Dem bones!


Medieval bones found during renovations at the Tower of London recently.


I found this new story really interesting pertaining to another medieval-bones discovery at the Tower...

This discovery reminded me of the more famous unearthing of the alleged bones of the two young princes, who disappeared in Richard III's time, by workmen doing renovations at the Tower of London in the 1660s. So the story goes, the workers threw them in a heap with other rubbish but reported the finding to a higher up, who wondered if perhaps these were the bones of those princes and so retrieved them. Why would he have assumed they might be the princes' remains, you ask? Here's where Tudor propaganda once again comes to the fore. Sir Thomas More, writing at the court of Henry VIII, wrote "The Historie of King Richard III," a damning book about Richard, used by Shakespeare as one of his sources, in which More describes the princes' deaths by murderers sent by Richard:

"After the wretches perceived them, first by the struggling with the pains of death, and after long lying still, to be thoroughly dead, they laid their bodies naked out upon the bed and fetched Sir James [Tyrell--Richard's alleged chosen instigator] to see them. Who, upon the sight of them, caused those murderers to bury them at the stair foot [of the Tower building they had been housed in], meetly deep in the ground under a great heap of stones."

This is where most Richard detractors stop in More's statement, because the placement lends itself nicely to the excavated bones two hundred years later. But let us read on:

"Then rode Sir James in great haste to King Richard, and showed him all the manner of the murder, who gave him great thanks and, as some say, there made him knight. But he [Richard] allowed not, as I have heard, the burying in so vile a corner, saying that he would have them buried in a better place because they were a king's sons...Whereupon they say that a priest of Sir Robert Brackenbury [Constable of the Tower] took up the bodies again and secretly interred them in such place as, by the occasion of his death, who alone knew it, could never after come to light."

Obviously, King Charles was one one of those who stopped after the first paragraph, because he was convinced these bones were the princes' and had Sir Christopher Wren (of St. Paul's fame) create a fancy urn in which to seal them for posterity, now on view in Westminster Abbey. No one questioned the validity of the inscription (that these were the bones of the princes in the Tower cruelly murdered by their Uncle Richard) until the 1930s, when permission was granted to unseal the urn and forensic analysis (pretty basic) carried out. All the experts could say then was that the bones were from two young bodies--together with a few chickens! They could not determine exact age, male or female and, most important, they did not have the technology to carbon date them.
The Urn in Westminster Abbey allegedly holding the Princes in the Tower bones

And that's what I find so interesting about the Smithsonian article:
Still, over the course of its nearly 1000-year history, the Tower has functioned as much more than a prison. Construction began in the 1070s under the orders of William the Conqueror, who sought to solidify his rule with a fortress that would loom high over vanquished Londoners, and as the site expanded into a complex with additional fortifications and towers, builders added lavish royal lodgings, a menagerie, a mint, and a tower for storing royal garments and the Crown Jewels.
Recent discoveries show the Tower “has also been a home to those who worked within its walls,” Hawkins writes.

Those bones in the urn could have been two youths from any period of the Tower's existence who may have died of plague or other natural causes. Nothing in the forensics was found to indicate they had been murdered. And even if they had, it still wouldn't tell us who murdered them!

Why has the urn not been opened again now that forensics could tell us so much more? Because Westminster Abbey is a Royal Peculiar* and despite requests to do more testing, the Queen has refused. Apparently she thinks the bones have been disturbed enough!

*A Royal Peculiar (or Royal Peculier) is a Church of England parish or church exempt from the jurisdiction of the diocese and the province in which it lies and subject to the direct jurisdiction of the monarch.



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