Corridors of Power (Westminster Abbey, London) | Series 17 Episode 1 | Time Team

we've dug some important sights on time team but they don't come much bigger than this because this is westminster abbey [Applause] westminster abbey is the setting for coronations and state funerals it's packed with the tombs of centuries of monarchs poets architects and politicians the people responsible for shaping the history of britain [Applause] the abbey standing today is largely the ambitious design of king henry iii in the 13th century although it bears the scars of centuries of renovations but there's one crucial piece of his original design that's missing because he built a sacristy a huge stronghold said to have housed the biggest collection of treasure this side of the alps and amazingly this important building vanished and we've got just three days to find it [Music] henry iii began to build westminster abbey in 1245. it was one of the most expensive building projects of the middle ages and set westminster on course to be the political center of london whenever there's talk of a time team coming to london you back off that's right but you're here because of westminster abbey you know he's the great benedictine abbey in the country one of the biggest we're looking for a sacristy yeah yeah am i right in saying that that's the room where they kept all the stuff for the services yeah where they keep the the chalices and patterns and where the the copes for the clergy to wear a kept we're all a paraphernalia for the services he kept so a really important room warrick do we have any idea where this sacristy actually is yes um the the sacristy or what they thought was the sacristy was discovered by accident in 1869 when sir gilbert scott was working on this area and repairing the building and particularly this north porch and they lowered the ground level all around this side and bumped into walls and this is the plan they produced here that's in this area here from the north porch so do we think it's all still here just under the grass well we hope it is still there but there is there is a little hitch in that um scott also ordered the construction of a vaulted chamber down here um in in this area and then it was demolished again not many years later we've suddenly been overcome by gloom we're not going to find anything aren't we no no i think it's extremely unlikely that they dug everything out and if we did find the sacristy if we found henry the third secretary that would be absolutely fantastic you'd be happy i would be very happy please do it better get on then even if the walls are still there we're a bit worried they may be nothing to do with the sacristy because incredibly later in the post-medieval period there were houses and workshops built right up against the abbey on the same footprint as the supposed sacristy where do we think our sacristy is whereas we think he's this l-shaped building north of the nave where the north transit is there is another one of course down here that's the more normal place to find it off the south transit right at the point where you can all troop in with all the vestments and and gear into the east end of the church right next to the chapter so that's where you'd expect it it's really hard to have a second one and it's very hard to have it in that position there if we did find it how important would that be well i think it would be an enormously significant would it be fair to call it a find of national importance oh yes yes i mean it would be a major fight for church archaeology no doubt about that this doesn't look like occasional light shows no that's saying the good news is geophys have found some wall lines starting at the top the near surface it's an absolute nightmare but as ever there's a problem and it's not just the miserable weather all these lines are services oh cracking electric cables maybe pipes telephone cables but with regards what you want to find if you ignore those for a moment go deeper into the ground deeper into the radar look at these wall lines starting to show oh right and these match that's yours exactly what you wanted there's the cross wall at that point there that's wonderful i think we should try and pick up the line of this wall that one there and where if we run a trench down there it will also pick up the cross wall here it will pick up the the raft on which it looks as though the whole transept is built a great stone raft and it will pick up the the edge of this area that looks like the vaulted chamber so we'll get a whole lot of things from the 13th century onwards all in one trench it's an ambitious shopping list warwick's given us especially if we've got to dodge the services copper strip as i'm sure the sacristy we're looking for was said to be built on a grand scale just like the rest of henry iii abbey and our historian has discovered that his inspiration was partly this man edward the confessor the last great saxon king who had built an abbey here himself 200 years earlier henry is mad about him he kind of dresses like everett to confess he has pictures of him in his bed chamber and he calls his son edward would you define the abbey as a shrine to edward the confessor it is a shrine to where the confessor but it's more than that it's a grand political statement of power i mean look at it it's massive and it's a very international place um henry decided to build this after he'd been to france and there he'd seen these kind of three separate cathedrals one where people were crowned one were the buried one which was sort of particularly religious and he decided to wrap all this into one big super building which is westminster abbey so westminster abbey's role as a theater for royal ceremonies would have made a huge sacristy an absolute necessity we just need to find it still if we do nothing else the next three days we should be able to give them an up-to-date map of their services hello welcome we've got lots and lots of images helen's wading through drawings and plans relating to our site to try and find out why the victorians thought