The Battle of Hastings - Searching for Bodies.

[Music] hi this is Philip day from The Crow host battle team Nick Austin and myself have put together an update on the work the team has been doing around co-host over the last two weeks and for those new to this wondering what all the fuss is about and why can't we just believe the official narrative of events now we're here to show you the serious flaws in the official version of the normal evasion right down to where Williams fleet landed where his base camp was located and most importantly the site of the true epic confrontation of the Battle of Hastings itself like to thank the volunteers who came out on the Thursday and the Saturday sometimes adverse wind conditions to pick out for the scans thank you very much for that and we're gonna see some good news coming out of this I'm sure so please put the kettle on put your feet up [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you William settles you could Normandy made a battlefield oath that if he won the day he would build an abbey on the site of his victory history records the William won the hard-fought battle this is what people have been told of the remains and the Abbey William subsequently had constructed on the battle site but more recently new information has come to light that suggests that while the ABI we see today of battle is without doubt and medieval construction it wasn't the original ABI William had built and more controversially nor was this the site of England's most famous fight a shopping list of anomalies raised by Nick Austin in his book casts grave doubt on the accepted version of events in a Time Team program the lost battlefield hosted by so Tony Robinson historians with differing views on the site of the battle were invited to present their theories most notably no scientific evidence was presented by English Heritage for battle abbey being the genuine site which their historians could easily have done to this date there has been no battlefield archeology recovered a battle so we have to take English Heritage's word for it which is an alarm bell and a genuine truth signal which begs the question use English heritage charging people with money to walk around a field of no historical significance it's an unwelcome question but we should never sure from challenging an accepted version of any event the truth is the truth whatever jacket it's wearing nobody likes to think that they do the idea that historians may have got something this important so wrong Chuck's a lot of people but big mistakes are always being made and many of them quickly become the accepted and unquestioned narrative of our age endorsed by the lofty imprimatur of university academics who write books reputation [Music] the Battle of Hastings changed everything for England after 1066 and for many of us a strange bond links us to these kings of this battle going back 10 centuries a nagging sense of questions unanswered that history has still not finished with William and Harold that the secrets of the norman invasion and the fate of the players are ever there to be discovered in the dusty rolls of parchments and the clay of the Weald [Music] you [Music] okay so here we are in Crowhurst again so it was time for us to do a summary of why we're here we're here actually to do a ground radar survey of the important places in Provos that we know of at the moment we don't know if they're really important but I have a feeling that we're going to turn something up ground-penetrating radar is a technique that looks into the ground non-invasively which means it doesn't disturb the ground at all what it actually does is it sends a radar wave down into the ground and it squiggles down to the ground and it bounces off of a reflects off of different properties contrasting properties like say a rock with soil over it I'll see that boundary where the rock is and by collecting data I go in transects so transect is a straight line and if you imagine a site like this as a square and in that square you make a grid and you have straight lines every few feet like say three feet I use meters so I have a line every meter and I collect data on those lines so I go in straight lines straight it's like mowing the lawn and what you do is you put you add up all of this data all of this data and you put your whole grid or this whole area in a software program when you get home at night and and you stack these slices up because they look it looks vertically into the ground like slicing think about a chocolate layer cake it's like slicing down through a layer cake and you can see all the different things underground so when I get home I stack that all up and then I make it look like it's the actual ground surface so all that information is in this cube and then I can actually make maps at different depths of the features that are underground and what we're hoping is that we'll be able to see the barn feature or the house feature those or the privee the bathroom which would be really cool to find if tabatha Nelson's but but but what's really important is that this actually will map a very large area that we could never excavate so here we are at Lerner house with amazing piece of kit in Rd 1500 which is a ground radar penetrating radar can see down about 8 meters and will give us a nice picture of what's there [Music] okay let's leave Nick and his team to start the first scans at the front of the manor we're going