Hunting King Harold (Portskewett, Wales) | S15E13 | Time Team

[Music] take a look at this photo taken in port skewer south wales this is harold's field it's dotted with mysterious lumps and bumps and i reckon it's going to be a real cracker of a sight picture of the scene it's 10 65 the year before the battle of hastings and harold godwin soon to be king is riding up this slope looking for a site for his brand new hunting lodge fit to entertain royalty why here well it's always been strategically important it's on the main crossing point for anyone wanting to go from england through to wales the romans built here the welsh had a royal palace here but amazingly no one's ever dug here up till now time team have got just three days to find out what really is under harold's field most of us know king harold as a loser the saxon king killed by an arrow in the eye at the battle of hastings in 1066 but what many people won't know is that he was actually a very successful warrior in the years before he became king as earl of wessex he owned land that boarded wales and personally as a big fan of harold i'm looking forward to finding out what he was doing here in port skewett the reason why no one's ever dug here at harold's field before is that way back in 1928 it was deemed so historically important that they made it a scheduled ancient monument which means nobody's allowed to excavate it but this is kate smith who lives locally don't you i live over the road in subbrook and kate organized this petition would you like to see a professional excavation at harold's field that was very enterprising of you why did you do that because nobody knows for certain what's into the under the field and we have a lot of very curious villagers who would love to know so once we got this petition we had to contact kadu who were the welsh equivalent of english heritage aren't they very good rick it seems a bit odd to me that this place was scheduled in the first place given that we don't really have any idea what's here well i'd look in our files to try and answer that question myself and the inspector came in the 1920s would have seen what we see the earthworks the position and so on but it seems to be the place name harold's house or harold's field that seems to have been the clincher to make this a protected site so we start with the name yes but we've also got a really nice piece of evidence from the anglo-saxon chronicle and that tells us that in 1065 harold came here and built a hunting lodge um but we don't know whether it was exactly in this field we know it's in port skewered the name itself could have been attached to it in victorian times we've got this some fantastic drawing by the rev green from 1893 which shows our earth works looking remarkably similar to the way they look today um and underneath he's written remains of harald's hunting tower at port skewett look at this face that is undiluted skepticism isn't it i just wonder if they've put two and two together you know they've got a field full of earthworks next to the church they've got this reference and they've combined it i mean actually very often we don't know what there is within a year of a scheduled monument do we i mean obviously earth works they draw a line around it nobody ever looks at it well the sooner we start digging the sooner we're going to know exactly what is buried under these mysterious lumps and bumps and if they've got anything to do with harold's hunting lodge the first trench has been decided is going in here across the biggest most obvious lump in harold's field it stands out so well in fact that we haven't waited for geophys to survey it instead they'll crack on to give us a picture of what's going on in the rest of this field half past 10 on day one and we've already got the first trench going in which is very good news unfortunately there's some bad news as well we've got a wounded soldier how did we do this we don't know tony i mean this is a sort of temporary measure but i've done something to my wrist what it means is i can dig so what can you do don't use my brain i can i can still observe the archaeology and still interpret it it'll just mean i'll get into other people's trenches and make myself extremely unpopular just like you do really well i'm sure we're going to need phil's experience but right now i want to hear more about the anglo-saxon chronicle the evidence that connects harold with port skuit we've got a splendid reference for 1065 which is often overshadowed by of course stirring events the following year but it's absolutely specific in this year before hamas harold ordered the building in wales at port stewart and there too many goods gathered he wished to invite king edward here for hunt meat so the implication is of a great hunting lodge so this is before he's king king edward is king why is he in wales in the first place he's consolidating his his military campaign in 1063 completely defeated the welsh armies and the welsh king there and it's it's asserting himself in what had been foreign land he would have been building the most wonderful building i mean he's immensely wealthy himself he's the second only the king in terms of wealth and power of course and he wants to impress the king and the king loves his hunting even though he's quite an old man by now well it sounds convincing but it could be very difficult to prove it was here because even a