Leper Hospital In Winchester | FULL EPISODE | Time Team

about a mile in that direction is winchester it's quite a sleepy place today but it hasn't always been like that in the 9th century king alfred made it his capital and it remained the top city in norman england until london finally overtook it but while winchester was thriving not all of its citizens were enjoying the boom this field lies just outside the city boundaries and 900 years ago it was home to a community of winchester's outcasts the men who lived here were united by a terrible bond a disease that disfigured their bodies and condemned them to a life of exile a disease called leprosy somewhere under here lie the remains of a 12th century leper hospital but this wasn't just any old leper hospital it had living quarters a master's house a huge cemetery and this fantastic chapel and time team have got just three days to find them it's the start of day one and geophysics are already well into their stride they're surveying a long strip of land cutting right across our site they're looking for building remains and traces of the wall which we think used to go around the site of the leper hospital we're field walking the site as well there's a huge amount of building debris just lying around in the field and that could give us important clues about where to put our first trenches i don't understand we've got this picture of the most fantastic chapel yeah and yet the people who would have worshipped there would have been the poorest people in the hotel yeah but i think that's to do with the patrons the rich families are endowing the hospital that's their insurance policy that's their ticket to heaven by giving money to set the place up so that's why there's a such a contrast what do you got do well as you can see here we've got um a collection of finds some of which seem to be quite important that's fantastic isn't it yeah look at this nice bit of encaustic this is definitely medieval is it indeed i'm not sure about that but that definitely is yes this would be the floor of either the chapel or one of the main buildings if it's the leopard hospital how do we know that this is the leopard well the location of the site just outside the city yeah no one wanted a leper hospital next to them the name of the site said mary magdalene is always associated with leper hospitals other hospitals the locals call this field hospital field and have done for a long time they never really forget that there's been something they've seen a pretty good clue doesn't it well and you walk across it there is all this stuff here isn't there and and uh on top of that a number of years ago there were some a few small test bits were dug which seemed to indicate again that there are some good remains still to be seen so what kind of things are we hoping that we might find well we ought to try and get the layout of the buildings because we're not really sure how you know it was whether it was one block or several blocks to find the chapel would be nice of course uh there's also must be a big cemetery of all the people that died here how do we set about it well we've got the geophysical in and uh that ought to be quite good here because i think this is chalk isn't it that we're right so you know we often get good results on that but we've also got bernard trying to relocate those test bits because they found stuff and the obvious thing would be to reopen one or two of those as well we've asked bernard our surveyor to pinpoint the earlier trenches because we know they contained building remains but why are geo fizz looking so pleased with themselves i don't believe this three meters two meters you're joking oh that's brilliant what's this well look over here this point here right and this point here this is where we want the trench to be because this is right on top of the building that we think is here in the geophysics so what you're saying is then you've got geophysics anomalies there that show buildings and that tallies with the trench one and the evaluation yeah which also had building remains which is here i mean the only reason we surveyed here is because as you walked over you know there's quite a bit of flint rubble and so on but how certain can you be that this is where the trench is i've positioned this very accurately but what the variable quality is is how well this was recorded when they dug the trench the crucial thing though is that it is likely that this thing here which we think is a building is the same thing that is that yeah so it doesn't matter that's that's that is the crucial thing that is yeah so with the rain falling in goes our first trench popes are high that there's a building under here and the early signs are promising [Laughter] but one flint doesn't make a building we'll find out later what's waiting to be discovered in trench one we've set up our incident room in the local girls school where robin's piecing together the early history of the site he's come across some 18th century illustrations of the hospital which could provide valuable information to the team meanwhile stuart's also in sherlock holmes mode investigating early maps for clues to the layout of the site evidence suggests it stood within a five-sided boundary wall and stuart thinks this aerial photo may show the faint traces of that wall up on site works continuing in trench one we've already found remains of a wall so carrenza is opening a second trench next door to try and pick up the end of the building we know our hospital must have had a cemetery too we're really keen to find that as any skeletons could give us crucial information about leprosy in medieval england so we've invited forensic scientist margaret cox along we haven't dug this lot up have we now these are actually from chichester from the leper hospital cemetery excavation there what is leprosy it's a bacterial disease that affects a peripheral nervous system and because you get a loss of feeling or an anesthesia associated with that then you damage your soft tissues they get infected and the infection tracks in and actually damages the bone so what should our diggers be looking for