In the Halls of a Saxon King (Sutton Courtenay) | Series 17 Episode 4 | Time Team

welcome to the flattest most featureless field i've ever seen on time team but first appearances can be deceptive and this field has already got our archaeologists practically foaming at the mouth look at this air photo it's absolutely full of crop marks archaeologists reckon that shows around 3 000 years of human activity they think this could be neolithic that these could be bronze age barrows but it's this rectangle here they hope will take the field from the merely extraordinary to the potentially stunning could it be one of the rarest features in british archaeology a massive anglo-saxon hall if so we've got not just one or two but three four five and we've only got three days can our archaeologists take all that excitement [Music] the village of saturn courtney lies two miles south of the thames in oxfordshire and in the 1920s an amazing discovery was made in the surrounding fields the first anglo-saxon settlement ever to be identified in the british isles since then archaeologists have explored all over sutton courtney but they've never been given permission to dig in this field where the crop marks suggest the most exciting archaeology lies now we've been given the opportunity to investigate this archaeological holy grail invited here by dr helena hammerow who recently dug the field over the road this is a site of national importance i think there's no doubt about that why do you say it's the site of national importance there was a man called e.t leeds who was keeper of antiquities in the ashmolean museum in oxford and he identified pit-like features with anglo-saxon pottery in them and he concluded that these were anglo-saxon buildings what we now call groupen hoysa what about the crop marks here did they come up with anything when they were excavated absolutely there was only one large building that intruded into this field and we excavated a bit of that building and showed that it was indeed an anglo-saxon hall if you've dug so successfully here why'd you go over the road this side of the road was really just around the edge of the heart of the site the real heart of the site the core of the site is on that side of the road and with such high expectations the excitement seems to have got the better of the team as gfiz gets stuck in straight away keen to explore the field for the first time ever we've only just set foot in this field and already gfis are hard at work me i don't understand usually by this time the three of us are around a four by four in a field we discussed the site and only then do you tell gfa's where to go well they're already all over the site and you haven't even spoken to them yet yeah but that's because we've got this fantastic air picture with all these crop markers on it already we can almost see where we think the archaeology is what can you see there are a number of circles which may well be ploughed out barrows but then in amongst that can you see these little rectangles they look like anglo-saxon halls which would be really exciting this is not like you you're normally the skeptical black countryman all we've got is circles and lines this has never been dug why are you so confident that what we've got is what you say we've got these type of marks on crop marks turn out to be sites of that period when they're excavated most interesting of this of course is the the anglo-saxon complex up in this area here well if it's anglo-saxon it's helen geek isn't it yeah and helen's a great expert on the anglo-saxon pool and i'm going to defer to helen on this one i'm going to hand over the responsibility to her great expert well actually you know i did my first ever undergraduate essay on anglo-saxon settlement in this area so being given the chance to excavate in this field is the most exciting thing i can imagine and if the geophysics can give us more detail i think that we need to start in this area because that gives us the chance to look at what maybe a bronze age barrow and an anglo-saxon hall so we we kind of get a double bang for our buck so to speak we might be able to find out all sorts of things including is there any continuity between two periods which are so far apart so that's where you want to put in the first trench i think so yeah yeah and it wasn't your decision no refreshing so we're targeting these crop marks first hoping that a single trench will reveal whether this is a 3 500 year old burial mound and most excitingly whether this is an anglo-saxon hall built 2000 years later and helen and mick's enthusiasm seems to have rubbed off on the rest of the team any chance of shifting a bit of muck where to phil well from here over there you mark it out i'll be there so it doesn't look as if we'll have to wait long to see if our field deserves all the hype though we'd better not be overzealous because this field is highly protected and we've got strict limits as to how much we can dig try to cut it to the line it's nearly lunch time and we're putting in our first trench how big is this one gonna be phil um it's about 13.8 something like that so what's that work out just uh it's getting on towards uh 100 meters 100 square meters a hundred square meters and how many square meters are we allowed to take all together 250 i know it's a loss 12 30 day one and we've already committed to practically half our trenches yeah but do you want to see results or don't you want to see results i do want to see results but it is a bit of a gamble isn't it