it was henry's sacristy but they're not proving all that helpful this fantastic plan from 1870 is very clear in showing these lovely walls and they're described very nicely as well but a lot of them are completely different depths when you look at this section drawing you can see that um they're different depths here but the how these are drawn doesn't bear any relationship to how they're described so we don't quite know how to how to reconcile the two to find out what's really going on there is no substitute for archaeology wow look at that it's good news in the trenches because it looks like the victorians have left some walls for us to look at what we're going to do now is hope that we find point the other edge of it on this side it's quarter to 12 day one inside the visitors are teaming in outside the reigns teaming down and they've just started digging trench one will we find the missing piece of london's greatest abbey we'll know soon westminster abbey's sumptuous design nearly bankrupted henry iii when he built it in the 13th century [Music] most of it's still standing but there's one important room missing his great sacristy despite terrible weather on day one by the afternoon phil's found some walls although he's not convinced there anything to do with the sacristy when you look at the stonework it looks very fresh i can't really believe that it is the sacristy no it definitely isn't not yet but then you tell me it is not part of this much much later seller that we know appears on the plans if you look at those plans you can see the wall line coming out here that's to that point there and it shows the cellar on this side and if you look at the radar the radar shows the seller here there's no doubt about that i think that feature there might be stairs going into the cellar do we care about this seller if it's much later yes what we've got to do is establish where we are on this plan so if we can prove those our stairs then we know that we're on the money [Music] the digs really beginning to get underway now phil expands the trench to check whether john's right about the position of the seller [Music] and once we've located the walls on scott's plan we can start to work out whether or not they belong to henry's sacristy will i wrap whether you like it or not concrete capping that's as far as you're gonna go down for a while we're gonna need some pretty convincing archaeological evidence because on paper this building looks nothing like an archetypal sacristy which should be tucked away securely in the heart of the abbey this is the original sacristy which was built even before the one that we're excavating for but what is it about this place that defines it as a sacristy well sacristies have to be very secure because they have all these valuable treasure in so the door that you have just come through was originally three doors one beside another lots of bolts lots of locks then the walls are very substantial there's a stone vault on the roof there are no doors no windows that lead to the exterior so it's a highly secure space if they've got these arches in the wall you see so you could set cupboards in with the chalices and patterns uh you know gold and silver and they could have been locked so that's more security as well but virtually everything that you've told me that defines a sacristy is hanging off the walls well when we dig down we're not going to find any walls so it's going to be difficult for our archaeologists specifically to identify what they've got as a sacristy well that's where we have to try and marry the archaeological evidence with uh documentary evidence and study it in a general sense from from what we know elsewhere it will not turn out to be a building like this with a great vault on it [Music] brilliant if we can't identify henry's second sacristy this dig could be a complete washout more sewage pipe there's a real prospect of three rainy days in london on one of the most important sites in the country and all we'll have to show for it is a victorian cellar filled with centuries of rubble [Music] one bit of good news though is that the documents confirmed that henry had definitely planned a second sacristy there's a reference here in lethebe's book westminster abbey and the king's craftsman now this says that the king issued a command that the sacristy should be built 120 feet long that's huge it is isn't it how does that tie up with the stuff we've got on this plan of 1869 let's see that is 120 there oh look i mean that's not even 100 feet long it's a completely different length but but even just shy of a hundred feet it's still a very large building i suppose what this says is that the king commissioned an enormous building i mean we don't know that it was actually built 120 feet long do we well exactly yeah and then look he goes on to say a large sacristy was certainly required for the vast treasure which matthew of westminster says was unequaled on this side of the alps so they certainly had a lot of stuff to store that could explain the size of the sacristy but it certainly doesn't explain its puzzling location right this trench has really come on i mean phil thinks he's found two features shown on the plan which he reckons at entrances to the victorian cellar so we've moved over here and look we've just come down onto this with this layer of concrete wonderful because i think that is the roof of the vaulted chamber that was built by sir gilbert scott and we have the accounts telling us about building the bolts and then concreting over the top of them okay so far so good but the crucial question is is this the medieval wall i mean it certainly doesn't look like it down here it's actually got bricks in it yeah it doesn't look like it yet but the medieval building was reconstructed as a house and then and hence if we've got post-medieval brick work on the foundations so you think that if we go down if we can go down beyond lower down that wall we should actually find the line of the media we should hit the medieval wall um below that yeah our search for the sacristy is