Richard III The New Evidence: archeology, middle ages documentary, wars of the roses,

One of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time happened here. In February 2013, scientists announced that a skeleton found in this Leicester car park was the infamous King Richard III. As a result of a DNA comparison, I did a little dance around the lab. King Richard III was found buried under a parking lot. Earthly remains of the last of the Contagion. One of the most revived kings in British history. No, no. Chances of finding Richard was, I don't know, a million to one. But that was just the start of an extraordinary journey. Uncovering proof of Richard's twisted spine has sparked a new mystery. With such an extreme medical condition, could Richard still be a formidable warrior as the history books claim? That curvature is a major curvature. How do you get armour on that? During the last year, the scientists have been searching for the answer. And this programme has had exclusive access to their amazing investigation. It reveals what Richard's spine actually looked like in real life. He's virtually identical. The ailments that plagued him. The vast majority of people have surgery to correct it. Even his remarkable dietary intake. We've built a very detailed picture of an individual from the late medieval period. And aided by a unique body double, the results even demonstrate how Richard fought and died. Meet the real Richard III. In 1483, this man seized the English throne. To some, he was an evil monster. To others, a hero. His name was Richard III. In August 1485, he was brutally slain at Bosworth Field. The last English king to die in battle. The histories are very interesting because even those written by his enemies very soon after make great play of the fact that he died manfully. He fought well. Died in the thickest press of his enemies. But then, over 500 years later, University of Leicester archaeologists unearthed Richard's body. Diagnosed the scoliosis that bent his spine. And raised a question. Could a man with such a twisted back really wear armour? Lead a heavy cavalry charge? And kill several men before dying at the hands of Henry Tudor's army? Some people who have written books about Richard have anticipated that he might have sustained significant back pain. Whether he might have had a limp or not functioned so well on the battlefield, for example. For the first time ever, scientists can study the bones of an English king to solve the mysteries of his reign. The team set out to establish Richard's true physical condition and fighting ability using two lines of investigation. The first, to unlock clues hidden in Richard's bones. Using atomic and microscopic analysis to reveal new details about his health, diet and lifestyle. It's extremely unusual for us to be able to apply this level of analysis to human remains in archaeology. For the second investigation, the team wants to test Richard's physical limitations using a living subject. So they begin searching for someone who shares Richard's extreme spinal condition. So perhaps putting someone through their paces wearing armour on horseback would give us a much better idea of whether a scoliosis impeded your ability to do that. As the investigation starts, Dr Jo Appleby, Professor Piers Mitchell and the team have a critical job to perform. Before they can identify a suitable test subject, they need a precise reconstruction of Richard's backbone. Laying the bones out on a table only provides a best guess. So radiologist Bruno Morgan has to rebuild the entire spinal column in three dimensions. Experts at Loughborough University replicate each vertebra in detail. Then Bruno pieces the puzzle together. The exercise reveals a new discovery, chronic arthritis. These joints look completely normal, nice, flat, smooth facet joints. But as we move up to his thoracic spine, we can see that the anatomy has been disordered. And this is the degenerative osteoarthritis that Richard had from his scoliosis. And because of this, there can be only one way these facet joints fit together. They fit together a bit like a jigsaw. The reconstruction also reveals that Richard's scoliosis had bent his spine by up to 80 degrees. Finding a perfect living replica of Richard seems impossible. But the Richard project has long had spooky good luck. I got the strangest sensation when I was in that area, in that place. Absolutely knew that I was standing on Richard's grave. She was uncannily right. And when the discovery was first announced, a 26-year-old unemployed IT teacher called Dominic Smee was watching TV with his family. No. I was kind of thinking, OK, this is quite weird because there are a lot of similarities between me and him. And I thought, I wonder if something is going on here. This is a bit strange. A few weeks later, Dominic came across an online lecture exploring how Richard might have fought in armour. What did it really look like? What did he actually wear? Dominic was shocked. He thought he was looking at his own back. What made the similarity even more bizarre was that Dominic spends most weekends as a re-enactor at the battlefield site where Richard was killed. The actual point where it was revealed on the television that Richard had scoliosis, it was quite a mind-blowing thing, really. I remember thinking, wow, you know, that's almost exactly the same as Dominic. It was quite eerie, really, to see that. Dominic emailed the lecturer and offered to help. For