Although Richard III was five foot eight, his spine was so twisted he stood a foot shorter. Imagine him hacking his way towards Henry Tudor at the battle of Bosworth; a furious human pretzel, ‘small in body and feeble of limb’, as a contemporary noted, he cut his way towards his rival ‘until his last breath’.
Earlier this year, five million people watched the Channel 4 programme The King Under the Car Park which first revealed that Richard really did have slight bones, and one shoulder higher than the other, as the earliest sources had always claimed. It caught the national imagination with the details of the injuries he suffered at Bosworth bringing the violence of the battle to life. Chris Skidmore’s Bosworth could scarcely have been published at a better moment, and it is just the right book for all those whose interest has been piqued by the archaeology.
For admirers of Richard III, including all those who were convinced that tales of his twisted spine was Tudor propaganda, there is little comfort in Skidmore’s narrative.
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