Langley gazing at a reconstruction of Richard III's head and making everyone else in the room very uncomfortable. |
Maybe, but then Langley along with a team from the University of Leicester in England did successfully locate, exhume and identify the long-lost bones of Richard III. Show of hands any one who's ever found a medieval English King buried under a parking lot? No? Nobody? That's what I thought.
Pictured: People who are not us discovering a dead king under a parking lot. Advantage: them. |
Delicious? Colorful? I don't know, the metaphor doesn't really hold up... |
Now before you ask why the English keep paving over the remains of their rulers, I should explain that Henry I's was buried at Reading Abbey which was later destroyed in 1538 when Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church. Turns out the Pope wasn't cool with him divorcing his wife and marrying his younger, frencher mistress. Anyway, thanks to Chubs McFesterleg and his tantrum, no one knows for sure where Henry I's body is now.
Above: Henry VIII, King of England and proof that monarchy is, objectively speaking, ridiculous. Sorry British people, but it's true. |
"Decades of research and hard work? Nonsense, all you need is a shovel."
-Philippa Langley*
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No one that is except Philippa Langley, who's convinced that the remains of the Abbey and Henry I, now rest under a school (or possibly its parking lot) in modern day Reading, and is now backing a plan for a new dig. And I wish her well, I really do, but say they bring in the backhoe, start digging and immediately find Henry I, his jaw bone still clamped around the under-cooked lamprey that killed him (no really, that's how he died), will I be the only one who gets a little suspicious? I mean, career-making discoveries take decades of painstaking research and dedication, don't they?
I'm not trying to be a jerk here, but I just have this feeling that we're going to read about her someday having been pulled over for a broken tail light with her trunk full of bones and a shovel on her way to plant Æthelred the Unready behind a Tesco.
*not a real quote. Although I suppose she might have said something like that at some point, who knows? So sure, let's say it's a quote.
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