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Dust Protocol, Bristol City, Bristol (2026)

23/06/2026

There are over 5,000 bodies under a school in London. The children walk past one of them every morning on their way to class.

The school is in Charterhouse Square, just north of the City, near Barbican. Quiet streets. A garden in the middle. An independent school on the south side where parents drop their children off and go to work. Inside the school building, there is a museum. In that museum, there is a reconstructed grave, lit by electric candles on all sides. The grave belongs to a plague victim from 1348. The children walk past it on their way to class.

Beneath that school. Beneath that garden. Beneath the street itself. Thousands of people. Modern estimates suggest over 5,000 in the broader West Smithfield burial area alone. They have been down there since 1348.

The Black Death arrived in England in the winter of that year. Nobody in London had seen anything like it. A quarter of the city's population would eventually die. The churchyards filled within weeks. The parishes ran out of space, then out of coffins, then out of time. The dead needed somewhere to go, and they needed to go there quickly.

So they dug pits.

Many of those who died within the City of London were taken outside the city gates. West Smithfield, which was then open ground beyond the walls, became one of the primary sites. What the Crossrail excavations later revealed surprised the archaeologists. The bodies had not been thrown in carelessly. They were laid in rows, individually, with some degree of order, even as the city was collapsing around the people doing the burying. In the middle of catastrophe, someone was still trying to do this with dignity. Then the city grew over them.

Charterhouse Square has never been built on. That patch of open ground has remained open ground for seven centuries, because at some level the city always knew, even when it half forgot, that something was underneath. A monastery was founded next to the burial site in 1371, built specifically to pray for the souls of the dead beneath the ground. The monastery eventually became a school. The school is still there. The candles still burn beside the grave inside it.

In March 2013, workers building the Crossrail tunnel beneath the square unearthed twenty-five skeletons. Scientists extracted DNA from the teeth. They found Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that caused the Black Death, preserved in the remains after almost seven hundred years. It was the first direct physical confirmation that these were plague victims. There were multiple periods of burial here, including the main Black Death phase of 1348 to 1349, a return in 1361, and further outbreaks into the early fifteenth century, as the disease came back again and again to the same ground. Charterhouse Square is not the only place.

Beneath the streets around Aldgate Underground station lies a plague pit from the seventeenth century. A single pit in that area reportedly received over a thousand bodies in just a few days. Between 2011 and 2015, archaeologists recovered more than 3,000 bodies from the former Bedlam burial ground near Liverpool Street, a site that held victims of both the medieval plague and the Great Plague of 1665. Modern Liverpool Street station runs directly through the middle of it.

The commuters waiting on the platform at Aldgate are standing on it. The people rushing through Liverpool Street on an ordinary Tuesday are passing over it. The children whose parents drop them at the gates of a school in Charterhouse Square are walking across it every single morning.

None of them are doing anything wrong by being there. The city had to keep building. Life had to continue over the dead, because it always does. But something shifts when you know. When you understand that the ground beneath a perfectly ordinary morning in London has been holding all of this, quietly, for seven hundred years.

The past is not far away. In this case, it is right underfoot. The next time you walk through the City, or wait on a platform, or cross a quiet square and wonder why it was never built on, you might already be standing on the answer.

Now you know it.

If you know someone who walks through London every day, I think they should know it too.

22/06/2026

They dug him up. Then they dug him up again & again.
Nobody can say for certain which hole in the ground he ended up in last.

I keep coming back to the indifference. Not the Dissolution, not the gaol built on top of him. The indifference.

This is the story of Alfred the Great. The king who saved England from the Vikings. The only English monarch ever given the title Great. And the man whose bones have been lost so completely that nobody alive knows where they are.

He died in October 899, at Wi******er, after a reign spent holding a kingdom together with nothing but stubbornness and a string of desperate victories.

He was also the king of the burned cakes, the legend of a man in hiding, hunted by Vikings, so consumed by the weight of a collapsing kingdom that he failed to watch a peasant woman's bread and let it burn. He was human. He was broken. He rebuilt Wessex anyway. He was buried at the Old Minster in Wi******er, in the heart of the kingdom he had refused to let die.

Within a few years, his son moved him. The Old Minster was too small, too cramped, not fitting for a king of his stature. Alfred's body was dug up and reburied at the New Minster nearby, built specifically to be grander.

