Animal Farm (Hanslope) | Series 12 Episode 13 | Time Team

800 years ago england was a far from green and pleasant land civil war was raging between king john and a bunch of rebellious nobles and among those nobles were the mordowitz who owned most of the land around here a photograph of this field showed these rather unusual crop marks archaeologists thought they were probably prehistoric pretty standard stuff but some amateur archaeologists decided to have a look and blow me they found this 12th century building along with some lovely finds like this weird corbel isn't that strange it was obviously a very important building but it was abandoned very suddenly time team have been called in to help what was this place and what was all around it was it part of the mortality state and if so did king john destroy it in an act of revenge we've got just three days to find out [Music] our sights on what used to be the border between buckinghamshire and northamptonshire near milton keynes [Music] excavations by students at an archaeological field school revealed the building within the smaller crop mark circle pat and jonathan who run the school are pretty confident about what they've uncovered so after all your hard work what have you got here well we have a 12th century building some 11 meters long by five meters wide three equal bays inside we have the suggestion of a staircase this is here yeah which way is it going then it's going straight up to the side of the building i see what do you think it might be well the presence of the staircase indicates it could be a first floor hall other possibilities are a hunting lodge or possibly part of a monastic range it's intriguing isn't it mick yeah does that mean we're going to focus our activities on the already existing dig well there's a number of things we can do but we need to look beyond the existing dig in the immediate vicinity in the field and maybe other structures associated with this as well as the site the other circle down there what do you mean another circle well on that air picture there's this site and then there's another one just just outside this area and then we need to put the whole lot into the local context we get stuart to look at the the landscape of the area around and we've got our jonathan here to try and decode what the building might be i'll stick my oar in here i have to meaty site this one i want to get my teeth into it if it is a late 12th century building this is the time when the elements fuse together to make the typical english medieval house and indeed if this is a first floor chamber at the end of a hall then we should we should be standing in the in the top bar of a capital t-shaped plan with a hall going off that way if it's right it'll be a big discovery but i must say from what i see it looks a bit more like cowshed than the two-story block so i really want to get in there and have a look because it's a few years since this trench was dug we've got to re-excavate the building check the measurements and see if we agree with pat and jonathan's conclusions that's going to take us quite a while if it was originally a two-story building it would probably have been a manor house with a high status t block where the lord lived and ran a large estate the best alternative is that it could have been a hunting lodge while we get to grips with the building in the small enclosure geophys are looking for the larger enclosure further down the field the crop marks aren't visible now so they've got to cover a big area to speed things up they're using their quickest technique magnetometry looking for telltale magnetic variations which can indicate burnt material in a ditch or around a half for example the previous excavation produced an absolute mound of pottery paul blinkorn's already identified where it was made and dated it it seems that the building was occupied for a surprisingly short time the stuff like this which is from livdon which is up in the the north of northamptonshire it's one of the earliest glazed industries around here it gets going around about 1200 12 10 something like that and then there's this um which has been coming up from oxford or somewhere around oxford now this could be as early as 1080. uh they've found this stuff in the construction of oxford castle oh right they're giving a very precise and what about this bit well that's that's quite nice yeah it's part of a fire cover or a curfew nc expression have to curfew it's when you put the the covers on the fire um imagine a big bowl but upside down with holes in what would be the base if it was a bowl yeah yeah you basically put this on the fire at night it allows the fire to smolder all night so you'd have to realise it in the morning absolutely so the site's starting sometime around 1100 we know it's still going sometime around 1200. what about the end well round here there's a there's a major medieval pottery industry at pottersbury which is just three miles down the road this industry starts about 1250 now if you excavate a site dating to the late 13th or 14th century around here you find masses of potter's reward and i do mean masses it completely dominates the battery assemblages there isn't one single scrap from anywhere on this site gosh so it was completely abandoned it must have been by about 1250. it must have gone by 12.50 and this site just stopped dead our diggers may find evidence for why the building was abandoned it might have been because of what was happening on the larger stage these were turbulent times in england in the 12th century we had there were some really powerful kings people like henry the first henry ii richard the lionheart and with that power came the ability to to tax