and Reburial of Richard III: March 2015, a Procession

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mat Fascione, CC BY-SA 2.0. The reinterment itself stretched across a full week in late March 2015 and was, by any measure, the strangest royal occasion in modern British history - a medieval king who had died at 32 in armour, mourned in a 21st-century city that had not existed in its current form when he w...

Image: Mat Fascione | CC BY-SA 2.0

Exhumation and Reburial of Richard III: Aftermath, Mostly Improbable

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Digital-Designs, CC BY 2.0. A few days after the burial, Leicester City Football Club began a winning streak that took them from the bottom of the Premier League to comfortably avoiding relegation. The following season they won the league at odds of 5,000 to 1. Mayor Peter Soulsby was not the only person in...

Image: Digital-Designs | CC BY 2.0