Gold In The Moat (Codnor Castle) | S15E01 | Time Team

somewhere underneath all this scaffolding are the remains of cod nor castle here in derbyshire the medieval knights who lived here fought in just about every battle from the crusades to agincourt to the wars of the roses but nobody knows exactly what it looked like this is the earliest picture we have of it but that's 18th century after it had fallen to rack and ruin now though the castle's about to get a facelift which gives us the opportunity to find out what it looked like how old it was and whether it was a defensive fortress or more of a medieval show home and as usual we've got just three days [Music] [Music] codner castle sits right on the border between nottinghamshire and derbyshire surrounded by countryside which has been park land for a millennium over the last 500 years the park's been extensively mined and believe it or not there are even records of mines within the castle walls we have this big problem in that no one knows where the mines were or how deep they were so john and his team have been here since the crack of dawn trying to do the preliminary work for us john what are the chances of survival and i'm not just talking about the archaeology well i think you'll survive the problem is we still can't find any of these shafts if there's been mining here for centuries are we likely to find anything at all yeah look behind you tony can you see the stonework between the towers and the grass above it that's the ground level inside there so it's above your head it's a good six foot higher than out here and i guess what that is is it's a product of quarrying and mining waste being dumped in there now that could act like a protective blanket sealing and protecting the archaeology underneath will the bits of the castle that survive tell us much yeah we've got quite a bit we've got the rather fine gateway here it's ivy clad but we can still see a lot from it and through the gap you can just about see the chamber block is this plan recent this is the best plan we've got can you see we've got the original castle here but only certain walls survived what's happened to these walls we need to try and work that out then the castle was extended maybe in the 14th century adding on the lower court this is where we're standing now and then around it all these earth works what are these are they a result of quarrying mining or actually medieval features so what's the first target then neil i guess a trench in there now and let's see how far down we've got to go we're going to go down six inches or six feet looks just like building rubble yeah we want to find out when coding castle was built and what it looked like so trench one goes in on the upper court inside what's thought to be the oldest part of the castle and six foot below in the lower court we're sinking two more trenches just outside the old castle walls [Music] phil's trench will go right up to the wall to see if there's any information to be gleaned from the foundations a few meters away matt is going to investigate the gateway to find out how the degrees who lived here entered their castle [Music] and stuart and henry are calling some of the earthworks to try to work out what's mining and what's moat i'm still cutting something i mean if that's three meters deep now the length length of that rod that's an incredibly deep ditch isn't it above the ditch in the upper court neil and raksha have had a very welcome surprise it's very mixed it just doesn't look to me like the kind of stuff you would get up cast from coal mining no but that's quite promising though i think i think this looks like archaeology you know and if we're right we're not even six inches dead well that throws a six foot theory out of the window in here on the other side of the castle wall six feet below phil is hand digging up to the wall oops hey phil that doesn't look like one of your normal trenches you're burying a dog no no what i'm doing what we want to do is run out of trench that way but obviously we can't machine right up to the wall so what i've done is cut a little slot in here to expose the wall and then we should just machine back from there and neil's working up there yeah he's just here to show you the wall neil neil it's juliet have you found anything yet fantastic discovery tony not six foot down not even six inches down two inches below the grass so we've got a real medieval wall coming across the trench and rubble all around it what it still doesn't resolve is that is the discrepancy between where you are and me six foot further down sure but as we dig down in our trench we should get an answer to that shouldn't we it's a huge relief to discover that the archaeology hasn't been entirely mined out what remains of cod in the castle has survived centuries of mining and even attempts in the 1960s to demolish it but with complete collapse seemingly imminent the landowner uk coal has stepped in with english heritage to preserve and stabilize the ruin the problem is if this is left much longer its route will expand and split the wall yeah the only way you can do it is to try and pick the wall apart so initially we take loose stones off until we can find where the root is penetrating into the wall when we got to a point where we can't take any more apart we'll cut the stump off poison it and then seal it in the in the war core when you've finished it how are you going to seal the top to make sure the rain doesn't start coming in and the whole thing will start all over again that's always the problem