The Mystery Of The Castle Built On A Castle | Time Team | Timeline

hi everyone welcome to this timeline documentary just before you watch i want to tell you about my new history channel it's called history hits it's like the netflix for history it's got hundreds and hundreds of his documentaries on there and interviews with some of the world's best historians we're adding new stuff all the time for example today i'm filming in this one of the few remaining lancaster bombers for a show about the dambusters raid in 1943. if you want to know more about history hit follow the information just below this video or search online for history it and make sure you use the code timeline to get a special introductory offer now enjoy this show [Music] here on time team we like to go to places where things once stood to dig holes in the ground piece together the evidence and use our imaginations to work out how they would once have looked but not today welcome to montour in jersey a stunning fortress which for hundreds of years played a little known but crucial role in the defense of not just the channel islands but the whole of great britain although it's been studied for centuries this place has still got its secrets here under this bumpy lawn but also right up there we've got just three days to unlock those secrets let's hope we can make it it is a ridiculously steep slope [Music] [Music] montaguay jersey's oldest castle sits high over gory harbour protected on three sides by the sea built on a steep granite bluff it dominates not only the beaches of western jersey but also the approach to the channel islands from france entering the castle you pass through a formidable corridor of gates and courtyards overlooked all the way by arrow slits gun platforms and battlements it was never supposed to be easy to get in but it's the natural defense of the terrain that's really going to cause the team a few headaches i mean that's a serious slope yeah that's slightly more vertical than i was expecting this is the first time you guys have run this machine over this kind of undulating ground undulating take the slack it's only 25 000 quids worth of kit has anybody done this before not on the slope this steve i don't think anybody's been so stupid it's not until you get right up here at the top of the castle that you begin to appreciate why it was quite so important strategically look you can see not only the beaches and the coastline but way over there on the horizon that is france helen location location location that's what it's all about absolutely because this is the closest english castle to france we may be 100 miles from the coastline of the uk but we're only 14 miles from france so that puts this place at the heart of politics and some of the most important times in our history but why are we here warwick well there are a number of mysteries about this castle that we want to solve although we've got this great stone structure all around us and we know quite a lot about it there are bits that are missing just a minute you've been working on this site for 30 years surely you must have cracked all the mysteries by now well that's short in archaeological time and there's a lot to do so there are still areas where we we just need to know about the bits of the castle that have been demolished and lost over the course of time what would you like us to be able to identify i'd like you to um come over here and look over the wall and look down to the green there below us that area castle green has got earthworks and lumps and bumps in it and clearly there are structures down there now that area um is unexplored we know nothing about it archaeologically and almost nothing about it historically um if we look at this plan which shows the outline of the castle as we understand it in the 13th century we are very unclear about the north side this uncertainty at the north end of the castle is due to the later edition of the grand battery and of somerset tower monstrous fortifications built in the 16th century that would have obliterated any earlier structures we'll have to closely examine these gargantuan walls looking for clues in their makeup in order to find evidence of the 13th century walls and towers the complete warwick's early castle plan helen why should we be so interested in this period of the castle's history it's because when this castle was built in the 13th century that's just at the point where england has lost its lands to france so this place is now on the front line of one of the major power struggles of medieval europe so this is what king john it is that's right yes king john who was famous for getting everything wrong and and losing all his land in france but in order to find out more about that our guys are gonna have to do some pretty tricky work aren't they our efforts will be concentrated on the bumpy lawn of castle green and on the steep slopes under the formidable north and west walls it's a relatively simple task but with one enormous problem the extreme terrain leading the hunt for the 13th century walls is the intrepid geophys team but it's slow going it's a bit of a climb with geophys struggling to get results phil's been looking for another way to start the investigation and he's found a small visible section of wall what i want to do right shy is we've put the trench in here we've got what looks like a wall and it's the wall that runs right the way along now at the back of it we've actually got the main wall of the tudor castle the question is does the tudor wall sit on this wall if that tudor wall is sitting on the top of that wall there the tudor one is later this one has to be earlier what we're hoping is it might be the 13th century war but doesn't have to be all we can say is it will be earlier than the tudors the crucial thing about the dating is if we can identify any of the original mortar and so that's what we've we've put in here is the place where these two walls come together john you know how much we love to wind you up but i think we've really surpassed ourselves getting us getting you to see if it's that slope yeah i mean i think the scariest thing for me is seeing jimmy in that harness there's lots of health and safety issues um we need to do it properly yeah and so it's taking time it's going to be a while before we get new results from that area so you've moved down here now yeah i mean this is more my sort of territory nice flat lawn and this is likely to be associated with the castle anywhere either