The Ricardian
The Ricardian is the scholarly journal of the Richard III Society, published in London, England. It carries academic articles on King Richard III and on fifteenth-century England more broadly, and it is the principal scholarly outlet for Ricardian studies — the research field concerned with the life, reign and reputation of the last Plantagenet king. The society has published the journal since 1974, and members receive the current volume as a benefit of membership, while earlier volumes are freely available to read online.
The Richard III Society
The Richard III Society is dedicated to the re-evaluation of the reputation and legacy of Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England and the last English king to be killed in battle, at Bosworth in 1485. Richard's reputation was widely maligned in the centuries after his death, in large part through Tudor writing, and later through Shakespeare's play. The society was founded in 1924 by the Liverpool surgeon Samuel Saxon Barton as the Fellowship of the White Boar — the white boar being Richard's personal badge and a symbol of the Yorkist army in the Wars of the Roses. Its original membership was a small group of interested amateur historians whose aim was to bring about a re-assessment of Richard's reputation.
The society became moribund during the Second World War, but the 1950s revived interest: Josephine Tey's detective novel The Daughter of Time, published in 1951, examined and doubted Richard's guilt in the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower; Laurence Olivier's film of Shakespeare's Richard III appeared in 1955, acknowledging at its outset that the play rested on legend; and Paul Murray Kendall published a sympathetic, detailed biography of the king. The Fellowship of the White Boar was renamed the Richard III Society in 1959. In 1980 Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester — the present holder of the dukedom Richard himself held before his accession — became the society's patron.
Foundation and frequency of the journal
The society has published The Ricardian since 1974. Some descriptions of the society's aims, including those of its overseas branches, describe The Ricardian as a quarterly journal; the society's own present-day accounts describe it as its research journal, published annually, with members receiving the current year's volume as a benefit of membership and the society also publishing a separate quarterly members' magazine, the Ricardian Bulletin. The journal's online archive covers Volumes 3 to 30, from October 1974 to 2020, indicating that Volume 3 appeared in 1974 — the numbering reflecting the journal's development from the society's earlier publishing. To mark its centenary in 2024, the society published a new official history, The Ricardian Century: A History of the Richard III Society, written by John Saunders.
The Ricardian is edited by the historian Joanna Laynesmith. Its former editor was Anne F. Sutton, a historian of late medieval London and of the Ricardian period whose long editorship helped establish the journal's scholarly standing. The journal is supported, as is the society's wider publication programme, by the Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, a registered charity established by the society in 1986 to advance research and publication relating to the history of late medieval England, which also makes research grants. In 2025 the society added a further strand to its communications with the launch of The Ricardian Podcast, presented by the journalist Alec Marsh.
Scope and subject matter
Although Richard III stands at its centre, The Ricardian's scope is the fifteenth century as a whole. The society explains that contributions include detailed biographies of men and women whose lives were directly relevant to Richard — relatives, officials and servants — but also of merchants, craftsmen, artists and scholars of the period, whose careers add to general knowledge of fifteenth-century society. There are discussions of aspects of social life, political and economic issues, and important events including battles; studies of crucial texts, both literary and historical; and articles on heraldry, works of art and archaeological finds. Maps, family trees and unusual illustrations complete the volumes.
Review articles cover a wide range of books dealing with similar material, and brief summaries guide readers to shorter publications on these subjects. The result is a journal that serves two audiences at once: specialists in late medieval history, for whom it is a peer-respected place of publication, and the society's wider membership of historically engaged readers, for whom it is the most substantial expression of the society's purpose.
Central Ricardian questions
Certain recurring questions define the field the journal serves. The society's own description of the online volumes singles out the controversial portraits of Richard III — what the king actually looked like, and how his image was altered after his death; his favourite saints and personal piety; the mystery of the Princes in the Tower, the disappearance of Edward IV's two sons after Richard's accession; and the problem of Edward IV's marriage — the claim of a pre-contract followed by a secret marriage which, taken together, would have made his sons illegitimate under canon law and cleared Richard's way to the throne.
Other landmark studies in the journal have analysed the book collections of Richard III and his family, and the elaborate funerals of Richard, Duke of York, of Edward IV and of Queen Elizabeth Woodville. Such articles illustrate the journal's method: returning to primary evidence — manuscripts, portraits, funeral accounts, administrative records — and testing the inherited Tudor narrative against it. That evidence-led approach, rather than simple advocacy, is what distinguishes The Ricardian as a scholarly journal from the pamphleteering with which Ricardian enthusiasm is sometimes associated.
The discovery of Richard's remains
The journal's world was transformed in 2012, when the society, working in partnership with the University of Leicester and Leicester City Council, supported the excavation at the site of the former Greyfriars church in Leicester that uncovered a skeleton later confirmed, through archaeological, historical and DNA evidence, to be that of Richard III. The search had been inaugurated by Philippa Langley, secretary of the society's Scottish branch, as part of her research into the king; it was the first-ever search for the grave of an anointed king of England. Langley and John Ashdown-Hill were awarded MBEs in the 2015 Queen's Birthday Honours for their services to the exhumation and identification of Richard III, and the king was reinterred with honour in Leicester Cathedral.
The discovery gave Ricardian studies an entirely new body of physical evidence — including confirmation of the king's scoliosis, a curvature of the spine quite different from the withered-arm deformity of legend — and it brought the society and its publications worldwide attention. The scholarly work of assessing that evidence, and of the king's life and reign in its light, continues to appear in The Ricardian, which remains the natural home for research generated by the society's own initiatives and collaborations with universities and other institutions.
The Ricardian Bulletin and the society's other work
The Ricardian should not be confused with the Ricardian Bulletin, the society's quarterly members' magazine, which carries news, branch activities and shorter items for the general membership. The division is a familiar one among learned societies: the Bulletin keeps the community informed, while The Ricardian publishes original research at full scholarly length. Through the Richard III and Yorkist History Trust the society also publishes important academic works beyond the journal, and makes grants to support research by others.
The society itself has a worldwide membership and local branches, which arrange historical and social activities in their own areas. It is open to all, historian and lay person alike. Its members are available to the media on topics concerning Richard's life and times and the Leicester excavation, and the journal's back volumes form part of the public face of that expertise.
Access and archive
Access to The Ricardian is unusually open for a society journal. Members of the Richard III Society receive the current year's volume as a benefit of membership. Earlier issues, from the early years up to and including 2020, are available to everyone in their entirety: Volumes 3 to 30, covering October 1974 to 2020, can be consulted and searched online free of charge, and texts can be downloaded as PDF files or printed, subject to the society's terms of use. In future, volumes are to be added to the online series after a minimum of five years — a moving wall that balances the value of membership against the society's aim of disseminating research.
Significance
The Ricardian occupies a singular place in British historical publishing. It is devoted to a single king and his century, yet its contents range across the political, social, economic, literary and artistic history of late medieval England. It has been published since 1974 by a society founded a century ago by amateurs, and it is edited and written to academic standards that have earned it the respect of professional medievalists. For anyone studying Richard III — his portraits, his books, his piety, his accession, his death and his rediscovery — it is, as the directory description puts it, the principal academic outlet for Ricardian studies, and the first place where new evidence and new arguments appear.
