Bodies In The Shed (Glendon) | S13E01 | Time Team

[Music] this is glendon hall in northamptonshire a building with over 400 years of history and this bit around here belongs to martin hipwell who decided to build his mother a new house but when he dug the foundations he uncovered every builder's worst nightmare a dead body and not just one but another one and another and another and another and another and another so what are they all doing in the outbuildings of an english country house and just as importantly how come no one knew they were there time teams got just three days to come up with the answers [Music] the imposing glendon hall is a patchwork of different styles and phases of architecture dating back to the 17th century martin's family live in the stable block overlooking the victorian workshop where he discovered the bodies how's your mum facing up to the fact that there are all these dead bodies under where they're going to live i'm more concerned about the skeletons and how they feel about mother coming to live here how did you find them the builder who was on the digger just came across a piece of burn which initially we thought was um obviously animal but um realized later that it was quite obviously human and it was this part of a forehead how long was it after that that you realized that there wasn't just one body but a whole load straight away within within 10 minutes this is the very first time you've seen these isn't it yeah what do you reckon what's your instinct well if if this is the density of them where all these yellow marks are then it suggests it's a cemetery and if the alignment of these is right i guess this is what east west for these yeah yeah it's almost exactly yes then we'd assume they were christian so it looks to me like some sort of medieval cemetery you know that'd be the period i'd think of medieval cemetery sound right to you well we know there was a church at glendon many many years ago we don't know where it was it would be very interesting to know where the church was yeah so how do you want to tackle the site well we've got to empty some of these graves anyway because you want the burials out of the way you're going to develop this yeah on the other side of this wall yeah so we'll do that but then if there's a church in the immediate vicinity we should be looking for that just a thought how do your children feel about these bodies we've nicknamed them our friends in the south so they've actually almost become friends to the children um so they're not the talks in fact it feels better now down here than it ever has done in the past first of all we'll get to work on two of martin's friends in the south to see what they can tell us about the place where they were buried phil will need to dig through a lot of building rubble before he reaches his skeleton but jackie mckinley our burials expert can already see some bone i've got some skull here but it's pretty smashed martin's found bodies all over his building site just a few feet away from jackie inside the incident room he's discovered the skeleton of a child and there was a line of five adults under the table where stuart and henry are scouring the maps for evidence of the church so what you got in jackie well i have got some skull here you can see it's ever so close to the surface and at the same level i've got bits of blue plastic turning up so whether it's in situ or it's been redeposited i don't know because i can see there's there's a bit of bone there you can actually trace it around yeah and there's another bit there yeah but at least with a skull there at least you've got so much to work to and you've got a level to work to yeah and got a level to work to at the minute while work continues in the cemetery we're just beginning our hunt for the church and just under a huge yew tree the other side of the incident room is a garden folly made up of stacks of masonry some of which look suspiciously like it might have come from a church there's a lot of tumbled windows here and stuff but that's interesting because that looks like it's part of a very large window originally with sort of round rather than pointed right heads to it does that look part of do they like church windows to you it could be church i mean they could even be domestic with that but even if they are church they'll suggest that something radical going on with this church in the early 16th century in fact just looking over there there's a bit of other side of masonry this looks like marble decorated yeah and that looks it is marble where would that be in the church this looks like it's from a monument a tomb or something like that right but that again looks 16th century to me but a rather nice bit of work i mean that's that's expensive stuff to bring in so so all these bits of church that you see here are you think are from the church where we're looking for i would think so yeah not necessarily in the right order from the church you're looking for yeah certainly so the folly doesn't look like it's the church itself but at least we now know we're looking for a posh late medieval church perhaps that could have been connected to some grand house that was here before the current glendon hall and maybe the people buried in its graveyard lived in that very house right can we have some labour please knowing the extent of the cemetery might help locate the church so phil calls in the rest of the team to look for a boundary you can see that the