with any ancient monument we'll cap it with flat stones and mortar and then put turf on the top uk coal are working on the chamber block the degrees private quarters which stands at the end of what we think is the original castle there should be walls surrounding it but two are entirely missing and running alongside the walls we're looking for rooms such as the great hall kitchens and servants quarters and we're hoping that an 18th century engraving by the buck brothers can help us it's so hard to make sense of it's absolutely full of doors and windows and the perspective is going completely mad normally they're reasonably accurate but they're a bit like a mockman-wise sketch you know all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order helen and richard's mission is to put the notes in the right order and locate some of the important rooms this should be the north global end of the chamber block but it's internal oh there's a great big fireplace there yes and that's enormous isn't it so if that implies a room coming this way it either can't be a very big room in which case you'd be getting extremely hot because you're next to this giant fireplace or something must have happened to the land around here because look how it drops off this room must have been you know at least sort of 15 foot 20 foot long and what do you think it might have been it's a high status room with some description otherwise it wouldn't about a fireplace that size but it's some sort of domestic chamber you know not the main chamber but sort of an annex to it possibly so gia fizz set to work to find the room's missing wall meanwhile rashers found our first bit of dating evidence near to her wall [Music] well paul we've had it's first pieces though isn't it no that's late 17th century early 18th something like that that's modern him the jug dates to the period just before we know the castle was in ruins do we know when it was built no we don't the first mention of the castle being here is in 1308 and that's in an inquisition on the death of one of the lord's degree and all that tells us is that there is a castle with various acres of arable and meadow and mills etcetera doesn't give us any physical detail about the castle why might it have been built for that i think we need to look at the ranking of the grey family their important barons in derbyshire they're important on the national stage they're soldiers they're serving in the king's wars they're of that rank that we would expect them to have a castle it could be couldn't it that there was a castle here before this one there could be we don't have the evidence of yet and maybe you'll find that over the next couple of days but we know there's a park back in 1246 we have king henry iii granting dear et cetera to i think it's then richard degray so they've certainly got a big estate here at codner we might expect them to have a house to go with it but at the moment there's no documentary and no archaeological evidence for an earlier site so we know there was a castle here in 1308 and we're hoping to establish what it looked like but the archaeology entrenched one's confusing matt was expecting to find a path through the gateway but instead he's got a wall just looking at the masonry i think it might be a later wall it might be post castle um but it's early days yet and let's see what it turns into i mean it's pretty big isn't it it's huge it's massive yeah matt isn't the only one who's confused by the masonry richard's finding the ruin quite difficult to date so now if we're on the outside what what's that sticking right out into the moat well that's like a guard road tower toilet tower that's big it's a pretty posh one yes can you put a date on it no well not at all not at the moment no i mean like any masonry structure unless you've got some moldings that you can specifically date to a specific period then you're just dealing with a masonry structure that could have been built any time in three or four hundred years although the masonry is difficult to date we're having more luck with the fines poor yes mate which is quite interesting that if i've got it right it's probably 15th or 16th century oh yeah it gets quite pale and orangey colored around here late on in the medieval period it might gone into the early medieval that's very encouraging great stuff good stuff we'll have a bit more out here cool neil when you're up here you get a real sense of the difference in floor levels between there and here don't you absolutely right tony and you know i said the archaeology was two inches below the ground stuff yeah but this wall you can see that face coming along there yeah now it's been chopped out here by quarrying and mining but we've got a really good face on this side and where a rapture is i think we've got something coming up there right there's these two stone lintels one here and one up right right there part of the doorway which the entrance is to be running in that direction so do you reckon that this wall here richard goes with this one here certainly looks like it's roughly parallel and that was obviously some sort of high-status chamber with a properly glazed window over it so what kind of room could it be well it's next to the gateway so possibly portis lodge this is great news we're not even at the end of day one and already we've managed to locate one of the key rooms in codner castle where we're digging is right round the back there but even all the way over here there are loads of what appear to be remnants of the castle just lying higgledy