Lost Centuries at St Osyth (Essex)| S12E09 | Time Team

long ago two viking marauders captured a lonely nun called joseph and they chopped a head off but they say she then picked up her head carried it back to her nunnery and died there and this miraculous act of martyrdom earned her a sainthood and the pilgrims flocked in and the local village adopted her name and prospered well that's the story this little town on the essex coast is still called saint ozith but its real origins are a mystery and the locals have called in time team to help them find out when and where their town really began they also want to know if these ancient timbers sticking out of the nearby creek fit into the story could they possibly hold the key to the mystery of sentosas we and the locals have got just three days to find out we begin our quest for the origins of this town on the waterfront [Music] geophys are testing a peculiar lump between the timbers and the shore [Music] if there's a significant feature here then these timbers might possibly be a missing link in saint joseph's evolution but the mud isn't going to give up its secrets that easily there's a rich trading history on this part of the essex coast and saint joseph just five miles from the ancient city of colchester is proud to have been a small port since the norman times today the town set back from the scattered creeks and marshes and clustered around a huge 12th century priory there's still a small harbour at the head of the creek but at the time the priory was built this waterfront might have looked very different alan this is a heck of a place you've brought us to poor old phil can't get within 10 yards of where he's supposed to be digging it's gonna take richard another half hour to lay out the duck boards for us when did you first notice that there was something here it was about ten years ago sally up and down the creek and when the tide was barely in these stakes kept appearing and i couldn't tie them with anything natural and so no why were they there who put them there so what did you think it was well at that stage i suppose it took a few weeks to sink in there's probably a key a key a key that you tie boats that's right yes but all the boats are way over in that direction aren't they yes now so does that rather undermine the theory no i don't think it does i mean it's on the outer bend of a river they might put timbers in to stop erosion and be able to tie boats that's where the deeper water is but there's a whole load of other things it could be it could be part of a fishware for catching you know fish coming in or out or it could just be a revetment for this bank phil you found anything yet yeah i've got some pottery here tony now 10 minutes and he's already found some fines before we arrived alan discovered loads of pottery in the field behind the creek mix asked a few of the locals to field walk this area to see if they can discover any finds that might link this field with our timbers field walking isn't easy with a young crop in the ground phil you're the only one of us who's seen this thing close up so far he's the only one oh i forgot the mud prince i thought you didn't do mud i wish we hadn't why not well look we've got the edge of the bank there that's the vegetation there's the creek they're the timbers we we have got this sort of gravel bank linked with it but isn't that what we can see with this lump in front of us anyway john uh yeah right so all you're wading around hasn't really come too much fruit not a lot what do you reckon it is i still think it's something just like a fish trap oh john stop being so negative i mean look at the way it's constructed it's really substantial there's all those big timbers down there and there's other ones laid on edge over there why can't it be just something more like a wharf with an access way here i think that's quite feasible right so what's your instinct i think it's something much more substantial because the timbers are running back up to the bank so i don't see why it can't be something like a mill do you buy a mill yeah it could be he could be or it could be a revetment for the side of the river there's all sorts well either way arguing about it now isn't actually going to resolve it i'll tell you where we're going to put the trench we're going to pull the muck away from the timbers in front there to see what the construction is then we're going to see whether or not those timbers do extend into the bank as raksha thinks they might do and then also we'll see the construction of the causeway as well he's telling you what to do you're the boss no but he's right with that's the way we've got to dig it because we we've got to work with the tide here we've got to work low down until we're driven off by the rising water i mean that's what you seem to have forgotten we haven't got three days we've only got three toys the low tides at midday phil oh look tony but boy halfway through the afternoon is going to be half way up which is actually going to cover the base of our stakes so we've got a fish trap or a revetment or a key or a mill and we've got just three tides to dig it that's right come on raksha let's get at it the history of this place is rather vague after the legendary martyrdom of saint joseph in the 7th century the first record we have is doomsday which tells us that 70 souls were living here by 1086. in 1121 work began on a huge priory dedicated to saint joseph and it's likely a medieval town would have sprung up around the priory but we don't know that it's a funny shaped town this isn't it it is it's not like what you'd expect from medieval town at all what would you expect well normally you get a sort of triangle or a rectangular