it's a gamble worth taking and and we're all agreed with it it's not a gamble we know what we're doing we've got to have a big area in order to see a building plan it's an enormous it's a gamble worth taking and it's not a gamble let's hope this non-gamble pays off we know what we're doing [Music] careful with my shovel welcome back to saturn courtney in oxfordshire and underneath the grass of this rather bland featureless looking field maybe one of the rarest buildings that you ever find in british archaeology an anglo-saxon hall although how confident are we that there's anything in the ground that justifies this enormous amount of digging just look at the results i mean they speak for themselves i mean you can see the ring clearly you can see the rectangular enclosure that we think may be the saxon building but then a lot more information more ditches more pits a fantastic picture what do we need to find in the ground to identify an anglo-saxon hall well obviously pottery and stuff would help but i think that in terms of the construction thing it's going to be built of timber you know it's going to be it's going to have posts set in the ground to support the walls and the roof so we would expect to find post holes which will be i would guess circular brown holes where the posts have stood or because there are different building techniques we might find trenches which hold the timbers to spores upright it's going to be quite variable i mean these results that definitely suggests a timber slot doesn't it yeah yeah and i think that's going to be important to find out whether we're dealing with um with a trench or individual post holes and then what's in those holes is it posts is it planks because all these constructional details the date depends on those building styles changed over time so it may be big but our first trench has gone in over some great geophys and to prove it's an anglo-saxon hall we either need to find post holes the remains of massive wooden uprights which supported the walls and roof or beam slots the remains of the alternative anglo-saxon building method large planks of wood set in the ground and as phil gets stuck in to see if he can find either of these features we've already made a reassuring discovery i'm assuming she can be with a bit of pottery that big that's probably early saxon so it uh could do with some bigger a lot of us would be amazed you could even pronounce it it's pottery well it's just a matter of elimination what it can't be you know i think you've got a bit of saxon pottery here phil there's one probable and one maybe well one piece of pot in the top soil doesn't equal a hole but at least it proves the anglo-saxons were here and as we continue to survey the rest of the field we've got some more geophys results and helen's already itching to dig another trench if you look at the data there's a whole series of these black blobs scattered across the field but then look at this really unusual anomaly so what size is that that's about four or five meters across right that is quite big i suspect it's a deep pit-like feature full of burnt material maybe rubbish well i'm thinking that at four or five meters in each direction it's a pit it's full of rubbish it's absolutely perfect for an anglo-saxon building that's got a pit underneath it and it'd be fantastic if we could put a trench over that and find out so we're putting in our second trench over this pit to see if it's an anglo-saxon building because when leeds dug similar pits in the 1920s they turned out to be anglo-saxon buildings called grubenhauser or grubhuts and it was these small buildings built over cellars that produced lots of fines the excavation of what's hopefully our anglo-saxon hall is well underway but it rather begs the question what is an anglo-saxon hall sam what did one look like imagine a great barn-like structure high gabled beautifully decorated beautifully carved great ceremonial doors and one of the great representations of those in modern times is uh tolkien's lord of the rings particularly the great feasting hall the medal cells in the in the kingdom of rowan for king theoden okay so it's big and echoey yes yes what was it for well lots of feasting lots of drinking uh mead halls beer halls wine halls these are all synonymous terms for royal halls well a number of our team i think are very well experienced in that kind of thing although at the moment they've been fairly silent what are you doing matt well this is an anglo-saxon board game and it kind of plays on your military tactics a bit like chess so you've got board games you've got poetry you've got blazing fires you've got feasting the blazing fire that really comes out well in this wonderful quotation from bead i quote the old english snower and stirrup which means harley needs translating the fire is kindled and nine hall is warm and it rains and snows and storms outside but it all is peace and happy within it's now mid-afternoon day one and back in the trenches it seems that all is peace and happiness as well although raksha's still shifting mud in trench one things are looking promising as phil's finally got through the topsoil how are you getting on then phil well you just asked a very crucial time i think we're just beginning to see the features poking through there's the geophysics plot here's our trench in there now we're sort of standing in this corner here so we should begin to see this big curving ditch coming through there and i think we've got it yeah when you get over here they can