saxon building posh enough to entertain the king would have looked something like this essentially a timber construction leaving only post holes in the ground for us to find worse still it may not have been here for very long because we know it was attacked by the welsh the world's band together we have a great big gang that come and kill the builders and seize all the goods that are assembled here by harold for hunting and building so we're not even dealing with a complete building it appears so the welsh burnt down harold the englishman's holiday home yes there's a bit of a pattern there isn't there but for the archaeologists this dig is about more than just looking for saxon evidence this ridge of higher ground was on the main route for anyone crossing the river seven and there are clues to suggest that this field was occupied over many centuries local pottery expert steve clark has dug several trenches in the area and found iron age roman and medieval fines all around the edges of harold's field when you say you've got medieval party from here what sort of date is that well it's a job to say it's probably 13th century could be 14th but there's it's not really closely dateable because there's not enough of it so not harold yet then no saxon pottery there's there's no there's one shirt from southern wales so if we got something saxon that would drag a story yeah yes it would be really big key to understanding this site will be making sense of the lumps and bumps geofiz are busy trying to detect what lies beneath them while henry is collecting data to make a 3d model and stuart seems to be studying them from every angle he hasn't spotted anything saxon yet but he reckons he can see traces of something that would be later in date a medieval manner you see looking over there that big ridge going across there there's no area between doesn't that on this aerial photograph that's this this bank coming across here this is a very typical dam holding back water in this area in here the area we're standing in so you've got quite a distinctive feature there showing up you've got this ditch going round you see all these earth works within here so you're getting the feel of an enclosure going around so would that be like an ornamental moat that's right there a fish pool very typical decorative feature going with a medieval manor house the plan is to put in a trench to test stewart's theory well they've got a big yellow digger i don't have to use my hand and if we need any digging i'll get bridget to do it phil and bridge are going to open a trench here across these earthworks to see if stewart's right and they are medieval and no sooner does the trench go in at the bottom of the hill than straight away phil spots the first find i mean how did i say that wrong with his eyesight is that she you don't you don't need your hands to do archaeology just need your old owners that's the way so what we need now is a pottery expert it's medieval what is medieval i think it is why are you saying medieval in this instance what what refine that a bit more somewhere around 1200. oh that would be good oh yeah yeah i didn't think it would say that early no no it could well be it's a bit noisy it's a great start we've come straight down on medieval pottery dating to around 1200 a.d so stewart could be right and there is a completely unknown medieval manor house here oh wow yeah it's what goes on in there well it's a bit it's a bit more degraded in there but there's definitely the there's bits of stone coming up it's a big old big old stone there that isn't it's a nice let's have another nibble in here please what's that a wall there well we don't know yet but that's what it's looking like up on the top of the hill we could be digging the very posh bit of stuart's manor house because we've uncovered a massive spread of stones and matt's got his first find of the dig yeah it's kind of square it looks like that squared off piece there fitted in a wall or something yes matt reckons there's at least one large collapsed building here but at the moment it's hard to see because of all the rubble there was a few pieces of very angular stones in the top so it's quite thick then we came down there's almost clearing water there and almost we have a possible i don't know revetment or wall there a few large pieces there but they're all very tumbled it looks like we might have another building at the other end of the trench and i'm glad i'm not the one who's got to sort it out that's a wall and dressed yes absolutely unlike all this rough undressed rubble this is actually and that's the only bit of dress stone we found but could this map dated 1777 contain a clue to what one of the buildings looked like and look at the name of the field tower hey tower hey yeah now i think that tower field name applies to the fact that there's these big lumps and bumps on the top here and there's a memory that was a tall building or a stone tower perhaps an old manor house but there's a memory of a stone building in this field stewart now believes that most of the bigger earth works are part of the medieval manor house and this is an exciting discovery in itself it's possible that these lost medieval buildings could be very early perhaps even dating back to the period just after the norman conquest but as well as digging the manor we also want to investigate the pre-conquest history of this hill so where