in its earlier phases or perhaps ancillary buildings associated with it yeah but mick you're not a castle sort of bloke i can't imagine that the reason that you want to come down here is simply because this is part of a castle no i think there's there's a lot of possibilities that there's something earlier down here as well if i mean if you strip if you mentally strip that all that stone castle off the top there you've got a a promontory sticking out into the sea which is likely to be the sort of thing that would have been iron age promontory a prehistoric plummetry in which case through here you might have ditches and banks cutting off that promontory so we might get something that's even earlier than the castle itself i think it's highly likely yeah gfiz is now well underway on the very promising castle green but meanwhile up on the slope phil is just putting in our first trench i wonder what he'll find i can't wait to get up there myself maybe after lunch welcome back to the fantastic monto guy castle here in jersey this isn't a bad job on a day like this is it our archaeologists are already underway up on that slope excavating behind those trees but down here on the castle green john you've got some gfs for us yeah we were saying earlier it's a fantastic area to survey yeah um the problem is the results aren't that clear why is that well we've got problems with the bedrock it's really close to the surface the electric currents aren't going into the ground having said that we've got some results you've got some big black blobs there haven't you yeah i mean that's on this higher bit of ground here yeah then you can see this green grass i'm just wondering whether there's a ditch coming through here before we get onto this higher ground here so i think an initial evaluation trench from where i'm stood over this potential ditch and onto this sort of possible building here a possible building you don't sound that convinced well i'm just worried it's all geology to be honest but then you always are aren't you so trench two goes in on castle green to look for a ditch that could add to the known defenses of the site and being cut into granite it should be easy to find could be a ditch or something filled up with this crushed granite stuff it's quite a clear edge if we're really lucky it may even date back to the original castle built in the reign of king john when do we first hear about there being a castle here well we first hear something in 1209 hints we don't have a mention of castle but we've got this description from the pipe rolls and it mentions the isle of jersey and deliveries to knights and 12 horse sergeants and 10 foot sergeants and also the horses of these knights so clearly this fighting man here there's a garrison so we might assume that as a castle we don't know definitely until 12 12. now this is a letter from king john where he mentions the isle of jersey insula de jersey there come castro with its castle so that's when we definitely know there's something here why chris why put a castle here in the first place well at the beginning of his reign king john of england owned most of the west side of france and jersey there was happily a scots in the middle of the angemon empire in 1202 he was summoned to palace by the king of france to answer for his feudal holdings and he refused to go so they were confiscated by the french king and the whole of normandy the caution brittany was taken back and jersey became a remaining outpost the island was fought over a couple of times certainly in 1205 1206 and again a few years later but the ruling elite who were in charge of the island decided they were staying with king john you could really see it on this map can you that when all this part of france was english property then jersey was slap bang in the middle of it and really well protected but as soon as this part of france goes back to the french king then suddenly jersey is on the front line yes and our little promontory here on the east side becomes a perfect place to put a castle because it's in the right place to put two fingers up to the french king kind of thing to say look we're english so what was the position of jersey by the end of king john's reign it was still held by the english king it was never part of the kingdom of england it was just a hangout from the old duchy of normandy and there began over 800 years of union siding with england though was to cause trouble with france making a stronghold on the island vital but finding evidence of that original stone castle under the massive 16th century walls is proving difficult undeterred stewart's hunting high and low and may have found something out on the northeast corner this this join here looks odd doesn't it this junction here these are part of the the tudor battery on the corner isn't we know the date for that but that's built over that wall there we've got a wonderful junction here where the the the tudor bastion comes up against a curving wall that must be of earlier date that itself is built against the rock phase curving wall suggests tower to me is that tower 13th or 14th century part of the uh arrangement of the curtain wall with round towers on it as we had before the tudors is this the first time you've seen it this morning the first time this morning yes when the ivy was stripped away we found something that has never been drawn on any plan or described before wow so we've now located an original 13th century corner tower underneath the 16th century defenses but round the corner phil's struggling to take trench one anywhere near as far back in time oh it's quite a challenge getting up here phil what was the purpose of this trench to see whether we could establish the date of this war and have you done it not yet what we have found is that we've got the outside edge of it plummeting away there and then across here we've got the main core of the wall what we'd like is for this wall to go underneath and be earlier than the main tudor bastion wall so at the moment you've got absolutely no dating evidence not really not for the war but what we do have is rather unexpected dating it's this water pipe or this pipe that's running through here which we think is probably a relic of the german occupation why do you think it's german well apparently everybody that digs around the castle says the one thing you always find is is relics left over from the german occupation it seems that's the best bet for that so you've got some pretty robust dating for the 