Forbidden History - The King’s Chapel Mystery

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

In this episode, archaeologist Tim Sutherland leads the search for King Richard III’s long-lost chapel at Towton, North Yorkshire. Through the study of skeletons, with traces of vanished architecture, he uncovers clues that may reveal the hidden story of this medieval sanctuary. Go to ⁠nakedwines.co.uk/forbidden⁠ to get a £30 voucher and 6 top-rated wines for just £39.99, with delivery included. Cast List: Tim Sutherland: Archaeologist, University of York Simon Richardson: Metal Detectorist Malin Holst: Osteoarcheologist, University of York Anthony Massington: Buildings Archaeologist Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. We're an independent podcast, and advertisements help keep us going. Ads are automatically placed and not specifically chosen or endorsed by us unless read by me the host. Thanks for supporting the show. A frost-bitten moor in Northern England. The year is 1461, and the Battle of Toulton has begun. Through the swirling snow, men will fight and bleed and bleed and don't. die in one of the most brutal days in the history of Britain. A team of archaeologists has spent years finding out what happened to the victims of this terrible day. Shiverary certainly didn't exist. A battlefield is like a multiple murder scene.

Now they're attempting to discover how King Richard III himself honored the fallen. That indicates that it's absolutely of that time. And see what remains of the chapel he created in tribute to the men who died for the House of York in the Wars of the Roses. So followed a day of much slaying between the two sides. And for a long time, no one knew to which side to give the victory. So furious was the battle, and so great the killing, wrote a contemporary 15th century chronicler. The Battle of Toughton on Palm Sunday, 29th of March, 1461, was one of the largest ever fought on English soil, and almost certainly the bloodiest. It left a scar that took generations to heal.

The legend of Toughton is left to us by the chroniclers. Some 60,000 men from the rival houses of York and Lancaster fought there. It was the culmination of years of dynastic conflict for the English throne, known as the Wars of the Roses. The bitter hand-to-hand fighting lasted hours in freezing conditions until the Yorkists won a crushing victory. As night fell, 28,000 men lay dead or dying. When almost five centuries later, the remains of some of the dead were discovered in the Yorkshire soil, It was clear just how terrible that day in March 1461 had been. I think the only time I've ever imagined what it was really like in the medieval world

was when I found that masquerade full of soldiers. And it was so obvious, it was so apparent how much these people had suffered, that as I was literally trawling away at these people, you just could not help but thinking, good grief these people suffered so much. That was not a good way to die. The victory at Tauton brought Edward IV to the throne and ensured Yorkist dominance for many years.

Until the wheel turned once more and the dynasty was brought to an end in 1485 with the defeat of Edward's brother and successor, Richard III. Whatever else the reputation of England's most controversial monarch, It seems Richard never forgot the sacrifice so many made on the battlefield that saw his brother become king. Nothing remains on the surface now to mark the battle. Yet Richard III himself is said to have been in no doubt as to how important Taunton was to his family's cause. It meant a lot to Richard III because his brother was made king here.

Now this was the place where the Yorkist dynasty formulated all their ideas. and their hopes and wishes and became the Kings of England. And so this place was everything to them. On becoming king, Richard immediately said about commemorating the sacrifice of the Yorkist soldiers. Richard wanted to put this in stone. He wanted to build a memorial chapel, and in the village of Tauten he did that. He raised this lovely, apparently gorgeous chapel, very sumptuous, it said. Yet, of this extravagant chapel, it seems there's now no trace.

It's one of the greatest riddles of the whole Toulton story. One of the remaining mysteries about the Battle of Touton is connected with the memorial chapel. The trouble is, we don't know where it is. For such a grand structure that meant so much to the Yorkist industry, how can it disappear completely? And that's one of the things we needed to find out. Where had the chapel gone to? Archaeologist Tim Sutherland is determined to solve this centuries-old mystery.

He's been linked with the story of Touton for almost two decades. It all began in 1996 when he was called in after developers working at Toughton Hall made a grisly discovery. We were very fortunate in Touton in that when a building was being replaced, they dug new foundations and they dug deep enough to actually uncover human remains. The builders had discovered the last resting place of some of the Tauten dead, the only mass grave from a medieval battle yet found in Britain. These things are incredibly rare. A lot of mass graves are buried very deeply under the soil.