do we put our next trench in search of some saxon evidence what we've got on top it's almost like it looked like a big courtyard but there are areas in here where there are much lower earthworks which don't quite fit that that same pattern they're almost interesting because they're blank in fact yeah they're blank and they're very low and you just don't feel the same substance as the other ones the geophys survey looks like it's showing more medieval buildings but it could also be natural sandstone the only way to find out is put another trench in yep you see i think the problem is in a way we don't want to know about the things we can see because these are going to be medieval or later stone or or solid structures whereas if we're talking about something early that might be timber built the sort of things that would be contemporary with harold you know late saxon early norman they're either going to be underneath these or they're going to be in the rather more blank areas so in a way we ought to be looking like you're saying in the blank areas because that's where we might see the post holes and timber slots of earlier structures trench three it's decided we'll examine this geo fizz blob but also extend into a blank area to see if we can find any trace of earlier occupation so trench three gets underway on top of the hill and it doesn't take low to reveal the source of the geophys black glob there's bits of water coming up a spread of mortar and rubble probably from the medieval manor house i don't think they're in situ so we can take those out then yeah in some ways finding a complex of posh medieval buildings here isn't surprising because manor houses were often built on important sacks and sites essentially it was a way of showing that a newly conquered area was under new management harold in fact may have chosen this hill for his hunting lodge because it had long been the site of a welsh royal court we could be digging the top of many layers of history in this field we've talked a lot about the medieval manor and about harold's hunting lodge but before that we've got this possible welsh royal court which was here for a lot longer what would it have looked like well we don't quite know there's been a lot of work done on these sites in north wales what is this thing called fleece the royal seat of the kings of gwent once again we're talking about a fancy wooden building built possibly as early as the 7th century the evidence for it comes from a historical text the life of saint tethaus which tells how the king of gwent went in search of a new royal site the king is on his horse which he rides without bridal or halter so the horse miraculously is guided by god to a spot uh as the nearest we get is well nigh to the banks of the seven but more specifically when he arrives here the horse scratches the ground and lo and behold a spring burst forth and at just at that point in the life we have a little bit of verse inserted which is often an indicator of a much earlier source so it it it it makes the whole thing much more credible uh observe the signs of god here the horse stands here is the place to abide so god is my god to find a place here what a very good horse champion the wonder horse there isn't a spring here now because they all dried up when the seven tunnel was built but it was described by antiquarians and it's shown on this 1777 map there's a church on here yes and there's it's labeled the springs yes another one and there's the real nah damn is somewhere down here well it sounds a bit dodgy to me but the archaeologists seem to believe it but the problem tony is is you know it's the usual one of how do you find timber buildings of that early medieval period yeah another clue to why this site became an important place is in the name itself port skewers which in welsh means the harbour below the woods hard to imagine now because the village is half a mile inland but in ancient times it's thought there was a tidal creek here linking port skewers with the seven estuary tomorrow we're planning to try and find the creek but it could be that phil's trench here on the lower ground has already picked up some evidence of it well across the whole trench is this clay this clay is the eluvian this is water lane deposits and look what we've got down here now that piece of pot yeah is actually in the alluvium steve you got any idea what this is yeah it's seven valley where it's uh it's roman it's second third century wow it's quite distinctive stuff really you want to get it out sure yeah you're not allowed to touch it right i can do it with my left hand but i can supervise god it's really claggy this isn't it yeah do you reckon this is in situ or has it just been dumped here at some stage the romans were here and it's got dropped in to the silt and then gradually the silt is built built up and up and up it's so gluey i'm glad it's not my wrist that's doing that here we are it's coming away it won't take 500 years now we can start thinking you have a rest i'll get the rest of the fires out the tree well this is our first sign that the site was occupied in roman times my beautifully excavated bit of pot comes from a second to third century roman storage jar that would have looked like this i said i thought this site was going to be a pretty good one and it hasn't let me down so far we started off with these earth works underneath it it looks as