and to impose fines on people so that really impinged on people's lives but we've all we also had some really quite weak kings you know people like stephen and john at the end of the period and you know they weren't able to keep their barons in check as successfully and both of them faced quite major revolts during their reigns the maudwit family who owned this area were norman nobles who'd been granted in effect lent land by william the conqueror their estates included the nearby village of hand slope like many of the nobility by about 1200 they got fed up with the demands of the king they now felt they owned this land they were if you like becoming at least part english and should have rights over it but we've got a long way to go before we know if any mordwitz might have lived or stayed in this building here gents we've got a two-story building that's what we're talking about anyway isn't it clearly we've got a one big wall running down there going underneath bridgette now where are the others well the return runs here right angles from that wall under your feet under my feet i'm down here yes five meters down away from the wall runs parallel down that way so under this bank yes under this this is uh okay so now is the character of this wall the same as that opposite one there no it's not this wall is far more crumbly than this one but there are traces of mortar in it well that's interesting because if this is a big chamber block i'd expect it to be built at the same time and for them to be linked so i want to see the end walls what we have of them and to uncover this i really want to see this wall the walls been re-buried since the excavation so we just have to dig it up again geofizz have been looking for the larger crop mark circle haven't got on then john we've done a strip of geophysics there there's nothing is there we can't find it um what's the explanation for that then it could be that you've got the building there that's where the activity is maybe they were just keeping animals over there if they're linked so what do you do just do more we need to do more okay we'll do another strip and we'll have another look showing up as clearly as this on aerial photos geofish should be able to find it but at least we can now see the back wall of the building this is a wall isn't it let's get we're getting sensible now and that's better look let's have a look at the width because that one is skinny for me it's skinny and it's badly built and i wouldn't want to live in the first floor of a house have been built like that so what'd you say your internal measurement was about three seven five two three seven five come on jonathan get that tape well if that goes from there to there well then we might be in business this wall may just be the right size for a two-story building but just as the archaeology is looking more promising stuart's piling on the pressure with a whole new set of questions do we have any evidence that there was a manner here on the ground i don't think we do at the moment what it looks like if we've got a building set within an earlier enclosure of another period right what we've got is a whole load of three loads of them yeah this is the enclosure there these look very typically prehistoric in date to me in the pattern of fields and boundaries here i'm not seeing anything which gives me any suggestion there's a minority site i mean it should be a church or a chapel there should be other buildings there should be road layouts there's a building on its own at the moment that's very much what it looks like we've also got an overlapping problem we've got royal hunting forest in this area so could what we have be a hunting lodge it's possible it could be something like a bayless lodge something like that an estate manager it at the moment it could almost be anything but it doesn't look like it's a minority site to me and as the excavation uncovers more of the walls it now seems less and less like a manor house to phil and jonathan as well we should find the width of the wall for a first floor late well 12th century building should be about four feet at least three to four feet anyway and how deep would your foundations wanna be for that four feet so four foot wide and four foot deep yeah which looks like we're fairly near the bottom here yeah so your foundation's got to come up to here yep that seems really unlikely that that amount of muck has been has been shaved off there to me yeah it does yeah it does so and we ain't got a wall that's four foot wide and he ain't four foot deep what's that tell us about our building well it looks more like it's going to be a ground floor one but pat you got a staircase it was only ever the possibility that it was a staircase i'm willing to sort of forgo with that idea and it looks like it might be actually a lower status dwelling well we've got to try and fit in where actually the highest state of stonework comes yeah that's true it's all to play for isn't it it still is [Music] maybe the crucial evidence about this building won't lie in the ground at all but in the documentary records [Music] it's an area rich in castles and manor houses and the suggestive bumps of deserted medieval villages it should be possible to answer at least some basic questions in the records okay it seems to me the first main problem is what is the name of this site well we don't know that do we is it cool i haven't got anything yet but i think there are some leads that i can pursue you know in the medieval period it's quite typical for a person to to name themselves after where they live they could be west of somewhere east of somewhere that would be a starting point that would be very useful in the 12th century