well the sorts of things they won't expect to find or a different face and if we look at this one here for example this is a male and if you look at him he's actually lost the nasal spine and the edges here have resorbed and become very round you've got that the bone that supports the teeth here is all also pulling back and so you lose your front teeth as well so you get a very flattened collapsed front of face but the most important changes that they need to be aware of are to the hands and feet because they have real implications for the way they excavate if you if you look at this one for example this toe it's really sort of penciled off and become very thin and tapered and it doesn't look like a toe bone so they might be seeing shapes and things that they don't really recognize and they're also very very fragile so they need to be extremely careful to to recover them we're sifting through the evidence from trenches one and two no bones yet and the building we've found doesn't look like our prime target the chapel maybe we're having more luck in the hunt for the boundary wall john how's the gif is going look that's the resistance we've got a really nice building and that that's worked well now that slots into that square there yeah we've surveyed a long strip magnetically and i can't find any boundary sort of ditches limits to the precinct at all stuart we can't find the boundary i think we might be able to help you out there a bit we've been looking at the the old maps and the air photographs and so on and we've identified that we're in the right field and one of the parish boundaries which comes along here gives us the area that is extrapolate this is the area within which the the lepers would have lived what's this little kink here well this kink corresponds exactly to where the pentagonal enclosure is shown on one of the 18th century maps now if you look at their photographic evidence we have these lines which are showing up as light colours in the chalk and this is the pen tank and all shapes and closure we've been looking for it's clear as day here why haven't you got it well i think we were hoping there were going to be boundary ditches there and clearly there aren't could they have just been plowed out possible yeah well that looks relatively clean and clear-cut there but there is one complication to add what's all this this is at a very very big first world war army camp which was built right across the side i mean we've got a detailed plan of it which ray sands actually transcribed onto here so we can work out where all the roads and buildings were and the way it's plotted out here you can see that's where the chapel site is likely to be in the boundaries the camp hasn't seriously impinged on it either back on site we think we've picked up a trace of the world war one camp already but it could actually help in our search for the layout of the medieval hospital we know our hospital had a well as lepers weren't allowed to use public water supplies when the army was stationed here they adapted the well and put a metal wind pump on top geophys think they've located the remains of the wind pump if they're right we could be on the trail of a medieval well we think it's worth a new trench to find out come on come on bear well be well how's it coming on there victor margaret's still waiting for our first skeletons to turn up in the meantime she's working with victor on a sculpture to show the facial damage caused by leprosy the first stage is to build a precise copy of this leper's skull which was discovered in a previous excavation the skull has damage to the nose and upper jaw which would have dramatically altered the sufferer's appearance once he's copied the skull shape victor will start to build up the muscle layers which help to define the shape of the face the building in trenches one and two is beginning to take shape as well although it's not the chapel but we know that's here somewhere because we've got these illustrations of the site they were made in 1788 just before the buildings were demolished meanwhile robin's been finding out when the hospital was founded i've got references from 1148 onwards of varying kinds and i would push it back slightly to say the 1130s possibly 1140s and who founded it well since we know it was a bishop of winchester that would identify henry of blue and who was he uh he couldn't be more important really if he tried other than being archbishop of canterbury he'd become apart from anything else he was the grandson of william the conqueror he became abbot of glastonbury the wealthiest monastery of england in 1126 and 1129 he becomes bishop of winchester one of the most valuable bishoprics in england but he also was a great building bishop we know from 1138 for instance he built six castles just like that and in winchester and in glastonbury and all over his his vast estates he is the one the chap who initiates building activity we're not having much luck finding any of henry's buildings on our site but on the other side of winchester there's an impressive reminder of the sort of things we're looking for this isn't cross hospital it was built by henry a few years before the leper hospital and although it's on a much grander scale i suppose you could think of these as the older relations of the buildings that once stood on our site but stewart may be on the verge of a breakthrough this 18th century plan clearly shows the position of the chapel within the boundary wall stuart already knows where the boundary wall is because you can see it faintly in this aerial photo of the site so if he overlays the plan onto the aerial photo that should pinpoint the exact location for the chapel on the ground well that's the theory anyway we'll find out later if it works in practice oh my goodness a big hole back in trench three jenny and barney have uncovered the first evidence of the well this must have been a metal strut actually attached to a post of wood sunk into the ground and the wood's now rotted away so it looks like a void yeah and how is it free if you wobble it or is it no it seems like it's pretty solid it's going down i mean you can