Birthplace of the Confessor (Islip, Oxfordshire) | Series 13 Episode 10 | Time Team

the village of islip near oxford has got a claim to fame it's said that the great saxon king edward the confessor was born somewhere around here and the local villagers want to celebrate the millennium anniversary of his birth so they've asked us whether we can find the 13th century chapel that was built in his honor not only that but they want us to find the saxon palace where he was born which seems to me a pretty tall order except the fact is nobody has ever dug here before and we've got just three days to try and sort it all out oh and by the way that isn't the chapel we're supposed to be looking for [Music] the village of islip is about six miles northeast of oxford and these days it's home to some 600 people who'd love to find some actual evidence in the ground to prove their link with edward the confessor i don't know about you but i always get really confused by all the english sacks and kings and their elaborate names so i'm very pleased to see this bloke sam morning tony what are the dates of edward the confessor 10 42 to january the 5th 1066. and what's he famous for he's famous for keeping the country safe for a generation and for the great building project in westminster abbey but on the downside big succession of crisis because no children so then you get king harold aaron through the eye and william the conqueror that's right and battle of hastings why is he called the confessor uh it's a name given to him long after his death once he became regarded as a saint a confessor is like a priest a monk this is very quick history this isn't it do we actually know that he was born here well as far as we can tell from the charter in westminster abbey which we're going to have a look at tomorrow uh the fact is he was born here according to his own words uh most important and difficult question where's mick uh last seen near the pub i believe you amazed me is that down there yep straight through there cheers mix talking to the two villagers who invited us here and he's showing them victor's drawing of the kind of building edward might have been born in a thousand years ago we've drawn here a timber hall the sort of thing you get on the saxon palace of about a thousand a.d and you see it's built of timber posts water work between it's got a timber roof it's thatched or shingles it's all perishable materials it's going to be very difficult to find that in the ground in the small plots that we've got available to us but how many sacks and fines have there been in the village so far none at all so even if we find one saxon pottery shirt it'll double the amount of knowledge we've got so far we should be able to find something shouldn't we yeah we should be able to find some saxon pottery but i'm much more optimistic about finding the the chapel that you wrote to us about we've got a drawing by thomas hearn in the 18th century look and you see at this time it's it's been turned into a barn but you can see it was the chapel because this is stone built unlike this one which is timber our chances of seeing that in the ground i think are that much better so to begin with we're going to have a go at finding this medieval stone chapel built in honour of edward the confessor and this illustration by antiquarian thomas hearn is the only clue we have to what it actually looked like helpfully hearn tells us that it was situated to the north of the church which probably means that it's now buried under one of these gardens but the villagers reckon it's going to be easy to work out where it was stuart on the face of it this looks extremely simple because i've just spotted sight of king's chapel and a big cross so what's the problem it does look pretty obvious doesn't it now the problem with these crosses when the map makers were coming around in in the late 18th century they were soldiers they'd speak to the local vicar or local antiquarian and he might have said oh there was a palace over there or there was a moat over there or there was a chapel over there and it wasn't that important to me so that could be one of two things it could be somebody precisely knew where that was and that is bang on or alternatively it could be just oh it was it was over in that yard somewhere and the surveyor just put across there tricky stewards worked out where the cross would be on the modern map and it falls firmly in the middle of that timber yard so are the buried walls of the chapel under here well geophys did a radar survey in the timber yard earlier this morning and they're now ready to look at their results the x marked on the map is literally here right in the middle yeah that's interesting because we've got no clear targets but there is one in the far corner and the second target genuinely is in the middle there that doesn't look very clear it doesn't very clear um it's not an easy area for us to survey all the problems with things around the outside well there's only one way we're gonna find out if the chapel was here and that's by digging a hole the trouble is this is a working timber yard and it looks like there might be one or two delays how long do you think depends where it is on the lorry really should be half an hour three quarters of an hour and we'll wait we'll wait yeah well if you want it done quicker you can always give us a hand there you go guys well this is a surprise no resistance from gfiz let's