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this is Wiccan in northamptonshire which may look to you or me like a typical English Village over here you've got the Posh Manor House you've got the church next to it but 800 years ago there were two churches and two manor houses in fact two Villages separated by this little stream right here where we are now was Wick de and over here to the South was Wick Hammond naturally the current residents of Wick and are Keen to find out why there were two Villages here in the Middle Ages and they also want to know what happened to the church and the other bits and pieces of Wick Hammond that have long since gone they also want to know which was here first but understandably they're very keen to establish who's got the oldest bit of the village in their back Garden time team have been invited here to investigate the origins of two English Villages and as usual we've got just 3 days to dig up the answers oozing with history the village of wiin is situated about 5 miles away from the very modern town of Milton ke but we're not the only ones invited to investigate the two medieval Villages that once existed here so the Hunts on to see which Village has the earliest Origins and our Target area here in Wick D is potentially really exciting test pits dug in this field have turned up sax and pottery dating way back to the 9th century meanwhile our second site in Wick Hammond couldn't be more different here we're searching for a medieval Church thought to be in this field somewhere but we're hoping to find out if the church was built on an earlier religious site so Helen's team are going to be working in Wick de where Stuart has been mapping the lumps and bumps he reckons most of the bigger Earthworks are likely to be 15th century and to do with the Mana house but can he see any trace of anything that could be earlier what is interesting about the Earthworks if you filter off all the obvious stuff there is kind of a back ground noise of subtle Earthworks show me a subtle earthwork right mission impossible that in it this is a game I've played with Stuart before ground Rises up very slightly is it is it just just here that's it yeah it's just right slight Earthworks are very difficult to see but as usual he's got ideas on where we should dig my feeling is if we're looking for background noise that's pre Manor then we ought to be looking in this corner but this is the same area that you've got the early Potter down in this corner isn't it it does seem that all the evidence is coming together and I re I reckon we want an area down in that corner don't we so our first trench in search of the origins of Wick D is going in over one of Stuart's subtle Earthworks and in an area that's also turned up sax and pottery over at Wick Hammond Sam wants to get on with finding The Village's missing Church a building that was pulled down in the 17th century Stuart who's much in demand this morning has found an old map he thinks will help 1717 is data uh there's the villages there and you see there's little parcel in there which is quite difficult to read at that scale but if you blow it up look what it says the old church yard which I think might be a bit of a clip might be might be yeah and it also shows a building just there which I'm confident is that Barn behind us oh yes that looks appropriate so this this map doesn't show the church at all but it does give us the area of the church yard which is actually over there under where that crop it so it's in here somewhere but where exactly John's talking to the farmer who reckons he can narrow down the search this is a very light field this particularly this end of the field yeah but there's a patch you can see a ridge just across here where the is tall little bit higher and when we work the field there is masses of stone there Big Stone like that okay well I'll arrange for the machine to come in and we'll take a smaller areas possible yes that's accepted that's what we've agreed so the business of clearing the crop gets underway in Wick Hammond basically all we need to do is flatten the wheat so that geiz can get in to do their survey over at wide we're opening up a second trench and turning up a lot of 13th century Pottery oh clearly there were people living here in medieval times you go I think that looks a bit better oh yeah that's the stuff that's some big old pieces yeah oh yeah where's this coming from Potters breur just up the road it's called Potters because it was full of Potters there been in the medieval times there been about 20 Kil excavated there and it's only a little village but it's stuff full of pottery kills back at Wick Hammond gef are ready to reveal the first ever picture of this Village's long lost Church I mean it's not a clear footprint of a church but I mean there's definitely a building here and it looks to me as if there's lots of rubble over there yes well it looks to me as if you might have the sort of Chanel coming out here and the rest of it back there so yeah if you can drop us on that the earliest documentary reference for this church is in 128 but we've no clue to when it was actually built hopefully this trench will tell us that and most importantly if it was built on the site of an earlier Saxon Church Church Mick's Keen to widen our search for sax and material in the village and he's gone off to see if he can get permission to dig test pits in a few back Gardens right it must be this one I better ask the boss go on then can you show us show us your G and we can have a look at it thanks you know the idea we just dig a one by one meter pit to see what sort of Potter and stuff you've got and uh you know that'll tell us a lot about the way the village is developed I me your mind us disturbing your grass we'll be as careful as we can that's okay anything anywhere cuz I mean you take this family have already collected a few fines and stored them