The Last Plantaganet
How does it come to be that the bodily remains of a former king of England were found buried under a municipal parking lot?
Burt Likko
Pseudonymous Portlander. Pursuer of happiness. Bon vivant. Homebrewer. Atheist. Recovering Republican. Recovering Catholic. Recovering divorcé. Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of Ordinary Times. Relapsed Lawyer, admitted to practice law (under his real name) in California and Oregon. There's a Twitter account at @burtlikko, but not used for posting on the general feed anymore. House Likko's Words: Scite Verum. Colite Iusticia. Vivere Con Gaudium.
I originally titled the post “The Last Lancastrian” because of my love of alliteration. But then I double-checked and was chagrined to find that in fact Richard was from the House of York, not the House of Lancaster. Keeping those straight has always been so confusing for this American! Seriously, one Plantaganet monarch was pretty much the same as another, amiright?Report
I would have gone with “They Paved Over Plantaganet and Put Up a Parking Lot.”Report
Eh, drop the “Over”. Been a while since I heard it. 🙂Report
Mostly the same. Edward II and Richard III stand out because the rest of them were straight.Report
My immediate thought was that the guy who was putting up the parking lot found out about the site and his first thought was not “I should talk to the historian authorities” but “If I talk to the historian authorities, they’ll keep me from building my parking lot and I’ll be out of pocket for the losses.”Report
A parking lot. A parking lot. My kingdom for a parking lot!Report
Based on the article he wasn’t found by accident so much as they tracked him down and the parking lot was one of the only open spaces in the area. So the dude with the parking lot probably gave em permission to dig and was thinking “Cool, this could be a lot more value added than a parking lot!”Report
Folks in Britain are also a lot more used to archaeology in general. You can’t put a shovel in the ground there without finding something. In the US archaeologists generally only get involved at the request of land owners, with government projects or when it is a NAGPRA site.Report
…A parking space fit for a king.Report
King Hoffa I?Report
The same problem occurs all over the US more than people realize (although not with the royal implications). Small family cemeteries pop up constantly. Sometimes there are even large municipal cemeteries that are forgotten about. A lifetime ago I spent a month in Frankfort, KY helping to remove 200+ graves from the late 18th century that had been completely forgotten about.Report
Yeah but the Brits forgot where they put their bloody King!Report
To adapt a joke from Mike recently, we’re Americans. If he comes back we’ll pave him over again.Report
In fairness to the Brits Burt this particular King was a very unpopular one who’d literally just been killed in a battle to retain his crown and was very hastily tossed into a grave by his usurper/successor. Not exactly a storybook succession or burial.Report
Stolen from somewhere else: “Prince Harry is glad he isn’t the only royal found face down in parking lots these days”.Report
That’s pretty damn funny.Report
Why does it always seem to go
That you don’t look for a horse till you’ve lost
They pave Bosworth Field
And put up a parking lot.Report
COOL!
Words cannot express how fascinating this is. The archaeologists must be thrilled.Report