hope it's all worth it because of course we can't trust the big x on the map it's quite possible that the remains of the chapel could be in the pub car park or in the garden of the house next door there's no room for geofist to survey in this garden so we've decided to open up a few random test pits possibly foolishly the owners have given us permission to dig anywhere we want to because their property has a name that could be a clue to the location of the chapel yeah this is the one look there's the clue confessor's gate jonathan confesses gate is it a good clue confessor's gate well now your deeds joanne they call the house it was called some dead woods originally it's now called confessor's gate i'm not sure when it was renamed and it looks like this gate has actually taken on that name because we have a figure of a head right over the top the problem is this arch and the wall it's in is no older than about 100 years old so we have to look at that really closely jonathan's wondering if the figurehead itself could be medieval it's weathered nicely it's got a lot of weathering on it it's also stuck around the back with cement like it's a found item that's just been applied but the trouble is he doesn't think it's edward the confessor he thinks it's a woman i think it's more like um edwina the um the contessa rather than edward the confessor the reason being that it's it's it's head gear because that to me looks like a whimple standard late 14 30 50. that was a mitre to be like this wouldn't it down over the sort of foreign your heart bleeding it's either victorian or it ain't edwards well it's not quite what i thought all right that's gonna fit easy you know well at least now we know this gateway is not ancient we can risk trying to squeeze a mini-digger through to speed things up but there's still a very good reason for digging here in the garden of confessor's gate and that is the house deeds include a plan that marks the site of the king's chapel that little square there is where the map maker shows us the chapel it's tiny and it's the wrong direction well but on the other hand if that's the if that's the east end of it yeah it would be over there somewhere where the blue sheet is it would mean it would be coming back this way i'd be incredibly happy wouldn't it if that would die and it extends underneath our feet something up to that sort of size yeah so we're going to extend one of our test pits in this garden to cover that possibility even if one of the residents has other ideas [Laughter] damn thing got it so with the trench in this garden and one in the timber yard which has just got going again we've got two possible sites for our chapel we can actually see that the chapel actually fits many times over inside professor's gate it's bigger than the house again isn't it actually it's quite surprising thomas hearn not only made a sketch of the chapel but also recorded its basic dimensions and this has allowed ray sand to build a 3d model that's lovely i wonder where there's a direct relationship of the space within the wood yard and the size of the chapel whether that's a direct result of demolishing it and using its space if that was a barn after all it might have a crew yard in front of it might it meanwhile victor has gone to church he's making a sketch of edward based on his image shown in this copy of the bayer tapestry history doesn't get any bigger than this and i'm still hopeful we might stumble on the saxon palace where edward was born edward's failure to produce an heir may have resulted in the battle of hastings in 1066 but he was also responsible for the building of westminster abbey as i understand it edward left the manner of i slip to the monastery before he died westminster then built the chapel in islip in honor of edward some years later jonathan's trying to work out exactly when that was there a group of three windows and quite fine masonry in there actually these are three lancets typical of the early 13th century so are these clasping buttresses before they become diagonal in the later 13th century to me those features suggest a date three decades either side of 12 20. the chapel was built more than 150 years after edward's death which would put it in the reign of henry iii this would make sense as henry was obsessed with the memory of edward the confessor who'd been made a saint in 1161. henry rebuilt edward zappy at westminster and may have been responsible for building the chapel in islip he was keen to popularize the figure of saint edward and encouraged the cult following for him that was growing in the 13th century the cultist in edward is one that has been growing through the reigns of previous kings flowers really flowers in henry the third time and what is what it seems to represent is a way of those norman and plantagenet kings giving legitimacy to their rule over the english at the same time as for the english themselves edward being the last of the legitimate old english kings it does represent a kind of reconciliation focus for the french and the english so it's as though the normans are saying it's all right saxons because uh we're related to edward the confessor who you like exactly exactly but why would they want to come here i can understand them wanting to go to westminster abbey where you know edward the confessor was but why would they any pilgrims want to come to this place well it's widening the base of the cult and the opportunities