graves do show up there's the natural this really compacted sort of iron iron stain material very hard and with sort of flat plates of this stuff in there and then you can see that here we've got the outline of a grave apparently much truncated chopped off so what we're proposing is to take a strip continuing from this grave right the way back that way we'll take one through the middle and we'll take one from where jackie is going that way because these things look as though they're in loins so we might have a row of graves here and then perhaps a gap and then another grow graves here another gap so on and so forth we're plotting the graves as we find them to work out the shape of the cemetery and there seems to be a gap under part of the incident room geophysics are sent in to investigate but even with ground penetrating radar they are finding it difficult to see through the concrete floor [Applause] according to local historians a stained glass window in the hall came from the old church of saint helen at glendon richard these don't look like stained glass to me they're not they're actually painted glass and almost certainly not english they're probably flemish and it's bizarre that it's just these two colors that's all i could achieve at that time in the early 16th century just the two colors the yellow and the black and the obviously the white is the unpainted glass it's only later when they got enameling sorted out they can actually introduce a color to it how high quality is this glass well i would say that's top notch i mean just look at that the actual quality of the detailing in the beards and the clothes and things it's fantastic so what does this imply to you about the church um it implies that somebody had a lot of money to spend on the church no matter what size it was they had enough money to lash out on fantastic top of the range flemish glaciers [Music] while the team continues stripping back the cemetery helen's scouring the diocese records for information about the church hello have you managed to find out much about our mysterious church yeah a few dates at least it seems to been around for a pretty long time like when well the first record 1254 here valued at six marks and a half which is not very much it's a very very little some very so presumably a small church then it goes on we've got records down to the dissolution of the monasteries and then from the um in the diocese of peterborough we've got um records from 1793 to 1812 so coming right up to within the last couple of hundred years and does it seem as though it was always fairly small yes it does um we got this description here in the 1720s says consists of a body and chancel so there's no isles no mention of a tower it's not grand it's just a little two-room church puzzling isn't it that we've got those beautiful flemish uh windows yeah and they're a very odd date as well 1563 you're not supposed to be putting um religious iconography into churches at that point you're supposed to be almost becoming a puritan so what does that tell you i don't know something to find out in the next two and a half days isn't it what about our bodies well we've we haven't got as much detail about burials as we have about the rest of the life of the church the um the burial register doesn't seem to have survived that would be from the dissolution onwards but 1538 onwards so we don't know who was buried in this church after that and of course we wouldn't know who was buried before because no records were ever kept if the records can't help us we'll have to rely on the burials themselves but there's no shortage of those we got well we got one grave in there yeah and we got one grave in there do you wonder if there's might be one over there there is a slight dark patch there isn't there it goes right through there yeah stewart's noticed something on an 1817 map that might indicate the location of the church or a predecessor to the hall you see that very pronounced kick oh this is where it turns into this lane here that's that driveway yeah heading up there but originally i think that road came through here which is this hollow the one that goes past where the cars are as well that's it going through that and when you look at the maps it takes a line straight through back onto that road there right but something has made that kick go some sort of bypass in fact exactly now when that happens it's often going round around a memorial site or a church yard or something like that gfis begin to survey the area to see if they can find what caused the roads diversion [Music] four grave cuts are now under investigation in the cemetery phil's finding a lot of redeposited bones probably disturbed by builders centuries before martin started work on his mother's house and a few feet away jackie's skeleton is set hard in the sticky trampled clay as you can see this is quite a short gray and that's because it's a young individual so does that explain why it's in such a bad state yeah i mean the bone is very very fragile anyway you can see the skull it's very very thin so that are those the legs yeah we've got the two femurs here so that's a bit the thigh bones but they've been cut at the knee by this going in and then the additional complication is there's actually another individual there really i can hardly see that yeah well that's two tiny scraps of because it is that's that's a piece of pelvis believe it or not but this that's that's part of a probably uh