Court of the Kentish King (Eastry, Kent) | S13E06 | Time Team

this is the village of east tree in kent and over the years the villagers here have been tantalized by anglo-saxon fines a warrior grave came up at the back of this house behind there another burial laden with fines but the most intriguing discovery was made just down the road this beautiful gilded brooch dates to around 600 a.d like some of the other finds nearby it must have belonged to someone with a bit of cash to chuck about so why did it end up here is this mysterious hill a clue to easter's anglo-saxon past could there even have been a palace here as usual we've got just three days to find out [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] in the 7th and 8th centuries the village v street was one of anglo-saxon kent's most important settlements according to documents it was a focus of authority a major administrative center and with high status fines unearthed at hybrid hill just a mile from eastern village it seems the site could have been at the heart of this saxon power base graeme caspell's family have farmed the site for almost a century when did you realize it was something special well i suppose really well from a very young age you know standing up here and playing you know you could just see for so far and just think well this must have some sort of historical interest have there been many finds up here there have been fines all around the hill from various different time scales so yeah yeah they have been meg hi there why are we here because this hill is very interesting apart from the fines that you've been talking about that are features on it and even on the early maps look look at that crazy remains it's like something out of dungeons and dragons and then the air pictures you see like this one have got soil marks or crop marks i mean you can make all sorts of things out of this we've thought of it as a big enclosure or several enclosures so you know something's going on here and we've got to find out what it is i've seen the gilded brooch where did that come up that one came up from this corner here but in this corner here right opposite came what's known as a plated discroach which is a kind of sandwich of gold and silver a really amazing find um and so things are spread right across this whole field so we've got to have a really good look at it look it's a very hilly hill in the very flat landscape could it be man-made i don't think it's man-made but i think it's been used a lot you can pick prehistoric flintsop around the edge just by walking across it it's the sort of hill that nobody's going to ignore in the past for one reason or another so what are we going to do well we're going to do some geophysics across the middle of this if we can pick up these ditches but i think even if we don't pick anything up we'd still put a trench across to see what these features are on the air pictures trench one will confirm if the series of features is actually an enclosure that surrounds some high status buildings to pick up these features it will be one of the longest we've ever dug on time team running over 60 meters from the bottom to the very top of the hill trench 2 on the south of the hill will investigate these interesting geophys results because so many high status finds like this 6th century saxon brooch have been found here in the past we've also roped in an unprecedented number of metal detectorists to comb not just the spoil heaps but the whole three acres of hybrid hill andrew and after just hours the strategy is paying off i don't know if you can see the look of satisfaction on these people's faces some might even say a trifle smug we never find anything decent halfway through day one but jamie what happened oh we've just been doing a metal detecting survey of the area and this was the first good signal i'd had all morning isn't it beautiful what is it home well it's an anglo-saxon brooch dating to the 6th century ad we think it's made of silver but we'll have to get it cleaned up by bridge and look it's got a garnet on it you can tell it's a garnet because of the way it flashes and glitters as you move it in the light it's amazing isn't it well you've demonstrated what you can do in two and a half hours by the end of day three i want the rest of this brooch but why would such high status fines be here on this hill what would their wealthy owners be doing in this area in saxon times the name eastery referred to a district the eastern region of the anglo-saxon kingdom of kent this region needed an administrative center and a place of assembly according to 8th century documents somewhere in eastery there was a villa regardless a latin term that refers to a king's high hall this major residence would have been a centre for the community a wealthy power base and a regular home to the king of kent so if there is such a major residence on hybrid hill it could explain the glittering high status fines right bridge um believe you've got something for me ah yes bridge has found what may be a key piece of supporting evidence look at this two bits apart rebecca's got out of this feature that's a bit more like it what do you think um looks like saxon to me are you sure i think so yeah um this is the rim shirt from a jar that's very typical of the early middle saxon pottery you get in dover um 450 to 850. okay what sort of size vessel is that going to be it's hard to tell it they're handmade they're not thrown on a wheel if you're looking for a bubble you can see