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Post by Admin on May 30, 2014 21:12:44 GMT
In 2012, the skeleton of King Richard III - the king of England from 1483-1485 - was discovered beneath a parking lot in the city of Leicester in the UK. Early analysis of the bones confirmed that the king had scoliosis - a condition that causes the spine to curve to the side. Now, a case study published in The Lancet reveals how the condition would have affected the king's appearance and mobility. The mystery surrounding Richard III's spinal condition had plagued researchers for years. Many historical references describe the King as a "crook-backed" or "hunch-back'd." William Shakespeare even used such terminology in his 1593 play about the king. However, it was unclear as to whether such descriptions were accurate or whether they had been conceived by enemies in order to harm his reputation. Therefore, the discovery of his skeleton was largely significant, allowing researchers to finally put the mystery to rest. And it seems a team led by the researchers from the University of Leicester in the UK may have done just that. On initial analysis, researchers confirmed that the King had scoliosis. But it was unknown as to what extent the condition may have affected his appearance, how it may have impacted his mobility and whether it was inherited. The University of Leicester team, alongside researchers from the University of Cambridge, Loughborough University and the University Hospitals of Leicester, all in the UK, set out to answer these questions. Prof. Bruno Morgan and the forensic imaging team from the University of Leicester closely analyzed Richard III's remains by creating computer-generated and physical replicas of his spine. They did this by carrying out computed tomography (CT) scans, and researchers from Loughborough University used these scans to create 3D prints of the bones. "We analyzed the skeleton macroscopically for evidence of spinal curvature and related lesions. From CT 3D reconstructions of each bone, we created polymer replicas and built a model of the spine to recreate its alignment in life," the researchers explain. From their analysis, the team were able to determine that Richard III was unlikely to have inherited scoliosis. Instead, they believe he had adolescent onset idiopathic scoliosis - a common form of the condition in which onset primarily occurs between the ages of 10 and 12 years. In terms of the King's physical appearance, they found that his spinal curve was well-balanced at around a 70-90 degree angle, meaning any physical disfigurement would have been small, but noticeable, "particularly from the rear if bending forward and bare backed," Prof. Morgan told us. Co-author Dr. Piers Mitchell, of the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, explains: If left untreated, scoliosis can cause severe damage to the spine, pelvis, chest, heart and lung. But based on their findings, the researchers say it is unlikely that Richard III's scoliosis would have affected his lung capacity, meaning he would have been able to exercise normally. In addition, the researchers say his leg bones were well formed and symmetrical, so there is no evidence to suggest he walked with a limp. Dr Jo Appleby, from the University of Leicester's School of Archaelogy and Ancient History, who led the research, said: "The major finding we have made is being able to reconstruct the three-dimensional nature of the scoliosis and understand what it would have looked like. "Obviously, the skeleton was flattened out when it was in the ground. We had a good idea of the sideways aspect of the curve, but we didn't know the precise nature of the spiral aspect of the condition. "The arthritis in the spine meant it could only be reconstructed in a specific way, meaning that we can get a very accurate idea of the shape of the curve. It's really good to be able to produce this 3D reconstruction rather than a 2D picture, as you get a good sense of how the spine would have actually appeared. "Although the scoliosis looks dramatic, it probably did not cause a major physical deformity. This is because he had a well-balanced curve. The condition would have meant that his trunk was short in comparison to the length of his limbs, and his right shoulder would have been slightly higher than the left, but this could have been disguised by custom-made armour and by having a good tailor. "A curve of 65-85 would not have prevented Richard from being an active individual, and there is no evidence that Richard had a limp as his curve was well balanced and his leg bones were normal and symmetric."
