Amateur Historians Attempting To Establish King Harold II’s Actual Cause Of Death

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Having already discovered the remains of King Richard III under a car park in the East Midlands region of England, a team of archaeologists is now turning its attention to the fate of another monarch: King Harold II.
According to Ben Farmer of The Telegraph, the same research team that helped discover the remains of Britain’s last Plantagenet king in 2012 now plans to search the Waltham Abbey Church in Essex to find out whether or not Harold II was actually killed during the Battle of Hastings on October 14, 1066.
The account of Harold Godwinson’s death told in history books indicates that he was “wounded in the eye by a Norman arrow and then hacked down by four Norman knights” during a battle on that day, in what Farmer calls “a turning point of British history.” However, amateur historian Peter Burke and his Stratascan team said that there are alternate accounts of the monarch’s fate depicted in a 12th century document called Vita Haroldi.
Those stories, he added, indicate that King Harold may have not only survived the Battle of Hastings, but lived for another four decades as a hermit before dying of natural causes in his 80s, said Serina Sandhu of The Independent. The 64-year-old Burke, a stonemason and fiction writer by trade, noted that he is “absolutely convinced” he and his colleagues will find the king’s body – but even if he does, will it be the body of a young man or an older one?
Burke is funding the search for Harold with £2,000 (roughly $3,200) of his own money, Sandhu said, and officials with English Heritage have given permission for the project. His team will conduct their scans at a site near the east wall of the church’s burial grounds, in a region where there is believed to be some unusual markings. The site is approximately 15 yards away from the monarch’s reputed tomb at the High Altar, Sandhu added.
“I’m very hopeful we will find something,” Burke told The Independent. “I’ve always thought you should question things. You shouldn’t just take history at face value. [The Battle of Hastings] is one of the biggest events in English history. Whether it will go as far as rewriting history books, I suppose they’ll have to.”
“I am convinced Harold survived the Battle of Hastings,” he added, according to Jennifer Smith of the Daily Mail. “If we find the complete remains of an old man in his late 70’s with scarring to his temple from a battle wound then we need to do a DNA test. Our understanding of this particular period of English history would have to change.”
Reuters reports that the scans are scheduled to begin on Tuesday. If anything is detected, the survey team will have to petition the UK government for permission to excavate the site. However, members of the Waltham Abbey Historical Society believe it is unlikely that anything of interest will be discovered, explaining that the site has already been disturbed by construction multiple times over the years.
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