Cape Town - First there was the skeleton with a gaping skull wound and possibly bound hands that had been stuffed hastily into a grave. Now, a mysterious coffin-within-a-coffin has been found in a nearby burial site.
No, it’s not from a crime novel by Agatha Christie orRuth Rendell, but the results of one of the most exciting and well-publicised excavations in British archaeological history.
The story started when new evidence suggested that the grave of Richard III, the last English king to die in battle, lay beneath a tarred parking lot in the Midlands city of Leicester.
In August last year, the University of Leicester, in collaboration with the Richard III Society and Leicester City Council, began an ambitious excavation project. The following month they uncovered bones of a skeleton showing a spinal deformity – the king was reported to have been a hunchback – and evidence of wounds consistent with his reported death during the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.
In February the archaeologists were able to confirm that the bones were those of Richard III, after tracing his direct descendants and comparing their DNA. They also found the remains of the friary of Grey Friars, the Franciscan monastic community established before 1230.
This month the research team, during a second, four-week dig at the site, uncovered the mysterious coffin-within-a-coffin, close to the final resting place of Richard III. They’d discovered the outer coffin during the first dig but hadn’t been able to investigate it at the time.
This outer coffin is a medieval stone coffin, carved from limestone and 2.12m long, 0.6m wide at the “head” and 0.3m at the “foot”, and 0.3m deep. It took eight people to remove the stone lid. The sealed inner coffin is made of lead and contains the bones of an as yet unidentified person.
The university said the inner coffin was likely to contain a high-status burial and that the skeleton could be the remains of the friary’s founders or of a medieval knight. Further analysis would be required before the lead coffin could be safely opened without damaging the remains inside.
Site director Mathew Morris of the University of Leicester Archaeological Services said: “Tantalisingly, the individual’s feet can be seen through a hole in the bottom of the casket. The archaeologists suspect the grave could belong to one of three prestigious figures known to buried at the friary.”
- Cape Argus
l See http://www.le.ac.uk/richardiii/ and http://www.le.ac.uk/richardiii/blog/page1.html
* If you use Gmail to read IOL's newsletters, note that Google is rolling out a new tabbed inbox that filters your mail into 5 separate tabs - Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums. IOL emails will probably be sent to the “Promotions” tab instead of the “Primary” tab. If you don't want it that way, drag the newsletter from the Promotions tab to the Primary tab. An alert will pop up. Click “yes” and your newsletters will continue to go to your Primary inbox.