Keeping Up With The Georgians (Somerset) | S15E07 | Time Team

imagine i'm a georgian gentleman i've just come from nearby fashionable bar in order to visit hunt street one of the largest and most opulent mansions of the georgian era and no it's not that that's just the lodge this grand design was the dream of local mp francis popham who tragically never lived to see it realised in fact despite millions of pounds being spent on it we don't know if it was even finished 200 years later all that's left of it is this portico or the rest of it's somewhere underneath these stables but the extraordinary thing is that apart from a couple of pretty little pictures we don't know anything about it we don't know who designed it what it looked like inside or even if anyone ever lived in it and as ever we've got just three days to find out [Music] [Music] there have been mansions at hunt street since medieval times sir john popham one of the most important figures of elizabeth the first's court acquired the estate in the 16th century but it was his descendant francis who built the last and legend would have it grandest mansion of them all what do we know about the mansion jonathan well we know that it was supposed to look like this at least just prior to the death of that man francis popham who was the patron of the estate but what we don't know is whether it was completed to look like that whether the artist has used license and or if it was partially completed and they lived in a couple of rooms in the shell is archaeology going to be able to give us the answers um well i think it will i think to the most important question is was the house actually over there where that portico is but what really fascinates me tony is if it was partially completed what was going on in those rooms did you have the families of the builders in there were they squatting and archaeology should be able to tell us first things first we need to confirm that the house is behind the portico so giofiz start to look for the grand eastern facade depicted here in one of a pair of watercolors the other shows the north facade complete with an impressive main entrance [Music] so is that portico there that bit here that's it this blown up painting shows it nicely doesn't it how long would this north front have been well in the 1920s there's a particularly dry summer and they recorded that the patch marks on the ground here were 200 feet wide by 120 and took that to be the side walls of the house that's one two three this is all looking a bit too easy the eastern facade should be a hundred feet away from the center of the portico have you done the gfiz for this area yet of course we have and have you hit anything that might be our east wall look at these results the red line is actually that theoretical line at 100 feet you can see this very clear black line right on the edge of our survey grid i'll tell you why i'm concerned john you see this looks like a perfectly regular rectangular pile doesn't it but relative to the portico there this thing's coming out at around a cranky angle yeah it might just be the effect of the results but um i think the only way is we've got a dig yeah i mean i totally agree because if we can actually pick up something really distinctive like this doorway then from that we could extrapolate where the front wall and the back wall is going to be i mean the other thing is there's also this feature in the data that might just be a ditch now whether that's related to the house or an earlier phase of activity i think it's worth looking at that as well so in goes trench one to locate the eastern [Music] facade that looks like a big bit of building that does that's the sort of stuff i'd have expected the building to be made of isn't it oh yeah on your knees manganese now mine mind your knees manganese ah oh you're a friend [Music] that is that same mortar that is exactly that same water as this is over there on the portico that is come on then john where is this on the geophysics oh well i said it it was yeah but i thought you said it was right yeah look you can see it two meters two meters in two meters wow there you go then that's it that is it it's still the first hour of the dig and already it looks like we're on to the eastern facade of francis popham's grand mansion a building project clearly intended to show off the family's status you know how if you're building your own place and you run out of money you park a caravan on site and rough it for a few months well this is the popham's version of that caravan the lodge that francis popham built was up on the hill overlooking the moted medieval mansion which we believe he demolished to make way for his new house if there was a perfectly serviceable medieval building here anyway why do you think francis popham spent so much money on building a new place well the 18th century is a century of improvement and that's a that's a key word and people want to improve their estates they want to prove their taste and their culture and one of the ways that you do that is by building or rebuilding and so putting up a new house or refunding an old house was very very typical when did francis die francis dies in 1779 in february it's his wife who takes over and dorothy popham's an interesting woman and obviously a fairly forceful woman and she keeps the building going until 1797 when she dies now this is really intriguing because of the fact that she doesn't have a child and most of these family