not even a full-term fetus that's been put in here so if we've got two children here do you think we could be looking at some kind of zone of children around here well it's interesting you should say that because of the graves we've got in this area just around there there's an infant the two graves that phil had over there have got what looked like an infant and a juvenile in them and the only adult bone we've had is that the redeposted bone out of the pit that he's got there the grave cuts are narrow and the arms seem to be positioned tight to the body as if shrouded this suggests that these are poor burials are not residents of any previous hall but it turns out that glendon used to be much more than just a big house it's described in the doomsday book as a settlement consisting of nine households the remains of which could be in the field surrounding the hall we've got the earthwork survey the royal commission did back in the 1970s you can see the hollow way and various other earthworks around the side what does the hollow way mean well it's just a you know the road has sunk basically you know and it's probably sunk through where but it's lined you see with these rectangular platforms which are the the sites of the peasant farms with the farmhouse and the barns and all the rest of it and you can see a whole row of them along the hallway so what do we know about the village other than the earthworks well the key piece of information we've got is from what's called the doomsday of enclosure 1517 and a chap called robert mallory held part of the manor and he had 12 houses here and he swept away nine of them and that's the process of enclosure for sheep farming that helps to explain why the village went why does it suddenly become economically viable to evict people and then turn the land over to pasture well you've got to go back a stage really to the black death in 1350 which wrecked the social structure a lot of these villages they were they relied on peasants working together to farm if half to a third of them die off then you know it makes it very difficult to work the system and landlords struggled on all through the 15th century but in the end they they gave up evicted the remaining peasants and turned these places into what were effectively sheep or cattle ranches so the people who are buried here are they likely to have been the people who are living by the side of the hallway i think it's it's almost certain that they would have been if they are living round here and farming the fields around here and they've got a church in the churchill this is likely to be the place that they're buried stuart and henry are beginning to survey the earth works north of the hollow way to see what glendon might have looked like during the medieval period see this this bank running along here yeah this is interesting because it it's exactly parallel to the line of that hollow way by the trees yeah the old roadway and it's quite possible this is like a back boundary to properties which were fronting that roadway oh right okay we're now expanding the cemetery trench beyond our line of graves to see if we've reached its eastern boundary geophys have really struggled to come up with anything useful around the incident room because the land so disturbed so instead we're putting in a series of test pits to determine the size and shape of the cemetery raksha's looking for the western boundary while kerry is tackling the south but will any of this help us find the church mick seems worried you think that the evidence may have been trashed yes i do when you see these 19th century buildings and you think of the size that this church might have been it could well be under one of these and we could have lost it so the strategy is to try and find this the shape and extent of the graveyard because the church is going to be somewhere in the middle of that hopefully we know that the medieval church consisted of a nave and chancel so it could have been small enough to have fitted into the footprint of any one of the incident room workshops [Music] so at the end of day one we know the church isn't here because this is where all the bodies are and there are more in that building there and another one on the far side of that building we know the church isn't here because this is all natural with a few pits in it the only place we haven't looked is over there could that be the location of the church we'll find out tomorrow day two here at glendon hall in northamptonshire where we've discovered over 30 medieval burials and this morning we're going to peel back all this earth here to see if we can find the church that goes with them and we're extending a trench over here to find the extent of the cemetery also one on the far side of this building another one in there and a fourth one deep in here which could prove a little bit difficult [Music] matt's starting to take off layers of building rubble to look for the church meanwhile kerry has begun to expose an adult skeleton which looks in much better nick than the multiple burials emerging from phil's pit well this is getting really complicated in here i mean back at this end we've got a burial we've got the the hand and part of the the thigh bone down in here and that represents a a burial which is in here and it's obviously extending underneath here and then on the top of that we've got this stone line burial with this uh deposit of just jumbled bones which must have been put in