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View Full Version : So...did you hear about King Richard III?



Grinner
2013-02-04, 07:07 PM
The story (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130204094610.htm).

I'd like to know how that backhoe they were using didn't mangle the bones.

Unless they knew he was there. :smalleek:

Castaras
2013-02-04, 07:08 PM
This woluld be my university.

My unviersity is the best. And now we have a zombie Richard III wandering around.

I like my university. it's a nice.

Emperor Ing
2013-02-04, 07:10 PM
Yeah I caught it on the Drudge Report. I wonder if that's how his back got all mangled.

Aedilred
2013-02-04, 07:37 PM
I heard when they found the bones last year: I've suspected for a while that the tests were positive, because if not I think we'd have been told sooner. It seems a shame they're not burying the poor chap in York, like he wanted (and a city that hero-worshipped him), rather than in Leicester, which just happens to be where his body was dumped after Bosworth.

I can't remember if it's been clarified, but I'm also curious whether he'll get a state funeral (there are religious issues there, but board rules prohibit discussion).

nedz
2013-02-04, 09:09 PM
It seems a shame they're not burying the poor chap in York, like he wanted (and a city that hero-worshipped him), rather than in Leicester, which just happens to be where his body was dumped after Bosworth.

He was buried in a Church, which got re-developed — so not really dumped.

noparlpf
2013-02-04, 09:50 PM
The story (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130204094610.htm).

I'd like to know how that backhoe they were using didn't mangle the bones.

Unless they knew he was there. :smalleek:

Yeah, they did suspect he was there.


Yeah I caught it on the Drudge Report. I wonder if that's how his back got all mangled.

Nah, he had severe scoliosis, according to some physical descriptions, apparently. And the skeleton seems to suggest it was true.

Mauve Shirt
2013-02-04, 09:55 PM
http://24.media.tumblr.com/cf07985f73474e532ac2fe6c8ea058d4/tumblr_mhpvh28acR1qks2j1o1_500.jpg

Aedilred
2013-02-05, 07:43 AM
He was buried in a Church, which got re-developed — so not really dumped.
As far as royal burials go, that still constitutes a dumping to me. They shoved him in the nearest patch of vaguely appropriate ground they could find and didn't mark it properly, so the site was lost. Even Mortimer and Henry IV gave Edward II and Richard II, respectively, a proper burial in a cathedral or royal chapel.

Henry VII did an awful lot to modernise the English state, but he was also (and probably not coincidentally) a complete tool.

Brother Oni
2013-02-05, 08:04 AM
According to some of the articles I've read, the skeleton also suffered an injury to the pelvis, suggesting a 'humiliation wound' through the buttocks, and that the wrists of the body were still tied when it was buried.

So while the body was still buried in consecrated ground, it was pretty much dumped in a hastily prepared grave.


http://24.media.tumblr.com/cf07985f73474e532ac2fe6c8ea058d4/tumblr_mhpvh28acR1qks2j1o1_500.jpg

I find it highly amusing that even 30 years on since that series, it can still be current today. :smallbiggrin:

Aedilred
2013-02-05, 08:36 AM
According to some of the articles I've read, the skeleton also suffered an injury to the pelvis, suggesting a 'humiliation wound' through the buttocks, and that the wrists of the body were still tied when it was buried.
There can't be many other figures in English history who've suffered quite so much or so long - both in body and in memory - from deliberate, politically-motivated malice. Whatever else you can say about Richard, he died like a hero, and the skeleton evidences that. I've heard it said that English chivalry died with Richard at Bosworth, and I can see what they mean - his death really did mark the end of an era.

Hopefully the discovery will lead to a wider discussion and reassessment of Richard and his reign by the historical establishment. I'm sure he wasn't a saint by any means, but I don't think he was any worse than any contemporary kings, and indeed, despite his reputation for brutality and ruthlessness, his actual deeds don't really measure up to those of the Tudors who succeeded him.

razark
2013-02-05, 10:32 AM
So ends the reign of the Hide and Seek champion of 1485.



