In Search of Henry V's Flagship, Grace Dieu (Bursledon) | S12E6 | Time Team

[Music] under these murky waters on the river handball lies some remains of a medieval ship but this isn't just any old ship we're hoping this is the grass deer henry v huge flagship in fact it was so big that no bigger boat was built for another 200 years but amazingly she only ever had one voyage and after henry v's death she was just abandoned and left to rot so was she too big to sail was she a failure and how much of her lies under here we've got just three days to find out [Music] on a bitterly cold night in january 1439 the grass deer was lying silently at anchor surrounded by three smaller royal ships the story goes that this huge royal battleship was struck by lightning and burnt to the water strangely enough the other ships weren't damaged nearly 600 years later the skeleton of a huge ship is still visible on the bottom of the river john adams who was one of the leading archaeologists on the mary rose has no doubt this is the grass deer so how are you going to prove it we're going to put a trench over the stern and look at a part of the structure that we think most information is going to come from in the time available to us on a practical note how the hell are we going to get the dura out well we're going to excavate essentially just as you do on land with trowels paintbrushes etc but we'll suck the spoil away with a water suction dredge and that has the effect of keeping the visibility a little bit clearer francis you're musing i am tony i mean how did they get such a socking great ship up this little river and then get it lodged in the mud well they cut what we call a mud berth and that would have been a big trench into the side of the riverbank probably cut at a very low spring tide and that would have allowed them to get another 20 meters into the back and so that it would have still allowed traffic to carry on past phil you've got a luxury on this one you don't have to wait for geophys to finish before you start digging but i also don't have a big yellow digger do i we could drive with it [Laughter] henry v was the most powerful king in europe after defeating the french at the battle of agincourt in 1415 in just one day the english wiped out most of the french nobility even though agincourt was the last great land battle of the hundred years war the french and their powerful allies the genoese posed a continual threat on the seas with their huge warships called carracks henry v kept his royal navy here in the hamble river unlike southampton which had been raided several times by the genoese the hamble was a safe anchorage protected from the invaders by a chain across the river mouth three miles upriver lies the ancient port of berseldon and a mile past bursalton four royal ships including the grass deer were laid up in specially dug mud births john has been talking about this wreck as though he knows it's the grass deer but we don't know that do we oh yes we do how well we've got a great deal of documentary evidence which makes it quite quite clear why when it was built how much it cost and who built it but susan that just says that there was once a boat called the grass deer not that this is it ah but one of the documents tells us that it was brought up the river here anchored in the river for some years and then eventually beached on the mud flats over there well okay susan so it did sink here at some time okay it was beast here at some time but that doesn't mean that what he's found is it it could be another medieval boat no no no he couldn't could it john it's too big to be anything else there is 40 meters from stem to stern of the structure in the mud and we know that that's not all because the original ship would have been much much bigger so the dimensions people have come up with are anything up to 200 feet or more in fact 60 meters long by about 15 meters wide 50 feet wide that is a hell of a size i mean 200 feet long 50 foot wide to me that seems too big i mean looking at the plans that were made in the 80s of just what they could see on the surface then it's very difficult to stretch them to fit those dimensions i think somewhere beneath that perhaps um i don't know 40 meters 45 meters long so 40 feet wide something like that rather smaller but still absolutely enormous are you saying this isn't the grass jeweler are you just saying that they lied about the size i'm just saying we you know the historical way of deriving the size is different to the archaeological way the archaeological way is to go out there and measure it the historical way is to follow the documents which are difficult to understand so we are looking for an enormous ship she carried a fighting force of at least 200 men and we think a forward castle or foxl was 50 feet above the water line that's three times the height of a double decker bus but as our experts can't agree about most of the other dimensions one of our targets is to define her actual size but why did they build her so big it would have to be larger than the largest ship the enemies could of of england could throw against it and those were the genoese carricks the big mediterranean sailing vessels of the allies of the french and the grassyear is is about three times as large as the largest carrack [Music] our first job is to get the geophys underway and here we're using the latest deep sea sonar technology depending on how much of the hull is left in the mud this might tell us how long this ship was but this system has never been used in such shallow water before what sort of depth do you normally work at we normally work in about 10 to 20 meters of water but most of my colleagues think that is ridiculously shallow let alone this see i mean how does this actually work how is it that this thing can pick up wood how does it work well basically um