this was buckinghamshire so dawn needs to go to the county town of aylesbury to find the records stuart's going too because it's becoming vital to know whether our site was in a royal forest where special laws [Music] applied we've also got something more to get on with because geophys have now found the elusive big enclosure look that's where we did the initial strip and it just was so weak we couldn't see it but there's the circuit well that's clear we've got problems with that pylon the electricity right but if you want to put a trench across the ditch we can mark one for you easily i think we need to put something across to see what date that is you'll only get that by going to the bottom of the ditch yeah i mean there's one or two sort of features inside yeah i mean maybe pits maybe areas of burning give us one of the pits or features inside as well we'll do that as well with these two trenches we should be able to date the ditches and see if there's any other sign of medieval life inside this larger enclosure in aylesbury stuart and dawn are getting stuck into the records documents from the 12th century are tough maps are non-existent and place names hard to come by so even working out if this is a royal forest is far from straightforward but later parish maps can hold clues and any information could be vital [Music] the only remaining evidence that the building might be high status is the carved stone such as that weird head and some metal fines the small pieces of metal work are really quite a curious little group actually because we've got the usual things horseshoe nails and so on a pair of tweezers which is quite hard to date but it seems to have some medieval decoration on it we've got a coin probably john something like that this knife handle is quite interesting it's got lovely decoration it's complete although it's broken might be bone might be antler might be ivory what about these ones well this bit is the most spectacular thing this is the um the curb bit it's a horse bit for a small horse that that can control it very well and what about this that's a bit of a problem if you have any ideas because i'm really a bit desperate i'm sure our viewers will have plenty of ideas it's quite flimsy made of iron and we just don't know what it is not a nice building material isn't there good mixed bunch here this one is a beautifully cut large block of local limestone norman buildings tend to have smaller blocks so this is surprisingly large could that be 12th century could be although it's bigger than i'd have expected this here that's a beauty that one you see these staring at you in parish churches across the country could be long to an arch might be from a cobalt table where the wall meets a roof probably 12th century he's got a skull cap pre-seeds and lusher hairstyles the decadent 13th century so nice piece that one so what kind of building are we talking about well no two stones are the same it must be said so they could come from a range of buildings so there could be a whole host of buildings in our field two thirds of the way through day one and we seem to have this extraordinary mismatch on one hand we've got all those beautiful finds that seem to imply a whole host of buildings but in the ground we can hardly find any archaeology at all i don't know what's going on and quite frankly i don't think the archaeologists do either [Music] but at least matt's now found the ditch around the big enclosure so far he's only got more 12th century pot but he's nowhere near the bottom yet to settle any lingering suspicion that our building might have been a two-story block jonathan wanted to see the fourth wall to check its size and construction it's been revealed and the judgment is damning it's nowhere near big enough it's nowhere near well built enough it's only 11 foot 6 wide 26 feet long that's not even on the large side of a medieval cottage and furthermore these walls are not substantial enough to hold the second story probably a thatched roof it's it's cottage so suddenly we're downsizing yeah i mean it looks more like a sort of peasant longhouse to me oh the sort of thing that i mean it might still be a wealthy person but it's not the home of a brave rebel fighting against king john no but what's a medieval peasant living out here like this on his own because we've only got one building at the moment so what are we going to do tomorrow well we've got an awful lot of cleaning here we feel sorry yeah well and do some work out there too i think we need to do some geophysics around here so shock horror we came here because we thought we got a two-story manor house and after just a few hours excavation we find it's a peasant's hovel but that's not the end of the story because there's all those metal finds where did they come from and all that masonry in that head what's that all about hopefully we'll find the answer to that tomorrow beginning of day two and this is all really rather embarrassing because this time yesterday i was right on this spot talking to camera telling everybody how in the 12th century there were aristocratic rebels who were fighting king john and they were based here in some kind of two-story manor house 24 hours later it appears there's no manor house here there's nothing except a peasant's hovel and last night in the hotel half of our diggers were so depressed they were saying let's just pack up and go home until mick waded in and said no this is archaeology we've got to get back to basics which is a conservative phrase i never thought i'd hear you use but what exactly did you mean well i think there's still a lot to do here you talk about this being a peasant's hovel but i mean it's really it looks like a medieval