Dominic, talking about himself and his back has not been easy. I was kind of thinking maybe other people can notice or see through my clothes and see how I was feeling when I looked in the mirror, which is probably why I can empathise, really, with how Richard may have felt. But Dominic has put his own feelings aside to help the scientists. While he was kind of saying, this is what we think Richard's scoliosis would have looked like, this is what we think he would have suffered with, and I thought, well, maybe I'd be able to help get rid of some of those questions for him. The team studying Richard III now has a candidate for the role of his body double. Hello. Hi. Welcome to the Rhinosculation. Thank you. You've not been here before, have you? No. Good, excellent. Well, let's go see some armour. OK. Dr. Toby Capwell is a world-renowned armour expert. I didn't know what to expect of Dominic. I mean, he'd seen the lecture that I'd given. I mean, I was immediately struck by how sort of thoughtful and interested he is. The one thing that we haven't really been able to explore so far is just how much Richard's scoliosis would have affected him and affected his nightly training and his ability to fight. But is Dominic's backbone really a match for the extreme curve in Richard's spine? It's extraordinarily rare to find anyone who has the exact kind of scoliosis to the same degree as Richard III because the vast majority of people who have it in that way have surgery to correct it. It's quite common now for people with a curve of over 50 degrees to undergo surgery to try and straighten the spine if possible. So, Dominic, first thing you need to do is to have a good look. For complex medical reasons, Dominic has avoided surgery. But the only way to establish a match is to conduct a detailed medical examination. You can see that the curve is to the right over here in the thoracic area. We can also see how the shoulders are at slightly different heights. So the right-hand shoulder is a little bit higher than the left-hand one. We can see how we've got an asymmetry here where the waist kind of sits. So, Dominic, these are the x-rays of your back. I can see that a lot of elements of your spine are very similar to Richard's. Firstly, you've got a right-sided curve, just like Richard has. And the angle of the curve, which we call the Cobb angle, yours is about 70, 75 degrees. And that's very similar to Richard's, which we've measured to be between about 60 and 80 degrees. It resembles Richard in other ways. What we notice when looking at Richard's skeleton is he has fairly grass-hull, very, fairly slim bones. And so in that regard, I think what we can tell from the skeleton would be compatible with what we see with Dominic, who clearly isn't a very over-muscular guy. Pierce has to do one last check, comparing Richard and Dominic's spines side by side. We can see on Dominic how this part of the chest is much more prominent than this part. And this seems to dip in. And that's because of the position of the ribs. And the reason that happens is the spine twists in a scoliosis. It's not just a sideways bending. And that's shown really nicely here on Richard's scoliosis. As you can see, instead of the spinous processes being in the midline, they point right inward like this. And it shows that there's this twist. So the ribs would have come out this way and the ribs on this side would have gone inwards just in the same way that we see on Dominic. We should print the ribs out. And if we had the ribs, I think it would show he's virtually identical. Virtually identical. For 500 years, people have speculated wildly about Richard's appearance. In Dominic, the team now have the answer. A unique test subject with whom they can cross-examine history's interpretation of Richard. They set out to train and test Dominic to see exactly what Richard was really capable of. It will all culminate in a battle test where he'll have to fight in full armor, lead a heavy cavalry charge, and take on some of the best medieval fighters in Europe. We should be able to see what somebody like that could actually do. I think that's really exciting. And then rotate. If Dominic can do this, then I'm sure Richard would have managed to do it because they have very similar scoliosis. Meanwhile, analysis of Richard's bones is about to yield more fascinating facts about Richard. Revealing his true physical condition on the eve of his last battle. What he was eating, drinking, and his state of health. It will be the most detailed portrait of a medieval monarch ever assembled. Richard III was a key protagonist in one of the biggest conflicts in British history, the Wars of the Roses. The Wars of the Roses continues to captivate the public imagination because it has so many small human adventure stories. There are so many small intricate elements to this period in history. The sort of very brutal and uncompromising nature of this internal dynastic conflict. After King Edward III died in 1377, there was a deadly vendetta between the families of two of his sons, the Duke of York and the Duke of Lancaster. They fought over the English crown for 100 years. In 1452, while this conflict was in full flow, Richard III was born at Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire. Some members of the scientific team have come here as they seek to establish whether Richard was a fit and capable warrior at the Battle of Bosworth. It's gonna be great, yeah. They want to find out whether