Richard III and the worms

History, they say, belongs to the victors and there is perhaps no single person who exemplifies that any better than King Richard III of England. Writing a century after Richard’s death at the battle of Bosworth Field Shakespeare used his eloquence to portray Richard as a hump-back with a withered arm and a limp. History also remembers Richard III as responsible for the murder of two young princes who blocked his claim to the throne. You have to remember of course that Shakespeare, for all of his talent, was writing for a Tudor queen (Elizabeth I) and Richard was defeated by Henry Tudor (Henry VII). The deformity attributed to Richard could be a result of Tudor “spin” on their vanquished opponents but now we have the opportunity to judge that because the remains of Richard III have been discovered beneath a car park in Leicester, England that was once the site of the Grey Friars church where Richard was buried. These remains have clarified just how deformed Richard III was and a new report has found indications that he had another health condition not mentioned by Shakespeare.

Richard was born in 1452 and was son to Richard, Duke of York. He grew up therefore fighting for the Yorkist side of the Wars of the Roses. In 1471 his brother Edward IV became king. When Edward died in April 1483, Richard was named as protector of the realm for Edward’s son and successor, the 12-year-old Edward V. As the new king travelled to London from Ludlow, Richard met him and escorted him to the capital, where he was lodged in the Tower of London. Edward V’s brother later joined him there. At that point a campaign was mounted condemning Edward IV\’s marriage to the boys’ mother, Elizabeth Woodville, as invalid claiming their children to be illegitimate. On 25 June, an assembly of lords and commoners endorsed these claims and Richard III became king. The two young princes disappeared in August and it was widely rumoured that Richard murdered his own nephews.

In August 1485, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who was a Lancastrian claimant to the throne living in France, landed in South Wales. He marched east and engaged Richard in battle on Bosworth Field in Leicestershire on 22 August. Although Richard possessed superior numbers, several of his key supporters defected. Refusing to flee, Richard was killed in battle and Henry Tudor took the throne as Henry VII. Richard’s body was reputedly taken naked on horseback before jeering crowds but he was allowed a hasty burial by the monks at Grey Friar’s church. That is where Richard III lay until 2012 when his remains were discovered as a car park was being dug up and those remains tell quite a tale.

For a start, it is true that his spine does show severe scoliosis (curvature). However, there is no evidence of a withered arm or a limp. The remains do show that his body suffered terrible injuries, probably most of them after death. What killed Richard though was that the base of his skull was sliced off by a blow, probably from a halberd, a medieval battle weapon with a razor-sharp iron axe blade weighing about two kilos, mounted on a wooden pole. The halberd seems to have been swung at Richard at very close range penetrating several centimetres into his brain so that he would have been unconscious at once and dead almost as soon. This fits with contemporary accounts that he died in the heat of battle and on foot, hence the famous lines attributed to Richard by Shakespeare, “A horse, a horse. My kingdom for a horse!”.

In the latest piece of analysis though we have an even more intimate insight into Richard. Although his death and deformed back are matters of history the new study shows us something of what Richard’s day to day life may have been like.

The new study involved examination of the soil around Richard’s pelvis as well as soil samples from his skull and the area surrounding his grave. The researchers passed the soil through a series of mesh sieves to remove excess clumps of dirt and studied the samples under a powerful microscope. They found multiple tiny, oval-shaped eggs with clear inner and outer walls in the soil samples taken from the region of the pelvis. These were identified as roundworm eggs. There were no eggs in the soil samples from the skull, and only one egg in the samples from outside the burial site. This strongly suggests that the round worm eggs came from Richard’s intestines and that he suffered with roundworm infection during his life.

Roundworms infect humans when they ingest food or water contaminated with faecal matter containing their eggs. The eggs hatch into larvae, which migrate to the lungs, where they mature. They then crawl up the airways to the throat to be swallowed back into the intestines, where they can grow into adults around a foot long. Roundworm infection spreads quickly in poor sanitary conditions such as those in medieval Europe. So what would Richard’s symptoms have been?

The symptoms of roundworm infection are often mild, but can lead to malnutrition in severe cases. At the mild end of the scale Richard may just have had a tickly cough as the worm crawled up his airways. He may also have suffered shortness of breath, abdominal pain, nausea, diarrhoea, blood in the stool, weight loss, and fatigue.

If a king could live this way, eating contaminated food and suffering as a result, it just goes to show what a brutal and unhygienic place the medieval world could be. With all Richard’s physical woes it was probably not just in winter that he would feel discontent.