Richard III - Uncovering the Church of the Friars Minor Leicester

The first excavation was hugely successful, we found Richard III, but despite the successes of the first project there's always that frustration that you've just raised more questions than you had answers and to have an opportunity to go back and do more work on the site is always fantastic. So what I really wanted to do was to be able to strip the whole of the footprint of the church so that we could see Richard's burial location in context and also see the proper layout of the church rather than having to resort to joining the dots between smaller investigations. But it was also the area of the site that was going to be built over with the addition of the visitor centre so we wanted to explore the area we wouldn't get a chance to investigate once the visitor centre was built. So that's why we focused on one particular question which was to look at the plan and the dating of the church itself. I think the important thing to remember about the second dig is that we didn't dig the site to destruction, in other words we didn't go through all of the periods of the church right down to its foundation back in the 13th century. What we were really looking at was uncovering the final phases of the building, so just before the dissolution in 1538 after which it was demolished. So we came down onto the uppermost floor levels and we got hints of the fact that there were more floor levels by taking out later disturbances that cut through the church and then in section you can see a profile of lots of earlier re-flooring episodes. So one example really of flooring I suppose are the inlaid floor tiles of which there were many coming from the church, many different designs and many different sizes. What was very clear was that in the later phases they'd actually re-used earlier tiles to re-pave the choir floor. You could tell that because the tiles that were laid right next to the wall would normally not get worn at all because people don't tread on them but here you had some very very abraded bits of tile so they clearly re-used it. One of the other advantages of excavating a big open area is that you get to see long lengths of wall lines so you can get a better alignment on them. When you've just got little one metre long sections in narrow trenches it's hard to see what the exact angle of the building is running at. So the second excavation we were able to get a true alignment of the church and it doesn't run perfectly aligned with the modern buildings but that's not really surprising. The modern buildings align off the streets and the church is not necessarily aligned off the streets. In fact most churches in Leicester are slightly off alignment to the streets that run next to them. They're being aligned for other reasons rather than the street frontages. Apart from Richard III one of the star finds in the first excavation was this large stone coffin that we found in the east end of the church. Unfortunately we'd found it after we found Richard III, in fact we essentially found it on the very last day of the excavation so we'd never had a chance to examine it closer and it is incredibly frustrating having to cover it back up and not knowing what's inside it. So this time we did decide to have a look at it. Intact stone coffins like this, medieval stone coffins, this is the first one that's ever been looked at in a modern excavation in Leicester. So it was going to be really exciting to see what was inside. It's always been the goal of archaeologists not to disturb human remains if they don't have to. On the first excavation we had one specific research goal, find Richard III and so we were only going to exhume human remains that were potentially Richard III. The second excavation we've identified up to about ten potential graves now in the east end of the church of which we've excavated another three. So we've got four graves in total excavated and five sets of human remains collected from the site. We wanted some comparative information on other burials in the church that we could compare with Richard III and we could compare with other medieval cemeteries we've excavated in Leicester. But the ones we specifically picked were the ones that were likely to get damaged by the building of the visitor centre over the top of it. We didn't disturb ones that weren't going to potentially get disturbed by later building work. What was particularly interesting about the burials was that we'd always expected that we might find lots of friars buried within the choir and the presbytery and the church. So it's a little surprising to discover that the burial in the stone coffin is of a female as are two of the other burials that were excavated in the choir house. So maybe these are wealthy benefactors of the friary or maybe the wives of benefactors. Richard III to date is the only male skeleton from the Greyfriars church and that might sound surprising but maybe it isn't. Maybe statistically we've only excavated five out of several hundred burials and maybe we've just found, by luck, found the only four women maybe buried in the church. We don't know. We've looked at such a small sample that we can't say if there's anything significant about it. There is a big contrast in the different types of burials we've found in the Greyfriars church. We've excavated four graves altogether including Richard III's. It really stands out in contrast to the other graves. The differences suggest that Richard was buried in haste or there was a lack of care in his burial. So when you compare it to the other graves they're all nicely constructed, they're big rectangular holes, nice vertical sides, all big enough to easily accommodate the person inside them. They've all got coffined individuals inside them. Richard's is sort of lozenge shaped. The sides all slope in, it's poorly dug, he doesn't quite fit into it, there's no evidence of a coffin. It's a really big contrast between the manner of his burial and the way the other people had been buried in the church. The second excavation that we did in 2013 certainly really helped us to establish the location of the grave in its proper context, precisely where it was within the church. The sort of interpretation of the evidence from the first excavation was that Richard was buried at the west end of the choir up against the southern choir stall but we hadn't actually had the west end of the choir or the southern choir stall around the grave itself. So one of the goals of the 2013 excavation was to firm up his location in the church. And we were right, he is buried at the very west end of the choir up against the southern choir stall. This time we found the southern choir stall just next to the grave, we found the west end of the choir just west of the grave and we found the northern choir stall and that was where the bit of in situ floor tiling was, it was next to Richard's grave and probably would have been the last floor in the church, it would have been a fragment of the floor he'd been buried through. So we can now see very clearly that the site of Richard's grave is just inside the choir, so for example if you were walking from a bit called the walking place which is an area underneath the main tower of the church, you'd go through a screen into the choir and you'd see timber choir stalls on either side and immediately on your right as you went through the screen you'd see Richard's burial. One of the things I really wanted to find out about was this part of the church that's known as the walking place underneath the central tower and that was partly accessible to us within the social services car park for the second excavation. So that was all very carefully stripped as well and I was hoping that we'd get very nice lines of either rubber trenches or stone wall foundations to show the footprint of the walking place and show the point at which you then walk through into the choir. What we found was a massive hole, something very large had been dug into that area of the church. I can't say exactly what it could have been, it just missed Richard's skull, it came within about a centimetre of his skull so again we're incredibly lucky his skeleton survived. What it could be is removing a massive stone base for a tower or it could just be someone's dug a massive hole to extract the sand and gravel or the clay that's underneath it. We couldn't really say, we never found the bottom of it, it was going too deep to safely reach the bottom. It's also a case of the Victorian cellar over the top of him that probably destroyed his feet might in the end have been the reason he survived at all in the fact that it was these group of buildings above the grave meant that there was no other way of digging any holes into the grave underneath them and they weren't demolished until the car park went in and since then it's just been car park. So it might be that that act of building the buildings over Richard that came so close to destroying him actually protected him in the end. The thing about any excavation, particularly research excavations, is that they normally throw up more questions than they answer. So I think what was very interesting about finding the footprint of the church was that then we discovered another building to the south of the church whose walls hadn't been robbed of their stone completely. So you can actually see the foundation stones in position and the buttresses in the building. So very substantial structure but tantalisingly we only had a little bit of its north wall so we didn't really know what the building was but a working theory is that it's possibly an earlier chapel of the friars, perhaps built in their early years, sometime after 1230 when they were founded and that then that was replaced by the church that we finally excavated where Richard III was buried. So it's quite an attractive idea but without further excavation we'll never know. And the site as we've now left it, most of the levels in the church are still intact and there for future generations to look at as are all these other buildings that surround it. I think the real prize for me in terms of the 2012 and 2013 excavation results is the fact that we've actually now got lots more information about one of the medieval town's great religious houses to add to the growing body of knowledge for the borough as a whole. So it fits in with our overall research which has been underway for many, many decades and people are now genuinely looking at how the story of our city unfolded from Roman times onwards and so that's a major breakthrough as far as I'm concerned.