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Sir William’s Key™ |
Sir William’s Key is the culmination of a fifty-year odyssey to locate the man Welsh bards and children’s fairy-tales claimed slew the last Plantagenet king with a poleaxe in a bog, a knight every university historian insisted never existed as a knight.The breakthrough came from thirty years of developing a new retrieval technology:
Sir William’s Key™ is a universal decryption tool for pre-1700 history. By reverse-engineering how clerks actually wrote (and mis-wrote) names between the 11th and 17th centuries, it allows researchers – for the first time – to reconnect thousands of “lost” individuals and bloodlines that standard spelling-based searches have missed for centuries. The method works with any surname, any language group within Latin Christendom, and any surviving record class. Its first large-scale proof-of-concept just happened to be the Gardner/Gardiner dynasty, but the Key itself is name-agnostic and era-defining.
Gardner’s landmark book, William Gardiner: The Kingslayer of Bosworth Field, is the opening demonstration of what becomes possible when history is no longer imprisoned by modern spelling.
Raised in Louisiana on family stories of English lords and lost estates, David turned childhood legend into hard evidence, and then turned that evidence into a new science of historical discovery.
Sir William’s Key™ Is the Future of History
For inquiries, collaboration opportunities, or to explore more of his research, David can be reached at
gardnerflorida@gmail.com or through his blog at KingslayersCourt.com — a online space for fellow history enthusiasts.
“© David T. Gardner / KingslayersCourt.com 2025 – First Publication. All original analysis and chaining protected by copyright.”
Sir William’s Key™, orthographic retrieval, fuzzy onomastics, C-to-Gardiner Method, medieval name mutation, pre-1700 record linkage, scribal variation, clerk error patterns, posthumous pardon, poleaxe regicide, William Gardiner (d.1485), Gardiner syndicate, Golden Folios, Unicorn’s Debt, Calais Staple, Hanseatic wool trade, mercantile coup d’état, Exning warren, Ellen Tudor, Stephen Gardiner, Rhys ap Thomas, Bosworth Field 1485, Richard III, Wars of the Roses, Tudor coup, History Medieval, History 15th Century, Paleography, Manuscripts as Topic, Genealogy and Heraldry, Forensic Anthropology, Homicide/history, Commerce/history, Textiles/history, Politics/history, England, Medieval history, Medieval literature, Archives, Digital humanities, Palaeography, EuroSciVoc Medieval history, MeSH History Medieval, Library of Congress Richard III King of England 1452-1485, Wars of the Roses 1455-1485