Stone Medieval Coffin as seen on BBC's "The One Show". View more information on the BBC Website.
As Bosworth was such an important battle, it is surprising that for many years no-one really knew where it was fought.
Only a handful of Medieval and Tudor records of the battle survive and they give conflicting views of what happened at the battle, including the numbers of soldiers involved, the positions and actions of the commanders, the number of people who died, and very little information is given about the location of the actual battle itself.
The names Redemoor and Sandeford are both used in early descriptions of the battle, but we do not know the location of either of them.
Some documents that were written about the battle will have been destroyed and others may lie unread in collections.
It is clear that the location of the battle was known in the early 17th century as a Civil War skirmish in 1644 was said to have been fought ‘on the very field in which King Richard was slain’. Perhaps it was such common knowledge that no-one thought to write it down. Several early maps of Leicestershire show the battlefield spread out between Dadlington, Shenton, Stoke Golding and Upton but it is difficult to interpret the location in any detail.
(Due to the conflicting and fragmentary evidence, Bosworth is a very complicated and difficult Battle to reconstruct. It is possible that none of these theories are correct.)
Ken Wright Theory 2002
In 2002 local historian Ken Wright published a revision of the Ambion Hill Theory moving the conflict to the southern slopes of the hill and lowering the marshy area to the lower slopes, where a stream cuts through. He places Richard’s death site much closer to the original site suggested by Hutton and Nichols in the late18th and early 19th centuries.
To find a lost battle a wide range of expertise is needed. In 2005 Leicestershire County Council commissioned the Battlefields Trust to bring together a team of experts to search for the true location of Bosworth Battlefield. The first job was to review the previous locational theories and local traditions to determine their likelihood.