near the stream that was once the boundary between the two Villages the stream's virtually dried up isn't it yeah it does I mean in the winter that'll actually flow over that pipe or about six or seven Ines really so this is our stream isn't it yeah but you can't believe it it's all dried up right the way through you know these are the unfor a small but I mean that looks like Building Stone yeah so yeah so that's very good news that suggest you might have had a building or house on the site originally well that was under there used to be a garage there and that was uh under the base my wife dug all that out by hand meanwhile over here in Wick Hammond I'm trying to get permission for more test pits and the garden of this house seems to be perfect oh nice house what a beautiful pool Tony look at that you're lucky in this weather wow it goes on for Miles just keeps on going over in that direction on and on and on well um I think we're going to need to consult about where best to put it but you wouldn't mind provided we don't do it over there that we put something it would only be little yeah that's fine anywhere this Garden is especially interesting because it's got a curved boundary around it and it's just next to our church site in Wick Hammond we're approaching the end of the day now but I'm Keen to see how we're getting on un earthing a church that was last seen way back in 1619 rxa you've got something yeah we're starting to see something eventually we have these rather substantial Stones here and then if you look at these two they're faced off so so could that be the outside wall of the church part of it certainly not all of it but part of it what do you mean part of it it wide of that beginning of day two here at wian in northamptonshire where we're looking for the origins of the village Village actually it's a bit more complicated than that because in the Middle Ages it was split into two Villages you had Wick D here where we are now and then a little stream and then Wick Hammond over here so far here in Wick D we've had some Anglo-Saxon Pottery out of that field and some mysterious Earthworks but as yet no structures so we're going to keep on digging here but the most exciting part of the day for me is that we're adopting a test pit strategy which means we're going to dig lots of little holes all over the village in order to do that we've recruited an army of volunteers who Mick and Richard are now briefing we're putting in test pits in both Wick D and Wick Hammond don't assume because it doesn't look interesting that it is isn't you know any doubts at all keep it the worry is that they might not recognize Saxon Pottery it basically looks like dog biscuits but terribly important you know the test pits will only be 1 M square but they'll help to build up a picture of where people were living in medieval and Saxon times our test pits are going in on Gardens colored green on this map but I'm wondering if we really need anymore because all these red dots record test pits already dug by Cardiff University but I mean you always do need more because the finer the number that you've got the more you can see the variations in different parts of the village this is the area that I found so frustrating last night why did you find that frustra well because we've got loads and loads of fines from it and absolutely no Anglo-Saxon structures if You' have stayed around a bit longer and not sced off as you did you would have actually been aware that we actually found posts last night really in that trench there are posts bents so if we can bottom out the footings maybe we'll find phasing there one of racha's main jobs now will be to dig down alongside the outer wall to see if it's been built on the foundations of an earlier Church meanwhile over at wickd Matt's got some good news about one of our new trenches we've got a ditch if you can see the edge of it coming along here um we've just got to the bottom of it here it's about 20 cm deep so we've got one side there and fortunately the other side is just beyond the section here so I think I have to extend it a little bit just to get the full width of it even better we've got some pottery to dated is that fantastic it's 10th Century it's exactly what we're looking for it's um near it's where it's the classic sax and Potter in this part of the world but it's early days yet we don't know if it is a ditch until we extend the trench to find the other edge of it but we do have our first really good evidence of people living around here in Saxon times which way around is this go it's the rims in turn so it's kind of like that and how deep is it oh maybe 3 Ines at the most oh quite quite small and how wide uh in a bit in a bit yeah about that probably so sort of shepherd's pie size oh yeah they're quite small you do sometimes get them with um sockets in the side that you could put wooden Handles in and use them as frying pans Helen what are you doing here I thought you supposed to be over at Wick D but it's rack's end of the trench that's got everybody excited why what we got rxa well I decided to extend the trench cuz we wanted to see whether we could find any earlier phases of the wall and as we were going down we seem to have found a burial a burial yeah you can see this soft material here which is the fill of the grave and this is quite hard and you can see the cut just going all the way around found some ribs popping up here there's a bit of a clavicle which is this bone just here but the really interesting thing about it is that it's north south align and it's underneath that wall there yeah it's underneath the wall so it's earlier than the wall when do we think the wall is well we think that this church complex is about 13th century so what's the big deal about it being north south well most medieval burials are supposed to be West East you have your head to the west and your body to the East and that's