piggly all over the place and take a look at this presumably this is some kind of door post look what else we've got henry and stewart what are you doing down here and i don't know if you know it but this ditch you're standing in here might be remote going around the building it seems to be defining something like a rectangular boat around the the buildings which are up here and so what we've been doing is coring it to see whether ever had water in it whether it was a proper moat anything so far henry well yeah we've caught a few few areas it's consistent that it's over four meters deep and also the deposits in each place is the same and what it's implying is basically that it's um it's held water and that water's been flowing but only very very slowly but the really interesting thing is if you go up there and follow this ditch line down it actually seems to be turning a corner if it does then it would have gone through where the lower court is down there and the archaeology confirms that the ditch or moat runs right along the lower court and in front of matt's wall i think the the main discovery since we last here is this wall here with the return coming off this one which is built into it it's a part of the same structure yeah we don't have another side to it yet um so it make this may just be a kind of pit here and then if you carry along the line you can see just in the corner there looks like you've got yep coming back this way as well and that would fit possibly with there being a drawbridge here with a drawbridge pit underneath it oh right but the problem is that they it doesn't line up with this turret very well this edge needs to be going underneath the turret it's hard at the moment to think what else it might be despite matt's reticence this is a huge surprise a drawbridge means a much grander entrance to the castle than we ever imagined oh that's nice and the fines aren't too shabby either that's what we call cistercian work it's made by monks no right it was close to sturgeon work because it was first found in the excavations of all the great abbeys in yorkshire oh you've got to call it something it's a beautiful little thing really delicate little cup and just the rim coming around like sometimes i have like up to eight handles on them they're really peculiar little things matt and faye have found some rather elegant carved stone work on the other side of the wall but it's thrown them into confusion the angle coming off here looks like it's chamfered going down this um that's one work stone there with the corner in it and it's coming out this way i've just been hacking i've been cleaning back here at the matic and doesn't look like it comes out further this way but the fact that it doesn't line up properly with this entrance do you think do you think it could be a completely different structure something earlier that is a strong possibility so the challenge will be to find out if the drawbridge belongs to an earlier building but as if we weren't busy enough right at the end of the day jafiz come up with a new target i think we've come up chumps we've got this fireplace in the end of that building in the geophysics you can now actually see this wall line i think we've actually got a room that goes with that fireplace i think there's a wall line that comes along here and then look this strong response here is that another building on that platform there well that big blob could just be coal workings couldn't it well it could couldn't it what do you think well it's obvious isn't it it's a big wall and it's right on the edge of this really steep slope so could it be that the actual building range comes right up to the end of the castle so if this is the perimeter wall could that be another tower so put a trench in tomorrow oh definitely first thing right through there coal mine or castle we'll know tomorrow beginning with day two here at codner castle in derbyshire nobody knows what this place originally looked like and it's our job to find out but first you've got a lovely little fine film yeah it's a little uh buckle fitting look it's a gorgeous little thing made out of copper and we've got a lovely sort of decoration and look some of us still have the decorative buckle fittings on our on our belts today that was a little surprising where did it come from it came out of the ditch here hang about that's got all that black stuff in the bottom which we got over there which we thought yesterday was evidence of coal workings that means that this ditch was filled up after that wall was built and i don't understand that well while phil does his trousers back up let's go and have a look over at this trench which is also another puzzle because you see you've got this tower here and you've got a tower here and in the middle it's blocked up but presumably that originally would have been some kind of passageway but this wall here doesn't really align with it properly look if you have a look at this this thing here to align with that you need to shove it over about a meter or so yeah i mean it's puzzling but it's puzzling in a good way isn't it i mean what we're wondering is whether this might actually be an earlier entrance tower which pre-dates these two round towers and maybe that feature could be drawbridge pig so what's the plan today we've got two objectives one is to pull back in this direction a short distance to try and see if we can get the matching splayed side can you see over there tony yeah yeah so hopefully that should come back here and that will prove conclusively how