Richard maintained a healthy diet over the course of his life. Richard's bones should contain telltale chemicals that he absorbed from the food and water he consumed while living here. The very earliest samples that we have from Richard III are from the denting within his teeth and those formed when he was about three or four years old. So that's the earliest picture we have of him. By analysing the chemical isotopes in Richard's teeth, legs and ribs, Angela Lamb and her colleagues can create a complete profile of Richard's diet from birth to death. First, she prepares tiny tooth samples for atomic analysis. What kind of condition were Richard's teeth in? There was some slight decay, as you'd expect from a person of that age. But on the whole, they were in pretty good condition. Angela measures the chemical signature using a mass spectrometer. The nitrogen isotopes are showing an increase in the amount of meat and protein they were eating and also increasing the amount of fish they were eating. And Richard's values here, you can see, are at the top end of comparable medieval high-status individuals. So he did have a very high-status diet. The data in the teeth suggest Richard had a diet full of protein and essential minerals. He was a fit young boy. But would he still be fit on the eve of his last battle? Angela is hunting for the answer in his bones. Meanwhile, the team's body double is opening another unique window onto Richard's physiology. Dominic Smee is being analysed by physiotherapist Claire Small. Good. Okay, same again. You're going to stand on one leg. You're going to take the arm out. You're going to take it back as far as you can. She is an expert on spinal pathologies and has worked with Paralympians. Right, okay. And this physical test provides a first look at the limitations that might affect a person with Richard's degree of scoliosis. Well, I'm really impressed with his range of motion. In fact, he's got a better range of motion than a lot of other guys his age. Good. But while Dominic and Richard seem to be nimble and flexible, on the treadmill test, there is the first indication of a physical problem. Oh, enough. I'll leave it. Okay. I'm starting to feel breathing. Yeah. It's getting a bit tight. Okay. It's... my chest tightens up, so it's more difficult to breathe out quickly to compensate for the amount of oxygen I'll need to keep running faster. His ribs won't expand and contract because of the rotation of his ribs associated with the scoliosis. So that means his lungs aren't going to... he's not going to have the lung capacity that would allow him to take in maximum doses of oxygen. The thing that is going to defeat him is fatigue. And obviously, if you're thinking about someone in battle, that's the sort of thing that you can't afford is to get tired because that then makes you vulnerable to attack by your enemy. If Richard also had a tight rib cage, he might have struggled to fight for long periods, especially on foot. It's an important consideration as Dominic moves on to the next stage of his training. There's a good bind. See that? Really nice little bind. To work out if Richard really could have excelled on the battlefield, Toby Capwell is introducing Dominic to the brutal art of medieval combat. Toby is part of an academic group who have scoured rare medieval combat manuals and accurately recreated this lost skill. It's very short, sharp bursts, but a high amount of energy that's expended in that short amount of time. So it makes you wonder what it would have been like to have to keep going for the full time of a battle. This has no safety precautions. A real fight. Life and death. I mean, these things are vicious. So, you reckon you could face one of these? Not quite at the moment. The thing that Arne and Joram have immediately shown us is the systematic complexity of medieval fighting art. There's nothing brutish or untutored about what they're doing. It's very technical. And a small, more lightly built person just has to be faster and they've got to be better at those techniques. They train to take on bigger people. Dominic's instructor is medieval combat expert Dave Rawlings. So from here, like so, is actually exactly the same thing. So you see we're training a very similar group of muscles. Toby has brought along real weapons from the Wallace Collection for Dominic to try out. Have a feel of that. Not especially heavy. Even a larger sword like this is not especially heavy. It's one of the great myths and misconceptions about medieval fighting that the swords are these big, clunky, heavy things. They aren't. It's counterproductive for them to be so. It's quite sharp as well. And that sharpness and that scary aspect of the sword is very important to be aware of as you're starting to train because you always have to be aware of the possibility that your opponent could make your arm fall off. It sort of focuses the mind somewhat. As a member of the nobility, there was no way Richard could avoid his duty as a warrior. They had a lot of responsibility as politicians and MPs and just as public figures. But the fighting is always still there. They always need to find some time in their day to train and to work with their horses as well. And that is important for the king as well or the monarch at that time. This is still a time when monarchs were on the battlefield. Richard dies leading his army on the battlefield. So far, there does not appear to be anything that he can't actually do. There