that's true true for the vast majority of the medieval period but the further you go back into the anglosaxon period life is not so simple they don't they haven't quite made a decision about exactly how they should be burying each other and sometimes you do get these anomalous weird burials and I think this might be one of them the discovery of a burial actually under a wall is more than we could have hoped for it should help to date the construction of the wall and better still it could be proof that we found evidence of a Saxon settlement here in Wick Hammond as well but typically just as I start to get excited I'm giv the bad news from Wick dly and what we thought was a ditch actually looks more like a pet now not only has our ditch turned out to be a pit but Matt's discovered medieval Pottery in it suggesting it was dug in the 12th century rather than in Saxon times where's these post hes you were so pleased with then Phil's got news too he's finished digging his post holes and they too are part of the medieval history of Wick Steve and this is actually a wall now if you follow up through here you can project it right the way through here and when you get to here it forms a right angle with these big Earth Works of the manorial complex these are walls likely to have been put in by the Mana and connected with the later use of this field all the evidence suggests that in the 13th century this field contained numerous wooden houses Front ing onto the road close to the manor house and church then it appears these houses were all cleared away when the Lord of wickd extended the grounds around the manor sometime in the 15th century as well as adding to the picture of medieval Wick D we also want to work out the layout of medieval Wick Hammond we've already managed to locate the exact position of the church and we're learning all sorts of details about what it looked like oh wow look at that isn't that an amazing decoration that is fabulous you can imagine there must have been four of them there curving around in a circle it's quite Fancy no matter where it is isn't it we haven't found anything else like that in the trench no we haven't that's amazing so you've actually got some pigeon holes on the left hand side there we've got the remnants of two uh rows of of pigeon holes with the little Ledges where the birds could land yeah Mick that's really substantial it is fantastic isn't it so what does that tell us well presumably we're near a manorial complex or something like that I think we're in the manorial farm Lords have a monopoly on the keeping of doves and the Brewing of ale so we're very much close to the Lord here I think but do you think this is the menorial complex itself because I've been looking at the the layout of the village and the boundaries around it the dove cost is over here and the church is over here they seem quite a long way apart for this to be within the manorial enclosure after analyzing all the maps Stuart reckons this curving boundar is a clue that the Mana house was situated here this would make sense as it would put the Mana house and the church close together as they are in wickd it's possible that the dovecot and the Brew House were kept separate as a kind of little industrial unit this is the first time anyone's ever been able to picture the two manners of Wick Hammond and Wick D together with the day almost over there's just time to water the trenches and the archaeologists while Mick and I check the progress in our test pits how you getting on with the test pits mate yeah pretty good I've been R them all now and most of them are producing medieval Pottery it's all pretty much Potters breur we sort of 1250 1300 onwards there's a few bits of earlier stuff maybe 12th century but nothing before that they're all ongoing I mean you know some are deeper than others some are about 20 cm deep some are about 40 cm deep I think you should knock off now it's late it's hot we'll do the rest tomorrow maybe tomorrow as they go deeper they'll turn up some Saxon evidence Helen's worry is that we might not have discovered an insitu burial under the wall of the church so far we found no trace of a skull and they could just be random bones digging Graves is a slow process but with less than a day to go hopefully we'll get an answer soon but there's a lot more to this trench than just old bones we're discovering all sorts of details about the history of this church wow look at that beautiful isn't it I mean these piles are really small and but they're actually smaller than some of those decorated piles that we had which suggests an earlier phase of floor they are very small see small in a in a sort of church envirment time but it's not just in the trenches that we're uncovering the Forgotten history of Wiccan Stuart's been making some important discoveries of his own about the Village Green and and the large garden belonging to the rectory I sometimes get the feeling at the beginning of day three that we've been summoned by St steuart to be told what's going on Stuart spotted on an old map that these two areas were both covered in houses that have been cleared away since the map was drawn in 1717 and what they've done is just cleared all those properties away to create a large garden and they're diverting the stream to put ponds in there it's a piece of or landscape in Garden it's just like when they used to build the stately homes that's right get rid of the peasants it's a mini one isn't it it's a mini mini Park the biggest surprise though is that Stuart reckons this stream wasn't the boundary between the two villages in medieval times in fact the layout of the village is actually quite regular over here and I think the road is more likely to be part of the structure and division between the two two Villages you've caught us at the most exciting moment we think we found uh we think we found a at least part of a skull in the grave cart