for pilgrimage centers by celebrating his birthplace but i mean what would a pilgrim expect to see something yeah architecturally what yeah when he walked through the door what do you think what's in there well that's the tempting thing i mean there must be some uh cult object some of his personal clothing or personal life perhaps his old nursery toys um items really yeah not the body but but anything else touched i mean during his life even the water in which he washed his hands was deemed to be crackling with spiritual radioactivity you know it was that potent and could then be used for miracles i think a load of 13th century dinky toys would be brilliant you know well it would be nice to find anything because so far there's no sign of the chapel in any of our trenches this is a really lovely garden and of course we're doing our best to wreck it we've got a trench in here and that's an 18th or 19th century cobbled farmyard surface we've got another trench just around here and can oh hang on one minute just turn around here and you can see our family having a cup of tea but anyway we've got our farmyard cobbled surface still in this trench and here cobbled surface again as usual phil's working incredibly hard for the cause but is he wasting his time stuart's got some news for us whatever you're going to say to a stuart you better say it soon that you're going to get buried up and because thor's going at it there am i right in understanding that you put this trench in on the basis of a deed yeah but a little match with the in the deeds yeah supposed to show where the size of the chocolate this deed showing sight of king's chaplain's little building there is actually a straight copy of the 1922 map over here we see a little building and in fact the antiquities sign he's in the wrong place that's right next door and the other in the lumber yard over there hold on so where it says here site of king's chapel and we've dug in this one yeah but it's actually referring to this referring to that cross and that's the cross that's in put something they didn't put the cross on there look phil you're digging in the wrong garden nick misinterpreted the map hey hang on hang on several people misinterpreted the map hang on hang on hang on he's gonna start chucking why am i in the wrong garden because the big x that says site of the chapel is actually next door over there all right it's only the writing that's across this garden well i'm still not going to leave this one until we resolve what's here quite right thank you quite right but don't hold your breath i think is the answer phil's absolutely right we have to finish these trenches the map on the deeds may be wrong but we don't know for sure that the chapel isn't in this garden not only that but there could be saxon material to find here that's much deeper down there are local historians who've pointed to i'd love to find some saxon pottery for the villages at least and i've heard that this car park might be the place to look because there are written accounts that say this was the site of the saxon palace is this the kind of place where they might have built a palace well yes because it's well-sized at the top of a hill and without the buildings here you'd have a very commanding view of the surrounding valleys and you could see people approaching its important crossing point and we've got a very good anglo-saxon place name here well iceland yes it comes from the old english slipper meaning the slip way or the slope by the river the old river name there's no doubting islip was a saxon settlement and this could be the place to dig in search of the palace tomorrow but now as we approach the end of the day there's bad news about our trench here in the woods yard it's turned up nothing but natural geology there's no sign of the chapel come on you want to see this but there is still hope because stewart's been studying the maps and has a new theory that we might find evidence of the chapel in this garden we know it was a detached building from the sketch it was oriented east west it says that on the sketch as well it was about 15 yards by seven so we know that much yeah and we know from the references it was likely to be standing in uh 18 1805. a barn standing on the side of the chapel is definitely there in 1805. now this map here is 1806 so it should be on this map really yeah and actually when you look at the map closely there are two detached buildings yeah east oriented east west right so which one could be one of those two yeah one is very close to the church but it's too small when you when you measure it there's another one which is the right size and that's in this garden here so logic wise we should if we can examine both those that this one looks the better candidate on its side well the way things are going i reckon we should dig both sides the trouble is this building is buried under the extension to the graveyard but we might still be able to get permission to dig there with help from local contacts joanna did you manage to speak to your old man yes i think what we need is an archdeacon's license rather than we don't have to wait for a faculty because that would take too long but the office doesn't open until nine o'clock tomorrow morning so as soon as the office opens we'll get onto the archdeacon's office thanks very much that's very good news so is the chapel in joanna's house is it next door is it under the churchyard we'll