The recent media coverage confirming that the bones found under a car park in Leicester do indeed belong to England's most infamous and reviled Plantagenet king, Richard III, have put me in something of a Medieval mood that I'm dying to share. Thanks to the wonderful The History Blog and The Richard III Society, I was able to learn some truths about Richard that go beyond Shakespeare and the image of the hunched-backed villain with a limp and withered arm, as played on film by Sir Lawrence Olivier and in the theater by numerous others. Forensic research and DNA testing are both remarkable ways of connecting the past with the present. In this case, the Channel Four documentary, The King in the Car Park, traced the whole process of validating the find. This included taking a swab from a living descendant (a Canadian-born cabinet-maker from London!) and reconstructing the f...