to do a quick recap of the whole picture to gain some perspective and then we'll look at everything from the air for those who say there can be nothing new discovered about the Norman invasion or the Battle of Hastings a thousand years after the event I disagree what have we been looking in the wrong places for both Williams landing site and the subsequent battle itself there has been not one credible battle artifact ever found at the Battle Abbey site if there had it will be in battle museum instead English heritage is charging visitors a large sum of money to walk around a field of no historical significance and we can be sure this mistake has been made because the nature tells us to understand the overriding historical importance of the wilty site we must appreciate that the Sussex coastline facing William and his invasion force in 1066 was radically different from what we see today [Music] in fact only a fool would land at the place we call Pevensey today back then a huge inland bay cut off Pevensey counsel from hastings assessor tating a huge detour by foot to get to where the Norman Army was supposed to her fort King Harold at the location of the modern day town at battle the only way William could conceivably have crossed to Hastings if he landed at Pevensey castle would be to reembarked sail across the mouth of old pevensey bay and then real and his army on the other side this plainly did not happen William had planned this invasion with tremendous foresight right down to the last detail his extensive spy network in England had provided superb jitu how credible is it that this veteran commander of a dozen campaigns would have made such an elementary and foolish blunder in secrets of the norman invasion historian nick austin shows what the primary sources have to say on where williams army landed in those days the Valley Haven was a sheltered Bay where the busiest port on the south coast of England was located the old port of Hastings the topography of the inlet was perfect even if the English were waiting William could continue further into the bay and land anywhere on several miles of shoreline around the inlet to avoid a direct attack in fact the landings were completely unopposed the ships were beached along a wide section of the inlet and troops and horses sloshed ashore along with tons of supplies and weapons that would be used on the campaign the first task was to dismantle some of the ships and use the wood to construct the lower fort to protect the landing site against attack this is alluded to in the Bayeux Tapestry which actually shows two forts built at the landing site a few days later the Normans move up the hill and established a second more elaborate defensive headquarters at the Wilton site labeled here as the upper fort [Music] it is provocative that the remains of some of Williams ships may still be earth dug down on the old shoreline awaiting discovery and verification as the centuries passed and the invasion slipped from the minds of men the shoreline too began to change the inlet silted up and the sea receded today we have one of the most beautiful marshland vistas and Sussex alas soon to play host to the East Sussex County Council in their link road right through the site of the Duke of Normandy up a fourth site at wilting ok back to the present that was a summary we did back in 2012 about why we believe that the Belvoir HIEs is absolutely the place where William lands his army look at it you can go any way and never going to be opposed if you see an army waiting for you you move to another part of that and what I find also fascinating is this is an ancient site the red ring on there shows where some boats ancient boats have been found prior to them putting in the road let's look at the satellite top-down view here's that here are the landing sites the old hastings port bottom right hand and the inlet of course you come straight off those boats and immediately you've got defensive areas the lower four Terriers built their upper fought is just a superb site on top of a hill and is Williams headquarters here we see a shot of the North going with the sea in the distance at the landing sites lower for Terry we'll be in the bottom left-hand corner and if we turn around and face the other way you're going to start to see that this is very close to the first Saxon defence line so there's the upper floor tario Saxon defence line up there if we plot it on Ordnance Survey you have the lower foot here but the old Hastings port right there and just up on top of the Knoll the hill the upper fort the red Route indicates the route that William takes his army to get off the peninsula and what Harold's gonna do is he's going to block Williams attempts to do that and this is an amazing site because it is a short front and it's got the male force the lower Malthus on the right and it's gonna have woods on the left-hand side so let's take a look at mix diagram of the old London Road which is actually not what we see the road to be today it takes a slightly different route if you have a look here that's the Saxon defense line just in front of those buildings and in foreground is the plain so Williams Army is gonna rush that and try to get across it and break down that shield walls they can get off the peninsula [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] on the night of the battle waist tells us they could see one another the two camps could see one