Usually they're buried in places where they are not going to be disturbed. There were approximately 50 skeletons in the grave. Each one, a snapshot of life from half a millennial. ago. Time was limited. There were just five days to carry out an excavation. A team of archaeologists from the University of Bradford was called in, including Tim Sutherland. Those skeletons really brought home what a rough life it was. You could see by the physique of the people, they were really robust people. They were very strong enough, of course you had to be. They were working on the land. They were doing physical, hard manual labour a lot of the time.

They were tough, tough people compared to us. These people had been killed fighting or been caught up in a fight. So they had evidence of excessive trauma, the head wounds and the wounds to the body. The weapons, the arrow heads, for example, still exist and still lie in the soil. Working with Tim to help find these traces in the Toughton soil was metal detector expert, Simon Richardson. A metal detector is a perfect tool. See eyes under the ground, if you like. Simon has decades of experience in metal detecting,

and he works alongside archaeologists adding an extra layer to remote sensing surveys. I know the archaeologists have their GIFAs and the magnetometers, but the metal detector for me goes one step further. I can find my new objects, things like arrowheads, coins. I can cover a lot of ground fast, where it could take archaeologists, weeks, months, even years to find the artifacts, to find things I can find with my metal detector.

And then I will complement their survey once they started digging. Simon had already spent many years developing skills on all kinds of sites, including medieval battlefields. If you're on a medieval site, you never quite know what's going to come up next. It can be absolutely thrilling. Over the years, Simon has found a wide array of artificial. artifacts from Taughton. Many of the finds are grim reminders of what men faced on the day of the battle.

From the recorded positions of the artifacts, Tim has been able to build up a detailed plot of exactly where the main contact areas were during the battle. It was the first survey of its kind in Europe, and it enabled Tim to interpret the events of that day in 1461. It's difficult for us to imagine what a medieval battle was like. We're quite soft in the great scheme of things. We do not attack each other with big clubs or with big machete type implements. And so of course we grew up with a very safe feeling.

But in the medieval period it was different. Medieval battles were relatively common, or medieval conflict was at least. So you've got the formal Lancashian army lined up. We've got the formal Yorkist army lined up. The Yorkists slowly move forward but in line. The battle began with both sides unleashing thousands of arrows. Because the wind is in the Yorkist's favour, when the Yorkists lose their arrows, they go further and actually manage to hit the Lancashian soldiers.

The Lancashians loose their arrows and because the wind's against them, all their arrows fall short. It's quite a major tactical achievement. If you can get your enemy to move away from their standing position, they're almost certainly going to lose. the Yorkists, they can stay put. The Lancashians can either withdraw or they can attack. And at this point they are numerically superior, so they decide to attack. Now the Lancashians are moving off their fixed position and have to travel down the slope

into the valley bottom to meet the Yorkists. And this is where they formally engage as two armies. The deadly stalemate continued until late in the day. Yorkist reinforcements arrived and tipped the balance against the Lancastrians who finally broke and fled. The whole of the landscape is just full of people fleeing off the battlefield in all directions. Some people tried to get to Tadcaster, to the river crossing, some people just try to make it through all the marshes across all the rivers. From here onwards you're getting people being hacked down in the landscape. Everything was decimated, the people were being killed, the houses were being burnt, everything was being

looted. It's possible that the men buried in the mass grave were killed during the chaos and carnage. It was in this war-ravaged landscape that Richard's new chapel once stood. It's a huge area, and trying to find buried remnants of a single building could be difficult. Tim's been surveying this landscape for years. With magnetometry and geophysics, he's gradually built up a picture of what lies beneath the surface. Matching this with documentary accounts, he's found that at the time the chapel was built, Richard III also sanctified an area of the battlefield. Some of the dead were cleared off the middle of the battlefield, again very soon after Richard became King of England, and he did that presumably to sanctify the ground, take the burials

off the unconsecrated ground of the battlefield and put them here in an area we know was consecrated ground because there was a chapel here before the Battle of Town. Chapel Hill seemed at first to be the right place to look but it turned out not to be as simple as that. So over the last 15 years we've covered this whole field in geophysical survey and excavation. Importantly we've excavated some of these features. So the whole of the top of Chapel Hill has been excavated. We know that this is a plain field covered in medieval field systems and there's nothing that remains of a chapel or any structure out there.