this relates to those powers and secondly we've done a radar survey out over there and we think the most about nine meters wide so what we're going to do is excavate a trench further up there nine meters that's about one two three four about to here no no that's that's three short meters you must have short legs right out here now this is a hell of a distance isn't it that's a heck of a distance so maybe even there's a central stone pier and perhaps even with a second bridge or even like a stone causeway coming out and wouldn't that be great wonderful to find they're not that short just above the drawbridge trench inside the round towers of the gateway richard has managed to find some dating evidence to help us work out the chronology of the castle oh what an amazing little face and you know yesterday we were saying there's not much to date in the masonry we've got something these tops these are quite distinctive these are called shouldered lintels right and this is a kind of cantilevered out block there i see hold a flat there right and they're also called carnavan arches because they first really come in when edward the first is building the welsh castles at carnarvon in 1280s and they're used for about 50 years so that ties in really nicely with the documentary reference as well because we've got that first reference in 1308 which is banging in the middle of the period yep exactly right okay let's go look for some more interestingly the building of the gateway corresponds with a period of royal favor for the medieval knights who lived here henry iii is said to have kissed richard de grey in gratitude because he and his brother were the only nobleman to sign up for an unpopular crusade and in 1294 edward the first paid a royal visit to codner an event so momentous it could even have prompted a rebuild so the gateway could have replaced the drawbridge that neil now thinks was surrounded by a tower measuring back 28 centimeters before it starts so we go back and measure across to prove it we need to find a similar chamfered edge on the other side is it a stone line at an angle or is it a chamfer i think so look are you jammy thing have you got it matt there it is [Laughter] you win i buy that gold star for you let's um let's do a quick check matt can you hold your tape over the top of the chamfer and i'll measure it up and i'll measure out to the drawbridge pit 160 centimeters if we go across to the other side and you just hold it on the edge there matt yeah hang on how about that so i guess what it's showing is isn't it that we actually have a symmetrical tower on either side of the drawbridge pit and i guess it kind of confirms that this is clearly unrelated to that yeah excellent so this is the earliest part of the castle we've seen the day although we don't yet know the exact date of the drawbridge we know it was surrounded by a tower and crossed the moat running around the original castle on the upper court around 1300 it was replaced by the gateway that's still standing but the walls on the west and north of the upper court have disappeared phil moves his team to the north of the castle to find out how much has been lost [Music] so that the wall should run through there he's looking for the wall and tower on the geo fizz which he hopes will be the other side of the room with the big fireplace on the end of the chamber block [Music] oh oh that's better there look that that is nice and we have another little course in underneath here yeah there we go now that one he's out knocked out of place but we i ain't gonna hold it against ian for that so and then there's a yeah yeah yeah yeah we're in the business now oh hey look at way look at that oh look at that well you know what it is his foundation what the hell while phil works out what he's found raksha and paul have pretty much finished up in the porter's lodge it's great when there's a little hill next to a trench because you can see the whole thing implant like normally you never can yeah and there are some fascinating details emerging what's this wall then can you see these holes right here are they joists to support floorboards you'd think that but i spoke to our local friendly castleologist and he tells me it's something called wainscoting it's where you put timbers on the inside of the building it's very posh so it's high status it goes with the castle another fantastic thing is there's this very very tiny gray spread just here and that's our earliest occupation layer and we've also found two pieces of pottery in there oh have you got a date paul certainly have this stuff comes from stamford down in lincolnshire let's stop making it about 11 50. you're kidding no really but that's ages before the first record of there being a castle here isn't that they actually start making it around about the time of the norman conquest so it could be that early in theory well that's a bit exciting there isn't it this date takes us at least as far back as 1201 when henry degray married izzold and norman heiress who brought into the family cod nor it's parkland and some money and it looks like we've found their home and the entrance might have been neil's drawbridge over the moat that looks doesn't it if you might have an intact dress stone face that's very similar to the core of the structure we have over there look at that look at that look at that i mean that's hefty stones isn't it shall we measure the distance back to the front of the bridge abutment there so neil gets his tape measure out again to find out how far the drawbridge would