Posted on 02/12/2014 3:04:42 AM PST by afraidfortherepublic
What a treat for all medieval historians! More than 500 years after he was killed, the skeleton of Richard III is giving them much more reliable biographical information than they acquired over the previous half a millennium.
Henry VII, his successor, and opponent at Bosworth, encouraged his court historians to produce a warped picture of Richard.
Thank God, then, for the miraculous discovery of his body in a Leicester car park in 2012, and the undeniable truths it provided. Analysis of his skeleton showed the king didn’t have a hunchback exactly; he suffered from scoliosis of the spine, meaning his vertebrae were bent sideways and his right shoulder was higher than his left. His skull had a big hole at its base where, it’s thought, it was hacked away by a halberd; on the right side of his head, a blade had apparently thrust through the bone to a depth of more than four inches. Tudor soldiers were nothing if not thorough.
Richard’s DNA has already been analysed, confirming that the battered body in the car park was indeed his. But his genome will tell us even more from beyond the grave. “The original discovery only told us so much about Richard himself – he had scoliosis, he ate seafood, he died violently,” says the historian David Horspool, who is writing Richard III’s biography for Bloomsbury. “Anything that increases our knowledge would be interesting. The waxwork made of him guessed that he had black hair and very bushy eyebrows; perhaps the genome will tell us something different.”
~snip~
Other ancient bodies have had their genomes sequenced, including Otzi the Iceman, Neanderthal specimens, a Greenlandic Inuit and a hunter gatherer from Spain. But Richard III will be the first named, identifiable historical figure to undergo the process.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
Richard was a general at 17 or 18. But he came from a family of inbred military and literary geniuses. (Inbreeding is not always a negative.) Their only problem was that due to inbreeding, they could not reproduce themselves successfully. When Richard had children before his royal marriage to his cousin, his natural children - born of commoners - grew up whole and healthy.
Did you like this show? As a long-time Ricardian, I had trouble dealing with it. Did it help you understand King Richard or did it turn you off to him?
No pun intended, I'm sure.
Yeah, I didn’t like him failing to do his duty to protect the Prince of Wales.................and hogging the throne
As Protector, it was his job to secure the prince and bring him into London. Instead, his awful in-laws rushed the boy into sanctuary, cleared out the royal treasury, raised troops against Richard, took control of the navy (although Richard was head of the Admiralty) and generally acted in a highly suspicious manner.
No Protector had ever survived that position in the past. All had been murdered. Richard had a lot of think about in those weeks leading up to the coronation. I blame his brother, King Edward IV, for the foolish way he let his wife’s family take over the Kingdom in his final years.
Welcome aboard!
It’s amazing what chances to survive.
Titulus Regius: The Title of the King
by Tracy Bryce
http://home.cogeco.ca/~richardiii/Titulus%20Regius.htm
None dared call it treason. :’)
He looks like a wax dummy or a marionette.
Interesting read. How cool is it that the copy of the document stored in the tower escaped being destroyed?
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