Governor's Green | FULL EPISODE |Time Team

Nelson's flagship HMS Victory a fantastic reminder of Britain's navels but Portsmouth's history as a seaport goes back to medieval times in the 13th century the harbour was a bit further along the coast when post by was the hospital which back then wasn't just a place for the sick but also provided an accommodation for travelers this church was originally part of that hospital and time team have been asked to find the complex of medieval buildings that would have stretched out into this field you'd have thought that would have been a pretty easy task but we know that a Tudor mansion was built on top of it not to mention a whole load of Second World War activity including a number of German bombs falling here so can we get at the medieval history without calling in the bomb squad we'll know in 72 hours [Music] the deep natural harbor at Portsmouth made it a much used crossing point to France in medieval times and the town went on to become the most heavily defended in England after Henry the eighth's made it the base for the Royal Navy in the 16th century our site at Governors Green sits within one of the last remaining defensive walls that enclose the old town and the garrison Church as it's known today was originally part of a medieval hospital built here in the 13th century this building survived because it was used as a chapel for a Tudor mansion and then later on it became a place of worship for the Armed Forces until a bomb destroyed the roof in World War two Tim you're a member of the friends at the garrison Church aren't you I work with them yes and you invited us here why what did you want to find out who was the 300 year gap between when the church was built in 1212 and the first reliable map we've got in about 1540 so yes if you can paint a picture that covers that period it would be wonderful we'll do our best Martin you work for the emoji yes the emoji has never allowed anyone to dig here before but you've managed to wangle it for us how come well with a lot of sites because no one's ever dug on them we don't know what's going on so I've got that same gap so if you guys can help fill that gap for us and help us manage it better I'll be really happy well there's only one man who's gonna help us find that out come and meet me Meg when we talk about a medieval hospital what exactly do we mean we mean a place where all people would have lived sick people have lived but also just a place where travellers would have stayed so East accommodation for the various types of people so apart from anything else it was also a hotel yeah yeah that's the way of thinking of it you Helen do we know much about this one we do one of the amazing resources we've got loads and loads of maps because Portsmouth is so important for the defense of Britain it was important to know what was where and this one is would you believe mid 16th century where the hospital the hospitals just here this map made around 1540 is thought to be one of the first accurate maps drawn in England it was made to show the defences around the town but it also gives us our earliest depiction of the hospital size as usual Mick wants to wait to see what GF is are detecting under the ground before we decide where to dig but clearly it would be good to know if any of the early maps are accurate enough in modern terms to be useful to us Dominic Fontana a geography lecturer at Portsmouth University has overlaid a modern map of the town onto a Tudor map and as soon as it comes up you'll see that it drops in with the streets and exactly the right locust are the street lines here the the yellow and black line that's really it drops in exactly of the street it's an astonishingly good fit Dominic's map dated 1584 is especially interesting because it shows a more detailed picture of the hospital it shows a complex of buildings with a wall around them and having lined it up with a modern map we can see that this road once continued along the edge of the hospital site if we take a line from the center of that building and draw it down here using this information Stuart and Henry are going to try and plot where the old medieval road used to run across this area this would be extremely helpful to know because the roads marked the eastern edge of the hospital site and all the medieval buildings were looking for should be on this side of the road the hospital was dedicated to submit honest the patron saint of sailors but locally it would have been known as the promised day meaning the house of God a place that looked after travelers the poorest what was first and foremost a religious institution most important thing for a medieval man or woman was their fate after death and this was what really mattered to them are you going to burn in hell in eternity and to avoid this you either set up a hospital or working one or you pray for the people who've assisted you and the man who founded this hospital had quite a need for spiritual insurance who was uh he was Peter de Roche and he founded it in in 1214 or possibly a couple of years earlier and he was Bishop of Winchester but apart from that I don't know a lot about him he was Bishop of Winchester but he was most importantly the second most powerful man in England in 1214 he was actually running England while King John was overseas so these men have tremendous political and financial power as well as actually running a diocese and acting as a minister of God it's like doubling up as well Chancellor of the Exchequer and Archbishop of Canterbury which is no small thing the local people who are involved in the hospital society have really keen that we should try to bring to life