and the other thing that's really exciting is we've just extended the trench out of the Machining came a piece of Potter Paul has stated that to Maxi wear 650 to 750 that's fantastic that's the earliest stuff we've got then I know is beginning to raise the possibility that there there is activity including burials on this site right from the middle Saxon period point of clarification are you the same archaeologist who was so miserable around the fantastic we have got an insitu burial and it could be 1300 years old although it has been disturbed by later building on this site we've got this grave cut here the skull would have been just under the wall here but as you can see because they were building the wall they've messed around with it and the skull has actually traveled down here none of the bones are articulated they're just a jumble mess and here we have some of the teeth that's hardly warn at all that's like a juvenile or a young adult it this bit comes from a pot that would have looked something like this and surely it's an encouraging sign that there was something going on here in Saxon times we've only got a few hours left to find out so it's just as well that we're starting to make sense of the medieval church we wanted to find the junction between the Nave where the congregation stood and the chancel where the altar was and it looks like we've found it usually the towers I did Li the sequence isn't it yeah so by the time we put the tower on I think that would have side Isles and this is how we think it looked before it was pulled down in the 17th century although the focus is now very much on the church here in Wick Hammond there's still the job of sorting out all the information gleaned from our various test pits essentially what we've been doing is adding lots of new information to the archaeological map such as the Lost Road and buildings discovered here in the rectory Gardens well nearly everything from this test bits medieval it's The Potters B again mid 13th to 14th we didn't find any trace of Saxon history in these back Gardens but the medieval Pottery finds add to the picture of how the village of Wick div expanded around 1200 ad yeah I mean it all seems to be from the pottery the same day along this entire block I mean I can't imagine that these things just you know sprung up simultaneously by accident certainly so strikes me that we might have a bit of Village planning going on here and Wick time team is 100% independent and funded by our incredible fans want us to make more episodes joining patreon gives you access to exclusive interviews 3D models master classes and more and you get to have your say in the process as we develop new sites see this that is 10 Roman coins if I found these all together in the ground they'd officially constitute an archaeological horde so imagine finding this many coins 55,000 to be precise this is the single largest site we've ever attempted to investigate and as usual in Tres Abus Nobis cognos endest it's a fantastic notion this idea that underneath this field is an entire Roman town but when I look at it all I can see is the sweep of the stubble I can't see any lumps and bumps or anything yeah it doesn't look that much does it really Tony but actually this is a site of a Roman town called Kuno but it site was lost for almost 2,000 years until aerial photographs of 1940s showed unmistakable parch marks ditches Big Stone Wall Roman buildings Roman Street so trench one is going in across a break in the southern wall where the team suspects we might find the Gateway and a watchtower there's our first Roman p would say that's a piece of Roman pot yeah without doubt that's from Dorset so yeah that's probably going to be later Roman didn't want an address for it despite centuries of destructive plowing on this field geop are producing cracking results and that's reflected in the archaeology Phil how are we getting on superbly Tony just as on the geophysics we've got the wall here it ends about here and then I think we going into the ditch it's much darker through there and it gets chalky around there and at the back around the corner we got this big black blob with with pottery and we got bone on it I think that's our pit and apart from that we've got other bits of pottery we've got coins it really is all coming together so already it looks as though our Roman town is beginning to appear in the field how much more is there we'll find out later oh and of course this being time team it looks like it's going to bucket down any [Music] minute John what is that Contraption this is Jimmy in the future we've got such a big site here um the only way we decided we could tackle it was to try this new bit of kit that the Swedish have developed and basically it's radar on Wheels Jimmy is this usually used on archaeological sides no no this is been designed with the utility mapping in mind so looking for pipes and cables hasn't actually been used on archaeology in Britain before well that's quite exciting is are first and it is absolutely amazing and as the predicted rain starts to fall trench 1 gives us our first classy find ah yeah it's a spoon yeah that's the handle you got the little drop and then you've got just part of the bowl could have been a circular one and they tend to be earlier rather than late Romans so more likely second century early 3D these types of spoon were usually silvered or tin plated and Were A Cut Above the regular day-to-day wooden variety and equally lavish objects were Unearthed here during the 50s and 60s unfortunately the excavation notes were never published but the amazing finds did make it to a local Museum dve one of the problems You' got on this site is a small M diging that has taken place has never been written up but you've got all the finds in the museum that's right and you see them all here uh here is an piece of Stone from an arch it would have set like that as a