marketplace and you get these very regular patterns of narrow properties around us so that even from the map you can see where the town was you don't have to sort of look at the buildings and ask where it was but here you look at the map and you can't see much at all no i mean we're standing just here um and if you look over your shoulder that way there's the priory and the church which is marked on the map here is just there and you know there's a triangular area here which is mick says is your classic marketplace perhaps but there's no sign of these long narrow sort of urban properties that you'd expect at all if you look at this row here you know it's tiny little places they're places that started as market stalls temporary and have gradually got fixed so there they are and they filled all the space up not many gardens here our task is to establish where the early town of saint joseph was at the time the priory was built carrenza will mastermind the hunt for the medieval town so matt and brigid and the locals are going to sink lots of test pits to see if there are signs of occupation [Music] in the garden of the red lion pub matt's looking for rubbish pits at the back of some of the early properties these might contain the remains of domestic pottery you see that there's a bit of a brick there or something so that's a piece of a brick or tile so there's evidence that you know people have been living and doing stuff already [Music] there are two test pits behind the butcher's house this victorian wall might have been the frontage for small market stalls buildings like each side of the alleyway come to here there's a gap so um must be something here once but we're not just digging carrenza and buildings historian brenda watkin will be trying to put a date on the oldest houses by identifying medieval architectural features and by dendrochronology dating wood by taking core samples from the oldest structural timbers the rivers are the waterways of the time they're the railways and the motorways um a town like this the foreshore in front of it would have been covered in small vessels everyone would have more people will have boats and horses and carts so you can see a lot of vessels would be here most vessels can just be pulled up on the foreshore you don't actually need a major facility so what do we mean when we say it would have been a key what you've got there is a very interesting unusual structure which is actually projecting out into the river or appears to be projecting out into the river now that is an anomaly but not necessarily a key not necessarily key as we know it but clearly something unusual something out of the ordinary on the riverbank and because that is at the ordinary that's why we have to dig it we don't understand it yet in addition to our test pits we're digging here at one of the earliest properties in saint joseph it looks like a wealthy merchant's house and we think there could have been craftsman's workshops at the back okay you can start traveling on this and see if you can see anything you think is man-made you've got a little tray stacks of fines but nothing early enough to prove our town started here so what dates the building then well the building apparently dates from about the 1300s the earliest bit but that's from an architectural survey done before so i think we ought to get our expert to have a look at it yeah but it does mean we should find that sort of thing we should do and hopefully we'll be out beyond the edge of the medieval house and into the garden area where we might find rubbish from you know rubbish pits or laundries or anything like that so we're optimistic now that's a piece of stoneware that's quite interesting this is a kind of pottery that comes into into britain probably from the 16th century is the earlier stuff from from europe so that could be an early date but there's just not enough of it to be able to say yeah that's nice at the butcher's mats off at a cracking pace so it's quite a bit higher isn't it the ground surface here so you must have had a lot to go through yeah yeah we have the road is actually a bit higher on that side as well the whole thing i thought down but it turns out that most of this here is actually there's a huge amount of topsoil in here being brought in however about a meter down the top of there you can see we've got this quite crude wall structure just right we've just managed to catch the edge of it there so it's pretty luckily placed and it's medieval it's block built and there's flint in it that looks very much like some of the other medieval walls among the plethora of fines i'm pretty sure he's medieval well that's fantastic i think that's our first pit so there's some sort of later medieval settlement up here but do fines like this tell us the town grew up around the new priory the tide has turned in the creek in a couple of hours the timbers will be completely submerged [Music] phil's cleared the mud from the bottom of the timbers and has found tool marks where the stakes have been sharpened at this stage it's impossible to tell how old the wooden structure is or what it is to the side of the timbers there's a steep slipway phil's found a layer of gravel mixed up with river mud sitting on top of a curving outcrop of clay this looks like the bottom of the creek there's a bank there's stacks of pottery in amongst the deposits so if that doesn't date it nothing will right opposite the old marketplace brenda our buildings expert has been doing some detective work this house looks classically victorian on the outside but inside oh goodness wow immediately you've got yes immediately we've got a molded bridging joist and just up the stairs there's the critical clue so here we've