Governor's Green (Portsmouth) | Series 17 Episode 9 | Time Team

nelson's flagship hms victory a fantastic reminder of britain's naval supremacy in the 19th century 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 and close by was the hospital which back then wasn't just a place for the sick but also provided accommodation for travellers 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 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 harbour 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 viii made it the base for the royal navy in the 16th century our site at governor's green sits within one of the last remaining defensive walls that enclosed 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 [Music] 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 ii tim you're a member of the friends of the garrison church aren't you i work with them yes and you invited us here i did why what did you want to find out 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 mod yes the mod has never allowed anyone to dig here before but you've managed to wangle it for us how come well with a lot of sights 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 going to help us find that out come and meet mick meg when we talk about a medieval hospital what exactly do we mean we mean a place where old people would have lived sick people would have lived but also just a place where travellers would have stayed so it's accommodation for various types of people so apart from anything else it was also a hotel yeah that's a way of thinking of it yeah helen do we know much about this one we do one of the amazing resources we've got are loads and loads of maps because portsmouth is so important for the defense of britain it was important to know what was where this one is would you believe mid 16th century where's our hospital the hospital's 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 defenses around the town but it also gives us our earliest depiction of the hospital site as usual mick wants to wait to see what geophys 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 in exactly the right location so these are the straight lines here the the yellow and black lines it drops in exactly all the street lines perfect i don't expect that that's fantastic 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 the modern map we can see that this road once continued along the edge of the hospital site if we take a line from the centre 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 road marked the eastern edge of the hospital site and all the medieval buildings we're looking for should be on this side of the road the hospital was dedicated to nicholas the patron saint of sailors but locally it would have been known as the dhomas day meaning the house of god a place that looked after travellers the poor and the sick but was first and foremost a religious institution the 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 work in 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 that he was peter derose and he founded it in in 1214 or possibly a couple of years uh earlier um 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 are 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 how you getting on not you hustling me how long well five minutes the geoff's team hates this bit because we're 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 four and a half minutes 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 four minutes 40 john you've got 20 seconds to go this is just the resistance so far just to orientate there's the church and stuart 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 that geophysics means i mean it looks as if we've got lots of right lines of walls and buildings there doesn't it no there may be the later jeweler house but i guess that's probably a conversion of the medieval buildings anyway so i mean i i'm going for a junction yeah let's do a junction where we've got walls of both directions somewhere like that point there phil in the middle there i reckon i reckon that's 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 geophys are detecting here this three by five meter trench is targeted here over what appears to be a junction between several walls but we don't know if this is part of the original medieval hospital or the later tudor buildings on this side may have detected some modern stuff here because already phil's wondering if he's uncovering a concrete surface all the archaeology underneath concrete 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 close look so that we can reconstruct how it looked originally when it was first built in the 13th 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 took over the site and used the church to store weapons we've got a list of the things that were stored in the church shovels and spades scoops bloke bills 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 domus day of portsmouth by a man called hp wright who is 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 650 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 although these aren't 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 maybe yeah i mean no matter how accurate that is to have a list of buildings and the dimensions of them is fantastically useful [Music] our victorian book also includes this plan which is based on the same information if it's accurate then our mission to find some of portsmouth's oldest buildings should be simple all we have to do is align the plan with the modern map and the geophys plot and hey presto we've 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 here [Music] but as we open our second trench i can't believe it's really going to be this easy can we really trust an old map from a victorian book everyone else seems to think we can oh hello that wasn't very deep was it this one here this area is labeled hall so these are kind of some of the more important buildings the ones over there are more service buildings yeah you think i think you may think i'm being a bit hard on them but quite honestly every time in day one when they're as confident as this it always turns to ashes mark my words 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 were a patient you'd be lying in bed on the side here in the aisles hang on so you've had a load of people all the way yeah running down here yes two to a bed [Laughter] i was just saying it's almost bed length they are those aisles 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 make you 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 wasn't a monastic one so just just lay people looking up but there were priests here too and they would be ministering to the spiritual needs of the patients 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 that's the whole point about this