column and the arch for the Gateway would have sprung from there just shows how Monumental the building was and then back here we have some painted wall plaster and you can see the decoration the designs on here so do we know where that's from I know it's from trench BB and I'm not quite sure where that's from so that's something hopefully you you will be able to find out so it does suggest that there's a building of high status presumbly plaster maybe with a hyper that kind of thing could be back out on site we've now identified a second target we're in the middle of the the world town and there's this massive building which we think is a mancio oh that's one of those Hotel type things that high status people used to stay in when they were wandering around the country that's right it's a a building made up with a series of rooms and it's ideal for radar to work on so we thought this is the best Target for us to try if we look at Mike's computer we can actually see the results on screen already I mean you've seen these time slices before we've put all the results together and what we can see as several rooms here we think this is part of the Mano So the plan is to put a trench across one of the walls from inside the room into the courtyard see if we can get some dating evidence um and see the state of preservation so our investigation expands from trench one looking for the southern gateway to trench 2 which takes in this substantial building in the interior and the radar results are good as we're straight down onto the the archaeology your work here is done I think in but with trench 2 looking to ID this building I'm concerned that we're overly confident it's a mano well in the aerial photographs there is a very clear large building which has lots of rooms within it arranged around a courtyard and these you very often find in towns and so this looks like a mancio it's in the right kind of place for a mano therefore it's highly likely to be one what do you mean it's in the right place do you mean that it's slap bang in the middle of the Town inside the walls well you actually have to imagine that the walls aren't there um because if they're sort of fourth Century then the Mano was probably built before this so what I mean is it's right in the center of the where all the roads are coming together all the major roads are coming together and joining what you're providing is somewhere for people to eat somewhere for people to sleep and somewhere for them to change horses so you have a whole sequence of bedrooms um very often or at least in the earlier stages of them the bedrooms were of two different sizes as to whether you had important offici staying or the common or garden Soldier or messenger or Postman staying if what we have got is a mancio what does that tell us about this side it tells us that it did have a formal function within the Roman imperial system if they're right then contio was built around a Roman Travel Lodge with important visitors coming and going on a daily basis is that all coins you got there yep I've got 13 here where have they come from they've come from the T Heat just around this trench but they've all just come from this trench y I mean have you any dates for well there's one here that dates to about 270 and that's a coin of ganus but the rest of them really tightly date to the middle of the 4th Century so around 320 to 340 ad I mean I suppose I mean it's a lovely little collection but the sheer fact that it's all from the spoil tip it's all unstratified it actually only tells us that the Romans were here in C at that time that's true but the interesting thing here is that 20e period that the coins come from and I'm wondering whether the perhaps at some point a clow has hit a little coin horde perhaps another one yeah another coin horde from puno see I mean I when you say that I was thinking this morning I mean Tony said he had a handful of 10 coins and he said that constitutes a horde you got 13 yeah so what we're looking at here is another case of potential treasure wow but the weather has caused one major setback rain has seeped into the radar machine's computer forcing it to retreat from sight geis have lost their Ultimate Weapon man will have to Triumph where machine has failed under the Marquee though work goes on unhindered Max can I come in your trench yeah quick get under the temp it's getting worse and worse out there miserable isn't it I think you're in the best place this is where we thought there might be man here yeah and I'm pretty sure we've got it I mean over here we've got this lovely packed chalk surface in the middle we're just starting to get the stones of this wall coming up and that goes straight down this way behind me there on that side got the Courtyard area or Yard Service looks like and on top of it in front of Cristo there can you see Stone roof tiles slid straight off the roof and landed right there so we know we've got a building we know it's Roman but we don't know it's a mano do we true but this fits in perfectly with the geop physics so I'm pretty sure that we've got it so you're happy to continue oh yeah I'm well up for it I'm not surprised you're the only dry people on the site we've clearly got a massive building here and the problem is there's just so much going on unpicking it is just so difficult but unpick it we must so we put another trench in on the strongest anomalies in the building Amano would likely have had both a bath house and heated rooms so if we can find them then we've as good as got our ID back over in trench one feels confident he's finally found the Gateway what I got here is the butt end of the wall that John got on his geophysics you can see here these flints set into the mortar where the flints that way are just in loose soil the geiz team still without their Speedy radar on wheels are putting in the miles and getting the Acres done that should line up with