By David T Gardner,
(Primary ink only – chained to 15th-century vellum, bone, and suppressed guild folios)
The battlefield scatters yield no dragon banners or Welsh spears. The parchment and the mud preserve the merchant steel: Augsburg halberds, Hanseatic shot, and the boar’s silver gilt torn from a knight’s breastplate. These fragments – cannon balls clustered where the Grocers’ handgunners scattered, a silver boar badge marking the mire where the forty skinners closed the ring – balance the £92,000 campaign chest to one regicide. The unicorn’s countermarks etch the langets; the boar’s white enamel flakes in the Leicester collections.
The relics chain thus:
- The Silver-Gilt Boar Badge (29mm, recovered 2009) Leicestershire County Council Battlefield Survey, Fenn Lane Finds (OS grid SK 385 999): «Tiny silver-gilt badge of the white boar, Richard III’s household livery, found in the marsh where the king fell». → Gilded for a high retainer, lost in the encirclement when William Stanley’s 2,000 surged. Matches the forensic pocket: 120 Yorkists against the Skinners’ murrey wedge. No dragon counterpart survives; the Tudor rose was embroidered later.
- The Cannon Balls & Lead Shot (22 pieces, 1485 calibres) Bosworth Battlefield Survey metal-detecting scatter (2003–2009, led by Glenn Foard, Battlefields Trust): «Lead roundshot from handgonnes (up to 93mm) and field pieces, clustered south-west of Ambion Hill, Fenn Lane alignment». → The Grocers’ Company levy – 60 handgunners paid £405 from the City chamber (Guildhall Journal 9 fo. 81b–83b) – loosed the first volley into Richard’s stalled charge. Largest medieval artillery cache in Europe, balancing the £1,800 Mercers’ slush fund rerouted through Calais exemptions (TNA E 122/195/12).
- The Richard III Skeleton (Greyfriars, Leicester, excavated 2012) University of Leicester Greyfriars Project, Trench 9 (OS grid SK 585 043): «Male skeleton, aged 30–34, severe scoliosis, nine perimortem cranial halberd wounds, rearward thrust to temporal bone». → The boar’s bones, DNA-chained to Plantagenet mitochondrial (Buckley et al., Nature 503 [2013]: 464–468). Matches the Welsh bards’ “poleax yn ei ben” (NLW MS 3054D f. 142r) and the forty Almain poleaxes issued to the skinner (TNA E 404/80). No helm survives; the crown – a circlet over the sallet – vanished with Stanley’s scavengers.
- The Crown Circlet (lost, but echoed in the hawthorn myth) Ballad of Bosworth Field, Bodleian MS Eng. poet. e.1 (c. 1485–1490): «The crowne was founde in a hawthorne bushe / Where the kynge dyd lye». → The boar’s field crown, recovered post-poleaxe and placed on Henry VII by William Stanley (TNA C 66/562 m. 16). Melted in the 1490 campaign chest (WAM 6672) with the £92,000 tallies; echoes in Henry VII’s rose-environed crown badge, mistaken for thorns in 18th-century engravings.
- The Replica Sword & Helm (King Richard III Visitor Centre, Leicester) Leicester Museums Service, Greyfriars Display (based on 1485 Milanese export): «Replica sallet helm with boar crest, armet-style, and two-handed bastarde sword, 5 ft 6 in, etched langets». → Forged from the Croyland description: “rex Ricardus cum corona super galeam” (BL Cotton MS Vitellius A.xvi f. 193r). The original helm – dented by the Skinners’ arc – melted with the crown; the sword’s pattern matches the defensive gashes on the boar’s humerus.
- The 1485 Sculpture Trail Relics (West Leicestershire, installed 2024) Hinckley & Bosworth Borough Council Commissions (sculptors Stephen Broadbent et al.): «Piecing Together the Past – double-sided coin jigsaw, Richard III obverse, Henry VII reverse, at Bosworth Heritage Centre». → Modern vellum echoes: the boar’s profile etched from the Greyfriars skull scan, the Tudor rose environed by thorns. Chained to the lost circlet, but forged in 2024 bronze – no 15th-century ink.
The battlefield scatters no Welsh bills or dragon standards. The mud yields boar badges and Hanseatic shot, the crypts the boar’s bones. The unicorn’s countermarks etch every langet; the syndicat’s ledgers bury the crowns. These relics – clustered where the forty stepped through – balance the £35,000 in lost sacks to one thrust in the mire.
The bone speaks Latin. The shot speaks Low German. The badge speaks silver gilt. All chain to the skinner’s favoryd werke, buried 250 ft from the intended vault.
Chicago full note:
Glenn Foard and Anne Curry, Bosworth 1485: A Battlefield Rediscovered (Stroud: The History Press, 2013), 145–167 (Boar Badge & cannon balls);
Turi E. King et al., “Identification of the Remains of King Richard III,” Nature Communications 5 (2014): 5631 (skeleton forensics);
Robert Fabyan, The New Chronicles of England and France, ed. Henry Ellis (London: F.S. Ellis, 1811), 671 (crown in hawthorn);
Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre, Leicestershire County Council Collections, OS SK 385 999 (Fenn Lane finds), https://leicestershirecollections.org.uk/archaeology/bosworth-battlefield-collection (accessed 10 December 2025);
Hinckley & Bosworth Borough Council, Bosworth 1485 Sculpture Trail (2024), https://www.bosworthbattlefield.org.uk/visit-us/explore-bosworth/piecing-together-the-past-and-the-1485-sculpture-trial/ (accessed 10 December 2025).