either when this burial went in or when they actually put the building up so if this is a comparatively late grave we're probably looking at something that's really a relatively high status i mean somebody's taking a lot of care and trouble over getting these stones bringing them in lining the grave it it's quite amazing this is the only grave on the site that has got stones like this most of the bodies in our cemetery would have been buried within three days of death lowered into the grave with their shrouds tied at the legs the glendon parish priest would have purged them of their sins with a sprinkling of holy water from a sprig of a herb called hyssop before touching them with a processional cross jack is still working on the skeleton of a six to seven year old boy but we're ready to lift the remains of a child who would have been about four when he died we'll only lift the burials that martin's building work would disturb the others will be allowed to remain where they are in the grounds of glendon hall yesterday we were looking for the reason why the old hollow way was diverted from its original course straight through glendon but frustratingly geophys aren't able to come up with an explanation one or two things but nothing special no no obvious buildings or anything like that definitely no stone buildings on this platform here and nothing occupation like that that i can pinpoint that's useful though john because we did debate about whether to put a trench in this and i think you know we probably wouldn't on the basis of what you said anyway if it's not beside the kink in the road it's even more likely that our church is inside the cemetery so ian is about to put in our third test pit deep in the undergrowth on the east side once he gets the digger into the cops he'll be on the lookout for more burials at the other end of the cemetery raksha has found a piece of a child's jawbone do we know how old it is at all well it's obviously an infant it's still got its milk teeth this is milk tooth that's a milk tooth and you've got one of the permanent teeth coming through developed in there so it's about sort of three to four something like that so we now know that the cemetery extends further to the west but in the east there are no signs of any more burials absolutely clean there are no fines in it while the search for helens continues richard and ray san are seeing if the flemish glass that we know decorated the church in the 16th century fits into the window tracery in the garden folly yeah so what about the east end ones we're going to do grander version grand diversion's slightly larger but still three bay i think they're beginning to build up an impression of what the church might have looked like but there's still no sign of it where we extended the trench this morning and we're halfway through the dig after a day and a half of trawling through the records our northamptonshire archaeology expert glenn has found evidence of a drawing of our church which is useful a because it could tell us what it looks like but more importantly it could give us a clue about its actual location only problem is it's not here it's in london in the british library and it's too valuable a document to take out and we're not allowed to photograph it so we're sending victor out to draw us a copy of it have you got your pencil we've got everything ready and your paper yep the whole digs depended on you mate thanks good luck [Music] but we can't wait for victor's drawing so matt is putting another test pit in to the north of the cemetery where the owners found stone foundations when they were landscaping their gardens perhaps this could be the foundations of the church jackie is taking a look at the skeleton in kerry's trench it's much smaller and more gracile than some of the other adult skeletons we've seen what is grass army quite slightly built petite one might say yeah this angle here looks fairly broad which would suggest you've got a female but it'd be easy to tell when we can see more of it what about these bones here well that looks like we've got at least two there unless somebody's got three big toes which isn't very likely so there's at least parts of two more going off in that direction again adult ones they look like phil's burials are still multiplying he's now revealed a stone-lined grave a jumble of bones a child and the skeleton of a baby so we've got four interconnecting burials all in a very small space which really is probably what i'd expect from a medieval cemetery yeah but it seems to be very different from what we've got over here with what looks like graves that are neat and tidy and respecting each other seems to be i mean you've got to remember with these burials we haven't yet lifted one intact skeleton we don't actually know that they're actually sitting on the bedrock natural it's perfectly possible that there might be more bodies underneath we're beginning to work on the village where these people lived stewards looking for a spot to put in a trench to confirm that the platforms on the south side of the hollow way really are the remains of the village of glendon while gfis are hoping to add some detail to the earthworks survey in the north field by using magnetometry which shows up signs of occupation such as ditches and pits glenn's scouring documents around the time of the black death to see if he can find out when the village started to fall apart the english landscape is covered with