find out tomorrow beginning of day two here at izlip in oxfordshire and one of our main jobs is to look for the 13th century chapel of edward the confessor now we know it's this way to the north of the church and we've already looked in this back garden here so far with no success our next two targets are this back garden and here which is this extension of the cemetery look at it we don't even know whether we're going to be able to get permission to dig it but even if we do how we're supposed to geo fizz frankly is turning into a bit of a nightmare but although we have to wait for special permission to excavate in the graveyard there's nothing to stop us starting work here as the owner of this garden has agreed to sacrifice their small lawn in search of the chapel what's clear is that the whole village wants to find this building which was built in honor of king edward the confessor because if we can find it it will give them some actual physical evidence in the ground to back up their claim to fame that a thousand years ago this village was the birthplace of the last great saxon king of england of course the villagers would also love us to find ethel red's palace where edward was supposedly born this would have been a wooden building that would have looked something like this but likely to have perished over the last thousand years [Music] today though we're opening up a trench in the pub car park because there are some documentary references to both the chapel and the palace being on this site there are two parts to this reference which is in 1823 it says on the site of a small inn known by the sign of the red lion there we go yeah anciently stood the palace of king ethel red so suggests there's palace somewhere in this area it also says in the same yard also stood in ancient building long used as a barn but said to have been the identical chapel appetaining to the saxon palace with mention of ethel red's palace and the chapel in this area it's got to be worth putting a trench in who knows at the very least we might find some saxon pottery for the villagers meanwhile we're still digging in the garden of confessor's gate which so far has only turned up what looks like medieval pottery for our expert to look at hello stranger hello good to see you um we have a problem we haven't yet found the chapel maybe we won't we haven't found the palace maybe we won't but the one thing that people really want is saxon pottery well like this what is that really something yeah how the heck do you know that that is saxon um it's it's east wiltshire were from somewhere in the region of new breeds i'd say saxon saxton norman 10 50 to 1100 right on the right on the date that we're interested in this is edward the confessor yeah well about it starts about the end of his overlaps with the end of his reign yeah well you've taken the wind out of myself i'll still ask you anyway do you reckon you could trawl round the village and see whether you can come up with saxon because until you got this magnificent find there'd be no saxon found in this village well there's this piece as well yeah but this this may be considered i think this is actually early early on middle sacs and it was well before edward the confessor fantastic not only have we found the first saxon pottery ever discovered here but we've got one bit that dates to the lifetime of edward the confessor when this pottery was made around 1050 edward was building westminster abbey and that's precisely where helen and sam have gone now to see the original documents that link edward with islip yes i suppose some westminster abbey is by far the best place to come to find out about medieval iceland isn't it well it is really because the abbey owned the manor and most of the documents have ended up in the archives of westminster for example this one this is a 14th century manuscript which contains a lot of the early charters to do with isolate including these ones of edward the confessor oh yes i can see the lovely e there for er edward king am i my old english peter's out about there king great woolsey bishop and earth aeol edward the king greets woolsey the bishop and early earth goblinson freyon lychee in a friendly manner and ich kith i wish it to be known that i have given uh to peter and christ at westminster that kotlief they the little dwelling in which i was born yet slipper by the name of i slip just as alfie view emma my mother the great norman lady on my birthday to foreign eva as firstborn gave to me so that it's a birthday yes it's absolutely as clear as it could possibly be yes yes and what date was this written down this manuscript dates from about 13 10. but it consists of a lot of copies of manuscripts of much earlier date so if they're copying it can they be slipping in a few things that weren't quite true that's quite quite possible but it does seem unlikely that they would make up a fact like it with the confessor being born at islip that there's no point in making that up really especially because people in the early 12th century might have known that he if he'd been born somewhere else they might have known that as if we could ever have doubted it edward was born in islip and believe it or not just now in the garden of confessor's gate we've made a remarkable discovery celebrating that very fact isn't this just what every archaeologist in the world would like to see if they're digging a historical character fessa fantastic