That should have been the end of it. It was not.

In 1110, the monks of New Minster relocated entirely, brick by brick, to a new site outside the city walls. They called it Hyde Abbey. Alfred came with them. Dug up again. Carried across Wi******er. Buried a third time, this time in front of the high altar, in a tomb that finally seemed permanent.

Three times moved. Three times disturbed. And still, at least those who moved him knew his name. They knew what they were carrying. They gave him ceremony. They gave him reverence. That was about to become a luxury nobody would extend him again.

It held for over four hundred years.

Then came the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s. Henry VIII tore through England's abbeys, and Hyde Abbey was demolished along with the rest of them. The lead from the roof was stripped and sold. The stone was carted away for other buildings. The tomb of the king who had saved England from total conquest was left exposed to the weather, in a ruin nobody had any reason to protect.

Not cruelty. Not hatred. Just indifference. The man who had preserved the English language, English law, and the very idea of England, his grave abandoned not through malice, but because nobody thought him worth the trouble.

By the 1700s, the site had become a garden. Then, in 1788, a gaol was built directly on top of it.

A county gaol, on the ground where Alfred the Great had once lain in state. Labourers working the site reportedly found bones and stone coffins while digging the foundations and simply discarded what they found, not knowing or not caring whose remains they were disturbing.

Discarded. Like rubble. Like nothing. The man who had held England together had no one left to hold him together.

In 1866, an amateur excavation dug into the old abbey site and recovered a partial skeleton, which was reburied at St Bartholomew's Church nearby with no firm proof attached to it.

In 1999, archaeologists exhumed those bones again, hoping modern science could finally answer the question that four reburials and three hundred years of disturbed ground had made nearly impossible. In 2014, a hip bone from that grave was radiocarbon dated to a range consistent with Alfred or his son, Edward the Elder.

Consistent with. Not confirmed as.

The bone sits today in a museum store, neither proven nor disproven, the closest anyone has come to finding the man who saved England, and still not close enough to say for certain.

Richard III spent five centuries under a car park before science gave him his name back and a proper grave in a cathedral. Alfred the Great has been dug up, moved, lost, misplaced, and disturbed so many times across eleven hundred years that there may no longer be enough of him left in one place to identify. Richard at least stayed where he fell. Alfred was never allowed to stay anywhere.

In 1901, a thousand years after his death, Wi******er raised a bronze statue of him in the city centre. Sword raised, gaze fixed on the horizon, a king cast in metal because the city could no longer point to where the real one lay.

Archaeologists are still trying. Community excavations in recent years have uncovered fragments of Hyde Abbey's walls and floors in the back gardens of houses built over the old site, proof that pieces of it are still down there, waiting to be found.

A few streets from the statue, somewhere beneath what has been a monastery, a garden, and a gaol, what remains of the actual man is still in the ground. Nobody currently knows precisely where.

His name was Alfred. King of Wessex. The only king England ever agreed to call Great.

We still don't know exactly where he rests.

21/06/2026

They stripped him of his armour and clothes. Slung him face down across the back of a horse, his head and arms hanging on one side, his legs on the other. Paraded him through the streets of Leicester so the whole city could see exactly what had happened to him.

A blade had already torn through the back of his skull. Another wound punched through the base of it. Whoever did that struck with enough force to remove a piece of bone the size of a coin. After he was already dead, a blade was driven into his lower body, almost certainly while his body hung over that horse, as one final humiliation for the crowd to witness.

22 August 1485. Bosworth Field, Leicestershire.

Eleven wounds in total, nine to the skull alone. Five hundred and twenty seven years until anyone found him again.

This is the story of Richard III. The last English king to die in battle. And the car park that swallowed him whole.

After Bosworth, his body was buried at Greyfriars, a Franciscan friary in the centre of Leicester. No grand tomb. No effigy. Just a hurried burial by monks, in a grave too small for the coffin, his head propped at an awkward angle because there wasn't room to lay him flat.

Then came the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Henry VIII tore through England's friaries in the 1530s, and Greyfriars went with the rest of them. The buildings were stripped, sold, demolished. Within a generation, nobody could say with any certainty where the church had stood, let alone where inside it a dead king had been put in the ground.

Centuries passed. The city grew up and over the site, the way cities do. Streets shifted. Buildings rose and fell. And at some point in the twentieth century, the patch of ground that had once held the choir of Greyfriars became something almost unbearably ordinary.