those 300 years when it was a medieval hospital does that excite you or is this pretty standard fare no it's not standard fare because in common with many places the records of this place were lost at the dissolution as well as a lot of the building and so we're very very dependent on the archaeology for this one and I'd be really interested just to learn what it looks like on the ground how big was it potentially we could have evidence of some of Portsmouth's earliest stone buildings buried here so rgf is detecting anything under the ground John hang on thought you hustle we make them hello well five minutes the geophys team hates this bit because we ran on their back so much but I love it it's such a feeling of anticipation as soon as that information has been through the printer we could get our first glimpse of a 13th century Hospital you'll have it I'm confident looking at the readings in the machine in foreign art burners four and a half minutes welcome back to governor's green in Portsmouth where we're waiting to see if our geophys team have managed to detect the remains of a medieval hospital thought to be buried under this field [Laughter] this is just the resistance so far just to orientate there's the church and Stewart talked about a road line coming through here and what we've got in black that's the high resistance so these are all buildings and actually rooms within buildings or separate buildings I mean there's so much detail going on I need more time to actually sort out everything ah but you see that's where we come in John we put the trenches in to tell you what physics means it looks as if we've got lots of wrought lines of walls and buildings st now there may be the later Tudor house but I guess that's probably a conversion of the medieval buildings anyway so aren't going for a junction yeah let's do a junction where we've got walls of both directions somewhere like that point there fill in the middle air I reckon I retinas perfect so with no time to waste Phil gets our first trench going the plan is to open up a large area to see exactly what your fears are detecting this three by five meter trenches targets in here level what appears to be a junction between several wars but we don't know if this is part of the original mega uses hospital or the later tudor buildings on this side aren't there again GF is in fact may have detected some modern stuff here because already Phil's wondering if he's uncovering a concrete surface well their archaeology underneath comfrey don't bear thinking about do it while we don't know how much of the hospital survives out in the field we do know that this church was at the center of the complex Richard our buildings expert is taking a closer look so that we can reconstruct how it looks originally when it was first built in the 30th century one thing's for sure this building has got a lot of stories to tell like when the hospital closed in 1540 and the governor of Portsmouth to go with the site and use the church to store weapons we've got a list of the things that were stored in the church as this ability shovels and spades scoops bloke bills and Morris picks chests of bows and arrows serpentine powder this is wonderful stuff this book a history of the church looks like it could be really useful to us it's called the the the Domus day of Portsmouth by a man called HP right who is the the military chaplain here and he was behind the restoration of the church the book includes references to a lot of original documents one of which is a bill for the repair of the medieval buildings in 1581 the the church 25 foot wide the armory 6 and 50 foot long the Smith's forged 32 foot long and what is then done which is perhaps a bit speculative but still quite a lot of fun is he's taken one of the contemporary plans and he's tried to attach the labels to these buildings you can see here so this is a plan of what this area would look like not when it was a hospital all those these are the same buildings but after it had been taken over by the military so that we've got things like the armory the Smith's Forge and the pay chamber yes we could test this couldn't we mate yeah I mean no matter how accurate that is to have a list of buildings and the dimensions of them he's fantastically useful a Victorian book also includes this plan which is based on the same information if it's accurate then our mission to find some of the Earth's oldest buildings should be simple all we have to do is align the plan with the modern map in the geophys plot and hey presto who got a blueprint showing where we need to dig to find any of the hospital buildings so using the plan as a guide we're going to open a new trench peel [Music] our second trench I can't believe it's really going to be this easy can we really trust an old maxim a Victorian boy this one here this area is labeled Hall so these are kind of some of the more important buildings the ones over there for service buildings yeah you think I think you may think I'm being a bit hard on them but honestly every time in day one when there is confidence as this it always turns to ashes one of the few places on this site where we don't need a map is inside the church and according to Mick it's quite unusual to have the largest and most important part of the hospital still standing I've been thinking that this was simply where the religious services were carried out it's not quite like that is it Carol it's this is the church and the main part of the hospital explain this underscores the religious aspects of the hospital because if you're a patient you'd be lying in bed on the side here in the aisles hang on so you've had a boat of people