in this period the health of your soul is so much more important than your body i mean bodies don't last long in the middle ages but your soul is 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 it's part of a big jug by the looks of it huge beautifully made nice and thick i suppose we'll have to wait for the pot expert to have a look at this for us won't we yeah oh better still in trench too it looks like we're starting to find evidence of a medieval building if you turn it over you can actually see the tool marks running an angle that direction do we know anything about it yet we don't because we've literally just opened 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 even i know that that looks very much like a 13th century stone a little what makes you say that 13th century well it looks like classic early english which is the our main architectural style of the 13th century it's got this small sort of colonet rather nice sort of 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 door frame like this the doorway perhaps into a medieval room with a posh stone floor because as you can see trench two seems to be getting better and better by the minute end of day one this trench over here trench one that's proved a bit disappointing there's so much of that comparatively modern floor surface but this trench trench two completely different matter all the archaeologists are getting really excited about it although you wouldn't know it was so freezing so cold i don't believe it but here we've got these flagstones which are apparently purbeck marble and you think you've got a medieval wall coming up certainly this one is here with the the door stop there for the door to go against it and it ties in apparently with the plans it does it's on the same alignment of the 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 should we go let's go and have a drink 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 governor's green where we're looking for a hospital which was put up here in the 13th century the only bit of it 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 plonked 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 so we just want to double sides of the trench this way and we may want to go we may want to travel the size of it we've uncovered a posh floor surface here that could be part of the medieval hospital but we've also got a series of walls that we don't understand so today we're going to supersize this excavation over in trench one phil opened up a big area yesterday and found a lot of modern concrete but he also revealed a few stone walls that could be medieval so he too is extending his trench to help him work out what he's got here yesterday everyone got excited about this plan which supposedly shows the layout of the medieval buildings after aligning the plan with the geo fizz stewart seemed happy that our two trenches were coming down on these two buildings but today phil spotted a problem where you've got your train she's on those jobs no it's not 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 john told me yeah exactly it's there over that building no no stuart this wall here is what i've got in the trench that does not appear on your map well it doesn't appear on that though so which map does it appear on it hasn't took appear on any map at the moment phil has rightly pointed out that his trench isn't positioned here but targeted on this geophysics signal on the wall he's found is nowhere near the building shown on the plan we need more maps phil suspects the plans wrong or has been misaligned with the geophys plot while stewart 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 because i think until we do that we really don't know where we are we need the walls and the wall corn there's something solid to hang on yeah what a palava and i did predict this kind of thing might happen yesterday you and stu were so confident that actually what was on the maps would be in the ground and right where you dug the trees the good news is that henry has already mapped the walls in our trenches and he's now ready to compare them with what's on the plan and you all do this on the computer yeah you see i do it on a drawing board with tracing paper and a glass of cabernet sauvignon that's my way of making you just make yourself sound even older than you are [Laughter] today we've got some visitors who want to know about the history we're digging up under their sports field knowing our medieval hospital wasn't just for the sick but was also a place where travellers could stay we've arranged for a couple of 13th century pilgrims to stop off here on their travels who knows what a pilgrim is is it a religious person who goes on long journeys oh isn't it to where they forgive their sins they go to travel places to forgive their sins correct they do and the harder the journey is the more sins you can actually have removed from your soul pilgrims coming through portsmouth were most likely on route to visit shrines at winchester and chichester in england or other popular destinations like santiago in spain stephen why are you here at the hospital i'm going to take ship from portsmouth but a place like this they're regular along the route 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 script which was supposed to contain what they needed for the journey humble everyday items like a wooden bowl for food and drink 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 are 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 and 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 team how they relate to the plan some of the fines though may be a clue to the function of this building it's what we call a pension they're mixing bowls essentially or 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 date the stone walls in this trench because the soil's all been mixed up and we're getting other fines 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 [Music] duncan brown our pottery expert has been looking at other finds from phil's trench yesterday this again is high quality and is part of the 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 must be in the out buildings at the back of the governor's house yeah in this part of the state well that's good that's the governor's house there presumably yep this is our standing building it's the chapel it's a tricky sight because although the governor's house started out as a tudor mansion it was modified and updated many times over the years until it was finally demolished in 1825 these are the trench positions here what you've got in those trenches are the lines of the wall some of the walls we're finding may date to the later building on this site but some may belong to medieval buildings that were reused as part of the governor's mansion crucially to have a chance