see it's going down along there i can't see where the bottom is actually no but you feel quite stable there at the moment yeah i think this is sunk into the earth rather than it being a big void and i think maybe this was something to do with the the wind pump which we were hoping would be sat on top of where we think the leopard hospital's well was right to get the water out of the old well okay but this is clearly nothing to do with the leper hospital well it's it's a modern thing so we're gonna have to go much further down yeah i think so yeah okay we're nearing the end of day one and we've now got three trenches up and running but there's still no sign of our main targets the boundary wall the chapel and the leper cemetery it's all very frustrating but maybe our luck's about to change now there are rumors that you agree for a change oh we always agree don't worry john do you remember earlier on tony with the computer you asked me what that was yeah and i said that was the sudden limit of the precinct that we're looking for yeah well we've got this map of 1780s which shows they precinct the chaplain saw that is the southern boundary we've scaled it onto that and once you do that the whole thing drops in with the soil mark that we showed on the air photograph that goes straight up there that goes along that hedge boundary comes back along that mark and then back down there which means we can now identify exactly where that chapel is and it's in that area there where that dark patch is and where is that in here we're actually stood on the northwest corner of the chapel here that bernie's set out right he's currently setting out the northeast corner over there it's not bad for them come on john where you go well we've extended our survey that was the building we had this morning in the resistance yeah and now we've got this really nice anomaly here and that looks as though it goes with the north wall of the church so in effect that's how the church sits seems to me we should put something across that then shouldn't we once once you've done the rest of that will we do that tonight well we could do i mean you know we want to look and see what's inside the chapel in case there's burials there but we also want to go outside and yeah those the cemetery ought to be on the side yeah well on the air photograph we had this enclosure showed up that's where the chapel site is or that dark market yeah and that shows up and i think that might be the cemetery on the south side of the chapel so yeah we ought to go there so we've wasted so as we prepare to open trench four here's the state of play thanks to stuart we now know where the boundary wall was and if we focus on the area inside the wall we found buildings in trenches one and two though we don't know what they are yet trench three may lead down to a medieval well finally stuart and geophys both agree that new trench number four should fingers crossed contain the north wall of the chapel oh wow look at that bang on the line as well there it is yeah that's that's what's that a couple of well it's the end of day one and after a fairly fruitless day whatever mick might say we finally hit what could well be the chapel and if that's the chapel then over here should be the cemetery which means with a bit of luck tomorrow we should be excavating bodies join us after the break beginning of day two just before we went home last night we came down on what we thought might be part of the chapel is it barney yeah i think it is i think it's the north wall of the chapel it's in really good nick so the chances are that inside the chapel over there we might even get medieval floor levels and what's the significance of that it'd be great because we might find tile floors or burials so where are you we're right there if that wasn't enough after we'd all gone home phil stayed here rootling around what were you looking for phil what we wanted to find is was the east wall it's the most sacred part of the chapel it's where the altar is tony and have you got it yes we've it's incredibly heavily robbed but if you really needed any proof at all look we've got our first piece of beautiful molded stone is from the main window and we should be able to tie that in with a 1788 illustration so where are you we're there which means that according to our plan 27 foot over in this direction round about where this hat is there should be the door out of the chapel into the leper cemetery which is exactly where mick's opening our next trench so now we've got six trenches up and running in trenches one and two we've discovered two sides of the same building in trench three we think we've located the well which supplied the leper hospital trenches four and five contain the north and east walls of the chapel and trench six is taking us into what we think is the leper cemetery it looks like it's gonna be a busy day [Music] in trench five katie's found our first bones it looks like they've been buried just outside the chapel this for example this rib is from a child quite a young child do children get leprosy children can get leprosy but but often um leprous people had their wives and children living with them and so you know there may well have been children here it's not there not to be precluded if we get an intact skeleton in that grave cut is that going to be more helpful than just these bits and pieces well yes because if we get a whole skeleton then we can look at the different areas of the skeleton where we might see leprous changes and see whether or not we've got somebody who had leprosy so katie what are you going to do now well we're going to obviously have to extend the trench so that we can find the end of the grave cast we've only got the foot end at the moment yeah so i'll have to go and get the digger drop barney oh there you are we've moved barney to the cemetery trench well we're doing quite well um down at that end we've got the south wall of the chapel more interestingly just between the two of us just there this other thing here yeah that's another wall that's definitely structural much smaller and it's possibly something like a porch what a bed down