all the way yeah I would just say any to almost bed length those oils they're almost that width and you can see why and more to the point you would be able to hear the services and to see the sacrament of the mass which is supposed to making better so it's generally um sort of elevating atmosphere where your soul is as healthy as your body which is what they're aiming for our artist Victor has been working on a sketch to picture this part of the building as it was in the 13th century it was a domestic one so let's just lay people looking at people but there were priests here too and they would be ministering to the spiritual needs and some nurses as well we think but still the whole impression still still looks like you're coming into a church in which sick people are laid out on each side it's the whole point about this in this period the health of his soul is so much more important than your body I mean bodies don't last long in the Middle Ages but you're soulless forever it's getting late in the day and starting to get really cold out here although trench one initially revealed a modern concrete surface we've now uncovered what might be medieval stone and we're starting to find some large chunks of pottery like it's part of a big jug by the looks of it beautifully made nice and thick I suppose I'll have to wait for the pot expert to have a look at this for us really yeah oh there's our still entrenched - it looks like we're starting to find evidence of a medieval building you can actually see the toolmarks of running an angle that's direction do we know anything about it yet we don't literally just open it we've got something that looks very modern looking in the top here and then something very promising which looks much older hang on Richard perfectly arrived on time what do you think of that stone thank you so much that looks very much like 13th century stone what makes you say that 13th century well it looks like classic early English which is the main architectural style of the 13th century it's got these small sort of collar net rather nice for the circular design quite delicate really what sort of part of a building might that come from it looks like it's part of a reveal or something a window reveal or a door reveal so this may have been part of a medieval doorframe like this the doorway perhaps into a medieval room with a posh stone floor because as you can see trench 2 seems to be getting better and better by the minute I understand 1 this church over here trench 1 that's proved a bit disappointing this so much of that comparatively modern floor surface but this straight trench 2 completely different matter all the archaeologists are getting really excited about it although you wouldn't know it's so freezing so but here we've got these flag stones which are apparently perfect marble and you think you've got a medieval wall coming up this one is here with the the door stop there for this the door go against this and it ties in apparently with the plan it does it's on the same alignments of the row row of buildings going in that direction so tomorrow we're going to extend the trench in this direction and see whether or not we've got at least a glimmer of our medieval hospital fingers crossed to have a drink on one keypad welcome back to blustery Portsmouth it's a city that's jam-packed with history you can see these 18th and 19th century walls here which once defended the old town but our digs on the far side of this tunnel nelson won't walk through here apparently we're inside the old town walls now and we're excavating over here on Governors Green where we're looking for a hospital which was put up here in the 13th century the only bit of it's still standing is that church over there but it's complicated by the fact that this mansion was put up here in Tudor times and I know from bitter experience that if you're looking for something really early on an urban site where they've plunked a building on top of it later on then the archaeology is very complicated and very frustrating mark my words we've opened two trenches so far and it's trench two nearest the church that looks the most promising we just want double size of the trench this way and we may want it up remailer to trouble the size of it we've uncovered a posh floor surface here that could be part of them even hospital but we've also got a series of rules that we don't understand so today we're going to supersize this excavation also fare only change one fill open up a big area yesterday and found a lot of muddy concrete the ocean revealed a few stone walls that could be medieval so he too is extending stretch to help him work out yesterday everyone got excited about this plan which supposedly shows the layout of the medieval buildings after aligning the plan with the geophys Stewart seemed happy that our two trenches were coming down on these two buildings but today Phil's spotted a problem where you've got your trenches on both because according to Phil his trench has been marked in the wrong place on the plan we did not put the trench there we did not the trench is in there well jock told me yeah exactly it's better this up over that below no Stuart this wall here is wide got in the trench that does not appear on your map which doesn't appear on that there so which map does it appear on it hasn't the pin any map that Phil is rightly pointed out that his trench isn't positioned here but targeted on this geophys signal on the wall he's found is nowhere near the buildings shown on the plan we need more maps makes the plans wrong has been misaligned with the geophys plot while Stuart thinks the problem could be that Phil's digging a