Manor That's Back to Front - Chenies Manor House, Buckinghamshire | S12E01 | Time Team

[Music] in 1534 henry viii visited this manor house in buckinghamshire the first of many visits by the king and his daughter elizabeth but the owner knew that the royals expected only the biggest and the best so he had his home transformed into a palace but magnificent though this tudor building is it's hardly big enough to support the king and his entourage of over 300 courtiers it must have been at least twice this big so where's the rest of it and what exactly does it take to build a house fit for a king as usual we've got just three days to find out we've come to cheney's manor at the invite of elizabeth macleod matthews who's lived here since the 1950s she and her late husband spent decades trying to decipher the house's complex history with only partial success and even the famed historian nicholas pevzner who spent 50 years chronicling britain's architectural heritage found the building a mystery he came in the 60s and he came and had a leisurely tea and chatted to my husband about it what did he think about it um he did mention i think that the brickwork was similar to the brickwork at eaton college and that it was very very early brick and uh he said that it was a great puzzle well the country's greatest expert on architecture may have been stumped by this puzzle but it looks like somebody's been able to solve it jonathan tony i don't know why we're here we've got loads of good standing archaeology we've got lots of documents and mick i've just been looking at the guidebook to cheney manor house and there's even a painting of what this place would have looked like in tudor times uh who painted it you ask jonathan foyle we didn't burn every copy um now this you'll see this is a suggested appearance you know like um like tv dinners that never work out that way when you serve them um and it may be the same here that when we look for the proof behind this speculative vision that it's much more complex than i've initially suggested so i want to learn more that's the point jonathan's serving suggestion painted from the church tower is based on the buildings that remain on the site namely this western wing and this southern wing which we believe were here at the time of henry's visits as well as evidence of a medieval manor hall which would have been the focal point for eating and entertainment a historical document mentions a wing measuring nine chambers from the church to a gatehouse this could either run along the north or the east of the courtyard with either one containing the grand gatehouse entrance jonathan's preferred option is two wings with the gatehouse to the east giving us a palace large enough for a king and his entourage we're talking about a house that henry viii visited and elizabeth up to a thousand people descending on it for periods up to a couple of weeks or more it must have been a very big complex with lots of supporting structures so my neat vision might be much more complex in reality mick how do we explode jonathan's cozy vision of what this place would have looked like well i think we can look the two wings that are on there that uh that don't exist today we can have a look at those by putting some trenches across and see if there is any walls in the bottom of them but of course the building itself is a piece of archaeology and it's full just by looking around the outside of clues of where walls have joined on windows have been altered so there's a sort of three-dimensional jigsaw to sort out of the building itself absolutely there is yeah i'm going to be really fascinated to see what the difference is yeah at the end of dayton hell aren't you i am i want to know what the difference is going to be between this painting and what we finally come up with let's get on man and so our first wrench goes in based on jonathan's recreation here on the proposed eastern wing close to where he believes there was a grand gatehouse you're a bit previous aren't you we haven't even got the geophys results here yeah but i i don't think it'll matter actually we've got a lot of clues as to what might be going on here we know about these two wings we can see where that step is there by the by the fire yeah alarm and then on the other side you've got a bit of war sticking out well that's the two bits of wall coming out in this direction there's different sorts of brickwork there aren't there there's all sorts of stuff going on we're gonna have to spend a lot of time looking at that for now it just tells us something's coming off in this direction as well as rediscovering this structure and the rest of the palace we hope to find out why much of this complex disappeared over the centuries because historical records show it was large and grand enough to play host to henry three times and elizabeth twice a place where they in their entourage could rest feast and hunt the house's high status was due to one man the first earl of bedford john russell who had a meteoric rise through the tudor court he was in the service of a man called sir richard gerningham who was one of woolsey's key officials now what's important about that is that when joningham died sir john russell not only if you like stepped into jonigan's job he also stepped into his bed he married his widow that was anne sapcat who inherited cheney and that's how he got chainers but that coincided with henry viii taking russell into the privy chamber he was a gentleman of the privy chamber in 1526. now he was one of only eight people in the country who were allowed to touch the king and even one of those eight in the barber was only allowed to touch him when the king specifically invited him to do so so russell is one of those very key courtiers at the very heart of the judah court so really you could say that russell was one of the eight most important