here though because we should have got bones i'm having a nightmare clearly what is that well i've got this articulated bone yeah and i've got a cluster of bones down here can you see them yeah a bit of a skull and then a couple of vertebrae there but no grave cut and the rest of the body's completely vanished so i fit i think we've got evidence for cemetery but it's all disturbed so this is where they've they've re-dug it and re-dug it it's all i fear so you don't even think it's necessarily one body presumably i i can't tell it's too jumpy so what do would you suggest we go we can carry on i think it would be a good idea to carry on with this one and see if there's any undisturbed graves underneath margaret have a look at those who are there phil phil's found our first grave but it's inside the chapel where the posh people were buried so it's unlikely to be a leper margaret thinks it's a female and john crook our architecture expert has a theory about who it might be just as a working hypothesis i can supply a female who is buried on the south side and that's mrs elizabeth simmons who died on the 12th of december 1695 aged 90 years so she was born in 1605 yeah now her dad john ebbton uh sometime master of this hospital is also buried there according to the other source that we have who says that i think he he died in 1614 when he was 98. so i'm not a mathematician but that makes him 90 when she must have been about 90 when so he can yes good god conceived at age 89. that's very healthy part of the world isn't it must be good air up here i will check the i'll check the dates of these these people i think it's easy so we may have a father and daughter both buried in the same part of the chapel over in the incident room victor has been hard at work on his bust of a medieval leper and you can already begin to see the terrible physical impact of the disease so how were lepers viewed back in the middle ages you could make the comparison with how people regarded aids about 20 years ago they were very afraid that they might catch it they thought the people who had it were repulsive because of course leprosy does disfigure you also they uh associated leprosy with sex they thought that one of the ways in which it was transmitted was sexually they thought that lepers were more lustful than ordinary people and so just as with aids there was this sort of feeling you know these are people who behaved wickedly and that's why they're like this how did they look after leopards by segregating them outside the town they had space for a garden they had a field with they could grow corn they could pasture animals and they would live in in a kind of village and and look after themselves so how many leper houses were all together well we know of about 300 documented ones don't we we might add we might say there are a few we don't know about so it's going to be somewhere between 300 350. you've also got to distinguish between hospitals that cared specifically for lepers or stated to do so and those who just care generally for the sick in various ways if there are 300 odd of these leper hospitals how many of them have been excavated and if you like how does our excavation here compare with us well there's there's been a number of excavations what's very important is that you're putting the hospital really in its context in the context of the landscape and the context of the buildings within its precinct and this really is a first for um english archaeology it isn't often that they've been we've been able to have an excavation that reconstructs the entire complex i like the words the first for english archaeology look at that oh yeah phil's uncovered a skull in trench five i mean the trouble is what i don't understand is what it appears to be doing in the middle of the grave cut i mean we've got a superb coffin imprint look the stain goes down there yeah okay it and there it's actually got the wood in it it's incredible and then there's the other end of it and it comes back up the other end yeah and it butts up against this side of the grave obviously once i clean the whole lot back i should get the whole shape of the coffin i mean the only thing that occurs to me at the moment is for the foot end of a grave you know that is actually not very big even for an adult and and i just wonder if we haven't actually got a child's coffin in here maybe on top of the earlier coffins but if that is a an indication of the condition of the bone yeah it looks good doesn't it i think you'll be very pleased with that jenny is this no entry tape yes can i come in as long as you're careful i will be what's the problem well we've we found the wind pump that was here for the first world war army camp um and we think it's on top of the medieval well so we're just being careful until we know what's going on why are we interested in a medieval world because i think it to be a really critical part of the leper hospital they couldn't survive without their own fresh water supply and if you could get one here then it'd be a good reason for it to be here how do we find out how deep it is i think we have to drop something down and time it oh we must do that we must do it it'll be very exciting but can we use one of the one of our spare mics these are the things that we all wear so we could hear the sound of something going down there right how we can do this right if you tell me when you let go of that i'll press yes on stopwatch what this yeah this is what's going in i think so it's nice and heavy okay hang on i'll say one two three go all right okay one two three go how long do you reckon about six seconds and what does that mean well um i think it's six six times six is 36 times uh you don't know it could be about 100 meters i reckon yeah down right i don't know what's that in feet uh 300 feet it's a long way do you think we ought to check it i think we should probably get somebody else to do the sum we could do a plumbline thing down yeah that's the other thing drop something with a string on maybe 300 feet but we'll measure it again later on yesterday it took us ages to find the chapel but today we're making much better