It seems a shame they're not burying the poor chap in York, like he wanted (and a city that hero-worshipped him), rather than in Leicester, which just happens to be where his body was dumped after Bosworth.
Moral of the story: if you want to choose your burial site, don't lose the battle.

Asta Kask
2013-02-05, 11:55 AM
This woluld be my university.

My unviersity is the best. And now we have a zombie Richard III wandering around.

I like my university. it's a nice.

Ancient Dead (http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4wand/20121016), more likely.

Chromascope3D
2013-02-05, 08:30 PM
http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/11212_532510803436520_1325707085_n.jpg

nedz
2013-02-06, 08:09 AM
KR3 isn't even close on that one

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/Tuthankhamun_Egyptian_Museum.jpg/330px-Tuthankhamun_Egyptian_Museum.jpg

Tutankhamun 1323 BCE — 1922

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1d/OetzitheIceman02.jpg

Ötzi ~3,3000 BCE — 1991

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f5/Cro-Magnon.jpg/330px-Cro-Magnon.jpg
Cro-Magnon ~43,000 years ago

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/56/Homme_de_Tautavel_01-08.jpg/300px-Homme_de_Tautavel_01-08.jpg
Homo Erectus: between 0.3 and 1.8 million years

CoffeeIncluded
2013-02-06, 08:15 AM
Ah, but this is someone we knew had been lost!

Aedilred
2013-02-06, 08:33 AM
Ah, but this is someone we knew had been lost!Tutankhamun was known to have been lost, although I'm not sure exactly when he was lost.

To be strict, and boring, the 1485-2013 span isn't quite accurate either, as he was only lost in the 1530s, and found last year.

Scarlet Knight
2013-02-06, 10:41 AM
Ok folks, if you were Queen Elizabeth, what would you decide?

Should Richard remain in Leicester or be relocated to York? Both cities have filed petitions.

Asta Kask
2013-02-06, 10:53 AM
Put him in a museum. Or a glass coffin and cart him around.

Castaras
2013-02-06, 11:08 AM
As a Leicesterite - send him back to York. That was his home, he should be buried there.

JustSomeGuy
2013-02-06, 11:35 AM
in the nearest patch of vaguely appropriate ground they could find and didn't mark it properly,

But, but - i watched the T.V. show, and the car park had an 'R' marking the spot and everything! The woman knew he was there, she had funny feeelings and everything.

Aedilred
2013-02-06, 12:15 PM
Ok folks, if you were Queen Elizabeth, what would you decide?

Should Richard remain in Leicester or be relocated to York? Both cities have filed petitions.
As I mentioned above, I'd send him to York. But then, if I were Queen (or, rather, King), I'd also have permitted exhumation of the "Princes"' skeletons for DNA testing, and that was refused, so maybe she bears a terrible grudge against the house of York for some reason. I guess she is Duke of Lancaster.

noparlpf
2013-02-06, 12:16 PM
Ok folks, if you were Queen Elizabeth, what would you decide?

Should Richard remain in Leicester or be relocated to York? Both cities have filed petitions.

I'm American, so I don't really care. I'd say stick him in a museum in London or something.

Aedilred
2013-02-06, 12:17 PM
I'm American, so I don't really care. I'd say stick him in a museum in London or something.
I'm generally opposed to putting people - especially known, historical people - in museums for tourists to gawp at. At best, it feels a bit disrespectful, at worst, ghoulish.

Unless, obviously, they mandate otherwise, like Jeremy Bentham or something.

hamishspence
2013-02-06, 12:19 PM
I'm generally opposed to putting people - especially known, historical people - in museums for tourists to gawp at. At best, it feels a bit disrespectful, at worst, ghoulish.