longhouse that belonged to you know a villain a peasant farmer the thing is they don't occur on their own you know be very odd to have one stuck out here in the countryside they usually come this part of the world as part of a settlement and what about all these strange enclosures surrounding it when you see them plotted out across the landscape as stewart's done it looks like an iron age landscape underneath this this medieval one it would be very unusual to get circular oval enclosures in in the medieval period they're nearly all rectangular square and so on and of course what we need to sort out there is to date those anything else we still don't know the context of this if this is 12th 13th century it'll appear in the document somewhere it might be something to do with the royal forest that was at saucy it might be something to do with the with the main manner of the main village but we'll only get that by looking at the documents and of course we've got all the metal finds we've got great chunks of masonry and there's over 2 000 pieces of pottery there may not be a story here about nobles in the 12th century but there is a story and a big bit of that story is whether the large enclosure further down the field was part of the same settlement we've now got two trenches open one looking to date the circular ditch and the other investigating features inside the enclosure paul victor has been struggling to keep up with our building as it yo-yos up and down the medieval food chain victor this must be one of those nightmare digs for you where we keep changing our minds about what we've got we must have run out of rubbers by now it certainly is um i've got plenty of those i think we'll need more too tony because this is what we thought we were looking for that big two-story stone chamber block with a large timber hall attached but take two victor something like that this is much much smaller isn't it yeah it is tiny it's not even very big for a medieval cottage what have we got of it well a bit of stone footing that could have taken a clay bonded stone wall or maybe timber certainly supported a thatched roof what we'd expect no signs of tiles anywhere mind you it is only day two who knows what we'll have this time tomorrow that cheered me yesterday pat and jonathan the archaeologists who dug this building a few years ago stayed pretty quiet as we reduced their fine from a manor to a cottage but they don't think we've answered all the questions our diggers have been saying that you two aren't happy that actually we're saying no there's nothing here and that's kind of rubbished your work and there may well be more here than we're currently saying do you feel we've misrepresented your work no not at all we're quite happy that this building is not as substantial as we originally thought but i think we still need to see it in the overall context what appear to be high status stonework and pottery all of which suggests at some point or in this vicinity there was people living a high status life that is that is what i was going to come to i mean so far we have only been looking at the building but like you say we really do have to bring the fines into the equation what i would like to know is is is can you supply me with a a a plot of where all these really significant finds are coming from certainly we've got plans but we'd need to look through them because the the most of this excavation took five years around five years ago so so i haven't got that information in my head i don't know i don't expect it to you didn't know i didn't throw it at you pat and jonathan are going to plot where all the major fines the stone pottery and metal turned up to see if they indicate hot spots we should investigate but jonathan foyle has a theory about why the masonry is turning up on our side [Music] he thinks it was a medieval recycling job salvaged from a posh house or a church after renovation he's discovered that in this 19th century church there are bits of a 12th century chapel that used to be about a mile from our side [Music] there's an arcade here that is was taken down from a chapel in a field between here and our site and in fact actually look look we've got heads um so this one looks you know not dissimilar oh yeah yeah offer up your head oh there we go hey that's very good isn't it not bad this is a similar kind of size it's just a bit narrower and the eye details are there as well maybe it's a bit cruder and again the same sort of hairstyle going on there so could this head have come from this actual building the stone's a bit rougher i don't know really what it shows is that masons who are working in this manner were producing work like this and the stuff that's on our site doesn't have to have come from far away if the masonry had been brought onto our site from other buildings at least it would explain why no two stones seem to match and stewart and dawn did have some success looking through the documentary records in aylesbury we especially wanted to know if our site was in a royal forest and if we could name it to show you what we've got this area in pink is is the manner of of hand slope in here with our site right at the top the top corner now what we've been able to establish is that the site itself actually is within the royal forest area of salsa this is all part of the forest and therefore our site will be subject to forest jurisdiction as we were now the evidence for that is that we've got names like hand slope green which we've been able to identify mentioned as being within the forest salsa green as being within the forest well that's right and i undertook some research into the sub tendencies of hand slope manor i came across a family