though we found the medieval manor and there could be all these layers underneath tomorrow let's hope we can get at some of that early history day two here at port skewert in south wales where we're trying to work out what all these lumps and bumps are about yesterday we found what we think is a medieval manor right on the top of that hill but this place is called a harold's field so we're hoping we might have harold saxon hunting lodge underneath the medieval manor but it's more complicated than that there's so much history here we could have a welsh royal court under the saxon below that a roman villa below that something prehistoric but what really intrigues me is that we discovered yesterday that in this low ground down here there used to be a creek which flowed into the river seven so once he's sorted himself out stewart's going off off you against my son in order to try and map the creek later on we're gonna put a trench in somewhere around here we've got our work cut out today we've got three trenches underway so far and in matt's trench we've unearthed two buildings which we think were part of a medieval manor house but we don't know how old it is or when it went out of use it looks like we might have something else coming through here you think yeah possibly yeah these big big stones because behind you they're all quite small and rubble aren't they but just cleaning up these it looks like they're quite they're pretty hefty i think we might have our second second wall in the trench phil's trench was put in here to investigate the earthworks at the bottom of the hill yesterday afternoon i excavated this beautiful piece of second to third century roman pot from over there but phil said that this end of the trench where i couldn't see anything at all had got more potential were you right absolutely tony the reason this has got so much more potential is we've got more layers here we've actually got stratigraphy and this is where the crucial part of the trench is going to be you see your piece of second third century pot came from this alluvium down here now the important thing is we've also had pottery from up there medieval pottery dated to 1200. the point is we've got all these layers in between that'll tell us the story often when you two say that there's stratigraphy i can't see anything but i have to say even i can see that you've got one layer down to there then you've got this dark layer here and you've got this mud below it exactly so what we want to know is what is going on in the middle bit and if we can get more bits of pottery we can actually fill that gap in between the romans and the and the period of twelve hundred so part of that gap would be our saxon harald hunting lives well it would but i mean you know let's be a bit cautious because we have hell's own difficulty finding stuff between the roman and the medieval anywhere well that's great isn't it we've got a trench here that's cutting into the hill and allowing us to see the earlier history but mick's telling me that we might not be able to prove that one of these layers is saxon i don't really understand why won't we get any saxon fines well certainly in in terms of of pottery which is you know arc he'll just rely a lot on portrait there just doesn't seem to be any about for right from the end of the roman empire through until norman why what happened to the pots after the romans left well it's a very interesting question and we can give you a very feeble answer it's the end of the market economy the romans had a number of centers where they mass-produced pottery in oxfordshire in uh dorset and so on and those disappear i think a lot of it is due to the fact that they're using wooden vessels we trot away which rot away i mean where you get a a wet a wet uh context that preserves wood the vessel the wooden vessels are there on mass so if we want to find evidence of the time between the romans and the medieval manner what are we likely to get the most satisfying thing we would get is is either some post holes or timber slots or something like that which were demonstrably after the romans and before the norman period probably would be with radiocarbon with something like bone or something that would give us a radiocarbon date that would nicely come out at 900 plus or minus 50. that would be the ideal but you know we're all cynical enough to know that that's that's a long shot well they may be cynical but i'm not giving up on harold yet surely there must be something saxon to find if the hunting lodge was in this field we're certainly checking the fines very carefully steve our pottery expert is examining everything under a microscope and this is the earliest medieval pottery we've found so far so how do you go about identifying a piece of pottery like this well first of all it's cooking pot you can see that there's soot on the outside on the inside from the water from the water the cooking yes they put them in the fire identifying pottery is all about recognizing the shape type of clay and the various extras added to it this has a purple tinge because of the high iron content in the clay and it's typical of pottery made in ham green near bristol sand has been added to the clay as a temper to prevent it from cracking in the fire of the cooking part and that's what we can see up on the screen isn't it these rounded grains and things are obviously obviously sand and what's