The only bit of Chapel Hill now that we haven't looked at intensively is inside the garden. Let's face it, this is the only place left where it can be. We've looked everywhere else. So if it's not here, then there's going to be no trace of it. The area Tim's now focusing on is within the grounds of Tauton Hall itself, known as Chapel Garth. The hall wasn't built in 14-6. but the site was in the battle area. The defeated Lancasterians almost certainly retreated through here. To help out, Tim has enlisted Helen Goodchild from the University of York.

She'll carry out a ground-penetrating radar survey to try to give an idea of where to dig. It's not the first time Tim has carried out archaeology at the hall. In 2002 and 2006, more burials were found. He and Simon dug beneath the building itself to recover the skeletons. Just like a forensic crime scene, you're trying to pick out little elements about how each person died or thought, but you're trying to do it on a massive scale where there could be hundreds or thousands of people doing exactly the same thing at the same time. It gives us an insight into the medieval mind, the medieval way of doing things,

things and also the mayor or the way of medieval death. I think the important thing for me when we analyze, for example, a medieval skeleton is to give them something back. They have probably given everything they had for somebody else. At a moment's notice in theory, your lord could come and say, right, excuse me, we're going to war. Drop your farm tools and off we go. It was a rough existence for most people actually.

Still more burials were found under the driveway at the front of the hall. Throughout the project, every skeleton was painstakingly removed and conserved by trained osteologists. Malin Holsts was there right from the start. At King's Manor, home to the University of York's Department of Archaeology, Malin is examining some of the skeletons. When we were excavating the grave, we were trying to unpuzzle every single skeleton and work out which bones belong to which skeleton.

And the only reason that was possible because every single person on that site excavating that grave was a trained skeleton expert and osteologist. The sheer number of skeletons in the pit made it hard to make sense of. The position of one created a misunderstanding about how the individuals may have been killed. It appeared as if one skeleton had the arms tied behind their back. And of course that had massive implications with regard to the individuals. regards to the interpretation of this grave, because it suggested then that perhaps at least one, if not all of them, were prisoners.

The interpretation that there were prisoners executed during or after the battle is a myth that has followed the story of the excavations. Yet careful recording of each individual bone meant this could be disproved. This myth that had been created about this possible prisoner could be dispelled by the fact that we closely analyzed the skeletons and we realized actually we'd recorded one arm twice and one of the arms of this individual that looked as if he'd had the arms tied behind his back one of those arms actually belonged to somebody else and had therefore been recorded twice. So that myth was completely destroyed.

Analysis showed though that almost every skeleton carried some evidence of violent injury. The grim reality of the medieval age of chivalry. The general opinion was that the Battle of Tauton, and probably all medieval battles, were actually quite chivalrous, and that they were very honorable and quite romantic in a way. It was quite shocking to a lot of people the sort of gory facts that were revealed through our analysis, that this wasn't chivalrous at all. It was a really bloody battle that people probably had a very, that red mist effect where they couldn't exactly control what they were doing anymore.

They went in charge exactly of what they were doing. It was just hacking around one another. The four skeletons removed from beneath the dining room of Tauton Hall showed the signs of a hard life spent soldiering. Most of the individuals who we've analyzed from the Battle of Toughton were aged usually between sort of 18 and 45. The men who fought the Battle of Taunton were mostly in the prime of life, yet their bones carry physical evidence of violent death, often from multiple injuries.