complicated by so many centuries of usage reflected in the fines for the tudor green which comes in about 1380 but most of its 15th century yeah it's beautiful so i was really really finely potted and highly fired and also a bit of medieval floor tile now that could easily be 14th century so it's about the only stuff we're getting from the medieval period so far but i see there's an awful lot of bone in this train yeah i mean some of it some of it's animal bones but we also have human bone and there's bits of finger bone and that's a bit of somebody's big toe there well this is all kicking around in the top yeah it's all just redeposited and it's fractured and broken but also what we've got are these they're like little brass studs and the kind of thing that you've got in the top of usually 18th century coffins as decorative stud work yeah so you know the fact we've got both these and the bones suggest that we've got at least 18th century burials have been disturbed so there's clearly a lot of history to sift our way through before we can find out what was going on here in the 13th century [Music] when henry built his great abbey his centerpiece was the shrine to his idol edward the confessor who'd been canonized a century before [Music] so important was this memorial to him that henry gave instructions for his own tomb to be placed next to it this was one of the great shrines of england to which pilgrims came from far and wide and their aim was to come and to see and to touch and to get spiritual power from the body of edward the confessor who's inside here and that's what the steps are for here and these niches so you you would kneel and pray at the niche contemporary accounts describe this in really splendid terms they talk about it glistening and gleaming i don't want to be rude but it is slightly dull now what we see today is the stone shell made of purple marble which is the frame that held all the decorative detail so is it the naughty pilgrims we've been picking off all these bits of glass then well i'm afraid it is um initially pilgrims but later on visitors i think in later centuries but you've got a bit left over there we've got a bit left there i mean that is a hint of what it looked like and you must think of that over the whole of this everything was full of this glistening detail and so it would have glowed as a great beacon henry was an avid collector of relics such as a thorn of christ's crown an impression of his feet from the ascension as well as a grisly array of saints bones it's no wonder he needed a super-sized sacristy [Music] and we might just have the first signs of it in the ground somehow or another there's something running out that way and this wall lines up with that one in phil strange exactly online yeah the abbey was built nearly 800 years ago and i think we've got just about every one of those 800 years represented in this trench but very importantly we've got a couple of finds which could well come from the very early years of the abbey what are they paul we've got a couple of it's medieval pottery it's kingston where and it's absolutely what you'd expect to find in london between about 12 30 and about 12 60 12 70. this building was supposedly built in 1245 so this bracket beautifully where did you find those they came from right down the in the corner next to that wall this is bang on the money and if you don't think that's exciting phil what have you got in your part of the trench in here tony we've got part of the original raft on which this beautiful abbey was constructed and if these foundations are medieval then you'll see as they come along they turn around there it looks like we could have our first medieval war so if we've got a medieval wall have we got a medieval building and if we've got a medieval building could it be henry iii long lost sacristy we'll find out tomorrow 8 30 in the morning and it's another normal day here at westminster abbey there'll be four services in here today between three and four thousand tourists looking at the three thousand plaques and monuments and burials to the great and the good which are inside there although actually it's not quite a normal day because in addition to all that we've got the time team digging a great big hole right there we're here because of the work of victorian architecture george gilbert scott during his renovations here he discovered the remains of a massive l-shaped building we're trying to confirm that it was henry iii 13th century sacristy we do appear definitely to have medieval walls we've got this wall here that is actually sitting on top of the main raft of the abbey you can see there it's built out of chalk and we've got a similar wall of similar construction with chalk in it running through there and that does tie up with what's on scott's drawing we've even got the curve behind matt which is of of the stairway which is shown on scott's drawing but the crucial thing is that now we're beginning to look at all these things we realize they are more than one date they are they're multi-phase not like the drawing says scott clearly misinterpreted the date of some of the features he found so we're putting in more trenches to check out exactly which walls are medieval much of what we've uncovered so far relates to post-medieval buildings which were built on top of the sacristy and in trench two faze getting a little taste of life in those later houses oh that's lovely um it's border ware it's the bog standard pottery in london from about the mid 16th the end again towards the 18th century and it's a frying pan handle i mean it's uh it's a skillet it's lovely that's pretty cool so ty's in about when the house is supposed to be here yeah that works it's in pretty good nick actually i mean you can even see what's been used see it's all blackened underneath so that's the side it would have gone on the fire so you know someone had their their fried eggs for breakfast out of that maybe sausages yeah oh yeah yeah it works for me it looks like we've got a lot of later stuff to get through before we reach the