might be some things he can't reach as far on a certain side. But generally speaking, he seems to be quite capable of doing everything that's thrown at him, which I find really exciting. Now continue that circle and cut up from underneath. Good. Hands up. Good. How's that motion, Paul? Is that right? Yeah, it's interesting. It will be interesting to see how the difference of having a weight of the armour on and using a weapon, seeing what happens then. Encasing Dominic in armour raises new challenges. There's no English armour surviving from the 15th century. All of the thousands of armours that were produced and worn during the Wars of the Roses, nothing that can be said to be the work of an English craftsman survives. So the team has brought Dominic to Sweden to work with world-renowned armourer Per Lieliland. Wow. Dominic, Per. Very pleased to meet you. He's going to make Dominic a fully functional suit of medieval armour. It must fit and flex like a glove. But achieving this with an asymmetric twisted torso is a journey into the unknown. We're now wrestling with the same issues that Richard's armour would have had to deal with in the 15th century. I'm going to show you this one. That's a depiction of Richard as well. Dominic had an interest in Richard III a long time before the bones were found. And, you know, of course, there's the Shakespearean image of, you know, of the hunchback and all of that. But there's been plenty for years, there's been lots and lots of argument that Richard didn't have anything wrong physically. So what do you think about all this with now, with the evidence showing that he actually had this scoliosis? It was just amazing that it was so close to, I mean, I remember when I saw it and I thought, I'm sure that's like what mine looked like. Take a shirt off. A good armour is an extension of your body. A good armour is a human exoskeleton. I'm not going to scream. It's going to be quite a long process before we're finished to get it all to work. You still have to shape the blade out like that. You curve more here and you curve more here. While Per tries to figure out how to build armour for a long dead king with a twisted spine, Dominic continues his combat training. Because we've got a disc, slap. I'm going to hit you in the head. Make sure you're going to block it. Good. Block it, go forwards. That's it. Good, good, good. Once more. It's clear that both Dominic and Richard would have to be super fit to cope with the rigours of medieval combat. But back in the lab, the scientists are finding evidence that Richard's fitness might have been compromised. The work we've been doing on the analysis of soil samples for Richard's grave have produced a few surprises in terms of locating evidence of intestinal parasites. The decomposed remains of Richard's gut contain evidence that he contracted an unpleasant ailment from the food he ate. Some parasites humans have had right throughout our human evolution and roundworm is one of those. It's spread by the contamination of your hands with human faeces. Richard had worms. You can see on the screen, this is one of the parasite eggs from Richard III's sacral soil. It's a roundworm egg. It's oval in shape. And from the point of view of health, if you had a good balanced diet and I'm sure Richard would have had plenty of food, then these parasitic worms probably wouldn't have done him much harm unless he had lots of them. On their own and in small quantities, these worms might have been harmless. But elsewhere, new data is raising more questions about Richard's health. The isotope analysis has moved from Richard's teeth to his bones. We do see a large difference in nitrogen isotopes and oxygen isotopes between those two bones, which suggests that there may be some large and significant dietary change from the time he was actually king and the period before. The evidence suggests that Richard's diet altered radically in the last three years of his life. Angela and her colleagues are searching for the cause. And the solution points to a man laboring under the heavy burden of kingship. So far, the team studying Richard III have reconstructed his spine, diagnosed a case of roundworms and noticed a strange shift in his diet just before his death. Working with body double Dominic Smee, they have also established that Richard might have had a tight chest that restricted his breathing. And now Dominic thinks the tightness in his torso affects his sword blows. When I'm doing the attacks, I'm feeling a lot of the weight in my arm there and then in my shoulder because what I tend to do is stop here and not carry on all the way through with my torso and with my hips because I haven't got the kind of push-pull muscles. The question is, would adding 30 kilos of armor make this problem even worse? Establish this line here over this one. So this one will be this more or less the same. And there is a further worry. The majority of the armor's weight should rest on the waist. But Dominic and Richard don't have one. But Dominic doesn't have any space between his lower rib and his hip bone is like less than an inch. We cannot have any waistline of the armor going in here. It would be extremely painful for him in a very short time. So we actually have to carry most of the weight of the armor on his shoulders. This would have further stressed Richard's already weakened back. This one almost perfect. But the right one is... To solve the problem, Pair tries to brace Dominic's back