it's quite uneven but it's probably something with the rim diameter of about that and sort of that sort of shaped size of body it's a nice quite big yeah nice globular cooking pot very typical of um the saxon period and the topography uh the position of this pit is quite interesting because on a south facing slope you quite often get early middle saxon settlements on south facing slopes you're in the sunshine but you're out of the wind if you're on the top you're in the wind so it's it makes it it's a nicer place to live i suppose it makes it a little bit more comfortable and so we could have a little saxon settlement just on this slope if paul's right and there was a settlement here this could be the site of eastery's saxon center of power [Music] but no structures have yet turned up in the long trench where we thought there might be a substantial enclosure another less thrilling idea is that paul settlement was just a few low status huts on the side of a hill hopefully these trenches will give us an answer but there's also another contender just down the road in east tree village eastern court is a grade one listed mansion in the centre of the village based on documentary evidence its owner david freud believes that it's his house not hybrid hill that holds the key to understanding anglo-saxon easterly posh house that's very nice oh hey david can we have a look inside your wonderful it's house bit good isn't it have you got any idea how old it is well we've got some clues and uh show you that here when we go behind this art george and here we've got uh a wall uh with some doors in it and the wall dates from the from 1294. uh we know the date because we found the bills and it actually cost the hall of which this is part cost i let all of 11 pounds and five shillings and something so this is the end of the hall where it's going into the kitchens and the pantries and stuff like that that's right do we know if there was anything here before that well we do know that in that year they pulled down the hall that was sitting there before so we know that it was continuously occupied for a for a reasonable period before that and prior to that hall well the rumor is that before that it was an anglo-saxon palace nick i think 10 years ago i would have got so excited at the prospect of an anglo-saxon palace but the number of times we've had with those saxon palaces what do we find nothing exactly are we going to be on to that this time well it's possible we've got some early timber work anyway we're right next to the church it's the right sort of site it's a nice big flat site so i would be more hopeful here than some of the others we've looked at [Music] wherever the palace exactly is east tree would have been the ideal place to build one a major roman road runs through the village while the coast and port of sandwich are less than four miles away and the building would have been pretty impressive our very own designer and trained architect ray san is trying to reconstruct one i've started making a basic model here of a sort of saxon hall and really now i could do with help it looks absolutely lovely but one of the things that does immediately spring to mind is you're going to need a door in in the middle of each long wall and it's going to have to be a door that's higher than the wall because you've got to be able to get through it without banging your head quite a prestigious kind of entrance and the second thing is that i don't think the roof is high enough because um we need to be able to accommodate something like a cauldron chain above a fireplace how long was that sam estimated 18 feet the length of the chair right then you've got to have the cauldron and the fire underneath it so really high building we are talking about a high hall visible from many miles around it's designed to be seen designed to be impressive shining out across many lands it's wonderful stuff finding such a building is a real challenge with very few examples in the country let alone in kent the real problem is this part of the world we have never found anything like this all we've got are these wonderful anglo-saxon cemeteries hundreds of them around here one of the biggest concentrations richest concentration full of gold and all the rest of it and what we have in terms of the settlements virtually nothing and mostly where they have been found in canterbury and elsewhere there are small sunken huts so if we can even find big rectangular buildings as post holes you really hit the jackpot but where is this palace is it down in the village at david's house or could it be up on graham's hill with the settlement we seem to have found it's got to be out there somewhere the search means splitting our resources in bridges trench yet another find only adds to our confusion over here this iron vessel that's what it looks like yeah but it is sitting in the same material that the saxon feature over there is cut into i mean this is the problem just because it's near something it doesn't it's the same day i mean i'll tell you a point about it being on the same horizon but i mean if it is a whole iron vessel and it is saxon then that's very unusual for a settlement site something you'd expect to see in a cemetery no i'm not saying it definitely isn't it may well be but it's unusual yeah all you can do is block it lifting x-ray i suppose really the only thing we can do in the state that it's in yeah so perhaps the hill is a burial site not a settlement a kind of barrow a hill-based cemetery this