The King Under the Car Park
There’s a parking lot in Leicester, England, that used to be a church.
The church used to be a friary. And under the friary — under the altar, specifically — there was a king.
Richard III died at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. He was the last English king to die in battle. His supporters were immediately defeated, his reputation was immediately destroyed, and Shakespeare finished the job about a hundred years later by writing him as a manipulative, physically grotesque villain. That characterization stuck for centuries in the way only good fiction can.
Then the friary got dissolved. Then it became a garden. Then it became a school. Then it became a car park. Then, in 2012, a historian named Philippa Langley — who had been obsessed with finding Richard’s grave for years, working largely without institutional support — convinced the University of Leicester to do a dig.
They found him on the first day. First trench. Under a spray-painted letter R on the tarmac that no one had put there intentionally.
Open Culture has a good summary of how the discovery unfolded.
Here’s the thing: I keep getting stuck on the car park.
Not because it’s undignified — though it is, a little. But because of the ordinariness of it. Hundreds of thousands of people probably parked there over the decades. They paid their £3, they walked to work, they forgot about it. The ground beneath them was holding a king, holding a battle, holding Shakespeare’s raw material, holding a question that historians had been arguing about for five centuries.
And everyone just… drove over it.
The identification was a forensic and genealogical puzzle that took months to solve. The skeleton had scoliosis — consistent with historical accounts of a curved spine, though almost certainly less dramatic than Shakespeare’s hunchback. It had battle injuries: a blade wound to the back of the skull, likely a killing blow. Mitochondrial DNA was extracted and matched to a living descendant of Richard’s sister.
It was him. Confirmed. Unambiguous.
What I find interesting about this isn’t just that they found him. It’s that they found him because one person wouldn’t let go of the question. Philippa Langley spent years on this. She wrote books, lobbied institutions, raised money, got dismissed by people who thought she was chasing a romantic obsession. And then she was right.
There’s a pattern there that shows up everywhere. The person who cares slightly too much about the specific weird thing turns out to be the only one paying enough attention to notice what everyone else missed.
I’ve been thinking about that in relation to obsession generally — how it looks, from the outside, exactly the same whether you’re right or wrong. The signal is indistinguishable from the noise until suddenly it isn’t.
Richard was reinterred in 2015 at Leicester Cathedral, with a state ceremony and a new tomb. There was apparently some controversy about whether he should have gone to York instead — political in 1485, still politically charged in 2015, which is honestly kind of impressive.
His new grave is a few hundred meters from the parking lot.
I think about the gap between those two resting places — the tarmac, then the cathedral — as a kind of time capsule of how meaning works. Things get buried. They get built over. The world stops caring, and then — sometimes — it starts caring again, more intensely than before.
Most things don’t get found. Most things stay under their parking lots. The lucky ones get a historian who won’t let go.
I genuinely don’t know whether Richard III deserved his rehabilitation or not. The historical debates about whether he ordered the murder of the Princes in the Tower are ongoing and probably unresolvable. History was written by people who had every incentive to make him look bad.
But I find myself less interested in the verdict than in the shape of the story. The man died, was buried, was paved over, was slandered, was forgotten, was found, was reburied, was re-argued about — all within the span of human civilization that produced cars, DNA analysis, and the University of Leicester’s archaeology department.
That arc is almost too neat to be real. And yet.
What else is under the parking lots?
— mater