Priory Engagement (Burford, Oxfordshire) | Series 17 Episode 10 | Time Team

a few months ago an archaeologist came here to the town of burford in oxfordshire he'd been asked to look at this beautiful place the priory which is built on the site of a medieval hospital but he's a bit of a nosy bloke so he wandered off started poking around in the flower beds and came up with a load of this stuff which is actually anglo-saxon pottery and then he began to hear stories of a roman coin hoard and a sarcophagus and he thought to himself i've got to dig this place to see what this is all about bit lucky he works for us really mick do you reckon you can crack the mystery of this place in three days oh i wouldn't have thought so don't you love his optimism [Music] [Music] birthday in oxfordshire is one of the finest medieval towns in england almost every house here is picture postcard perfect and the granddaddy of them all is this one the priory this sprawling mansion is being restored with great care because underneath it is thought to lie a medieval hospital but that might just be the start of it the owners called in our very own mcaston who stumbled across something rather surprising in the garden so the fact that we're here is all down to you yeah i'm afraid it is actually i i was asked to come here and look at this building and then wandered off and looked at the grounds around it thought it was really interesting and we ought to come back and do more work i bet you're great to employ you asked to look at this fantastic place and you're poking around the back yeah well there's a medieval uh hospital on the site but up on the hill at the back we found 10th century pottery so there's anglo-saxon yeah when you say you found it where was it it was it was in the vegetable patch on the top of the hill but it's earlier than the day of the town of burford when that's found in the 12th century so something here that much earlier and finding that was sufficiently exciting for you to come to us and say i really want to dig it well that's right and we've already started actually because john came and did some geophysics here you mean you two set up your own mini time team before we could arrive and we've got some fantastic results i mean these are the resistance plots and you can see in black what i think of wall lines they actually suggest that there's walls coming out from the building underneath the lawn so what are you going to do now well we want to expand the survey to see the whole of the lawn do we have to wait for john or could we start digging here where he's already geoff is no we can start digging here because these anomalies here seem to reflect buildings incorporated back into that building so we should certainly have a look at those first yeah but knowing you i bet we'll be wandering off elsewhere as well oh yeah we're gonna go back up on the hill and see if we can find more of that pottery certainly so medieval hospital or anglo-saxon settlement it looks like mick's got us looking for both in this massive garden that's over a thousand years of history to sort out at least our search for the hospital should be fairly straightforward fingers crossed john's radar has picked up part of it under the front lawn [Music] it means we can put in our first trench straight away this should be a doddle shouldn't it barry look at that hopeless oh dear the first cut is the hardest [Music] typical anna mick aston come here rephrasing saxon pottery what do i find china oh well stop moaning phil you've got the easy job our second target is the vegetable garden and it's going to be a lot harder this is where mick found his mysterious anglo-saxon pottery and he wants us to scour it for more it's not exactly small so we've called in some extra help [Music] more people up here but organizing his class proves a little difficult for archaeologist professor dumbledore so each group of three go to a tray just put it backwards oh that's the best way put your arms over each other don't start don't start digging yet don't start [Music] i see you've recruited some archaeologists to have a look for you yeah this is the local primary school we thought we'd get them to go through the garden soil see if they can find any more pottery see if there's a concentration that might indicate a site how do we work out how to analyze that concentration well in theory it should be quite simple we just count the number of shirts of each type of pottery that's come from each of the squares that the kids are digging in plot them up on the screen or a piece of paper and then we've got a lot of pottery then hopefully we've got a settlement i must say they're being remarkably quiet for a bunch of primary school kids yeah well they're waiting for you to start them off they've all got a bucket in the sieve and they're going to fill a bucket and sieve it and see what's in the in the sieve so as soon as you say go off they'll go right off you go so are we going to find anglo-saxon burford or this being time team will we end up with a load of moldy old vegetables and he won't wait to find out start digging welcome back to burford in oxfordshire where we're trying to uncover the secrets of burford priory the biggest house in town down here we think we may have the first glimmerings of a medieval hospital why are we so sure that there are likely to be medieval remains here well the archaeology doesn't just stop at the front door excuse the mess this is the incident room by the way but look at these arches now even i can tell that these are medieval but what puzzles me is that it all seems far too grand to be a priory antonia you know more about this place than anyone else you actually wrote the book on burford is this really a priory no it's a private house and it has been for the best part of 500 years so why is it called a priory because it stands on the side of a medieval hospital but one's a priory and the other's a hospital there seems to be some confusion over the name towards the late 15th 16th