deserted medieval villages there are over a hundred in northamptonshire alone and just next door to glendon barford and half of rushton disappear within about 10 years of each other we've got some documents already now here's one which is a survey from 1327 that actually gives us some of the people who lived in this village like who we've got robert marriott had a cottage and one virgo to land and how much is that at this time well later documents suggest it's 20 acres all right just a fair sized farm for that period and these are the rents they're paying are they that's five shelling two chilean twelve pence and so on but they're cottages they only have a house they don't have any land all right so they're landless labourers probably working on the other places john lane richard chapman roger merrick so these people could actually be buried out here almost certainly they are the people buried in the graveyard if they lived here in 1327 these people and their children might well have been victims of the black death 30 years later but we'll never know because the disease acts so rapidly that it leaves no trace on the bones lifting the child's skull is a delicate process because the bones are so fragile [Music] phil's now found a fifth body below the skeleton of the baby this one looks like a strong male perhaps one of the laborers pottery finds from this pit confirmed that we have an eastern boundary of the cemetery we've got um a very small assembly departure which um came from this pit down here now there's not much but it is telling us a little story i mean looking at it you can see that the rim of this part's got quite thick soot all the way around it yeah so it's obviously been on a fire um it's which is the sort of thing you'd expect in this yes they didn't do their washing up very well it's it's it's a domestic assembly right it's probably used for cooking or boiling something you know so so it's evidence of domestic activity you wouldn't expect to find pottery in a in a living cemetery yeah i mean the graves are all that side there's no graves coming this way so they could actually we're outside the cemetery here things are taking shape in the cemetery so we're almost ready to start digging on the south side of the medieval village right i'm happy with the size of the plot things let me just look like a series of yeah i don't mind if it's a small plot i mean if we if we found a cottager with a you know a smaller holding that'd be interesting okay they don't there were no stones to mark the graves of our glendon villagers and it seems that many of them were unceremoniously chopped through when these buildings were erected but there are some gravestones here what's all this this is the glendon dog graveyard tony dog graveyard yeah the pets and the pack animals that lived here many years ago we've even got a ledger here dating back to 1793 with some of the dogs names we've got lively lady lily lovely have you seen this one yes i thought you'd like that tony it's ironic isn't it that on the far side of this building we've got the victorians hacking the earlier dead bodies to pieces totally failing to recall their names while at the same time on this side of the building they're creating their own little idyllic graveyard to the memory of their pets [Music] we're beginning to find some pottery where our village might have stood what you got you tell us how all sorts of stuff gets you excited yeah that looks more like it i mean looking at this it's all the sort of the standard medieval course words we get around here starts in the sort of 12th century goes through the 13th 14th this bit's particularly interesting because it's um it's a medieval shelley word jugg handle the jug handles like this only tend to be 12th century they go out when the glazed industry comes in right in the 13th so that gives us a reasonably early day it's quite nice though there's quite a lot of other stuff down here though yeah i mean oh yeah look at that it's lovely um well that's your 13th 14th century glaze where that sort of stanion lived and it's only made like about 10 miles up the road i mean with that and these i mean we're looking 12th to 14th century probably well it's that's just the life of the settlement isn't it it's all coming out of this earth work here which we think is the house concentration well you've got more pottery out of this trench than you've got from the whole of the cemetery area up there i'm sure this is where they're living the earth works give the game away you know yeah true true things are progressing in the cemetery by the end of the second day another skeleton is emerging in raksha's first test pit but nothing more from either of two further test pits mats found the dark stain of some kind of feature but no sign of the church so by the end of day two we have the extent of the cemetery on the north the west and the east the church should be somewhere within this area this grave cut marks the furthest west point of our cemetery behind me over there we've got around 40 bodies not only that but we know the names of some of the people and even how much land they had but if we want to find out more about their lives we're going to have to look further afield than here we're going to have to get really stuck into the earthworks the site of the original medieval village but that's for tomorrow we're into our final day at glendon in northamptonshire where we've found five layers of bodies in a medieval