The Bizarre Disappearance Of This Lost 14th-Century Medieval Village | Time Team | Chronicle

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] I'm just near Middlesbrough and over there is the river teas but hundreds of years ago somewhere under all these lumps and bumps there used to be a village called high wurzel quite a big Village it seems although now all that's left of it is this little church yard and a clutch of tombstones but where were the main buildings was there a Manor House who lived here and why did the village just disappear off the map time team have got just three days to uncover the story of high wurzel foreign [Music] so why are you sure that what we've got under here is an Old Village well because of the Earthworks or all these bumps and lumps are absolutely characteristic of Village sites this one in front of us for example is fairly typical of a of a house site it's here yeah you see and it goes across if you don't stand up the other end look that's the sort of gable ends and you've got to imagine this with a Timber and thatched roof on the top it is pretty big actually isn't it yeah I mean it doesn't look much on the ground but it would have been substantial building originally and when you say Village I tend to think of duck pond and Village Green and The Little Old Tavern or that Forever Amber Jimmy just I think it was how close is that to what we're likely to do that's a rather romantic image of really what relates to the post-medieval period 1600 onwards this is earlier I mean this this may go back to the 12th century or early in that it's occupied all through the Middle Ages probably was abandoned at the end of the Middle Ages you know that's things for us to look at and how we're going to start well we've got to go and talk to the others to sort out the detail in fact the others are already hard at it our site covers a huge area so the geophysics team is at work in the middle of the Earthworks trying to make some Headway Stewart has been out since early morning sizing up the lumps and bumps trying to put some shape to them [Music] okay what have you got then ah Mick I've been looking at all the Earthworks in this field and there's it's a fantastic song but what it looks like is a planned Village two planned rows with one planned row up there one planned row up there back Lanes at either side of them with a big air in between which is actually full of Earthworks which are really complicated but what's emerging really very quickly is that we've got a very strong row of buildings up here yeah on the side of a Holloway a main street with paddocks out the back all laid out symmetrically I've called that North row and they're very well preserved way over there is a very similar layout of a row of building platforms and paddocks behind but that one is very poorly preserved yeah it's plowed right down yeah it seems we need to know if they're the same date and what date they were deserved I mean this is the one that we should do more work on because this is already damaged very Cloud flat isn't that we may get less evidence so may maybe if we're looking at both areas for the beginning we'll we'll know then whether we can get anything useful out of the air it's been plowed and we'll have this area the bottom the bottoms of ditches and trenches will be well preserved in that because they won't have plowed down to that level will they feel we should be putting a trench in up here or would you rather leave that alone if it seems weak oh come on I just got out of my precious archaeologists meter and it's running into the red here but that's our concern okay Mick what are we going to do now well I think what we do is we put a trench in here and then you'll move off to the South Row do more geophysics there before we decide where to put any trenches in there well for goodness sake let's get a trench start once he's reunited with his Spade it doesn't take Phil long to cut through the turf and open trench one right can we get on with this then [Music] an earthwork that looks promising at one end of North row at the far end of the site over on South Row John's looking for a promising spot to put in a second Trench he's looking for a similar house platform to the one Phil's digging we hope that the fines from these two trenches will enable us to date both areas and discover whether these two rows were built and perhaps abandoned at the same time history hitters like Netflix just for history fans with exclusive history documentaries covering some of the most famous people and events in history just for you with familiar faces such as Dan Jones and Dr Eleanor yanega we've got hundreds of documentaries covering the greatest figures and events of medieval history we're committed to Bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else sign up now for a free trial and Chronicle fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code Chronicle that's foreign well archeology can only tell you so much about a site like this we want to go off and dig out the historical record which in fact can tell us an awful lot more than the archaeologist ever will actually gonna do a bit of work this weekend yeah I'm not know a lot about archeology but I don't think you realize there's a real process to historical research and that's what we're going to show you this weekend so what sort of things are you going to be looking at what we're going to be looking for evidence related to the manner of high worths or the Parish of high was or maps and plans that sort of thing hopefully and it's drier for armchair historians anyway a bit of detective work that's it good luck see you later cheers so I reckon we've got to try and find out what doomsday says about the place I think we need to check whether there's a Victoria County history and entry I think that would