century when even the records refer to the priory or the prior of burford what's our earliest reference to the hospital right the earliest reference is this close roll of 1226 in which the king grants to the hospital of saint john in burford ten car loads of wood from the forest of whichwood but in addition to the medieval stuff which we're pretty sure is here mick's been getting very excited about the idea of anglo-saxon fines is it likely that we'll find anything anglo-saxon oh i hope so why the place named burford is saxony origin and it relates to the forward leading to or by the birth and what's a burr a borough is a fortified enclosure um which would have been used in times of stress that people could use as a refuge or it might have been inhabited okay so the names are good anglo-saxon clue but that's all we've got so far but fingers crossed so apart from the odd leftover arch the big house bears almost no resemblance to the 13th century hospital as lovely as it is this building dates from the 1580s [Music] our best chance of finding the hospital lies under the front lawn and out back we're also going to see if we've got some kind of anglo-saxon settlement the question is which one will we find first so does this line up with the geophysics then a bit early to say yet actually phil thinks he's made a good start he's found stone and look at that you see look those do fake they got a bit of a face to him there but he's being given a run for his money because in the vegetable garden our junior archaeologists are coming up trumps this is part of a medieval jug uh so that probably dates to about 1200 or about so that's about what 800 years old so that's like the oldest piece of pottery anyone's found that's it come on phil that's another one on the same same alignment look so that's three that dates for about the time of william the conqueror so that's really really really really old so that's great i mean that's fantastic i mean you've been doing this for about 10 minutes have you something like that got another one four in alone so young time team 47 professional archaeologists four phil's in danger of being out dug by a bunch of nine-year-olds our young diggers have now found so much late saxon pottery that we can plot it all on a map we're going to put in a trench where there's a hot spot so we say cheerio to one team [Music] and say hello to another [Applause] so that's both digs off to a good start but the sheer size of the priory garden is a challenge in itself it's one of the biggest we've ever dug on time team it's got rows of topiary victorian flower beds even the 17th century chapel and that's the problem it's so big we could find anything here and i'm gonna have a little chat with mick because i'm worried we're just digging holes willy-nilly in other words do we have a plan [Music] make alarm bells are ringing in my mind if we were looking for the medieval hospital fine if we were looking for a saxon bird fingers crossed maybe we would find it but this seems to me to be much more scattergun surely what we ought to be doing in archaeology is either proving something or disproving it well yes you could look at it like that but it's actually more of an evaluation of what is a very big garden you see the part the problem i think is that with a lot of archaeological work we dig because we know we think there's something there of a certain date there's actually stuff all over the place yes but will we get a story i think it's worth seeing how many periods of occupation we've got represented here so you know i'd like to try this with what is after all a big garden i mean it's almost it's a bigger version of thousands of gardens that's stretching it a bit make this place is huge we've got half a dozen trenches open in the vegetable garden alone and we're getting a lot more pottery most of it late saxon early norman oh marvelous look at this 10. there's a clear cut-off date around 1100 but we still don't know where the potter is coming from so we've got to keep digging over on the front lawn phil's row of stones has turned into the corner of a large wall which lines up perfectly with the geophys could this be our medieval hospital well some 13th century hospitals could be very big but most had two main buildings a long infirmary hall for the sick and a chapel either on the end or on the side so which one does phil have you can't tell whether you're outside or inside there can you oh surely i must be inside i mean that's got to be an outside wall or at least part of an outside wall and then turn around and go in round there i'm sure that must be outside and i'm on the inside and just to prove phil doesn't make this stuff up look at this lovely floor tile it must mean we're inside a building this is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to find in a very posh 13th 14th century building like a chapel yes so this could be one of our hospital buildings the chapel and the second the hall might be closer than we think come here and have a look at these these things you richard are they the sort of thing that i should be finding in my trench you should be these genuine medieval late 13th century you see the thing of it is that the what we think is the outside wall of the building in my trench lines up over there it doesn't line up through here does that mean to say these are not in their original position they've been moved yes and they've been reduced in height because during the restoration 1908 by colonel sal de la terrier he discovered this portion of arcade in that wall and i can show you where it is so if you look if you imagine those two arches where they're reduced in size came out of this section of the wall so we would have a a row of arches just like that literally coming right the way back down through here yeah all the way through so if phil's right then we might have an isle with an arcade running under the house that would tie in quite nicely with the idea of a chapel at the end of an infirmary hall so pretty impressive work