got a joist cut out here is the soffit tenon which has been cut off but is still in place and above it the diminished haunch right and what's that telling you that's telling me that that's a joyous joint that's coming in in the early 1500s a diminished haunch we've got our first reliable date for this part of the town but it's not medieval it's 400 years later than the founding of the priory all the pits in the town are producing stacks of good fines yeah that looks potentially medieval yeah absolutely i'd say whether they're the right date remains to be seen time day one and we've already put two test pits in the garden of the old house two in the pub two in the butcher shop one in another house vaguely in that direction and we've hardly started yet why are we looking in the graveyard well because this is the next space that we can get right into the very end of this marketplace right at the edge of it and it's the only open area and are you really happy for us to dig here oh absolutely that's fine are there any rules yes as long as it's on the unconsecrated land which is where well it's clearly marked look at the boundary here it follows this line this side we've got individual graves within the consecrated ground and as you move outside you can see a massive change and all these strong resistance anomalies suggesting maybe cobbled courtyards building rubble whatever but stretching right back from the road and where we're going to dig just about there which is where um clue yeah pretty good clue by the time ian's got the turf off we'll have to pack it up for the day we also hear the vicar's a bit of an archaeologist he's dug here before there was one over by that red brick wall very ancient wall there and one behind us here and one directly behind you over there and what did they find they found evidence that supported what we thought was the case that there was an old stable yard surrounded by buildings here in the past well as you can see things have pretty much ground to a halt here because it's the end of tide one even phil's decided to come on out of the water you come up with anything we've been absolutely inundated with results it's been brilliant i mean we're stood along here now all this is covered in water but what you saw this morning was this l-shaped of timbers coming round there and our causeway which is all this muck in front of us is actually along there well what we've actually been able to find is that the causeway is supported by this revetment which is wattle lined and then along here we've actually got this artificial cut now i reckon that is pointing towards a wharf do you reckon that knocks all the other theories on the head i think it's unlikely we've got something as massive as a mill now because the timbers aren't that big but this could still be you know part of a fish weir that's reused something like that i mean we want to still resolve it tomorrow we're going to explore and actually join up with the other side of it over here and there are all these finds from your trench it is amazing i mean my wharf as i like to call it has produced all this magnificent amounts of pottery and and bone loads and loads of roof tile and we've actually got some leather as well and this isn't all we've got is it it's been a regular cornucopia up in the village we've had all this stuff from the field walking all that's come out of the test pits or these bits have come out of the test pits so what does it all mean well our fines experts will tell us when they get here tomorrow beginning of day two in our search for early saint joseph hey up haven't you got a trench to go see i'm not going to walk past this it's just beautiful look at the quality of the craftsmanship look every flint of that has been shaped up squared and then laid look barely get your thumbnail in there absolutely magnificent craftsmanship tony craftsmanship that's what that is this magnificent gatehouse was added to the priory in the 15th century the same date as most of the pottery that we're finding in the town but our task is to discover what sort of place this was at the time the priory was built this morning this lovely old photo came to light it's from about 1900 and that church is this church here except it's the other side so can you see those buildings there they would all have been here and here and here and here and here why do you reckon there would have been all these little buildings slap bang in front of a church it's not unknown in medieval towns to have rows of little shops little workshops you know with a stall out the front plant along the edge of church i was like this it seems to be speculative development to make a bit of extra rent the thing we really need to know is what date were those buildings first started to encroach on the marketplace and that's really starting to pull together the history of medieval symptoms how do we get the date well i think it'd be very useful to dig dig somewhere where those buildings are on the photograph to see if they do start as you know speculative shops in the middle ages so do you mean that we go back in here and sort of stick test pits around here somewhere yeah i mean this building here could be the end survivor of a whole row this big one what about this and then that's the end of one that stood in here just stuck on the end there the brilliant thing is we've got an open area right in the middle of our marketplace that we can actually investigate i reckon the cheap bottle of wine it will be 15th century i hope it's not because she won't touch cheap wine as the vicar predicted we found victorian rubble but we've still got to go 500 years further back down on the creek the second tide is on the way out but something's