The society has attracted members from across the spectrum of interest in medieval history, from professional historians to enthusiastic amateurs to individuals who identify personally with what they perceive as a miscarriage of historical justice. It maintains an academic journal, publishes research on Ricardian history, and has been associated with efforts to find and examine primary sources relating to Richard’s life and death.
The society’s involvement in the Leicester excavation was primarily financial. When a corporate sponsor for the Looking for Richard project withdrew, the Richard III Society’s members raised approximately £13,000 within two weeks to cover a £10,000 shortfall in the excavation budget. This fundraising allowed the project to proceed on its original schedule.
The society’s relationship to the historical rehabilitation of Richard III is complex. On one hand, its members have produced genuine historical scholarship that has complicated the simple Tudor narrative and identified evidence that the historical record is more nuanced than the Shakespearean version. On the other hand, the society’s emotional investment in Richard III’s reputation means that its publications sometimes approach the historical evidence with an advocacy orientation — seeking to exonerate rather than to analyze dispassionately.
The Leicester discovery did not resolve the historical questions about Richard’s character or his guilt in various alleged crimes. It confirmed that a real person with specific physical characteristics and a documented burial was not a fiction, and it provided evidence that some specific physical claims by contemporaries had been accurate. Beyond that, the discovery offered the prospect of accurate forensic information about Richard’s body without settling the deeper historical questions about what he did, what he knew, and what he was as a person and as a king.