Richard III's grave was lost forever
The old claim turned out to be wrong and was rejected by evidence.
TaughtAfter Bosworth Field in 1485, Richard III was buried at Greyfriars in Leicester, but the friary was destroyed at the Dissolution and his bones were thrown into the River Soar. The grave was gone for good.
NowHe was under a council car park. Excavation in 2012 found a skeleton in the choir of Greyfriars, and in February 2013 the University of Leicester confirmed it as Richard III through radiocarbon dating, battle wounds, scoliosis, and mitochondrial DNA matched to living descendants.
What actually happened
The river story came from a seventeenth-century account and was repeated for centuries. The Looking For Richard project, driven substantially by Philippa Langley of the Richard III Society, argued the remains had probably never been moved and mapped the likely footprint of the friary onto modern Leicester. The dig began in August 2012, and the skeleton turned up in the first trench, on the first day.
The identification was unusually thorough. Radiocarbon dating placed the death in the right window. The skeleton had severe scoliosis, matching contemporary descriptions of uneven shoulders, and refuting the Shakespearean hunchback with a withered arm. There were eleven wounds, nine to the head, consistent with losing his helmet in close combat. Mitochondrial DNA matched two matrilineal descendants of his sister Anne of York.
The genome also produced an awkward result: the Y-chromosome line did not match supposed male-line relatives, indicating a false-paternity event somewhere in the intervening generations. He was reburied in Leicester Cathedral in March 2015. Anyone who sat through this in school before 2013 was taught a mystery that has since been solved by a parking lot.
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Who was taught this
Still standard through 2012, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2013 learned the earlier version.