actually begin to see the dish look you've got gravel there yeah and you can see there's a line there oh yeah yeah there you go into this dark sandy stuff and then you get back to gravel there now i reckon our ditch i think we're just on the top of it and i rang it's swinging round there so is that bone i can actually see down there that is bone there yeah with what looks like burning material absolutely but what you haven't seen is this look we've got one two three looks like four my goodness bits of pottery actually broken in the top of the ditch now those bits none of this material has been disturbed by the plow and that's a crucial thing about it so what date's that at the moment i will show your hand dug it up yeah literally just the last thing i did sweep it away with the digger and there there were these bits apart it's so tempting isn't it to think that those two things might be related pottery well i'm thinking bronze age cremation exactly something like that yeah but the point of it is that that pottery is going into that ditch once the ditch is completely filled up so that should actually give us an early indication of how old that ditch might be so the crop marks and gfiz seem to be delivering on the prehistoric we might have our bronze age barrow and as matt joins the trench we might even have a hint of our anglo-saxon hall matt have you seen this that was like an owl-shaped feature in here coming around and going up there as well i mean where are we relative to the saxon hall i think it should be about where you're standing so kind of halfway up the trench so okay oh it's on the corner of a building so so it's all looking promising but if we really do have an anglo-saxon hall what's it doing here in the middle of nowhere do you think this site here was the original village of saturn no i don't think this site is a village at all in any case villages come along a bit later this is something else in here like what well the best way to describe it i think is is an estate center what does that mean it's where the king's officials the reeve and song would have administered the block of land round here the king might have come here occasionally and at the place clean but it you know it's a group of buildings to do with running that estate this is what drives me mad about anglo-saxon history what we call the the dark ages suddenly this word king floats into the conversation king of what king of saturn courtney king of england king of mercia we know that the the dynasty who lived here they were called the usa we've got this name in some very early sources not least of which our main source the venerable bead and the usa are none other than the the people who became what we later called the west saxons this is the heart of the old west saxon kingdom well being right at the heart of the kingdom of wessex would explain such a big anglo-saxon site and not only that it might even suggest a royal site but it's the end of day one and this all depends on what we've got in our trenches well it's certainly a beautiful big trench but what does it tell us well you know our gamble has really paid off i mean just just look at this fantastic prehistoric ditch it's so clear as it curves around i think odds on it's a barrow so it's pretty historic but phil nice prehistoric ditch but where's helen's anglo-saxon i reckon we got that as well tony we've got this whacking great foundation trench the wall comes straight through here to the corner here it moves and it comes straight the way through there the beauty of it is that we can see that it cuts through the ditch here so it must be later than the ditch but that's not all in front of you we've got a big row of post holes we might even have another building all right a great big box of delights this trench but what else are we going to do tomorrow well tomorrow have a look at this here's our big hall but look over here a couple of smaller ones now this one has got a gruben house what seems to be a greenhouse cross fingers at one end now if we put a trench in across that we can have a look at the relationship of the grouping house to the hall we could also look at the constructional details of this hall and see if it's contemporary with the big one here now if it is it means we're dealing with a complex of buildings and that puts us way up in status terms so we've got grub hearts we've got prehistoric we've got anglo-saxon halls coming out of our ears well actually we haven't yet have we all we've got is little stains on the earth but tomorrow we're going to get right down into here beginning of day two here at saturn courtney in oxfordshire and look at that geophys looks like there's archaeology all over the place and it seems to be born out in this trench you see all those different colors there we reckon we may have prehistoric anglo-saxon even that rarest of all commodities in british archaeology and anglo-saxon great hall so this being time team what are we going to do today we're going to dig somewhere else we're not only putting in another little trench in the corner of the field where we're looking for an anglo-saxon grub hut but helen has left the field all together and is digging on the far side of the fence that's because we really need to find out what the context of that great big building over there is what do you mean by context well i mean did it stand on its own or was it part of a complex and if you look on this aerial photograph you can see that we've got lots more of these rectangular buildings and we're