11 Facts About John Ashdown-Hill

Louis John Frederick Ashdown-Hill MBE FSA, commonly known as John Ashdown-Hill, was an independent historian and author of books on late medieval English history with a focus on the House of York and Richard III.

John Ashdown-Hill taught languages including English, French, Spanish, Italian and modern Greek and Classical civilisation in the UK, in Tunisia, in Spain and in Turkey, but eventually gave up teaching to focus on his historical research.

In 2003, John Ashdown-Hill was asked by colleagues in Belgium to seek the mitochondrial DNA sequence shared by Richard III of England and his brothers and sisters as one of them, Margaret of York, had died and was buried in Mechelen in what is Belgium.

John Ashdown-Hill spent a year tracing an all-female line of descent from Richard III's eldest sister, Anne, to Joy Ibsen, a woman living in Canada.

In 2004, John Ashdown-Hill was commissioned by the BBC to research a story that Richard III's remains had been thrown into the River Soar in Leicester.

Subsequent DNA research and analysis by Turi King and her colleagues proved that the mtDNA of the bones matched the sequence from Richard III's mother's female descendants that John Ashdown-Hill had identified in 2004.

On 5 September 2012, John Ashdown-Hill had the honour of carrying the remains from the car park.

John Ashdown-Hill covered the box of bones with his modern copy of the House of Plantagenet Royal Standard.

John Ashdown-Hill was awarded an MBE in the 2015 Queen's Birthday Honours for "services to historical research and the exhumation and identification of Richard III".

John Ashdown-Hill died 18 May 2018; he had had motor neurone disease for some time.

John Ashdown-Hill carried out innovative research on the Plantagenet Y-chromosome, and on the mtDNA sequence of the Princes in the Tower.