another the Normans were in wilting and the Saxons were it were it was somewhere on the ridge and so I started to look into this and you find that there is one place that fits everywhere [Music] [Applause] [Music] 40a tells us that when they fought the battle there was a huge ditch and it was called the mal Foss and and so and the soldiers the Norman soldiers were killed in the ditch and they passed it in the battle in another commentary at the The Chronicle of Aqaba it tells us that there was a male force but it was at the end of the battle so yta is telling us as one during the battle there's another one telling us at the end of the battle it doesn't seem to make any sense there's no ditch in battle abbey there's no way you can die they say oh when it might have been three miles behind the lines of course it wasn't the whole point about the battle was it it occupied a confined space a place where the Normans were held on the peninsula and the only place for that was Provost [Music] you it's an unidentified building in the middle of Crowhurst if there's no record of it in the historical record there's no record of it in anything to do with Harold or anything to do with before then and yet this site is huge it's 80 meters long by 40 meters wide and has been level when you look at the ground radar which we've already had a peek at you can see that two meters down there's a pretty level platform and on top of that the stuff loads of stuff there are 13 mounds down here in the gully in the undergrowth that I have to admit look like graves that's wishful thinking of this stage until we can get some evidence for but we're laying out the scanning grid see if we can actually come up with her nothing okay question what makes you think that that's a construction you used to work construction yep because the stone layer goes all the way over the edge top there goes the second layer looks like it probably does the same but it's collapsed so you can see that there's air pockets all under here and and also you can see there's a construction in the in the mound itself it's not just a pile of Earth which you'd expect you'd expect just a part of Earth or silt or something but here there is there's a layer then there's some some wood then there's another layer then more wood and and the word is tightly knitted it's not like just just laid it's tightly knitted whoever built this I think they didn't want anyone to get inside it in the chronicle of our Abbey it says they buried their men in the bosom of the earth and moved on here we are so now I've got to look with the ground radars I guess really there it's hard to get on film what these mounds look like but they're probably about 20 paces by five paces and nobody builds a man like this for no reason and thirteen of these things and apparently there's a bunch more in media in the other Valley so if you're going to bury thousands of bodies nice to make anywhere from three to five thousand casualties at Hastings Resnick says the norman records indicate that the Normans were buried in the bosom of the earth you can't really see it but there's just undulations these are actually seriously large mounds we're gonna find out what's in them you so here we are in the middle plane of the battlefield on earth or might call it the top plane my image of what's happening during the battle is changing as I'm getting more and more information coming in here there is a big pond right at the top of the hill it's not the top of the hill the top of the the slope where the fighting clearly took place and there's a defensive line just in front of it and I'm quite convinced that that the battle took place below this field and fought its way over the top and I I suspect the the blood lake idea that came into existence was probably due to this little pond here being right at the top of the the norm like a like a hillock in the middle of the battlefield [Music] okay so we're looking at what's potentially a defensive yarn here in this tree which is a pretty ancient on the contrary Carla says that way says they've built three defensive three enclosures he could and I think this is one of the enclosures the other one is at the bottom of the field and the third and the last one was at the very back of this field [Music] we put the ground radar to look for bodies because bodies are the missing thing from batter addicts and they're the missing thing from anywhere else and if they're anywhere and must be missing when I have a look at the the first scans came back from this great equipment it shows clearly the unidentified things in the ground in this field and in the other way [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you I hope you enjoyed the film we're going to keep you updated as to any further news regarding the professional appraisal of those scams that we were taking in various sites around the project and that's the weather clears up and we move towards spring Nick's been talking about further adventures and further investigations and other aspects of this project so we'll be sure we'll keep you informed thank you for watching

Channel: SOTNI UK

Views: 248,995

Keywords: battle of hastings, Harold of England, Battle Abbey, William the Conqueror, English Heritage, Housecarls, Crowhurst, Wilting, Bulverhythe, Crowhurst Manor, 1066, Bayeux Tapestry, Pevensey

Id: toRQiy-zdgc

Length: 31min 21sec (1881 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 09 2018