medieval levels the great sacristy that we're hoping to find is an example of the abby's extraordinary design which henry never lived to see completed [Music] this was going to be one of henry iii's chapels it's 50 feet above the floor of the abbey but it was never finished because these high chapels went out of fashion but i've come up here to show you how much this part of westminster is at the epicentre of english royal power over across there is the houses of parliament and underneath that was the old palace of westminster which was henry's favorite palace he actually lived there and in those days there was no road there there was just a wall so he'd come out of his palace through a little gate in the wall straight to here it was like having a very large office at the bottom of your garden living in the palace also meant that henry could keep an eye on his builders and in phil's trench we're getting an idea of the logistics of constructing his great abbey we can now see that this war here which we've always been calling medieval which we still think is medieval is actually built on the raft and is actually butts up against the basal course of the main abbey so is of a later date we still think it's medieval but later medieval than the construction of the abbey itself but what is new and very interesting is that you can see that this is actually part of a wall and you can see there's got an edge running across there and that face is actually visible continuing in here you see this little raised step of mortar yeah and that employs that there was once a wall coming across here blocking off between these two buttresses apart from the main wall that we know was running from east and west is this what you'd expect warrick or is this all new stuff this is entirely new we had no idea that there was going to be a wall running between the buttresses here so that suggests that the the foundation for the north transept in the 13th century when that's put in they're already thinking of this corridor this room going off and in fact that block there that looks like the base of a doorway is part of a doorway that was built into the wall at that stage to go off in that direction it certainly looks like that because i mean you have to remember that when you're building something like this you put the raft in you build the great mass of the transept and you might leave connections ready for when you're going to add these other lower appendages and then when the scaffold comes down you then add these lower level chambers if there was a doorway in phil's trench there must have been another one out of the north transept but there's no sign of it on the exterior today thanks to centuries of re-facing [Music] nor can you see where henry's build came to an end at his death in 1272 halfway down the old norman nave which was still standing but on the inside you can see where the work resumes to complete his design a century later there's a junction oh yes you see to the left henry the third rich rich surface decoration and all the purbeck marble shafting yes you're going to the extension as it were not much just quite plain just look at the contrast there that die print is absolutely incredible isn't it i mean just the cost of all that chiseling has to be incredible well it's not only the chiseling you're going to paint it then and guild it so where does that take us to on the plan well the henry iii work got as far as there so they built that buttress yes okay so are they in blank space around here no no there is still a nave here it's the norman knave and they're gradually replacing each bay of that as they go along right so that's slightly narrower than the building we've got at the moment so our l-shaped structure straddled the join between henry's rebuild and the old norman knave and it would have led it to both ends of henry's fabulous newly built part of the abbey we've now found medieval walls in all of our trenches but we're lacking hard evidence of a sacristy [Music] this is the place to view it from isn't it yeah you can actually see the wall of the sacristy from up here can't you yeah we've got a line of it in in one trench over here and then faye trench got the other bit but i really do wonder if it's a sacristy isn't it what we've been digging for one and a half days i know we know it's there from the documents we know it's there from the documents but this actual position is the result of the victorians interpreting these foundations as the lost sacristy what worries me is that this is effectively either half a cloister or just a stone corridor but is he going out to something that we don't know about that that's never been found i can't believe that we're on a site of international importance looking for henry iii sacristy and we might just have some monkey old corridor yeah i can't help that tone that's the reality of it oh come on [Music] if mick's right we haven't found the sacristy yet but it might be at the end of the corridors on the other side of the path in which case it should show up on the geophys but whatever our building is we're getting below the foundation levels there's been quite a few bits and this articulated burnout here there's been bits of skull and now we're getting hints of the earlier history of the abbey so it suggests that whenever these things are put in whatever date these are um they have cut through earlier burials which may i say on the basis of that and the level we're at would be associated with that that original professor's building this is potentially important archaeology because precious little survives of the abbey edward built before henry depicted in the bayer tapestry and as if that wasn't enough mick suspects there might be some even earlier burials on the site there were two burials about here on the 19th century plan but there's no sign of them they either got rid of them which they said they didn't or they're further down my bet is that they probably are much further down i mean let's be honest if they took them away we would expect to see the cuts from the backfield