by phil but then mick just has to go one better is he getting anything poor oh yes are we um funnily enough there was very little in the soil as we got down yeah as we're going down through it then once we got near the bottom there and where faye was traveling there's what looks like a linear feature and that came out of it now that's the cotswolds word but that's the early stuff that's pre-conquest that's late 10th or 11th century right and it's actually sticking out of a feature we've got features in this trench with talking buildings or settlements or something like that i think it's a building i mean there's a bonus we got this out as well which is a large lumper dub which has been burned so possible building right one door or an oven or something like that and a pig tooth as well so it's starting to look like domestic refuge it really is it's very good isn't it spiky there's possibly a couple of post holes down there it's still being cleaned up um faith's going to get it all sorted out hopefully in the near future this is fantastic news whisper it carefully but this could be the first hint of an anglo-saxon house and i can count on one hand the number of those we've ever found on time team yeah yeah yeah yeah oh what oh look at that oh that's a big lump of metal working slag so we've got possible timber buildings now working slag possible piece of an oven dome yeah timber building timber building pottery domestic food waste with the pig bone it's only going to get better isn't it let's hope so they're only going to get better and with two medieval buildings and now a saxon one it's a cracking end to our first day at the back of the house mick's been going all anglo-saxon on us and has come up with this piece of pottery which dates to around 450 a.d that's just after the romans left and about 800 years older than that wall so look at that could we be about to find the anglo-saxon origins of burford we'll find out tomorrow [Music] beginning of day two here at berford in oxfordshire where we're at this fabulous house called the priory and over there behind that topiary phil's got some really intriguing middle ages archaeology he thinks we may have the medieval hospital but on the other hand if you look behind this door here after you i do love this place it's full of these tiny little nooks and crannies if you look through here we've got the vegetable garden where there's completely different archaeology and over here having a little rest of the flower pot no we're not having a west we're waiting for you what kind of archaeology have we actually got here mick we've got a lot of anglo-saxon pottery from about 4 50 the end of the roman period right up to about 100. and is it generally spread all over the vegetable garden there is a spread all over this vegetable patch here but it's denser up the top end where that group are digging over there and it's getting denser as we go up the slope and is that enough of a clue for you to be able to say i reckon there was a saxon house or even a saxon settlement here yeah i think we're looking at a saxon settlement on this little knoll actually we're seeing a sort of halo of of pottery debris around it that's probably what we're looking at well it's great that we can all pat ourselves on the back you've got fabulous medieval archaeology in the front garden he's got his anglo-saxon stuff but is this two separate archaeological digs or is there going to be a way that we can tie them together i think we are already beginning to pull the story together tony i mean you see mecca's got this well it looks like he's got a settlement here ending what 1100 something like that yeah and you see down there we've got we've got we've got our hospital building which as far as we can see at the moment is probably what in the 12th century 13th century something else something like that but we're beginning to get hints that we could have an actual earlier building on the site it's closing the gap to that 1100 gap and it will bring the site here and that site there it will just bring them together into one complete site so at the moment there's a break in our timeline today we need to close the chronological gap between our saxon village which ends in 1100 and our hospital which pops up in the records over a hundred years later but medieval historian john blair suspects our hospital may be a lot older than the history books let on that arcade in there yeah now those moldings they look late 13th century to me they look about 1280 1300 maybe yeah but then you look at these buttresses i mean if these are buttresses these are very broad shallow buttresses they look really really romanesque what to me is like norman yeah the round the lovely rounded arch that's right they look to me maybe 12th century or perhaps first half of the 13th but not as late as that arcade so that makes me wonder if we might have two phases in this building if john's right our hospital could start just 50 years after the saxon village ended and instead of the two buildings we could have just one an early norman chapel with a later arcade added on so great theory guys we just need to find one arcade [Music] so 67 for me two meters from there up until a few minutes ago i thought this archaeology here was part of the 13th century hospital which we know exists because of the history books but now they've started looking at it closer some of the archaeologists are starting to think that this stuff is older older than anything we know about here maybe it's part of an earlier phase of the hospital which stretched back in this direction and the only way to find out whether that hypothesis is true or not is to put in a big hole here which is why phil and john are doing this measuring which is fine that's their job as archaeologists except look at this place never mind the tulips that is a listed building it's a grade one listed building you can't just slap in any old whole what one and a half meters from the foundations although they seem perfectly happy about it i