would explain the high status broaches buried with their owners helen intrigued by the idea of graves opens a trench in an area of the east side of the hill where metal artifacts have been found [Music] but on the other side of the hill the metal detectorists are adding to their collection tony look at this the most brilliant golden object where'd you find it just down there just from metal detectoring yep david could that be saxon it could be but i'd want helen to see it it's just possible they might be more recent tantalising it's lovely isn't it beautiful stunning look at that isn't that good well we hope it's good graham worth coming over wasn't it so if the broach is anglo-saxon did it come from a settlement a grave or even a palace while the jury's out mick's still determined to test the theory that the palace may be in the village at eastree court so geoff is set off to survey david's luscious lawns meanwhile another extraordinary find has been made at hybrid hill look at this come on over it gives john gaiter a reason to feel smug believing he's won a geophys jackpot this is a first you haven't finally found someone that is the first time we've ever found a windmill windmill well i've been told there's a windmill on top of the hill here we are on the top where is it if you extend the trench a couple of meters under the digger what i think you're gonna find is the cross pieces the timber supports for the windmill do we know when it was up here well some of them are 12th century apparently it's for you to find out because if that's the first time we've got the windmill in geophysics you can buy me a pint oh it comes in cheap i hope it ends there then all right let's find the windmill after a few hours john gator wins his point off phil because we do find the cross beams of a windmill that once stood on the hill but it's medieval and doesn't help us in our quest to understand what the anglo-saxons were doing here i can't remember a first day on time team where we've had so many really good finds and yet the irony is that we've got no anglo-saxon structures no cemetery certainly no palace what's going on it's been really hard for me to accept that it's not a cemetery but all day we've had no graves no bones so i've got to come to terms with it i suppose and what else it might be well have you got any ideas mate the thing that i've come up with which might work is that i wonder if this isn't a meeting place one of these moot sites where people gathered for you know proclamations and trials and stuff like that so what are all the fines well they are things that i get dropped at the time but there's no structures here how do you feel about a moot well it's quite a radical suggestion for the fifth sixth and seventh centuries first of all i have to look at the fines to see what the breaks look like could they have been rolling around in the plough soil for hundreds of years if it was a moot hill what would be its association with the rest of the country roundabout well you'd expect there to be as there was in later times a central meeting place to serve a big estate but because he's not permanently occupied you'd expect the the main residence the hall the farm buildings possibly the church to be somewhere else on that estate so where might that be here well i think in this case it's probably down at east street it's probably down by the church on an easter court so the answer to what's going here could lie down there yeah yeah and that's where we should go and work next i think tomorrow yeah you're up for a point mine's a shandy it's the beginning of day two and yesterday we were trying to solve the mystery of hybrid hill up there how come we were getting all these anglo-saxon finds could we have a cemetery might there be a palace we certainly weren't coming up with any structures and by the end of the day mick thought that what we might have was a moot hill or meeting place and all the fines were just things that people dropped when they were meeting each other but he also thought that the key to the whole mystery might lie not up there but down here at eastree court where john's been dear fizzing mick what do you think the link could be between a moot hill and this place here well you'd expect the moot hill to be the administrative and probably legal center of a big estate you'd also expect another center that was the agricultural center probably have the church and that sort of stuff and i think that's more likely to be down here where the later medieval church is so somewhere around here is where i'd expect the early centre to be yeah but what do you expect us to find under the gardens that's my problem i think right here there's going to be bits more of this medieval building we know this is a medieval hall inside there's going to be other structures going with that in either stone or timber i would also probably expect burials because the graveyard probably was bigger came further out from the church and then under that there could be sex and buildings and stuff as well so i think there's probably a whole sandwich of stuff somewhere in this area have you got anything on your geophysic by the remotest stretch of the imagination could reflect what he's just said well i've probably got all that but i just i don't know where i mean it's a fantastic garden yeah but it's a nightmare from our point of view there's drains going through there's paths it's been landscaped the levels have changed from what you've described to be honest i think our best