this great lump it's also sand as well it's it's a quartz grain which is sub angular but these this year which we got really excited because in wales these are generally 12th century this cooking pot could have been brought here as early as 11 50 a.d less than a hundred years after harold built his lodge here and it was found in phil's trench so gradually we're moving in the right direction we're making progress in matt's trench as well it looks like we're starting to get some dating evidence for our manor house yeah what have you got that bit of pop seriously no it's tiles fairly standard medieval tile bit thin for roofing tile isn't it what do you think might be from a half or something like that not floor tile then it's not floor tile it's far too too thin hopefully we'll find more clues but at least it tells us we're dealing with a manor house that was here in the 13th or 14th century thanks to some 21st century wizardry henry's 3d model of the lumps and bumps is helping to show up the extent of the manor house he's illustrates quite well on the top the the rectangular nature of where those big lumps and bumps are where the building is oh yeah clearly you find that he's on henry's mouth i'm really pleased with that that's great it's good isn't it but what it also shows if you can swing it back henry it's starting to pick up various earth works down here there's clearly more going on in this area tell us something about the history of this site so yes it's been really helpful stuart's main challenge today is to find the silted up creek that once connected port skuit to the sea so there's the site just in there and you can see you've got the coast out here with all the mud flats all these lines on here these are medieval strip fields i this wasn't flooded in medieval period because we're able to plow it but there are areas where you can see stream channels and areas that don't have plowing on could this be where you could bring boats up to our site the theory is that there was a tidal creek known locally as a pill running close to our site it may well have looked something like this one which is only a couple of miles away phil's going to help with the search for the lost creek and he's wondering what the harbour port skewer it might have looked like i mean we've got these sort of well modern jetties and and bits and pieces like that would they have had that or would they have just literally let it sink down in the mud it would depend we we have got examples of medieval key size big stone establishments but probably the majority of times people would come into these small pills and there wouldn't be a major facility they'd have a boat that they could bring in on a flood tide and settle on the low tide unload then wait for the next tide to come in and flood and go out on the next tide our environmental archaeologist emma is taking a series of soil samples to locate the creek it's tough going but already she can tell us there is a silted up channel here and it's four meters deep in places we're now also digging a new trench based on emma's work and it's been positioned here to look at what could be the edge of the creek meanwhile phil's making his way out of his tidal creek into the seven estuary and he's learning just how much local knowledge and skill was needed in handling one of the most difficult stretches of water in the country what makes this water so special it's the speed at which the tide comes in and goes out and only sailing boats cannot overcome the speed of the tide the tide runs at up to 10 knots and even more on spring tight and the boat does three to four knots so if you don't get it right the tide will just take over you go down backwards have you made those sorts of mistakes okay three yes i think we all have the wind drops then you're entirely left with the tights back in harold's field we're making real progress unearthing the medieval manor i've been looking around the sides of this hill for most of today because quite frankly the archaeology up here on the top was so complicated i wanted to give the archaeologists time to have a really good look the big news is that matt reckons he's revealed a doorway into one of our medieval buildings that's lovely isn't it store jam coming out there's just come up now making a nice space for the timber door to fit in there we've got a doorway here into one building and we've also uncovered two walls that are clearly part of a separate building and both walls bizarrely have been made without using mortar if you build a good solid stone wall gravity will actually hold it in place for you without having any water yeah with no water until it begins to fall down because then it seems to crash right down the hill gravity assisting in its collapse on top of the air yeah ian's up to his neck in rubble but he's also finding a lot of medieval roof tile underneath this rubble here we've had this layer of roof tiles which i think means that the building was actually didn't fall down it was brought down demolished they took the roof off threw away what they didn't want then they took the walls down and threw down all this rubble on top of the roof it's taking a lot of time but we're slowly making sense of these medieval buildings and up in the helicopter stuart's ready to report to mick he reckons he's worked out where the creek ran up to port skewered the church sits on a little promontory of