houses that are being built are being built with dynasty in mind you want to perpetuate your family name and if francis and dorothy had no heirs it makes such a vast building project all the more extraordinary she's white stuff looks like shelner let's put the old spectacles on back on site phil's discovered a gravel surface beside the wall line that looks like burnt flame i just don't like burnt flint that looks like a yard surface wow it is a pottery welsh slate charcoal it only goes right away across doesn't it yeah have your trail mate thank you a yard surface up against what looks like a wall suggests that we have found the eastern facade but it's a bit nearer the portico than recorded patch marks had led us to believe and now jonathan's noticed that something about the portico doesn't quite add up all of the illustrations show 17 bays wide so 17 windows yeah so if each of these then should be 12 feet wide and they're about 5 of the 17 this should be 60 feet long in all but it looks to me like it's shrunk by well it is about half size something's clearly wrong we need to work out if it's just the portico that's small or the whole house and finding the corners will help so how are we going to do this that's the edge of the trench yeah i'm pretty sure i've got the corner now we've extended the survey so that's going to be in here so in goes trench 2 to find the south east corner of hunt street mansion let's start down here quickly work our way over the thing about georgian buildings is that they conform to various architectural patterns and are therefore easy to date jonathan thinks that hunt street is an example of the palladian style like much of bath but he spotted an inconsistency so looking at that portico what tells you that that's palladian it's those rusticated blocks they're so precise what does rustic i didn't mean well think of rustic and of the earth because the italians thought that the bedrock was the basis for building the roughest stones are used at the bottom to do all the supporting and then above that you have the refinement of the columns and then the fine balustradin figures on the top so it's a sense of natural order but herein lies the problem you see because these palladian villas are in fact quite thin to get light in front and back on one rectangular block you look at the the illustrations here and this is more like a palace it's just too deep it goes back too far that way it should stop maybe there it feels like this is somehow compromised because by the time we get to the middle of the century everyone's building dinky villas with little wings and pavilions on the end and this is quite the opposite it's massive and it's huge so if this is a house of 1760 it's completely out of date an unfashionable building would hardly have been the impressive statement that we think francis popham was after i think that that's banked against the wall something's not quite right about hand street and it looks like we're going to have to rely on the archaeology to shed a little light hey phil what have you got well we got this superb wall coming along here so this is the edge wall of the building the outside wall are you that one yeah i mean one concern i've got phil is that the wall looks if anything a little skinny for the footings of a three-story stone building don't you think i couldn't agree with you more but there's something that matt's digging over there isn't it it's got a return on it it looks thicker this thing here and if that in fact were the true width of the wall it's something just around a meter and that is pulled back where you and francis are digging to make way for maybe an embrasure in the window for a window seat or maybe the door threshold you know then maybe all of the weights being carried by the fat sections as piers as it were between the windows [Music] phil expands his trench to find out if the wall thickens out enough to support three stories well that's it and that's it there so we got close on two meters of it it's looking thicker francis popham was a politician in the public eye at the most fashionable time of bath's history so when it came to kitting out the inside of his mansion only the best would do it was very elaborate two of the rooms used three italians for several years just to do the decoration and we've got an octagon columned hall so that's going to be pretty elegant and that probably was in the center and it might have been around the grand staircase okay so i walk into the house i'm confronted by this spectacular eight-sided room i go upstairs what do i see then what you would have seen is a series of interconnecting rooms because country houses by this time were made up of at the top level for entertaining so they had rooms that connected one into the others he went from one into a slightly grander room into a slightly ground room for instance we know that there's a cove room that had 76 squares of blue tiling and then you would have eventually got your way into the grand or great salon and that would have been the room that you used for displaying your pictures but it would also have been your ballroom these regular layouts should help us to reconstruct the inside of hunt street mansion and we're beginning to get details from inside a room in the eastern corner what about the life inside the building has anything been found to tell us what when there's been a bit of a mishmash of stuff but three things um definitely seem pretty significant this