Or, rather, a parking lot was paved over the remains of King Richard III.
âFound under a parking lotâ would be a bit more accurate than "buried in a parking lot"as the parking lot post dates the the burial by several hundred years.
Honestly, Britain canât be expected to keep track of all its famous dead people. You can put a plaque up or something, but it takes more than playing a leading part in the Middle Ages and being immortalised in Shakespeare plays to get your own bit of land after you die. I recently passed John Harvardâs parentsâ place in London. He may have a university named after him in the US, but he just owned a pub in London . There just isnât the space for that kind of sentimentality.
And to think all he did to get Harvard College named after him was donate a few trunks of books. The average resident of Cambridge, Mass, USA does that every 4 years.
Even with a population just over 100k, that is a huge number of books.
'Donât it always seem to go,
That you donât know what youâve got 'til itâs gone,
They paved (the last) Plantagenet,
And put in a parking lot.â
âŚIâll just show myself out.
Exactly what I was thinking. If it were as in the headline, that would indeed be a super awesome story. But he was buried in a field that became a car park 500 years later. Not quite as awesome.
Was there a horse with him? And a receipt for a kingdom?
Change the headline from âburiedâ to âfoundâ, and youâve lost none of the irony, and it becomes much more accurate.
What I find suprising is that when they âtracked downâ Greyfriars Church, it was on Grey Friars Street. Whouldathunkit?
Given the houses Iâve seen which are not on the street given in their address (not uncommon in older neighbourhoods), it wasnât a foregone conclusion, either.
Just before coming here, to see this article, I read an article about the parentage connections, and was filled with phrases like this one:
âAlthough it is impossible to say when the affair happened, if it occurred around the time of Edward III (1312- 1377) it could call into question whether kings like Henry VI, Henry VII and Henry VIII had royal blood, and therefore the right to rule.â
I boggle at the thought that anyone in this day and age seriously believes anybody has any right to rule based on their parentage.
I mean, I suspect some of these people are using the terms loosely to mean something like âunder the legal strictures that were in place at the time he should not have been king,â but there was an air of earnestness about the whole thing that bothers me.
(Related, lately, now whenever I watch a movie or something where the plot is the ârightful heirâ is deposed and needs to be returned to the throne, I canât bring myself to sympathize too much with the protagonists⌠I mean, sure, if the current ruler is an oppressive douche, get rid of him, but I donât see any good reason YOU need to be in place there. What the hell is wrong with you, why arenât you starting a democracy already? Thatâs what I want from my Disney movies these days, the princess realizing, âUh, isnât it kind of unfair that I live in wealth and luxury and get to make life and death decisions over all these people who are struggling to get by, based solely on who my parents are? Letâs change this system.â)
Iâve got nothing against the current Royal Family of England, they make a fine tourist attraction and cultural landmark, but theyâre no more inherently important than, say, Doctor Who, or the apparent current American Royal Family equivalent, the Cardassians (however you spell it, I canât be bothered to look it up). (I want to note that I do not want to indicate that I was comparing the overall classiness and respective quality of these examples⌠clearly, Doctor Who is best, followed by the British Royals, followed by the US reality TV stars⌠but in terms of inherent meaning and imporantness, theyâre pretty much the same⌠with Doctor Who having a slight edge).
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