those defenses and their survey is gradually adding key features to the rich tapestry of our 3D map but 20 M away on the other side of the Roman Courtyard Matt has at last pinned a date to the mancio you know Matt the thing about this trench was it had a great plan didn't it and it absolutely matched a geophysics like a dream but we didn't actually have any dating for any of it but looks like it's changed yeah indeed we've just done this tiny little hole up against the wall here must be about half a meter by about 30 cm we've got pottery from the floor itself this chalk floor that I'm kneeling on we've got pottery from the kind of layer below the chalk floor and there's another layer below that and there's Pottery coming out of that as well so there's plenty of shoes for them well just quick inspection the immediate thing is it's not late Roman you know samian wear is always classically s of first and second century ad that looks like to be second century so it does suggest that these floors are being laid around about the 2 Century ad but there's absolutely no late Ro Pottery at all and no any sort of later floor levels but it sorts the doesn't it that this building was built around the 2 Century ad but perhaps by the time that the stone walls were going up and the fancy house in the far Corner was being built this could be out of use yeah pretty sure it was so before huge walls dominated Cano the heart of the town was a mancio with its many bedrooms stables and bustling kitchen providing an important staging post on the Imperial Highway to the West it was somewhere on the road heading south from that mancio that the massive coin horde was buried and Matt seems to be a step closer to finding its location Philipa this is just come out wow of the ground down there it was just in the subsoil kind of churned up kind of leaning up against the structure here well it's the earliest coin that we found in the past 3 days definitely it's an ass and it's the emperor Nero so so what date is that that's 64 to 68 ad it's pretty precise so what we've got here is this oval coming around like that set into this chalk structure you can see the chalk blocks coming around there and it looks to kind of be coming to a point around there I must admit looking at the shape the way it's emerging Neil oven is what Springs to mind you got potentially then a sort of oven set inside a building domestic occupation and probably earlier rather than later maybe I would have thought so Neil up up here yeah so we're in someone's kitchen as Phil heads underground my questions are on the money do you re these were buried in Panic it's a possibility and that's the traditional interpretation of Roman coin hordes that they were buried in a time of unrest and then the people would come back and collect them when things are calmed down do you believe that well it's a possibility but I think there are lots of other reasons why coin hordes might have been buried like what who might have access to this kind of money well I don't think it's going to be one individual but money lenders maybe would get this sort of number of coins or we could look at this as being a sort of community collection and that it's been buried for a religious reason and that they've come together to give this all to the gods well we ratten that's about it I think so look at that it's not very deep is it the room's practically at the surface ah but you've got to remember the original nio horde was was roofed over with a slab and that slab probably was at ground level so this is probably what it looked like what do you Excavating right there now well we've got these layers of demolition that come off either side so the idea is to put a slot down through these thinking that you know there was a chance that they were going to be covering intact floors but unfortunately it looks like this is actually build up and the floors would have been higher so we've lost them so it's certainly a very high status building but we're not going to be able to tell just from this one trench no unfortunately not the dating evidence for this substantial building points to activity in the third and fourth centuries the same date as the stone walls so it's likely to have played an administrative role over the lake town we've had some really fascinating archaeology from all over the site we've got the man C we've got the big high status building that Stuart identified we've got the building where the horde originally came from but we keep being drawn back back to this trench for one very good reason this wall it's huge isn't it Mark it's Monumental we knew it was big but to actually now see it exposed is incredible I mean you got the front face there just here yeah the rear face is here and then we got another big foundation beyond that probably for a gate house I mean it's absolutely astonishing but when this gate house was at its apy yeah what would it have looked like well let's go and stand up where we would have been in the middle of the gate so we're roughly now standing in the middle of the road you've got a gate that's at least 5 to 6 M wide then you're going to have a great single Arch coming up four to 5 m High the wall itself is going to be 6 to 8 m High we've got the block behind us telling us there's a kind of tower structure so there's probably another story above that it's very impressive when you first pick one of these things up it seems pretty light but the more you hold it the more you can feel its weight in your biceps and for me in the smaller my back and yet you guys have been going up and down this field nonstop for three days yeah well you've just walked about 20 M yeah if you kept going for another 55 km in total you'd have walked what the team have walked in the past three days I mean they've collected just short of a half a million data points and surveyed 27 Acres of ground I mean it's the biggest survey we've ever