Richard bloom

LEICESTER, England — Until it was discovered beneath a city parking lot last fall, the skeleton had lain unmarked, and unmourned, for more than 500 years. Friars fearful of the men who slew him in battle buried the man in haste, naked and anonymous, without a winding sheet, rings or personal adornments of any kind, in a space so cramped his cloven skull was jammed upright and askew against the head of his shallow grave.

On Monday, confirming what many historians and archaeologists had suspected, a team of experts at the University of Leicester concluded on the basis of DNA and other evidence that the skeletal remains were those of King Richard III, for centuries the most reviled of English monarchs. But the conclusion, said to have been reached “beyond any reasonable doubt,” promised to achieve much more than an end to the oblivion that has been Richard’s fate since his death on Aug. 22, 1485, at the Battle of Bosworth Field, 20 miles from this ancient city in the sheep country of England’s East Midlands.

Among those who found his remains , there is a passionate belief that new attention drawn to Richard by the discovery will inspire a reappraisal that could rehabilitate the medieval king and show him to be a man with a strong sympathy for the rights of the common man, who was deeply wronged by his vengeful Tudor successors. Far from the villainous character memorialized in English histories, films and novels, far from Shakespeare’s damning representation of him as the limping, withered, haunted murderer of his two princely nephews, Richard III can become the subject of a new age of scholarship and popular reappraisal, these enthusiasts believe.

“I think he wanted to be found, he was ready to be found, and we found him, and now we can begin to tell the true story of who he was,” said Philippa Langley, a writer who has been a longtime and fervent member of the Richard III Society , an organization that has worked for decades to bring what it sees as justice to an unjustly vilified man. “Now,” Ms. Langley added, “we can rebury him with honor, and we can rebury him as a king.”

Other members of the team at the University of Leicester pointed to Ms. Langley as the inspiration behind the project, responsible for raising much of the estimated $250,000 — with major contributions from unnamed Americans — it cost to carry out the exhumation and the research that led to confirmation that indeed Richard had been found.

Ms. Langley’s account was that her research for a play about the king had led her to a hunch that Richard’s body would be found beneath the parking lot, in a corner of the buried ruins of the Greyfriars Priory, where John Rouse, a medieval historian writing in Latin within a few years after Richard’s death, had recorded him as having been buried. Other unverified accounts said the king’s body had been thrown by a mob into the River Soar, a mile or more from the priory.

Richard Taylor, the University of Leicester official who served as a coordinator for the project, said the last piece of the scientific puzzle fell into place with DNA findings that became available on Sunday, five months after the skeletal remains were uncovered. At that point, he said, members of the team knew that they had achieved something historic.

“We knew then, beyond reasonable doubt, that this was Richard III,” Mr. Taylor said. “We’re certain now, as certain as you can be of anything in life.”

The team’s leading geneticist, Turi King, said at a news conference that DNA samples from two modern-day descendants of Richard III’s family had provided a match with samples taken from the skeleton found in the priory ruins. Kevin Schurer, a historian and demographer, tracked down two living descendants of Anne of York, Richard III’s sister, one of them a London-based, Canadian-born furniture maker, Michael Ibsen, 55, and the other a second cousin of Mr. Ibsen’s who has requested anonymity.

Dr. King said tests conducted at three laboratories in England and France had found that the descendants’ mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element inherited through the maternal line of descent, matched that extracted from the parking lot skeleton. She said all three samples belonged to a type of mitochondrial DNA that is carried by only 1 to 2 percent of the English population, a rare enough group to satisfy the project team, pending more work on the samples, that a match had been found.

When she studied the results for the first time, she said, she “went very quiet, then did a little dance around the laboratory.”

Even before the DNA findings came in, team members said, evidence pointed conclusively at the remains as being those of the king. These included confirmation that the body was that of a slight, slender man in his late 20s or early 30s — Richard was 32 at his death — and an analysis of his bones that showed that his high-protein diet had been rich in meat and marine fish, characteristic of a privileged life in the 15th century.