Some of the trauma marks are small and easily missed, but with careful analysis, it's possible for Malin to interpret how they came about. So there are actually two parallel cuts into this one. pelvis. We've got a little mark on the inside of the pelvis that there was probably a blade or perhaps even an arrow that went into the left side of the hip and penetrated the bone. More than one of the skeletons has unusual blade trauma to the jaw. This led again to interpretations that the men had been executed or finished off by having their throats cut. So this individual has actually also got a cut there on the jaw in exactly the same place as the previous skeleton,

but a much deeper cut that's actually come from the sort of front and the side, and then bone has splintered off upwards and downwards on the lower jaw. It's difficult to know how exactly this came about. There were many ways to get injured in a medieval battle. One of the skulls carries an injury that was immediately evident as it was excavated. It's one of the most horrendous found on all the Tauton skeletons. This injury was noted immediately on site during excavation when his skull was exposed.

It's a cut that's come from above and the left-hand side of this individual and it actually ends here, so it was probably the tip of a sword which severed this person's lip and maxillary bone here and also his teeth. I think it must have come from the left side and above. Malin also found that some injuries seem to have happened even without the impact of a weapon. These men may have led hard lives and been used to fighting, yet this didn't stop them from experiencing terror in a battle like Taughton. So this person has fractured the first molar in their mouth,

and this has occurred before death. And when we spoke to soldiers who would currently be fighting, they said that in the midst of battle they clenched their teeth to such a degree that it actually causes fracturing of the crowns of the teeth. Of the four skeletons, three had been buried together in a triple grave. It seems possible that brothers, sons, fathers or cousins may have faced battle together that day in the snow. It's quite interesting that these all three have got a minor genetic trait in common

and that's a little anomaly in the spine. The fact that these are all very, very similar could potentially suggest that they were related. Back at the hall, the remote survey around Chapel Garth is complete. The hunt for the chapel is proving more difficult than Tim imagined. The chapels would be constructed on top of the hill. The geophysical survey doesn't show anything that looks like buildings on this part of the hill. There's one last place he wants to look. The radar survey showed up a small anomaly under the garden at the front of the hall.

Now, with all the other options exhausted, he tries one last throw of the dice. The only place it can be is very close to the Townton Hall, the present building. And so by carrying out the survey in the very close proximity to the hall, hopefully we'll find some evidence. The survey data shows what might be building remains, but they might also just be flower beds. The only way to find out is to dig. Simon joins up again with Tim to help. They're working right by where some of the skeletons were found. Yeah, I worked on the battlefield for 35 years, mostly metal detecting work, but I've done a few surveys.

with Tim where we dug test pits and done some magnetometer surveys but it's just it's just an area I love it's not long before Simon begins finding rubble which indicates building work at some stage in the halls past it looks like old features were removed and buried here under what's now the front lawn everywhere we've dug there is like a lens of this rubble material that's been spread over the whole site imagine that's modern building site what they do is they come in, they dig the foundation trenches and anything that's around that they dig through to make the foundation trenches just get spread around on the surface and then what they do is they put the modern building inside the foundation

trench, the level is all off and then they come around and cover it all in topsoe so it looks pretty. So one of the demolition layers gets spread around the whole of the area of town hall and that includes some of the moulded plaster work from some of the ornate rooms inside the hall and then you'll get some stone work where they've knocked through walls or demolished walls and rebuilt them. And so you should get a bit of everything really. So far, most of this seems to be from a period much later than a building of Richard the Third's time. The stone fragments are the first real clues they've found, evidence of what looks like a medieval

building. But with no foundations or walls still in situ, it's difficult to be sure. Could they be from Richard the Third's Chapel? Where is Richard the Third's Chapel? It's a very good point because it's somewhere tantalizingly close to this site. It's so close you can almost smell it, because it's nowhere else. We've looked on top of the Chapel Hill,

we've looked north and south, we've put test pits in, we've done geophersault survey. This is the only location where there are medieval buildings. The finds encouraged him to begin working out what form Richard's Chapel might have tested. No illustrations or plans exist, so to get an idea of what a 15th century medieval chapel built by a king might have looked like, Tim heads to Warwick. Richard Beecham, 13th Earl of Warwick, was one of the most powerful nobleman in England in the 15th century. After his death, the family memorialized him by building an entirely new chapel here in the Collegiate Church of St. Mary's.