progress as we attempt to slot together the pieces of our medieval jigsaw and it looks as though things are about to get even better john you've got the jiffys there you are geophysics absolutely fantastic in it the whole site laid out we're just comparing it with the 18th century map and you can see the church there which is this block which is what we're digging over here and next to that there's a thing described as the masters house on the on this map what does that mean well we think it's probably the chap in charge of by the lepers early on or the you know the people in the arms house later on and that must be that area there john wasn't it we've got a massive stuff there and then these two little buildings here a part of this great north range which um there's a description of in the 18th century but it doesn't show it on the map you can see the foundations but that fits in very nicely with this prospect of the 1770s and where we did think that this range might be a sort of spurious invention but it's clearly there now as a row of arms houses so we've got the church masters house north range on you know each source of information and the boundary wall don't forget which you couldn't find yesterday but you found that yeah well done our plan of the site's really taking shape in trenches one and two we now know that we've found the arms houses where the lepers lived and in trenches four and five we've located the chapel so what's the next target we want to look at the masters house see what sort of condition that's in if we come from that across into this north range so across there somewhere we should be able to look at look at both how deep do you think it was last time um back at the well we're adopting a more basic measurement technique this time this tape is actually 100 meters long so let's go whoa it's smoking it's smoking is it i'm going to get a tape oh i'm actually out of tape there is the red line i mean there's still weight on the end of that so mick the dig needs to find another tape measure meanwhile margaret's catching up with katie's burials in trench five i found some bits of jaw so i don't know if you can tell if it's a man or a woman that looks yeah that's that's male that's flaring nicely there yeah it's interesting margaret yeah you've got a minute could i drag you away what have you got now got another skull oh my god look at that that's fantastic there's loads more coffin nails again so this is a bit strange isn't it because we seem to have two skulls in the same coffin we do seem to have two two skulls in the same coffin yeah it's a really good condition and we're still on the on the top of the head very much on the top of the head and we oh yeah definitely i mean no indication no indication of sutures no it might mean it's an older person yeah so i hadn't actually anticipated that i was going to get a skull at this level it's always the same a minute you just never know quite where they're going to crop up next no yeah at the well we're adding tape measure number two in our quest to reach the bottom that is a hundred and fifty meters and it's still it is still pulling when i let go has anyone got another tape this is getting silly okay we're on to take measure number three now so this is our last 30 meters you still going but even three tapes tied together won't stretch far enough to reach the bottom i don't know what to do we haven't got any more tapes the hole is more than 180 meters deep that's incredible more than 550 feet in old money sadly though we've had to call off the well excavation the risk of it collapsing is just too high but as we near the end of our whirlwind day two our other trenches are really helping us piece together the shape of our medieval hospital so what have we got here well this is a 17th century fireplace i mean quite sweetly when we dug it there was a whole pile of ash with masses of clay pipes in it like all these old boys living in the arms houses have been sitting smoking by the throat fire and throwing the pipes in it and in here we've got the walls of the armhouses you can see there's a wall across the back there and then running right down here which will probably have gone on and on and they're really well built i know what this one is this is the new trench isn't it where we're trying to get the masters house that's right you can see already those walls are looking much better built than the arms houses ones we haven't had many fines to help us date the arms houses but the building styles the same as the chapel and we know that's 12th century or earlier so here we're into the chapel and you can see that big lump of stone there that's one of the piers and then over here we're right into the center of the chapel phil's strange that's right is that a skull you got there phil we've actually got at least two bodies in here tony is quite amazing it's really interesting we've got other burials outside the church where katie is she's out in the graveyard um and interesting it's probably where the lepers were buried outside and the the patrons of the whole establishment would be buried in here so we carried on to try and find the rest of the church this is still inside this year we're all inside the church there's probably the other peers here and then coming along here we've got the south wall again you can see with those flint cobbles lining it and look lovely bits of the masonry that would have um you know made up the really ornamental bits of the church and then we're outside again into the graveyard under these bones what we've been finding here yes more human bones and you can see we've got well two skulls in that grave again so it looks like another double burial it's been a fantastic day too but there are still plenty of questions left to answer on day three do any of our skeletons have the telltale signs of leprosy what more can we discover about the buildings where the lepers lived how many people do you think are actually in there then phil and will we solve the puzzle of phil's mysterious chapel burials join us after the break as we uncover the secrets of what one of our experts has told us is the most