if you sort of tend to sound source down to the sea bet the physical property change between the water column and the actual sediments is pretty significant you get an echo back from it and what we've found out is there are also big physical differences between the wood and the sediment so we also get an echo from that so hopefully we'll get echo both from the sea bed and maybe wood bury beneath it and you should actually get a 3d image of the boat well that's what we would hope to do anyway this is the first time that this wreck has been excavated by divers once the diving begins two of them including john will be working flat out for hours on end but before anyone can get in the water there's a huge amount of preparation to do these safety checks are essential but they're swallowing up our valuable time function checks completed all working correctly one two three five four three two one without be clear we think that at least 17 ships of henry v royal navy were maintained and overhauled at burzeldon a mile towards the sea from our site stewart would like to know more about this busy village in the time of henry v with so much royal business burzeldon docks must have been a focal point for trade if steward can locate the medieval shoreline then he can begin to piece together the layout of the ancient port the tides in the river churn up all sorts of silt and weed and the underwater visibility is very poor so john has designed a special enclosure this paddling pool looking device is called the sea curtain once anchored over the trench the sides can be let down and secured to form a tank the water inside can then be pumped out through a filter and returned into the enclosure clear of silt [Music] well that's the theory but it's already taken half the day just to inflate it and get it in the water it's just after lunch and the tide is slowing down john's getting ready to dive each diver has a companion on standby in case there's a problem contents gauge carabiner suit inflation you okay get over in the water please but there's little point in phil and i taking the place of the two working divers until the visibility is far better and they've started to uncover the wreck surface [Music] john has chosen to dig across the stern of the ship in a trench about 2 by 2.5 metres the depth of water at the moment is only 2 meters but the tide's still running the visibility is extremely poor and there's a huge amount to get ready before the serious archaeology can begin john's still positioning the anchors for the seeker i was rushing around like crazy to just after lunch and now everything's just gone that's really frustrating but why well nothing's happening look at this thing it took them hours to blow this up and it's just been sitting in the water forever no i mean i i disagree with you i mean i know it's disappointing i want to go and see this boat don't get me wrong it looks like at least i've got my feet in the water um but i mean look this is a difficult exercise a lot of it is experimental that has never been tried before so i mean we've got to get it out there we've got to test it and we can't run it until we've done all this the first people to investigate the wreck were the victorians who thought the grass deer was a huge viking ship because her hull was clinker built this was an ancient technique using horizontal overlapping boards still used today in small boats the rec diggers noticed the old ship's hull was made up of not one but three planks of oak fastened together with huge ships nails nothing like this had ever been seen before and not surprisingly archaeologists since have been asking questions to understand just how this royal ship was built and the problems the medieval shipwrights faced with a ship of this size damien is going to reproduce a very small section of this extraordinarily complicated hull tell them what'd it take to make a plank like this do you reckon if you knew what you were doing and doing it all the time no i'm suggesting you don't know what you're doing but you know you know what i mean it's a little bit cheeky but um i was just trying to get an idea of how fast work was likely to progress uh well if they knew what they were doing small ones like this um they would make i don't know 10 or 20 a day if they really if they had very good straight pieces which this is reasonably straight and regular and nice and fresh so they'd make a hell of a lot um if the the material wasn't as good it would take longer john's finally got the site prepared he's had problems sighting the anchors for the sea curtain and he's been marking out the trench underwater on the surface phil has been waiting patiently for his instructions phil can you hold it there and then i'll come and get it you'll come and get it we're so nearly ready to go but no end of optimism will make up for the fact that we've probably lost a whole day just getting the site ready there's the total with the kings donation added in as well so you've got four thousand pounds here carrenza is looking at the quantity of materials and manpower used to build the grass deer and the time they took to construct her which is the original which has what's that well it's a kind of summary of all the accounts from the building of the grass there and all the other there are no diagrams or ship rights plans but there are copies of some of the 15th century commissioning documents and accounts so there's a huge amount of detail in this and there's various other documents that people have gone through and the realization of what it took to build an enormous royal ship is beginning to dawn the scale of it is just kind of unbelievable by the end of our first day at least a picture of this huge ship is beginning to emerge from the history and the first glimpses are even beginning to appear from under the silt okay one and