East Midlands

Bosworth was the last battle where a king of England died fighting.

The death of Richard III brought to an end three hundred years of Plantagenet rule and ushered in the Tudor dynasty.

A thousand men died in the battle

Since the early 1970s the accepted view has been that the battle was fought on Ambion Hill near the village of Sutton Cheney.

Leicestershire County Council even opened a visitors’ centre and a tourist trail there.

In 1985 The Prince and Princess of Wales took part in ceremonies marking the battle’s five hundredth anniversary.

But now Inside Out East Midlands can reveal they were in the wrong place.

Inside Out has spent time with the Battlefields Trust which has been trying to discover the real site of the battle of Bosworth.

Trawling historical documents

The Trust’s work involved taking soil samples, metal detecting and a detailed trawl of historic documents.

In the process they ruled out a recent theory that the battle happened near the town of Atherstone over the Warwickshire border.

That’s because they know dead from the battle were buried in the churchyard at the village of Dadlington, and in the fifteenth century the dead were not moved far to places of burial.

The interpretation which seems to bring us closest to the true Bosworth battlefield was first put forward by a local historian, Peter Foss, in the 1980s.

He said that the key to locating the exact site was finding the edge of a marsh which is known to have been a key element to the way the battle was fought.

Find the marsh and the battle can be pinpointed.

Could this be the edge of the marsh?

Inside Out’s camera was there with the diggers and the landowner as they discovered the edge of the marsh.

It’s in a field roughly a mile away from the traditional site – a field where there were once plans to build a race track.

But the historians are still not satisfied. 

They were expecting to find artefacts from the battle - small items of clothing and armour fittings such as buckles and strap ends.

But so far they’ve not unearthed a great deal.

For a battle in which seventeen thousand fought and a thousand died – that’s a mystery.

Meanwhile the visitors centre has been rebranded the Heritage Centre and had nearly a million pounds of new investment.

Staff there have embraced the new research and point out it’s actually good that the re-enactments which take place on the hillside aren’t on the real battlefield because they would destroy the archaeology.