A car park..!!!

Not a grand one. A council car park, marked out with painted white lines, used by Leicester social services staff. People parked there for the working day and walked into the office without a second thought. If you live anywhere near Leicester, there's a decent chance you've driven past it, possibly parked in it, without a single reason to think twice about the tarmac under your tyres.

In 2012, archaeologists from the University of Leicester finally got permission to dig. Years earlier, a Richard III Society researcher named Philippa Langley had stood on that exact car park, right on a spot marked with a painted letter R for Reserved, done years before by a caretaker who had nothing to do with any of this. Standing on it, she felt something she couldn't quite explain, a conviction that this was the place. It was a coincidence. Most people involved have since admitted it didn't feel like one.

This part is worth sitting with. On the very first day of digging, in a trench cut close to that marked spot, the team found a human leg bone. Within weeks, a full skeleton emerged, curled slightly from a pronounced curve in the spine. Nine wounds to the skull, eleven in total. A skeleton that, on paper, matched almost exactly what five centuries of garbled rumour had insisted was a hunchbacked, butchered king.

DNA from a living descendant of Richard's sister, a London furniture maker named Michael Ibsen, confirmed it in February 2013. The remains under a council car park belonged to King Richard III.

Think about that for a moment. For decades, possibly longer, people parked their cars on a quiet ordinary morning, walked into a building to do a normal day's work, and went home again. None of them knew a king was six feet beneath their front bumper.

In March 2015, Richard III was reburied at Leicester Cathedral, a short walk from where he'd spent over five hundred years beneath asphalt and painted parking lines. The car park itself is gone now, replaced by a visitor centre where you can stand on glass flooring and look directly down at the exact spot his bones were found.

But for most of the time he lay there, it was just a car park. The kind of place you park, lock up, and forget about within seconds. Nobody walking across it on an ordinary Tuesday had any reason to imagine what was underneath.

Most of us will never stand on ground that holds something like that. But almost everyone has walked past something significant without knowing it. Driven the same road a hundred times. Stood in a place that mattered enormously to someone, sometime, and felt nothing at all, because nothing told you to.

He lay under a parking space marked Permit Holders Only.

His name was Richard III. King of England. Found beneath a car park in Leicester.

Now you know it. 🖤

20/06/2026

She arrived at the railway station and a stranger was waiting for her.

Lady Kelly was a guest staying at George Norton's house, sent to meet the train because George would not come himself. Caroline had never seen her before in her life. She asked the only question that mattered. "I am here, is my boy better?" Lady Kelly answered. "No, he is not better, he is dead." Caroline had travelled the length of England to reach her dying son. She arrived to find a coffin already closed.

That is where this story ends. It does not begin there.

Caroline married George Norton in 1827. She was nineteen. The marriage turned violent almost immediately. George drank, and when he drank he became dangerous. Caroline reported his conduct to the police courts twice, in 1833 and in 1835. In 1835, while pregnant with their fourth child, George beat her so severely that she lost the baby.

She stayed. There was very little choice in leaving. Everything, under the law, belonged to him.

By then they had three sons. Fletcher. Brinsley. William. In March 1836, after a quarrel over where the boys would spend Easter, George locked Caroline out of their home and sent the children away. She came back to a house that still had their toys in it and no one left to play with them. She did not know, that first night, where her sons had been taken.

Under English law, a married woman had no legal claim to her own children. They belonged to their father, regardless of what he had done to their mother. She never lived with them again.

George was not finished. That same year he accused the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, of having an affair with Caroline and took him to court over it. The jury dismissed the case in nine days, without even leaving the room to decide. The scandal still did its work. It changed nothing about who controlled access to her sons.

She had no legal standing to fight him directly, so she wrote instead. She published under the name Pearce Stevenson, so the argument would be taken seriously: that mothers deserved some legal right to their own children. A mother fighting for her sons had to borrow a man's name to be heard at all. Her own would not have been enough. It worked. In 1839, Parliament passed the Custody of Infants Act, the first law in England to give mothers any access to their children at all.

George's answer was to take the boys to Scotland, where the new law did not reach.