wall that doesn't appear on any plan I think we should give Henry an hour to get these trenches and the features in them accurately plotted yeah cuz I think until we do that we really don't know where we are you need the walls in the wall corner something solid to hang on yeah what Apple Arbor and I did predict this kind of thing might happen yesterday you and Steve were so confident that actually what was on the maps would be in the ground and right where you've dug the treasure it's never worked so it's still very confident about that the good news is that Henry has already mapped the walls in our trenches and he's now ready to compare them with what plan and you'll do this on the computer yeah you see I do turn a drawing board with tracing paper and the glass of Cabernet Sauvignon I just make yourself sound even older than you are today we've got some visitors who want to know about the history we're taking up on to their sports field now in our medieval hospital water just for the sick that was also a place where travelers could stay we've arranged for a couple of 30th century pilgrims to stop off here on their travels who knows what a pilgrim is isn't it to where they forgive their sins they go to travel places to forgive their sins correct later and the heart of the journey is the more sins you can actually have removed from your soul pilgrims coming through Portsmouth will most likely enroute to visit shrines at Winchester introduced er in England or other popular destinations like Santiago in Spain so even why are you here at the hospital I'm going to take ship from Portsmouth but a place like this there they're regular along the routes we can actually stop and ask for food and rest if we need it as well because obviously it's quite an arduous journey it's being made on foot every pilgrim carried a bag like this called a scrip which was supposed to contain what they needed for the journey humble everyday items like a wooden bowl for food and drinking a knife and a sewing kit to repair clothes can you imagine I've got loads and loads and loads of food in there I'm not going to carry much am I so that's why places like this is so important people were supposed to have a holy duty to actually feed us particularly religious institutions such as this Carol when the pilgrims arrived here they'd have stayed in this room wouldn't they we don't know they may have had a separate wing where travelers earn people who wanted short-term hospitality stayed this is what makes the excavation so exciting and we seem to be making good progress here in trench one Phil's uncovered more stone walls but he's still waiting to find out from the mapping scene how they relate to the plan some of the finds though may be a clue to the function of this building it's what we call a pension they're mixing bowls essentially all food preparation vessels this is a great find because it dates to the time just before we know the hospital was closed in 1540 but it doesn't help take the stone walls in this trench because the soils will be mixed up come on getting other finds like this this was once part of a massive wine bottle which dates to the 18th century this maybe is our first glimpse of the fine living enjoyed by the governor of Portsmouth who lived here at that time Duncan Brown our pottery expert has been looking at other finds from Phil's trench yesterday this again is high-quality this part of a Spanish olive jar these were used for transporting olive oil and preserved fruits so we're late 16th 17th century and I would say bang on with the governor's house myself we've got in the outbuildings at the back of the governor's house yeah it's part well that's good that's the governor's house there presumably yeah this is our standing building for Chapel it's a tricky sight because you know the governor's house started out as a Tudor mansion it is modified and updated many times over the years until it was finally demolished in 1825 these are the trench position here what you've got in those trenches other ones the wall is right in it some of the rules we're finding may date to the later building on this site but some may belong to medieval buildings that we've reused as part of it that was mentioned crucially have a chance at understanding we need to know there are trenches in relation to have been really checking everything including the measurements given for the medieval buildings we took the measurement for the church and scaled it from the map 54 correct Chapel 25-foot correct the stables and bake house 68 foots correct but when we checked the 10 the louder right it says he's a 100 hundred foot 100 foot long but when you scale it on the map it's only 60 foot so the 40 foot missing actually should be that long on the plan and the stable should be up there so just got this one building which is wrong I hate to sound somewhat skeptical but you know if all the other buildings are right and the one that fills in is wrong that does sound like a bit of special pleading to quality control I think over lunch you oughta tell him about that so problem sorted and if we now correct the plan we can see Phil's trench is positioned across a building described as a la so we're talking food storage one of the service buildings while trench two is located here across a building described as a hole this would be a higher status room which seems to fit with the posh stone floor we've unearthed in this trench this feels like a real turning point but the challenge now is to make [Music] even skeptics like having new confidence in the trench and any evidence of these buildings on the south side of the church neighbors no one from the hospital will