putting a trench in on the edge of this one up here to see what its constructional details are like i mean to see if it's got a relationship to our big one over here could they have been standing at the same time because if they were all standing at the same time then we might have something really big an estate or something yeah and that's when you'd start using words like maybe royalty or kings that's very romantic and you know let's hope that we find an enormous palace but looking at the geophys this is where you think the anglo-saxon hall is right that's right we've got a blob here yeah is that another one of your rabbits well we're hoping it might be a groove in house yes and what we're hoping is we'll be able to get the relationship between the grooming house and the hall which is potentially on top of it because one might have succeeded the other because then we might have a story of anglo-saxons coming here and living in relative poverty and only later on does this become a royal site exactly and then you have to ask why from rags to riches so on helen's orders the team gets stuck into our latest trench because if the crop marks deliver we're dealing with two more anglo-saxon buildings another grub heart and another hall two phases of occupation but most excitingly of all we might have a huge royal estate in our first trench we're already hoping we've got a massive great hall and so far it's looking good we've got these walls and this morning phil's extending the trench to expose the other corner oh good night now then i think that's pottery that's a bit adorb ah no then trench that could be what the building's made out of well i mean it's not unusual to expect to find water and dirt construction it's one of the classic sort of timber building techniques you put your posts in you put interwoven panels or with ease wattle between them then you get this mixture of sand clay and cow dung and you plaster it onto the outside let it dry and then whitewash it so maybe we've got our first piece of structural evidence for this building which is great because while we've exposed lots of features in the trench at the moment they're just stains in the ground we now need to dig down into each of them to get some dates and confirm whether these walls and post holes are the remains of one truly massive anglo-saxon hall or several different buildings from different periods we're going to have to be patient her patience seems to be a quality lost on some of the team now look you promised me life in a saxon hall and the thing that really really attracted me was that there was going to be lashings of beer where's the beer well it's coming but first you've got to earn it now you've already competed with matt on the board game one of the other great competitions in the hall was i sort of ritual exchange of insults known as flighting i'm sure this will come naturally to you phil so i've got to insult him yeah matt you're rubbish now can i have no it's not quite as easy as that you could provoke him like that and he could come back with some dangerous response initially like um which means thy mother sleeps with wolves yeah but then i hit him well that's that i know you're not allowed you're not allowed to be violent in the hall in fact they're quite important rules about leaving your weapons outside and i've written up that sort of simulated thing which i'd like you to just try i say to you that the shovel is new unsharp that being shovel is new unsharp shovel is now blunt after year of onyabootis after a year on you booters after years of misuse and you would then respond philippus philippus un sharpe is mean shovel unsharp is mean shovel a blunt may be my shovel axe samara is hey axamara is hey he is greater than vina he's greater than yours more than yours [Laughter] i declare you the winner no contact now can i have the beer no you can't fill because we've got loads of work to do and in our second trench where we're trying to find an anglo-saxon grub hut raksha's uncovered some kind of feature but so far it's only produced one piece of pottery it's either saxon or iron age ratchet the best i can do i'm afraid do you wanna make up your mind then well look at it in trench three they've only scratched the surface but they're already having more success finding animal bone and more pot yeah that's saxon all right that's what we're looking for can i push you to a slightly narrower date than just saxon well early middle 450 to 850. brilliant brilliant that works one scrap of loosely dated pot hardly screams royal estate to me mick you get very very few anglo-saxon finds all you get really is stains in the ground yeah and yet there's at least half a dozen people here who are all dewy eyed about anglo-saxon archaeology yeah why but probably because we've got so little of it but we haven't got really quite enough to explain everything and therefore that in a way it attracts people to try and it's more difficult to make what what you cannot because it's more difficult i mean i certainly that's the attraction for me and that's very stimulating to work on sam it is mad you have got so few sources you're forced into relying on tolkien and lord of the rings we've got we've got enough fragments to let us know there was a far greater wealth of literature that has not survived and at times exactly this is my point listen to that sentence we have a far greater wealth of literature dot dot dot that's not survived but we can reconstruct it it's occasionally it's like getting in the glimpse