men in the country at that time absolutely now but what henry also does is um he gives him a wedding present and he gives him the manner of amisham next door and that gives him the money to build a chain is it looks like this wall's got plaster on it looks like it's got loads of plastic it's interesting because it's just along the spout it really suggests an internal wall doesn't it it does over at the wall beside the church jonathan and bridget think they've found evidence of the other end of the eastern wing that phil's digging looks at first like a junction doesn't it quite different doesn't it oh that's interesting isn't it look at those diamond shapes there what are they called gelatin diaper diapers diaper work yeah because they're diamond shaped and they're 15th to 16th century so um yeah good diagnostic and external too absolutely because why would you want decoration like that on the inside of you well he wouldn't you'd plaster it wouldn't it and we've got the plaster on the other side this wall with its plaster on the inside and elaborate brickwork on the outside would give us buildings on three sides of the courtyard but jonathan feels it may also be the corner of a northern wing a theory that's got the backing of geophys who found a possible wall line heading north i mean look we've got this wing that's meant to come through here so i mean well we've got this clear line and i mean it's literally just in front of us somewhere this bump in the grass is yeah i mean right if we put a trench across here yeah am i in the courtyard now yeah and is this the range yeah so trench two will go in on our possible northern wing over john's geophys anomaly but the trenches are only part of our investigation because we're using the whole house as an archaeological resource we've got mick the dig taking dendro samples from all over the house to date its evolution frustratingly there are no pictures of cheney's in its full tutor glory but ray stan a trained architect before he took the time team shilling thinks later illustrations of the manor may give some clues for his reconstruction so when we got down here on we're on the lower floor now the sixth lower chamber from the gate you see the seventh lower chamber from the gate and the house also has a fantastic document archive including an inventory from 1585 that lists every possession room by room throughout the household valuable when trying to work out the exact layout of the house come on have a look at this oh crikey yeah look at that looks like we've got see that is a mortar surface there yeah but at the end of the day it's the holes in the ground that will confirm or sink jonathan's theory you must be inside a building hang on why do you say that that's a floor it's it's a it's a laid mortar surface it's very compact it's evenly distributed it's laid on these bits of these brick surface it may have had a tiled floor actually on the top of it yeah which they lift it off but that would what you're looking at is actual foundation surface for a floor i think and they've got something else now this is really the good stuff look we've got this these mortar bricks in here but look it's bang on line with the end of the wing line's just exactly like it to be why couldn't that be 21st century it could be i mean there's still a lot of demolition rubble about it but with that that looks to me that looks to me tudorish i mean one one one piece of pot does not make a a period yeah but it i would have thought we could be looking at at that sort of period almost like that cistercian where isn't it which is that sort of very dark green stuff you know yeah i think it's all right there's our first bit of tudor got it good early days yet tony the evidence does suggest this wall is tudor which going by jonathan's theory means we should be close to the sort of grand gatehouse you'd expect at the entrance to a royal residence but just as one piece of pot doesn't make a period one wall doesn't make a wing so we're putting in another trench to find the other side of our possible gatehouse wing trench two has also come up with the goods and it's even more substantial than the wall in phil's trench hey well that's wallish isn't it very warnish got the wall up here and we've even got some flint footings which you know fairly typical aren't they local resources chalk and flint absolutely yeah yeah not only does this feature line up with the existing tudor wall by the church there's even some traces of plaster on it suggesting this could be the inside of our northern wing it seems all our evidence confirms jonathan's initial plans for the tudor palace and yet there are those amongst us who aren't so sure that view looks very much like it is today ray-san do you know when that was drawn i'm not sure of the day but there's certainly a progression of date through different paintings this one here seems to be showing us a wall going across the whole front of that building all right and that's the windows are very much what we've got there today aren't they yeah it's pretty much exactly the same at this stage just this wall may be an opening paying homage through to the church but if we go back one further all the decorations gone from the top of the gable yeah the wind has changed and the wall is still here across this bit that's looking very downbeat in comparison to what we see now isn't it yeah totally and even the path is going away from the building not following the access we showed you earlier now it's not as straightforward as we thought is it no there's a lot of changes going on well it looks like the doubting thomases have just jinxed the site because the eastern wing has suddenly become very confusing so far there's nothing in the trench where we expected to find the back wall and the more we dig trench one the less promising its archaeology becomes here's our tudor