done on time team and the result has been an entire Roman town is there anything about it that surprised you or you didn't expect there's just so much going on it it's unbelievable you know there's the inclosure ditches the defenses the trackways the fields paddocks the buildings a complete plan and it's coming right through the field and we've not actually found a limit to the archaeology it's quite brilliant you've actually got 400 years of history on one piece of paper so our findings suggest that cantio began in the first century as the Roman army drove a Road West a small settlement grew around a major crossroads and early in the 2 Century a mancio developed to cater to passing Travelers attempts to formalize the town resulted in a grided street plan but all that was done away with in the 4th century when town planners slapped down huge walls and cleared the interior administering the town from the big Villa in the corner all a far cry from the field today Phil why do you reckon cantio eventually disappeared under the ground whereas other Roman towns like siren sester survived well the way you see it Tony probably in the early Roman or British period you had a perfectly Peaceable prosperous little commun at e Ro here everybody going about their local business minding their own business and getting on perfectly well and then in the later Roman period you have the M of bureaucratic administrative Rome coming here and building this whacking Great Wall bringing in their taxation their Administration and all those nasty things and I reckon that killed the local community they cluttered off and then of course when the Romans went away well the locals didn't want to come back today time team is 100% independent and funded by our incredible fans joining patreon gives you access to exclusive interviews 3D models master classes and more please join us on this exciting Journey we need more support to make more episodes codna Castle sits right on the border between Nottinghamshire and darbishire surrounded by Countryside which has been Parkland for a millennium over the last 500 years the Park's been extensively mined and believe it or not there are even records of Mines within the castle walls we have this big problem in that no one knows where the mines were or how deep they were so John and his team have been here since the crack of dawn trying to do the preliminary work for us John what are the chances of survival and I'm not just talking about the archaeology well I think you'll survive the problem is we still can't find any of these shafts if there's been mining here for centuries are we likely to find anything at all yeah look behind you Tony can you see the stonework between the towers and the grass above it that's the ground level inside there so it's above your head it's good 6ot higher than out here and I guess what that is is it's a product of quaring and Mining waste being dumped in there now that could act like a protective blanket sealing and protecting the archaeology underneath looks just like building Rubble doesn't it yeah it does we want to find out when codna Castle was built and what it looked like so trench one goes in on the upper court inside what's thought to be the oldest part of the castle and 6 foot Below in the lower court we're sinking two more trenches just outside the old castle walls the north G end of the chamber block but it's internal a that's a great big fireplace there yes and that's enormous isn't it it is so if that implies a room coming this way it's a high status room of some description other that wouldn't have had a fireplace that size but it's some sort of domestic chamber you know not the main chamber but sort of an Annex to it possibly so geiz set to work to find the room's missing wall meanwhile raters found our first bit of dating evidence near to her [Music] wall well Paul we've had our first piece of potery it's pretty modern though isn't it no that's late 17th century early 18th something like that that's mod in mind not M The Jug dates to the period just before we know the castle was in ruins of this wall you can see that face coming along there yeah it's been chopped out here by quaring and Mining but we've got a really good face on this side and where rature is I think we got something coming up there rat there these two Stone lentils one here and one ight right there part of the doorway which the entrance needs to be running in that direction so do you reckon that this wall here Richard goes with this one here certainly looks like it it's roughly parallel and that was obviously some sort of high status chamber with a a properly glazed window over there so what kind of room could it be well it's next to the Gateway so possibly pters Lodge this is great news we're not even at the end of day one and already we've managed to locate one of the key rooms in codna Castle the main Discovery since we last here is this wall wall here return coming off this one which is built into it it's a part of the same structure you can see just in the corner there looks like we' got just here yep coming back this way as well and that would fit possibly with there being a drawbridge here with a draw bridge pit underneath it oh right U but the problem is that they it doesn't line up with this turret very well this Edge needs to be going underneath the turret it's hard at the moment to think what else it might be despite Matt's reticence this is a huge surprise a drawbridge means a much grander entrance to the castle than we ever imagined oh that's nice and the fins aren't too shabby either it's a beautiful little thing really delicate little cup just the rim coming around like that they sometimes have like up to eight handles on them they're really peculiar little things but as if we weren't busy enough right at the end of the day jeiz come up with a new Target I think we've come up trumps we've got this fireplace in