think somebody hey hang on a minute i'm talking to the camera well yeah i know you are but we're putting in a trench you're putting in a trench right by a grade one listed building yeah have you got permission to do that yeah you do you haven't that is i should know you have no permission to do it yes we have he hasn't someone's gonna have to make some phone calls don't say yes we have yes we have it's childish yes we have since the filming of this program phil's asked me to tell you that yes he had or so he says over in the vegetable garden which i hasten to add isn't grade one listed faze got a rare foundation trench for a timber saxon house it was definitely gone by 1100 but when was it built it's hard to tell the pottery from it could be as early as 450 a.d and we're also getting roman stuff as well to you and i a bit of pot is a bit of pot but to expert paul blinkhorn this stuff is key to dating our site now i know that's neat's work because you told me this is true what period is that well it's the typical sort of early late saxon pottery we get in this part of the world i mean it starts about 900 possibly even as early as 850. and again this is a bowl but um it's different the cottwell's work so we're talking about this about that sort of size yeah you do sometimes find them with sockets on the side like spouts but we think they were actually for putting wooden handles in so you could use them as a frying pan it's not nearly as sophisticated this stuff as the stuff which preceded it the roman work yeah i mean the roman pottery production was generally a lot more organized and sophisticated than the saxons they had full-time potters throwing stuff on wheels firing it in big kills really really churning the stuff out the commonest form of early saxon potter he's got animal dung mixed in with it animal dance yes why did they use that you mix it in with the clay you fire the pot all the organic material burns out and you're left with quite a corky pot it means even though it's quite crudely made we put it on the fire it'll expand and contract without cracking so it's a functional thing unless they like the animal dung in their pantry well slightly more information than i wanted but how on earth did they first discover that animal dung is good for making pottery lucky for us that someone did because we're now starting to find this so-called anglo-saxon poo pottery out front as well it's coming from this dark layer of earth that matt's digging under the hospital floor it's really quite tight date-wise we've got lots of the the cotswolds were the sort of saxon norman stuff that we're getting in the garden but you've got a couple of other bits of stuff uh kenneth valleyware that doesn't come until about 10 50. so i mean looking at this this feature whatever it is dates are about 10 50 1100 right really tight so it's got to be earlier than this all these stone walls are cut through it so it looks like we've got an early norman hospital sitting right on top of saxon demolition material phil can now quite clearly see two norman building phases he hasn't found the arcade or any of its arches yet but he has found the edge of the 13th century extension now we have got that wall yep coming through there and then turning and coming back on itself there everything we're finding points to something significant taking place around the year 1100 mick's starting to get very excited so excited that he's disappeared off into town [Music] come in and up okay meg oh you're there are you i thought you'd take longer than that go along there look you better have a good reason for dragging me up here i have i have because you can see the whole town from here look cool look across there look there's our hospital the priory site look from here you can really clearly see how there's quite a substantial hill behind it can't you yeah where the trees are at the back is where the saxon pottery is coming from but then in front of us you've got all this medieval new town laid out uh you know you come over the the ford over the river wind rush down there then you've got the main street up the middle and you've got all these carefully laid out properties running back from that when would the new town have been built well this one's about 1100 which is quite early because there are literally hundreds of them founded in the 1100s and 1200s everybody's at it because you make money out of building a new town wouldn't it make sense for our hospital to respect the high street though it's it's set a long way back from it yeah well that's fairly typical you don't want to if you like use your valuable properties on the main street but you want the the hospital nearby so it's it's quite normal to have it sort of just tuck the back of the town like that okay that deals with our medieval archaeology but we've got a lot of earlier stuff too yeah and i think i'm beginning to think that what what's actually happening is that's the earlier settlement it's probably one of a number of the villages down this valley and then the town is built and people move from there into the town that would make sense with what we what we see so we're beginning to see the big picture it looks like the creation of the new town killed off our saxon village but did anything else survive beyond our garden [Music] stewart our landscape investigator is taking a nose around the town to find out [Music] it's now mid-afternoon faze uncovered most of her saxon house and she's also narrowing down its date well it's cotswolds again but it's really crude so cotswolds that's the anglo-saxon stuff yeah yeah but i mean it's really unusually thick and heavy um we get stuff like this in the midlands that's middle saxon but not in this fabric i've never seen anything quite like this before from this part of the world and i've seen an awful lot of pottery from this part of the world well that's good we've got a first few well it's either a jug handle or it's a rim of a really simple crewed upright pot the sort of thing you get in the