On this day in 1485, at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire, Richard III became the last English king to die in battle. Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, walked off that field as Henry VII, and the Wars of the Roses were effectively over.

So where did the losing king go? Down to the Greyfriars friary in Leicester, and then out of the records entirely. For 527 years nobody could say with confidence where he lay. Then in the late summer of 2012, archaeologists opened up a Leicester council car park, found a grave on more or less the first day of digging, and by February 2013 the identification was confirmed. Best detail, and the one that always gets me: the grave had been dug slightly too short for him, so he was laid in with his head propped up at an awkward angle. (No coffin, no shroud pins. Somebody was working fast.) He was reburied in Leicester Cathedral in March 2015.

The second image is the sort of thing that makes a battlefield real: a silver-gilt boar badge, about three centimetres long, the white boar being Richard's own emblem. Someone wore that to Bosworth and lost it in the mud. The portrait above it is the familiar one, hands raised, quietly turning a ring — painted well after his death, so it's a memory of a face rather than a sitting.