Friday, September 14, 2012

Richard III Found?

With the rain on Wednesday came cooler temperatures - I actually wore long pants yesterday and today when I was walking Rosie and Remy.  But I am sitting at my desk in shorts and a T-shirt, with the back window and patio door wide open, right now.  Lovey and Nedi have been wandering in and out, as they also got to do before I left this morning.  I had a blast watching the Green Bay Packers defense eat up Jay Cutler of the Bears last night - but I occasionally rooted for Major Wright, too.  And I caught a few things I had missed the first time watching last night's episode of Person of Interest.  I'm looking forward to the new season.
   I think it's fascinating that archaeologists believe they have found the body of King Richard III. There were multiple rumors regarding the King's body - but they seem to have found it in Leicester, under the choir of the old Greyfriars Abbey site, just as was originally reported.  The members of the King Richard III Society and archaeologists dug two "test trenches", each of them 98 feet long in a city parking lot, which seemed to a part of the old abbey.  They found, buried under the Abbey's choir stalls, the skeleton of a man, who had pronounced scoliosis of the spine, making his right shoulder appear much higher than his left.  He also had an arrow head embedded between two vertebrae (shot from the rear) and a large sword gash across the back of his skull.  As King Richard III died in battle on Bosworth Field (in 1485), the skeletal remains might actually be his.  Mitochondrial DNA testing should be finished within 12 to 16 weeks, and will determine whether this is King Richard's body.  If so, he will be re-interred under his Memorial Plaque in Leicester Cathedral.
   I've always found Richard III to be very interesting - most reports of his behavior towards his family and his people seem to have been favorable during his life.  It was after Henry Tudor (Henry VII) defeated Richard in the War of the Roses and set up the Tudor dynasty, that he came to be vilified - as well as that little question concerning the Princes in the Tower...  'Twas Shakespeare who first described Richard as being a "hunchback," and that was almost 100 years after Richard's death...  Ah, well....  The winners of the wars do write the histories....

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