wall and that does line up exactly on the end of the building we still don't really know whether we are in a building or as this material here this gravel material might suggest that we're actually into a courtyard surface the other problem of course is that we've got these walls here and we don't know again whether they're a building or whether they're garden features the trouble is that they've been so smashed around that we got no idea where the floor levels were yeah it is frustrating isn't it it is but it i mean we often have this problem don't we we dig a hole for a specific purpose to see if there's anything in it yeah and there is something in it and then we try and screw more information out of that hole than it's actually capable of giving us we're now also having problems with the archives we're talking 60 rooms at least from this inventory housing 100 people regularly yes indeed yeah and there's no way a closer inspection of the 1585 inventory of the house reveals a complex of rooms that's too big to fit into our courtyard model we know that there are nine chambers from the church to the gatehouse in one direction do we know where the gatehouse was well you see this is all part of the confusion that's left by an incomplete record back at phil's trench we still can't find any evidence of another wall to make this arrange i'm just hoping this isn't all chopped out because this looks like service rubble well it may well be but if if we've got a foundation coming off of there it's gonna be in there ray sands got an explanation for this it's just that it's one we don't want to hear we've got the tudor wall there coming off now what we don't know is whether it's a building a structure or whether it's just a boundary wall if we go back a little bit what we're starting to see is a wall running for a flush so it's more like a boundary wall if we go back even further it shows even clearer this strong wall all the way running across the front it does suggest that that wall is no more than a boundary wall rather than a structure yeah you can't really see any structure it's it's still a bit confusing it is isn't it i mean i'd like a painting from the other side you haven't got one of those we just don't have any evidence here to back up jonathan's original theory for a gatehouse although the wall may once have been part of a larger wooden structure for example a gallery leading to the church but it does mean our straightforward plan for this site is unraveling in front of our eyes in fact i've noticed that even our nice posh southern wing doesn't seem that posh close up this epitomizes it for me look fantastic great wall yeah no window yeah no window no window no window about 24 chimneys so loads of rooms and this is on the south side of the building which you ought to have the windows in looking out over bowling greens and stuff like that it's like the rest of the house it doesn't make much sense does it we're not going to solve it tonight i don't think so we need to think a lot more about it look at the plans i think we're going down the pub come on that's a red wine beginning of day two and yesterday it all seemed so easy we were looking for the house in which henry viii stayed and it ought to be on all four sides of this big rectangle and fair enough when we dug a trench here we found a tudor wall except it is a bit of a jumble and we couldn't find a room associated with it but then we found another tudor wall in this trench here although once again as yet there's no room with it the problem is then the archaeology started contradicting the architecture and the documents didn't fit in with the topography and basically nobody can agree precisely where this flipping house is one thing we are certain of jonathan's neat little picture of it is consigned to the dustbin of history jonathan shall we put this straight in the shredder it could be time to go back at the tower couldn't it but not yet because we still don't understand what was here what do we do we've got to look over this way because we do have tudor walls standing just beyond this site and we're taking our bearings from that this is clearly in use through the tudor period and so if we go to the other side of that wall maybe there's something over there that tells us more sounds like an act of desperation to me hopefully this trench behind the garden wall will find the other side of the northern wing but just to confuse matters geophys have discovered these anomalies in the courtyard suggesting two completely different shapes and sizes of that northern wing and that means we'll need to dig two more trenches to test their results and if that's not complicated enough we seem to have lost the east wing entirely the archaeology and archives now suggesting it was just a boundary wall in the midst of all this contradiction and confusion stewart has been fertiling around the site in his own inimitable fashion and he now believes these massive earthworks to the north of the site could be the remains of the formal tudor gardens it's got malta in it hasn't it are there any are there any bricks in there is a little bit further up we've got brickwork slowly but surely stewart's evolving his own very different theory as to the whereabouts of the grand palace and the records we have of henry's visits here show it would have been very grand it belonged to john russell one of the most powerful men in tudor britain and it didn't just accommodate the king but also his full entourage of a thousand plus the records show it was also at the very heart of a royal scandal and he was showing off catherine howard she was his trophy wife he wanted everybody to see her i mean the irony is of course that a week later she is denounced for adultery and in fact there is also evidence the national archives that while at cheney's you know she was engaged in a liaison with