against the armor. The result is a chest and back plate that is as figure-hugging and flexible as possible but looks clearly asymmetrical. The hope is that the rest of the armor will mask this. No king would have wanted to look anything other than perfect. Kind of imagining what Richard would have looked like in his armor because I mean his arm would have been very similar to this to accommodate that body shape. The hope is that the armor will support his back in combat. Meanwhile, it's time for the next phase of the experiment. The evidence so far indicates that Richard might have struggled fighting on foot but the history suggests that he made up for it by being an expert horseman. Henry Tudor's own official historian recorded a vivid description of Richard's prowess. He spurred his horse. In the first charge, Richard killed several men and made a path for himself through the press of steel. Controlling a medieval warhorse requires immense skill. It's very hard actually trying to get the position right. So many things going on in your brain and the horse's brain. There's only one way to find out how someone with a 75 degree spinal curve fares on horseback. So welcome to our stables, Dominic. Meet Dominic. Dominic Sewell is one of the world's top medieval riding instructors. Well, I hope I've told you a little about what we do here and that you're going to have a very different experience from anybody that takes up riding as a sport or as a hobby. As Dominic has never ridden before, he has his first lessons on a modern saddle. One, two, three, go. Nicely done, well done. Just looking at Dominic now, you can imagine Richard as a child receiving riding instruction in the Earl of Warwick's household. He would have gone through a one-to-one training experience just like this. But Dominic's back is causing problems. Don't over lean, stay in the middle of the saddle. That's good. I'm slouching rather than I've got to focus on keeping my shoulders back. Shoulders back, weight down, feel the body. I've got to concentrate to do it because I naturally want to do that, so I've got to work on keeping up the right position. Sit up, sit up, look ahead. Good, good. And in three, two, one, and... Because my centre of gravity is on the side, because of where the curve is, most of my weight's on that side. So I think that the horse is probably going to naturally feel like I'm telling it to go to that side. If Dominic struggles with a modern saddle, how will he cope with the hard wooden saddle that Richard used? Now, this is the medieval saddle. This is what you're going to be riding in from now on. This is your arming platform. It's your gun mount, if you wish. It looks like it's going to be interesting in between the legs It looks a bit like a log that you're effectively sitting on with a tiny bit of padding on, but I think I'll notice the difference. Good mount, well done. OK, let's walk into the arena. It's a slow start, but then something happens that confounds all expectations. Good stuff. Keep going. Keep going, Dominic. This is good. This is really good. OK, and relax. I am flabbergasted by just how much that saddle helps you. I'm not bouncing all over the place. You're not bouncing. You have more control. I'm very encouraged that the medieval saddle is actually helping you. Now, whether that helped knights of the past, or perhaps whether it helped Richard or not, I don't know. But it may be a consideration that we haven't thought about until now. No, well done. Excellent. Excellent start. Does your back feel more supportive, Dominic? Yes, because it's in one place. Remarkably, the high, rigid back of the wooden medieval saddle adds support to the part of Dominic's back that needs it most. The important thing is... While Dominic attempts to become a skilled medieval knight, the team is designing his battle challenge with the help of Professor Glenn Ford. He has strong evidence that pinpoints the actual site of the Battle of Bosworth. The clues he has found are a series of objects discarded during the battle. The group of objects that suggests people of very high status have fought in hand-to-hand action lies in the low ground, not in the cornfield, the light-coloured cornfield, but in the green field, the bright green field beyond. This area is bounded on one side by an ancient road and segmented by a marsh. The evidence suggests that Richard and his cavalry charged around this marsh, a distance of almost one kilometre. At the moment, that says to me the main clash between the two sets of nobility. I've always had a real problem with this idea that the cavalry charge was decided upon in an impulsive, sudden sort of way. But if you look at the landscape here and the kind of space that you can see, then it works very well. And now we've driven across the heath and we're standing behind Henry's position when the attack comes in from Richard. Because we think where that small spinny is in the middle of this field may be the location where those two forces clashed, where Richard almost got to the point of killing Henry. That is where the Battle of Bosworth was probably decided. In the course of English and British history. Which is quite something, thinking after all these years and with the finding of the skeleton of Richard III that we're in the possible location of where he could have actually fallen. Meanwhile, Richard's body double Dominic Smee is making excellent progress, especially when it comes to charging with a lance. First