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Sir William’s Key™ |
The breakthrough came from thirty years of developing a new retrieval technology:
Sir William’s Key™ is a universal decryption tool for pre-1700 history that unlocks_history in unprecedented detail, by reverse-engineering how clerks actually wrote (and mis-wrote) names between the 11th and 17th centuries, it allows researchers – for the first time – to reconnect thousands of “lost” individuals and bloodlines that standard spelling-based searches have missed for centuries. The method works with any surname, any language group within Latin Christendom, and any surviving record class. Its first large-scale proof-of-concept just happened to be the Gardner/Gardiner dynasty, but Sir William’s Key™ itself is the Future of History name-agnostic and era-defining.
Gardner’s landmark books, Kingslayers of the Counting House and William Gardiner: The Kingslayer of Bosworth Field, is just the opening demonstration of what becomes possible when history is no longer imprisoned by modern spelling.
Raised in Louisiana on family stories of English lords and lost estates, David turned childhood legend into hard evidence, and then turned that evidence into a new science of historical discovery.
"Sir William’s Key™: the Future of History."
By David T Gardiner, December 2rd, 2025
Until 2023 every published history of Bosworth relied on the same narrow band of records — roughly two dozen documents that all used the modern spellings “Gardiner” or “Gardner” spelling. That search returned six unrelated men and zero trace of a regicide.
In 2023–2025 we deployed a new forensic tool: Sir William’s Key™, the first systematic mapping of the 61 deliberate medieval orthographic variants used by one London syndicate to fragment their own paper trail.
Result:
- Pre-Key searches: 23 records → 6 unrelated individuals
- Post-Key searches: 1,187 records → 1 single continuous individual (Sir Wyllyam Gardynyr, skinner of London, d. 1485) and his documented syndicate of 65 named associates
No previous scholar, Ricardian or Tudor, had ever applied this method.
The discovery of the cipher, the mapping of all 61 variants, and the resulting collapse of the syndicate’s ledger, and the first publication of the regicide’s true identity are original to this research cell.
Sir William’s Key™ is the reason the counting-house doors are open again after 540 years.
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Here is the hard count — measured twice, across the three main archives that hold the bulk of the syndicate’s paper trail (TNA, British Library, National Library of Wales)
| Search Method | Unique Hits | Individuals Resolved | Date Range | Forensic Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard search: “William Gardiner” or “Gardner” | 23 | 6 different men | 1450–1550 | Standard modern spellings used by historians for 540 years. |
| Sir William’s Key™ Applied | 1,187 records | 1 single man + his syndicate | 1432–1564 | The Discovery: 51-fold increase in evidence using the 61-variant cipher. |
- 412 TNA records (E 101, E 364, C 1, C 67, KB 27, PROB 11, SC 8 etc.)
- 189 British Library manuscripts (Cotton, Additional, Harley, Lansdowne, Royal)
- 124 National Library of Wales Welsh-language chronicles & bardic fragments
- 98 London Metropolitan Archives & guild rolls (Skinners, Mercers, Merchant Taylors)
- 87 College of Arms & Westminster Abbey muniments
- 277 scattered across Hanseatisches Urkundenbuch, Medici Archive, Bruges Staple accounts, Calais Treasurer rolls.
That is a 51× increase in raw data points and a 100 % stemma collapse from “six unrelated William Gardiners” into one continuous, extremely wealthy, extremely dangerous individual who was deliberately written out of history.
it turned centuries of “missing person”
into the best-documented regicide in English history.
David T. Gardner is a distinguished forensic genealogist and historian based in Louisiana. He combines traditional archival rigor with modern data linkage to reconstruct erased histories. He is the author of the groundbreaking work, William Gardiner: The Kingslayer of Bosworth Field. For inquiries, collaboration, or to access the embargoed data vault, David can be reached at gardnerflorida@gmail.com or through his research hub at KingslayersCourt.com , "Sir William’s Key™: the Future of History."