is a big piece of metal work yeah it's a paneling hook or hanger and you build that between two stones so you set it in the mortar that projects and you basically nail your paneling frame to that piece of metal and it dresses the room beautifully so you could make a guess that these rooms here were given wooden paneling so rather nicer small very nice indeed yeah the other two bits i wanted to show you were these two bits of pottery and i've been speaking to paul blinghorn and he's put them in a date range of 1650 through to 1750. so if we've got a house this building let's say in the 1760s is it likely that you'd be using a vessel that's made 60 or 70 years earlier it's not impossible but it could be from an earliest occupation too couldn't it well it's a tantalizing idea isn't it it would be a real bonus if this did could reveal something about francis popham's ancestors but the job in hand is to get to grips with his georgian mansion and raksha's trying to ascertain if some stones sticking out of the ground are related to it with that then trying to look at that and in trench one phil's found our first piece of work masonry that is cut for constructional reasons not for decoration do you think it might be maybe a lintel on a door or something that that gives you a wedge so that you can fit timber up to it don't ask me you're the bloke who's supposed to [Laughter] while jonathan scratches his head stuart's looking at a map which could be a gold mine of information dating to before the georgian build began it shows what seemed to be plans for the lodge as well as older structures where we're now digging for instance the buildings that are drawn here which is close to the site that we're looking at right they're drawn in a three-dimensional bird's eye type of view which is a much earlier style of mapping probably 17th century dates but here this is drawn in plan for much as you'd expect with the mid 18th century but it's it's actually drawn quite casually so it's not quite clear to me whether it's actually here or whether this is what they're aspiring to put here because if you look underneath this heavy droid can you see there are ghosts oh yeah lines of earlier features and rope systems there's a complex of buildings here which you clearly need to do more work on because they're not very well defined if he can decode it steward believes this map could reveal how not just francis but generations of pophams transformed hunt street by the end of the afternoon phil's discovered a kink in the skinny wall of the eastern facade when we opened up this trench virtually the first thing we came down onto was this wall and immediately we thought that maybe it was a bit thin but at this end it seemed to thicken out yeah but in fact what it's done now that we've extended the trench that way is to actually dog leg and in fact this wall here goes straight through to where and joins onto where bridget's trench is so jonathan we've got a kinkiest wall it is kinky wouldn't guess it from this drawing but at each end of this central section is a projection that's what phil's found so if it's got a thickening there and there it's nicely buttressed at those points to prove that this is the grand central projection we'll have to find the other side of it but that's for tomorrow end of day one and we've done the easy bit we now know that hunt street mansion actually is here and we've defined quite a lot of the outside of it it's smaller than we originally thought but as jonathan says it could turn out to be an exquisite little jewel box there are what appear to be rooms here were they really as elegant as the records suggest and were they lived in by the landed gentry or were they squatted by the workers we'll find out tomorrow when we go inside beginning of day two and somewhere underneath these stables litha remains one of the most opulent mansions in georgia and england here at hunt street near bath yesterday we found some of the outside walls although i have to say the building was slightly smaller than we thought it was going to be today we're going to go inside what's the plan francis well these are the walls that we picked up yesterday but now what i want to do is turn my attention towards the center of the building what looked like rooms and this rather strange pink thing here which might possibly be another wall i think it's the back wall of what may now be a c-shaped building if you look at the map stewart's got 1806 there's the portico and there's two wings so where would the c shape be on your gf is well that would be one wing there's the front range with the portico and another wing under the stables before we can get going rakshas discovered a corner two meters away from the wall line on the geophys it lined up with the corner bridge found yesterday so we're going to open up a huge trench right across the eastern wing to work out what raksha's wall is and to get inside some of the rooms of the georgian mansion [Music] gfis are now trying to locate the west wing under the stables in the eastern corner we're digging through tons of rubble in what could be the mansion's cellars and matt's been investigating the flinty surface running outside the east wall we appear to have this feature or ditch or something start starts here was cut by this wall and goes a good what meter and a half behind me there so that's that's way too big for a construction cut for this wall i think so what i'm thinking is it might be um maybe a part