help us yeah so that'll be what that'll be the old North riding of Yorkshire that's right yeah because we're right at the end the edge of it uh we're going right or left here no this isn't even clearly this one there's a really biting wind out on the site now and some people have already snuck into the incident room we're just having a look at the air photos about absolutely fantastic you can really get an idea for have a sort of geography of your site works this is the building we're building a trench in early you can see you know it's obviously a rectangular building it's really clear so North Road goes right down there that's the sort of front end of North row with the houses up against the street and the boundaries between the properties coming off at right angles from it you can see how regular it is it doesn't look so regular on the ground but you look at it from above it's a sort of planned housing estate almost and then right the other side of the site this is South Row and you can see similar sorts of lines and these are the ghosts of the original plot yes the property boundaries do you think that within the space of three days we're going to be able to unpick this story oh I think so I think I mean we've got stunning Earthworks we've got terrific air photography we'll have geophysics to top it all up I think by Sunday afternoon I can take you on a walk around this Village up the street show you the houses take in the front doors and reach create what a medieval village will have looked like I'll take you up on that all right I think we'll all do it out on the road the process of historical research is well underway do you have a set of the public record office calendars the the Patton roads close rolls and fine rolls Etc oh while Phil's making good progress in trench one is that the reference section yeah sure trying to give me another number she's on a tea break all right and even this is still there's still topso yeah cheers it's not getting blood out of a stone foreign we've got our first find of the day oh yes that's nice medieval course that's medieval medieval yeah late early days from about the 13th century through the 15th century yeah and I mean look at the edges that's really really sharp though I mean that that hasn't been played or rolled around does it it's really really crisp yeah well again that's certainly medieval yeah what's interesting is that we're only getting medieval at the moment yeah that's it that's right doesn't it so we may not be in a building that lasts beyond the Middle Ages which would be useful no that's right so our first piece of pot from North row tells us that this is a medieval building from the shape of this earthwork we can begin to tell what this building might have looked like Victor is trying to flesh it out a bit for us while Sue and Steve are trying to define the edges of the village by plotting the Earthworks survey over the Ordnance survey map s are so we can just drop things straight down on top of it trench too over what she believes is a house platform because this area has been heavily plowed she didn't worry about digging through the top layers quickly she's looking for evidence that'll show where the North and South rows were built and abandoned at the same time it's quite scary in these things when there's a wind blowing isn't it yeah why did you get us up here mainly to show you this area of the South Row which is across here uh we can see that right next to this field is a plowed field in fact quite a few plowed Fields one of our objectives is to find out how old the villages and where there's anything here beforehand we might get for example a Saxon or Roman or even prehistoric material from walking across that field and that's our only chance there's some field walking which is a technique I do a lot and I enjoy a lot it's very useful this is just getting gangs of people to walk across a field and see what's on the surface that's right [Music] it's a piece of Roman Pottery it's exactly the kind of thing we're looking for because it tells us that there were people living here before the medieval village [Music] what you got Robin I thought we had a flint blade but it turned out a piece of sleep we do have a nice wet stone oh that's good that's very nice isn't it any idea of date of a thing like that uh well that's absolutely it's medieval um to sharpen knives and implements within the yeah period either there are more fines out in the field or people are getting better I think most people must be getting better I think people are getting better okay so we're ready for the next line are we we are yes Robin Bush hello Alan Piper Dr Hadley dawned to her friends nice to meet you now in Durham Robin and Dawn are at last in touch with historical documents um here and can begin the process of piecing together the hidden history of high wurzel 1531. there's John Sayer of words yes as with many of these inventories it lists It Room by room they find a remarkable will it belongs to the lord of the manner of words and lists all his possessions with a good number of pots and pans in it and candle sticks and then he goes on to list the man's outside other shops in the fields crops in the field um we've got the cattle here oxen and milk cows and their calves and so on this is the um the net of the gift of lands um from William II to the bishop of Durham oh hold on hello Robin Bush here Robin is Tony how you getting on oh we're doing fine we're in the most marvelous uh library of of Durham Cathedral um we've got this wonderful quote written by the curate of high wurzel uh who wrote a book on Cleveland in 1808 and he says the chapel here it seems shared a similar fate with the village and continued in Ruins until about the year 1719 when the present humble structure was erected out of the remains of the former