Recently, archaeologists working at the Tower of London discovered the remains of two people, an adult woman age 35-45 and a child of about seven. Proper modern carbon dating has taken place and it is determined that the pair are from between 1450-1550. Osteological examination shows no signs of trauma on the bones, although the woman had spinal arthritis. Neither of them were particularly well-nourished and showed signs of having suffered illness during their lives.
I was most pleased to find out about this discovery, as it is another bit of proof that the Tower, a site occupied since before the Roman era, is full of human remains from a multitude of periods, and therefore identification of the ‘Bones in the Urn’ at Westminster as the ‘Princes in the Tower’ is extremely unsafe-in fact, highly unlikely. I have had circular arguments recently with certain hard-headed folk who still cannot believe that it is, in fact, VERY common to find pre-modern human skeletons anywhere in the U.K. (As example, the housing estate next to me is on a Roman cemetery which in turn overlies a Bronze Age one with burials stretching back over a period of 1000 years. There is a dead Beaker Era man still lying under the local tennis court!))
The new finds at the Tower not only are welcome because they show that burials within the bailey were common but because they also show that there was a substantial number of ordinary people who lived, worked and died (of natural causes) within the castle precinct.
Another frequent argument Denialists seems to occasionally put forth is that there were hardly any people living there in 1483, other than Richard and the Princes! Yes, folks, some people seriously believe no one lived in the Tower at all at that time, save wicked Uncle Richard, waving a set of jangling keys (the only set of course), as he slips past zombified guards to guide such improbable characters as ‘Black Will Slaughter’ to smother the Princes….
In fact, there was a household of some 150 people at the Tower in Richard’s day and a number of people with access to the various important areas, which makes the story of the Princes’ supposed burial even more silly–as there is no way a few men could dig a ten foot hole UNDER a staircase, deposit two bodies, block the shaft with stones and not have someone out of 150 people notice a thing!
Of course, no doubt there are some out there this very minute trying to work this new archaeological discovery into Richard’s story, doing mental gymnastics as to how they can find him responsible for these two new sets of remains! I can just imagine how it might go–Hmmm, let me see–do we really know what happened to “Jane Shore“? Could it be a cast-off mistress and child (one of the improbable seven proposed by Alison Weir)? Or is the child really one of the “Princes” (one of, oh, at least five so far.) Maybe Richard really killed Edward of Warwick too, making that nice Henry Tudor completely blameless in his murder! Maybe the woman is Queen Anne who he poisoned (hence the ill health) and he really dumped her here and never buried her in Westminster at all! Or, maybe the female is just another of Richard’s ‘many victims’ since he got the taste for blood at St Alban’s (aged 3) but one who had a sex change!
(OK, the last is completely and deliberately preposterous, even for a Denialist, but you get my drift.)
Heh, if I was of the same bent, maybe I would start putting it about that the child was poor Henry Pole the Younger, who was locked away in the Tower in 1538 and never seen again. He was of royal descent, being the grandson of Margaret Pole, daughter of George of Clarence, but for some reason he never gets as much, or rather, any sympathy, unlike the Princes with their maudlin Millais painting (one figure of which was modelled on a young girl–an interesting coincidence, as there is, in fact, some fairly compelling evidence that one of the sets of the Bones in the Urn DOES have female characteristics. But only DNA testing can tell the sex of juveniles for certain, and it is unlikely we’ll ever get to test those bones; a great pity as the MTDNA line from Elizabeth Woodville was finally traced by the late John Ashdown-Hill.)
Of course, Henry Pole the Younger was not seven when he vanished, he was a teenager, so the newly-discovered child is not him (and one article says the new juvenile may be female too), but believing these bones to be Henry’s would only be slightly more ludicrous than wholeheartedly believing that undated, unsexed remains from under a stone stair, ten feet down into the Roman layer, near several graveyards, mixed with animal bones, with no verification as to exactly where/how they were found since they were discovered in the reign of Charles II, are Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury.
Two articles on the latest finds are below:
murreyandblue 
Well, Hoodman1, just my sort of post, thank you! I greedily red both of the linked articles but your observations were more engaging and pertinent (if a journalist covers this sort of topic wouldn’t you expect them to be somewhat curious, even fascinated by these discoveries and the Pandora’s Box they open? Ignore my griping, I’m grateful that you remember poor Henry Pole! Another possibility for the child, should it be determined to be male, is the son that Warbeck had with his wife Lady Katherine Gordon, who disappeared upon his surrender (along with his wife’s surrender) to Mr Charm in 1497. Even with her copious notes Ann Wroe doesn’t have any leads as to what happened to this baby son – presumably he was left ‘safe and sound’ with Mother Beaufort.
Sarcasm aside, what really struck me was the some 1700 bodies found in 1876 when they attempted to shore up the unstable Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula – many no doubt the remains of the executed but also Tower ’employees’ as the curator mentions (my goodness, just on the face of it that sounds improbable, those positions in the Tower were determined by the King, they were not trivial appointments!) – anyway, to your point, the Tower would appear to be littered with remains, in varying layers, and were it possible to peel back those layers without damaging a world historic site imagine what else they would find.
Thanks for the articles!
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