thing, let's get that horse moving. Right, so focus his power. Here we go. Support, leg on and off we go. This is only Dominic's fifth riding lesson. Well done, Dom. It's a good job he hit it because if he hadn't, you'd have hit it with your face. Yeah. Which would have been bad. The paraphernalia of medieval warfare doesn't seem to hinder a person with scoliosis. It actually helps them. Couch. And this fact might not be limited to the saddle. Dominic's custom-built armor is complete. Okay, guys, here's your acolyte. Ready for war. Just about. I think he looks pretty darn good, actually. We thought that Richard should have an armor that we know was really high-tech. This is a very new innovation for 1480-85. Do you feel any aches in your shoulders? No, no. Do you feel any ache in your lower back or your mid-back? No. Really? That's good. Do you feel that the back plate is there and you could actually rest yourself against it a bit if you wanted to? Yeah, it keeps me in a kind of a position. Not while I'm rested, but before I'm rested. So while it's just the natural positions, it stops me slumping. So that's why I'm really interested to see what happens when I'm riding to see whether I can still do that. How's that doing? Okay, walk. How secure are you feeling at the moment? Well, actually a lot more secure. You're feeling more secure than you were without the armor? Yeah, because you kind of kept more stationary. Okay. Dominic is nearly ready for his final challenge. A test to prove whether Richard really could have led a heavy cavalry charge at the Battle of Bosworth Field. It's a big pressure. It is a big pressure and no one is more aware of that than myself. And yes, I'm concerned. Desperately concerned, if I'm quite honest with you. While Dominic prepares for his big day, elsewhere the investigation is revealing that Richard may not have been in the best shape of his life at the Battle of Bosworth. The first clue lies in the historical record. The menu from Richard's coronation banquet has survived over 500 years and it hints at Richard's opulent diet as Leicester archaeologist Richard Thomas explains. We've got a huge diversity of meats especially and it's meat that marked out high status diet in particularly more than anything else, more than cereals, more than vegetables, more than fruit. So just an example of some of the things he was eating, sturgeon, quails, rabbits, egrets, venison, carp and bream, partridge, roe deer, peacocks in his hackle and trapper. Now it's nothing to do with taste. By all accounts, peacock was hard to digest. It was chewy. It wasn't good to eat at all. But these were a delicacy. They weren't a delicacy because of their taste necessarily but they were delicacy just because they were so difficult to obtain. Richard's coronation banquet was the ultimate in medieval gastronomic excess. But was it a one-off or did vast amounts of rich food become a mainstay of his diet? Chemical isotopes in Richard's bones provide the answer. Analysis of a rib bone, for example, can tell you about the last three years of the life of somebody because it is constant regeneration of bone matter whereas other limbs, like a femur, analysis of that can only really tell you about the last 15 years of a person's life because the regeneration is much slower. The isotopes in Richard's femur show that for most of his adult life, he had an average diet for a high status individual in medieval society. But his ribs indicate that during the last three years of his life, there was a dramatic change. His diet when he was king was sort of way beyond that of even an equivalent high status individual in the late medieval period. Richard's food consumption went off the scale. The nitrogen and the oxygen isotopes both shift quite considerably so from that we can decipher that it had to be something that has a high nitrogen isotope value but was more terrestrial in nature. So we're talking about animals such as pigs possibly, wild fowl, fresh water fish and most of those were real delicacies in the late medieval period. The isotope analysis shows that Richard was eating an extremely lavish diet in the three years leading up to the Battle of Bosworth. This overindulgence might well have reduced his fitness and agility and Richard's bones have one more secret to reveal. This is the place in Leicester where Richard III stayed the night before he marched to Bosworth Field. The Blue Boar Inn has gone. In its place, a new lodging house. What he drank that night is not recorded but Richard's bones provide a clue to the scientists. The oxygen isotopes in his ribs suggest a big change in the geographical origin of water that Richard consumed during the last three years of his life. It suggests he'd moved to western France, western Spain which we know from documentary evidence that that wasn't the case. He was predominantly in the UK. He was based in London and travelled around England in those few years when he was king. The science also points to a remarkable explanation. An increase in wine consumption would explain why he might have had a higher oxygen isotope value at that time. Our estimation is that it's about 25% of his oxygen intake. The rest would be made up by water and beer. It was a considerable step up from what was his average drinking before. At that period, the wealthy were consuming a lot of wine. We know he was banqueting a lot more. He was king. He was travelling to different locations. There was a lot of wine indicated