of the earlier moat maybe and it's cutting through all this stuff on the outside of the building you've got this kind of gravelly stuff here and there's something linear going along there now i think those two grooves are possibly something like the found you know the the for the roots of a box hedge and that looks to me like a proper path so perhaps the georgians filled in the medieval moat to create a pathway around the mansion we're hoping this dig will reveal when the mansion was built we know it was demolished in the 1830s because the bulk of it was salvaged for prior park one of the most important buildings in bath the thing is with prior park that it suffered a fire and when hunt street was planned for demolition its joinery and plaster work became available so there are bits of hunt streak inside so jonathan and ray san our graphic artist are looking for clues as to when hans street was built and what it looked like what a beauty isn't it it's extraordinary to think that this was the very staircase that would have greeted francis popham well that to me is nothing to do with the house of the 1770s first impressions are this belongs to the earlier 18th century the reason i say that is because these balusters the columns that sit on these urn-like things start fat and big in the 18th century and they get skinny they go on a diet as the century progresses and these generous handrails there turn into rounded shapes everything becomes more slender so it looks like they put in the staircase when they started building the mansion but it took a very long time even by builder standards to finish off the plasterwork well this is a different world isn't it oh it's so much finer and lighter and i guess this must be later then it does feel later you know i'd put it 1770 to 80 this room we're now in the era where robert adam has influenced plaster as an interior designers and these wonderfully tight and and detailed panels within complex ceilings are all the rage i think we've moved on almost half a century from that staircase it seems that francis popham's mansion took a lifetime to build but the quality of the interiors was second to none how about that for a wall then back on side phil's found another wall what do you think of that then that's a wall in half in it but it's much fatter than anything else we've seen what's think of that then how do you know that's the other edge of it look god he's a hell of a width in it isn't it compared with everything else we've had it's twice the width oh still me that is a wall okay so it's a big wall but phil's job is to find out what it's doing inside the mansion yeah meanwhile marrick has dug deep into the rubble-filled cellars in the eastern corner and discovered window moldings from earlier buildings i wish you'd have shouted when you found this one because that's not georgian is it that's older you've got a rebate there for a metal frame window not the wooden sashes that the georgians use and this overload or round moldings brought in by elizabeth the first and the broad flat front gets more popular in the middle of the 17th century over a century before popham supposed to have started building what about some of these older pieces that we've got on the side here at the another edge of a window or door you'd expect that in tudor england so you're talking the first half of the 16th century this is going back and back now and then well that one now we're back in the georgian period see those beautiful reversed curves flat sections all part of a polite classical window surround so you've probably got three centuries of building here now we found masonry dating back to the 16th century when the pophams first arrived in hunt street 200 years later when francis popham died their line nearly ran out because he and dorothy were childless and this forced dorothy to take surprising steps to protect the mansion what she does is intriguing she passes the house down to another francis popham the reputed son of my late husband so we've got an illegitimate son here but dorothy's not very trusting and so what she does is she creates a trust he he becomes a tenant for life he can get the money and the profit from the rents but he can't actually sell it basically in case he's a waste drill she wants to make sure that that this is protected and was he always true well we don't know unfortunately he dies so early he dies in 1804. so what happened next it goes to the lay borns her nephew bought she specifies in her will whoever inherits that doesn't have the name popham has to take it and if they don't they're going to be disinherited so her nephew general edward laborn took the name popham and inherited the estate but something drove him to demolish the house 30 years later and finding out what should help us unravel the end of the story of hunt street mansion by lunchtime trench 3 and trench 2 have met i think i think there might be a wall here and phil's found traces of a thick wall right across the east wing running parallel the thin outer wall turns a corner and kinks out to form one of three equal bays hey matt but now jonathan spotted a problem with his theory looking at where the portico comes in to form a boundary for this whole range i'm just not sure we've got room anymore now if you measure 12 meters 30 you'd be able to replicate the measurement from the corner up to this first point right that's a regular bay where's the next 12 30. so that puts us here just in front of the