what do you think that is let's see it looks like it's early victorian or some something of that period my early 19th century and um i suppose it's not professor it can't be no it must be head with a confession oh it has to be doesn't it it wouldn't make sense after the chapel is used as a barnes i'm not sure it's from there and i don't know what i mean do you think there's a portrait of him above or something or maybe maybe there's a rhyme maybe i don't know i'm disappointed maybe in a garden of edward confessor he kept us a bit of a guesser no no we'd hope to find him instead we found edward the lesser maybe that's it thank you for your contribution oh that's nice sadly these pieces of glass aren't from the confessor's chapel they've been found mixed up with a lot of other victorian rubbish dating to around 1840 and they must have come from a decorative window somewhere nearby meanwhile the news from the trench next door is i'm afraid exactly what we didn't want to hear there's no sign of the confessor's chapel rakshas found nothing except the undisturbed natural soil although the trench is being extended to make sure we haven't just missed anything to make matters worse in the pub car park phil can't find anything either he reckons any archaeology that was here has been quarried away everything could have been dug away when they when they when they if they were after stone for subsequent buildings yeah so it's all been i mean the whole valley the the only thing is that you can be sure of is that there's no saxon archaeology there's no medieval archaeology here there's no archaeology here at all it's all been quarried away so there's no archaeology here then i think phil's fed up digging trenches with nothing in them but i'm disappointed too i was dreaming we might find ethel red's palace here but then suddenly i hear that mick and stuart know a lot more than they're letting on oh you two have got a bone to pick with you oh yeah why is that have you been holding something back or almost certainly from you we try and keep you in the dark as long as possible you know that what is it this on the map supposed site of ethel red's palace here look look come here look supposed sight of ethel red's palace we're in day two we've been looking for the damn things ah there is there is a reason we've yeah we've not told you too much about this basically we're digging over here this side of the village this is right on the other side of the village this map was made in 1876 and stewart reckons it's another example of the map makers recording what the locals thought was in the field rather than knowing what was actually there there is there is some documentation that suggests that the abi abbots of westminster are building themselves a new manor house or a new palace in the 14th century and because this is a rectangular moat that's that's the most likely site for it but you're quite right we're going to do some geophysics in that area and put a trench across it if nothing else to dismiss it i mean if it's 14th century we would need to know that don't we gia fears are only too pleased to escape the problems of small back gardens and they've already surveyed a small area of this open field and the first trench will go in here so far all of our trenches have been put in without any real target from geophys and now that we've got something solid to go for phil's keen to get the first trench started it's very very compacted guys i'm very very broken limestone but i just wonder whether this could be the wall line that that john has picked up could it be of course it is it looks a bit more obvious on your geophysics than this though john looks a bit more obvious on the geophysics than that believe the geophysics you didn't tell me that it was specifically a war you said there was a large anomaly there no no there's a wall coming through diagonally oh and then you've got a sort of tower gate double story building here why am i bothering to dig it john i don't know no one's ever excavated here before but our experts reckon that the lumps and bumps showing in this field which are especially clear in this 3d model all point to this being the site of a medieval manor house that we know was built in islip by westminster abbey what we don't know of course is if the medieval house was built on the site of an earlier saxon palace this is something we can ask helen and sam to investigate by looking at the original medieval documents kept at westminster abbey john fleet's chronicle dates from the middle of the 15th century and this is one of the manuscripts of it and you can see that it says here william to kirklington the abbot this father built the the manor of islip in the eldon of in the county of oxford from the foundations from new very splendidly sumptu so that must be our building that's that's down as ethereum's palace that we know is a is a medieval manner right um so we know it's it's so what do we know archaeologically we know it's very splendidly built newly built from the foundations and it dates from between 1315 and 1333 well for once the archaeology is agreeing with the documents there's no saxon palace in this field but what we have here is a chance to investigate a forgotten medieval manor house that's very much part of the story of westminster abbey and medieval islip as you come along here the most important thing is we've actually got part of the wall that runs around the the outskirts