gone horribly wrong hey phil you don't look at your normal cheer yourself is it surprising look i mean this last night was my trench wasn't it look at it now what's happened well the toad came in didn't it well you must have expected that you were the one who said to me this is about in out in out in out over three days yeah but we didn't actually expect it to come in this this this hole i mean i was reliably informed this was going to be a neat toy and apparently neat toys mean that they don't they don't come in as as hoey but look it's just inundated everything it's a mess so what are you gonna do right sir well there isn't anything that we can do really we just have to clean it up and start all over again it's a bit of a waste of time though no it's not a waste of time there's no point in doing it until you unless you get it cleaned up and recorded it we've got to do that i'm glad he's deaf as a post in our incident room paul blinkhorn has confirmed that the pottery found by philip the creeks no earlier than the stuff we're finding in the town but the finds from the field walking behind the creek are much earlier just about every grid square is producing shades of medieval pottery 12 13th century yeah so this is where the early stuff's coming from the earliest stuff i've seen so far is all from the field walking it's all local words um there was medieval pottery kilns just north of colchester yeah producing grey sandy wares in the 12th and 13th century and this is what we're getting um even this bit with a bit of green glaze i'm gonna slip on it might have come up from london possibly right um but there's one grubby stuff in here it's quite nasty that bit actually it's quite crude there's one outside possibility that this thing might be saxon norman oh come on paul how can you tell that the fabric i mean it's a very very battered uh shirt but um there was a lot of very high quality pottery being made in east anglia in the late saxon period the thetford wares this obviously isn't it that might be a bit of thetford where it's very beaten up and it's very battered but the fabric's a little bit different to the other stuff it seems to be slightly finer but anyway getting back towards the norman conquest with this stuff yeah we're talking 10 15. possibly middle ages for this it's consistently 12th and 13th century the background noise well that's all very interesting isn't it because it's it looks as if the the the jetty where phil is is similar sort of date to what's going on in the town and the early stuff is actually in the field at the back that's confusing the timbers by the creek are 16th century and there's no sign of any settlement around the priory before the 15th century so much for the planned medieval town the stuff that's remotely contemporary with the start of the priory is a mile away in a wheat field behind the creek make sure that the only way of explaining this conundrum and seeing what if anything was going on down there is to send in gfiz the historical documents tell us that early saint ozith was full of tradesmen who could have serviced a growing priory town including the usual suspects carpenters potters brewers well there are one or two with rather more unusual names there's a chancellor who might be a court official or usher and there's a man who's possibly a gauger what's that a type of customs official or excise man so does that imply that there was quite a lot of money around i think yeah one could expect there to be a number of merchants and another man is called a chapman which is a sort of petty trader or merchant what sort of population would there have been well our best evidence comes from the late 14th century in the poll tax and that implies a population of perhaps five to 600 people in the 16th century would there have been the same kind of merchants and sellers around here oh very much so i think but we've actually got the record of a far greater range of trades at that time so we've got a tanner a glover a butcher a weaver so great great variety anybody to do with the harbour yeah very much so there's record of five mariners and a shipwright so clearly boats were being built here in the early 16th century hey phil it's getting more and more precarious down here the more people use your duck boards oh come on stop making her first oh you've cheered up now haven't you seen him this morning she was giving me a lot of stickers we've got real fun down here this morning we've got a dock what do you mean by dog what you're looking at is a place where a boat would have would have slipped in through there just see this this big area of clay it's all a big area of climate no no you want me to get over there and show you look at the yellow underneath that's the clue blimey this stuff here that's the actual natural and it comes way across there and goes up the other side and in the middle of it is this great big dollop of grey clay so the boat is going to fit into there it's going to be protected on this side by these timbers and we've got along there a load of wattle that actually the boat would have slipped up against and beyond that we've got our gravel causeway which is where you would have unloaded and offloaded the boat and the actual front of that causeway is supported by a wattle fence now when that water fence actually rotted all this gravel which is part of the causeway collapsed and fell into the dock and on that side we've actually got another wooden frontage which is comprising of boards but in the front of that is also what lined can we dendrotate this wood no we can't i mean unfortunately the the timbers i think they need about 50 rings or something like the timbers are just not big enough to actually be able to get