have to span to cross the moat that is 7.4 meters okay and if we go i'll go back to where the radar picks up a big block of masonry which is about here what's that distance matt that's 13.9 well 7 and 14 in round numbers yeah and maybe what we've got here is a central pier yeah i think brian was saying that the longest span you could have with wood is about eight meters so that would fit perfectly one span to this exactly doesn't it and in the north in the upper court the line of stones phil found earlier looks like it could actually be the castle's perimeter wall but it's a stack of mysterious semi-circular stones that's confusing him reg rick come here i mean you don't know what it is either amir yes it's semi-circular he's supposed to be shooting another scene look at that what are these things a pier base it's not just one thick thing look they're in layers look there's one there i can even squeeze my trowel in amongst it and then there's another one there there's probably about inch inch and a half thick and then there's another one there and a fourth one going on down and they're still going way way down and they're semi-circular am i allowed in your trench yeah yeah well it's not a trench as a whole good grief good grief that sounds as though they do appear to have tool in yeah they're properly made um think of two possibilities one is a kind of a demi column that sits against the wall as they are now stacked up or perhaps if they turn 90 degrees it could be coping sound something like that and it is just a nice waterproofing thing to go over the top of it sheds the water yeah exactly i mean they don't seem to have been ever used because they're not been they've not been exposed to a lot of weathering yeah but there are some odd things on this site where it looks like things are planned or never finished or planned finished but then sort of scrapped very soon afterwards while phil gets to grips with the northern wall back at the drawbridge trench it looks like the pier that neil thought was in the middle of the moat might actually be the other side of the moat the more this material goes back the more likely it is that this isn't the pier this is actually the solid abutment of the bridge spanning across to where the drawbridge pit is i don't think we've actually got to where the anomaly is are we in no it's underneath my cab so we're just going to be riding and see if we actually hit that really big anomaly and see how it relates to this material so this means there would have been a wooden bridge over the moat under attack the degrees could have burnt this as a first line of defense then there was a drawbridge over the pit which would have raised on a pivot and if the intruders got this far there would probably have been a port kallus this elaborate defense seems to fit the image of the degrees because these were soldiers who featured in every battle from agincourt against the french back to the scottish wars and the crusades and we're hoping to find some of their rooms alongside the missing west wall where phase digging yeah look at these of course well i think you've got here is part of a plaster wall surface it's got this nice plain surface on one side and if you turn it over you can see the impressions of the wooden laths that the plaster would have been attached to if you've got that what could this feature be this kind of semi-circular feature coming in does that butt up against the wall yep it looks very like it might be a circular staircase yes i was so hoping you were going to say that that's fantastic over the last two days we've discovered so many bits of walls and windows and finds from different phases of the castle that my head's spinning it's time to take stock of what it all means well we can add a bit of flesh to that picture we can give some phasing we've got the earliest part of the standing structures of this posh from the gate front here with the round towers now from the diagnostic evidence it's quite clear that's around 1300 1320 something like that and going on from that we know this wall here of the lower court because it butts against that tower is going to be later maybe 100 years later behind us the big chamber block here isn't as as modern as the brick fireplace than it would seem because those brick fireplaces 1500 say have been inserted into an existing fabric so that's probably around 1400 as well so we've got those two basic medieval phases at least if this red is around about 1300 that ties in very nicely doesn't it with the first reference to a castle being on this site but what about the archaeology well we've got rashes building here the sort of portis lodge that probably goes through that red phase there in phil's trench we've got another room of that building perhaps difference of a curtain wall and over here where phase digging we're starting to see evidence of a structure but what really excites me tony is actually getting some evidence of earlier occupation inside the porter's lodge we've got some pottery that seems to take to the 12th century from the floor now that doesn't go with the red phase that must be an earlier phase because we've got a much earlier gate tower that predates the round tails in that frontage so the archaeology is suggesting earlier structures before 1308 what kind of building might that be could it be another castle castle fortified manor i'll just look at that entrance tony you know that's a monumental entrance it's got a drawbridge it suggests a major structure to me definitely yeah the archaeologists were hoping