graves yeah i think they must be further on down and the other thing about him is and they're on a different alignment to the present abbey and all these walls and of course this the possibility is that aligned on a on a much earlier church which would have to be a saxon church because it'd be early then with the confessors and if we find more burials of that date that'll be absolutely fantastic these burials might represent the first solid archaeological evidence that there was a church here before edward the confessors because early sacks and churches were often built on a slightly different east-west alignment but as exciting as all this is it's not helping us with our search for the sacristy which is beginning to feel a little desperate this is a handwritten note in a book but it's been written by mr westlake who was writing a book himself in the early part of the 20th century and he's written down sacras account for 1535 for pitch rothen and canvas for mending of a pipe in margaret's churchyard carrying to the sex tree threatens sex tree i've checked up and it's an alternative spelling if you like of the word sacristy now saint margaret so i would have thought that this shows margaret on the north side so surely if the pipe is being mended in the churchyard it must have been running across to a sacristy somewhere around here but why couldn't it have just gone to the north side of the abbey on that side of the transept oh i hadn't thought of that to be honest oh well back to the drawing board it's so frustrating the documents only tell us that the sacristy was somewhere on the north side meg look i've got the geophys from the grass over there let's hope this new gear fizz can help locate it it's rubbish isn't it what do you mean it's rubbish well this is the demolition rubble from the houses that stood here until the 19th century oh you mean it's literally rubbish exactly there's no walls or structures that we can see within that so as far as you're concerned the sacristy probably isn't there there's nothing we can see that indicates that well look yeah in phase trench medieval right which is weird over there in phil's trench yeah that bit there this is joining the dots isn't it yeah over there we've got this tracy's trench there yeah and this little trench by the digger actually wasn't there yeah look fish bash bush bush job done there's your sacrifice all that proves is that we've got medieval walls in those places it doesn't demonstrate it's a sacristy this looks to me much more like a corridor or a cloister all right but you tell me what piece of church architecture exists there is this funny little corridor which comes off at right angles outside of an abbey and disappears back in there again a covered walkway is what it looks like i know that's what's his function i don't know but it that doesn't mean it's not an old national health hospital you know going from toward that it doesn't mean it's a sacristy just because we don't know what it is the secretary could still be somewhere else in the area it might for example be over there by the north door of the the north transect all right i'll buy that as long as you put your thinking cap on tonight and work out if it's not a sacristy what this could be all right i shall have a glass of wine that helps me think a lot better our search for henry's sacristy may be falling apart but just before the end of the day dave finds some definitive evidence of edward the confessors earlier abby let's have a look and see what you've got there these are 11th century um hand in size floor tiles with with glaze on and this is very heavily worn this is an absolutely wonderful find extremely rare this time it's so rare they're only known at westminster abbey and we only recognize them with within the last five years absolutely wonderful find us some more please okay i'll try this is more than we could have hoped for because fines from edward the confessor's great abbey are like gold dust if that isn't exciting enough if mixed to be believed then down here we may well have burials from something even earlier the very first saxon church which gave its name to westminster beginning of day three here at westminster abbey and completely by surprise we seem to be uncovering the story of three churches on this site we came here to find the lost sacristy of this man henry iii who built this marvelous abbey that's here today but late yesterday afternoon we unearthed a tile from the abbey belonging to this man henry's inspiration edward the confessor 200 years previously and not only that but we think we may have a row of burials from the very first church on this site way back in saxon times and if we have then we're sailing into completely uncharted archaeological waters the theory rests on the orientation of these chalk-lined burials which were discovered by sir gilbert scott in the 1870s phil needs to find them to see if they were aligned to the earliest saxon westminster abbey ian just like being on the downs anyway but there's still the little matter of whether the l-shaped building we're excavating is henry iii's long-lost sacristy no codepaths although we're sure the walls were all originally built by henry mick's convinced himself that they're just corridors and nothing to do with our sacristy but warwick's got a new idea he's been searching for evidence of a doorway from our building into the north transept although there's no sign of it on the outside he thinks he's found it on the inside so where's this door within warwick all i can see is monuments and filing cabinets yes we've got quite a few of both but there in the middle of this bay the central um arch you can see the arch is different from those either side yes the arch stands up taller it breaks through the window sill now that molding there is all original henry iii work but it is very tall and narrow isn't it it's not like a normal doorway into a room yes well now that's what makes it particularly interesting because it is so tall and narrow it immediately says one thing it is a processional entrance where