thomas culpepper oh really actually absolutely absolutely here yes yes because the the the evidence against her actually mentions chain is with the archaeology still not giving us any results stewards decided to do his own subterranean exploration there's a lot of myths attached to tunnels and manor houses and churches people often think it's a tunnel between the two but more often not these things are actually drains but actually that's even more exciting in many ways because the drains connect different bits of the house and the the stables and dairies and all that sort of thing so if you can work out where the drains went you can often work out where buildings were even when those buildings have gone the results stuart and henry come up with throw a very large spanner in the works because they reveal a finely engineered drainage system that goes nowhere near the courtyard suggesting the main part of the judah palace isn't where we're digging this appears to be backed up by the archaeology up top the new trenches in the courtyard have revealed nothing more than a collection of garden features and as for the trench in the orchard absolutely nothing here uh tony when you say nothing there's degrees of nothingness nothing at all nullis what we're tracing of course is a wall that has a return on it what it means is simply it doesn't extend this far it's not a range what we're looking at yesterday is an outbuilding this is not part of an enclosing courtyard so doesn't that completely throw the shape of the building that we're looking for it may do what we have standing buildings surrounding this area there's certainly certainly an enclosed area of building what shape that is i mean god only knows i'm certain that i don't that's a starter none of our options for the northern wing work and yet we've got historical records that say it's there there's no choice now but for the team to go back to the drawing board i've got earthworks landscape maps and drains they all seem to me to point in a slightly different direction to where we're hunting for the big house actually at the moment you see that's drives me unlikely to be part of the corp the main courtroom somehow if you're approaching from that direction you're gonna approach from the back end of the church yeah that's gonna be the first thing you see the rear of it yeah and why would you want to approach from the back of the church it seems just to turn its back on everything you want to celebrate this building it's halfway through day two and we've got almost nothing to show for it time for an archaeological council of war when you approach where is the main big house do you think we are sitting in the angle of it but beyond on the other side of the angle toward the gardens and on the south front i think there were bigger rooms that uh that have since been neatened up by the victorians this side of it feels quite like the rear of the building there's not a lot of ornamentation these are the smart lodgings these have been retained if you've got a house that's falling to boots what do you do you keep the best lodgings for yourself no i don't think they are actually there has to be something here which presents a kind of facade to when you approach it so i'm looking at like two components one going north south and one going east west we're in a complete state of confusion we just can't agree how to fit the missing parts of the palace onto these elaborate standing buildings which must have played a central role in henry viii's visits but that suddenly changes when we get the dendro dates for the west and south wings this bit here comes much later in the summer of 1550. hang on hang on whoa whoa when did henry viii come and stay here 15 40. what 34 and 41 14 41. is this and we've been sleeping we've been assuming that this is the constant this is the reason we came here because we've got a bit of the place where henry viii stay so the building is elsewhere yeah the buildings that henry saw or else or elsewhere although he did see this one behind me so this wing on which we've based so much of our digging strategy wasn't even built until after henry viii's death and that means we can turn this dig on its head distilling a new layout for the house and this is it with the main entrance to the west and a grand set of lodgings to the north overlooking terraced gardens which is where our new trench will go in unfortunately it's in the most inappropriate spot on the whole site jammed in between a wall and our portable toilets ah the glamour of archaeology elizabeth's gonna be really disappointed why well because she's always thought this building that she lives in is where henry viii came to visit she's told everybody that she's got a guide book and everything no no but it's just i mean look you've got um queen elizabeth come and stays here for a month in 1570 and revisits it repeatedly she loves the old rambling house we've got details about her secretary saying it's not in a decent state for her to come and stay you know we've still got a two demonic staying here it's just a different two demonic yes if you've loosened this product there'll be a lot easier over at the portable toilets it seems that the doubting thomases were right within inches of the concrete surface phil's uncovered some tantalising remains sure what's your right and then jonathan is it uh tudor well what i can say is this all all the characteristics are there for it to be generically tudor i mean it's inevitably difficult generically because each site has its own brickfiring clamps and you know reuses material it's set in soft lime mortar in the right way the bricks are roughly the right size and they seem to be making an english bond which is um the pattern of having the ends of the bricks all in a row the sides all in a row alternate and they get fed up with that by about the middle of