digger where does the third one take us to another 12 meters 30 in that direction and you'd be beyond the line of that portico so either you've got a tiny end bay which is a completely weird thing for a georgian builder to do or the other scenario is that the georgians have inherited this footprint of a building and what the artist shows us as a three-bay facade looking symmetrical is a fudge job they've done their best with an old building so matt and ian begin the search for the third bay on the eastern facade i'll be right here i reckon i know get out that machine and get your trowel and right where jonathan predicted the wall kinks in there's the kink in right so the other side should be there yeah you go so it does come along in back in and then back along in that direction like things isn't it which is exactly what it does at the other end yeah exactly the same distance yeah so it looks like the mansion did have three bays but the third one was smaller than the artist depicts jonathan thinks that could be because the architect was attempting to transform an older building into a georgian mansion do we know who the architect was although it may look like it should be someone grand coming in from london that's doing it it actually turns out to be a chap named daniel green who's from hunt street where would a local person have got the qualifications from to be able to build something like this well you have to remember that bath is a magnet for masons around the country who are armed with these pocket books of how to build and how to carve details and how to slot walls together and and it's easy guides basically how-to guides so it could be that one of the reasons why this place took so long to build and why it's so quirky is because it was local blokes who were doing it who didn't have the expertise that some of the grander people had or very possibly because they'd be happy for the work whereas a great architect would say look i'm not compromising a reputation on that and bodging up that old pile records suggest that our local builder never finished the west wing most of which lies under the stable itself where we can't touch it but jonathan thinks he's found a bit we can get at in the northwest corner of the building so in goes trench four despite digging out a vast amount of rubble we found very little evidence of anybody living here let alone the pophams we've got one piece of pottery that we could perhaps regard as high status which is this it's a little tiny bit of chinese export porcelain now this sort of stuff starts coming in around about the mid 17th century but all nearly all this pottery is just simple utilitarian words it's not exactly the sort of collection you'd expect to find on a georgian mansion is it well it isn't it isn't i mean a problem a little bit of porcelain it's not the sort of stuff that you expect the head of the household to be eating and drinking off it's the stuff they were using in the kitchens to prepare food it's the stuff the gardener was eating his dinner off you know it's the pottery of the lower orders i suppose some of the pottery dates back to medieval times and phil's beginning to think the thick wall goes with it i think that inadvertently what we've done is stumbled on a medieval building where well i'm actually standing on it it comes through there and then it turns and it's coming through here but if you look on that side of the wall look you've got wonderful plaster that's beautiful but you see that means that that must be the inside wall yeah exactly so we've got the wall coming along here and it it's it's a bit muddled up here with robbie you can get it here that's right and look here we've got more plaster there more plaster there so again that is the inside and our wall comes along here it's a bit messy but we've got it there yeah and we've got it oh got it here in space and it's turning back that way yeah now if that's the outside of a medieval building could it be the moat all that deep stuff down there that's moat that's what my suggestion is oh wait a minute though if this is a moat then what's this wall doing here that wall is the wall of the georgian mansion if my theory is correct what they've done is to use the moat it's a whacking great big foundation trench well i knew jumping the gun a bit have you got any dating evidence to suggest that that large wall is actually older than the georgia one there not specifically i think the thing that suggests this is this is medieval is is firstly its scale its size secondly we can say that is clearly of a different phase that the mortar is a different color we've not actually got any physical data so what you're saying is that your theory is very cogent and very well argued and totally unproven yes but i happen to think that it's right medieval wall or not we found more of it in the north west corner i must admit it looks like those big medieval walls were getting on the other side of the house all this would make sense if we were looking for a medieval house but we're hoping for a georgian one so we're off to the other side of the portico where the thin wall which we think is georgian should turn a corner and by the end of the day we have found another wall there's nothing like the wall we had over in that far corner no but it doesn't look like the georgian or the medieval walls so day two draws to a close with the promise of a lot of overnight head scratching when we came here looking for francis popham's