What followed was years of visits that existed only at his discretion. Word would come that she might see her sons. She would make the arrangements, allow herself to hope, and then word would come that the visit was off. There was no pattern to break and no court to appeal to. She lived for years not knowing when she would next see her own children, entirely dependent on the temper of a man who had already shown her what that temper was capable of.

In 1841, she was finally allowed to spend Christmas with her sons, for the first time in years.

The following July, William fell from his horse while riding unsupervised. The injury did not look serious at first. Then infection set in.

Caroline later said her son was left without proper care after the fall, that the days that followed were treated with neglect rather than urgency. Word reached her slowly, through George, on George's timing, the same way every piece of news about her children had always reached her.

By the time it came, William had already been gravely ill for days. She boarded the train not knowing what she would find at the other end, only that she needed to move faster than the news already had.

There was not enough time left. There never had been, not since 1836.

William was nine years old.

I keep returning to that platform. A mother who had spent years fighting just to be recognised as a parent at all, finally racing toward her son, met instead by a stranger and four words that ended everything. The system that kept her from him did not pause for this. It simply continued, indifferent, until there was nothing left to take.

After William died, George allowed the two surviving boys to spend their school holidays with their mother. It was not justice. It was the smallest concession a man could make once tragedy had made anything less unbearable, even for him.

Caroline did not stop. She campaigned for the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which gave women limited grounds for divorce, and for the Married Women's Property Act, which finally let married women own and control property in their own name.

The artist Daniel Maclise later chose her as his model for Justice in his painting for the House of Lords. He said she had come to represent every woman the law had failed. She stood for Justice in a painting that would hang for generations, inside the same institution whose laws had reached her son nine years too late to save him.

George died in 1875. Caroline remarried in March 1877, a quiet match to an old friend who had admired her for years. She died three months later.

Fletcher had died of tuberculosis in 1859. Brinsley outlived his mother by only a few weeks. William had been gone for thirty-five years by then.

Caroline Norton spent her life trying to change a law that had already cost her almost everything. The law did change, eventually, and it helped the women who came after her. It came far too late for her own son. A lifetime of fighting was the only thing left for her to give him, and it could not bring him back.

19/06/2026

She was probably no older than twenty. She was accused of witchcraft. And the one thing she wanted before she died was to apologize to the man she believed she had cursed.

This is where most stories about Pendle begin. It is not where Alizon's story begins.

Alizon Device grew up in the shadow of Old Demdike. Her grandmother had spent decades building a reputation that the entire family lived under. Old Demdike claimed powers. She said she could curse people. She kept a spirit, or so she told anyone who would listen. And for decades, that claim kept the family alive. Fear was currency. Alizon grew up watching this. She grew up knowing that the threat of a witch's curse was worth something in that landscape. She also grew up being told, implicitly or explicitly, that she was part of it. Old Demdike's granddaughter. A Device. Someone to be careful around.

At some point, Alizon Device started believing it herself.

In her own confession she described an encounter she said had happened some years before 1612. She had been walking near Pendle Hill when a black dog appeared to her. The dog spoke. It asked what she wanted. She said she wanted the ability to hurt the people who had wronged her family. The dog asked for her soul in return. She agreed.

That is the confession of someone who genuinely believed she had made a pact. Not someone inventing a story under pressure. Someone reporting an experience that felt completely real to her.

On March 18, 1612, Alizon was walking near Colne when she encountered a pedlar named John Law. She asked him for pins. He refused to open his pack.

The pins matter. In the folk practice of this period, pins were not simply sewing implements. They were used in charms and protective rituals. Whether Alizon wanted them for practical reasons or magical ones is not recorded. What is recorded is that she asked, he refused, and she cursed him.

John Law walked a few steps and collapsed.

Watching him fall, Alizon Device believed she had caused it. She believed the pact had held. She believed she was exactly what Old Demdike had always suggested she was.

When Roger Nowell summoned her and asked what had happened, she told him the truth as she understood it. She did not have to confess. Nothing forced the first words from her. She spoke because she believed she was guilty.

And the thread unraveled.

What Alizon Device could not have foreseen was what one honest answer would do. Her confession opened the door to questions about her family. Her grandmother. Her mother. Her brother. Who else had been involved in what. One young woman who believed she had hurt someone began a chain that ended with ten people dead.

I want you to sit with the moment she understood what she had actually done.