high grounds well that's the line of the original creek phil's boat at the moment is here and he's looking from water level at what would once have been the entrance point into the creek so literally everything that's forming the shawn now is silted up yes it looks like featureless mudflap but in fact that's changed with the new medieval sea wall coming in and could have been our pill during the early medieval period colin if you were coming into a harbor here what can you can you tell me would it be a favorable place for harbor well yes first of all the tide would have pushed you nearly right up here having bounced off the english stones and then the last little bit with the westerly wind as we have now you would just sail straight in which is exactly what we're doing and if we go very much further we're going to be on the shore we're ready to ready go back well that's great we've located the long lost creek that once connected port skuit with the seven estuary allowing boats to reach here from places like bristol just across in england and the wider world beyond but was the creek still flowing when our manor house stood proudly on this hill the news is that we've got enough pottery now to date these medieval buildings idea because the the pottery is a lot of it's from bristol and it's uh it's a type of pottery which doesn't come in until the second half of the 13th century and goes out in the 14th and how does late 13th century time with history well actually very very well because the one and only reference we have to port stewart after harold's time is here dated 1271 survey of the forest of wentwood and one matthew deneband is resident here in a house at port stewart and he's got three privileges house boot the right to cut timber to build houses hey boot the right to cut timber to build fences and fire boot the right to cut certain types of timber for his house fire well now we really are getting somewhere we've got a 13th century manor house and the name of someone who lived here at the time we also know it was pulled down in the 14th century well before the creek dried up in our trench here at the bottom of the hill much of the day has been spent investigating this ditch which we can now confirm also belongs to the medieval manor but it's meant that we haven't had time to investigate the layers phil pointed out to me this morning with roman pottery at the bottom and medieval at the top we could have a layer of saxon history in the middle i've been promised we'll definitely find out tomorrow day three here in port skewett in south wales and our last chance to find evidence of harold's saxon hunting lodge thought to have been in this field what we've learned so far is that many of the big lumps and bumps here belong to a 13th century manor house which is causing a lot of excitement at the moment there's all this work stone coming and we found this lovely work bit there so we took that out i think it's rubble and underneath another one the same and another one the same all stacked up what about that as well oh oh yeah there's two more there look well that that's that's that's fantastic that's the side of a doorway i would have thought oh door the door jamb well yes and you've presumably got a stack of them these stones were part of the door slowly we're starting to build up a picture of what these buildings look like can you see it oh yes yes so i guess maybe those or similar stones would have been out would have been on that would make sense because that's the doorway there and you're coming into something this way yeah and if you're coming into something then presumably this earthwork and this parched grass is is the inside of it oh i just wonder if this isn't the tower the field's named after [Music] well away from the medieval rubble we're going to have one last stab at finding some earlier structures on this hill our last trench is going in here if we're lucky this bit of the field might not have been built on in medieval times and we might come straight down on some saxon evidence that's nice and nice evil isn't it that is medieval that's very nice all right 13th century i think still early then yeah there's so much good archaeology here but phil will be happy whatever we find but personally i'll be disappointed if we can't find anything to prove the saxons were at least here in 1065 a.d i'm told my best chance is in this trench [Music] here we've exposed a series of layers in the slope of the hill that could allow us to get at any sacks and evidence if it's here oh so how are you getting on then tracy that's looking interesting yeah it's not what we expected we were peeling off this redeposited clays forming the terrace yeah to find the earlier ground surface and is it coming off easily at that level it is it's just peeling off of this that is definitely the level then it we didn't expect was this yellow degraded sandstone the top layers which have now been removed dated to 1200 a.d they were put down to create a terrace on the side of this hill and it looks like similar terracing has been going on in much earlier times could this be evidence of activity here in the saxon period mick tells me it's rare to find saxon pottery but we have to hope for some dating evidence as tracy carefully unpicks these layers a worn coin of harold [Laughter] thankfully i'm not the only one who's optimistic about finding some trace of the last great