target are these responses here they might be wall footings and that's just here it's close to the church close to the buildings let's give that a try i think anywhere in this area would be useful to us so you're happy to put in something absolutely that's ideal hang on a bit david stop lurking watching us working this is your house your lawn do you fancy helping us dig the trench yeah yeah you'll have to put on some older clothes than that make you look far too smart i'll see you later okay we'll see you later i want to see him sweating drive him hard mick puts in the first trench right next to david's house while hopefully this will give us the archaeological story stewart sets off on his own mission to find out what the landscape can tell [Music] us studying old maps he's tracking pathways and routes to find evidence of a royal anglo-saxon site he's particularly interested in the location of east tree church although it's medieval the original church on the site might have been anglo-saxon around the time we expect a center of power and history in the seventh century christianity was spreading in kent and a new church would have been at the heart of an important estate for stuart the present church could lie right in the middle of an anglo-saxon royal enclosure and if there's a royal enclosure here there will be a palace here too [Music] david's now sweating away ruining his own garden trying to find evidence of this palace [Applause] stuart thinks this is a small price to pay for the promise of a very rare building it starts to get really exciting because we've got this 1841 tide map right showing that the planet of the village so where are we now we're in the ground where's the garden there just there yeah there's can you see that yeah big shape in there like a big rectangle pronounced rectangle in the middle it's influenced the layout of the whole village and that's been preserved as a shape if you look at it on the aerial photograph it's all that all the air in there we're sat in that that garden there down this side is a stream valley down that side is a valley and what you've got is a big plateau here with this very distinctive area of ground which has never been encroached on i think this is exactly the sort of place you get a saxon estate center and then the church sitting inside it but it's not just the landscape that suggests there was a palace here there's also a legend of persecution and treachery [Music] in fact our earliest reference to a palace in history comes from the 670s from the story of royal betrayal and bloodshed david as soon as sam knew that we were coming here he went oh great there was a murder here a murder what was it uh a royal murder of two princes atholbert and atharad two princes of kent murdered by their cousin undoubtedly the background story is dynastic feuding and he murders them secretly at night and thinks he's got away with it by burying them in the king's hall but because of shafts of light that radiate out the murder is revealed so what's this white light all about it's uh an indication of a miracle it's a miracle like god's light and it means that we've got saints so it's like a hammer horror that the light comes on interestingly uh the bodies were moved to the chapel and if the medieval chapel is on the remains of an earlier chapel we're now sitting bang on where the uh where the two uh princes were buried so there could be a pair of little innocent sweet darling princes buried somewhere under these flagstones unfortunately we you won't find the murder victims because we know from the saints like tradition that they were translated to ramsay in huntingdon sure so no bodies uh almost certainly not but you might find the murder weapon perhaps oh i like that on day one we found a spectacular broach on hibra hill that seemed to be anglo-saxon not only that but the brooch appeared to be high status now after a little cleaning it's time to hear the verdict all morning the diggers up on the site have been saying is it saxon is it victorian helen you're the specialist what is it well it is actually victorian a few things that give it away they're really big giveaways a soldier on the back victorians added separate fixings to their broaches and the anglo-saxons didn't especially not on a gold piece secondly ovals in plain wire wrong should be twisted beaded wire on something anglo-saxon and but the real clincher the most obvious thing is on these balls around here they're dented so they're hollow anglo-saxons did not make things with hollow gold balls on them everything was solid so i'm afraid it is victorian what i don't understand is there must have been 20 trained archaeologists out there thousands of pounds of taxpayers money invested in their education and yet everyone was really tentative about whether or not it was modern or anglo-saxon why well i died of my phd on this kind of thing and i still was a bit nervous about it it's because until it's cleaned up you can't see the details and both the victorians and the seventh century anglo-saxons are both copying roman designs of jewellery they were both trying to look as classical as they could and both doing pretty well actually so ultimately they are going to look very similar back at hybrid hill there's still no sign of anglo-saxon graves or buildings it clearly isn't a barrow or burial ground mick's idea of a meeting point is the only theory still standing but at least matt has found some evidence of a structure at the bottom of trench one matt what do you