History buffs at the ready

[Jennifer Stone]

My city is going nuts at the moment with the whole 'Richard III' adventure, but I'm not convinced it's really him. Can DNA really survive 650 yrs or so? Sufficient to find a match among modern people? Am I right in thinking he would've been beheaded and his noggin stuck on a spike at Traitor's Gate? Maybe I'm completely wrong, maybe it is Tricky Dicky. Maybe it's all for tourism.

 

[AgentPete]

Well, DNA can survive millions of years to clone dinosaurs... oh wait, that was fiction...

 

[Katie-Ellen]

'The Daughter Of Time,' by Josephine Tey is a fictional but fact based whodunnit. It's pro-Ricardian, offering a probably Not-Guilty of infanticide verdict. There's still the question too of who was Perkin Warbeck.

The man was quiet and a brave fighter, for sure, bearing a truly terrible weight of responsibility in a terrible time, and by the time he died, had not long been bereaved of his wife and their son. Loyaulte Me Lie was his motto. He was a captain in his brother's army at 14. The hunched back may just have been one shoulder noticeably bigger than the other, the sword arm. They've thought for a long time that his bones were thrown into the Soar after the dissolution of a Franciscan monastery. But if the facial reconstruction is truly based on the skull in the car-park, it looks like his portraits. Retro-fitting?
Maybe.
I feel they've probably got him, in fact. Look atta card drawn, co-incidentally enough, how's that for synchronicity as I ask the Tarot ie my gut, is it him?

 

[Brian Clegg]

Can DNA really survive 650 yrs or so? Sufficient to find a match among modern people? Am I right in thinking he would've been beheaded and his noggin stuck on a spike at Traitor's Gate?

DNA can easily survive that long, but not long enough for Peter's dinosaurs. DNA deteriorates with time, but can in principle last up to 6 to 7 million years. The oldest sample in good enough state to sequence found to date is around half a million years old.

As for the spike bit, I think the answer is no. I went to an interesting talk at literary festival last year by a historian who'd written a book about Richard's death - apparently in this period it was considered bad form to kill royalty on the battlefield at all, ideally you captured them alive - and if you did kill them, their remains were supposed to be treated honourably.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Unless Stillington had lied about Edward 1v having married Elizabeth Woodville bigamously, and Richard had put him up to the lie, Richard was not by any stretch a traitor.

True about the bad form. Another tragic instance: Catharine/Katherine of Aragon shocked Henry v111 by sending him a blood soaked garment of her brother-in-law James 1v of Scotland, after he fell at Flodden. http://www.englishmonarchs.co.uk/battle_flodden.html

 

[Jennifer Stone]

Thanks guys for your wondrously informative responses, it's an area of history I must brush up on

 

[AgentPete]

You've got some real experts here

 

[Marc Joan]

For those like myself who are not experts, may I recommend '1066 And All That' by Sellar and Yeatman. 'A memorable history of England comprising all the parts you can remembr including 103 good things, five bad kings, and two genuine dates'. History is not what you thought - it is what you can remember.