Also strongly indicative, they said, was the radiocarbon dating of two rib bones that showed that they were those of somebody who died between 1455 and 1540. In addition, team members said, the remains showed an array of injuries consistent with historical accounts of the fatal blows Richard III suffered on the battlefield, and other blows he was likely to have sustained after death from vengeful soldiers of the army of Henry Tudor, the Bosworth victor, who succeeded Richard as King Henry VII.

The fatal wound, researchers said, was almost certainly a large skull fracture behind the left ear that was consistent with a crushing blow from a halberd, a medieval weapon with an axlike head on a long pole — the kind of blow that was described by some who witnessed Richard’s death. The team also identified nine other wounds, including what appeared to be dagger blows to the cheek, jaw and lower back, possibly inflicted after death.

But perhaps the most conclusive evidence from the skeletal remains was the deep curvature of the upper spine that the research team said showed the remains to be those of a sufferer of a form of scoliosis, a disease that causes the hunchback appearance, with a raised right shoulder, that was represented in Shakespeare’s play as Richard III’s most pronounced and unappealing feature.

The sense of an important historical watershed was underscored when reporters were escorted to a viewing of the skeletal remains, laid out in a locked room in the university’s library, lying on a black velvet cushion inside a glass case. Two members of the university’s chaplaincy’s staff, one of them in the black-and-red robes of a Roman Catholic priest, sat beside the remains as reporters filed silently by, cautioned by university staff to behave with the “dignity” owed to a king.

Members of the Richard III Society have said in the past that they believed he should be reburied, once found, alongside other British monarchs in Westminster Abbey in London, the traditional venue for most royal weddings and burials. But in Leicester, officials said that plans were in hand to bury the bones early next year in the city’s Anglican cathedral, barely 200 yards from where the skeleton was found, with a visitors’ center dedicated to Richard to be opened in the cathedral grounds at the same time.

LEICESTER, England — For more than 500 years, King Richard III has been the most widely reviled of English monarchs. But a stunning archaeological find this month here in the English Midlands — a skeleton that medieval scholars believe is very likely to be Richard’s — could lead to a reassessment of his brief but violent reign.

If 12 weeks of DNA and isotope testing confirm that the remains found amid the ruins of an ancient priory are the 15th century king’s, those who believe that Richard has been the victim of a campaign of denigration — begun by the Tudor monarchs who succeeded him and deeply entrenched over the centuries in British popular consciousness — hope the renewed attention will spur scholarship that will correct the injustice they say has been done to his reputation.

It is a debate that has raged with varying intensity since at least the late 18th century. And at its heart is this: Was Richard the villain his detractors expediently made him out to be, or was he, as supporters contend, a goodly king, harsh in ways that were a function of an unforgiving time, but the author of groundbreaking measures to help the poor, extend protections to suspected felons and ease bans on the printing and selling of books?

The version that has prevailed since his death, initially nurtured by the Tudors to entrench their legitimacy, has cast Richard’s 26 months on the throne as one of England’s grimmest periods, its excesses captured in his alleged role in the murder in the Tower of London of two young princes — his own nephews — to rid himself of potential rivals.

In Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” and in movies shaped by it, he is depicted as an evil, scheming hunchback whose death at 32 ended the War of the Roses and more than three centuries of Plantagenet rule, bookended England’s Middle Ages, and proved a prelude to the triumphs of the Tudors and Elizabethans.

Even Richard’s burial place was left uncertain, an ignominy deemed fitting by Tudor successors whose dominion was secured when Richard was killed — poleaxed, according to witnesses — at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, then bound, naked, to a horse for two days of public display in Leicester, about 100 miles north of London.

Over the next century, the foundations of the modern British state were laid by Henry VIII, son of the Bosworth victor Henry VII, and by Henry VIII’s daughter, Elizabeth I, and it was during their reigns that Richard’s wretched place in history was set by chroniclers loyal to the new rulers.