that phase staircase might be part of this structure so that if that's the ark i mean it's much larger than a stairwell isn't it that's four meters conceivably if you project the line so with the light fading fast day two ends with yet another puzzle we came here looking for a castle now we've got loads of castles and tomorrow we're going to get down into the moat to see if we can find evidence of one of the earliest phases and up here we're going to shift our attention to inside the castle to see if we can find the rooms where the degrees actually lived and all that tomorrow beginning of day three here at codner castle in derbyshire and we've got a drawbridge the first drawbridge we've ever dug on time team this hole here is the pit in front of which the drawbridge would have sat and you can imagine in the medieval period before that entrance was blocked up with stones the knights in armor charging through it and across the drawbridge except if you did imagine that you would be totally wrong because that part of the castle is much later than the drawbridge neil how old is the drawbridge and how does it tie in with all the rest of the archaeology well that's what we're going to find out today tony all we know is the castle experts tell us that those two towers date to the early 14th century so therefore this must be earlier in the 14th century so we're going to get some dating evidence and that's why we're going to dig into the moat so can you see where matt's digging we've got all this rubble from demolition of the tower so we're gonna get through that to the bottom of the moat and get some dating evidence to go with that bridge [Music] as the rain sets in neil and mata searching for the bottom of the moat between two stone plinths the suggestion is that these could be garden features from the final phase of the castle do you know what is that a bit of marble is it or quartz no idea i mean you're almost wondering it might come from a statue or something yeah from the garden this dig has been so rich that it sometimes seems as if the castle has been bursting to tell its story and it inspired victor to create our answer to the bayer tapestry following the fortunes of the degrees during the 13th 14th and 15th centuries but the most colourful character of all was henry de gray who managed to survive fighting on both sides of the wars of the roses and was granted a license for alchemy oh so that's what we're seeing him doing here isn't it he's in his lab with all his books and his pestle and mortar and his crucible yes and i guess this is in part going to be due with the extraction of mineral resources from his estates yes i suppose so because we tend to think of alchemy as all about um turning base metals into gold and so on but really it was it was just what we might call chemistry these days wasn't it the the sad thing i guess is we come to his death in 1496 he's got through three wives he's had a number of illegitimate children but he leaves no air behind so we have the end of the line so that's where his luck runs out after henry died the land passed to the zeus who created an industrial empire and phil's uncovered some of the changes they made to the northern end of codner castle where he's found the perimeter wall and an explanation for the blobs on the gfiz what we've got is this circular thing here but on the other side of the wall as well there's this other circular thing they're not a tower but i think they're garden features i mean it could tie in with this sort of peculiar sort of tourist landscape and these are miniature turrets or something overlooking the landscape i mean what it means is is that at some stage this end of the castle went out of use they knocked down that wall and they they then converted this area to gardens yeah that's a little view mount you've got cracking views over the valley there from here the castle and the landscape have clearly changed dramatically over the last millennium and stewart thinks he knows how this is one of my more ridiculous moments on time team doing play school in the rain with stuart presumably this is some kind of demonstration sand castles absolutely between the 12th and 16th centuries the de grays built and rebuilt the castle but it was the zeus who had the really big ideas at some stage i think this is the early 16th century they start to dig a small lake in this corner over here and create a huge bank on this side and then this ditch goes all the way down here and again all the material goes on the outside to create a big terrace on the end they create a sort of mound featured which is a belvedere that's where it puts like a viewing platform to look over the landscape and they do the same at the other end and the whole thing is becoming a very grand fashionable garden and its style is all typical of the early 16th century now what i've been able to see is that these garden earthworks never fully finished it's almost finished but not quite why didn't they finish it do you think they ran out of money or something i think what happened is it got so grand they simply almost bankrupted themselves doing it and so the castle felt a rack and ruin losing both its north and west walls and phil's now joined faye on the west wall where her latest theory is that her feature is a turret oh faye oh my gosh look you know you've been telling me you had plaster in this rubble here yes well i've actually got it on the wall look at it there's the plaster there's the wall it's just a very very thin it's a very very thin veneer but look it's white