It's one of the most opulent chapels still surviving from the time of the War of the Roses. This was built just before the Battle of Toughton, and it's built over the period that encompassed the Battle of Tountain. But one thing we don't know about the chapel at Toughton is how big it was. Was it on this scale, or was it significantly smaller, or was it half a small, or a quarter of small? Was it more of a private, little private chapel? So on one scale we've got this very large, expansive building, which is the Chantry Chapel. But next to it, and built on the side of it, we've got what's known as the Dean's Chapel. And this is on the other scale, and this is all you really need to say prayers for the dead.

We need to consider how this fits in with our story at town, because obviously we've got what is essentially a royal chapel. We're Richard the Third Commission, the chapel at town. Are we expecting something along the size and scale of this here? And it's almost inconceivable that something like this could disappear and nobody would ever see it again. To try to narrow it down between the two, Tim needs some expert advice. At King's Manor, Anthony Massington checks out the finds. He's a buildings archaeologist and specializes in the techniques and styles used

in medieval stone masonry. There were buildings at Taunton earlier than the Battle of 1461, and much later from the 17th century onward. Richard III's prestigious chapel is known to have been started during his two-year reign from 1483 to 1485. So Tim needs to date the stones to roughly the end of the 15th century. So are we talking post-medieval sort of Jacobian, early Jacobian, or are we talking about a medieval, late medieval period. And then we need sort of status, how good is the quality of this? Is it top quality, medium or pretty poor? So what do you reckon to that? Anthony immediately identifies the fragments.

That's the jam of a window. So it's the vertical right on the side. Yeah, so it should be like... And I presume this is a glazing bar. Yeah, yeah exactly. So that's the glazing group. It's not peasant stuff. No, this is... It's quite good. This is... really high status. This is... It's high status. Yeah, yeah. This is this is... This is very fine. I mean, it's finished really in a nice way. And yeah, you wouldn't get this except in a high-status building. Excellent. And is it right?

High status fits with the kind of sumptuous chapel Richard III may have built. But can it be dated to the right period? And this sort of Chamfer style is current from the end of the 13th century all the way to the mid-16th. It's a really broad range. Tim needs to narrow it down. Maybe some of the other pieces can help. So you have a big opening for a window, and then that's divided up by stone bits into individual lights in a window.

In the medieval period, stained glass panels were usually fairly narrow. Otherwise, the soft letting would bow under the weight. Mullian strengthened the windows and divided the glass. I mean, you've got glass here and glass here, but we don't know if you had another one over here and over here to make it a really wide window. We can't tell it from this one.

So the molding profile here is this diamond pattern and that diamond pattern is most common in the 15th century. Again, this pattern does sort of appear in the 13th and the 14th, but really its heyday is the 15th century. So that is a very good. And the quality of this is good. It's a beautiful quality. It's fine quality. It's really finished off well. So it's not particularly fancy in terms of its ornamentation of its molding profile.

But when they finished it, they finished it very much. they finished it very nicely. So they're all high quality. It's not just any old stonework that's been thrown up into a building. No, no, this is good stuff. No, it's very good stuff, yeah. The fragments seem to fit with the building of the chapel status, and Anthony can detect more clues from their condition.

I mean, this is as nice as the day it came off the sort of, you know, the day the Mason finished with it. And then they put this nice, lovely, very thin skim on so that it could either be, just stand there and be white to be very nice, or be painted. So this is the side that's being presented to people inside. If this is Richard's Chapel, then this was built in 1483, 484. There's much evidence here that indicates that it's absolutely of that time.

The evidence points to the right date. Now, can they back this up with anything about the shape or style of the window? I would initially have said this is a corner of a window sill, and this is the inside. You can't tell if this is necessarily a head or a sill, without finding a piece of stonework that has a slight curve to it. You're not going to be able to tell. Well, that's where I might be able to help you because there is this one, I mean, we're talking about very, very slight curving. That's the only bit of curve that I can find anywhere in any of this. No, my initial feeling on this one is that that's

been cut that way. Right. Too well. Because I think I'm seeing a little bit of tooling. Right, but that may be a part of the upper framework of a curve. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's so nicely finished here that I I'm pretty sure that's intentional. The fragment seems to hint at arches. Though just how tall or wide the whole window was can't be judged without more evidence. But there's one more thing Anthony can tell.