a day but you know there's an awful lot we can get out of this aren't they with the with the timbers and everything you've got a question of whether i can get out of it one big question though when was it ah yeah well we i think we know that now because paul's gone through the pottery that phil found up on the top there and it's a closely dateable group he's got one lot of stuff that's about 1600 to 1650 and the rest of it's post 1650. so we're looking at a 17th century dock that's good and i've been here all morning and i've got the foggiest idea how old it was shame is not medieval though see if you can find us on medieval key do you want to hand out are you all right no he's all right thank you friend no don't pull don't pull your silly old fool john's already got the geophysics results john you can't have g fizz this entire field we've done a pretty big chunk to start with uh it looks pretty busy doesn't it yeah i mean there's anomalies right along the river frontage i mean that's where phil's trench is in there and there's these responses cool blimey that's your first oh that's good isn't it how does that tie in with the field well we've just got it plotted out look i think it's the same here as yours it's the same grid and there's medieval pottery in every square phil see that good lord not meaningful geophysical results for a change looking at that where do you think that we should now do oh no no just a minute you chose where we dug on day one give me a chance we're tough we're gonna put a trench in in there in amongst all that noise and that's where we got quite a bit of pottery right where's that on the ground can you see that sort of 12 foot tall cane over there yeah well that's where we we've got the really nice anomalies and that's where quite a bit of the pottery came from yeah so we're gonna dig there you're gonna join us i know you're gonna dig this but i'd actually we must look at that first yeah i think yeah but i think these could be industrial type responses what are you thinking of something in the back of the river that sort of workshops boat yards it could be like a small house couldn't it boat building boat breaking boat repairing the whole load fantastic if we found a lot of industry in here well we've got more medieval pottery here than anywhere else it's very difficult to explain the huge gap in time between the waterfront where phil's fines were 16th century and the field behind you feel like one of these sort of gm gm vandals no you need a black mask over your head slag really isn't it oh dear [Laughter] flynn stick to jeff physics john i can't believe that we know from the poll tax that people were living in sentosa in the 14th century might be the remains of one of your windows there martin but none of our test pits have produced any fines at all to prove the town was here you're getting earlier there's a quite a lot of the 15th century stuff but you've got this i mean as far as i'm going this is a find of the day it's the first thing we found that's that's earlier than the 15th century in the in the town itself brilliant i mean i presume looking at your trench you're still in topsoil are you we're just coming off to topsail down onto another layer with cobbles in it but it's not making a lot of sense yet but it's definitely archaeology well i mean looking at the phones you're getting coming up it's looks likely to be 15th century everything else i've seen today in the town has been but this bit i mean shows at least that there are saxons around here somewhere yes we've got an earlier find but is it too early this pit doesn't look deep enough by now pretty well all of our test pits have hit the bottom and there's still a horrible gap of 300 years between the founding of the priory in 1121 and our 15th century fines in the town what do you think is going on man well the only explanation really is that we're in the wrong place and the centre of medieval tenosave is not actually here on this side of the priory do you think that's right i don't think it was here at all i think we've got the priory over there we've got the um harbour the creek over there if you're going to do a town you're going to put your settlement near those things so that's going to be pushing it over the other side of the priory plus an old house here this is the oldest recorded building 1300 absolutely no medieval whatsoever the features suggest agriculture so this could just be a farmstead with the settlement over there paul i have to say that isn't the noises that mick and korenza were coming out with this morning well it might not be but whenever i've seen pottery assemblages from a medieval town or settlement of any size you invariably find lots of early medieval pottery mixed up in the late medieval and early post medieval deposits that just isn't happening here there's not one single scrap of medieval pottery before the 15th century apart from one shirt of saxon if i looking at this i can't see how there could be any medieval archaeology here before the 15th century it just doesn't look right it just doesn't look as if there is any carrenza's not happy there's absolutely no sign of an early saint ozith springing up around the priory during its first 300 years no i mean we would have expected to find more 12th and 13th century posture i think in the buildings around that open space of the marketplace and i do find that hard to know it doesn't look as if this is got a built up series of properties around this marketplace by say the 12th and 13th centuries come on that is a problem well it may be that the marketplace was bigger than we thought sometimes they're an awful lot bigger before they get infilled we've got a building of 1500 here that's built