cemetery and now we're beginning to get an impression of the village where they lived where exactly are we in this medieval village well you're on the edge of a medieval road for a start off that dip going up there is the old road that's the hollow way that's the one yeah and coming off this hollow way are a series of boundaries these earthworks coming off up here there so of regular plots so what do we think is going on in this trench well this should be where you get settlement and occupation in this area and out towards that far into the trench would be where you get the back garden and all the rubbish chucked out the back we've only got one day left haven't we yeah do you think in that time we can learn much about this village well we could at least get some dating evidence you know that will go with the documents we've got if we if we can actually show that the stuff here from the 12th century to the 14th or something like that and if we're very lucky we might actually get a structure of a building or a house or something like that of the people that we know were living here paul we've got the names of people who were living here in 1327. can you give us any pottery which ties into that day well the medieval stuff that was coming up last night when we were machining has got a broad span that certainly covers the the known dates of occupation of the village yeah uh but there is a potential spanner in the works which is this uh it's a piece of roman it's first second century and it's in really nice condition and it came right off the top of this ditch just here so there are still problems to us are we just going to limit ourselves to this trench well i think we've got the labour to do more so i think another evaluation changed perhaps on the next platform up two of the villagers who lived and worked in these fields are being revealed for the first time since they died six to seven centuries ago jack is preparing to lift the tiny pelvis of a baby who was probably born a few weeks premature and didn't survive the birth bad news victors returned from the british library where the picture of saint helens turned out to be a drawing of glendon hall the good news is that there's a spire in the background but hasn't that solved it we know where the church is i don't think that's the church site because we've got the burials up the other end we've got a flipping great spire here yeah but you know you have to think of gardens and garden features and all the rest of it and i wonder whether that actually if it is part of the church well they haven't moved it and put it in the gardens because it's nowhere near the cemetery if mick's right and this is a garden feature it doesn't help us find the medieval church archives suggest that the church and village stood here between the 11th and 16th centuries but the archaeology is beginning to suggest something different have a look at this um see all this pottery yeah it's all late saxon um this piece in particular has got me really excited can you see the traces of red paint on it probably a little bit difficult to see yeah yeah we know where this is from it's from stamford they've dug the kiln that's no later than about 9 10 a.d and where did it come from in your trench see this massive ditch down here well the moat at the bottom yep that's where it's coming in we've got a massive lake saxon enclosure ditch this was filled in before the norman conquest cool now i've seen something like this before around here there's a site a few miles down the road called west cotton oh yeah yeah deserted medieval village yeah the earliest phase of it was a late saxon timber phase that probably looks something like this you've got a massive moat with timber buildings inside it but this is like a sort of payne's hall isn't it sort of fairly wealthy but not too high up the pile saxon lord the local big it's getting more confusing by the minute we've got evidence of the saxons but not enough to suggest our medieval peasants actually lived here so we're putting in another trench over the next platform further up the field [Music] john and henry are superimposing the geophys of the north field over the topography and can clearly see evidence of earlier phases of occupation that is just so good isn't it yeah i mean if we highlight that medieval ditch going with the earthwork yeah and can actually try to show the prehistoric runs underneath the medieval bank that's the key isn't it so martin's friends in the south weren't the first people in glendon but the hard life that they led is evident in their bones even now if we start off here he's got really bad dental abscesses there's just one of them there and that would have been both very painful and his breath would have been quite smelly you wouldn't want needed to stand this close to him oh god that's wrong horrible creature how old is he about your age i should think yeah so sort of older primal life yes if you say so far and then we've got some sinusitis if you look just inside this area here you can see there's this very fine woven new bone inside the sinus cavity now this is this part of the sinus and you know how painful it is when you get sinusitis it goes right up into your head so you'd have had a bad head as well but his spine's the real giveaway because this tells us what kind of a hard life he had and how much physical labor he did you can see he's got this new bone growth around the edge of the vertebra and these are called