Not cursed a pedlar. Not made a pact on a hillside. Something far worse than either of those things. She had told the truth. Her truth. The only version of events she knew and believed completely. And that truth had walked through the door of Roger Nowell's room and taken everything with it. It had named her grandmother. Her mother. Her brother. It had fed every person she had ever loved into a machinery that would not stop until it was finished with them. She had done the one thing she was raised to understand as honest and right. And it had destroyed everyone.

The system used that belief to destroy her family. It did not need to invent anything. She handed it everything it needed.

She was hanged at Gallows Hill, Lancaster, on August 20, 1612. She was probably no older than twenty.

Before that day came, she asked to be brought to John Law. Not to recant her confession. Not to blame someone else. She sat across from the man she believed she had hurt, knowing exactly what was waiting for her, and told him she was sorry. Abraham Law, John's son, had been the one who pressed the original complaint. Whatever John himself felt in that room, history does not record it cleanly. But Alizon Device asked for that meeting. And she walked into it with nothing left to gain from it.

History remembers the Pendle Witches as a story about persecution. Alizon Device is a reminder that it was also a story about a girl who told the truth.

19/06/2026

Ten minutes into the climb, her throat began to close.

Dawn Poxon walked up Pendle Hill on All Saints' Day, the morning after a calm, ordinary weekend of walking the same countryside. Ten minutes from the base, her glands swelled. Breathing got harder. The headache that followed felt, in her words, like something pressing her eyes out from behind. She turned back. Halfway down, her breathing eased. The headache didn't.

At the cafe by the car park, a staff member looked at her and said, unprompted, that she'd had a bad experience up there. That she wasn't the first.

That night, she found marks on her leg she couldn't explain. Her husband, who'd been with her on the hill, found scratches on himself too.

Pendle Hill carries more than scenery. In August 1612, the Pendle Witches were tried at Lancaster Assizes. Two days later, nine of them were hanged at Gallows Hill. One was Alice Nutter, a widow from Roughlee, wealthier than most of those accused alongside her. She never confessed, and barely spoke at her own trial. The case against her rested largely on the word of a nine year old girl, Jennet Device, whose testimony also convicted her own mother and two of her siblings.

Four hundred years on, people climb the same hill for the view. Most don't think about who stood on that ground before them, or what they were made to admit to.

We don't know what happened to Dawn on that hill. Nettle stings and a long walk catching up by evening are plausible enough. So is something else. Make of it what you will.

Roughlee's statue of Alice Nutter still has flowers laid at her chained feet.

She went up for the view. She came down with marks she can't explain.

Coincidence, or does that hill hold onto something it hasn't let go of?

18/06/2026

On the morning she died, she sent every servant in the house to Abingdon Fair.

Every single one.

AMY ROBSART
8 September 1560. Cumnor Place, Oxfordshire.

When one of the ladies, Mrs. Odingsells, refused to go, Amy argued with her until she gave in. By evening, only an elderly woman named Mrs. Owen remained, in another part of the building entirely. Amy was, for all practical purposes, alone.

By evening, she was dead at the foot of the stairs. Neck broken. Two wounds in her head, one of them two inches deep. Her headdress, according to those who found her, was still in place.

The staircase had eight steps.

The coroner ruled it an accident. Her husband, Robert Dudley, the queen's closest companion and the man all of Europe assumed Elizabeth I would marry, received the news at Windsor. He wrote immediately to his steward urging him to find "discreet men" for the inquest jury.

Before she died, a private conversation had already taken place.

William Cecil was Elizabeth's Principal Secretary. He had watched Dudley rise for two years with growing alarm. Dudley was everywhere: Master of the Horse, the queen's constant companion, the man every court in Europe assumed she would marry. Cecil had built the Elizabethan settlement carefully, piece by piece. A Dudley marriage would dismantle everything he had built.

Sometime before Amy died, Cecil sat privately with the Spanish ambassador, Álvaro de Quadra, and said something that has never been satisfactorily explained. He told the ambassador that Amy Robsart was in perfect health. He also said she was taking great care not to be poisoned.

There had been rumours since 1559 that Amy was suffering from a disease in one of her breasts. A previous Spanish ambassador had already written it down. Modern physicians have noted that when breast cancer spreads to the bone, it can cause spontaneous fractures from even minor falls. Eight steps, in that context, is more than enough.

Cecil told the ambassador she was in perfect health.