the 17th century so it's good it looks like we may be finally in the right place but to be sure we're going to have to move all our resources to the back of the house but the royal appeal of cheney's would have been much more than just the accommodation the rolling hills of buckinghamshire were the perfect location for henry's favorite pastime hunting particularly its most noble form falconry in the last day and a half of our dig here carrenza is going to try and learn the rudiments of this royal sport [Music] just held up there and she should now the idea looking across the shoulder of the bird rather than have the actual glove in front of your face is obvious the bird hits the glove and comes up into your face then it's going to hurt really big powerful and sharp talons right so i just hold the chicken leg up oh wow here she comes that's amazing when this wild animal kind of swoops and lands on your hand but these birds were valued for more than just their inherent beauty they were there to hunt and kill food for the dining table and to be successful in her challenge carrenza will have to learn to control a cold calculating killing machine with a top speed of over a hundred miles an hour well you have to remember with the bird of praise it's not a creature with emotions so you can love it to death but it will never return that back to you they're not designed to have affection um because they are obviously instinct creatures and and they're born really to hunt to survive and the notice on her anklets she's also got her bell that's where that's attached i know you can hear it all the time what's the point of the bell the bell is for when they've caught their prey because they're not retrievers they won't fly back and drop it at your feet unfortunately their instinct is to drag it into a ditch or into a hedge and hide on it so you have to listen out for the tinkling of that bell in order to find the dinner that's supposedly going on your master's dining table this wall here phil seems to be still running out it almost looks like a bay window you don't think stuart could be right dude i wouldn't wouldn't rule it out in this instance i mean it looks like is that a join running along there yeah it's a straight join there so you've got the main wall coming along there and then that bit going out there is actually tagged on yeah and it's still running across there so then then i don't see why that shouldn't be a bay window what you got there around dave i was uh got this window glass one side of the wall here well that is i mean if ever you needed evidence all this glass is coming by this big bay innit could have been quite a view down here it seems that this unpre-possessing farm yard is indeed the front of the building henry viii visited but funnily enough this glass is about the only find we've uncovered for a sight steeped in history it's almost barren i haven't exactly had my work cut out here but we've got some 12th century cooking part here and another fragment there and we have small amounts of 16th century pottery and we have a few small lace ends two normal sized ones and one rather larger sort of medallion man lace end and these would have been used instead of buttons if you'd come here not knowing that this was a site where henry viii and elizabeth the first feasted yeah what would you think the site was given the fines i would have said it was a bog standard medieval site when where is the fine pottery and the fine glass and small finds like buckles and brooches and things like that where are they where's the buckles and brooches now somewhere else is the answer isn't it but i mean we're we're not seeing the place that they're getting rid of the rubbish here obviously that's going somewhere else but it's so clean isn't it yes it is yes if you think there's several hundred years here represented here say 300 years yeah and i think it's a social thing as well isn't it where the the tudor sort of peasant living in his little cot might chuck it out of the door but at this level this is this is the top of society somebody's going to clean up after them aren't they somebody's going to dispose of the stuff it's not just going to get trampled into an earth floor because they haven't got earth floors but even without fines there's one person who thinks he can explain what was going on in this courtyard and surprisingly it does tie in with our new plan for the site what we've got here is the wall of a narrow range of buildings which led from the chapel at one end with the hall and the big house at that end why do you say a narrow range well it's like it's like a corridor because this being one side of it where on the outside that's on the inside and where that wall is there this one here yeah that's on top of what we think might be to the world underneath we can't put that's speculation but we haven't found any evidence of any buildings over there if i uh try it on on here for you where are we we're stood about here at the moment yeah what we seem to have is a wall that came off the end of there to close a courtyard and here we have a corridor a narrow corridor range coming down here to join the chapel there yeah that would link into where the hall was there and then coming off from there would be this big fine building that we've been looking for this is the bit that connects the big smart house with the chapel at this end it might not be as glamorous as we'd expected but this narrow range is the one that features in the 1585 inventory running from the church to the grand building phil's digging overall our new design for the site is shaping up as something more impressive than we could ever have imagined you invited us here in all good faith to help illustrate the story of henry viii in your house and now we've turned the whole story upside down how do you feel about that i think it's rather fascinating