of a lost continent we can see a headlander it's just very stimulating to be in because i'm absolutely persuaded it's the thinking man's dungeons and dragons yes absolutely absolutely and apart from anything else it's it's the beginning of the period of history that we we now dwell in the i thought this conversation was over all over again sometimes i don't know whether to admire their enthusiasm or simply despair because over in trench two we're back to the reality of anglo-saxon archaeology so so far we've only found that one piece of pottery here which we couldn't tell whether it was anglo-saxon or prehistoric as far as you're concerned does this look like the cuban house well unfortunately i think it's it's starting to look as though it's not a grouping house if it was a gruben house i'd expect more clearly to find edges quite sort of vertical nice vertical edges they're very sloping they're very sloping and regular it's almost like a sort of scoop in the ground and also it feels very stony which you wouldn't expect necessarily in a grouping house yeah it's just the right shape it's just the right size but i don't think that's a grouping house now surely they must admit this can't be good we've opened and closed a precious trench over a blob which thrillingly turned out to be a blob their best interpretation a watering hole yes we might have a great hall but it still just stains in the ground and what are the archaeologists doing they're opening another trench because they think they've discovered the entrance [Music] there and a pit there even i could have guessed a hall would have had a doorway in it look at this this is the example of a find tray from our main trench trench one one tiny piece of bone i was promised garishly painted halls maybe mead horns that kind of stuff this is what we've got you never do get an awful lot of fines through an anglo-saxon hall almost the the bigger they are the less fines you find in them i think i think we've done quite well with that this is a policy of despair is this what it's going to be for the next one and a half days no look at this though look what john's got this is real hope this is real excitement basically what we've done is we've re-surveyed this east end of the the long haul that we're looking at and you can see here the extra detail has really paid off we can actually see what we think is an entrance at this end and outside of the entrance we've got at least one pit and then a pair of pits even further beyond these are three blobs aren't they yeah but these are exciting blobs aren't they yeah i think the the entrance is always of interest and in two cases we've got either a human burial or a cow burial so who knows what that pit might contain so we could have something very interesting here yeah we could have something very interesting but it's not likely to be full of gold you know it's going to be interesting rather than rich well i wouldn't mind if it's just something interesting you don't know why you use them so in the hope of trying to find something interesting we've moved matt and phil into our latest trench to find the entrance though phil seems to be more interested in playing the anglo-saxon than finding it no shovel's bigger [Music] your shovel's going rusty [Music] my ho comes with a ten year guarantee it's now mid-afternoon day two and it seems patience is a virtue because at last we're beginning to get a more personal glimpse of the anglo-saxons that's lovely isn't it it's an antler comb or a bit of an antler came because they're made in lots of bits and then riveted together and you can actually see the rivet hole there oh yeah because i thought there was it seemed to be a really clean rake is what i was thinking yeah no it's been made separately and it's got fine teeth on one side and coarse teeth on the other which is lovely and it's a brilliant classic fine for a sunken feature building it seems like every every sunken feature building has got at least one antler comb in it it seems like everybody needed to comb their hair or their beard well not everyone helen but grooming aside we might actually have our first anglo-saxon grub hut and what's more we're finally getting to grips with the hole that is amazingly deep business charles have you got to the bottom of that yet yeah i think i'm just on the bottom now so it's half a meter deeper board isn't it and that's just the side wall tracy that we're looking at isn't it that's the the foundations for the side wall of the hall yeah that's right that's the northern northern wall that way it's just yeah it is but i suppose you have got to have something that is that deep in order to support these mighty great timbers yeah they were going up to support the roof i mean the scale of that seems very different to these posts which are presumably inside the building aren't they behind you here yeah these are internal posters they're not going to be supporting the sort of weight and structures at the external wall though so that's pretty much confirmed that hasn't it that they definitely are internal posts that's fantastic and this trench gives a real sense of just how massive these walls would have been and since the post holes are internal we know that we're dealing with just one building and in our latest trench at the other end of the hall we've now uncovered the entrance and one of the blobs is turning out to be quite interesting paul i've got finally here this feature lovely let's have a little look that looks pretty sexy to me right yeah that