An English History, With Sea Monsters

After Richard III, last of the Plantagenets, was slain at Bosworth Field in 1485, his body was said to have been taken to the church of Grey­friars in Leicester, but after that nothing reliable is heard about what became of it. “He is the only English king, after the time of the Normans, who has never been placed within a royal tomb,” Peter Ackroyd writes in “Foundation,” his rambling, affectionate new history of the remote English past. In September, archaeologists from the University of Leicester dug up a parking lot at the long-razed Grey­friars site and found, well preserved as if by a carefully wrapped shroud, the bones of a man whose skull had been hacked open and whose spine was curved, as Richard’s was said to have been. Sensation ensued among ordinary Britons, who flocked to comment on online forums and thronged the excavation site.