king of the saxons our historian sam is backing me all the way oh absolutely and looking at the historical context here i'm sure he was here i'm just waiting for the archaeologist to prove it yeah exactly it's not our thoughts they're a bit slow victor's got him hunting is that just because he built a hunting lodge or did he really like hunting oh he i doubt he liked hunting it was all part of the territory of being a great warrior and a war leader because it was such great training for mobility over land lines of approach all this sort of thing that's why it's always associated with with warriorship and rulership what we all remember about 1066 is him losing the battle of hastings but in fact after he became king at the beginning of 1066 he started off being really successful militarily didn't oh he did very well one of the greatest victories of all time over an invader was the battle of stamford bridge where he defeated the vikings exactly harold hardrada and it was it was an all-time success but of course overshadowed by the dramatic events of only a couple of weeks later uh down at hastings and he nearly won at hastings oh it was such a close run thing it was like a last minute goal really but if it hadn't been for that stupid arrow in the eye harold could well have won and would be now as famous as queen elizabeth or henry viii yes it would have been the beginning of a great line and he just looked up at the wrong moment one thing we have found that was here in harold's time is the old river creek that allowed boats to reach here from the sea emma's soil survey has shown us that it was at least four meters deep and likely to be just as wide this trench put into test emma's results found this edge of the creek emma's now working here trying to find the end of the creek but i'm a bit confused stewards told me there was a huge pool of spring water in this area held back by this causeway that acted like a dam or haven't i got that right that's absolutely right but we think that causeway going across there is a late much later than the saxon period well into the medieval period but before that the creek came up through here so take that away yeah the creek came up here and what you've got is this the land rises up where you get to to where the the fence is over there yeah and this area here looks be to be where that creek comes through and joins the land so asked emma i should do some old green to see what she could find and what you got i found some sand tony and there we go yeah that's exactly what that's beach that's beach sand so this is the place at which the water will come up to where you would bring boats up to drop them on the beach settlement growing around around the head of that that's exactly what you've got this is absolutely brilliant stuff that emma's done here rediscovering the tidal creek has allowed henry to create a 3d model to show the approach to port skewers in saxon times right what you're actually seeing here is the 1940s aerial photograph over the top the topography but what the work that emma's been doing is something about what student's been doing has shown is just how wide this area of wetland with creeks running through it would have been running right up to our site here you'd have been able to bring a vessel up this creek up here right into the landing spot there in the in the saxon there's no doubt about that at all it's fantastic but then so is the news from this trench because a few minutes ago tracy turned up guess what two bits of pottery from one of the lower layers of the trench could they be saxon he's just said to me that he's been cautious but excited and we've got all these these books here of stuff called chepstow wear and lots of little fragments of pottery why are you excited because the fabrics are so distinctive really under the microscope there's limestone angular limestone there's quartz but that fabric with the quartz with the vertical rim is identical to the to this one in chepstown okay so we've found something that is like something that's been found in chess gemstone what's the significance of it well it's the dating and what is that dating late 11th early 12th century this is great late 11th century when you say late 11th century could it actually be before 1066. i wouldn't have thought so but it's it's almost certainly norman anyway it's a rare find unfortunately the wrong side of the conquest but it means the layer it came from dates to the late 100s and trace is still digging down into what could be earlier layers the news from the trench we opened this morning by the way is that we didn't find anything saxon just a couple of ditches dating to the 12th century but that may not matter now because this trench continues to surprise us all oh hello hey ah indeed it looks like we've got another bit of potential saxon pottery it's back to the microscope i have to say i never thought i'd be so interested in a few scrappy old bits of pot and sam in the excitement has turned into a geologist it's it's it's olympic limestone tempered what's an english eggs little eggs um made of eggs dinos tiny lots of tiny tiny little eggs from ancient tropical oceans that form these limestone uh geological layers the the cotswolds see that that's a void that's that's a very distinctive oh yeah yeah yeah so that might may well have been where there was a newer lift oh there there are lights there i don't i