complete excavation of a leper hospital ever to take place in great britain it's the start of day three and the weather's turned against us but we're not letting that dampen our spirits as we race to complete our picture of winchester's medieval leper hospital our new trench is targeting the hospital's boundary wall and the gatehouse which gave access to the site i hope we find something to cheer these three up margaret's still searching for a skeleton with the signs of leprosy in trench five katie's found an unusual chalk-lined tomb with a pair of legs inside the rest of the skeleton was probably destroyed when a later burial was placed on top of it it's very unusual to see feet like this propped up against the stone i don't think i've ever seen it like them before so well preserved yeah they're in very good condition i've got there's some loose ones oh right yeah oh yeah tell from that it's very thin isn't it which is one of the things we look for with leprosy where you get the eventual destruction of the joint surface and end up with a sort of pencil tip shaped bone but whether it's significantly thin or not i don't really know i need to look at all of the foot bones it could just be somebody who's very slender and billed but we've not just been finding skeletons our trenches have also produced some fantastic stonework but can we match any of it with our 18th century illustrations of the chapel yes absolutely and that's what's fantastic about the things that are coming out of these trenches let's have a start with that one now you see this little sort of pie crust decoration now do you recognize it there absolutely probably that that very art the other seemed to be a bit different and what about my little piece well that's that's the best for the best of the lot really as far as the 12th century is concerned over the high altar you've got this zigzag or chevron decoration and there is an actual piece of it i just thought that was just pain yeah it does look like pain but it's not what this this shows of course is that this is actual real architecture would all these arches have been made at the same time or could they be from different periods well i think they're probably probably what this shows because we've got the the same geology the same sort of tooling uh that these arches are indeed 12th century examples of late transitional architecture rather than sort of 14th century stuff as one might have thought what about this bizarre looking thing here well that's perhaps the loveliest of the lot there's not much in the way of what you call liturgical furniture in these pictures but there is this niche which presumably held a statue it had a ornamental top which you can see there and here is part of that very top what are these red things here you're sort of looking up into the head of the niche within the head itself rather like a sort of acoustic hood there were ribs and the point where the ribs sprout there are these kinds of well are they leaves they look actually more like well raspberries i think you would say so what would have been standing here a saint no doubt the statue of a saint probably isn't there in magdalen the the patron of the hospital itself so if i'm the saint yeah yesterday barney uncovered what looked like a double burial until it turned out that one of the skulls wasn't actually attached to a body but the other skeleton's almost complete and if the hands show signs of damage this could be our first leper well we've got more of the right hand out than the left and it's in very good condition but they don't look as though there are any changes from leprosy there so okay so not immediately not immediately no we can have a look at the feet as well and see what they're doing yeah you know there you go what about other things like uh is it a man or a woman or it's one of those individuals that's not easy to sex it could be a male it could be a female i really need to look at it properly to be able to tell that then we can get it out and have a look at it probably the better we're still digging for the boundary wall and gate house but as the rain worsens are the results anything to smile about i've got a bed of natural clay here and i've got some kind of cut going this way so it could be the the rubber trench the actual precinct wall but i'll carry on digging that way get the other side of it and then we'll go into it and see if any of the wall left look him in oh yeah come in tony you two are to no good yep cool what can you tell us about these margaret well we're trying to work out what's going on tony yesterday we thought we possibly had two burials that have been disturbed and re-buried here because there seemed to be a jumble of bones then we keep on getting glimpses of bones that are actually articulated such as bottom of those legs down there but they're far too far away from this head to relate to it this person would have very short legs and a huge long spine which doesn't stack up either and we've also got a part of a pelvis here with the the femur running off of it but it's by somebody's head so it makes no sense at all do we know anything about these people sex i think this is a female but i'm not 100 sure yet and that one i think is a male and in a way one of the one of the prime things is actually get the bones out of the ground let margaret have a look at them and see whether she can actually make two complete skeletons out of them [Music] the weather's getting worse by the minute we're racing to tie up as many loose ends as possible before the whole site just gets washed away how many people do you think are actually in there very nice [Music] oh [Applause] [Music] better leave that for margaret finally in the cemetery trench a breakthrough in our search for a leper we can now say that this is a male right the pelvis and the skull both indicate that but although we've got none of the leprous changes to the hands and feet we actually have got the beginning of remodeling of the nasal bones right and so this edge here which is usually sharp is actually rounded and the nasal spine is resolved so he could have been a leftover he could have been