of understanding this site we need to know where our trenches are in relation to our plan of the hospital consequently our mapping team have been rechecking everything including the measurements given for the medieval buildings we took the measurement for the church and scaled it from the map 50 foot correct the chapel 25 foot correct the stables and bakehouse 68 foot correct but when we checked the 10 the larder right it says it's 100 100 foot long 100 foot long but when you scale it on the map it's only 60 foot so if 44 miss it 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 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 it isn't is it i mean not at all we had the quality control here i think over lunch you ought to tell him about that have you got a hard out so problem sorted and if we now correct the plan we can see phil's trench is positioned across a building described as a larder so we're talking food storage one of the service buildings while trench two is located here across a building described as a hall 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 sense of the many different walls we've revealed and try to work out which ones are part of a medieval hall that was last seen hundreds of years ago [Music] and now with even skeptics like me having new confidence in the plan we're opening up a third trench to see if we can find any evidence of these medieval buildings on the south side of the church and having sorted out the maps stuart wants to get a look at our site from the air to see how it fits in with the rest of medieval portsmouth what's clear is just how close the cathedral is to our site in medieval times this was the parish church and because it was founded in 1180 some 30 years before our hospital it seems they got to impose a lot of rules on their new neighbours no one from the hospital would 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 that's 12 29 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 he's saying that they can't go up yeah and that's the point because the priests here have been doing just that and the parish church does not like it because it's quite successful financially they're making money and they're undercutting the profits of the opposition oh so this is politics it's not just politics it's monetary it seems there was no shortage of people bequeathing money to the hospital which means they'd have had the resources to upgrade or refurbish buildings over the years so maybe you've got a line of green ones and then a line here in trench two where we hope to find evidence of a medieval hall we've now got so many different walls and floors to puzzle over that phil's 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 in-situ floor but 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 800 years we're going to start in the early 19th century when after hundreds of years of repairs it had been reduced to this and looked 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 all we have to do now to make it absolutely authentic is lose a few victorian additions and change the roof line 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 by end of play tomorrow we'll have enough information to picture some of the other buildings that were part of the hospital so far our latest trench trench 3 close to the church has only turned up lots of gravel [Laughter] oh wow although we have found a bit of medieval roof time i love that yeah yeah yeah that's brilliant but as we approach the end of another bitterly cold day what a funny thing it is it is it's really weird the most intriguing find has been found in phil's trench i mean it looks to me there's a sort of like i've got a crown motif on the top look it's a triangle with 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 had a kind of silvery golden coating on it and the color of that looks very cheap and nasty to me not she showed trinket is look at the size of it it does fit me extremely well absolutely so i think it's more of a woman's size i think to know a date though i'm going to 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've got books on seaside trinkets i've got books on everything 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 two 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 flag stones 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 phil how did you come to that conclusion well what it boils down to tony is if you've got a building and then you knock it down and you put up another building you are bound to destroy traces of 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 oh you can see where they they've punched through here can't you 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 wall 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 but right now everyone wants to get out of the cold and escape to the incident room or should i say the bar downstairs it's been a really tough day today have we found what we're looking for well i haven't heard one of these archaeologists tell me that anything in any of the trenches is definitely medieval i did no but tomorrow they're going to sharpen up their axe right eyed and bushy tails tomorrow morning we're going to have a really good crack at finding that medieval hospital [Music] day three at governor's green in portsmouth where we now not only have the freezing wind to contend with but 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 brolly what are you gonna give us today well we've got the road we don't know if you saw that which road is 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 hall shown on this plan [Music] and if anyone can unpick the medieval archaeology from all the later stuff it's got to be phil so i've just got to keep my fingers crossed we have a fantastic picture of portsmouth in 1545. it famously shows henry viii ship the mary rose sinking but more interesting to us it shows the walled medieval town and our hospital situated inside this was when the military had taken over the site and was storing weapons in the church so it is actually showing a good level of detail isn't it so 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 chimney either a kitchen or a hall something there why 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 well it is medieval it's at least pre-1580 if this was going in in 1580 with the governor's house it smashes through something that's already there so that's either 16th 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 of all this we've now established that this floor and this wall are part of a medieval building and now we've got the rest of the day to prove it's the medieval hall shown on this plan [Music] and right on cue the sun makes a welcome return so we shouldn't be slowed down by bad weather all of a sudden i'm feeling much happier just see if we can