think this is now well we've got down to the uh the top of this chalk and it looks basically it's a road of some sort a huge flint nodules have been packed in what the bottom and then chalk has been tamped down all the way across it but the most strange thing about it it's like that deep so far half a meter really solid road yeah so what kind of road might that be well let me show you what one that was dug up in yorkshire that i think really sort of explains what we've got and there they had a hollow way that had worn out over the years with cattle and people walking along its side it got so deep and presumably so boggy that in the end they decided to put a properly built road of boulders and stones in the bottom of it and i think that's probably what we've got here we've got a hollow way which has then been reinforced with a new road built up and i think they're probably doing it because this is probably going up to the mill on the top of the hill and it's going to get a lot of use it couldn't be saxon i don't think so i mean mills like that don't come into the 12th century anyway so if it's going up there it would be later i mean at the moment my guess is that this hollow way might be a bit earlier it could be you know might even be roman or something like that but the filling and everything's probably late medieval so where's the anglo-saxon well we've got various fines from across the site but what we haven't got is any structures at all to go with them by the middle of day two hybrid hill hasn't revealed any more of its saxon past in fact apart from a high status broach the finds on the hill have been almost entirely prehistoric and medieval even the iron hot which we'd hoped was a saxon cemetery vessel turns out under x-rays to be nothing but a modern paint pot perhaps magnolia with no burials or structures other than a bit of road mix left with only one course of action why are we closing down the hill because i think we've done all we we need to do and we canned up here and we need to work elsewhere you know our ideas that we've got about it won't be helped by more holes what ideas well you know we had this idea that it might be a meeting point a moot hill where assemblies were held another possibility which has come up is that it might actually have some sort of um well we don't have a term for it a sort of symbolic center i suppose because if you go along the roman road along there and you look back across to this it looks like a great barrow and i'm just wondering whether the name that we've got now of wodensborough which is a village over there didn't actually apply to this and it wasn't thought that it was where i know roden was buried or worshiped or something like that and that's why the fines are here would the name really have shifted from one place to another well i think it could it could have happened in the 18th century when there was this amazing find apparently consisting of 30 glass vessels at wooden spring people might have said what could have caused this so maybe the place names in the wrong place this must be the woden cult centre and just moved it because if this is a cult center then it's even more likely to have been a meeting point as well that's documented in lots of them this is a typical time team isn't it none of us are going to be able to prove this but we all think it's a really plausible theory [Music] at least in eastern village stewart's found some solid evidence of a saxon enclosure and this fairly ordinary looking pathway yeah i think is a remnant of the boundary of this saxon estate center we've been all right we've been looking for because just when you get to here you see how it it drops off on that side it must be a couple of meters high here yeah i think this this that we're on top of is a remnant of the bank that defines the western side of this enclosure that saves the village yes that's outside the enclosure that side's inside and we're on top actually walked along a big broad bank yeah and it's this that's been preserving this boundary yeah for god knows how long in fact that's good that is but not far away the first trench at east tree court hasn't shown up any sign of a palace or any anglo-saxon finds promising geophys results persuade mick to open the second trench at the bottom of the garden and a third trench near the church ripping up even more of david's lawn if that looks all right when he replaces it i'm a dutchman you're gonna yeah dennis is going to be deeply miserable of that despite the lack of evidence from the trenches stuart's still banging on that the garden is in a royal enclosure stuart all day you've been saying we're in the right place we're in the right place we've done loads of trenches now and we haven't found the palace and i'm going to carry on saying we're in the right place now if you look at this photograph we took from the helicopter this is the the area of the enclosure there's the the church there this bit i've highlighted in white that actually survives on the ground it's a footpath now but what makes you think that just because we've got a bit that's extant there that there were all those other bits there because they're continued in the mapping you can see their boundaries are continuous through the different generations of maps and they're still existing this day why so much space it's a very big enclosure yeah a relatively small palace yeah i think that's again designed for status reasons you know you want your buildings to look impressive with lots of open space