the end of that building in the geophysics you can now actually see this wall line I think we've actually got a room that goes with that fireplace I think there's a wall line that comes along here and then look this strong response here is that another building on that platform there just above the drawbridge trench inside the round towers of the Gateway Richard has managed to find some dating evidence to help us work out the chronology of the castle these tops these lentils are quite distinctive these are called shouldered lentils right and this is a kind of C leave out block there I see hold a flat there right and they're also called canavan arches because they first really come in when Edward the first is building the Welsh castles at canavan in 1280s and they're used for about 50 years so that ties in really nicely with the documentary reference as well because we've got that first reference in 1308 which is bang in the middle of the period yeah exactly right okay let's go and look for some more interestingly the building of the Gateway corresponds with a period of Royal favor for the medieval knights who lived here Henry III is said to have kissed Richard De gry in gratitude because he and his brother were the the only nobleman to sign up for an unpopular Crusade and in 1294 Edward the first paid a royal visit to codner an event so momentous it could even have prompted a rebuild so the Gateway could have replaced the drawbridge that Neil now thinks was surrounded by a tower and measuring back 28 CM before it starts so if we go back and measure across to prove it we need to find a similar chamford Edge on the other side is it a stone lying at an angle or is it shamp there it is that's definitely to be it there you can argue with that you win I buy that gold star for you hang on how about that so I guess what it's showing is isn't it that we actually have a symmetrical tower on either side of the drawbridge pit and I guess it kind of confirms that this is clearly unrelated to that yeah so this means there would have been a wooden bridge over the moat under attack the degr could have burnt this as a first line of defense then there was a draw bridge over the pit which would have raised on a pivot and if The Intruders got this far there would probably have been a port Callis this elaborate defense seems to fit the image of the degr because these were soldiers who featured in every battle from aenor against the French back to the Scottish Wars and the Crusades and we're hoping to find some of their rooms alongside the missing West Wall where fa is digging yeah look at these of course well I think you've got here is part of a plaster wall surface it's got this nice plain surface on one side and if you turn it over you can see the impressions of the wooden LS that the plaster would have been attached to if we've got that what could this feature be this kind of semicircular feature coming in ises that buty up against the wall yep looks very like it might be a circular staircase yes I was so hoping you were going to say that that's fantastic over the last two days we've discovered so many bits of walls and windows and finds from different phases of the castle that my head's spinning is that a bit of marble is it marble or qu no idea I mean you always wonder if it might come from statue or something yeah from the garden yeah this dig has been so rich that it sometimes seems as if the castle has been bursting to tell its story with such a vast amount of material coming out of the moat it's important that we search the spoil Heap thoroughly and this is wine why is your hand shaking gold coin gold hammered coin look at that hand come here look at look at that I can't hold it still I'm afraid and given how soft gold is and how big this is it is absolutely quite incredible over the last 3 days we found more than we bargained for and phze West Wall is no different okay so does that kind of line up with the just about doesn't it it's pretty much in line with that lower court wall but the most impressive bit is this block of masonry which comes all the way around here and is sweeping round like that so it's actually a round Tower that's been stuck on to the curtain wall and and you can see look at the foundations they're going down and down and down it's massive this way it's massive down that way inside our round Tower we've got loads and loads of burning and originally we thought this was kitchen but the thing that really CH made us change our mind was this feature over here which appears to be a fireplace you can actually see that it's later because it's got all those bricks in it you know it's 6 and 1/2 M wide and it's 3 m deep coming further back up we see here now we've got the abutment on the other side of the moat you know really wellb built mortared wall and so coming up here you know you get a really really good perspective of just how impressive that Tower is and goodness knows what's it standing 78 foot high you know just think none of that was visible yesterday so this is how Henry de gry and isal his wife would have entered their castle in the 13th century across the moat over a grand drawbridge past the Porter's Lodge and into the Great Hall but in the early 14th century the Castle was rebuilt with towers and turrets on the perimeter walls in the 15th century they extended into the lower court but it was the Zushi in the 16th century whose extravagant plans bankrupted the estate and left the castle a ruin hello my name's John Gator time team is fanf funded by patreon this vital support helps us to make new episodes joining p gives you access to exclusive interviews 3D models and master classes plus lots more

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 61,657

Keywords: Team Team, Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode

Id: cxguPzWbQ_8

Length: 49min 4sec (2944 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2024