of the of the manor you see we've got one edge there that's the inside edge and then on the outside edge here so we've got the wall running parallel with the moat and then on the outside again we've got a lot of clay which i think is part of the bank which is stacked up against the wall but the thing we've discovered now is this is where we've put the trench over these anomalies here now we've extended the survey across the field look at these responses cool the main building is about 30 meters over there we're only in out buildings over here mick wants to investigate the main building tomorrow which means we should be able to tell the villagers quite a lot about at least one fancy building built by westminster abbey but what about the other building that we've been struggling to find the chapel of edward the confessor which was up on the hill we've put in trenches in the garden at confessor's gate and the wood yard and the pub car park without any success and last i'd heard our latest garden trench here had found only natural soil but apparently all that's changed right so this trench must be important if jonathan's got his hands dirty [Laughter] and you've done an extension uh here yes nobody tells me anything could it be the chapel do you know i think it can and the reason i say that is because it's roughly where stuart had mapped it we've got a wall coming down here it's cut into this shade of mucus there in the clay that would be the outside of it that's the inside the wall thickness is about right if that's a north wall this is the west one then we're looking for a door just the other side of the garden wall so it could be this corner here look northwest corner like that yeah right sure who's queen of the dig me brilliant this was one of the two buildings on this 1806 map that are the right east-west orientation we haven't been able to get permission to dig this one which is under the graveyard but we don't need to dig it now because it looks like this is the building we're after we think we found one of the four foot wide walls of the chapel in this tiny garden we'll see more of it tomorrow but right now i think we all need a drink the last two hours have been quite remarkable amazing amazing finish of the day i think we're in for a fairly long evening beginning of day three in our search for edward the confessor's chapel and in this garden yesterday we put in loads of trenches and found virtually nothing except for a rather manky cobbled farmyard surface and then ran about quarter to five in the evening beyond that wall there raksha put in a trench and found what we think is the corner of the chapel how did she do it well she went below what we previously thought was undisturbed natural earth and got the wall below it so today this is what we think is the natural here but we're going to get our archaeologists to go below that to see if we've got anything medieval too the theory is we've discovered the north west corner of the chapel in this garden and it's possibly the only bit that survives as we've dug other trenches close by and found nothing we can't open any more trenches which is why we thought it was worth digging deeper here just to see if we get any related finds but every one of us i think is just relieved to have found it this picture shows the chapel long after it had been turned into a barn in the 1700s but it was built in the 1220s to promote the cult of saint edward it meant that pilgrims could not only visit his tomb at westminster abbey but also worship here at the place of his birth in islip was it a popular cult were people flocking to worship at the shrine of edward the confessor not as far as we can tell there isn't a single pilgrim badge from islip known and there aren't very many known from from westminster nearly all our pilgrim badges seem to be from canterbury which is a really popular place it became very very rich westminster just never never had that popular appeal it was always somewhere for for kings not somewhere for your normal person so canterbury had its own shrines that was thomas becket who was really the people's saint and sin edward was bit more the king's saint i'm afraid how long did the cult last well it doesn't seem to have functioned terribly successfully despite the great ideals with which it begins and there were investigations because allegedly they were not maintaining daily services incident with chapel here in islip for the soul of sin edward which was clearly part of their duty to give them that uh tax-free status so i've got this picture that everyone's flocking to thomas and beckett at canterbury the king's pumping money into this cult of edward the confessor but it's not really working would that be fair i think so yes but westminster abbey can't have been doing too badly because out in this field we're digging up a large manor house built by the abbot around 1320 we decided to dig here because an old map had this field marked as the site of ethel red's palace where edward the confessor was born a thousand years ago but we've now proved that the only important building remains in this field belonged to the medieval manner yesterday geophys revealed this plot showing the extent of it and today we're opening up trenches here over what we think is the manor house itself a building that must have been one of the biggest and grandest houses in the area we know it must have been quite special because isabella edward ii's