These fragments aren't reused. So this is primary rubble. This is primary and it's not been reused. Primary 15th century stonework, not broken up for walls or infill, and not as weathered as might be expected, if it had stood for hundreds of years in the elements. Tim begins to suspect what might have happened to the chapel.

I'm pretty certain that this ties into a period of the hall when it was renovated in the 19th century. Now this is the tricky bit, because this suggests that somewhere there was an upstanding chapel that was renovated and knocked down in the 19th century. We don't have that, so we've got a problem there, unless, of course, we're talking about a building that just got buried within another building?

Is that possible? Those sorts of buildings are really ephemeral, and they get repurposed. And then once they get repurposed, fragments of them can hang around for centuries, and bits of them will come out as a building gets renovated. So it's entirely, entirely possible that somewhere in the core of the present building,

you've got the chapel. Toulton Hall first appeared sometime in the 17th century. Then it was changed and expanded over the years. into its current form. If it were built over a chapel, you'd expect it to follow the normal church alignment, east-west. Yet, that isn't the case here. The other problem that I've got is the orientation of the present hall

is distinctly north-south. Again, what frequently happens is that when a building is repurposed after the sort of reformation period, their focus literally gets shifted around. So if you've got a chapel, then frequently what will happen, is that the building will start to sort of grow off of that east-west, north-south,

and then if you happen to sort of leave a little bit sticking out, it's very common that in renovation they'll just lop that off, and suddenly turn an east-west building into a north-south building. If the chapel somehow survived, still standing within the footprint of what's now Toulton Hall, then where is it? Tim goes back to the evidence of the mass graves and the other burials around the hall. Maybe they can help him find the chapel. If I didn't know the sort of when those burials were from,

I would say that those burials are younger than the house. Yes. Because they're in alignment with the house. Yes. Now the burials would have been put in alignment with any sort of chapel that would be on this site. I've never seen a building follow a burials alignment, a skeleton, alignment, but I've seen lots of building following the alignment of an older building that they're building on top of. The three things that left out of me when I looked at this plan.

The first thing is that the house respects the alignment of the burials. Yes. And that means I think the house's alignment is preserving the memory of whatever building was formerly on this site, which is common. I mean, that happens when they convert these spaces. I would put the chapel in this region. In the central block. In the central block. And like you said, I mean either the house is built and it butts up.

the earliest house is built and butts up against the chapels. You may have a west wall of a chapel here, or the house just encased the earlier chapel. Anthony's interpretation fits with Tim's research. After the battle, the landscape was sanctified. Many of the dead hundreds, perhaps thousands, were recovered from the fields around Taunton. With due care, they were reburied in the consecrated ground

of Richard III's chapel. As the centuries passed, Toughton Hall grew around it until the chapel itself was gradually hidden within. It's not on Chapel Hill, it's not in the gardens, it's not around the hall, it's actually partially inside the hall and therefore the evidence we've been looking for is actually inside all the data that we already had, all the whole buildings. So for the last 15 years we've been looking for something and it's been there in the one location where there is still a standing structure. So this answers one of the main questions about where Townton Chapel went

to. The fact is it didn't go anywhere. It's still there. It's still there. Still inside the hall. Yeah. That is unbelievable. So that's 15 years of work. You've learned a lot about the context though. Exactly. So now we know the landscape it's in and this is at the moment the summation of all this evidence. So it really does tie into the fact that it's a Richard's Chapel is now possibly still existing to a small or greater degree in and around Town Hall. Thank you very much. You're very welcome. Absolutely fantastic.

The years of careful detective work have paid off. It seems likely now that Richard III's chapel, so long lost to history, may have been there all the time. I've been looking for the chapel for so long. It was one of the primary objectives of starting the whole of this project off. It was the story that motivated a lot of people. This was the missing chapel of Richard III. In all the places where we've looked, this was probably the last place we'd actually consider

finding it. It's actually structurally standing still there, inside another building. More than five and a half centuries later, the memory of Taughton lingers in the Yorkshire fields, and in their many thousands, lost within sight of York's great Minster, the dead still lie. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

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