Richard III's remains....

the dude abides wrote (see)

Breaking: Ed Miliband calls for an independent, judge-led inquiry to determine how many more Monarchs lie underneath car parks.

Well if it turns out there are any more they'll be easy to spot, just look for their initial in the parking space!!!

Dave The Ex- Spartan wrote (see)

Screamapillar wrote (see)

 

Interestingly, the actor Richard Armitage also has a pet project involving a drama series about Richard III that he's been working on for some time, so we could well be deluged with interesting stuff soon.

Depends on your definition of interesting I suppose

Mine's not the same as yours I suspect.

No it isn't. Dave likes caravans 

Did anyone catch the David Starkey prog Monarchy about Rich 3. Turns out all the apologists for him saying he is much maligned and not a nasty man after all, were a bit misled. He was a tyrant and killed whom so ever got in his way. 

"But he killed those little boys" you cant apply modern morals, to the Medieval thinking.

Interestingly they noted he got a dagger in the Ar$e 

No but I do know that Starkey is not a Ricardian so I'm not surprised by the content of the programme.

I expect he conveniently skipped over the bits which prove his contemporaries actually behaved in much the same way  - Edward IV not only having Henry VI murdered but also his own brother for instance? Or the prisoners of war  Margaret of Anjou had executed after St. Albans, despite her husband ensuring their safety and her repeated assasination attempts against the Duke of York? 

They were all at it. Richard was, at worst, no different. 

The lesson of the Wars of the Roses was if that you didn't get rid of your rivals, a faction would gather around them who would come back with an army and fight you. In a sense Henry VII got lucky - once he came along there were very few people left alive with any real claim to the throne. Had Richard won at Bosworth his monarchy would probably have been secure. 

Yes hes not a fan but.I didnt really know much about Rich 3 so it sort of filled in some gaps about him and his brothers

It seems anyone with the name Edward, Richard or Henry were tyrannincal. Interesting how the two side Ricardian and Tudor lovers cant seem to meet a common ground. Basically they were all ba$tards from ancient times to the end of the Victorias reign.History is always open to personal view point. I get the feeling he was just as nasty as all of them but was caught up in a Tudor spin machine

Trouble with being buried under a car park for a long-time is that they will tow you away,

I see York have now pitched in saying he should be buried in the Minster and not Leicester Cathedral.

Yorkists kicking off again. Plus ca change.

Yes, I agree with them too.

At first I was OK with the Leicester thing and then I came to the conclusion that if you were going to give him a "multifaith" service AND bury him in a building that didn't exist at the time he was alive then you might as well put him back under the car park.

At least York Minster is a building had a connection with in his lifetime. 

I'd be surprised if they are really his remains.

Whose do you think they are then? Given that there's a DNA match?

he probably thinks they're related to the guys who say that Neil Armstrong never landed on the moon

Screamapillar wrote (see)

Whose do you think they are then? Given that there's a DNA match?

Some bloke they're pretending used to be a king.

These things happen.

Yes because that's what archaeologists do - lots of scientific testing just to make something up.

Anyway, stop trolling and go and sell some blood.

How easily you exclude the possibility you may be being deceived.

Screamapillar wrote (see)

Whose do you think they are then? Given that there's a DNA match?

Screampillar:

 A person who is alive now will be related to thousands of people who lived 500 years ago.

Their DNA will presumably therefore "match" to some extent thousands of people who were alive 500 years ago.

There is no reason why a "match" should mean that a skeleton found dating from 500 years ago should be one specific relative rather than any other of the thousands of dead people the living person is related to.

Correct me if I'm wrong on the science by all means, but I don't see that saying there is a "match" means this is Richard III. There are thousands of other past relatives an ancient matched skeleton could be.

That might be true - but I'm guessing there are not thousands buried in the particular place where Richard III was said to be buried, who died of traumatic injury to the head, who had severe scoliosis, who are a genetic match for the living relative of Richard III

Come on, it's him.  

A layman's intuition vs. an expert's "beyond reasonable doubt".

Hmmm... tricky one!

popsider wrote (see)

That might be true - but I'm guessing there are not thousands buried in the particular place where Richard III was said to be buried, who died of traumatic injury to the head, who had severe scoliosis, who are a genetic match for the living relative of Richard III

Come on, it's him.  

Sorry, is it true or isn't it?

"traumatic injury to the head" - The skull had a hole in the top, not surprising since it's been in the ground in the middle of various parcels of redeveloped land and the land has been used for parking. A flappy bit at the back: so what? A flattening in a certain place, so what? I didn't feel the "armoury" expert could make the findings he did. And the bit about the injury to the buttock because the body was lain across a horse was laughable.

"who had severe scoliosis" - the Channel Four programme itself said one in a hundred people suffer from scoliolis.

"who are a genetic match for the living relative of Richard III" - this comes back to my question above. It may well be a genetic match for the living relative of Richard III, but so would thousands of other corpses interred in the 16th century.

The Channel Four programme lacked scientific rigour. A team went onto the site wanting to find the remains of Richard III, they found one set of remains with a curved spine and went public with the information too soon, and thereby painted themselves into a corner, needing to prove it was Richard III rather than being objective. (They'd put all their eggs in one basket.) The carbon dating was out, so they shuffled it along to a later date with some schpeel about diet - if in doubt, massage the facts, hey! The reconstruction of the face was a joke: lay all this material on a skull, look at a picture of Richard III, then present a model that - lo and behold! - looks exactly like the portrait (quelle surprise!).

It was admitted in the Channel Four programme that aspects of the bones were FEMININE – e.g, the shape of the pelvis - that this could even be the remains of a woman,  not a man. This was brushed aside by the so-called bones "expert" with a reference to literature that suggested that Richard III was himself a bit feminine.

The whole approach to this appalled me. It reminded me of watching a two-year-old nephew trying to bash a square block into a round hole, and if it wouldn't go, keep bashing...bashing... bashing. Seemingly a nation is easily duped. Some of us like to see a case PROVED, rather than nonsense masquerading as science.