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Post by Admin on May 31, 2014 5:42:36 GMT
Dug out of the ground after more than 500 years, this perfectly preserved tiny silver badge has finally pinpointed the exact site of the battle which decided the Wars of the Roses. The 1.5in decoration proved to archaeologists where the Battle of Bosworth had actually taken place and it was in a field a mile from where historians have always believed it happened. The most famous battle of the War of the Roses was fought on August 22, 1485, and famously saw the death of Richard III. The battle ended decades of civil war and was won by the Lancastrians. It paved the way for Henry Tudor to become the first English monarch of the Tudor dynasty. The battle also inspired the scene from Shakespeare's play Richard III when the defeated hunchback king declares: 'A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse'. The current site has a stone to mark the spot where Richard fell. Historians originally thought the battle took place on Ambion Hill, near Sutton Cheney, Leics., and a stone memorial supposedly marks the spot Richard III died. So four years ago the Battlefield's Trust spent £1million excavating dozens of nearby fields in a bid to end the argument once and for all. Last October it was revealed the battlefield was not where it was originally thought - but the location was kept secret for fear of 'night hawkers' raiding the site for treasure. But today experts revealed the exact location is a field behind Fenn Lane Farm which belongs to an arable farmer. The new location was revealed after archaeologists discovered a hoard of medieval weapons in the field, including the silver white boar badge believed to have been carried by one of Richard's trusted knights. Evidence such as cannon balls - now the largest collection of that date in Europe - and pieces of armour have been used to confirm the site. A 16th-century historian recorded that Richard was 'killed fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies'. University lecturer Carl Dawson discovered the badge next to a medieval marsh which experts say was the exact location Richard was dragged from his horse and killed. Researchers also found 22 lead shots fired by hand-held guns and from the largest cannon used during the battle. But it was the silver white boar badge - an emblem of Richard III - which proved to be the key in pin-pointing the battlefield. Measuring just 1.5in the badge would almost certainly have been worn by the king's knights during his last stand.
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Post by Admin on Jun 4, 2014 5:42:13 GMT
On 22 August 1485, in marshy fields near the village of Sutton Cheney in Leicestershire, Richard III led the last charge of knights in English history. A circlet of gold around his helmet, his banners flying, he threw his destiny into the hands of the god of battles. Among the astonished observers of this glittering panoply of horses and steel galloping towards them were Sir William Stanley and his brother Thomas, whose forces had hitherto taken no part in the action. Both watched intently as Richard swept across their front and headed towards Henry Tudor, bent only on eliminating his rival. As the King battled his way through Henry’s bodyguard, killing his standard bearer with his own hand and coming within feet of Tudor himself, William Stanley made his move. Throwing his forces at the King’s back he betrayed him and had him hacked him down. Richard, fighting manfully and crying, “Treason! Treason!”, was butchered in the bloodstained mud of Bosworth Field by a man who was, ostensibly at least, there to support him. Historians have been tempted to see Stanley’s treachery as merely the last act in the short and brutal drama that encompassed the reign of the most controversial king in English history. Most agree that Richard had murdered his two nephews in the Tower of London and that this heinous crime so shocked the realm, even in those medieval days, that his demise was all but assured. The reason he lost the battle of Bosworth, they say, was because he had sacrificed support through this illegal coup. But hidden among the manuscripts in the duchy of Lancaster records in the National Archives, lies a story that provides an insight into the real reason why Thomas, Lord Stanley, and his brother William betrayed Richard at Bosworth during the Wars of the Roses. The records reveal that for more than 20 years before the battle, a struggle for power in the hills of Lancashire had lit a fuse which exploded at Bosworth. The Stanleys had spent most of the 15th century building up a powerful concentration of estates in west Lancashire, Cheshire and north Wales. As their power grew they came into conflict with gentry families in east Lancashire who resented their acquisitive and relentless encroachments into their lands. When John Harrington had been killed at Wakefield the only heirs he left behind were two small girls. They had the legal right to inherit the castle at Hornby, but this would pass to whomever they married. Stanley immediately sought to take them as his wards and to marry them as soon as possible to his only son and a nephew. John Harrington’s brother James was equally determined to stop him. James argued that his brother had died before their father at Wakefield and so he himself, as the oldest surviving son, had become the heir, not John’s daughters. To make good his claim he took possession of the girls, and fortified Hornby against the Stanleys. Unfortunately for Harrington, King Edward IV – striving to bring order to a country devastated by civil strife – simply could not afford to lose the support of a powerful regional magnate, and awarded the castle to Stanley. However, this was by no means the end of the matter. James Harrington refused to budge and held on to Hornby, and his nieces, regardless. What’s more, the records show that friction between the two families escalated to alarming proportions during the 1460s. This virtual state of war became a real conflict in 1469, when, in a monumental fit of pique, the Earl of Warwick – the most powerful magnate in the land, with massive estates in Yorkshire, Wales and the Midlands – rebelled against his cousin Edward IV. The revolt saw the former king, the hapless Henry VI, being dragged out of the Tower and put back on the throne. Stanley, who had married Warwick’s sister, Eleanor Neville, stood to gain by joining the rebellion. There were now two kings in England – and Edward was facing a bitter battle to regain control. In an attempt to secure the northwest, he placed his hopes on his younger brother, Richard Duke of Gloucester, the future Richard III. With Richard at Bosworth were a close-knit group of gentry who served in the royal household: men like John Huddleston, Thomas Pilkington and Richard Ratcliffe. They were men whom Richard could trust, but they were also the very men who were instrumental in reducing Stanley’s power in the northwest. By Richard’s side, possibly carrying his standard, was James Harrington. When Richard III sped past the Stanleys at Bosworth Field he presented them with an opportunity too tempting to refuse. During the 1470s Richard had become the dominant power in the north as Edward’s lieutenant. He served his brother faithfully and built up a strong and stable following. The leading gentry families could serve royal authority without an intermediary. The losers in this new dispensation were the two northern magnates, Henry Percy and Thomas Stanley.