johnny you're well yeah i've been well diver well roger that could you see much down there quite a bit actually like what i could see about a meter and a half and by the time we finished we cleared off about two meters of the ship structure so you could clearly see the black timber against the seabed but we are a long way behind aren't we it's been such a frustrating day well these things always take a bit longer than expected but no i think we've done quite well really we've got the trench in the right place uh the enclosure's moored down the boat moorings are all set so we could carry on to a night shift but you're so cool and so relaxed now tell you they're all champing at the bit out there are we gonna get to see this wreck we'll find out tomorrow it's the beginning of day two on our excavation of henry v huge flagship lying here on the bottom of the hamble river yesterday was so frustrating not being able to see anything having to wait for the site to be prepared but this morning conditions are far better low tide's about two hours away and that means optimum visibility the sea curtain can also be anchored down soon so shortly they can begin to exchange and clean the water happily the dredge used for sucking away the mud and silt is working perfectly and inch by inch the ship's hull is coming to light for the first time in over 500 years with susan and john's help ray san is working on a 3d picture of how the grass deer might have looked for the first time we can see how overpowering this 15th century battleship might have been and what a huge advantage it could have provided for henry v over his enemies building a clinker vessel of this size was very complicated rather than building the frame first they started by forming the ship's hull with layer upon layer of triple boards and when it was complete they fitted the frame inside the clinker boards were clenched together with huge iron nails and washers called roves and the hull was then fixed to the frames using tree nails long wooden pegs that were driven through both the boards and the frames and wedged at each end to join the boards end to end the ship rights cut over lapping scarf joints we don't know if these joints were staggered or how long the boards were to the modern eye this appears to be a really cumbersome way to build a ship and why did the medieval shipwrights use this triple clinker construction in the first place to find out more damien is looking at some of the timbers that were salvaged from the grass tour in victorian times and which are now kept in winchester museum what's it telling you it's telling us a lot about the tools the shipwrights use you can actually see a fine detail of tool marks in this scarf joint here where the board's joined end to end where and even the little places where the nicks and the blade sharpest ridges on the surface of the timber that is just superb preservation and what are these things here uh these are the the iron washers for the end of the bolts or rove nails that held the ship together on the inside we can see traces of tar and for me one of the most interesting things is we can see how relatively rough the finish was i mean this is a royal ship but they were building her fast and they weren't obsessed about the finish by any means i mean this is really quite rough what's going on here well this is part of a frame timber i mean you it's it's again fantastically well preserved you can see shipwright's marks you can see what is that damian is that a sort of the carpenter's mark to show it was his bit of timber he needed to be paid for or is it a sort of kit number of how to put the building the ship together um it's probably got most to do with how the frame timber fitted in the ship the shell of the planking was built first frames put in afterwards you can also see some pretty crude work yeah what is this well these crude scallops are to fit over the heads of the bolts and uh they're cut pretty crudely and very deep so they again they're going bang bang bang chop chop chop chop the clock is ticking you know this is speedy work and damon is this going to help you actually try and reconstruct how it was put together it is i mean i'm already beginning to realize that we've been we've been wasting our time making the boards as smooth as we have on our section we're building and you know this i mean it's just fantastic it's just the beginning of understanding i can't i can't say what it's telling us he's always so taciturn it's really nice to see him excited oh no this is i mean i've been a student of medieval shipbuilding for several years and this is just just fantastic material the tide's beginning to slow down now and that means optimum visibility john you're wet i'm wet i had what they call a wet dip phil's been put on standby and he's really excited is it alright we're nice and productive now and and how's the skirt doing well the tide's still too high for that to be operating that's still about a meter above the seabed so we're just operating down on the seabed below that at the moment but is is the excavation going up to according to plan is it is just it's plain sailing now is it gone down this much already yeah yeah yeah so what's the plan why aren't you still in there i've just come up to change hats and then you're going back then i have permission denied [Laughter] in 1420 five years after the battle of agincourt the grass deer was finished and ready for sea she was the biggest most prestigious warship that had ever been built and probably amongst the first royal ships to carry guns were the europeans impressed by it oh yes i mean this is one of the nicest things about the grass yeah the florentines used to come to southampton every year with galleys to trade and sopa who's the guy in charge of the royal ships was also a merchant so he met up with his contact and