actually i think it's wonderful a really big change isn't it i bet you never thought that the key to this whole site would be this rather unpre-possessing area between the wall and the moon never absolutely never and it is it's fascinating isn't it what have you got phil well it is just amazing and we've got this massive piece of tudor masonry beautiful bowie window actually tagged onto it with superbly fine thin glass from the window and then this lovely little drain running inside the building i mean tomorrow that's where i want to be inside actually in the building try and find out what the building was used for and who might have lived there end of day two and there's been a sea change in our understanding of the site and the very good news is that everyone now agrees on the same plan and this is it this tiny yellow bit here represents the trench that we've just been looking at and the idea is that it's part of a huge range this salmon pink thing around which there is a lot of other buildings which are a very long way away from where we are originally looking and tomorrow we'll see if they're right it's the beginning of day three at our dig at cheney's manor where the archaeological mist is finally clearing and at last we found the house where henry viii stayed the first bit we discovered was just round the corner there so we've had to shift these toilets but the big problem is we've got the catering bus here we've got these shed things behind it we've got the kitchen we've got this and john's ambulance here we've got all this concrete stuart we're not going to be able to shift all this lot and dig up the concrete in time to find the rest of the house no not at all no but we have got one fixed boundary to work from now we've got a bit of the building we can make an estimation of its length and we can make an estimation of its width after two frustrating days we've turned the plan for this site on its head replacing jonathan's original theory of a quadrangle building for this new layout a layout that now seems to be confirmed by phil's trench where this wonderful bay window has been unearthed so we've got a group of bay windows on that north side looking down onto the gardens which is all the terraced area yeah right we also think we've now found the main entrance to the complex which includes some of this standing building jonathan's thinking seems to be that we've got the gate house he's actually not a building with a with a tunnel under it's an arches which is what my initial that's what i've been thinking of for three days more likely a couple of buildings either side of a passageway which would have been cobbled which that's one and the other one probably would be somewhere here but the only way we can be sure we've got the right dimensions is to dig and geophysics this whole farmyard so bish bosh here and bishwash over there i would have thought so yeah there's a lot to do with just a day to go our new plan may be causing headaches for the archaeologists but it's completely transformed our understanding of the archives including this comprehensive 1585 inventory of the house which john and corenza feel may establish the location of henry viii's bed chamber king henry the eighth arms in it so because we know from the will that the state bet for henry viii was in the lower chamber and do you think we can work out where that actually may have stood on the ground outside well to know that we'd have to ask jonathan what he thinks the measurements of these rooms were right well this uh this has developed a bit phil well yeah well the idea was what we thought we'd do was extend across the across the trench to see whether or not we could get another bay window just to give ourselves a bit of room see yeah well look look we've got this big thing coming round here it's a nice big feature too is it's not quite the same as that one though is it this no it's rounded yeah do i reckon it might be actually see that that um brick work down the center yeah if that is you know a deliberate wall it's typical of a of a guard array but if you find organic deposits around the side i mean you know it could could be a loop you know could be it's a right sort of human frame for it that's a lure this is the piece of equipment that we have to try and teach you to use it's basically dummy prep carrenza is now halfway through her introduction to that essential royal tudor pastime falconry and onto this we tie a piece of food which is obviously the bait for the bird and the idea is to try and present this lure to the bird in flight teaching it to to chase the prey as it would naturally in the wild so what you're doing is swinging it forwards up and over right she now has a couple of hours to master the art of controlling a bird of prey as it attempts to rip the bait from her hand so then you're presenting the lure forwards stepping around and keep the momentum swinging and that's the point of which the bird has gone like that the birds move away past you and gone off again okay so it's round round forward round and oops oh wow there we go yeah you got it i think it's going to need a lot of practice isn't it it's just it's learning to control something that's very easily out of control well it's always going to hit myself in the face with the lure it's one thing and i get hit in the face with the bird it's a bit different well exactly after the thrill of the archaeology in phil's trench our new targets at the rear of the grand lodgings and in the gatehouse area have produced disappointing results still got the chalk the flint and a mix of bricks within it so it really does look like just a sort of a demolition or a sub-base kind of fill we're straight down onto this um very gravelly almost natural type stuff it's natural there it's quite dirty here and totally sterile there's no bits of cb it looks terrible stuff