you could walk through carrying a processional cross which of course stands high above your head but if it's to carry across that suggests it's a passage behind it and not a sacristy doesn't it well yes and no both answers are correct it is clearly processional but i mean uh processions can start in sacristies and so i think what we're looking at here potentially this this long passage is that this is really uh a robin area and an assembly for procession rather than a sacristy in the sense of a treasury where you keep all the valuables i think we're understanding it yep at last we've got a theory to satisfy mick i am now convinced about this jolly good glad to hear it and in the trenches phil's making progress too so does that look like as though it's in situ phil oh it's definitely articulated yeah i mean that looks like there's a pair of legs in there look and there's a foot bone so there's the ankle in there but it's not the early saxon chalk lined burial phil's looking for for the last two days there's been one big question that's been bugging us why is our sacristy such an odd shape basically it's just two corridors in an l shape well we think we've got the answer but it isn't until you get in here that you understand the logic of it most of us think of an abbey like this don't we it's beautifully decorated highly painted we hardly even notice areas like that one or this little room over here but that is where the real work of an abbey gets done and that's the logic of our sacristy it's a place where things are stored where things are sorted out and where people get changed out of the public eye until they process back into the formal part of the abbey dressed in their full glory mick are you happy now oh ecstatic ecstatic i really feel we've sorted it out but helen how does all this time with the documents that you've been looking at it ties in brilliantly and what it does is help us understand some really tricky passages in the documents i mean to be to begin with the galilee of the sacristy what does galilean well we didn't know nobody is there everybody says what does this mean it's so annoying but when you realize what this place is that it's a place to prepare for for processions and it's a place to put all your kids on and so on but it becomes very obvious now i do a few processions every year as a member of church choir and they're awful if you've only got a tiny little space then you can't organize yourself in a great long line and you don't know what you're doing now if you've got this lovely space which you could call a galilee you can line up and you can check that you're all in the right order and you're all doing the same thing without all that huffling and shuffling and worrying it also sorts out the l shape because you can take a procession through into the north transit appearing as if by magic through that lovely door you can also take a procession into the nave appearing as if by magic it's absolutely ideal helen's talking about other galilee i thought we were looking for sacristy there are two functions to a sacristy one is to keep the holy vessels gold and silver chalices patterns that sort of thing and the best place for that here is that that one on the other side and faith chapel the other function is is to keep the robes in the vestments and copes and so on the clergy where so we're talking about two sacristies with two different functions yeah most places would have had all this going on in one room yeah here they've got the luxury of keeping the the the clothes separate if you like in a less secure building but he's ideal to get to everywhere so our sacristy was like the wings of a theater and what a theater [Applause] because henry was setting the scene for the most important ceremonies in the kingdom royal weddings funerals and coronations and this sort of pageantry needs a lot of room for preparation [Music] oh that's pretty spectacular what's that this is a cope and it was worn by the priests and it dates back to about 1660 and it may have been used for the coronation of king charles ii that's beautiful it seems good nick isn't it wonderful yes what else have you got another cope here dating back also to charles ii 1685 and it may have been used for his funeral and these are still used to this day you can see why it requires such a lot of space can't you i mean this cupboard goes back what maybe five foot here you pull that out and then if you need to change as well then that's obviously additional space and if you've got 20 50 people all changing in the same place it really could be quite difficult a bit chaotic yes actually i've just noticed over here all the work that maybe 10 or 20 monks used to do in the medieval period is nowadays reduced to an ironing board a little rack and plenty of starch oh now what that that's another bone oh that's a joke outside phil's got his work cut out hello there's another set of teeth yeah here's the top set and here's the bottom side because he's uncovering multiple burials yeah burials on top of burials aren't there that's another one we need to find some anglo-saxon pottery well warwick was excited to see saxon tiles last night dating to the abbey that edward the confessor built before henry so this must be one of the oldest surviving rooms in the abbey is it it is this is a wonderful space it's known as the pics chamber and it is a complete 11th century room you weren't going anywhere older in london it was a treasury now these tiles um which we've dug up and are specimens similar to some we have here in in the floor now look down here you can see we have a number of them in the floor uh which have scratched designs on and that as you can see is a sort of crisscross design and this is the corner of one of those tiles it's just brilliant because that fits absolutely perfectly yes so this is something that would have been commissioned by edward the confessor himself yes the problem is when we focus on henry iii we forget there was this massive glorious building already here that edward the confessor had been there was yes i mean