name of bozenam now they seem to have taken ah yeah they seem to have taken their name from this northern part of the parish just across the parish boundary is bozeman and mill yeah we we crossed it that's right that's that's right but i think that that name applies to a bigger area bozonum literally means bowser's spur of land now the mill is not on a spur of land our site is on a spirit of land so i think we've got a real clue there so that might be the name of the site that we did in there i think it might well be oh that's brilliant didn't have a name to attach to so we know that our site bozenam was in the forest in the 12th century and we also know from the doomsday book that this was quite a wealthy area with amongst other things a predominance of pigs hand slope boasts a thousand pigs compared to the handful its neighbors had but keeping pigs in and around the royal forest had its risks this was part of a huge patchwork of hunting grounds created by william the conqueror which spread across the country not even the barons could hunt or farm there without royal permission and peasants would get in serious trouble the royal forest isn't necessarily full of trees after alex moore and dartmoor raw forest there were no trees in them at all so what do they mean by forests though the term meant a particular type of law applied to that area and the law was designed to protect the cover for animals for particularly for deer so they could be hunted what sort of punishments do people get well i mean cutting trees down poaching animals you were fined but some of it was quite draconian i mean they would remove the toes of dogs for example so they were immobilized from chasing deer how do people feel about these laws well i don't think they liked him terribly much because it was such a restriction on what they were doing and they were constantly breaking into the forest clearing areas of it turning it over to agriculture and of course poaching and this went right to the top you hear about bishops and abbots and so on accused of poaching and of clearing land so do you think the people who owned our manor might have been breaking the law oh yes and indeed our manner might have started by somebody clearing a piece of the forest and setting up a farm in the middle of it so would they have been punished oh yes i mean they they would have paid a fine for doing that but they might have paid it so often it almost becomes a license to do that with all these laws it's highly unlikely that a peasant farmer would simply have set up home here by himself it would have been too risky but perhaps our cottage wasn't alone in the middle of nowhere about 500 metres away is the farm where we have our incident room now stewart believes he's found evidence of a medieval moat there if you look at this map of 1828 now that is very typically the corner of something like a medieval motor homestead i mean it's possibly the residence of like the minor gentry it's not quite the lord of the manner status but it's kind of levels below that and aspiring to show off a little bit well how many sites like this are there in the memorial area i think there's four others recorded in in this manner well that puts our little place down the hill in context doesn't it because if there's one manner four sites like this each one of which may have i don't know five or ten cottages for villains to tend their land it's a plausible scenario isn't it so the building may have been a villains or small farmers cottage part of a minor norman nobles household but where are the other villains houses in their conquest of england the normans had one hugely successful weapon the night on horseback highly armed highly mobile and terrifying to english foot soldiers some of the horse kits used by norman knights seems to have been rather unusual such as the curb bit found on our site it looks intriguing and we want to know how it worked tomorrow we're going to try and find out on a real horse but first we need to make a usable copy hector cole's using the same techniques as a 12th century blacksmith [Music] paul blinkhold's helping pat and jonathan to map where their fines came from 510 stroke 505 450 grams they know which bit of the site produced each bag of pot 70 grams by weighing the bags they can plot how much was found where this is the last lot paul oh smashing thanks a hell of a lot of pottery isn't it 2 500 pieces you've already processed another 2000 or so from the first dig and all the stuff that we've come up with in the last couple of days we must be looking at a very big 12th century side not really no we do get an awful lot of pottery at medieval sites in this part of the world pottery was plentiful and probably cheap as well so how big do you reckon this settlement was it's really difficult to say um i looked at uh the pottery from a village up in the north of county called west cotton we had 107 000 shirts of pottery from there and how many houses were there there's five tenements basically why were they using so much they just got through it if you look at anthropological studies of pottery use the average humble cooking pot probably only lasted a week let's say that our site was occupied for 100 years minimum they break one pot a week that's 50 pots a year that's 5 000 pots in the lifetime of the settlement each pot breaks into let's say 100 pieces there's 500 000 pieces come on put your neck on the line how many houses do you think we're looking at here i honestly don't know i could easily believe it's only one i really could bit of a turn up mix expecting more houses he could still be proved right though because where matt's digging inside the big enclosure at the bottom of the field geophysics