1940s now you've just got to get back to the 1300s yeah and i mean there are two ways that we're actually going to try and approach that firstly if see if we can establish whether this wall goes underneath the buttress and the second way is actually to look at the mortars what would be significant about the mortar well according to warwick the 13th century mortars tend to have quite a lot of shell in them whereas the tudor mortars have they're a lot more gritty but it also tells me that there are miscellaneous mortars we just gotta hope that we haven't got one of them no sign of the 13th century down in trench two either the rock cut ditch is deeper and wider than anyone expected but it's producing little to help us date it although this might not be the only ditch down here stuart thinks he's stumbled upon another one near the castle gate and after clearing the brambles he calls in jimmy with his radar for confirmation if he's right this is yet another unknown defensive circuit around the castle if you if you follow the contour around but you can see there's actually a ditch comes round here and it heads down towards where the drawbridge for the original medieval castle gate was so really this ditch ought to be part of that original 13th century castle defenses so it should be just outside the 13th century stone walls there it is yeah it's it's clearly it's on this side of the castle this is the weakest side down here you could easily come up here yeah and and get to the base of the towers to undermine them and so i think it needs some form of defense round here uh and to be able to prove this is part those original defenses would be great i mean the radar that we've done across it shows it's about a meter deep so we should get some dateable material from that shouldn't work well i hope so i mean given given where it is at the baseless slope there should be all sorts of material in that ditch shouldn't they let's get on with it then we'll get on with the tea there was rumors of cake you know before we started filming this you'd be lucky so trench three goes in to see if there is a second ditch cut below the western wall if stuart's right it should run tightly butted up against the lower slopes of the castle parallel to john's ditch but the question remains where's the wall that should go with it stewart has a hunch and is about to boldly go where no landscape investigator has gone before with a bdi he's clocked something 30 feet up can you see that is different to the battery yeah above it encouraged by the daredevil antics of the rest of the team good luck stewie he heads off up the rock face confused by such an up and down archaeological site i catch up with mick to get my head around what's going on so phil's looking for a 13th century wall up there down there we've been digging for some ditch yeah but suddenly i find that you've opened another trench here yeah well there's another ditch you see coming through here by the earth work so we want to know the date of that one as well but you know given the magnificence of these castle walls there's a bit of me that feels a bit disappointed that you're just digging for ditches but the castle walls are just half of the defensive system as well as each line of stone wall there would have been ditches at the front as part of the the other depart of the defensive circuit so we need to look at those as well and do you think all those ditches will be the same day i'd be very surprised if they were because the walls are all of different dates and and so you'd expect correspondingly different ditches to be dark after all this is the weak side of the castle the rest of it's defended by the sea and rocks this is the side you can come over land to it so you're gonna have to revise your defense strategy from time to time dig another load of ditches it's hard for me to concentrate solely on mick because while he's digging down into the ditches stuart perversely is swinging in the air about 30 feet above our head stuart hello what you doing up there having a look at this masonry here you see you see this this block here can you see there's a band of masonry going that way yeah this is very different to the stuff that's on top of it and it goes in a curve this is earlier than that that's tudor so this has got to be earlier and it looks like it's the corner of a round tower could that be the 13th century wall that we're looking for it looks very probable well the castle is beginning to give up its secrets although very slowly and it's hard work isn't it it is yeah who knows what we're going to find tomorrow normally on time team i try and finish a part with a cliffhanger but just can't think of one any of day two here on the island of jersey where we're looking at the awesome montal guy castle and trying to unpick some of its secrets yesterday afternoon john suggested we put in a long thin trench here because we'd started looking at the defenses in front of the castle and he thought there might be a defensive ditch running along there and maybe some sort of building over here so matt what have we found well we do have this ditch here it's huge one cut into the rocks nearly five meters across it's been backfilled and then re-cut again at that end so they keep using it but down at this end of the trench there's nothing any dating evidence at all well we've got a few bits of pottery coming up from the fields of the ditch but nothing firm yet john bit frustrating slightly inconclusive well no the ditch is good i mean i wasn't sure about the building but we've done some more resistance in radar you can actually see we've got another massive ditch showing in both data sets and they're both showing another huge ditch where's the ditch well you can actually see it in the grass the dark green lush grass this is this is just over here yeah that depression there yeah the ditch is running through there now is that related to the castle or is it part of this commtree fort that we talked about that might be here so do you want to dig it we've got to it looks quite promising but i must admit this part of me that thinks we've got a bit ditch crazy on this dig so trench four goes in on castle green to investigate john's gear fizz a third ditch would mean the approach to the castle was very heavily fortified but will it relate to the 13th century or could it be much much older i'll laugh if this turns out to be a prehistoric site and we've got a soccer medieval castle behind us we're now unearthing diagnostic