middle saxon period okay and that what date with that that would be 650 to 850. i mean that's perfect because actually that dates in our beam slot so we've got a middle saxon building so this is from the beam slots yeah well that's interesting because i mean if you look at middle saxon buildings in places like east anglia the the really quite vague structures what you basically get is a couple of very faint shallow beam slots where there's been wooden beams set in the ground and then upright timbers jointed into them and then the whole superstructure built around that and all they basically leave is two very faint sort of gullies which is just what we've got you've got so it looks like our timeline is really clear our site starts off as a mid to late saxon settlement which disappears when the town's built in 1107 and is followed by the early norman hospital and then a trench which so far we've overlooked suddenly pushes our story even earlier apparently we've got a surprising development here in the vegetable garden scarlet what have you got in your trench a roman wall you're kidding me no i'm not this one here that we thought was medieval yep definitely how do you know that that is roman well first of all it's on a completely different alignment to anything else that we've had and secondly it's just really really well built look at this lovely ashla block here in the corner it's absolutely beautiful and the third thing is the clincher is the pottery what about the pottery pool well i mean you've got this victorian water pipe cut through the wall and the only potter you've got is either victorian or roman so it's got to be a roman wall there's no medieval pottery around at all if you look at the medieval buildings in the other trench there's been evil pottery all over it there isn't a single scrap from this trench what's the roman stuff um it's just a couple of shirts but probably first or second century i think so what do you think this building is a big stone one thank you very much the wall is a real mystery and it's got us really excited because we've heard rumors of other roman stuff [Music] we've sent john blair to check out a supposed roman sarcophagus in the churchyard and there's also talk of a roman coin horde being found here in the 19th century and then things start to get a little mysterious out front too our hospital seems to have a bit of a weird shape new gear fizz suggests that it's only got one side aisle when we would have expected it to have two and try as he might phil can't find any more arches for the one we found it's almost as if this big house is determined to cling onto its secrets for a little longer ever get the feeling someone knows more than you do i've been wandering around the gardens and walls around here stewart's search around the town has led him right back to the garden and he thinks he's identified the heart of our saxon settlement the original road along which it grew up he reckons this back street here once carried on to the river today there's a 17th century chapel in the way but there's a clue in the south wall what is interesting is the geophysics of radar that was done in here there's a chapel there and you see that line coming through underneath the floor there well if you look down on the outside the building look what's sticking out there ah right to an ignoramus like me it looks if the chapel sits on top of that that masonry what do you think about it looking at it it does i mean obviously a bit of measurement like that doesn't match the rest of the wall so it's pretty short isn't it it's pretty shoddy but if it was there originally and they were building a chapel on top of it it wouldn't matter because it would be below the ground level right stewards noticed that this block of stone continues the line of the old road he doesn't think it's actually the saxon road itself but he does think it might be the boundary wall of the medieval hospital which was built on top of it the only way to prove it is to dig inside the chapel but that's going to have to wait until tomorrow because the rest of us need a well-earned drink something really weird has started happening earlier this afternoon all our archaeologists were getting really excited about what they found they were going oh we've got two phases of medieval archaeology over here over here there's this massive anglo-saxon site even we've got this vast roman wall and yet in the past five minutes or so and it's probably something to do with the fact that we've all been drinking this stuff those same archaeologists have been tiptoeing up to me and saying actually we're not really quite so sure that we've got what we thought we had which is crazy we came here to solve the mysteries of this house i now feel as though we've come no further forward than we were when we started and in addition to that they've all started getting really intrigued by this place the chapel which they hadn't even looked at until late this afternoon they're quite mad it's gonna be a lot of work tomorrow beginning of day three and things are quiet here at burford priory too quiet [Music] two days ago mick promised me that he'd be able to tell the story of this place before we go home but this big garden keeps throwing up more questions than we can answer [Music] yesterday afternoon our archaeologists were really excited they'd found this beautiful medieval hospital here just a few questions about its shape was it narrow or was it much fatter with two side aisles in order to sort that out they put in this highly controversial trench here very close to the side of the house and it proved absolutely inconclusive this stonework here is just some garden feature or something so that was a total waste of time so have we got the two side aisles well this appears to be one of them it goes along here like that and then turns like that this stuff in the middle here that's just rubble what about the other side aisle well that ought to be where this light blue plastic is but according to john's