don't know you definitely would say that would you oh yeah but but you see the saxon and the norman havou lights i mean we don't see that saxon pottery in wales so this is one of two types this is either olytic limestone pottery from the late saxon or if it's another type it's early norman yeah without the eggs yeah but we don't know which yet no excitement but they made the inclusions may be too leashed for me to say you know you need alan vince on this let's hope the inclusions aren't too leeched if you visit our website you can find out more about harold and probably more than you'd want to know about saxon pottery but right now we're running out of time the villagers who invited us here are turning up to see what we've been able to discover about harold's field and in matt's trench we're nearly ready to tell them we're down deep enough to find the floor of this building oh at last excellent what is it what do they make that's stone yeah it's a sandstone these are harder limestone yeah strengthening it doesn't seem to be seems to be lower than the bottom of the wall there doesn't it this is so typical of you mick aston we're all working away in the freezing wind over in the field and you're sloping off to the church we're working away on the church rick reckons we can tell the villagers when the manor house was built this church dates to the early 1100s and he's noticed it's got similar stonework to this bit which he's lugged across from matt's trench well i mean i would suggest that you could put it almost yeah exactly into that doorway it's the same type of stone even doesn't it same block size yeah same detailing the windows have been added in the early 1200s and they too are a match for some of our dressed stones suggesting that our manor house was altered at the same time so that one yeah we're comparing with this one yeah so we can by comparison with this window suggests that perhaps in the early 13th century there's a significant alteration to that great tower that matt's working so mick what do you think is the relationship between this church and what we've got over there i think it's it's a very direct relationship we should see all over the country which is the manor house has the church next to it and that's usually because they start out as the private property of the people in the manor house it's only later they get dragged away and become the parish church the church and manor house were probably built by the same stone masons but can we now say which bits of the manor house we've been digging up i think what we're looking at here is the doorway into a 12th century tower i mean it's magnificent inside you've got the floor and then you go out through the doorway over the threshold that's that big stone down there that's that big slab there and then you're outside the building yeah and then our trench turns right and goes down the hill and what the trench has done is cut through a range of buildings along that side which are later 13th century and i think probably are likely to be a stable block they've got a central sort of walkway going through we've got no later 13th century pottery from there anyway have we so it's not domestic no i don't think it is so we know these big earth works sketched long ago in harold's field are not the remains of harold saxon hunting tower and we can now reveal to the villagers what was under the lumps and bumps the main building we unearthed was a norman fortified tower house likely to have been three stories high next to it there was a stable block and these earthworks are likely to be a courtyard with ancillary buildings set around it encircling the hill was this deep ditch and the impressive route inn was across this causeway with the creek on one side and a large lake of spring water on the other this was the home of the local lord but not the centre of power as it was in harald's day because in norman times their base was at chepstow castle down the road but what i hoped for was something to link this field with harold did we get any pre-conquest pottery we've got some of the earliest medieval party ever found in wales really it's very exciting but is any of it proof that the saxons were here we've just got a fragment out now it could well be you know pre-norman almost certainly but which fits that it's a very small piece there it's not too fanciful then to say that this could be from the time of king harold no not at all because we know it's that much earlier in the sequence well it's not much but finding this from a time when there simply wasn't much pottery feels like discovering the holy grail this is chaff tempered wear and it's saxon i can hardly believe it we can tell the locals that we found evidence of activity here just before the norman conquest and for me it's proof enough that harold was here our historian sam is convinced that harold would have built his hunting lodge on this important hill intending it to stand out as a symbol of new power to anyone arriving in the creek below so basically what we've discovered is that this is a really classy place and if you didn't know it already you're really posh people to live thanks [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 385,188

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, Wales, King Harold, Saxon period, Cadw

Id: syiVXUf911A

Length: 47min 10sec (2830 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021