so that gives us a date uh probably when the village had gone you know 1719. listen um we've been coming up with 14th century Pottery no not specifically we've turned up the will and inventory uh of a John Sayer at my words or in 31. can you see if you can get us some more of that earlier medieval stuff absolutely well if you've got anything tonight give us a bell all right okay bye well I suppose all we can do is uh clown backwards okay over on South Row things are moving on quickly we've already hit the natural soil in trench too with no fines at all so we decide to try two more trenches here trench three and trench four trench three is over what should be the very edge of the village we're looking for a ditch here in which we might find early pottery karenza is marking out trench 4 which is across a ditch marking the boundary between two houses it goes up the middle meanwhile back in our first trench in North row Phil has uncovered a strong Stone feature but it runs across the center of the building and not on what we thought were the outside edges I thought whatever was under here would be the same shape as this little hillock we're on yeah but the stones aren't why not I don't know this should be we think the same well end of day one and we've got a mystery I'd have put money on there being walls but this is this is really interesting isn't it yeah then why are we spending so much time about 200 yards over there where it isn't it is interesting over there I mean we've got we've got a trench being opened up to see where the boundary ditch is because the boundary ditch may have the earliest material in the bottom of it which will give us some information about the day to the plan and you've got another area opened up that's got a similar you've got three trenches opened up there now so yeah we can get into that we can excavate that area much more freely because it's more damage this this the Earth Works in good condition we must be careful with this area we've got one eye on the fact these are well preserved Earthworks which we want to keep I mean what they've done over there in fact is playing off a lot of this getting us down to the lower levels that are going to answer the questions about when it was founded how it was laid out so what are we going to do tomorrow we're going to carry on over there we you're on about no you're the chief archaeologist yeah because I just think it's a waste of resources but you'll prove me wrong why because I think that the only reason you're not concentrating on this area of the site is because you want to demonstrate that you don't want to do too much damage to the most interesting part and I think it's Madness because you've got so much of it and that you could actually make it very very neat sections in here you can't dig it all in one weekend we want okay so let's go plums here and I'll eat the bad ones because neither are we going to use these Earthworks to answer the questions we set out with if we can get the same answers from the damaged part of the site he's not convinced well end of day one I've been beaten hands down by anally retentive archaeologists join us after the break when hopefully we'll be able to crack the puzzle of this mysterious Trench [Laughter] I'm feeling really happy this morning last night I was winding the archaeologists up partly because I felt that they were being Ultra conservative in not being prepared really to excavate in what I considered to be the plum area of the site and partly because I was frightened that we were going to spend the whole weekend exploring the lumps and bumps on the surface without really being prepared to get underneath to find out what the archeology was like there well overnight they've conceded that we can put in a new trench here in what I think is a really interesting part of the site where we haven't dug yet where there's some very interesting Earthworks this is where we put in our first trench on North row this is where we are now on what we're calling the Western Zone and Jon Stewart are just working out precisely where we should put the trench the area we're now looking at is here just west of the church the geophysics team is collecting data from it while Stuart begins to examine the lumps and bumps the earth works on this part of the site are very different they suggest a group of buildings in a settlement we know that somewhere on this side there was a manor house some of us are beginning to think that it may be around here in trench one Phil's back at work trying to make some sense of the massive Stones he's come across is there a wall to this building in here somewhere absolutely and across in South Row corenza's still looking for the dating evidence we need trench 4 is getting longer but there's no sign of a ditch yet we also decide to extend trench 3 in our hunt for a boundary ditch at the edge of the village from the air the site looks impressive you can clearly see our trench one at this end of North row you can see you can pick out quite a few houses along it those little rectangular platforms going right out to where the grass gets more yellow Southern row is where it starts at the the very Green Field Beyond The Barn it's that strip running right the way across and the Western zone is on the far side of the big Square which is the church yeah across the other side of the church yeah would you expect to find such a big church site slap bang in the middle of a medieval village well you'd expect to find one but not not apparently on the Village Green or in the middle of the village like that you might expect that to be where the manor house was originally and then the church built next to it and then the village coming later on that would be quite a normal sort of sequence it's a beautifully compact site fantastic isn't it yeah Phil's extending