queen stays here and so it's certainly fit for a royal residence and i think this would have been really sumptuous whereas ethel red's palace or so-called palace um which was allegedly on this site probably was just quite a simple hunting lodge and we don't know that for sure but we do know that he had a hunting lodge at brill really quite a a nice place there that's right and that's very close do you think that that's more important than this then in in ethel red's time yes i think it probably is except that this is where where edward is born that's interesting because we i think we've been rather assuming that it's a fairly big sort of extensive complex but but it may not be from the implication of well it isn't really i mean doomsday but look if you look at doomsday it's quite small it still seems most likely that the saxon settlement was on top of the hill but it could be that islip was an even smaller place than victor's drawn here have i got enough houses in there should i put any more in there i don't think you want a lot of houses i mean again going by doomsday book it's really quite small so it's about five hides i think you might have to rub some out victor ah i mean it is a very small settlement outside that might be one of the reasons we're not finding much pottery and we're only digging in very limited areas as well so the chances of finding it you know it can get quite remote yes as team leader it's mick's job to gather up the information and try and make sense of it so what's he thinking at the moment i don't think there's any doubt that edward the confessor's born here but i think there's a series of assumptions after that that are really questionable like what ed was born here there must be a royal estate here yeah buckingham palace there must be a royal palace here and so you go royal birth to dunk the dunk and in no time at all you're looking for a royal palace yeah yeah what the archaeologist showed us is there really isn't much up on the top of this hill that we can find that before saxon norman times you know there's there's not a great palace complex there's not masses and masses of pottery and so on and it's not until you know you you get the ownership by westminster abbey and the cult develops that you start to get the interest in the place helen's got a theory about how edward came to be born here that perhaps hasn't been considered by other historians as i'm pregnant at the moment my baby's supposed to be arriving quite soon i'm becoming really aware that where you give birth you may not be deliberate choice it might be accidental happenstance do you think we're actually reading too much into the fact that edward was born here at islip that's a really interesting idea because i think there is a big question mark about what sort of residents ethelred has got here we know he's got a really very fine hunting logic brill which is not very far away at all and possibly here all he has is quite a simple wooden building where he would perhaps sometimes stay overnight from real or something like that and maybe indeed emma gus gets her dates wrong so she could just have been passing through islip and just got caught short well who knows if it doesn't happen to me [Laughter] it's an idea that the villagers will have to consider as they plan to celebrate the millennium anniversary of edward's birth but while they might be disappointed that we don't think there was a saxon royal palace here in islip we reckon the posh medieval manor house that we're uncovering in this field should more than make up for it phil yo nice bit of wall in it absolutely magnificent and i mean look at the size of it and the beautiful thing of it is we can actually tell that where ian is is outside the building you can see that it's just dirt and soil and where i'm standing inside the building so we would expect to find the other wall somewhere there just inside the moat can you definitely say that that's medieval yes i can because all the pottery above it is medieval there's nothing there's nothing earlier or nothing later it's so it's sealed by medieval pottery and more importantly it's got a superb assemblage of roof tile you won't have a word with paul he's eulogizing about it paul oh feels waxing lyrical about what you've found yeah i mean just look at them this is like a stunning collection of um of medieval glazed roof tiles it's these incredible posh ridge tiles i mean this is only the sort of thing you would have got on a really big posh house in the medieval period they are a weird shape aren't they yeah they call these cox combs with the sort of the jagged top you know it's it's well because they look like a cox comb i suppose paul's not easily impressed but it's unusual to get so many finds of such quality personally i'm intrigued by this bit of medieval glass if you look at it can you see how there's that flat bit there well that's the interior and the base of the vessel if i turn it over you can see this dimple here and that's the outside base of it on which the vessel would have stood and paul and i've been looking through this book here and we've come up with what we think it pretty much is and that is a urinal are you rhino pretty exciting do you mean like a potty a long cutter well they were used for medicinal purposes um in the medieval period the urine was a key to recognizing the symptoms of lots of diseases by the by the the medical practitioners of the time so you'd