geophys there doesn't need to be anything there at all so mick have we got a wonky chapel with one side eye well we might have i mean it might just have a north aisle but we think we ought to look where the plastic is even though there's nothing on the geophysics there might still be a robber trench that shows us that there was an oil butted onto the chapel at that point show me the nothing there's the corner of the chapel yeah and there is nothing so has it been robbed out did it ever exist so that's where we want to look [Music] so with one day left we're quite literally digging for all or nothing [Music] and it isn't just phil who's going for broke we've got to tie our hospital in the front to the saxon village out back so we're taking a leap of faith by opening a final trench inside the present day chapel under the altar lies a strange block of stone the more romantic of us think it could be a tomb but stewart suspects it might be the boundary wall of the medieval hospital which follows the line of the old saxon road so that's the front but what about the roman wall in the back we've now got a roman coin from the same trench but is everything what it seems so it's a roman coin but it's got two loops for fasting over a strap that's right a strap that's very interesting because it's a very common early anglo-saxon practice to salvage roman coins and mount them up as jewellery so it supports the impression we're getting of an early anglo-saxon settlement here so are we looking at the roman stuff the wrong way around or are we just plain wrong i hear that the uh the story here has changed yet again it has but it's not roman it's not romans no so you're absolutely right i'm also absolutely wrong i'm afraid so why are you so sure it isn't roman now where yesterday you were convinced it was well we've got this pit here that is saxo norman oh i see so uh this can't be roman because the saxons came after the romans so you couldn't have a roman wall on top of a saxophone yeah you're absolutely right anything else and also we've got this iron stone here yeah um that wasn't used as a building material to the late 1600s well that seems very inconclusive doesn't it paul paul blinkhorn world famous authority on pot it was roman yesterday this wall it was indeed roman yesterday but it's not anymore have you any idea what this structure was i haven't got the faintest idea i'm afraid it's a really really big wall but i've no idea what it's for so we were just plain wrong after all but as we close the trench down we realize it's forcing us to wonder about a few other supposed roman finds at the beginning of the program i said a roman sarcophagus had been found here well our experts have looked at it and it's not roman at all it's just a bog standard cattle trough and in addition to that i thought that we'd got a horde of roman coins well it turns out that that was just a myth there were in fact just two roman coins but it's weird isn't it paul because although we've lost all these big dramatic roman things there is roman activity here we've found it in the ground well i mean there's roman pottery all over the site there's a little background scatter of it this hole down here is absolutely typical we've got six shades of pottery come out of it four of them are roman one's early saxon and one's late saxon so does that mean that we're wrong in thinking of burford as essentially saxon and that it could have been a big roman settlement originally i don't think so i mean looking at the stuff that's come out of here it all seems to be first second century there's no evidence of continuity into the saxon period so it could just be that there was a little roman farmstead here at some time yeah i think that's exactly it there's obviously some sort of small-scale roman settlements and we're just kind of seeing the fallout from it i suppose across the side but no sarcophagus no horde no big roman war well we all make mistakes but we can't afford any more because time is running out so we've once again asked the local primary school next door for help the children are making us a model of burford and in return mix agreed to tell them the story of the town but will he be able to pull it all together in time well at least we now know that our story begins with the saxons in the area of the back garden [Music] fair are you still happy you've got an anglo-saxon house definitely without a shadow and do we know the date yeah um there's a few more rather scruffy bits of pottery coming out of the beam slots but i don't see any reason to sort of change the date in from yesterday which is what middle saxon date a 650 to 850. can you show me your house i am if you follow me we're now in the entrance of the house yeah and so what we've got down here is a beam slot so there's one wall there that's one wall five fifteen what's this thing here this is a pit it's had pottery it had bone in and probably from when they constructed the building they put a load of stuff in all right so if we walk this way yeah we've got another pit here which is actually where i got a load of animal bone and this could possibly be like the hearth area where they had their final meal before they scarpered yeah and then if we keep walking down this way to here this is the end of our house it's pretty small isn't it this but it's cozy our saxon house is a little gem we hardly ever find timber buildings as old as this one the small village it belonged to was founded sometime after 6 50 a.d before vanishing around 1100 stuart's looking for the line of the old saxon road he thinks it may have become the boundary for the medieval hospital and a little bit of stone under the present chapel may just prove he's right all afternoon matt's been beavering away in this little hole i think it's the first time ever on time team that we've excavated an altar of a chapel stuart why have we done it well on the outside of here there's a stub of a wall sticking out and this chuckle is clearly built over it did it come through and