grand design we thought it would be huge and it turns out to be much smaller we thought it would be really elegant but it looks like it was a very expensive botched job and today we thought everything we'd find would be georgian it looks like there's a medieval house stuck right in the middle of it what other theories are we going to demolish we'll find out tomorrow beginning of day three another day another theory but this one seems absolutely crazy the outside wall of our georgian house this wall on which all our other theories are based isn't the outside wall of a georgian house at all it's some kind of ornamental parapet jonathan have you taken complete leave of your senses i've returned to sound first principles when we opened up this trench we found a skinny wall i mean it could be georgian but it seemed too narrow to put a big three-story building on i think we've just got to accept that it isn't the facade but it is associated with the georgian building so where is the wall the outside wall of the georgian house well if you take that to be like a riveting wall of some sunken feature between the gardens on your side and the house which is here then when you follow that skinny wall around the south side it forms a neat boundary and six feet in it on that south side are big chunky walls that serve very well for carrying a substantial house so the facade's here i think he's referring to the big chunky walls that phil thinks are medieval but i'm going to leave that for a moment could be francis do you buy any of this um yes it is very plausible it's very plausible penny but i think we need some good archaeological proof of it we don't even know that there is an inner wall here no so but the key thing precisely tony the key thing is to put a trench here that goes back and with any like it might catch a kink in an inner wall if there is an inner wall so your the theory is that it goes georgian wall some unspecified void here some kind of parapet here and then the moat which is is that georgina or is that medieval we don't know so far the evidence suggests medieval the irony is when we first got here i said to francis the problem with this dig is it's going to be too easy by now we had thought we'd be happily digging inside one of the gorgeous rooms of france's popham's grand mansion but instead we're still faffing about trying to figure out which of the outside walls but supposing jonathan is right the thick corner we found in the west must be the corner of the mansion which means matt's been looking for the corner of the thin parapet wall we've got this we've got the thin wall there one side there yeah inside there yep yep go down a bit but it's sitting on top of this massive it's huge it's getting even more confusing there's no sign of any corner and the thin and thick walls seem to have merged phil i have a very clear memory of late yesterday afternoon we're in this trench you said to me that wall there is the outside wall of the georgian house this wall is medieval this morning the archaeologists are saying you were wrong they're saying that this is some kind of parapet wall and this wall is georgian but that parapet war is still 18th century what i've had to do is is redraw the edge of the mansion on this but i still think that these foundations could be medieval all right so what have you got this morning well what we've been able to clarify is the layout of the rooms on this side of the building we help one big room in here with a nice plastered wall there and paneling along this side interestingly we've got a gap in here we really need to know whether that's a doorway leading out or a window we've now got a mid wall coming through there and it looks like we've probably got a doorway there into the next room and we can now see so much more of this room coming along here you see we've got another butt end there we've got some lovely traces of paneling along there as well yeah but all that rather begs the question of where exactly we are in the house is this the ground floor is it the basement what is it i think we've already gone so low that we must already be below the ground floor level i think we've got to be in basements at last phil's found us some rooms to get stuck into possibly the mansion's kitchens and offices meanwhile francis has been looking for the thick wall on the east side of the building um we've got a big wall okay as we anticipated it's big it's reassuringly big isn't it this will do for a for a grand house good isn't it lovely but no sign of a kink to match the kink in the outer wall no but the thing is it's fat enough that if you were to reface it you could build in a bit of depth and modelling couldn't you oh yeah so you can you can still express that central section that's nice [Music] finally it's beginning to make sense it looks like francis popham put a sort of georgian cladding on an earlier building to create three bays shown in the watercolours and because we're all agreed that the thick wall is the outside wall the footprint has shrunk which means that the three bays would have been symmetrical now if we could just find the corner in matt's trench it would all make sense oh hello there we go yeah look at that but archaeology is never that simple oh flipping x i thought you'd like that it's a world of buttresses it certainly is it is yeah everything you're standing on there is all solid mortar and stone goes right right back into both right back there i'm still on the