looks like sucks and that's the kind of stuff you'd expect to be getting right here yeah so where did this come from well it's just coming out of this this large pit here i think it might be a post hole because look can you see oh black sponge yeah like a post pipe where the post went down the center of it well that's a big post hole yeah so how far from the building are we we're about must be about five meters six meters you could be looking at a porch i suppose but i mean if you look at cheddar they actually have these massive sort of other totem poles or flagstaffs there i mean these massive post holes that didn't really form a building or anything but they were near buildings or near entrances and they reckon they might have been i don't know what this actually kind of a totem pole would be but something like that or a flagstaff it's all you know it's a big royal center you want big grand ceremonial stuff so you could be looking at something like that nice fabulous and matt's not the only one with anglo-saxon fines over in trench three the potential gruben house is now looking much more likely well this is more like it i mean clearly a lot of material has been coming out of this trench angle saxon pottery from a little jar probably seventh century in day and we've got a lot of it yeah lots of animal bone too maybe butchery waist got a nice jawbone here fantastic and have you seen this thing lovely little knife isn't that beautiful oh it is it's great it's a nice little angle-saxon knife again yeah in good shape yeah fantastic faye yeah could you give us a quick kind of explanation of what's going on here tour of the trench yeah yeah um let's start here this is our main wall of what we think may be either a hall or some kind of building which basically goes right up to here this is the corner of it and then we think it goes this way to our sunken feature building which is a huge great big round thing i'm standing in so can you tell what the relationship is between the hall and the sunken featured building no i can't i can't tell which one's earlier or later yet so what i'm gonna have to do is actually stick in a slot here and hopefully this section will tell me what's going on all very tantalizing but we've come to the end of day two so it'll have to wait till tomorrow ah this is a bit more like in it the old saxon lifestyle we didn't have to come 75 miles to watch you drinking but it helps though didn't you think today was good very good i got really a bit down about halfway through the day because we weren't coming up with any fines but then we got this beautiful little knife and hopefully sex and fine yeah yeah hopefully it's a promise of more to come well before we continue with the serious business of the evening can i remind you that the archaeologist who discovered the original anglo-saxon stuff around here was a great friend of jrr tolkien who wrote lord of the rings so i think it would be a very appropriate place and time if right now we all raised our glasses to professor tolkien and our own bilbo baggins professor mcaster beginning of day three here at saturn courtenay in oxfordshire and we've got it our very first anglo-saxon great hall and it's enormous but in addition to that late yesterday afternoon paul blinkhorn our pottery expert came up with evidence of something just as rare and even more bizarre a pair of totem poles paul are you serious i think we can make a good case for it yeah um if you look at the excavation of some of the high status saxon sites in the past like yevoring and cheddar they found one of two of these enormous post holes i mean what about things like a meter deep they weren't structural they weren't part of a building they've got to be some sort of display thing i could certainly see a huge pillar covered in sort of symbols relating to the social identity and power of the people there couldn't they have another function they could have functioned as gibbets of assault i mean if you look at the 7th century documentary record king osmond when he was killed his body was cut into quarters and displayed around the kingdom now if you've just overcome an enemy king and you've got a chunk of his body what are you going to do hide it under a bush you're going to nail it up outside your outside your house just to let everyone know how hard you are helen your body language says that you're not altogether convinced i'm not i mean i do quite like the kind of pillar or obelisk theory that you've got a pair of great big obelisks outside your front entrance it does look good but to go that extra mile and say that they could be a gallows now we do have evidence for gallows but from much later and from the gallows paul stop scoring points because helen's the boss and besides we've still got loads to do by the end of the day and as matt continues to explore this enigmatic posthole phil's finally got to grips with the rest of the building helena have you looked at this section i think it's an absolutely cracking section you can actually see the outline of the post in there and the post where you can actually see more or less how big the post would have been and it would fill the foundation trench it's an arrangement a deliberate arrangement around these raking posts you got one here this one here now it's not a vertical post it's actually slanting like that to support the the wall plate so you've got a raking post and a raking post and then a big post in there in the middle and if i'm right we can start building that picture going all the way