Ey up - Richard III speaks with Yorkshire accent

King Richard III has been given a new lease of life, with state-of-the-art technology recreating his voice - complete with a Yorkshire accent.

A digital avatar of the medieval king, which went on display at York Theatre Royal on Sunday, was created by a team at Face Lab at Liverpool John Moores University.

Richard ruled England from 1483 until he died at the age of 32, and his remains were discovered under a car park in Leicester in 2012.

Vocal coach Yvonne Morley-Chisholm said she found it “exciting” to work on the project over the last 10 years and learn more about how the former king would have spoken.

Ms Morley-Chisholm told the BBC: “In a nutshell, it came about while I was on a weekend away with a bunch of voice teachers like myself, speech therapists, and we were meeting in Leicester and we had to come up with an after-dinner speaker.

“I thought, ‘they found someone under a car park didn’t they?’ and then I realised Face Lab had rebuilt Richard’s face and got very excited and thought, ‘we’ve got muscles, so what more can we learn?’

“From there, I went into a deep dive of finding evidence of how he would speak through speech and language therapy, dentistry, forensic psychology and archaeology.”

She went on to work with cranio-facial identification expert Prof Caroline Wilkinson and her team at Face Lab, as well as Prof David Chrystal, who is a specialist in pronunciation.

After a 10-year search, they found actor Thomas Dennis to give the performance that would drive the avatar.

Philippa Langley, who discovered Richard III’s remains under the car park in 2012, said the experts were able to determine how he would have spoken through looking at his “own handwriting, as well as looking at how words were spelt in medieval literature”.

She said: “We also looked at the contemporary source material we had about his personality and who he was as a king, along with public and private descriptions of him from diaries and letters.

“His character is very clear, he was very able and earnest , he was loyal, brave, devout and just.

“That is not to make him a saint, but that is what the evidence provides - people say he was nice.”

Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485.

He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty.

His defeat at Bosworth helped usher in the Tudor dynasty and bring the Wars of the Roses to a close.

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