to do it is a pain i can tell you that yeah but just because we haven't found it doesn't mean it wasn't there hey rick the one thing we desperately need to know at the moment is the difference in height between this chalk and flint surface in here yeah and the walls in phil's trench all right see if it's the same foundation yeah yeah see where you are okay well i've already taken points over there so if i take a point um in front of the bridge yeah squeeze in and i can compare the two and see what differences so that's about 45 centimeters lower here so this is is that much lower than phil's yeah walls yeah quite a bit lower that almost suggests sort of got horizontal truncation and what does that mean horizontal truncation someone's come along with a big fish slicing right spliced off the top the modern farm yards destroyed much of the foundations of the palace but there are still enough clues including the tudor remnants in this building to keep the archaeologists happy what about your gate house that's supposed to be going on around this area well i mean that that structure there is much much altered and if that's the site of the gatehouse not a typical building with an arch through it but two flanking buildings with a gate in between like lodges with the gates yeah i see no reason why all the stuff that's going on outside of the track up from the woods actually doesn't have much evidence for building right honestly so you would you don't want to alter your sort of suggestions of the layout i think it's not too much evidence for the approach from this direction to question that on the basis of finding natural under a later soil there's only so many places in this farmyard we can dig and it's becoming clear that they're not going to yield any archaeology but all is not lost phil's trench proves that some of the structure was preserved underground unfortunately in areas we can't dig like these barns can you see we've got a bit of a problem with these trees get the flippers out but we can gear fizz so stuart's now measuring out the plan for the accommodation block on the ground which john can then survey for any surviving archaeology this is really how hawks would have been carried into the times yes this is the couch the full runner of the range rover the cage and this is where we get these wonderful sayings to kaiju lift and uh the old codger because someone that carried the birds if he was a had a few gray hairs it'd actually be known as an old codger so we get these lovely phrases from this frame oh cod you've got birds with you i've got the birds thank you what are you gonna do well we've only been practicing this this morning so i'm not sure is probably the answer we haven't tried this with the actual birds at all yet but hopefully we'll be able to sort of fly the birds around and get them to come to the lure and fly past me and it'll all look wonderful she's very alert yeah she knows lorenzo is the person to watch already so we'll just keep an eye on her keep turning to face her all the time okay corenza start swinging she's a good distance away prepare to pass and pass hey fantastic tony if we can run the other side good girl what we're trying to do is keep well out of reach okay here she comes again prepare to pass past well done fantastic okay start swinging we'll try and call her back over and i think we'll try and give her her reward okay nice swinging nice and fast get ready to throw up and now yes well done it worked i don't know this is scary it was very exciting yeah um it's such a split second between knowing whether it's going to work or not that you don't really have time to be scared but that that moment when i actually pulled it away fast enough and she went past it was just fantastic you can see why it might have been so attractive to the tudors because it's it's very modern all that speed and turning it's like motorbikes or cars i mean like my heart it's exhilarating isn't it it really is yeah thrill of the chase that's what it's all about this is a cracking piece of archaeology in it thank you man it really is do we understand it now i think we actually do i think what you're looking at here is the front facade of the royal lodges we think it's actually built in probably two phases they put up one skin of bricks and then added but the most obvious thing are these two bay windows one there on there and one over there which they've actually added on to the front of the building so it's got a whole series of glass windows up the front of it it really shows how important this is and we check this out it could have been a garder rope turns out that in fact it is just a massive bay window yeah we've had glass out of here as well so anyway once we come into the building yeah we've got a room on that side yeah and a room on that side so petition wall down the middle is more than a partition look at the size of it it's big as the outer wall isn't it and you see here look you see we've got a whole series of these little niches cut into that wall now i reckon that's where the flooring joists would have been so if you allow for the flooring joist and allow for the floorboards on the top i reckon that floor level is about here and you would have looked out down over the valley so it would work out to be about 30 foot in depth and you could say it is literally palatial we may not have found a tudor ensuite bathroom but these remains show the sheer scale of the apartments that would have greeted the royal entourage [Music] this new layout has got one final treat in store for us after careful measurement and cross-referencing with the 1585 inventory it seems we may have stumbled across the bed chamber of a certain henry viii by 1541 when henry came here he had a badly ulcerated leg and he wasn't as mobile and in fact he would have stayed in this building on the ground floor not the first floor