Would make it a bit difficult for the owners of various Egyptian displays, if this was abolished.

noparlpf
2013-02-06, 12:20 PM
I'm generally opposed to putting people - especially known, historical people - in museums for tourists to gawp at. At best, it feels a bit disrespectful, at worst, ghoulish.

Unless, obviously, they mandate otherwise, like Jeremy Bentham or something.

Skeletons are cool. Plus he's dead, so I doubt he minds much.
(And as hamishspence notes, what about various mummy exhibits and prehistoric human remains?)

Aedilred
2013-02-06, 12:25 PM
Would make it a bit difficult for the owners of various Egyptian displays, if this was abolished.
It was specifically those displays, actually, that started me thinking along these lines. Displaying the sarcophagi is one thing, but I don't see why the bodies themselves need to be on display.

I don't think nationality needs have anything to do with it, either. It's just about... respect, and privacy, I guess, at a basic level. When I'm dead, if I can help it, nobody's seeing me except those people needed to certify the death medically, the undertakers, and the worms. The idea that I could be stuck in a glass case (for snot-nosed infants to drool over while their parents read half the description label and take flash photos in defiance of the signs) just because someone thinks they might find it interesting, makes my flesh crawl. And I was never even king of anywhere (yet).

Skeletons are cool. Plus he's dead, so I doubt he minds much.
I think he would have minded, though - but that discussion leads down the same religious path that I mentioned earlier, so best not to go any further.

Scarlet Knight
2013-02-06, 01:10 PM
I tend to agree with Aedilred; how long does a man need to be dead before he ceases to be a dead man & becomes a thing?

In the US we have this type of trouble with Native Americans dug up & placed in museums.

noparlpf
2013-02-06, 01:13 PM
Dunno if we can go further with that line of discussion without heading over into Religion.

Aedilred
2013-02-06, 01:24 PM
Well, not necessarily. I think there are essentially two points of view on the subject. The first is that the body remains the property of the individual and therefore deserves equitable treatment with the person's wishes concerning their remains to be paramount as far as practical; the second is that once the individual is dead, the body is really just a hunk of carbon and it's for the state to do with as it pleases: be that compulsory organ donation, medical experimentation, cremation, public display, or whatever.

I don't think religion is necessarily the deciding factor, although some religions do specify that remains be treated in a certain way.

I can see both points of view, but I'm pretty firmly in the first of those camps.

Brother Oni
2013-02-07, 07:25 AM
I can see both points of view, but I'm pretty firmly in the first of those camps.

I'm of the first camp with the following caveat - the wishes of the descendents should be taken into account if the actual person's wishes are unknown.

cucchulainnn
2013-02-07, 10:53 PM
http://memeblender.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/king-Richard-III-hide-and-seek-world-record-holder.jpg

nedz
2013-02-08, 07:35 AM
Apparently they might try to dig up another Plantagenet (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-21366578).

Asta Kask
2013-02-08, 07:59 AM
Then we can find out if he had any descendants and oust the tyrant Windsors!

GnomeFighter
2013-02-08, 08:48 AM
Then we can find out if he had any descendants and oust the tyrant Windsors!

Bah. Why would we want to bring back those Norman pretenders to the throne? Everyone knows the House of Wessex is the only true royal line.

nedz
2013-02-08, 09:09 AM
Then we can find out if he had any descendants and oust the tyrant Windsors Saxe-Coburg-Gothas!
FTFY

1234679

Aedilred
2013-02-08, 11:05 AM
Then we can find out if he had any descendants and oust the tyrant Mountbattens!
FTFY (properly this time :smallwink:)

While I am generally of the opinion that the last "proper" English king died (ignominiously, with an arrow up his bottom) in 1016, I would also be the first to acknowledge that it doesn't actually matter one iota. It's worth noting, too, that Henry I (the king from whom the Plantagenets traced their claim) married Matilda of Scotland, who was the daughter of Edward the Exile. So the Plantagenets are about as good as it gets for successors of the house of Wessex anyway.