took him to dinner on the um the gracious when it was in southampton and this guy wrote it all down in his diary and then he says it was the most beautiful ship i ever seen well that was real praise from a from a florentine she set sail in july 1420 on her maiden voyage from southampton to the isle of wight presumably the sailors who worked on it must have been terribly proud that they were on this great ship well you'd like to think so but have a look at this this is an account of the master of when they were going on the only expedition that the grass gear went on muster is just like making a list of them so you know who to pay that's right a roll call in effect and if if you look here this tells us that how the quarter master of the grass joe's william duke of dartmouth of the grass deer he threw the muster roll into the sea when they asked him for it the crew were underpaid the weather was appalling some of them who weren't used to handling such a large ship just wanted to chuck it in and they insisted on being put ashore on centellins in the isle of wight and then they things got even worse after that they attacked one of the servants of the guys taking the muster and tore his clothes and it says he they used were bees contaminants otherwise they swore at him you know i find this so refreshing when we're doing archaeology we're always going oh what a great imposing structure look at the size of this boat but actually there were ordinary people on it who were really hacked off absolutely they wanted to go home they wanted to go home i mean brother was clearly dreadful they may have been afraid that this vessel was not seaworthy though there is no evidence whatsoever for that so after only one wretched voyage the grass dear was anchored in the mouth of the hamble to deter enemy raiders eventually she was birthed upriver and her masts and rigging taken away she was never to see the open water again they had ship keepers on these ships like caretakers and we know in fact that the superintendent ship keeper was jordan browning who was a very experienced royal shipmaster he'd been master of the holy ghost he was a southampton man a local man he superintended the building of a little royal ship down the river at basildon called the little jesus well stuart's our man on the spot if he can work out where the medieval village was then the boatyard could be somewhere there in the main all functioning correctly ready to hack the diver you happy phil i am overjoyed i can't tell you how long i've waited for this good it's mid-afternoon on day two and phil's moment has finally come you happy i am absolutely happy too ready to enter the water but there's a problem john hasn't been able to secure the sea curtain to the river bed properly and the water exchange isn't working so phil's going to have to take a chance with the visibility tony to phil can you hear me what's it like down there can you see anything of the boat at the moment i'm attempting to fight to find it i feel i'm gonna follow john he said follow me and i'm gonna stick it to him like whoa there he is you've got to bear with me because i cannot see a single thing the i cannot see a thing the visibility is literally oh it can't be no more than a foot baby i cannot see the boat but i know it's here now he's guiding my hand oh my god this is like a radio program not television what can you feel there it is now that makes sense and that is questionably disgraced damian's ready to put together his section of the triple boarded hull he's just waiting on some nails he's ordered from local blacksmith colin phillips oh hi oh my god they're enormous frighteningly big unbelievable and someone was telling me that you'd actually weighed these and what sort of weight is that one pound and that eight and a half ounces it's unbelievable there's a huge amount of iron and these are the rows brilliant i mean these are incredible these are just so much bigger than the the examples that we normally deal with i mean they're twice the size basically now the job will be to see if we can actually cut these and rivet them because they are so massive okay thank you all right then less than 20 years after her maiden voyage from southampton the grass duo was struck by lightning in her mud birth and burnt to the waterline ten men spent over three months salvaging eight tons of precious iron from her hull presumably on the orders of her masters in berlin stuart i bet you were a train spotter when you were a kid absolutely not come on with that little thermos listen over the other side they were saying that there was this guy called jordan browning who was the caretaker of the grass deer once it had been laid up and he actually made ships just around here what would this place have been like at that time well then in the 15th century well it wouldn't be as genteel as it is now there certainly won't be a railway line here but the present foreshore of the river that's very much where it would have been at that period and the water line would have come through here to the edge of that car part there yeah yeah run along to the edge of the car park over here to where the road is yeah and then swept back out to there it's like a huge creek all this would have been creeks mud flats that sort of thing do we reckon that jordan browning's boatyard could have been around here then well the one thing i'm reasonably certain of is that the the focus of settlement at that period would have been in this area the church is up on the top of the hill there at the end of this creek and that's been that's where they'd expect the boat building to start from in that period this would have been an industrial community boat yards here hammering carts being brought backwards and forwards that sort of thing lots of smoke lots of activity do you want to get the number of that train so