results suggested burning it looks like we've got a half or small oven or kiln there right right at the edge of the trench and possibly another collapsed one here of course we've only got this from two meter wide slot going across here have you got any potty from it um more of the same pottery come out here it's all medieval similar to the stuff coming out of the ditch matt when you said uh because we've only got this two metre strip did that imply that you wanted you can see what i'm driving i want a bigger trade i think we should just just a couple of meters maybe on each side and then we can get the ovens or half whatever that in plan is that all right if he extends it i think we're probably going to have to yeah in order to understand what we've got here we don't even know at the moment whether this has got buildings in it looks likely by the pottery and the structure our replica of the curb bits now ready i think that would be called the finish article if you'd like to compare it with the other yeah let's fetch the other one up and then these little knobble bits coming up here so the equivalent of these spiky bits yeah i'll tell you what with old spiky bits it makes you look even more gruesome than it did when it's rusted put that one back in there i'll give that one to you and then all we've got to do is present it to alan's auras tomorrow and hope it likes it see what he thinks of it pat and jonathan's fines including the horse bit and the posh knife handle have now been mapped okay let's start with the the bit where did that come from the bit was inside the building just over here so we can be pretty certain that whoever had that bit actually lived in this building now what about the head well the head appears to have been just outside the building i think about here it could have been in a little niche set into the gable end and literally toppled out whoever was living in this building undoubtedly had the head how about the knife handle knife handler is further away still it came out so we're kind of losing that connection between the building and the owner of the the knife handle right back there in this section here yes and paul's worked out that there are two concentrations of pottery usually big deposits of broken pot are found in so-called middens or rubbish pits two middens could mean two houses what we've got is this massive spread of pottery and domestic refuse right up against the wall of the building just we'd expect to find a domestic midden now now suppose i mean one of the things we were deliberating about yesterday about was was where there might have been a doorway i'd say from this there must have been a doorway in this wall nearly always the middens near a door you just go out and shut it down [Laughter] watch this well this is another concentration of pottery there's about 10 kilos in this one obviously it's not the size of this midden but it's still a decent concentration i'd say that's another midden now the only other thing that strikes me is where is the ditch coming in well the ditch seems to come in around there ah so we're looking at a dump in the end of the ditch we are so no evidence here for a second house and amazingly jonathan foyles now decided to question whether we've got a house here at all nick i know you think this is a pig of a sight but jonathan has come up with a fabulous theory that might ease your grumpiness a bit okay day one i said it's a meaty site okay now the theory is this no one actually lived here it's a pig processing plant right come on justify this okay given the rubble that you've got in front of you it's it's very small for a house okay it could still be you know peasants um a small hovel or something but i'm suggesting pigs are brought in possibly water heated scald the pigs you know and de-hair them and then maybe this is some kind of a smokehouse those weird metal clamps we found might just be for pig's legs now when he told me this i thought it was brilliant you're the professional hasn't it well the thing that helps i think is that in doomsday book for this particular manner they record a thousand pigs on the manor you know using the woods for grazing and surrounding that's a hell of a lot of pigs to have around and what's this doing here which is the only hearth we've found in the entire place is not in the middle as you might expect but it's slightly outside the building do you buy the idea of it leaking its smoke this way into the house well you feel where the wind's coming from now over there behind us so prevailing yes from the southwest you put this at the southeast corner it's going to blow the smoke into the building isn't it yeah so it's in the right place it's all pretty plausible isn't it yeah what an interesting journey in two days we've moved from a manor house to a long house to a pork scratchings factory where are we going to end up tomorrow beginning of day three here near northampton and we've done just about everything we can at this end of the field we've sorted out the house there's modern field drains running through the medieval ditches and when we examine the fines they didn't give us any new leads so now we're moving everyone lock stock and barrel right down the far end of the field where things are looking much more promising it would be odd for a medieval peasants building to be on its own so the search is on for a wider settlement we've got two trenches one to date the circular ditch and a big one investigating features inside the enclosure mick eight diggers in one trench is pretty impressive yeah i think we're getting somewhere as well where are we getting well here we've got lots of blobs on the the geophysics and so we've opened this area