have these glass vessels for you'd put the urine in hold it up to the light and then make the pronouncements make sure you wash your hands before lunch [Laughter] it's been so much easier digging in this field as opposed to up on the hill where we can only put in small trenches but no one can accuse us of not trying hard enough today here in the garden of confessor's gate we've been digging deeper just to make sure we haven't missed any evidence relating to the medieval chapel we found next door well yesterday i was giving your wife a really hard time because it seemed that your garden wasn't riddled with history in the way that you both hoped it would be but this morning we had a reassessment we realized that actually we hadn't gone down as far in these trenches as we needed to go so matt spent virtually the whole day re-excavating these trenches and the news is i was right there is no history in europe there's nothing here at all nothing here as you can see look at that great big hole but the good news is that it looks as though next door we've got the chapel so the value of their house is going to rock it we'll sell them the name as ever back garden archaeology is a tricky business and there's no predicting how it will turn out rachel how's our chapel getting on it's not really a chapel anymore you're kidding no it's a more humble building it's a privy you're joking so you've got a cesspit in fact yes why how do you know far lots of degraded feces i'm afraid there you go and what's this thing here it's a nice uh kind of cauldron vessel cooking pot that we found and you found it down the toilet yes i can't imagine what it was doing down there what what date is the cesspit the cesspit is about 17th century i can't believe it yesterday we were convinced we had a medieval chapel here what happened a rasha as queen of the trenches how could you mistake a medieval chapel for a 17th century toilet well it just shows it's an easy mistake to me it also highlights that it's best to kind of dig down and actually find what archaeology is underneath because you can't tell by just looking at the top of it what was it that was at the top that made you think hey we could have the chapel here it was when i just dug down a little bit and you could just see the stones peeking out so you know that they are foundation stones of a wall but of a smaller building we only had this one trench open at that stage as well yeah it's only when we opened it out and went further back that we found the other side stuart thought the chapel was here too what's his excuse we were reasonably confident this was going to be the size of the chapel we know there was a barn here until relatively recently and there's this quote written in 1843 which probably illustrates why it's so difficult to find some of these things so it continued to be used as a barn or outhouse until about 1780 when being found dangerous it was taken down and the present barn constructed out of its materials so it was actually physically taken down we kind of hope we find some evidence of it but it ain't there so we're in the right facility there's no doubt we're in the right right patch for it yeah but just can't see it in any of the sections we've got so it's not here what a way to end a dig i don't think i've ever felt so disappointed what really hacked me off is that i'd assumed that at the end of the program i would be standing here surrounded by one of those fantastic time team graphics of the chapel with those great walls shooting up in the air and that huge roof and those very interesting windows and instead i guess you'll have to make do with a drawing of some old bloke sitting on a 17th century lou and now with a big turnout of villagers all eager to hear how we've got on mick has to explain that we haven't found any evidence of the confessor's chapel well it's one of the problems you see you you dig lots of holes and i've been saying this for 13 years now you can't guarantee what you're gonna find he also has to tell them that we don't believe there was a saxon royal palace here either but you do think that it's quite likely that he was born here i don't think there's any doubt about that but it's not all bad news because what we can show them is the impressive remains of the moted medieval manor house that once occupied this field built around 1320 by abbot kirtlington of westminster abbey this would have been a collection of separate stone buildings set around a great hall and with its newly channeled water supply fish ponds and extensive grounds this was a manor house literally fit for royalty to visit and yet it had been largely forgotten until now do you think we've contributed something to the millennium celebrations well that's a relief i think we've certainly shown how important isalip is to english history and that it was the birthplace of edward the confessor but i think from our point of view what we've learned yet again if we needed to learn this was that archaeological reality is always far more complicated than the stuff of legend 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: 129,869

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, islip, oxfordshire, time team, time team full episode, time team season 13 episode 10, time team birthplace of the confessor, history, british history, historical digs, dig site

Id: X-I_c2RrEr0

Length: 47min 42sec (2862 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021