jordan browning's boatyard could have been there [Music] so most of the boat building for sure of medieval berseldon appears to be under the railway line tomorrow stuart's going to pinpoint the creek between the foreshore and the church with francis who can open some test pits john and his team have been diving for eight hours now and are making really good progress even in the poorest visibility because this is this is almost vertical because the stands about here the other side is just about here it's not far away these are really tough conditions even for the most experienced divers [Music] it's the end of the day and we're waiting for phil so we've retreated to the pub reading and ran out of stuff to do but phil is the bearer of bad news the sea curtain is a non-starter after two days john's decided to abandon it all together it's just not working i mean we did spend a hell of a lot of time putting it in if we hadn't and and installing it if we if we'd ignored it if we'd gone in without it we could have been diving you know by lunchtime today yeah but but you know on the other side you know i mean it i mean okay it doesn't come as a great surprise to me but i mean the main thing is i've actually been doing it don't let's be too glum we may not have seen the grassy earth i've seen you have not seen it i have seen it's a bit that far away but i have seen you you saw it like a short-sighted mole i saw it as i live and breathe i saw it tomorrow let's hope that we can see it a little bit clearer and tomorrow i'm gonna get down and have a look at it all right beginning of day three in our search for henry v flagship and yesterday was so frustrating phil managed to dive the wreck eventually but the visibility was so bad he couldn't see anything he could just feel it and we had been proposing to put that orange sea curtain around it and pump it full of cleaned water to improve the visibility but it wasn't the greatest experiment in the history of diving was it archaeology is all about interpretation tony and i think it worked brilliantly actually we now have a working system and i now know that that device will work really well in another situation so it was a great experiment it's just that we can't use it here well in three days it's just too much of a rush to get it deployed so are we going to be able to dive the wreck today in in circumstances if you come in when the water's moving just gently enough to take away the sediment then you'll see what i see now we've been making great progress show me what you have soon okay well we opened up a trench across the stern of the vessel and we've got a series of frame timbers coming up almost vertically with the outer planking still attached but what's rather nice about it is that we can actually see part of the construction sequence these are the scarfed ends the tapering ends of the planks and this is one of the things that we've been wanting to find out actually how long these planks are so we can now follow those and find the joints at the other end what's this well this is to give you an impression of the three-dimensional setup of the structure that we've got here are the frames coming up massive things and this is the this is the planking still in position stepping down sort of clinker fashion down into the seabed are we going to be able to get on any faster than we did yesterday faster you can't make me work any faster than i did yesterday we've been champing at the bit and all the time he's so easy so relaxed i hope you're all right let's have this conversation at six o'clock tonight yes yes yeah that's fine phil and i haven't seen any of this underwater yet john's trench is two meters from where the ship's rudder would have been he's seeing both sides of the ship's hull with the triple thickness planking tapering down to the stern post the frame timbers here look as if they're 40 by 50 centimeters thick which are far bigger than he'd expected and john thinks there could be anything from a meter and a half to two meters of the hull still under the mud justin dicks has been processing his sonar geophysics results at the southampton oceanography center it's really exciting fool even in this very shallow water we've got a really good image this along here is the actual seabed and we can actually sort of add that on there and then what we've got is a really strong anomaly really sort of yellow and red colours here very very strong reflections that is a cross section through the ground and that's actually cutting a slice through the actual grass juror and in fact the reflections are so strong we get nothing no sound being reflected back beneath whereas on either side where it's just a sort of muddy sediment we get sort of horizontal layers sort of some basic layering within it so we're fairly confident that's the actual hull so from a series of these cross sections you can put it together and actually build up the shape of the hole well that's what we've been trying to do over the weekend if we go into this screen here what we've done is we've effectively picked the seabed surface so we can actually sort of have a sense of what the seabed's like but if we go underneath here and we start to add the actual horizons we can start to pick out the actual hull section and if we then rotate around you can start to see a sense of that whole form that's right here here's the actual width of the hole and you see it's tapering back towards the sternum that's right how much of the ship have you got there we've got about two-thirds of the vessel here at this time i mean normally we would survey for a number of days and process for several weeks so over a weekend we're pretty pleased with this you're pretty chuffed about this i'm over the moon so here it is a huge section of the royal flagship still under the mud if justin can do some more work we