around them rather like you know buckingham palace isn't hemmed in with lots of other buildings it's it's got nice spaces around it emphasizes the dramatic size of the buildings in the middle but if the royal saxon enclosure and palace are in eastern village and mix right that there is a saxon ritual center on hybrid hill could the two be related can we borrow those frank mind your head now stewart now on a roll must have had a shot of divine inspiration he's got yet another theory oh stuart can have a look so where's hybrid hill from here can you see that pylon well the site's just to the right of that pylon it's behind the trees there let me show you on this portable interactive digital workstation but we're here on the church t street and hybrid hill is over there now they look detached don't they can't really see any connection between the two but what's emerging looking at the landscape is that there are a network of parallel roads established in this landscape long before the roman appeared i've started to mark them up in in pink coming through here in fact you can see one of them over there going through the middle of those yellow fields of rape the green the green road yeah and there's another one crossing over the hill over there that green hedge line coming coming over the top yeah well what's interesting about one of these roadways this one here it actually goes right by hybrid hill i.e hybrid hill is on a major route way so mixed idea of a meeting place makes sense because it would have been on the road yeah we've also got another one which comes out of the corner of this enclosure e street and it heads out the back and actually takes you up towards hybrid hill i think hybrid hill is on a major network of roads but also we've got a connection between this enclosure and hybrid hill itself and remember that bit of road that matt found on the hill earlier in the day thanks to stuart we now think this very road is part of the one that runs between the hill and the enclosure and stewart's got yet another idea now another interesting aspect is that we've got a little corner inside this enclosure here which is just down there it's now called the recreation ground it's a nice open green space and it's always been within this enclosure the village has never encroached on it so the chance of it being disturbed by later development are quite thin so are you thinking what i'm thinking trenches yeah absolutely the recreation ground stewart wants to investigate is in one corner of the enclosure but with jumbled geophys results there mix instead putting all his resources into easter court gardens with trenches clustered around the other side of the church [Music] fueled by his conviction stewart tries to persuade mick that opening trenches in the recreation ground is a priority but mick's not having any of it it's all very busy here but we haven't forgotten about the recreation ground have we no but when i had a look at it i was very worried about all those earth works over the top of it where there were later cottages or whatever whereas this had rather nice geophysics answer so i thought we'd start here right but i'm you know i'm very keen to look at that area because they've been fines up from the air it's within this enclosure i'm a bit weird we sort of forget about that side we need to sample over a big area well we've got three things going on in here anyway it's a bit lopsided it's on this side of the church we've got enough on our hands for the moment right but we will go over there won't we i mean i'm sure we'll get to that eventually is that promising no no it's not no no by the end of the day we've moved all our resources to east record in our search for the palace but having not yet found anything how far has that got us in a way i don't feel that we've advanced at all from where we were at the beginning of day one we knew that that hill had got some amazing finds and sure enough it's got more amazing finds oh we have moved on though because we've now got a lot of holes opening in the village you know so we're well on the way to sorting out what's going on under east tree but the hill itself has been pretty intractable isn't it yeah it's been terrible i feel really inadequate because as you say i don't think we are any further on with it and i thought it was going to be so easy no but we are because the the local archaeologists have been saying to me this evening that they now know more about that hill that they did and what the context of those fines are so they don't feel it's you know we haven't moved on they now know a lot more about the hills yeah but we haven't got the link between the hill and the village i think we have i think looking at the pattern of roadways it fits into a pattern which link it with history which is where the core of the activity is yes but links the hill to what well the center of activities in east street which we shall get hopefully when we finish digging all those holes in the middle we haven't finished them yet we've got a large enclosure there i think we're confident we're digging in the right place for the right reasons so we've dug in one bit and we've got a great opportunity to dig in another bit and that's the recreation ground and we shall start that tomorrow you've been putting it off haven't you yes i have today but we shall start it tomorrow yeah yeah yeah so can we find the heart of anglo-saxon easterly will we find it underneath the recreation ground we'll know tomorrow cheers beginning of day