encourage this uh bleach to bite in which is more than i can say for stuart he's about to experience a bit of medieval bloodletting by allowing this leech to bite into his vein in medieval times the practice of drawing out bad blood was believed to cure many illnesses oh stuart did you volunteer for that it is cool isn't it 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 a leech used in specific circumstances you know coagulation of the blood specific part of the body but a lot of this is a myth most people wouldn't experience a leech in their lives so you're an exceptional man steward 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 so 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 osteoarchaeologist 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 is actually a reduction in height of this individual of about almost 10 centimeters there which is quite a height at this hospital they could have reset the bone and then dressed the wound in bandages soaked in juice obtained by boiling the roots of a comfrey plant and that would be wrapped around the limb and there is actually an active ingredient in the juice that's been extracted that encourages bone growth jack has also brought this mystery item which was found inside the skeleton of a medieval man that's what a tapeworm would live inside off have you got anything for that other than a pair of scissors i haven't got any vermifuges here but there were herbs which would also seek to kind of vent your guts in a very violent way you want to try and remove them what makes me laugh is that stuart our patient is listening to all this apparently blindly unaware he's got a leech on his arm but we need stewart to get back to work so we're going to apply a saline solution to encourage the leech to let go of stuart's vein what are you going to call it stewart i'm going to call it john gator actually here we go there we are it's good yorkshire blood is that that's why you see that outside the church mix reviewing progress and in particular trench three which was put in here yesterday to find these medieval buildings i was really disappointed in this trench party and i i really thought we'd get something of the south range that might have gone with the church well you and me both really um we've backfilled it 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 more interested in the medieval story than the later history on this site but after finding out that one of the walls we've uncovered was part of the governor's mansion i'm intrigued to know a bit more about it this one shows one side of it so we'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 uh 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've got a list of the people who who were here um we've got the prince regent with the emperor of russia frederick king of prussia marshall blucher prince platt off whoever he may be and um 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're thinking of the battle of waterloo in 1850 argued 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 if i put my glasses on so in these three holes there would have been stones and then you can see here there's a there's an s there's an a and then the big one there is an r 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 it's for a sailor's girl he's bought it he's tried to write sarah perhaps it hasn't quite worked well yeah maybe the relationship made him 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 larder or food store house shown on this plan but it'll take a much longer dig to sort it out with the people who invited us here starting to crowd around the trenches all our efforts are now being focused here in trench two where we'd like to be able to prove to them that we 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 mack yeah i reckon i got it you think you've got it no right now he's got it at last we 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 going to be about that sort of width like that then well it it about that sort of width but i'll tell you when i dug it [Music] it seems this medieval building didn't get updated to become part of the governor's mansion and would have gone out of use when the hospital was closed down by henry viii in 1540 along with the country's monasteries and other religious institutions [Music] what on earth did people do though if they were used to coming here when they were aged or infirm or sick or whatever and suddenly it's 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 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 time to time and trying to get some assistance and it became a massive social problem were there places they could stay well a lot of people start finding arms houses what's an arms house arms houses are smaller institutions it's more sheltered accommodation really which is for the deserving poor those 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 prove when our medieval hall was built because it may have been part of the original hospital built in the early 13th century to do that we're digging under one of our medieval walls in the hope that we can find some pottery that will date the construction of the building here we are look at this there we are that's that's got to be pot look it's got a glaze on it good man now that's what you're there for as far as i'm concerned 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 found one of the earliest buildings in portsmouth what have you got there richard for the inside wall 21 foot six by 50 foot is 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 uh tony which uh duncan has not seen before come on give us an answer oh that's 13th century 13th century we've got a medieval hall we've got our medieval hospital great eh wonderful apparently it doesn't get better than this these bits of 13th century pottery come from a vessel that would have looked like this and confirm that our building was part of the original hospital built around 1212ad 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 and 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 plonked 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 harbour nearby at the dumbest day they could give thanks for a safe passage and look forward to a bed and a free meal [Music] to ensure you catch all the latest updates please do subscribe to this channel follow us on social media and sign up to our newsletter and join us on patreon [Music]

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 328,920

Keywords: 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 season 17 episode 9, time team governors green, time team portsmouth, portsmouth, british history, history, dig sites, time team dig sites, time team digs, Time Team

Id: MOfBfQ_zC7k

Length: 47min 51sec (2871 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 21 2021