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Post by Admin on Jun 8, 2014 6:06:29 GMT
Traditionally taught as a Good King, but a Boring Man, Henry VII is the one whose reign schoolchildren plough through between the bloody thrills of Bosworth Field and the romantic soap opera of Henry VIII. The first Tudor king is remembered as a cheese-paring charisma-vacuum who restocked the coffers while fending off challenges from those trumped-up commoners Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck. His wife, Elizabeth of York, is usually a footnote in the lesson because his marriage to the daughter of Edward IV helped him absorb the Yorkist claim into his own court. Philippa Gregory has made an impressive career out of breathing passionate, independent life into the historical noblewomen whose personalities had previously lain flat on family trees, remembered only as diplomatic currency and brood mares. And with The White Princess, she makes a psychologically involving page-turner of the reign that Shakespeare skipped. Gregory’s historical fiction has always been entertainingly speculative (those tempted to sneer should note that she’s never claimed otherwise) and comes with lashings of romantic licence. Thus we meet our golden-tressed girl heroine still pining for her one true love (and uncle) Richard III. Although there’s no historical evidence that Elizabeth was romantically entangled with the man rumoured to have smothered her brothers (the princes in the Tower), the fifth novel in Gregory’s “Cousins’ War” series finds the Queen masking a deep grief with a professional display of royal manners: “smiling, smiling, my teeth bared, my eyes bright, my skin like strained parchment”. The White Princess, by Philippa Gregory With her lover’s body slung into an unmarked grave in Leicester (over which we’d one day build a car park), she is forced to hope his usurper will marry her to ensure the safety of her family — especially her nine-year-old cousin Teddy, a potential Yorkist claimant whose name is being shouted in the streets of London. Beyond her chambers manoeuvre the two most powerful and ambitious women in the country: her mother, Elizabeth Woodville, and Henry VII’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. Sweet innocent or seductress? Rebecca Ferguson in BBC One’s ‘The White Queen’ Photo: BBC Gregory has fictionalised both women before, in The White Queen (2009) and The Red Queen (2010) respectively, and it’s good to have them back, scheming away on behalf of their issue. They have much more quiet depth and mystery than the gowned versions of themselves currently appearing in the BBC adaptation. When Elizabeth finally meets the slight, balding Henry, she experiences relief that “he is less of a man than I had expected” and a wave of empathy with one who has been “burdened by an odd twist of fate, coming to victory by a sneaking disloyalty, on a hot day in August, uncertain even now if God is with him”. She has been raised as part of her charismatic father’s radiant and entitled court — “a stained-glass window in motion” — and pities his grim, anxious lack of charm and confidence. He, in turn, will soon take a steely pleasure in humiliating her. History tells us that Henry and Elizabeth’s union appears to have been “happy”. They were married within a year of his 1485 coronation and had seven children. He did not remarry after she died, aged 37, in 1503. But Gregory imagines a woman torn between loyalty to her husband (and her children) and her hopes that her brothers might have survived the Tower to topple him. She portrays a couple whose “very touch smudges blood prints between us”. Depending on the political climate, their relationship comprises “unlovely conceptions” and “ripples of pleasure”. As we always know the outcome of historical fiction, Gregory shows considerable skill in generating and maintaining tension, mostly between women. Sometimes her projection of 21st-century analysis into the mouths of characters is unconvincing, as when Elizabeth confronts Margaret Beaufort with the accusation that her lack of love for her son has rendered him incapable of inspiring love in his subjects: “You worked for him, and you strove for him, and you plotted for him — but I doubt that you ever, in all his baby years, held him on your knees, tickled his toes and made him giggle.” But I enjoyed Gregory’s support of the exciting theory that Prince Richard had been smuggled to safety by his mother and a poor page-boy sent to the Tower in his place. Historians such as Anne Wroe have certainly proved the Tudor account of the period to be unreliable. As Gregory writes in an afterword: “I cannot think she [ Elizabeth Woodville] would have risked her daughter’s place on the throne for anyone but her son.” Making her a Good Yorkist but a Bad Mother? A Good Mother but a Bad Grandmother? Plenty there for the book groups to discuss.