trench one he knows he's definitely Excavating a building but these Stones don't make any sense the extension is a good move that soon pays off this is all Stoney yeah yeah there's an opening up there there's an edge do you think we got the of a war is that possible this you could you could mat it that it was just peeling off with a matter you go through it here you can see this different color it looks it is there is an edge here you know look at the way that roots look at the way that root run at the side of it is in it yeah so it should be able to spot it wow that's right we should be able to follow it there oh look yeah here it is yeah that's the cracking along there that's it same thing Phil we saw from the air that you're extending this trench uh yes we've got a very good reason for extending this trench actually um we really don't understand what those stones are so there's the only way to find out is to come straight over this bank uh and actually try and find out what's happening to the stones through here and actually try and find the edge of the building now so you might get the end wall here well this is what we're this is what we're so excited about look yeah you see over here we've got this sort of a grayish Brown material now you see when you come down onto here look at that it's a very moist wet quite nice can you see there's an edge coming across here you can follow it as a crack I'm pretty sure that this is a good possibility of being the center of the wall and that this down here is the collapse of the wall outside right are we thinking of this as a clay walled cob wall building now then looks like we might we might be we haven't found any evidence of um on the bank over there over the sidewalls not already Stoneworks well you know a modern straw you know very much like the West country today lay a layer down let it dry lay another layer down let it dry what they say about is as long as you keep its its head and its feet dry you know you put some foundations in you put a cap as long as you've got a nice big Eve over the top of it so that the actual base of the ward and wash away in a road all those pictures there's Cottages in Devon a lot of those are built a cob which is basically mud lumps and I mean if if you're going to build a house you build it build a house with the materials that's locally available and if they got clay here and it works that's what they'll use I mean now that we know these are cob walled buildings Mick can give Victor a much better idea of what they may have looked like I don't know we can have sort of just angled Timbers sort of like that you know it's not just roughly hacked out well probably split trees actually yeah but yeah so we can put a thatched roof on something like that you see yeah give it a bit more shape like that yeah in South Row carenza uncovers a pot which turns out to be a very significant find we should be able to piece it back together again but what what's nice is that it's come out of that end of that trench quite high up so it's giving us a sort of final layer of occupy our final date of occupation and what does this tell us about the story of the medieval village I think what's interesting is that we're now getting the same data pottery from from both sides of the village so we're not getting any distinction between when one side was abandoned when another was abandoned so it may be that we've got it getting buildings abandoned at much the same time so this pot confirms a final date of occupation in the medieval period but we don't find any evidence of when our village was first built we decide to pull out of South Row altogether it's a small victory for me over my ultra cautious friends back in the incident room there's an air of excitement John and Stewart have finished looking at west row and they're both saying the same thing right so what you got for us some these are the resistance results row John has an area of high resistance just west of the church coming through at this point this is the Earthworks is saying much the same thing as the geophysics and from the Earthworks Stuart is pretty sure that this is an important part of the site it's been a defined area like a minorial complex computer has the final piece of the jigsaw the detailed geophysics results um this is the bit that you don't often see in time team we say we've got just three days to do this so much of the three days it's been actually waiting for various bits of data to be processed when the software doesn't actually fit in with the hardware it'll print straight out from this one won't it we haven't not well we haven't tested that printer driver because it's ready on this just just go back so just slap it on the back and we and I'll change the the primitive um well it's five past one so we're exactly halfway through this timetable s technology technology in effect what we've got is a band of high resistance and it goes up and this is the causeway that Stuart's talking about this is the Holloway the ditch that goes down here like that yeah the reason why everyone's starting to get so excited about this area I suspect is because you think that this might be a high status area is that fair yeah I think so yeah I think that's very much the way it's starting to one of the key components in in villages of this date is one's the church and one's the manor house would you be happy to do a little exploratory excavation there I think we might have the time but I I would still want to spend most of the effort on that top platform because if we've got a manor house and it's early and all the rest of it you know then we've got to we've got to try and sort that out in the next day and a half so when you're talking about Excavating this platform yeah this that actually could be the floor of a Manor House well presumably or stone