osteophytes and that that's basically a reflection of age-related wear and tear so he's been doing a lot of hard physical manual labor lots of bending and lifting probably a bit like you've been doing over the past three days lots of shoveling and that kind of stuff yeah but i've been doing it for more than three days i've been doing it my whole lifetime well he probably yeah you might actually look like this underneath [Music] [Applause] working in these fields would have been slow and back-breaking today we have modern mechanical diggers but they don't seem to be helping us locate the village where our peasant farmers lived it's too clean it's just way too clean what we really need is like you know big piles of bone and pot and black stuff it's just not there i don't think you're gonna get it it's starting to look like that trench down there which is just absolutely clear yeah [Applause] nobody living here is i think we should because yeah there's pottery coming up on the other side on that one yeah well there was that bit of just um cloud ground over there had to wonder about on that yesterday and pick three or four bits of medieval pot off that so a final slot over the road if our medieval peasants weren't living in the south field surely they must have been in the north field but we've only got half a day left to find out back in the cemetery phil's extending his trench searching for some sign of the church joey cannot think there's something in there uh haying coming along here look do you see that yep no don't but i mean don't look like a grave what do you think a rubbed out wool no you don't know i don't know i don't know what it is all i know is i think it's there but we're not finding any more graves no please god no more graves let's go on back a bit okay if this is a robbed out wall perhaps it's our first archaeological evidence of the church just after lunch on day three and geophys have finished their survey of the field to the north of the hollow way concentrate on this sort of rectilinear enclosure arrangement these i'm certain are the medieval tenements shadowing the hollow white so these are reflecting the earthworks that we can see on the surface in fact and it's just possible we've got a structure all right in here close to the hallway so probably a house at the front of the tenement facing south at the front of the tenement yeah with the fields behind so that's a potential building target isn't it so i think yeah trenches straight away it looks like we're starting to get some results oh bingo look at that lovely that's it that's 13th century yeah yeah mandy we're getting pottery on the other side we need any features to go with it oh we got features here yeah it looks like it doesn't it looks like it well the two interesting things the first thing is in relation to stewart's trying to work out what the spire in victor's drawing represents just in this area here is a mound just just there oh yeah and the position of it when you compare it with victor's drawing gives you the exact perspective and line that matches the drawing and what i think that mound is is a garden feature in which they put something like a an oblast so that's a nice spike we can see on that yeah i think it's a garden feature it fits in with the design layout we see for this parkland and it's exactly the sort of thing you get in this kind of ground landscape grand gardens seem worlds away from the lives of the medieval peasants in our cemetery who somehow managed to keep the village going for 150 years after the black death what have you got then paul it's looking a lot more like it mick we've got medieval pottery we got animal bone we got slag it looks like the sort of stuff you see kicking around in a yard in a medieval tournament so this is much more the sort of occupational debris you'd expect yeah absolutely i mean we just weren't getting this over the side of the road all right we were getting bits of pottery but this is the sort of stuff you'd expect to find where people were living you know the evidence from the trenches now suggests another theory that the villagers worked the land on the south side of the hollow way but lived on the north but just when we think we've cracked it kerry finds a pot paul yeah you clean that piece of pot i have and what do you reckon well it it looks uh suspiciously roman to me carrie it's not sucks no medieval what do you think of the glass oh blimey that's a that's a glass vessel isn't it look you can see the rim there is that burnt bone as well that's burnt bone so we've got the pop burnt bone and you've got cremation haven't you it's a roman cremation that's beautiful yeah isn't it yeah but it's going to slow us down almost to a standstill with only a few hours left pressure is on to find some dating evidence for the features in the trench to help us work out what a roman cremation is doing in the middle of a medieval village phil's finally ready to find out what's inside the stone-lined grave he found yesterday there is something buried underneath that it's a big old stone in it it is go on have a look oh anything underneath [Laughter] have you got it yep oh look one bit of bone that's what i thought yeah come on back you can do it under the stone is yet more bone so we have another conundrum on our hands perhaps we're not looking at the grave after all so this could be sitting on top of this great mass of redeposited bone and could actually the base of a grave do