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Post by Admin on Jun 10, 2014 6:36:52 GMT
Elizabeth Woodville, "The White Queen" has been portrayed in novels and legends as a romantic figure. In reality, her 15th Century life was far from a fairy-tale. She may have married for love but as England's Queen she faced danger and betrayal. As the new 10-part drama series "The White Queen" continues on BBC One, historian Amy Licence delves behind the myth to find the real Elizabeth Woodville. Elizabeth Woodville was born around 1437 at Grafton Regis, Northamptonshire. Her mother had been married to a son of Henry IV but after he died, the wealthy widow controversially became the wife of her social inferior, the knight Richard Woodville. Elizabeth was the eldest of their 14 children. She married, aged about 15, and soon after the country erupted in civil war. Known as the "Wars of the Roses" or "Cousins' War," this pitched the "red" Lancastrians against the "white" Yorkists in a struggle for the throne. Elizabeth's first husband, the Lancastrian Sir John Grey, was killed at the Battle of St Albans. Now his enemy Edward IV sat on the throne. Early in 1464, Elizabeth appealed to him for help after her husband's lands were confiscated as an enemy of the "white" regime. Legend has it that Elizabeth entranced Edward with her beauty, after lying in wait for him beneath an oak tree in Whittlebury Forest. In reality, the meeting may have been more mundane; they had probably met before, as the Woodvilles had been prominent at court under the Lancastrian Henry VI. Her beauty, described by historian Thomas Penn as "cold" and "lynx-eyed," drew the Yorkist king's attention. The 16th Century writer Thomas More, wrote that he was "enamoured" of her and described "much wooing and many great promises." Yet Elizabeth was not content to become just another royal conquest. Out of piety or ambition, she refused to become Edward's mistress, but his passion for her spurred him to make a surprising proposal of marriage. For Elizabeth, the offer of a crown was irresistible. It meant her two young sons, parents and siblings would be well provided for. Hers was a whirlwind courtship but she would have been a fool not to accept what Edward could offer. The marriage was conducted in secret, as the last union of a King with a commoner had taken place in 1066. Edward knew it would prove unpopular because he would be expected to marry a foreign princess and secure alliances for the Yorkist regime. The ceremony was conducted in the late spring of 1464, at Elizabeth's parental home. A "red" Lancastrian by birth she was now part of the "white" Yorkist family and England's Queen, yet Edward delayed announcing the marriage for five months. When Edward died in 1483, Elizabeth's world changed completely. Her twelve-year-old son was declared king Edward V, while his uncle Richard was appointed Protector. However, rumours surfaced that Elizabeth's husband had made a previous betrothal which would have invalidated her marriage and made her children illegitimate. Richard took the throne and shut his nephew Edward and his younger brother in the Tower of London. They were never seen again and historians today still disagree about their fates. Elizabeth and her daughters returned to their Westminster sanctuary. Forced to accept the situation, the dowager Queen had little choice but to hope for better days, until an old Lancastrian ally, Margaret Beaufort, proposed a marriage between her own son, the exiled Henry Tudor and Elizabeth's eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York. Following the disappearance of her brothers, Elizabeth of York could claim to be the legitimate heir. She became Tudor's wife and the first Queen of that dynasty after Henry had defeated her uncle Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485.
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