rubble from it well that's that's that would be our only Stone building on the site at the moment so we begin our search for the manor house we open up trench 5 on a large promising earthwork just beside the church thank you Mick decides to check with Robin who's in Middlesbrough library to see whether we're on the right track sorry about this this is terrible taking a mobile phone call in a library oh dear hello Robin here Robin is back um where would we expect the manor house to be I mean were we expected to be near the church or somewhere else well to be honest I would always expect the earliest manor house to be cheeked by jowl with the church right yeah so I reckon you're looking at a pre-conquest a possible pre-conquest site which continues in use in one form or another through to the period of your village right that makes sense okay mate we'll speak to you again about it later on Cheers then see you then yeah he reckons that it would have been that the church would have been by the manor house because the Lord would have built it and wanted it right next door and at that date it could it could be earlier than the village sorted so that's great that's exactly what we want to say well we just gotta wait and see what the archeology produces too at trench 5 the archeology is already beginning to show results we're detecting small metal fines in the spoil Heap some of which turn out to be very instructive and we're coming across stonework which is different from the other stones found on the site which suggests a different type of building it now looks more likely that this is the manor site so Victor begins to put some shape to it back in the outside world Dawn and Robin are still on their epic track around the libraries of the Northeast they're focusing on the manner who might have lived here King Henry to William devaski of all the possessions including werslam and what would it have looked like that's the wrong one it's reference to the inheritance of William Sayer of wurzel Esquire and who should be his right Heir and what age and of whom the lands should be holding off down at the river two men are up to their knees in water mix sensibly you might think keeps dry the modern way but Mark a member of the white company sticks to Medieval practice and takes his trousers off spawning grounds right and the basket is uh in in that way they're going to be funneled in through this this V here yeah yeah go up into the basket I thought it should be that way around hi there we're low on time we're short of Labor what are you doing fishing what would people from our village Just Fish down here then well only with the Lord's permission yeah they would have used well Mark well very very simple Rod there's no reel on this it's just a long stick with a string on it but this is actually horse hair the Lion's horse hair and on the end of the hook we have that there and we can we can tell this there's a book here from about 1487 which it shows you everything how to make your Rod your line and there's there's so board is reconstructing the hooks modern replicas you say there they are fishing away have you caught anything yet yes we've caught three fish a nice seal a flat fish and a tub I think the eels are most significant because we're here of those even in doomsday but people catching large numbers of them yeah but this this is really the business here look Tony because the Madeline here is making a wicker work trap and most of the fishing as far as we can see was done by building like that thing at the back there in the river across the river to support these and you left them in the water to catch the fish overnight so how did this work then well hopefully your nice big fat sea salmon or trout is going to come up here I think he's gonna be funneled into this trap while our hurdles come all the way up to here get to the end which Madeleine's going to close and finish off I can't go any further now they don't there's enough room for him to turn around so he's going to back up at which point he gets his poor little gills trapped in all these little sticks here and especially gets wedged in until I come along in the morning and have him for breakfast or probably the Lord of The Manor has him almost certainly the Lord of The Manor because it was they were it was a very jealously guarded privilege to have the fish out the river they probably would have put Stallions in it in the Middle Ages Mark yeah it's just I don't know whether it's necessary but we find them with with the stones in the bottom so we've got to push that down yeah I think he's gonna need some stones in it don't you think yeah in trench one Phil's at last beginning to figure out the complexities of these stones and then we got this nice walkway down here paved coming down here and then going on through underneath now that he knows where the walls are it's clear that the stones are flooring it's already the end of day two and only now dimick and I get our first chance to visit trench 5. I know we've had some great finds from here but what's the story of this story I don't know because I've been in the river all afternoon have you got on then Robin hello there well if you remember we decided to put a trench in here to find out if this was a memorial enclosure yeah and what we've got here is a building you can see down there we've got some post pad and that would have been used to put a been put on the ground you've had it posted on that which had held the building of so you stop it press it into the ground with the weight of the roof and everything that's right yes we've got Cinder we've got Pottery we've got bone so we've certainly got a building there do we know what sort of building it might be well a metal works very high status it looks as though it should be the house of Lord of The Manor so we think we've