It was there that things stood, more or less, until three weeks ago, when a University of Leicester archaeologist working in a trench cut into a parking lot uncovered what could turn out to be one of the most remarkable finds in modern British archaeology. Judging from the clamor that has met the discovery in Britain, it may lead to demands for Richard to be buried, like other British kings, in a place of honor like Westminster Abbey.

The archaeologist, Jo Appleby , noted signature characteristics that pointed strongly to Richard: a deformed spine, what she has described as a mortal battlefield wound in the back of the skull from a bladed instrument and a barbed metal arrowhead found between two upper vertebrae.

The remains were buried in the choir, an area of the priory church where Franciscan monks would have sat during ceremonies, close to the altar. It was in the choir that one of the most credible contemporary accounts said Richard had been interred.

But that pointer proved moot when Henry VIII seized and ransacked the monasteries in 1538, leaving priories like Greyfriars to crumble into rubble, to the point where centuries later, nobody had any precise fix as to where they once stood.

That left the archaeologists to determine, using ground-penetrating radar, where the priory had been. Their big break came when it proved to be not under a 19th-century bank building where local legend and scholarship had placed it, but under the more accessible parking lot across the street.

Within days of starting the dig they had located the remains, which Dr. Appleby and her colleagues later painstakingly transferred to a laboratory in Leicester that the partners in the dig — the university, city authorities, and the Richard III Society , dedicated to revising history’s verdict on the king — have declined to name.

Much now depends on the laboratory investigation, especially the DNA tests on genetic material from the remains that will be compared with swab tests from Michael Ibsen, a cabinet maker living in London, whose mother was a 16th-generation niece of King Richard’s. Other tests will involve carbon dating to fix the age of the bones and the arrowhead, and isotope analysis, which can determine where an individual lived in his early years. In Richard’s case, that would be Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, not far from Leicester.

Those involved in the Leicester dig say that the scientific tests, like much about the venture, are a “long shot.” DNA testing, they say, can be voided by genetic mutations that have occurred over generations. For that and other reasons, they say, a negative DNA finding will not prove, definitively, that the bones are not Richard’s.

Mathew Morris, an archaeologist who was working with Dr. Appleby when the skeleton was found, was cautious about the discovery: “All the archaeology and the lab testing can tell us is, if it is Richard, is that he had a spinal deformity, the nature of the injuries from which he died in battle and the respect shown to him in the place and manner in which he was buried. It can’t tell us anything about Richard the man. But what it may do is to reignite the debate about whether he was a villain or not.”

Experts involved in the dig have reached some tentative conclusions. Lin Foxhall, the chairwoman of Leicester University’s archaeological services department, said preliminary diagnosis of the curved spine pointed to a condition known as scoliosis, which often causes one shoulder to be raised higher than the other — exactly how contemporary accounts described Richard.

“It doesn’t fit with Tudor sources which portray Richard as a wicked hunchback,” Dr. Foxhall said at a news conference to announce the find. “There was a long history from Greco-Roman times onward of associating physical disability like spinal deformations with negative character traits, a belief that we explicitly do not share today.

“But it does partially explain the Tudor representation of Richard III. The individual we have discovered was obviously strong and active despite his disability. If this individual does indeed turn out to be Richard III, this has the potential for a new and different understanding of the last of the Plantagenet kings.”

Philippa Langley, a screenwriter in Edinburgh who led the Richard III Society’s efforts in pushing for the dig, said she expected that if the remains are proved to be the king’s, it will prompt new scholarship discrediting Shakespeare’s representation of him as “an evil man all the way through, with no redeeming features whatsoever.”

“The truth will turn out to be somewhere in between,” Ms. Langley said. “Richard III was a medieval man, and a medieval king; he was a man of his time. But what we know of him doesn’t stack up to his being a brutal man and a serial killer. Now, perhaps, we can finally get to the real Richard, to the truth that lies behind the Tudor lies.”