this is where matt was working in a narrow trench over there yesterday yeah but now we're getting all sorts of burnt areas bits of pottery 12th century stuff like that so it's sort of looking like occupation i think so much interesting stuff coming up but yeah can't interpret it yet what's this thing here bridge well you can see tony that's a very circular looking structure got these great pitch stones all the way around the outside of it all the stones really heat affected it's surrounded by a lot of burning discrete areas of charcoal so it's definitely looking something like a a half does that make sense yeah either way you'd expect that to be in a building and i think by cleaning it back we might well see where the walls or the you know the the perhaps beam slots to support timbers or something like that this is what you'd expect to be in medieval houses with the pottery as well well comrades i don't want to get on your case but we have about eight hours left no problem tony so early promise down here but it's probably going to take bridge and her comrades most of those eight hours to get the full story our replica curb bits ready to be tested the original was unusually small only four inches wide we've got a lineup of pint-sized war horses courtesy of grafton pony club this is the size uh that fits at least one or two of these ponies which are the same size as norman cavalry horses i find that hard to believe at the moment what's your pony's name bobby bobby what size bit does bobby need five inches but look if that is a four inch bit and that's a five inch bit horse then that must be for kids or something like that your norman knights rode ponies that were about 12 hands in height oh you're laughing no you've got to be look they're big warriors they've got enormous horses have a look at this where the men's feet are look how close they are to the ground but can't that be artistic license no because we we have excavations of bones from horses that scaled up would have been for a 12 13 hand maximum pony oh sorry bobby's too big sorry wow what's this one called cali cali yep no don't think it's going to fit no i think a likely looking candidate is here hello what's your horse's name murphy hello murphy at first sight phil thought our bit looked like an instrument of torture but the normans seemed to have known what they were doing murphy accepts it without fuss he doesn't seem to be objecting too much no i'm amazed we've prepared your war horse so philip is that all right all right for me to get on your horse is it do you need a hand up [Laughter] to you to to you tony this must seem like a mighty charger to you exactly nice one two three cool oh hey wait i'm up here yeah i'm up here okay come on stone across well if if tony was a was a saxon in a shield wall yeah you know he's still an intimidating sight isn't he bearing down on you you surf yeah phil has never ever been on a horse before he's so chuffed it may take us a while to get him back to the side ah magic we started out with just one building but it's now becoming clear that bosnian was a busy place pot and bone from the circular ditch show that people were also living down here in the 12th century at exactly the same time as the building was occupied i can see that there are all of the main domesticates uh here we are cattle jaws sheep jaws uh pig also and there's even a bit of horse here so does that mean they're eating horse then well no they wouldn't have been in this case horses are big there's lots of meat on them so rather than just wasting it it's much more sensible to butcher it up and feed that meat to the dogs so this is the original knackers yard sort of thing yeah that's right it's all butchery waste it's the sort of smelly nasty bits that you're not going to eat you don't want them up by your house you're going to shove them off as far as you can and sticking them in an enclosure ditch is the perfect place what about the pottery then paul the dating is very tight on this it all looks to me like it's 12th century there's these with the roller stamping on yeah that's very nice though yeah i mean that's very typical of the 12th century shelley where's oh right so there's no glazed worms at all the the early glaze words we get in the early 13th century they're just not here and an assemblage of this size i'd be expecting to see the oddsshurdo too so nothing beyond 1200 i don't think so no we still don't know why this site came to such a sudden end it may be that the area stopped being a royal forest which had been one of the causes of the quarrel between the nobles and the king and our peasant farmers would have been caught up in these turbulent struggles so why did people around here revolt against king john well i think it was largely because of the imposition of various fines for individuals who transgressed forest law um and that's obviously very relevant in this area do you think the people around here would have known the local rebels absolutely because the lord of the manor of hanslow which is you know the man in which our sites are located was one robert de mordread and he was one of the barons who rebelled against john and you know because of that john sent one of his henchmen out here to burn his castle to the ground so the people in our site couldn't fail to have known about that so far our site appears to be entirely medieval mick had suspected that the crop marks were originally prehistoric fields now found the bottom of the big enclosure ditch and can settle this have you got the bottom yet phil and usually the crucial dating evidence is not at the bottom where you'd expect it to be my feelings are that it's probably was cut as a medieval ditch and is medieval