thickness of this wall that is a major wall that pattern of buttresses the cross buttress tends to die out as you get late 13th into 14th century and it's replaced with a single diagonal one it's much more efficient so that to me is an old manner of bracing a wall and a corner the other thing is what what direction you you guys are facing east yeah east is that way straight ahead of us now the 1517 survey begins the description of the site with the chapel of saint nicholas so if you were to come into the end of a chapel on built on this orientation you'd be facing east which is perfectly right such a good find isn't it and for a full description of the chapel visit our website i'm about 100 meters away from our site and i've come up here because stuart has done a rather clever bit of detective work well we had this plan of 1759 and all the focus of attention was on this medieval hall which the 18th century house replaced this is the one that we're excavating that's the one but i got quite interested in what appeared to be a smudge over here but when you enhance it on the computer that's a rather fine elizabethan or 17th century grand mansion is it a fantasy or was it ever built it was definitely built because i asked john to do some geophysics over here on this earthwork platform and look at stonking underground remains so it was definitely built why is there a mansion up here well in the medieval period the happy living down on the moat that's where everything emanates from but by the 16th century they're wanting to make big statements on the landscape they literally want to put their houses on top of the hill they need room to expand and show off they need large areas of formal gardens all that's up here on top student keeps saying they did this they did that who are they well they really is sir john popham and it's sir john popham who gets the estate after the dissolution of the monasteries he becomes chief justice of the king's bench he's speaker of the house of commons and he's probably the best lawyer of his day he's does the state trials like that of essex of sir walter raleigh he's massively wealthy i can just imagine sir john popham's grand elizabethan house looking down the hill to the old medieval manor the house we now think francis renovated a couple of centuries later and it now looks like the medieval moat was the first thing to go so if this then were a medieval moat it would stretch from the footprint of the house presumably to about 10 feet behind us that way you can see the edge of it going around there look i see okay so it's a bigger moat the georgian wall was put in the middle of it and then backfilled so the sloping bank of the moat becomes a hard stone edge exactly now one thing i can guarantee you when they built this wall the thing that they wanted to create was something was dry because right at the bottom you've got a drain and there it is presumably then this becomes a dry moat ornamental feature that you walk around the outside of phil thinks that the basements had windows or doors which logically can't have been built until after the moat was drained or they'd have flooded so perhaps francis popham did more than just clad an old building after all perhaps he remodeled it from the bottom up only half a day left to find out that is that is the return there in it it's a nice little find just come off the spoil heap it's a small elizabethan coin it's been deliberately bent and the archaeologists are speculating that it might be a love token which you gave to someone who you fancied and if they returned it then you knew you were in with a chance well we found this presumably having been discarded so no luck that time i guess we're now walking up the main carriage drive for the 18th century mansion steward and elaine's bid to unravel the mysteries of the estate has revealed that the bulk of francis popham's budget went on constructing a vast lake and planting thousands of trees to create a series of impressive views of the mansion by the time we get here instead of being enclosed by the trees it's like the curtains of a theater have opened now and look what happens you're going to go wow that's fantastic the second viewpoint is the angle from which the watercolor of the grand eastern facade was painted what you've got now is a perfect picture frame with overhanging bows and the trees here on the left-hand side on the right hand side will be other screen of trees the carriageway would then have swept the visit around to see the main entrance would have seen the portico and sweeping off to the other side you would have seen acres of the family's land and their their sheep and their animals we've been very impressed it wouldn't it and this is really important for the archaeology because to achieve the effect they wanted all they have to do is rebuild the east wing and the north wing they don't need to do anything behind because the visitors won't see that you could keep the medieval buildings and they could function perfectly well and unlike today georgian visitors simply didn't wander round the back so there was no need to rebuild the service quarters and stables we're getting towards the end of the day and phil's beginning to get a clearer idea of what his basement rooms look like there's the wall there's a bit of a recess or in it we've got a bit of wood underneath it's not going to fluff over look at that phil oh good lord see that running underneath those slabs there's your wood yeah