in the early stages of leprosy yeah so at last we found the first evidence of a possible leper burial and we've made progress in the other trenches too it's like it's all turned to mush mick but did you find the boundary yes this merch as you call it is actually the feel of a rubber trench so it's a trench cut for a wall yeah it's not big enough for a ditch it's the right size for quite a substantial wall did you get any dating evidence unfortunately no that's it i just can't dig it it's like soup but at least we now understand where the precinct boundary was oh absolutely we've got fixed points on the chapel and we've got fixed points on the boundary i think we've positively identified the extent of the like the hospital we've had to close down the chapel trench too but it's already given us lots of useful information about the centerpiece of the hospital jenny we have to stop yeah which just leaves the master's house it's filling with water i think so yeah we've got quite a nice picture now we've got the back wall of the masters lodging yeah and then this big wall here is the is the north range the arms house probably where the leopards actually would have been living yeah um and then in between the two which is nice we've got this little alleyway with a nice flint floor i think probably it would have run all the way along here and then all the way up to the north door of the church so that you they could basically go to church without getting wet so would that have been covered over i hope so i think so yeah so in one respect at least they'd be better off absolutely we've got 45 mile an hour winds forecast the rain's still shooting down so we're gonna have to call it a day but it's been a fantastic three days archaeology and the excitement of what we've found has made even these appalling conditions just about bearable but we're not going home yet we may have stopped digging but there's unfinished business to deal with back in the incident room so have you managed to sort it out i think we've been able to establish some quite interesting facts about this field right we've very quickly been able to establish the precinct boundary yeah this is the area marked in here we've been referring to it as a pentangle as if there's something mysterious about it but all it is is a regular shape which has been added to an already existing boundary that's what that side is odd and it's probable that that boundary all the way around there is the original 12th century piece of land given to the lepers but one of the real highlights for me actually is in looking at the maps and the the development through the ages yeah and if we look at from this angle we've got the leper hospital precinct here and you can see wind just at the back yeah in 1887 next door the winchester council built the royal victoria isolation hospital for infectious diseases next door yeah and you know it was the first world war army camp here well these red blocks next to our site were disinfection hands so you had continuity right through to right the way through for the last 900 years or so that's fantastic in it three days ago our site was an empty field but now we've pieced together the layout of the buildings which made up the mary magdalene leper hospital we've located the wall which surrounded it and we found the chapel the master's house the arms houses where the lepers lived and the cemetery where they were buried but what about those puzzling burials in phil's trench oh margaret you've finally sorted out my jumble of bones well i've tried to i've talked about my misery how many people were in there there are two there are two adults um as we thought at the time and we've got a female there that's a female pelvis is that the one that was articulated yeah that is and we've got these pelvic bones as well which i think are all over the place and they're from a male probably it's actually very incomplete but probably from a male and how old are they well there are a couple of things that suggest that they're actually quite you know quite old the really interesting thing we've got is this ossified cartilage this is actually the cartilage that protects the larynx and the vocal cords and when you get older this turns to bone effectively look we've got a male and a female yep and they're both very old well they're old yes pretty old dish is beginning to ring like the the father and daughter story that we were thinking about it's uncanny um and the thing that really for me makes me think that that could well be what we have here is if you look at the skulls if you put them in profile like that you'll see that they both have very very unusual shaped heads they're only really long and to see two people with the same head shape in the same grave when we know that there are a related couple buried in that area it is does actually indicate that we might have the cannon and his daughter it is actually uncanny it is which one have i got you've got him good lord so i could actually behold in the skull of john ebton cannon of winchester and formerly master of the college here yeah you could it's incredible isn't it but john ebden and his daughter walked the grounds of our site many years after leprosy had disappeared from britain there are many others resting here whose names are long forgotten who are far less fortunate than the ebdens you know what this reminds me of when i was a kid uh there was a robert louis stevenson book i can't remember which one it was but there's a leper that comes in throughout the whole book and his head is always covered by this cowl and i used to wonder what hideous deformities lay underneath and now looking at this chap i realize that it's not just the pustules and the squash nose and the the lip it's the fact that underneath all that you can still see an unblemished human being looking out of it with those blank staring eyes [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 103,801

Rating: 4.9329824 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, Winchester chapel, Winchester

Id: KlOoahV3XcY

Length: 47min 53sec (2873 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 23 2020