should be able to calculate the size and shape of the ship damian was expecting to build a larger section of the triple clinker hull but he proved that it's a slow messy business sandwiching in the tar and moss that they used to waterproof this ship now he's got to fit it all together okay do you want to tap those in just gently how many of those nails do you reckon would have gone into this boat now's this side we can't say exactly because we don't know how deep she was but thousands we're talking about thousands so i mean it's a huge amount of iron these are not bedding down very well are they i'm wondering whether we need to cut a bit of a recess for that you got to whip them out again so well this is learning i mean this is learning by doing and we're learning the hard way damien is not amused it's all got to come apart again you know two steps forward one step back at the moment but we're learning are you happy after yesterday's peace super phil's hoping he'll see something today okay happy okay off to go diver two this is much more like it the visibility is so much better here are the massive frames john's so excited about and the side of the ship which is dropping away to the right there's a huge tree nail which looks as fresh as the day it was driven in and a scarf joint one of the main tasks today is to establish the length of the boards that form the clinker hull colin mcewen who's diving with phil at the moment is measuring one of the hull planks could you just give me a measurement from the scarf joint at the end that's free back to the farthest point away that you can get okay [Music] this is a new discovery everyone thought the ship had been built using boards no longer than two meters stuart has been searching for medieval berseldon yesterday he found the outline of a dried-up creek below the church which he sure is the center of the ancient village today he's identified a building on the 19th century tithe map near the water's edge is this this building just here number three now if there's a storehouse there in 1839 and it's at the end of this feature which is the foreshore that would imply it's up on dry ground i would definitely on on good land there so it might be the sort of area that has a continuity of tradition that have been used for storage and so on that might be a good place to examine francis has got two test pits on the go in this back garden he's looking for the storehouse the other he's put in just along the street to see if there's any evidence of the medieval shipbuilding on stewart's projected shoreline in 1422 henry v died just two years after the grass stewart's maiden voyage she cost a massive 4 000 pounds to build you could have probably put up a fine cathedral for that at the time and robert byrd the clerk of works of the ship who'd lent the king some of the money to build her didn't do very well out of it so did he actually manage to get his money back and make a profit on building the grass there very unlikely i mean here you've got the total amount received and then down here you've got the total expended and in fact it says rather sort of laconically he should have more 65 pounds 12 shillings and eight prince hatefully so he made a loss he made a loss on this case not a very big one but still a loss and his chances of getting this back were pretty slim even though it's written down the extraction yes yes tony comes check one two three four five yeah i can hear you fine roger that loud and clear [Music] you happy driver 2 ready for the walter roger that get the diver in the water please i don't think i've ever been on a time team where it's taken me two and a half days before i get to see the archaeology reports well but now the moment has come as i get closer i'm trying to imagine all those medieval shipwrights putting her together why those mutinous sailors abandoned her maybe she wasn't struck by lightning perhaps they set fire to her on purpose to get all that precious iron out i feel the tony can you hear me i press that down feel the tony can you hear me phil's absolutely right you can't possibly tell how big she is until you get down here now i can see for myself the massive frame timbers with the side of the ship disappearing away the ballast i assume as there's no other reason for flints to be in here and until you see how close together these enormous timbers are that step down towards the stern you can't appreciate the scale of this ship archaeologically john's made great progress this weekend and he's made yet another discovery the surprise this morning was when we followed the frames back north to the other side of the ship and it appears to me is that we have a series of truly massive um crooked grown floor timbers sort of big y-shaped timbers uh standing on the keel that sounds extremely plausible to me it's like some late 17th century ships these big wide shades that's really interesting information yeah i i hardly dare say this but this does look to me very similar to those grown flocked timbers at the bow of the merry rose over uh yes i'm not surprised uh that would be i think the most likely option you know within the sort of medieval mindset the crooked timbers at the stern of the grass dure which john has just discovered were cut from trees specially picked by the shipwrights the shape of the timber gave the ship's frame far greater strength in one piece than if separate timbers were joined together at the keel [Music] this is the first time john's ever seen anything as enormous as this damien's run out of time his experiment isn't finished but the process has revealed some surprising insights into medieval shipbuilding on this scale we've learned things like that these absolutely massive nails which are basically four times the size of your average medieval ship now just can't be worked the same way that the smaller