found the manor a great way to end the day can I tread on your Trench so it's been a really good day everyone's worked fantastically hard we've closed down some trenches we've opened up some others and these are our high status fines from this trench one silver medieval coin and one silver medieval pin not a bad way to end the day beginning of day three it really is a bit Parky up here isn't it what is it that you want us to look at well we've got this trench open down here that we opened yesterday you see we've got this sort of ditch coming up around here and then it turns a corner there and comes across and we get these on uh deserted village sites often there's actually a moat full of water around them but this is the wrong place the wrong geology for that but I think that's what it's doing it's defining an enclosure which within which there would have been the manor house the service buildings a big barn you know Dove goods outbuildings and all the rest of it and we've just got one little sort of look into that so what do we do going to do on this part of the site today well I think we might we might do a bit more excavation perhaps over in that area over there yes but much more important right is to make sure we've got all the Earthworks accurately plotted because there's a lot of bumps and lumps up here which will help us to understand it as well and I'm an Earthworks man in the end you know I mean I like these little bumps and lumps two inches high what are you two doing here you're supposed to be doing the tour of the libraries of teaside haven't you heard about Sundays record offices closed Librarians go home and meet their families so we've come back here to analyze everything we've turned up in the last two days well this is what Nick reckons was the minorial side sure in the medieval period have you found any references to a manner around here at all oh certainly in 1400 1401 a family called Sayer inherited The Manor and decided to live here so that means that there must have been a manner here before that oh yeah there's a in terms of an estate we can go right the way back to the Norman conquest and and what do you think would have been on this site well it didn't necessarily have to be residential I mean don't forget a manner is essentially in a state and on an estate like that you're going to need somewhere for people to pay their taxes and for there to be a man of Court they wouldn't necessarily be a Mana house but it could be a large building in which lots of people could gather together it could have been a very large structure nonetheless so just beside trench 5 we open up another exploratory Trench it's on a small earthwork that's also thrown up very strong magnetic resistance on Jon's geophysics it may be an important building in the memorial complex in any case it may also help us to define the extent of the complex meanwhile Stewart has analyzed the Earthworks across the whole site and he throws up a fascinating proposition oh look at that it snowed on him this is the result of the Earthworks survey push these are the key elements of the medieval village these regular layouts down here and here are part of the planned layout of buildings and their Gardens and so on with regular roads and back Lanes then the Earthworks there's a different plan form over here which is a squarish layout which we thought would be a Mana site and it appears to be turning out to be so in this area here and the church next to it which is is we know the site of anyway what we're left with over here is an area that's very irregular so it's all curvy different shapes and Lanes which are very different to everything else but these are very interesting because the regular layout is wider at this end than this end and I wonder if when this was laid out it's because there's something already here I an earlier Village than our North row and South right limit are we likely to come up with any archaeological evidence to support the idea that that yellow bit is an older Village yeah I mean if we put a trench in that area and we get early Pottery then that will obviously obviously help the argument and we've got time to do that I think so yeah yeah that'd probably be the last one we do in fact in that area another Trench [Laughter] I'll have to put something in his teeth so karenza and Stewart try to decide which earthwork might reveal the oldest part of the village most quickly I was thinking this platform which is cut by there was this bank here yeah which cuts across this mound I mean therefore the mound must be earlier than this bank at least so I wonder if um yeah we've got two two lanes either side got two wide delays it feels like sticking a pin in but I think this is the best shot we've got in this area at the moment with the time we've got well if we put in a trench that starts here and we line it up in that direction while they stick a pin in I catch up with Phil in trench one wow you can see We've Got This Magnificent clay wall and then slap bang in the middle of the building we've got this paved surface running right the way through the middle the amount of material we've had out of this this surface I mean you can see masses and masses of debris you see look at all these bone masses and masses of pot and this is already evil is it yeah there's certainly all this is exactly the same potteries we've been having throughout I'm not what we had this morning what's that spindle whirl it's what people would have used for spinning the wall you've got a a shaft wooden shaft running through there and it's what you would have used to make your yarn what sort of date do we think we're looking at for this place more most of this Pottery is is probably about the 14th century so you know that's and it's all the same so what do you want to do well effectively it's it's nearly