up against buildings already in existence we've got a 1350 here and we've got saxon pottery turning up in the churchyard there seems to be an early focus well one shirt i mean i think it's odd that all the points that you're making there they're all late you know you're talking about a 15th century building here a 14th century building here where's the 12th and thirteenth century only doug small test pits we we i still think we've got time it would show up okay so where is the door all the 12th and 13th century pottery is down by the edge of the river so i think one possibility must be that it is down there i mean this is later i mean certainly what we don't have is a regularly planned market town laid out by the priority is this sort of diy we wouldn't be in this mess if we got a proper plan okay so the big question is is the medieval town by the church is it to the north is it down by the harbour is it just a higgledy-piggledy town that hasn't got a center somewhere else let's find out tomorrow two days ago we came here to the essex coast to try and find the medieval origins of the town of saint ozith and have we found them no we haven't we've dug whole after hole in the present day town and come up with nothing at all that's earlier than late medieval so with just one day left mix decided to throw virtually all our resources into this field next to the creek why here mick because the field walk-in here produced the earliest pottery from satoshi's that we got so far you know the large collections of 12th and 13th century stuff came from across this slope here we've also put the geophysics in here which you've got great swathe at the bottom of this field just above the creek in fact just above where phil was digging and john tells me that a lot of this indicates settlement activity some of it is probably industrial activity as well okay so what are we going to do well it's a big area to deal with and uh we've only got one day to deal with it so what we thought we'd do is dig some long trenches with a machine probably i'll say long trenches five by one something like that clean them up and see what's in there and that will give us a sample across quite a large area to see whether we've actually got structures and whether we've got more fines but why here so far away from the present-day town well it's probably something to do with the fact that there's a port or or trading going on the river and it's not unusual applications for places to move about you know we tend to think of towns of static and villages are static but over a period of fifteen hundred two thousand years they do move about as their fortunes and economic change it doesn't surprise me that they might have lived down here at one stage a lot of trading going on the mayor lived up by the priory when that was in existence and servicing that live round the town you know servicing a market which is supplying the local areas another time and the fortunes of these places are changing from time to time so i'm quite confident we're going to get something here at the moment he's written a book on that it's still available as well john giafiz has pinpointed a number of big anomalies and no sooner can henry confirm the position than a new trench is born everyone's getting stuck in excellent level by lunchtime we should know if mixed dig or bust strategy is paid off gas our harbour expert is examining the timbers in phil's dock hopefully he can tell us if the structure related to the town or the field behind or both most of the town trenches have shut down as after two days there's no tangible evidence of a settlement earlier than the 15th century but martin the vicar isn't giving up looking good back by the creek mix gamble hinges on the geophysics and quite understandably john's a little nervous kind of we're losing here we'll have to clean this back a bit there's this massive great blob here so i'm wondering if we've got a couple of intercut rubbish pits or something it's domestic rubbish it's tile it's shell bits of pottery one shirt is 12th century definitely yeah maybe slightly earlier it could be saxon norman well i think that's a big fitting i think you got it right john john in writing rubbish pits could mean houses john's identified seven anomalies so paul's here phil's here and raksha's fines suggest there was shipbuilding here you seem to have found your anomalies lots of metal and nails and things that's all within this pit that's all within this pit so you did well on your geophysics this time and john keep saying that i'm on a victory tour at the moment oh what a victory tour well if you're in some victorious mood what have you got on your printout for this this is actually the anomaly it's one of the strongest we've got okay it looks like uh fired brick i wonder whether it's not a furnace uh uh a smithy oh well that would be because because oh look what i'm getting lots of clinker and stuff like that masses of it and it isn't flint is it no john that's not flint but it's all it's all coming in here just as we predicted come on in the river we thought we'd got a 17th century dock but gus has got other ideas these piles are not straight they're all twisted at various angles that one over there is seriously twisted these ones here if i may just wade into the water this one here i've actually got the bottom of you can see it's got this nice nice chamfer on the bottom there which means these piles were driven in at about that height so only that meter or so was actually standing proud of whatever river level was there then we've lost all the front half and you can see that over there you can see where that broken plank is you can see very clearly that we've lost the front half of the structure