now we had a piece of pot about there right which i think is going to date all of that right there's no break in the sequence if this material down here is iron age yeah then you'd expect somewhere about here to get a break a turf line or something like this and then the medieval goes in on the top but you haven't got that there is no break in there so i think it's one continuous story right the way through so it looks as if we're gonna have to accept that the whole thing's medieval and there's no prehistoric there at all the crop marks have surprised everyone by turning out to be medieval after all but then no one knows much about medieval pig farms it's in the right location in forest where pigs would feed perhaps the large enclosure was a pig pen with a deep pig proof ditch around it the real purpose of the forest wasn't to feed pigs but as a playground for the norman aristocracy we can now see how that intriguing curb bit helped them to fight and hunt [Music] norman knights used long reigns to move their hands around freely the curb bit actually softened the violent movements of the rider's hands so that he didn't yank the horse's head off when he swung his shield or spear now come on alan this entirely fair this morning you had me on this puny little horse you got this whacking great thing that's not fair what are you playing at it's not the same horsepower well i know is it the same bit it is scaled up you know i haven't i haven't actually seen this i've only seen the rusted up original how does it actually work you know our take on this has changed so much from the first day where we saw it when we thought we're going to get arrested if we put that in a horse's mouth far from it it's actually a very humane cleverly designed piece of equipment this this this is obviously swinging and you really have to yank it right up before you get any sort of lever action inside the mouth and it's designed so that i can also maneuver my shield in battle around as a defensive and an offensive weapon whilst not gobbing her in the mouth because you're holding the reins in this because i'm holding the reins in the same hand the curb bit wasn't just for the battlefield so why exactly am i holding this piece of rope what we're going to do is a hunting game because this site as you know probably saw a lot more hunting action than it did military action and this curb bit is as useful for hunting where i keep one hand free as well as it is for war we need a target we need a boar to run away and i'm the boar you are the ball you tow that sack you run like be jabbers i come after you and when you feel a spear hit the sack stop now then if there aren't any last requests i can't think of what they are now running for your life [Music] it does snatch while phil plays with the norman nobles matt and his workers have been revealing what the villains and peasants of bozenam were doing inside the big enclosure they've uncovered a medieval workplace good job matt what have we got well we've got a large post hole there another enormous one here so presumably they were post supporting a big roof building yeah huge i mean these are really substantial and it still had the remains of a scorched post in it as well i've got another shallow post hole there another one with packing stones there so we have even an internal wall going up that way and what's that well this to me looks like a small collapsed oven or kiln of some sort vaguely circular you can see it there over here we've got much better example of what i think that probably looked like beautiful circular oven or something there still in quite a good nick and over here we have another one this one's slightly more collapsible you can see the base of it is all scorched and burnt and going round this this area here is this ditch which comes along here round here and goes off to the corner of the trench over there lots of fines yeah a huge amount of really beautiful finds here i mean look at that drug handle gorgeous gorgeous a heck of a lot of activity going on here this settlement of pig farmers at bosnia has given us an unfamiliar glimpse of ordinary life in the medieval manner of hand slope powerful nobles such as the mordewitz grabbed the headlines of history by quarreling with the king but the story of bosnia is really the history of ordinary people pig farmers who grazed their animals in the forest and slaughtered and scalded and smoked them in the enclosures remarkably this dig has taken our archaeologists into uncharted territory [Music] because almost nothing's known about medieval pig farmers we know that they had specialized cattle and sheep farms in the middle ages called beckeries and vacaries so why couldn't have been specialized pig farms as well which i suppose will cause something like porkeries well if we've done nothing else over the last three days we've invented a new world possibility when we came here three days ago we thought that we were going to find a medieval hall complete with elegant masonry but the reality turned out to be rather different less high affairs of state and more of this that's really good very nice to ensure you catch all the latest updates please do subscribe to this channel follow us on social media and sign up to our newsletter and join us on patreon

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 532,453

Keywords: 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, time team, time team full episode, time team animal farm, time team hanslope, hanslope, history, british history, time team season 12 episode 13, northamptonshire, time team northamptonshire, Time Team

Id: A7sjBnH6eFQ

Length: 48min 35sec (2915 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021