Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
A coffin-within-a-coffin discovered close to the remains of King Richard III contained an elderly woman who may have been an early church benefactor, archaeologists have announced.
The lead coffin was found within a stone sarcophagus at the site of the former Grey Friars church in Leicester, England, and according to BBC News, it was initially believed to have belonged to a knight or the head of the religious order. However, researchers have now revealed that the body was a female who might have died as much as a century before Richard III.
Feet sticking out the bottom
As Discovery News reported on Sunday, the coffin featured an inlaid crucifix which had been carefully soldered on all sides but had feet sticking out of the bottom. It was discovered inside of a larger, limestone sarcophagus in August 2013 – one year after the battle-scarred remains of the last member of the Plantagenet line of kinds were unearthed in a Leicester parking lot.
Radiocarbon dating suggests that the woman entombed in the lead casket could have died as late as 1400, although experts believe it is more likely that she was buried in the last half of the 13th century, the website said. Her sarcophagus was the first medieval stone coffin found intact under the former Franciscan friary, and was one of nine other burial sites located there.
Girls, girls, girls
In addition to Richard III’s grave, three other grave sites were excavated, and all of them turned out to belong to women, BBC News added. The woman’s stone casket was found in a prominent position within the church, possibly near the high altar and typically reserved for wealthy donors. The other two coffins were both wooden and found in the same area as the king, the choir.
The friary was built around 1250 and demolished in 1538 during King Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries, Discovery News said, and while it King Richard was the only male identified at the burial site, the archaeologists point out that there may be hundreds of other graves located elsewhere inside the church, in other nearby buildings and outside in the cemetery.
“Richard III would certainly not have been the only male buried here during the friary’s 300-year history and historic records list at least three other men buried in the church,” dig leader Matthew Morris told BBC News.
“What stands out more is the contrast between the care and attention taken with these burials – large, neatly dug graves with coffins – and the crudeness of Richard III’s grave,” he added. “The more we examine it, the clearer it becomes how atypical Richard III’s burial really was.”
They’re so working class
He and his colleagues also revealed that the diets of the women, which included a variety of expensive foods such as sea fish, meat, and game, indicate that they were relatively wealthy. However, they also showed signs of having participated in hard physical labor, suggesting that they were most likely middle-class Leicester residents.
“It is interesting then that she is buried in an area of the church which would have typically been reserved for wealthy benefactors and people of elevated social status,” Morris said. “[This] might suggest that the friary’s main source of donations came from the town’s middle classes, merchants and tradespeople, who were probably of more modest means and worked for a living.”
[VIDEO: Discovering Richard III’s death blow]
Prior to the discovery of the woman, the archaeologists predicted that the grave may have belonged to one of two former leaders of the English Grey Friars order: either Peter Swynsfeld, who died in 1272, and William of Nottingham, who died in 1330.
“We speculated that this grave might be for one of them,” Morris told Discovery News. “To find that it contained a woman was intriguing and to some extent frustrating for we know much less about the women associated with the friary than the men.”
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