In other news, York Minster have apparently said that they'd prefer Richard's remains to stay in Leicester, which is a bit of a shame, but probably the most straightforward way of resolving things.

nedz
2013-02-08, 01:46 PM
By Mountbatten I think you mean Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg :smallwink:

In other news, York Minster have apparently said that they'd prefer Richard's remains to stay in Leicester, which is a bit of a shame, but probably the most straightforward way of resolving things.
Hmm, well I was in York a couple of weeks ago and they had the car park outside the Minster dug up already ?

Mercenary Pen
2013-02-08, 04:39 PM
I think Tony Robinson did a documentary on Richard III a few years ago, and they traced the Plantagenet line to somewhere in Australia...

Surfing HalfOrc
2013-02-08, 05:43 PM
Ok folks, if you were Queen Elizabeth, what would you decide?

Should Richard remain in Leicester or be relocated to York? Both cities have filed petitions.


Put him in a museum. Or a glass coffin and cart him around.

Is it wrong of me to have imagined a pneumatic tube with Richard III's mortal remains in a glass coffin, shuttling back and forth between the two cities? Like a bundle of cash from the bank teller to your car? :smalltongue:

noparlpf
2013-02-08, 07:04 PM
Is it wrong of me to have imagined a pneumatic tube with Richard III's mortal remains in a glass coffin, shuttling back and forth between the two cities? Like a bundle of cash from the bank teller to your car? :smalltongue:

Ahahaha. Yes, yes it is. But amusing.

nedz
2013-02-08, 07:55 PM
I think Tony Robinson did a documentary on Richard III a few years ago, and they traced the Plantagenet line to somewhere in Australia...

Part of the verification involved genetic analysis comparing modern descendants with the bones from the car park.

scurv
2013-02-08, 09:48 PM
Let us look at intent.
So and So builds one of the wonders of the world to safe guard his body, I suspect his intent was not to have it put on display. But it is easy to marginlise the dead and people we do not have to look in the eyes.

Aedilred
2013-02-09, 10:03 AM
I think Tony Robinson did a documentary on Richard III a few years ago, and they traced the Plantagenet line to somewhere in Australia...
To be honest, when it comes to tracing the "legitimate" Plantagenet line, it comes down to opinions and technicalities as much as anything else. After all, the Wars of the Roses was (theoretically) basically about the legitimate succession to Edward III, who by now has literally millions of descendants all over the world. If you follow strict agnatic primogeniture (the Lancastrian model) which was widely held correct at the time, then that gives you one set of results. If you follow modified agnatic primogeniture (the Yorkist model) which has been the one used since at least 1553, you end up with something else, and if you follow full cognatic primogeniture (the system now in place) you get something else again. Or you could take the line that the legitimate successor is the one who Parliament decides, which goes back in principle to before the Plantagenets themselves, but was confirmed in statute in 1701, then it doesn't really matter.

Then there are the various technicalities surrounding the undisputed descendants. The Beauforts were legitimate descendants of John of Gaunt, but barred from the succession (not that it stopped Henry VII) so didn't carry the surname. The children of both George of Clarence and Edward IV were barred from the succession by Parliament over attainder or technical illegitimacy. Richard III didn't have any legitimate descendants, either. Unless one or both of the Princes in the Tower actually survived and had children, the last person to be born a Plantagenet died in 1541 when Henry VIII had her killed for no good reason.

Following strict cognatic primogeniture, we should actually be looking at the descendants of Edward III's daughter Isabella, to whom nobody has ever paid a great deal of attention, since he had enough sons to worry about. This line leads to the Flemish house of Croy and the Dukes of Aarschot, and thereafter to the Dukes of Arenberg, who are still extant. Failing that, I think the next in line was Henry IV of France, and thus all the subsequent French Bourbons.