so alan is actually standing on the front of the structure he is the riverfront this is the middle of the riverfront we're in the middle of a waterfront feature what about dating well the dating seems to have come all that pottery you're talking about seems to come from the bottom of these erosion levels okay so that pottery dates the erosion of the feature the demise of this structure the collapse of the front not its construction so we know when it ended and we know how it ended but what we don't know is when it was built and what it really looked like and what it was for gus basically you're telling me that yesterday evening we had a nice little story a beginning and a middle and an end about what this wood was and now you're kicking the whole thing wide open again that's right thanks mate no problems but at least this enigmatic structure could be a lot older and could tie up with the story of saint joseph carrenza has finally accepted that there is no earlier town up here but she's trying to find out what it was like in the 15th century when the priory was powerful and the town was probably booming yesterday brenda found a place that didn't look significant at first but its location is crucial on the corner of the old marketplace brent is sure that it was a public building as both floors were originally open plan but she needed confirmation of its age martin have you managed to get a dendro date off this medieval public building we've discovered yes i have we've been quite lucky we've got a lot of sack wood and adding in the sap wood that might be missing because we've got no bark takes us 1494 to 1500. brenda that's pretty much exactly what you said yes it's very very close to what i said i would have liked it a little bit later but well the trees tell the truth classic site for guildhall chris do you think it was a guildhall have we got any historical evidence for guild yes well we've got a good tie-up with the documentary evidence in the 1524 taxation the um guild was recorded paying attacks on its possessions so this tells us that since it was a small booming town with thriving guilds at the beginning of the 16th century sadly this was probably the peak of its prosperity as the fortunes of saint joseph waned after henry viii dissolved the priory 50 years later so we've got any tool marks on these timbers gus yes um yes we have mick you can just see the striations that the the bottom of the x-cut when the light's right yeah so what do they tell us well there's definitely an an iron bladed access not bronze age oh that's good i'm relieved to do that and it's not stone age right so it is in the era of um before mechanical tools but we've had um quite a major trauma but what sort of thing are you thinking of well what i mean by that is this is a well-built structure which which kept the riverfront robustly safe with most high tides but there has been an exceptional storm surge which has simply wiped out the entire front of this structure right in which case you'll find this interesting this is samuel peeps writing in his diary 7th of december 1663 so it's right for what you're telling me about the purely says at whitehall i hear and find that there was last night the greatest tide that was ever seen in england to have been in this river all white hall having been drowned i mean that does sound like a big event just down the coast doesn't it well given that the pottery that was in that eurasian square was mid to late was was that 1650 to 1700 it's 1663 between 1650 and 1700. yeah it must be the flood then well samuel pizza's right i'm always a bit wary about one event causing something but clearly you know damaging tides like that must have happened it was an event like that a quite cat an unusually high catastrophic event which destabilized the structure which had otherwise served quite sensibly quite robustly to keep most tides out but that was just one time too many yeah amazing amazing with just two hours to go the vicar's persistence has finally paid off a meter and a half below the surface he's produced the most important finds in the town i can finally say you've got back before the 15th century in the medieval period only just only just but yeah you're back there before it right so what do we got this well we've got these three fairly small shirts but they're enough to keep me happy basically we've got this which is a shirt of lake london where probably 14th century we've got this which is a shirt of early german stonework probably about 1350 and this which is uh dutch medieval pottery the generic term for it is ardenberg where but again 14th century this is exactly the sort of thing i'd expect to see in a medieval port town you go over to holland or you're coming over from holland you fill the hold of your boat with with expensive goods for trade you have a spur corner you stick something in like a basket of pots or whatever it's it's not a big profit but it's better than just wasting space wasted space was wasted money as far as the merchants are concerned so this is exactly what i'd expect to see yes i'm happy now these are terrific finds and paul's convinced that the wealthy end of town was up by the priory but there's still no proof that an earlier settlement began to develop up here at the time the priory was built down at the workman's end of town phil has confirmed there was industry alongside the creek but it's much later what you've actually got is a flu that's this dark stuff and it actually comes right the way through here now it's got a wall on that side and a wall on that side and as the flue comes through when it gets to here it widens out on that side and on that side into a major chamber that's what i'm actually standing in now