three here in kent and we've had some fantastic finds up at hybrid hill we're still putting in trenches down here at east street court but could the center of our anglo-saxon royal estate be here in this little recreation ground phil i see they've got you working here at last well somebody got to otherwise we'll never find out at eastree court digging continues in our search for the palace with a new trench opened next to the house just when we thought the hybrid hill story had ended mick's now having his ear bent by john gator who's determined to excavate some unexplored geophys anomalies the thing is mick on day one i've got this very distinctive area of noise yeah we've got anomalies that extend for 20 25 meters across the hillside here yeah at the start i didn't know whether it was cemetery or whether it was occupation but we're not quite sure what the occupation is and it's very odd it is well i think therefore to you know abandon it not knowing whether we've got saxon here because we haven't dug some of the features yeah it seems we haven't answered the question i think we need to get dating material out because at the moment all we've got is a couple of shirts of medieval yeah but we haven't just got two bits of medieval pot we have got medieval part out of this ditch here we've got a medieval pot out of the pit down there as well this is one load of medieval stuff that's come out of all the features up here except for two bits of sacks saxon pot that were actually stratographically above the medieval in one of those pits so deriving something on the top i mean if you're happy to ignore this then and dismiss that as possibly being anglo-saxon you're saying it's all evil you know why in the time we've got why don't we just strip another area and given you're worried about dating evidence dig whatever feature we're on top of in there so that we get some more dating evidence of one sort or another but we don't strip that big an area that we can't handle it in the remaining time that we've got [Music] mick reluctantly agrees to go along with john's idea and extends the top of trench too while in the recreation ground phil's pulling out all the stops in the hunt for the palace but with the lack of any hard evidence our palace remains a virtual one with help from our historians ray sand finally reveals what such a palace may look like when people looked at it in the surrounding countryside how do you think they would have felt about it well it's the great ideal that it it it the equivalent of camelot in seventh century kent as a great building that is the the focus for all that is good and noble it's a place of identity and solidarity if you were a football supporter it would be your great stadium where the great action the great dramas took place i can see that its dimensions are really grand but would it have been the colour of a garden fence a very interesting possibility is that they would have had some guilt paint uh it parallels the description we have of the temple of old uppsala which could be seen shining and there was something described as a golden chain around its roof that shone from miles around so there could be some kind of decorative freezer exactly exactly i think that's what i'd do if i had one of those would you put money on there being one of these in history from the documentary sources which as far as the 7th century go are very very good emphatically yes tony i'm absolutely convinced that it was here and looked like this the search for such a building continues at the recreation ground phil yo you got a palace in your trench no not at all i mean we got two scruffy-ish looking features there's one in there and there's one in there they might turn out to be some but apart from that absolutely nothing stuart you promised me a royal palace i could almost smell the mead and the roast ball well i still think we're in the right place for the right reasons i mean that's the critical point here there doesn't seem to be any debris modern or post-medieval debris to me that implies that the village hasn't been allowed to spread into this enclosure that we've identified which implies that somewhere around this space is something very special why are these palaces so difficult to find because they're built of timber post holes and stuff like that and really you need a large area to see whether the plan of post holes and slots makes any sense and so where they've been found it's been in gravel pits where you can strip a large area and see what the plan of everything is it's you know it's difficult with little holes in an occupied area to piece anything together but this is this is incredibly clean in it that is the most amazing thing to be in the middle of a village to be in the middle of a village and find nothing yeah it's always great on time team when they get really enthused about finding sweet fanny adams isn't it what are we supposed to do i think we dig more holes much to stewart's relief mick opens a second trench in the recreation ground over at hybrid hill john's fight to reopen the dig has paid off well sort of was it worth it well i think so look we've got more features that we didn't know about and we've got saxon pottery what's that feature well we've got a ditch tony that's running up this brown material up towards a hill and around in that direction what about the pottery john where did you find that well it came from the ditch it did so can we now say we've got an anglo-saxon ditch well if you want to see the pottery yeah