If he knew she was already dying, that single sentence changes everything that follows. Her death would destroy Dudley without a conspirator's fingerprints anywhere near Cumnor Place. The scandal would make any marriage to Elizabeth impossible. And the verdict would carry the clean appearance of misfortune.

This is also why Dudley is the wrong suspect. A historian named A.F. Pollard said it plainly in 1910: a meaner intelligence than Elizabeth's would have understood that murdering his wife made their marriage impossible, not inevitable. Dudley's motive runs in the wrong direction. He was at Windsor. His alibi was the Queen of England herself.

In the weeks before she died, Amy's maid heard her praying.

She prayed, often, to be delivered from desperation.

Read that again.

Then there is this. The full coroner's report on Amy's death did not come to light until 2008, when it was discovered at the National Archives. A mystery everyone assumed had been sealed by history had simply been sitting in a box for four hundred and forty-eight years. The report is compatible with an accidental fall. It is compatible with something else. What it cannot account for is two deep wounds to the head and a broken neck from eight steps, in a woman whose headdress was still in place when they found her.

Cecil stayed. He kept his position. He managed the queen's affairs for another four decades.

Dudley never married Elizabeth. A pamphlet called Leicester's Commonwealth, published in 1584, named him a murderer in print. He spent the rest of his life beneath a cloud that began in a private conversation he was never part of, about a woman he had not seen in months.

Amy Robsart was twenty-eight years old. She had married Dudley as a teenager, in a ceremony attended by the king. She had visited him in the Tower when his father's treason nearly killed them both. She had waited, in a succession of borrowed houses, while Europe decided what her existence was worth.

On the last morning of her life, she sent everyone away.

We do not know why.

Written by Dust Protocol

No portrait of Amy Robsart was painted in her lifetime. This is how the 19th century chose to remember her. She was twenty-eight years old.

It was never really about the stairs.

16/06/2026

Historians disagree on exactly when Edward V moved into the Tower of London or when he was joined by his brother, Richard of Shrewsbury. There is general agreement, however, that both boys were there by 19th May 1483. Tradition places them in the Garden Tower, later named the Bloody Tower, but I see no reason for this. Edward was the king, preparing for his coronation, Richard was his younger brother and heir. The two would, surely, have been housed in the Royal Apartments.

The Wardrobe accounts for May 1483 contain the last known entry for expenditure on Edward V. The entry, for fabric, is generally supposed to be in connection with Edward's coronation robes. After this, the boys disappear from the written record.

We know, however, that the boys were seen practising archery, or playing in the privy garden, as late as July 1483. So why are there no more entries in the Wardrobe accounts? I think the answer lies in the accounting system. Then, as now with the vast majority of UK businesses, accounts were closed off shortly after the end of the month. So the accounts for May would have been written up in early June. Edward is still king, the coronation, although postponed, is still proceeding, everything is fine. Then, on 22 June, Edmund Shaa preaches at St Paul's cross, publicly throwing the boys' legitimacy in doubt. On June 25 the Lords and Commons petition Richard, Duke of Gloucester, to become King and on 26 June the boys are formally declared illegitimate and their households dissolved.

This gave the clerks a problem when, in early July, they came to write up the June accounts. The expenditure on the boys could no longer be charged to the Royal Household. The clerks took the only course open to them; they charged the expenses to the Tower's General Account. Expenditure on the boys appeared in six different ledgers, kept by six different departments and written up by six different sets of clerks. These covered Meat & drink, Laundry, Candles and fuel, Clothing, Chamber necessaries and Payments to warders for supervision. In the Tower's General Accounts figures for each category except clothing rose slightly for June from the May baseline and rose again in July to establish a new baseline which then continued over the following months. Whilst the weather and seasonal fluctuations could account for some changes, I think the key ledger is the laundry account. This would only increase if people were added to the account. The increase is in line with the addition of two people in June/July.

Double-entry bookkeeping did not arrive in Government departments until 1830/1840. It certainly wasn't in use in 1483/84. The ledgers record expenditure. So, who picked up the tab? In view of the relatively small amounts the expenses may simply have been paid from the Tower's general allowance. This would be safest. The Tower's general accounts didn't identify people by name. In terms of the paperwork the boys were now safely "off-grid".