be allowed to go on board ships to give benediction preach or read the Gospels that seems pretty severe why did they make that kind of rule well as 1229 and the hospital is very very successful very quickly and this is a seaport and so sailors who are leading a very dangerous life want spiritual protection yeah but I'm saying that they can't go yeah that's the point because the priests here have been doing just that and the parish church doesn't like it because it's quite successful financially they're making money and they're undercutting the profits of the opposition also this is politics it's not just politics its money it seems there was no shortage of people bequeathing money to the hospital which means they've had the resources to upgrade or refurbish buildings over the years so maybe you've got a loin of green ones and then alignment here in French to where we hope to find evidence of a medieval fall we've now got so many different walls and floors to puzzle over the Phils been drafted across to help sort it out the crucial thing is if there's a green in there so there is there is a logical pattern this definitely looks like an incision floor it's going to take time to work out how old it is our buildings expert Richard has spent much of the last two days studying the standing building so we can tell the story of how it looked originally and how it was changed over eight hundred years we're going to start in the early 19th century when after hundreds of years of repairs it had been reduced to this more like a Scout hut then in the 1870s the Victorians painstakingly restored the building to look like this pretty much how it would have looked in medieval times we have to do now to make it absolutely authentic is lose a few Victorian editions and change the roofline slightly and we're now looking at the original infirmary for the sick and the chapel where religious services were carried out it's wonderful to see how the modern building looks so much like the original let's hope I under play tomorrow we'll have enough information to picture some of the other buildings that so far our latest trains trenched through close to the church has only turned up oh wow although we have found a bit of medieval roofed on them I love that yeah yeah yeah that's brilliant but as we approach the end of another bitterly cold day the most intriguing find has been found in Phil's trench it looks Tomatoes are sort of like got a crown motif on the top because triangle is three dots on the top my first reaction is that this looks almost homemade you know this is not a kind of standard ring you would buy in a shop and if you look here you can see the remains it's had a kind of silvery gold coating and the color of that looks very not shrink so I think it's more of a woman's size I think to know a date though I'm gonna have to go to some books and try to find a parallel because I have never seen anything quite like that before don't tell me you got books on seeso trinkets well hopefully we'll find out more about this ring tomorrow but right now I'm interested in how we're doing unraveling the puzzle of different floors and walls here in trench - this is the trench where yesterday afternoon we thought we'd find the medieval hospital so 24 hours later how are we doing well these flagstones aren't medieval maybe they're Tudor this wall is apparently even later than that floor as is that wall and this wall well maybe it's medieval but we don't really know fill how did you come to that conclusion or why it boils down to Tony is if you've got a building and you knock it down and you put up another building you are bound to destroy traces of the foundations of the earlier building let's say take this floor here and that wall over there this floor doesn't run right up to the wall there's a gap that couldn't possibly happen if they were the same building that wall has been punched through that floor so that floor is earlier that wall is later now you can see where they've punched through here Conyers absolutely broken teeth absolutely so this wall is again later than the floor this wall comes all the way along here and there's a gap here this wall has been punched through by this war that's got to be earlier it might be the medieval one well tomorrow it looks like we're going to have to extend this trench even more to find out right now everyone wants to get out of the cold and escape to the incident room downstairs yes it's been a really tough day today have we found what we're looking for well I hadn't heard one of these archeologists tell me that anything in any of the trenches is definitely many I did know but tomorrow they're gonna sharpen up their axe bright eyed and bushy tails tomorrow morning we're gonna have a really good crack at finding that medieval Hospital day 3 at governor's green in Portsmouth where we now not only have the freezing wind to contend with the driving rain to go with it we're looking for the remains of a medieval hospital but last night I was told that virtually everything here in our best trench is probably to do with a later Tudor mansion that was built here for the governor of Portsmouth with just one day left I'm really going to be pushing to try and find a bit of the medieval Hospital Mick come out from behind your bra Lee what are you gonna give us today what we've got the road we don't you saw that which runs that this is the road outside the precinct wall which is this wall here and why does that help us with the medieval story well that's the edge of the precinct of the medieval hospital this here in some shape or form must be the medieval boundary well that's good we've now got the wall that