Mercenary Pen
2013-02-09, 06:37 PM
To be honest, when it comes to tracing the "legitimate" Plantagenet line, it comes down to opinions and technicalities as much as anything else. After all, the Wars of the Roses was (theoretically) basically about the legitimate succession to Edward III, who by now has literally millions of descendants all over the world. If you follow strict agnatic primogeniture (the Lancastrian model) which was widely held correct at the time, then that gives you one set of results. If you follow modified agnatic primogeniture (the Yorkist model) which has been the one used since at least 1553, you end up with something else, and if you follow full cognatic primogeniture (the system now in place) you get something else again. Or you could take the line that the legitimate successor is the one who Parliament decides, which goes back in principle to before the Plantagenets themselves, but was confirmed in statute in 1701, then it doesn't really matter.

Then there are the various technicalities surrounding the undisputed descendants. The Beauforts were legitimate descendants of John of Gaunt, but barred from the succession (not that it stopped Henry VII) so didn't carry the surname. The children of both George of Clarence and Edward IV were barred from the succession by Parliament over attainder or technical illegitimacy. Richard III didn't have any legitimate descendants, either. Unless one or both of the Princes in the Tower actually survived and had children, the last person to be born a Plantagenet died in 1541 when Henry VIII had her killed for no good reason.

Following strict cognatic primogeniture, we should actually be looking at the descendants of Edward III's daughter Isabella, to whom nobody has ever paid a great deal of attention, since he had enough sons to worry about. This line leads to the Flemish house of Croy and the Dukes of Aarschot, and thereafter to the Dukes of Arenberg, who are still extant. Failing that, I think the next in line was Henry IV of France, and thus all the subsequent French Bourbons.

In other words: It's complicated- very complicated.

Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll
2013-02-10, 11:15 AM
Of course, it all becomes irrelevant once they eventually get rid of the Monarchy.

Really, the Monarchy is alive by right of power. All the rules of inheritance and such are mere formalities: the crown went to whoever had the power to hold it.

Asta Kask
2013-02-10, 11:32 AM
Today it's more like the power of Inertia.

Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll
2013-02-10, 12:58 PM
Today it's more like the power of Inertia.

The power of tourism profits. Though that really only applies to the UK, the rest of the Commonwealth, inertia and the troubles have having to rewrite everything.

Aedilred
2013-02-11, 08:05 AM
Of course, it all becomes irrelevant once they eventually get rid of the Monarchy.
Even if that did happen (caution: political discussion) people would still probably find it interesting. Witness, for instance, the debates and so on over Anastasia Romanov many years after the Russian imperial family was wiped out. France hasn't had a monarchy (discounting the Second Empire) since 1848 and people are still interested in the Bourbon heirs; likewise the Habsburgs.

Really, the Monarchy is alive by right of power. All the rules of inheritance and such are mere formalities: the crown went to whoever had the power to hold it.
Up to a point, although the semblance of legality was always an important one to uphold even if it really was a "get what you grab" arrangement. Incoming monarchs in hereditary systems usually put quite a lot of effort into presenting themselves as the legitimate heir to a previous monarch (not necessarily the immediately previous one) to shore up their legal position. Obviously in elective systems it didn't matter so much.

Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll
2013-02-11, 05:10 PM
Even if that did happen (caution: political discussion) people would still probably find it interesting. Witness, for instance, the debates and so on over Anastasia Romanov many years after the Russian imperial family was wiped out. France hasn't had a monarchy (discounting the Second Empire) since 1848 and people are still interested in the Bourbon heirs; likewise the Habsburgs.

Up to a point, although the semblance of legality was always an important one to uphold even if it really was a "get what you grab" arrangement. Incoming monarchs in hereditary systems usually put quite a lot of effort into presenting themselves as the legitimate heir to a previous monarch (not necessarily the immediately previous one) to shore up their legal position. Obviously in elective systems it didn't matter so much.

All very fair points. I hadn't considered the first ones about the Romanovs and Bourbons at all.