Their physical disappearance was equally simple. For years I have been puzzled by what Sherlock Holmes called "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." Watson's remark was that the dog did nothing in the night-time. "That," replied Holmes, "was the curious incident." In this case we have a busy fortress/royal palace housing hundreds of people. It was also the Royal Mint, the main Armoury and contained the Royal Menagerie. During the daytime the numbers would have included all those who worked at the Tower but lived outside. The boys would typically have been woken, a servant would have brought them water to wash, breakfast and small beer, a priest would have said Mass, perhaps a tutor visited, an armourer taught them archery and swordsmanship and so on until dinner and bed. Laundresses would have washed the boys' linen.

According to Mancini (who never set foot in the Tower of London and never saw either of the boys) the two withdrew more and more into the Tower and were never seen again. This too, I think, suggests that the boys were in the Royal apartments and not the Garden Tower. You can't really "withdraw more and more" into a four-roomed tower. What Mancini omits to mention is that the summer of 1483 saw a particularly virulent outbreak of the plague in London. Many shops and businesses closed and merchants petitioned for relief. In these circumstances it is entirely natural for the boys to withdraw further from the multitude of Tower workers into the comparative safety of the Royal apartments.

It is also a good time to move the boys. In early August the Duke of Buckingham and Richard III reach Gloucester on their Royal progress following Richard's coronation. Buckingham asks leave to visit his lands at Brecon, his Welsh power base. Richard agrees. This is the start of the break. By late August Buckingham is no longer Richard's ally and by early September he is in open rebellion.

The obvious place to move the boys to is the royal nursery at Sherriff Hutton. This is far from the plague of London and is securely within the North. It is, I think, too obvious. Richard needs the boys safely hidden. Where does one hide two leaves? The boys are almost 13 (Edward) and 9 (Richard). The safest place to hide them is amongst others of their age and the easiest is among one of the great households. This wasn't the age of mass media. Very few people would know what the boys looked like. Edward had passed most of his life in Ludlow, Shropshire, away from Court. They could easily slip in among the pages and children of a noble household and there is a perfect one for Richard's purposes.

John Howard was the son of Robert Howard of Tendring and Margaret Mowbray. He grew up in the household of his cousin, Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk (d. 1461) where he became involved in conflicts with William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk and in a lawsuit with Alice Chaucer, his wife. He became a loyal supporter of the House of York and in 1461 was knighted by Edward IV after the Battle of Towton. In 1467 he became a member of the King's Council and in September 1468 Treasurer of the Royal Household. In April 1483 he carried the Royal banner at Edward IV's funeral and it was he who escorted Richard of Shrewsbury from the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey to join his brother in the Tower of London.

In 1477 Richard was appointed Earl of Nottingham and Duke of Norfolk in anticipation of his marriage, at the age of four, in 1478, to the five-year-old Anne Mowbray, grand-daughter to the Thomas mentioned above. Anne had inherited the vast Mowbray estates and by Act of Parliament these remained with Richard of Shrewsbury when Anne died in 1481. On 25 June 1483 Richard was dispossessed of these estates, along with all his other properties. On 26 June the Mowbray lands were awarded to John Howard who, at the same time was appointed 1st Duke of Norfolk (third creation).

At some point before the end of September 1483 the boys were moved from the Tower. Out of public view, out of Buckingham's grasp. To the east of the Royal apartments in the Tower of London is a small courtyard from which privy stairs lead to a small postern gate and a private wharf. Nobody remarked on their leaving because there was nothing remarkable about it. Edward wasn't going to be crowned; there was no need to stay. They were leaving for Sherriff Hutton. Or was it Ludlow? Somewhere anyway. The dog did nothing.

I believe that the boys were placed in the household of John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, either at Framlingham Castle or one of his smaller manors. Because of the size of the household in which they could be hidden I favour Framlingham.

On the night of October 2, 1470, Edward IV and his 18-year-old brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester had escaped England by sailing from King's Lynn (then known as Lynn or Bishop's Lynn) for the court of their aunt, Margaret of Burgundy. Why not use the same tried and tested route for the two boys? I believe that, at some point, the boys slipped quietly out as members of the Howard household.

Facts up to July 1483 can be verified from various documents held at the National Archive, including the Chamber accounts and pipe rolls. The details following July are speculation – but possible.

Written by Keith Dalby-Oldham
Published by Dust Protocol Think Tank : History Debates

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