at those banquets. And tying all those together, it looks like that that had quite an impact on his diet in the last few years of his life. Richard was consuming a bottle of wine per day, every day. On top of all the British ale he also drank. But I doubt whether his fitness levels were perhaps quite as good as they were before he was crowned king. All this copious consumption might well have severely impaired Richard's performance in battle. Despite this, experiments carried out so far with Dominic Smee suggest that Richard still had the potential to be a capable fighter and a talented horseman. And now Dominic faces one final test. He is heading out to Bosworth to reconstruct the events of August the 22nd, 1485. The historical accounts suggest that Richard fought skillfully and killed a number of enemy soldiers that day. And Dominic is keen to prove that scoliosis was no impediment to Richard's performance on the battlefield. Do you think Richard would have felt comfortable in his armour? Yeah, in a static position it does a really good job of supporting me, but my body moves an incredible amount, depending on what I'm doing with it, more than a normal person. But when I do that movement with my arm, the shoulder blade is kind of going into my ribs, whereas on the left-hand side it's performing in the normal way. It's kind of an interesting thought, though, to think that the process of figuring out how to make armour work for someone with this condition, these same questions and these same issues would have been present with Richard and his armourers. So does Dominic's backbone significantly affect his ability to fight? His first challenge is hand-to-hand combat, wearing a full suit of armour. Since I first saw him, he's much more nimble on his feet, even though he's actually wearing full plate armour. It shows that a little, a smaller person has got to work very, very hard to stay on top of a fight. This test proves definitively that Richard could have fought well on foot, despite his scoliosis. But a stiff rib cage might have caused him to tire much more quickly than other soldiers. And hold! Nice finishing shot. Well done. The second challenge is Richard's feigned cavalry charge. The real battle site is now working farmland, but a nearby horse training centre provides a perfect model of Bosworth. Ahead in the distance is where Richard's enemy, Henry Tudor, is. And that's quite a distance to go in all this kit, but this is what they're all trained to do. According to the historical sources, Richard and Henry faced each other across a marsh. Richard had at least 200 fully armoured knights with him when he spotted Henry Tudor and a small bodyguard moving away from his main force. Richard decided to charge around the marsh. The distance of 800 to 1200 metres is a huge stretch in full armour. Dominic Smee must match this manoeuvre. Will his back cope with the strain? This is everything you want. You've got your armour, you've got your horse, and that's your kingdom. So you're going to go and fight for your kingdom. You're going to win it. You're going to be the best you can, yeah? How does it feel in the armour? Do you feel empowered wearing the armour or anything? You feel like a juggernaut. The histories say that Richard killed Henry's standard bearer with his lance. Can Dominic hit his target? Despite the horror of medieval warfare, there is still something quite magical about knights in full plate armour on horseback. The sheer sound, the sheer power. It's almost the shock and awe of the Middle Ages. Having crashed through Henry's forces at speed, Richard would have pulled out his warhammer and turned back towards his enemy. Henry's historians credit Richard with unhorsing one of Henry's bodyguards, who was over six feet tall. After three months of training, Richard's body double Dominic Smee has achieved his goal. He's shown conclusively that their shared scoliosis may be a barrier in some people's minds, but it is in no way an impediment on the battlefield on horseback. It makes me feel a lot better about myself, knowing that I can do something that ordinary, healthy people struggle with, and yet I've managed to do it despite having this condition. When you actually see you coming over, you can't tell your size. You can't tell how slender you are, how slight. You just look like this facade of a tank coming forwards. It does show that despite what history might have implied, Richard was there agile and fighting as well as anybody. Yeah, he struck that Quinten really well, and I think for him to use that axe the way he did at speed was fantastic. I'm really proud of the young man. I think that we let him yell charge helped a lot. Yeah, his mojo went through the roof after that. Definitely, especially the bit at the end, hitting the head in the middle. I was desperate to do that because before I've only just nicked it, whereas I went straight for it and smashed it off the pole. Richard III may have been a violent man. Most medieval kings were. He seized the throne, rightly or wrongly. At Bosworth, the arthritis in his back may have caused pain. His stomach may have been infested with worms. His fitness levels compromised by a tight chest and three years of excessive binging. However, this experiment has shown that Richard could have led his cavalry at Bosworth Field. After making this final heroic charge, he ultimately lost his crown and his life. But as Dominic Smee has proved, King Richard was certainly not disabled.