John Ashdown-Hill, a historian specializing in the Plantagenet dynasty, later argued that Speed’s account was almost certainly an invention. Ashdown-Hill traced the history of the Greyfriars site and concluded that Speed had confabulated the story, possibly drawing on an earlier tradition about a monument near the bridge that had nothing to do with the actual burial. His argument, published in a 2004 paper, was that the burial itself was likely undisturbed because it had been a straightforward inhumation without a coffin, and that the friary site might still contain the remains if it could be identified and excavated.
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## A Medieval Map and a Car Park
The question of where the Greyfriars Friary had actually stood was itself complicated by five centuries of urban development in Leicester. The city had grown substantially over the medieval friary’s footprint. Houses had been built, then replaced by office buildings and public facilities. By the mid-twentieth century, the Leicester city council social services department occupied the site, with a staff car park behind the buildings.
The key breakthrough in locating the site came not from archaeology but from historical documentary research. A medieval map of Leicester, rediscovered and studied in the early 2000s, showed the friary’s position with enough clarity to allow its location to be identified in relation to surviving street patterns. The research pointed strongly toward the area now occupied by the council buildings and car park.
Philippa Langley, a screenwriter and member of the Richard III Society, had become interested in the king’s burial in 2004 after working on a stage play about him. She had developed strong views about the historical injustice of the Tudor portrayal and was committed to the idea that Richard deserved a proper burial with a known location. In 2005, she stood in the council car park and later described a strong, inexplicable sense that she was standing over the grave — an account she has shared publicly and that has been treated with varying degrees of credulity by different commentators on the case.