finished we want to clean it up the sections will be drawn photographs and then that'll be it and what are you going to do for the rest of the day I suspect I'll probably uh find a bit more digging to do Tony okay then can we just um agree on some of the more important dates we want to talk about because Robin and Dawn of just a few hours to assemble all the information they've managed to find over the weekend they're putting together a chart a picture of life in the village from this they hope to be able to work out when and why the village died I'd be happier to start with 11 46 which is definite so Chapel at worsel or at w all right yep and then you can put 1094.5 yeah got that Allerton claimed to have chaplaries okay out on site our final two trenches are well underway Karen's is opening a trench at the spot identified by her and Stuart our hope is that this might be part of the earliest Village settlement predating the planned Village which we know to be medieval while up in the memorial area Phil already has a useful find actually getting just that bit cleaner generally Henry VII growth 1544. yeah shears is crown with this little spiky bits on the top and you come down there's his hair streaming down the back so a bob style really in it there's his nose he's just he's only very faint and like you say this chubby little chin it's in wonderful condition okay in medieval times fish was a very important part of the diet especially here in a village right by the river Mick and I catch up with our medieval fishermen great seeing that isn't it it's wonderful Mark how did you get on well not so good with the Trap but um bojay you want to bring that basket of fish up we've caught quite a lot more with the the rod basically what was the problem with the Trap well um it's not really a medieval River anymore it's too deep uh the water level has dropped from the banks but it's very deep in the middle of the sound does it like something yeah it's presumably no salmon in it or not enough Salmon well apparently three or four a year the local Anglers so you've got nothing at all basically I can't complain about that now what are these well there's a big eel at the back still there are you here and these are all these are all chub isn't it Roger they're chub so from my point of view of being a vegetarian we're throwing them back uh oh yes they'll go back in the river but we do have a bit of rice for you and uh what we've also got is a salmon that we've uh in the best interest television one we caught earlier should we uh put that back in the river oh yeah so what's that in a clay covering well this is actually in salt dough just pastry with a lot of salt in it really um inside here hopefully is going to be a cooked salmon I'm gonna crack it out I've got to crack it open this has been just been cooked in the ashes of the fire so we uh yeah I mean the fish fish was terribly important in the Middle Ages despite the diet oh what's this inside aha there we are there's your salmon but this this stuff what's this this is nothing there's breadcrumbs there's uh onions sultanas herbs and spices quite sort of sweet and sour stuff in this one would the poorer people have had fish as well or would they have just been The Preserve of the river oh no everybody would have eaten fish salmon was incredibly common everybody had salmon and probably were quite sick of it um there was legislation in fact in the 14th 15th century that said you couldn't feed your apprentices salmon more than three times a week [Laughter] bit different from today yeah right should be the sort those kept all the all the juices in all the steam oh we've already got the taste it is lovely I'm telling you people always taste things and go oh it's lovely but this is but imagine what the medieval cook would do take this to the table open it all out and you the lord of the man will be hit by this huge cloud of salmon scented steam basically I can smell it now to you it's probably anathema but to me it's the bee's knees well the Salmon's gills you don't know what you're missing me 13 54. you know when you set everything out like this it's it's fascinating how those 14th century entries come together and make you realize what a hive of activity the place was around that time yeah there's so much going on in high werzel we've got murder we've got robbery we've got men poaching fish and even the chaplains in on it yeah when you add that reference to the creation of a park in 1354 it honestly makes you wonder whether having suffered all the slings and arrows of outrageous Bannock burn bad Harvest Scottish raids and finally the Black Death whether the creation of that Park wasn't the final death knell of the village when they flattened everything and just turned it into a gentleman's Country Park well it's one of the better ideas that we've come up with this weekend we'll never be able to prove it of course but I reckon it's as good a theory as any [Music] they're giving us important pointers to the story of our village this scraper is from the field walk and dates back 3000 years but most of the pottery we've collected is Medieval like this pot found by Phil in trench one it's jug found by carenza these firmly place our planned Village in the Middle Ages along with the bigger finds these pieces prove that there was a manner here a silver pin and a medieval coin there's an air of excitement on the site now with lots of people turning up to look at what's going on in our final trench karenza thinks she's got something okay uh yeah that's uh that's very exciting it's certainly earlier than anything we've seen before um well it could well be Saxon Norman really so that's 10th to 12th century that's right yes it's it's a thinner fabric it's slightly grittier and the rim is a different shape so it looks different it looks earlier