as you know would normally have done well we think that because when henry viii's bed was actually given away by the second earl of bedford in 1585 it was actually on the lower floor in the lower chamber now the royal bed was absolutely huge you didn't just bring it into the room it was probably built inside the room and wouldn't go out through the door it's bizarre isn't it that we're in this old bus and yet at some time in history king henry viii might have been just here gazing out into the garden with his separated leg well i think that's entirely possible and this would have been just one small part of the fair lodgings that sir john russell had built for his royal visitors because wedged between the dining bus and the portable toilets geofez have been able to confirm stuart's suggested extent of the missing tudor range as we get up to the line there's a definite response where the front wall is anything yeah pretty much way around where they put the marker we've not done that much radar on the side before have we oh no i'd be happy not to do it again look two points yeah there in the shed where you sent us we've got a clear demarcation there right and that lines up perfectly oh excellent that's with phil's excavation going through there possible back wall at that point running through just this side of the bus under the cockroach so if we hadn't parked the dining bus there we might have been able to have a look at it and if there hadn't been concrete and you had to make concrete right but at least it's giving us a width for the building it's brilliant these results fill in the unknowns on our plan giving us a wing that was 30 feet at its widest and ran from the gatehouse all the way to the church it's the final bit of evidence jonathan needs this array of buildings we've got with the with the glass looking down onto the gardens and where we started with this courtyard we still have that we still have the hall there and the lodgings yeah what we've discovered since is a building something like six times the size of the one we started off with and it's now looking much more like a small town and yet all that now remains of this grand palace is a beautiful fraction of its former glory john we've got this picture now this vast complex of buildings here in tudor times but they're not here they've gone where did they go well in 1627 the family here simply up sticks and moved to woburn they were in financial difficulties they had three houses in this area so they simply left this one and robin was their best house so then a tenant farmer came in here and simply farmed the land but he didn't need all this huge house so he moved into the older house over there the state apartments became derelict and this house was used simply for storage is that it's a rather sad story no but there's uh there's more to it uh because we know in fact that um the state apartments were becoming derelict they decided to remove the valuable glass and there's a reason for that which also explains why there are no windows in this wall the big mystery big mystery because in 1747 parliament decided that it would extend the window tax one of the big you know sort of special stealth taxes of the day and so um the tenant farmer simply wrote to the bedford state office and said well fill in as well as many windows as possible so out of 100 windows they filled in 60. and of course by that time the russells have built this wing and we know that now from the dendro dates so this may well have been the bit they were really concentrating on the state apartments were starting to be a bit expensive so maybe when that came in instead of just blocking up the windows well bother it we'll just pull a whole lot down and we won't pay any tax at all elizabeth i'm ever so sorry you will have to rewrite your guidebook am i yeah it is so so different from how you thought really isn't that interesting well you say oh isn't that interesting but don't you feel a sense of loss well i suppose i do really yes but oh henry wasn't in your part of the house at all no that is sad but the real story is i think much more interesting and more dramatic really than what was thought before behind us here between there and there you've got this enormous pair of gate houses with this great stately driveway going up here and beyond it over there there's a great hall and then over there the fine lodgings where the kings and queens of england looked out onto the lovely garden in the pouring rain just like us this is the story of a grand medieval house turned into a palace fit for a king its facade further embellished with modish and very impressive bay windows by the time of queen elizabeth's month-long stay in 1570 and dendro dating shows that by this time they'd also added another wing to the south of the complex in every respect this house reflects the very pinnacle of the power and wealth of the earls of bedford its tudor owners [Music] well now that confirms the fact that we once read that it was called chaney's palace what is a palace isn't it isn't it and then it was called the great house and now it's just called the manor house well you can start calling it the palace again that would be rather fun wouldn't it three days ago we came here looking for something like this a house fit for a king encased in these beautiful evocative tudor surroundings but it wasn't here instead we found it round the back underneath some ramshackle old barns which just goes to show you shouldn't always believe what you read in the guidebooks [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 103,614

Rating: 4.9393282 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, Chenies Manor, Time Team Official YouTube Channel, Tudor times, Buckinghamshire, Chenies Manor House

Id: PC5U4uhESdg

Length: 47min 51sec (2871 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 21 2021