nails can be i think they may well have actually got blacksmiths to cut them individually off the ship before they use them because cutting them off the ships a lot quicker and then chase these in and then they might they might recess them in where they had to if if the nails were square they wouldn't need to do that given the historical evidence we've got damien for the sheer quantity of materials involved in building this ship and how big it was how tough do you think it would have been working on it everything about the ship the size of it the laminations the nails the the weight of everything that loads of tar and moss everywhere it's complicated it's difficult um i don't think it would have been a popular ship to work on myself so perhaps they'd have started off thinking they could just scale up and it became more difficult the minute they started trying to do it i think all the shipwrights were schooled in in a simpler tradition which ultimately goes right back to the iron age and um they were struggling in new circumstances having to build enormously bigger ships cannons were coming in oceanic voyages and so on and really the technology wasn't up to that i you know my my view is that it's really a bit of a technological dead end the grass deer heralded the end of the great clinker ships by the time henry viii launched the mary rose nearly 100 years later the old clinker technology had given way to a radically different carvel design using parallel boards fixed edge to edge onto a rigid frame this morning francis and stuart started to look for the medieval shoreline in berseldon one of their targets was the remains of a storehouse near the old dried up creek francis i reckon this must be the most impressive rhubarb plant in england i hope your archaeology is exciting well actually it is tony this is the storehouse we've gone down and we've hit lots of rocks and i think these are footings for walls or something like that we don't know what date they are but next door right dug a little hole and came up with this now that makes me very excited it's a bit of pottery dated about 14.50 so that is right on the money for the grass deer and then we've also found in that trench a large headed nail that could be something to do with ships but we don't know for sure yet what does it tell us well what it tells us is is what bursal denied in the late 15th century berlin seems to be i mean i think we're writing our original assumptions between there and just beyond the main road which exists today so that's the bezel done of the 16th century with the creek out in front of it so if stewart's right this dried up creek just by the church could have been at the heart of medieval berseldon and the center of a royal shipbuilding business which would grow and diversify for centuries to come or at least until the railways came along carrenza has discovered that the practicalities of building the grass dure were astounding it's a remarkable testament to the courage and ambition of those medieval shipwrights i mean what's really struck me is the sheer quantities of everything that was required to build it i mean there's thousands of gallons of tar and pitcher needed to waterproof it 38 tons of rope for the sails never mind anything else for the sails there's 23 tons of iron required to make 52 000 pounds of nails that's just the nails on the ship and that's without the acres of timber that you need to hold together are unbelievable aren't they 735 oak trees 1145 beech trees now at a ton and a half per tree you know that's over six and a half thousand tons of wood just moving that around must have been phenomenal that doesn't include all the timber that came from abroad you're absolutely right i mean some of it came from the baltic you've got in um wade's cup boards and you've got regals which are timber from riga and you've got prussian deal which gains all from the baltic coming into the east coast ports here and then there's a fitting out the the anchors it's got 24 anchors and the largest one is 17 feet high that anchor was had a name it was called tinktor and it survives in royal accounts right up to the time of henry vii over the three days we've discovered a lot more about the grass gear from the sonar geophysics we think that she measured about 120 feet long at the keel and when you take into account the overhanging bow and stern she was probably longer than 200 feet [Music] and there's no doubt that she was very broad over 50 feet at the widest point john's discovered a lot of new technical information from the length of the hull planking to the sizes and arrangement of the stern timbers [Music] as a ship we can't say if she was a success or a failure because through no fault of her own the grass dure was a battleship without a war there's no doubt that if she'd gone out in anger she could have overpowered her enemies but would she have lasted the ravages of the wind and the sea that we shall never know this was always going to be a difficult shoot what with the untried technology and very fast flowing river and the bad visibility and there were times when i thought we weren't going to get anywhere but actually we know far more about the grass deer than we did three days ago and that's why we came here the rest of the time team have gone home but i've got to have just one more look left surface gravity left surface [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 60,133

Rating: 4.9476333 out of 5

Keywords: Team Team, Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode, time team, time team full episode, time team season 12 episode 6, time team grace dieu, time team bursledon, bursledon, grace dieu, time team diving, diving, underwater, archaeology, british history, history channel

Id: vSpow0idVKM

Length: 48min 38sec (2918 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021