resting on that yeah which means these blocks are in situ on top of it in the doorway with more stonework above it it gives us some indication of how much further we got to get down to get the floor that we hope to be standing on that's right the height of this doorway suggests there's at least a metre of rubble to dig through and every bucket full is a reminder of how francis and dorothy popham's dreams came to nothing thanks to their nephew the general in the end the house is costing the general too much money and he decides that he wants to have it pulled down i thought the world specified that the person who had the house couldn't let go of it they had to look after it well what he does is he gets a master builder to come in here and survey it and he writes up a report in a damning terms saying just what kind of horrible shape the house is in and what he he actually tells us in this report is that if we wanted to make the house livable it's going to cost about 5 000 pounds however if you were going to finish it to the original design right here he's saying it's going to cost you at least 60 000 pounds what's that in today's management it's about 4 million pounds it's a heck of a pile of money so he submits this document to the trustees he does submit this to the trustees on the argument that he's going to be ridding the estate of a nuisance the huge expense persuaded the trustees to authorize the demolition of an unfinished and dilapidated hunt street mansion that's the face there and the best bits were sold off to prior park well that is nice the general left the portico as a relic of his uncle's grand design while his family made the lodge their home we got our shell look here phil's trench is now too deep to work in but he's determined to get to the bottom of his basement room oh look at that is that look like you plaster to you does yes i mean if we can hook that away awkwardest form of digging we've ever done i'm sure that is a plastered surface there it's looking like it isn't it oh look ah come here a moi roy in thinking that there's a loin comes up through there does that mean that's where the wind is going to be then so it seems that there were windows looking over a dry moat running around the eastern wing up to the mysterious corner where jonathan thought we'd found a medieval chapel well i've been slapped round the face by the wet haddock of reality haven't i because this felt like a medieval building see what i mean those corners sort of seem like buttresses but i don't mind at all because if if what i'm reading is right is that is that stub there built into the corner yeah it's all part the same thing um you can just see it's a vertical face down the bottom there then you've got another one going along there that's fine you're on the corner of that big wing yeah that extends down to phil's trench and if that wall the small one is built into it and it returns around this way and it's built into this corner then we've got the same wall being built into both the wing and the moat wall at the same time it's the same build isn't it yeah yes right this requires a major rethink and it's now clear that the outside wall was built at the same time as the parapet wall the question now is when and right at the end of the day jonathan's found the answer this room now we've passed the rubble and we're on to the details which really revealed the period it was built in and you can see the plaster lining there squeezed between what were once wooden uprights against the walls some of it was paneled on this downstairs room stores scullery kitchens that sort of area all that's typical of the 17th century in the smart rooms might be colored with tapestry down here those cheap materials are well done for the kitchen staff seems to me that after three days we haven't discovered a georgian mansion at all 150 years after this was built the georgian slapped a bit of lipstick on it that's basically it so it's a bit of georgian cladding yeah so francis popham's doomed grand design turns out to be the last flourish of a family intent on building ever more impressive houses sir john popham acquired hunt street's medieval manor around 1600 and constructed a new house befitting a lord chief justice [Music] but around the time of the civil war the next generation of pophams built another house the one we've uncovered and over a century later francis spent a fortune refacing the outside of the house lavishly remodeling the inside and transforming hunt streets gardens but to finish it was too expensive a proposition for his nephew who eventually pulled it down and moved into the lodge we've all overstretched ourselves but the pophams more than any of us they put all their hopes in a building that eventually turned out to be a visible symbol of their decline not only was it sold off for scrap but if our evidence is right they hardly ever even lived in it a perfect example of reality meeting a rather two grand design and of course this being time team in the last five minutes of the dig we found out that it's 150 years older than we all thought you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 79,510

Rating: 4.9712472 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 15 episode 7, time team hunstrete mansions, hunstrete mansions, hunstrete, somerset, bath, time team somerset, time team bath, british history, archaeology, time team dig site

Id: Pj-tPz5LnWM

Length: 47min 42sec (2862 seconds)

Published: Sun May 09 2021