around i reckon there's another big post in there and how do i know that because we've actually got bits of chalk and everywhere else we've had chalk because we've had a post yeah so we've got one in there and another raking post with a bit of a gap in here but we got chalk there yep so we ran we got another post there raking post vertical post raking post upright post let me guess phil another post upright post mass is a chalk and i wrecked nasa way they put this building together yeah so how would you reckon it'd have been there at sutton who they found a cauldron with a cauldron chain and would have hung from the ridge post of a great hall just like this the chain was 18 feet long so you have to imagine 18 feet plus the cauldron plus it would have been suspended over a fire so you're looking at a ridge post that's over 20 feet high so i'm really tall building and tony was getting really grumpy oh i always say he said all you've got is marks and stains in the ground i'll tell you what it's doesn't matter what stains you get in the ground it's knowing what they mean absolutely and we've got the evidence here for a truly magnificent building all right i take it back you can tell a lot from stains in the ground and since we know that the walls would have been covered in wattle and dorb the hall must have looked really impressive but this isn't the only hall we think we've got on this site the crop marks suggest there are four more yesterday we opened a trench and it looked like these are halls which could make this a royal site but the archaeologists aren't satisfied yet look we've done the detailed survey now and i think what it clarifies is we don't have any entrances on the side walls of this building so that's not an entrance no that that's not it's our last day we've only got enough meters left to dig one more trench we know we want to put it in somewhere around here but frankly we've had so little dateable evidence so far that we want to make sure we put it in somewhere that's potentially really fruitful the question is where helen how far have we got well i i think what we're just saying is that what we need to be able to see is more clarity on this end ball i think we really need to extend the trench here to be able to give us the other corner so we can see the whole thing the trench is just too small at the moment how many more metres can we dig well we've got 209 meters accounted for so we've got 250 allowance so about 40 square meters maximum we're probably looking at something six by six meters or less is all we've got left provided chris agrees of course because chris is our english heritage inspector and he's like our archaeological policeman and he's already said today that we can't extend a trench which we wanted to uh extend so we've actually got to persuade you haven't we chris you have but i can see the argument for this because i think we've got a very clear question about this particular building and we're not going to answer it without going a little bit further this in this direction so i think yeah there's a there's a very good case for extending this trench so the team begin to extend the trench to uncover more of the hall hopefully find the entrance and construct a picture of how it was built [Music] but we're not only interested in the anglo-saxon buildings we also want to find out about the people and luckily we've just got our first really personal glimpse of one of them [Music] have you got that then well just found that in the spoil oh oh that is fantastic isn't that nice yes that is a 9th century strap end they're really characteristic shape with these kind of convex edges and they do often fall off because they're on the end of a really narrow belt or strap and that i mean ninth century it doesn't fit in really with the date that we've been thinking for the rest of the site which is largely seventh century but this could simply have come from somebody walking across the field 200 years later so nice find but unfortunately helen thinks the strap end was just a casual loss so it won't date our buildings and as matt's got to the bottom of his post hole it's not the only date which is slightly surprising what's this about roman oh that looks roman doesn't it yeah so not an anglo-saxon totem pole then paul and heather knows what the romans were doing here but over in the gruben house the anglo-saxons are beginning to make sense is that a dog's skull you found there faye yes it is here have a look what would you expect yeah we think that they might be part of some kind of closure ritual that when the building went out of use right depositing skulls sometimes bits of animals sometimes even bits of people was part of the kind of ritual associated with the building going out of you is kind of ending its life in a way so you make an offering when the building's abandoned so the dog skull suggests that the grub hut didn't go out of use gradually but was deliberately closed by the anglo-saxons which might suggest it was demolished in order to make way for the hall but it's now middle of day three and we need to find out more about this hall so we've brought matt and phil into the trench to help though i'm not sure it's the most productive combination call that a brush phil yeah there's a brush what's that i think you'll find this is a far superior brush is it yours looks like a demented hedgehog is that ruby yeah well yours looked like having a very abbreviated mustache would be better off hanging off the side of my head wouldn't they phil [Music] [Laughter] we're now concentrating all our efforts on this hall because the archaeologists believe it's key to proving that we're dealing with a royal site which still kind of niggles me because let's be honest whether we've got one hall or five it's a huge leap from stains in the ground to a royal estate helena from the moment that you saw those air photos you went i really think this is a royal site and then when we dug that first train she went yes yes it's confirmed why i mean there's very little evidence to go on isn't it well i've always been struck from the moment i saw these aerial photographs by the similarities between sutton courtney and a very famous anglo-saxon site about which we know quite a lot called the evering up in northumbria we've got this l-shaped arrangement of buildings yevering also has a series of great halls very similar to this similar in size similar in layout but why did you assume that it had royal connections yeah well i don't have to assume it i've been told it by none other than than beed the famous anglo-saxon historian who tells us that in the 7th century around about the year 628 that the king in northumbria king edwin actually came with his queen and his courtiers his nobles to a place called adieffering yevering and there dwelt six and 30 days and he says it was a royal bill of villa regia so judging by the evering comparison our site certainly looks as though it could be royal and what's more having surveyed the surrounding landscape stuart thinks he's got evidence which supports this idea the important thing in the saxon landscape is the river right we're standing just there where the site is you see this beautiful sweeping boundary going around here with the the water in the bottom this is the former edge of the river thames it was right next to our site virtually what we've got is a possibility here of a river landing bring huge great boats up here couldn't you with with imports from anywhere you like absolutely i mean it becomes a key focal point on the river thames yeah the other point to bring out on on here as well is this old road which is way beyond where the cars are this is also a parish boundary i think this is the the the road into the complex where that where the holes are oh wow that's fantastic now i get it at first i couldn't understand why a royal center would be in the middle of nowhere but if this was a riverside site on the main road then i can see why it became so important and it's now nearly the end of our time at sutton courtney and i think the archaeologists finally have a handle on the site we are standing in the sunken future building a grub a grub and if we come over here basically what they did is they put a big hall over the top of it so we've got a wall here and it goes through where you're standing and then out and returning back through there where you are right now is our entrance way and then the the building is running straight back through that way it's a loin is a line this way yep so the doorway is again in the end and not in the side so brilliantly it does seem we've got two phases of anglo-saxons who first lived here in grubhuts as a small community which then grew as they were replaced with a series of halls since this hall is very much like the great hall we think it's contemporary proving that this was a royal site it's a pretty exciting piece of archaeology isn't it it is absolutely fantastic we've got the end of one wall there we've got the end of another wall there in between is this great big elaborate entrance and once you've come through the gable wall you walk into the hall we've got a wall there and a wall there and you've got to imagine them going right up up to the to the ridge we've got maybe seven meters up there and look at the scale of it i mean can you imagine the size of fire you would need to heat this huge space would have been just absolutely literally awesome now look these are rough plans of hitherto the largest buildings from anglo-saxon england both from yevering in northumberland now this one is ours and look it is substantially bigger and we dug it up we did what a result three days and we've got a whole anglo-saxon royal riverside complex and not just one hall but possibly the biggest great hall the anglo-saxons ever built whoever would have thought that at the end of day three we would be sitting inside an anglo-saxon great hall well i thought this was going to be a great site but honestly it's exceeded all my expectations mick helen said to me earlier this is why i went into archaeology in the first place absolutely i mean this this is so important it's it's the point at which england starts well carl's and thanes as we've done so well i think we all deserve to get stuck in with a bit of drinking don't you hang on a minute tony i've got to earn it first matthias ichiday on sage that thing is shovel is new and sharp philippus un sharpe is mean shovel aksamara is hay than thine [Music] up then [Laughter] [Applause] so the the drink will now be presented to the winner by the lady of the house and we will honor the winner with the traditional cheer wassel [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 102,705

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 sutton, time team, time team season 17 episode 4, time team in the halls of a saxon king, time team digs, saxon history, british history, time team courtenay, sutton courtenay

Id: SttjCzjJ8VA

Length: 46min 50sec (2810 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 05 2021