marked the boundary of the medieval hospital and the road that ran beside it but today I'm hoping we can identify at least one of the medieval buildings that stood inside the wall so we're widening this trench even more to help us work out which walls belong to the medieval halls shown on this plan and if anyone can unclip the medieval archaeology for more latest stuff it's gonna be filled Justin possibily we have a fantastic picture of Portsmouth in 1545 but famously shows Henry the eighth's ship the mary-rose sinking for more interesting to us it shows the world medieval town and our hospital situated inside this was when the military had taken over the site and restoring weapons in the church so it is actually showing a a good level of detail isn't it it really is you can see the the wall around the site this picture may also be showing the hall we're digging which we know was next to the kitchens that looks tall to me either a kitchen or a hall something there quite probably yes it certainly shows some quite interesting windows back on site and there's been a development up until now while we've suspected that walls in this trench may belong to the later use of this site we've had no way of dating them but John's been comparing this plan of the governor's house with the latest geophys results and he's made an important discovery look there's the trench in red look at that wall of the governor's house going through the middle that wall there is clearly cutting that floor oh wow you asked us to find the medieval right you're not saying that that floor which we've been banging on about as probably a Tudor floor for the last two days is very even it's at least pre 1580 this walls going in in 1580 the governor says it smashes through something that's already there so that's either sixteenth century or earlier oh that is so bizarre so we might have had the hospital for the last two days amazing it means that in among the confusion all this we've now established this floor and this wall are part of a medieval building and now we've got the rest of the day to prove it the medieval Falls shown on this plan right on cue the son makes a welcome return so we shouldn't be slowed down by bad weather the sudden completely much happier Stuart he's about to experience a bit of medieval bloodletting by allowing this leech to bite into his vein the practice of drawing out bad blood was believed to cure many illnesses most often a knife was used to cut a vein but a leech like this would also do the job although they were used less frequently you might have it each used in specific circumstances calculation of the blood specific part of the body but a lot of this is amiss those people would experience the leech in their lives so you're an exceptional man Stuart but this table is full of herbal medicines that would have been used as a medieval hospital herbs like rosemary and aniseed which were used for raising people's spirits and aiding digestion if your digestion wasn't working properly that would lead to illness or something like this something simple like that is a very very important medicine but what about a serious medical problem like a broken leg our osteo archaeologist Jackie McKinley has brought some bones excavated at other medieval sites this lower leg bone would normally look like this but it was fractured and ended up like this so what you've got she's actually a reduction in height of this individual of about almost 10 centimeters there which is quite a height they could have reset the bone and then dressed the wound in bandages soaked in juice obtained by boiling the roofs of a comfrey plant and that would be wrapped around the limb and there is actually an active ingredient in the has been extracted that encourages Bhangra jockeys also brought this mystery item which was found inside the skeleton of a medieval man that's what a tapeworm would live inside on Oh have you gotten anything for that pair of scissors I haven't got any very few G's here but there were herbs which would also seek to kind of vent your guts in a very violent what makes me laugh is that Stewart our patient is listening to all this apparently blithely unaware he's got a leech others apply a saline solution to encourage the leech to let go of Stewart survey outside the church Mick's reviewing progress and in particular trench 3 which was put in here yesterday to find these medieval buildings I was really disappointed in this trench party I'd really thought we'd get something of the south rains that might have gone with the church well you and me both really with backfill there because it was becoming unsafe yeah and what you've got in there is just layer upon layer of dumped gravel as you can see from this post-war photo this area was once a parade ground used by the military in the 19th century and it appears that any medieval buildings here were destroyed during the construction work I have to admit I've been very interested in the medieval story than the later history of this site but after finding out that one of the walls we've uncovered this part of the governor's mansion we should do a bit more about it this one shows one side of it I've got our church there and this one shows the front just before it was knocked down in 1826 looks rather nice doesn't it and it was the scene of some of the most amazing moments a few years before it was knocked down in 1814 there was a massive four-day party here to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon and we're going to Lister the people who who were here we've got the Prince Regent with the Emperor of Russia Frederick King of Prussia Marshall blue hoofprints Platt off whoever