it's a white plaster but you think about it if the if this small turret was plastered you'd have had you could have had gleaming white walls all the way around look at that no look floor coming in as well i think that could well be a stone floor helen's been searching for rooms and features in the castle's ruins in an 18th century engraving by the bucks and she thinks she's got a breakthrough this opening here is clearly the same as this one over here yes it must be and that makes this stub of wall the same as this one it's just we've only got half of it surviving and then moving on much much later i mean this must be early 20th century i suppose and luckily we've got the opening there so now we've got a photograph we can go back to the building and say this is definitely that opening there so that means that this thing this opening is probably a doorway yeah because of these joists tolls here that's right shows are definitely a floor in that position and although we now know that the chamber block is this part of the engraving where the door lead is a mystery but helen's on a roll she's managed to locate the wall in raksha's trench so that big tree there is growing directly in this doorway which means that the wall is presumably could be that one isn't it yeah yes it must be that's excellent all ties in then yeah so how much further do you reckon we've got about i reckon probably another half maybe a meter almost neil and matt are finding it tough going as they dig into the moat to find the bottom of the drawbridge tower okay bottom of the moat almost there to yield its secrets with such a vast amount of material coming out of the moat it's important that we search the spoil heap thoroughly and this is why my hand's shaking why's your hand check gold coin gold hammered coin look at that come here look at look at that i can't hold it still i'm afraid i can't believe you're still on two feet i can't i nearly fell over then i can't i'm just shaking you need to sit down strong sweet tea and it's a big one too isn't it and given how soft gold is and how big this is it that is absolutely quite incredible okay let us all calm down for one moment what do we do with it what we do is we clean it up which is a pretty simple process because um because gold doesn't corrode so we we and it's in such fantastic condition we will be able to get a good date off it where was it found just hearing the spoil let's come out the bottom of the moat neil is that the ditch that's it's out it's out of the ditch so is this is this a primary silt here is this something we can date yeah i mean it's a great context because this has come out of the really thick silt at the bottom of the moat so let's really hope you know i sang to you earlier on what is dating evidence of what date is that tower if that coin is coming out of the primary silk it's in a great position it's not just a date though i mean don't forget that this is it's not just wonderful dating it is a gold coin it's going to be very very high value we've been talking recently about how the people are maybe not that rich and you know they're pouring all their money into the building they're fairly rich just let me bring you around here for for one second look at all these people gorping around here have any of you ever found a large gold coin before as archaeologists this is a big one this is such a big one but not everyone's down tools to gaze at the gold that is oh there it is all stoney that is a gorgeous edge isn't it phil and faye are determined to find the other side of the turret come on does it curve look and actually look at that actually look that's actually no surface on there ah what what a little gem rachel this is quite a busy day for you looking at fines isn't it yeah we've already found a gold coin in our silver one yes this um this is a little silver pen and on the back you can just make out that it says rex skatorum so it makes it a scottish penny and from the look of it with these little pointed stars on the back it appears to be alexander iii so what on earth is a scottish penny doing lying around here well we know that the greys were fighting with um the english king up in scotland in the early 14th century so they could possibly brought it back that's amazing isn't it makes you wonder what we're going to find next [Music] with time running out neil and matt are desperate to get to the bottom of the moat in the drawbridge trench paul you have a look at this we've got a bit of pottery that's come out of the right at the very base of the ditch what do you think what kind of date might that be oh that's well that looks proper medieval that's you're kind of 13 14 13 14th century we're getting there and we now know a little bit more about the other find from the moat you've been looking in books you've been on the computer you've been making frantic telephone calls what have you found out well uh it's a gold noble which is a the big gold coin of the of the period these are really high status things and on the front it's got this complicated design you can see a king there and his head is kind of poking up through the through the sails he's holding a sword upright and he's got a shield with the arms of england courted with the arms of france standing in a ship it's an exquisite little design actually does it mean anything it certainly does yes apparently it's symbolic of the power of the english navy at an amazingly early date when you i tend to think of the navy as being nelson and so on but but this apparently refers to an incident at the