tell me if this is evidence of a sex and community it's saxon 850 a.d this is the sum total of our finds in your trench jump another triumph for gfs at least this is better than what's been found in the trenches at eastern court gardens absolutely nothing hello paul how are you in a newly opened trench creation ground at least there's a group of hope i don't get too excited it's probably not the biggest piece of pottery you've ever seen but um it's a piece of decorated early saxon pottery that's amazing it is my news it is you can just see those those kind of grooves what are they made it's combing it's the sort of thing you get the classic anglo-saxon urn with the combed panels with the stamps in and that sort of thing it's something along those lines i think so does this mean uh accessory vessel in a grave or a cremation or could this be the kind of thing that's used on a second website hard to say i mean decorated pottery tended to get mainly used in graves but you do get it on settlement sites as well it's not very common on settlement size but you do find it might indicate a particularly high status site you can't really say that from the bottom from that no it turns up on sites of all sort of different sorts of status you know well either it's pretty exciting to start certainly yeah that's absolutely brilliant but another minute piece of pottery seems little consolation for having found no evidence of an anglo-saxon palace in any of the trenches so why haven't we found it ah that's a that's a good question if you look at this photograph that took from from the helicopter put these yellow dots and see them these are the trenches that we've dug in this yeah in this area i've done something similar um over the top of this is a royal anglo-saxon palace in northumberland and at the same scale i've drawn on dots which match the spacing of our trenches and look we could have done like this mistake we could have done that missed the palace it could have been we could have gone on mission it could have dug 50 trenches and carried on missing but we've only dug in one section of the enclosure why didn't we excavate there and there and there and there and there and there well that was a bit frustrating that because all this area in here we just couldn't get access into it i'm already let's get in you see yeah so we've missed it by bad luck well that and the fact that we really needed to strip large areas as they've done when they found policies and other sites to see the patterns of post holes and timber slots and all the rest of it it's difficult to do in the village that still lived in and still occupied you can't bulldoze it all out the way by the end of the day no more fines or structures have been found in the enclosure so yet again time team has failed to find an anglo-saxon palace but we have found out something about anglo-saxon eastern in the 7th century a community would have thrived here in easterly near a roman road and the coast it would have been an important and powerful center for east kent high status fines on hybrid hill led us to think the palace was there we now think it was an anglo-saxon ritual center where valuable offerings were made [Music] through stewart's investigations we've revealed that the hill was on a network of ancient roads linking it with an anglo-saxon center at east tree village we now believe that it was somewhere in the village that the palace was once built inside a royal enclosure with eastern court and the church and recreation ground and its heart but there are still questions our landowners want answers to graeme was playing on that hill when he was a little boy what can we tell him about it given how emotional these three days have been for you and that hell well it's still it's a mystery wrapped in an enigma that hill it is producing the most stunning objects which look like they must have come out of graves we've carefully excavated the areas around them and there aren't any graves i do not understand it so helen what would be your best guess as to what was going on up there well i think actually mick's idea about it it being a cult center devoted to woden might well be the best hypothesis we've got which we just need to then go out and test in other places because we really don't know anything about cultures they produce this kind of range of wonderful metal work and i think really the answer might be the next time you go up on the hill you just offer up a little prayer to woeden good harvest for you a few answers for us what about the village that's what david's interested in well i think we know an awful lot more about it now and we've got this rectangular enclosure in the middle inside that is your house and the church so i'm sure that's the the center of the saxon palace complex if there's one thing you would like to know from the work that we've done what would it be i'd really like to know if this is the site of the original saxon palace and where the murder was done i think almost certainly it's either under your house or it's him just immediately to the easter field but we won't actually know unless you take your house down and we can have a look underneath it i'll call you okay [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 339,407

Rating: 4.9043913 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, time team, time team eastry, time team s13 e06, time team kentish king, kentish king

Id: N8pK0ikTymM

Length: 48min 12sec (2892 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021