he may be and I'm killing them they all came the Duke of Wellington did turn up two days late but then perhaps he was allowed to hang on did you just say defeat of Napoleon in 1814 yeah you are thinking of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 oh there was a bit of a problem because just as they were celebrating I think he was escaping from Elba and let's do it all over again we may not have found anything belonging to the Emperor of Russia but having cleaned up the ring we found yesterday Helen believes it probably does date to the time the house was being demolished in the 19th century you can see much more clearly now what's going on I will do over put my glasses on so in these three holes that would have been stones then you can see here as a as an S there's an a and the big one there isn't ah and then after that he's had a go at doing an A or an H it says Sarah so I think it really is a bit of sentimental jewelry is for a sailor's girl he's bought it he's tried to write sir that sounds quite work oh yeah maybe the relationship maybe chuck it away with time running out we've now stopped digging here in what was Phil's original trench it's possible that we've turned up evidence of the larger or Storehouse shown on this plan but it will take a much longer dig to sorted out with the people who invited us here starting to crowd around the trenches all our efforts are now being focused here in trench to where we'd like to be able to prove to them that we've found the medieval Hall belonging to the hospital right now Phil's extending this excavation yet again to see if he can find the western end of the building right yeah all right now you got it you've got no shortage at last we've found what we think is another medieval wall and it's parallel to the wall we've already identified at the other end of the trench now it feels like we're getting somewhere so it's gonna be about that sort of woods like that's it well it's about that for a width but I'll tell you when I dug it it seems this medieval building didn't get updated to become past the governor's mansion [Music] when the hospital was closed down by Henry the eighth in 1540 along with the country's monasteries and other religious institutions on earth did people do though if they were used to come in here when they were aged or infirm or sick or whatever and suddenly shut down well that was the big problem because they were literally out on the street and there's a lot of literature written in this time about that the new problems faced by these people who had been looked after in hospitals and in monasteries and suddenly find themselves beggars you know going from town to town and trying to get some assistance and it became a massive social problems were there places they could stay well a lot of people would start finding arm sizes what an almshouse arms houses are smaller institutions of sheltered accommodation really which is for the deserving poor as people you know to be reputable but who are perhaps elderly or disabled and they can live there till they die if we can we'd like to be able to pose when now medieval four was built because it may have been part of the original Hospital built in the early maybe I'll look at this yeah well that's that's got to be pot let's go glaze on it good man now that's what you were there for it's far like mr. this is the first really good piece of stratified pottery just a bit of pot but this should tell us when our building was first put up and now as we approach the end of the dig just enough time to pull all the evidence together and see if we really have had one of the earliest buildings in Portsmouth what have you got there Richard for the inside wall 21 foot fix by 50 forties that is that likely for a medieval Hall yeah that's fine yeah that's excellent that's really really really good but of course what it doesn't give us is an absolute date show us the pottery we have got two bits of pottery Tony which Duncan has not seen before come on give us an answer oh that's 13th century 13th we've got our medieval hospital great ain't wonderful apparently it doesn't get better than this these bits of 13th century pottery come from a vessel that would've looked like and confirms that our building was part of the original hospital built around 1212 AD this hall was a living space and a room where food was served and maybe it's also where pilgrims sat down to eat we've untangled these two walls on the floor of the building but much more work would be needed to get the full story although the records tell us it was still standing in 1581 we now know it was demolished by the time this big wall of the governor's mansion was plucked down on top of it so although we had to correct this plan we now believe it's an accurate layout of the hospital buildings as they were when the hospital closed in the 16th century and we can now create a reconstruction to show what the site looked like at that time our medieval Hall like these other big stone buildings would have been one of the oldest in the town and hugely impressive in a world that was still largely made of wood built 300 years before the big defensive walls around the town in medieval times it occupied a prime location near the sea and would have stood out like a beacon to any pilgrim arriving at the harbor nearby at the damas day they could give thanks for a safe passage and look forward to a bed and a free meal [Music]

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 156,496

Rating: 4.915916 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

Id: U1ucR5PUEwE

Length: 47min 56sec (2876 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 21 2020