edward the confessor didn't build the first monastery here he was rebuilding something that was here earlier so the sanctity of this site had been established hundreds of years before the confessor and it's the original abbey that we're putting our resources into because nobody has ever found any archaeological evidence for it fracture yeah you know we're looking for those chalk line burials yeah i think oh i might have one also what do you remember about the alignment yeah it was on the skew that's right one should never go anywhere without a compass yeah they are a bit on the skew aren't they they are that's due east that way watch this space i know it's a tall order to find out if this burial really was aligned with the earliest abbey at westminster now then i believe you've got some you have got some bones down here and tracy has spotted something that might have been part of its fabric in the victorian stairwell that one there the long ones yeah and you see the difference in the carving on that this looks very much like roman rustic stone carving oh is that oh that's carving is it well yes you see all these medieval post-medieval stones here they've got dressing on them you can see the stripes where it's carved into the surface here they're dressing the stone for use this one is completely different here you've got this surround coming around here but that's carved the decoration the pattern is in relief so it stands out right yeah i can see that but i mean there isn't really a major roman site right near the abbey is there not right near the abbey no but the theory is it could well have come from the earliest phase of every building and then it's just been incorporated into walls much later on it's a fab thing to find though that's really nice everybody involved in the abbey is on tenterhooks to find out what else we can discover about this historic site in the final hours of the dig already identified several burials including an eight-year-old child their alignment and level suggest that they're probably from the time of edward the confessor but what we really want is to pin down a date for the chalk lined burial this is definitely been disturbed by the victorians yeah this is all victorian backfill that's in here and this means that any fines from the grave might be misleading usually fines are vital clues for us and this dig has produced vast quantities which the students of westminster school are helping us process what we need is something dateable from the very bottom of the grave that looks more like a bit of tile or brick to me that's not pottery but you can't give us a date on it hey it's tyler brickman it's not my job i'm afraid sorry the good news is that now we can see the chalk lined grave it's clearly on a totally different alignment to the later burials so this ought to be associated with an early saxon church exactly that would be incredible it would be fantastic and in order to be able to work out the date of the building to which this grave relates what we need to do is to take a small sample of bone from the leg and have that radiocarbon dated what about pottery dating though paul one really interesting bit we have got is this now this is much higher up in the general jumble but it's a piece of saxon pottery it's late saxon shelley where uh late ninth to early eleventh century so pre-ed with the confessor worry does does it make sense that that piece of pot is pre edward the confessor oh yes that is wonderful and forget that i mean the fact that we've now got um a saxon pottery of the period probably of dunstan who founded the church before ed with the confessor and now if we've got a grave that could easily be of that period also we're beginning to get new horizons in the archaeology of westminster has anyone ever found anything associated with dunstan on this side no we do not know anything about dunstan's church or quite where it was or anything structural to do with it we haven't anything and this and the grave could be the first solid indications that we've got saint dunstan founded a benedictine abbey on what was then thorny island in the 10th century but there are stories of an even earlier church at the end of the day after six hours solid digging phil finds more evidence that the grave predates henry iii sacristy i reckon i've cracked it around this wall cuts this grave in other words the grave is earlier no that is just what we want really isn't it splendid absolutely sure about it now good but the final piece of the jigsaw will be the radio carbon date if i put you on the rack what date would you say that burial was oh you don't want much do you um around 9 50. oh not good enough that's too late go on that's too late i think it should be earlier than that i think it'd be nice if it was about 800. so we're 99.9 sure that this burial is anglo-saxon which is a first for westminster abbey but it all depends on that one little bit of bone i wonder what days it'll be we've had quite a journey here at westminster abbey we came here to find henry iii lost sacristy and in doing so we've discovered it had a totally unique role it was the backstage area for the spectacular royal processions that were at the very heart of henry's groundbreaking design but the totally unexpected find was the first evidence of an early saxon church which we now think was built on a different orientation because the carbon date suggests our burial dates from the early 11th century earlier than edward the confessor and this was a critical period when king canute built the very first royal palace next to dunstan's abbey and the stage was set for greatness [Music] 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: 198,021

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, westminster abbey, history of westminster abbey, time team, time team full episode, time team season 17 episode 1, time team westminster abbey, time team london, time team corridors of power, british history, roman history

Id: gwZ4NU0wLYY

Length: 47min 38sec (2858 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 31 2021