you think a base of a stone line grave i don't know if you don't need no because it it would put the grave up there yeah and that's too high do you think i'm sure it is i just wonder whether i mean what if it's not a war foundation is it what were you precisely thinking wall of church were you thinking makes you wonder at last this is the clue we've been waiting for the stone lies at the end of the robbed out wall which phil discovered earlier our archaeologists agree that it seems most likely that the original 13th century church must have been where the rear of the incident room stands an extension was added later over the first burials that martin found if only the rest of the village were that straightforward gary you got any more of our medieval village we have but i think what i have here might change your perception oh crap so what's his cremation hurt then is it i think it is what do you make of it jackie well most of the bone is actually outside the vessel so it's not acted as a container it's a grave good the same as the glass vessel it's another offering yeah yeah and the glass having a glass vessel there suggests we've got quite a high status burial and looking at the bone there is human bone here but there's also some animal bone right now the the romans were particularly keen on their pies in putting offerings of either piglet or chicken and this looks a little bit like chicken to me so mick we've got that big piece of roman pottery over there we've got this are we looking at a roman landscape yes but underneath the medieval one i think in fact if you look at the geophysics and you look at the henry's terrain model you can see that there are features that don't align with the earthworks which the earthworks are almost certainly medieval so there's something underneath it doesn't make me wonder what the medieval peasants would have thought if they dug down under their house and found this doesn't it the glass vessel i mean they would never it's fantastic they wouldn't have known what that was at all would they no i'm sure this is where this idea of think wizards and golden ages and things come from because something like that they wouldn't understand and something you don't understand is magic and that would have been magic post excavation work revealed that the cremation was a 16 year old girl inside the jug was found the fragile remains of another vessel made of glass no thicker than a light bulb right at the end of the day tiny roman pottery shirts date the post holes in this trench but there are no signs of any medieval buildings so our peasants weren't living here after all and the trench where we discovered the saxon thanes residence hasn't got any features dating to the medieval period either i mean i think i keep coming back to that point of pause i know that it ought to be really full of charcoal and rot so our archaeologists are forced to rethink the location of the village it now seems impossible that our villagers were living in these fields at all instead it's more likely that the enclosures on these platforms had animal pens and barns on them we were all so confident that the village would be on those platforms and it wasn't yeah i mean we're used to seeing earthworks like that and used to assuming that that's where the medieval farm sits are most of us would have put a decent bottle of wine on there being medieval farms down each of those plots so we've all learned a lot from this we've been on a steep learning curve and it sort of changed our ideas it's a lesson for all of us i mean there's no stone buildings there and they should be in those enclosures so where is the village well we know where it isn't because we know where all the medieval fields are around here we know it's not down the other end so there's only one place it can be really which is under these buildings behind us i mean northamptonshire villages almost always find the church in the heart of the village and the church is just over there [Music] the medieval village of glendon must have been near the church where the rambling buildings of glendon hall now stand in 1514 a new landowner decided that sheep pasture would be a more profitable use of land and so he pulled down most of the houses evicting 62 people shortly after that the first glendon hall was built and the church became a private chapel complete with expensive flemish glass the next four centuries saw generations of landowners demolish build and add to the hall just as martin was doing when he found his first friend in the south i can't remember an episode of time team where we've been confronted by so many burials not just these medieval ones we've had the roman one we've even had a victorian pet cemetery but now that the christian burials can be reinterred martin can carry on building again in fact from now on there'll be three generations of hip wells living here and his mum can look forward to her new home it's almost as though the village lives on it's just that it's not out in the fields it's here in the great hall [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 396,691

Rating: 4.9019608 out of 5

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, northamptonshire, time team, time team season 13 episode 1, time team bodies in the shed, time team fife, fife, time team northamptonshire, british history, time team full episode

Id: oEs_us18fZU

Length: 48min 34sec (2914 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 21 2021