was it anything to do with the medieval hospital richard there's certainly something there isn't it yeah it's not quite as clear as i thought it would be but it's certainly there it's certainly pre-chapel it's in line with the chapel and all the sequences matt's getting out of there are very similar to the big trench phil had in front of the house so i think we can say that boundary wall probably came through here so it looks like this wall marks the original road leading to the river crossing when the medieval town was founded a new road was built the one that exists today the saxon one disappeared along with the village and it became the hospital's eastern boundary we know that the hospital had an impressive early norman chapel but we're still not entirely sure what it looked like in its later years phil spent the morning trying to find out if it had a second arcade now if there is a south oil wall if you come here look there's the line of the wall on the north side it should come straight through here it should be hitting here and if it's here we should see it in the side of that modern soak away what do you see in the side of that soak away it's absolutely nothing in there natural clay where is the wall that's not there exactly the empty trench means a second arcade was never built and at last phil can say exactly what this building looked like funnily enough i think john was right when he said to me the other day about there being two phases because that's what we've got we've actually got the northeast corner of the chapel and where this hole here is just about ties in with where the altar would have been so we've got this massive thick wall coming through here with quite slender buttresses on that corner and on that corner and then the wall comes through here it's sort of basically an oblong chapel that is shooting straight through the house there and then at a later phase what they've done is they've added on this oil through here and of course that belongs to the phase with the arcading in and we've been looking to see whether there's a south arcade and south oil right and all we've managed to find is the robber trench for the the wall that goes with this one in other words the early phase of the chapel so there is no south oil it's possible our hospital chapel doubled up as an infirmary hall but without a second aisle it must have seemed a rather cramped and odd-shaped building and we think we might have found the reason why [Music] i've come across a reference in the victoria county history to a record held by the bishops of lincoln in which in 1305 the bishop granted an indulgence to all those who gave aid to the fabric of the church of the hospital of burford what's an indulgent it's basically a payment that you could make in order to buy your way out of purgatory or hell a bit more quickly it's a naughty tax isn't it basically so what do you think happened well i think it's possible that that they may have started work on the hospital and run out of money and gone to the bishop and said we're a bit strapped for cash can you help us out and he decided that he'd grant an indulgence which would raise some money and that they could have the proceeds from that but despite offering a get out of hell free card the hospital failed to raise enough cash for a second wing it's a sad decline but perhaps there weren't enough sick to look after or perhaps no one in burford was very naughty so there's just one question left with all the pieces of the jigsaw in place can mick make good on his promise and tell the story of burford [Music] and we've brought back some of his fiercest critics to judge him tough crowd take it away mr storyteller so you know where your school is you know where the river is you know where the main road is up the middle of the town okay first bit of the story we can't put on here you found roman pottery we don't know where the roman site is the bit you also found was lots of saxon pottery and we now think there's a saxon settlement saxon village somewhere here my lovely assistant stuart debbie mcgee of the archaeological world will put on a little saxon building right and that lasts from about 400 a.d right through to about 1100 a.d and then sometime after 1100 they build the new town down the main street that's where your houses come in so take the saxon village away because everybody's moved into the town right everybody goes away and then all down the main street build the houses bust [Music] oh it's filling up with new people [Music] once the town is built the hospital which is on this site where the poor people and the sick people were looked after was built next to your school and that then went on right the way through to about the time of the tudors when that was taken down and on the site was built the beginnings of this big house here yeah there it is and that's smallest as it is today isn't it big house at the priory the parish church and the town all laid out along the street so we just looked at over a thousand years of history burford's got talent either splendid houses you've done very well there that's really good our story of burford isn't unique a similar one could be told in any number of towns across the country ours started with just a few bits of pottery in this garden and a lot of luck and just think we'd never have known any of this if one archaeologist hadn't got just that little bit nosy to ensure you catch all the latest updates please do subscribe to this channel follow us on social media and sign up to our newsletter and join us on patreon [Music]

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 113,033

Keywords: Team Team, Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode, time team, time team full episode, time team season 17, time team season 17 episode 10, time team priory engagement, time team oxfordshire, time team burford, burford oxfordshire, british history, dig sites

Id: JEKhRYDpWFk

Length: 47min 36sec (2856 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 10 2021