beginning of 100 years war in 1340 and then on the on the back you've got lots and lots of symbols of power we've got crowns and lions and fleur-de-lis and a big cross and right in the middle of the cross is the initial h and that little h gives you a clue as to who it is on the front it's henry isn't it but which one there are lots of henries it is it's henry's a fifth actually that very short-lived king oh that's uh agincourt isn't it once more into the breach and all that absolutely and what is really fantastic of course is that we've got that action called link one of the lords to grey is on the agincourt master role and you can find out more about this on our website over the last three days we've found more than we bargained for and faye's west wall is no different okay so does that kind of line up with the well just about doesn't it it's pretty much in line with that lower court wall but the most impressive bit is this block of masonry which comes all the way around here and he's sweeping round like that so it's actually a round tower that's been stuck on to the curtain wall and and you can see look at the foundations they're going down and down and down it's massive this way it's massive down that way inside our round tower we've got loads and loads of burning and originally we thought this was kitchen but the thing that really made us change our mind was this feature over here which appears to be a fireplace you can actually see that it's later because it's got all those bricks in it just as likely to account for all this burning definitely i don't quite understand phil is that what you're saying is that the tower is added onto this wall and i can see that's a very clear butt joint isn't it but down there the towers are actually integral with the wall so how does that work well i think that front bit is the most important bit of the castle you don't want to look like a bodge job you want to look at proper rebuild this is the side of it so it's not so important so you've got round tower added on to it richard thinks that the tower was added to the west wall at roughly the same time as the second gatehouse possibly for edward ii's visit in 1322. and he's not done yet we've been looking for the most important rooms in the castle and just before the whistle blows he's found one of them now you know i've been blindly referring to this as a chamber block the last few days i will try to find a rethink oh yes i think we found the great hall oh my goodness because it's such a tall building i thought naturally it was of three stories chamber above chamber above undercroft but when you start looking for the floor joists which are pretty important you've got a set of floor joists there yeah for the first floor none above so you've just got this one huge room at first floor level and we even know where the door is oh yeah over there oh i don't believe it we've been staring at that door so hard that's the one on the bucks engraving exactly and said of course that explains why it's such a vast great door doesn't it [Music] this is more than we could have hoped for it's the 13th century first floor great hall where henry de gray entertained king edward the first and the date ties in with the romantic entrance of the drawbridge brian we've done a lot of work in the moat area today and i think we've just about got a good story now excellent um we've exposed the front face of the tower yeah we've got a hole that's been crudely bashed through the wall mm-hmm it might be simply that's the drain for the drawbridge behind if the water's been accumulated in the airport's rainfall then this has helped to drain it back out into the ditch okay then at the very bottom the good news is that matt's managed to expose the yellow natural clays and that is the bottom of the tower wall coming back we've got the moat i mean it's big you know it's six and a half meters wide and it's three meters deep coming further back up we see here now we've got the abutment on the other side of the moat you know really well built mortared wall and so coming up here you know you get a really good perspective of just how impressive that tower is and goodness knows what's he standing seven eight foot high you know just think none of that was visible yesterday [Music] so this is how henry de grey and his old his wife would have entered their castle in the 13th century across the moat over a grand drawbridge past the porter's lodge and into the great hall but in the early 14th century the castle was rebuilt with towers and turrets on the perimeter walls in the 15th century they extended into the lower court but it was the zeus in the 16th century whose extravagant plans bankrupted the estate and left the castle a ruin we were all really anxious that coding castle might have been almost completely mined away but we needn't have worried an earlier castle a moat and a drawbridge and a great hall and a tower all came to light and even the rather sad final phase of gardens that bankrupted a family certainly did us proud oh and of course we had one rather special find which i'm glad to say is going to end up in the local museum in derby now that's something you don't find every day [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 133,192

Rating: 4.9616098 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 full episode, time team derbyshire, derbyshire, codnor castle, time team series 15 episode 6, time team castle, british history

Id: URrI3Y1kVEM

Length: 47min 47sec (2867 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021