so the idea that there may be nearly a settlement on the green looks as though it might might have something going for it that's fantastic I better leave you to get on with it this is a crucial find this pot predates anything else we found on the main site our last trench confirms the existence of an earlier settlement this is the trench that we hoped that Mick was going to dig in what we believed to be the oldest part of the site and you're dead please that we dug it aren't you oh yeah because it's a corker yeah it's produced early Pottery for this irregular area between the other rows which seems to indicate we've got a different settlement here that's fantastic and why are you so excited about that well because uh a lot of us have spent years looking for something like this I mean the project I've been running down in Somerset we've spent eight years looking for this sort of evidence because you thought that they used to be early higgledy-piggledy settlements yeah we're fairly sure there's been a change in the way Villages have been organized from rather irregular settlements to much more planned carefully laid out ones and that seems to be what we've got here what would it have been like around here we'd have lots of little Lanes running through that's what these Hollows are it's a little Hollow roads that have got worn out with the traffic over the years and I think we should see the odd Cottage and Farmhouse dotted about so a much smaller settlement altogether rather like just a group of little farmsteads on day one stewart promised me a tour of the village so Mick and I go back to North row to take him up what do we think it looked like then Stuart well begin the weekend I was hopeful that these Earthworks would allow us to recreate the medieval village and that's exactly what worked out we're standing down here in the Main Street the cottages on North were on the right hand side of us here yeah we're walking through a living tapestry of buildings and and medieval life here as you walked up the street the church will be there on the left-hand side where churchyard is now we're not behind it over the manor house dominating your view up here another house there and there's a one of the larger long houses just here Tony in front of us should we go up and have a look at it yeah if you walked up here you'd be going straight towards the front door presumably yeah we would have come up through the door which of course might have been locked we find lots of locks in excavations and then at this end if it was a long house would have been where the cattle would have been and only two or three perhaps with the drain down the middle to take the effort out and then there would have been a passage here with the doorway up to the Garden on on this side would have been the half where the family would have lived all around this probably with a sort of half loft or something under a great thatched roof where they could they could sleep up there or they could store you know apples and cheeses and next year's seed corn and so on and if we went through the back door here we'd have gone out into the yard which went right as far as the little Bank probably the Hedge on his head the back there so first of all they must have had somewhere to grow some onions and garlic and leeks because we heard about those we know they had they ate a lot of cabbage and Brassica type things so we probably expect a little Garden in this area here I would have thought but we also know that they needed pasture for the few sheep they would have kept so out of the back it would almost certainly have been grass but there probably were fruit trees as well we know that if they had about six or eight apple trees they could produce enough cider for their own use of the family through the year so this all this lot would have helped to support the family living in the house and there would have been at least 20 of these habitations in this one Village in the planned the element The Village that's right yes we've got this beautiful 400 year old coin but by the time it was accidentally dropped in this field The Village had disappeared do we know when it vanished well in 1354 the then Lord of The Manor Thomas Seaton created a deer park in this area now that's only what four or five years after the Black Death we know the villagers in this area and probably this one were in Decline as a result of Scottish raids bad harvests and so on perhaps in that year 1354 they decided to cut their losses flatten what was left and created a lovely park here it's it's only a theory but it's the best one I've heard this weekend well there's nothing we've had from the archeology that disagrees with that that would disprove that and what the archeology has shown is that the history hasn't been able to tell us about is the earliest phase of the village this trench in the middle of the site shows occupation here between the 10th and 12th centuries so either side of the Norman Conquest so we've actually got both the origin of the Village from the archeology and something of the decline we've got the complete history of the place and and the other great bonuses we've had lots of of Earthworks we could actually see the patterns of everything and they if nothing else give us a lot of information about everyday life at that time so we've learned an awful lot about the story of The Village over this weekend we've had some Fantastic Finds we found a manor house and we found not one but two Villages not bad for a chilly October weekend [Music]

Channel: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries

Views: 102,389

Keywords: history documentary, medieval history documentary, middle ages, medieval history, the middle ages

Id: wmJIP09f02M

Length: 50min 35sec (3035 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 15 2023