when i actually found it i thought oh it's going to be a furnace or something like that maybe even a smithy but now i've actually got in it i realize it's far more substantial than ever i imagine and i think it must be a kiln or something like that what i don't know is how old it is everyone bricks um well this is a handmade brick not not a machine made one it's slightly smaller in dimensions than your average modern brick yeah and it hasn't got those uh the characteristic indentations the frog of the frogs in the top which you use for putting them in water so this is uh potentially a tudor early stewart brick uh 16th century early 17th at tops could it be contemporary with our warfare there broadly it is contemporary with it yeah i would guess it would be a very convenient place to actually offload a barge or something like that bringing in raw materials or maybe taking away finished products well i couldn't help noticing that in your tray here you actually have a bit of nail with a washer that's the roll this is the um the diamond shaped rove that you use to clench two planks of a barge or bait together so you couldn't sail very far on that but provided you got the wood to go with it that would make a nice little barge well that road end came from a trench just over there so i mean it looks like we do have boat building on the site as well or boat distraction yes this this is a used boat rivet right so um which means that they've had a barge and broken it up and that presumably is undateable virtually yes but except the fact that the clinker building using these rows you know things like the mary rose don't use these the mary rays sunk in 1545 um they went on to carvel building there so this could be earlier in the 16th century but um some ships and barges still used roads like this through to about the 17th century or so this morning mick was confident we'd find workshops and industry along the edge of this creek and we have roughly 16th century from the tudor period but the 12th and 13th century settlement of saint joseph is still as elusive as ever in the first trench we opened yesterday afternoon we found a cluster of mysterious rubbish pits and now the trench is finished mix delighted we've got evidence of buildings in here can you see the sort of light-colored patch across that area there can i get in yeah yeah when you say light colored patch you mean this that yeah what's that that's mortar so there's a there's been a wall or a bottle and door structure there yeah there's a cobbled service outside it look where they the smaller stones this kind of pea gritty thing that's right that's not that's not natural and then behind you we've got a post hole in the bottom of a trench that's going away from it that's full of oyster shells oysters of course important part of the diet then not quite the luxury we think of today so does that mean we've got a building yeah we've got a building here or an oyster bar [Laughter] well we've got a building you know one of probably many that went across the site but we've got no date well well we have i mean most of the pottery that's coming from these features is 15th century we're no nearer finding the medieval than we were yes we are because we've got lots of residual pottery that's earlier pottery that's mixed in into later features and we've got everything from the 11th century through to the 15th century we've got the full range of medieval pottery not only that we've got imported stuff we've got things like this that's part of a 13th century french jug this is exactly the sort of thing we'd expect to see in an east coast medieval port but you see he's got his silly grin on his face i haven't told you the best yet we've got a major bonus which is this why is this a bonus it's a piece of a middle saxon german wine jar is that common it's very rare the only sort of places you find these are in middle saxon ports again mainly on the east coast of england so are we saying that in the eight or nine hundreds someone in germany was importing wine or beer or whatever right to here yeah it was important enough for a german merchant to come up the creek bringing this sort of thing with them so given the evidence that we've got and it's not comprehensive is it are you prepared to say that we've got a saxon settlement oh i think so yeah we've got a complete range of the pottery we've got structures which almost certainly go on in each direction that's enough to show us we've got a settlement of that early medieval period so our elusive sentosa settlement is elusive no more the earliest occupation started down by the river and this would have been a busy port in saxon times we're sure that the mysterious timbers that alan williams brought us here to see were part of a dock or slipway used to load and unload cargo but the terrible flood of 1663 would have devastated the waterfront at saint joseph and wiped out many small businesses the shipwrights sail makers and blacksmiths would also have lost their houses and the old port of santosa would have changed forever ours is the story of two towns the rich and the poor the haves and the have-nots we've got in the priory people like brother mick deep in prayer and contemplation in the posh house we've got lady carrenza feasting on imported pottery looking down on the plebs like phil and i eating ordinary people's food and trying to scratch the living room down by the creek cheers you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 462,835

Rating: 4.9242778 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, Century Viking, Essex, St Osyth Creek, Saxon King of Essex, Vikings

Id: aJ98P549KFs

Length: 48min 6sec (2886 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020