and dateable artifacts across the site but they're just not doing much to take our story back in time second world war german barbed wire i would think yes frankly so far the finds have been a bit disappointing you can see this is obviously very late 19th century ink bottle desiltery is the word that springs to mind except that phil you've just turned up with stuff from your trench absolutely tony i mean most of what we've been getting is the the debris that's been thrown over the walls but we do happen to have some bits of pottery which we're pretty sure are a lot earlier what do we think about that one olga right well i this definitely is our first piece of uh prehistoric pottery and i imagine it dates to the iron age but you see if you want early tony really early look at a piece of flynn this stuff is actually going to throw our story back probably to 4000 bc something like that but we don't really want to throw we'll underthrow our story right back to the beginning oh i know you want the early stuff fred flintstone but we're actually trying to date the earliest castle up here have either of you seen in the pottery anything that could be say 13th century no not yet not as yet but we haven't got down to the critical layers yet sure stewart's now confident he's located a bit of 13th century castle high up wedged under the corner of the 16th century walls so he's back up his rope recording the archaeology with a little eagle-eyed help yeah i can hear you stewart i found some new wall up here henry which is really really nice it's a curving bit of wall going around this crag and it's got mortar in it with the crushed burnt limpets in it that warrick was saying are likely to mean it's 13th century if i give you a couple of positions can you plot them for me first one now where i am observation roger that's it um where my left glove is now henry encouraged by this medieval discovery stuart follows the base of the vast 16th century wall in the quest for more we're walking on a wall of ivy at the moment yeah so follow behind me and if we have to go on our bombs to scale across the no problem okay now there's a few stingers just down here okay bingo concealed under the ivy is a second tower this is really good so in addition to the north west corner tower we can add a second 13th century tower just along the western wall everything we're finding on this site is geared to war and defense suggesting that this castle has seen some serious action looking up at it you really do get the most amazing sense of how difficult it would have been to storm a castle like this how many layers of defense there are it's all absolutely bristling with defenses isn't it but the the stone castle once it's built in the early 13th century it doesn't stay static does it it's constantly being added to and remodeled it's constantly added to because the castle and the island are constantly under attack yeah i wrote down some of the attacks i've been trying to make a list of what what's been going on and i have got attack after attack after attack um there's this big one in 1294 isn't there yes there's about 1500 people believed to be killed at the time which is probably about 10 to the island population that's terrible isn't it it would have made a difference yeah and who so who's attacking at that point at the fence oh no wonder they're not very popular that's what i say i'm called a french sorry sorry and then moving on into the 14th and 15th centuries there's there's several sieges at that point so i suppose um what are they doing building up great big towers and and and hurling missiles trying to break through the walls presumably yes that was standard siege warfare in those days so were the walls ever actually breached in 1373 the french broke through the outer wall um but they couldn't take the keep they said at the time that their ladders went long enough and the foundations were too strong you'd think they could send home for a few more ladders didn't you got to go back to vaughn's with that henry i wonder if you do a bit of modelling for me right no not in that way stuart thinks he's located a defensive earthwork down below the corner of the 16th century grand battery a large pointed platform seems to sit on top of the rock-cut ditch jutting out into castle green and you've got this big flat earthwork that comes and lies on the slope well to me that looks like it's um an outwork or a bastion some form of defense covering this this sort of weak area out here they saw that sense of a triangle isn't there which is yeah yeah that would be right well what would be what be really good if you could model that yeah and see how it fits in with all the line defenses and the topography see whether it is a defence work under orders henry gets cracking but he's not the only one surveying the castle we've got a very flashy piece of kit on site this week ben all our techie people are really excited about what you're doing what exactly is it this is a 3d laser scanner and we're actually using it to digitally document the the castle at the moment how does it work well what it does it bizarre laser beam and any surface that it hits it calculates a three-dimensional point in space and does this thousands of times a second creating a rich point cloud of data which is an exact sort of replica of the castle why do we need a 3d model of the castle look i've got eyes here i can see the castle we've got a camera here that can see the castle as well why do we need you we can use it to create very accurate measurements at any point within the castle so if we scan the exterior walls and then we go inside and scan the internal rooms we can create measurements throughout the building so you can actually take slices as it were out of the castle we can yeah once we've scanned the whole thing we can literally slice through at any point horizontally or vertical and create sections through throughout trench three has now bottomed out and is thrown up some useful pottery what data 15th century oh right at the bottom yeah right the base right well i just expected it to be sort of 13th century or something like that well we thought medieval so it's later medieval but right unless it's been washed down it's cleared out but from the evidence it looks like it's 15th century but we have got lots of rubble and other bits coming in yeah i mean that's a cracking section you've got there with all those tip lines isn't it we've got water we've got stone there and it looks like some form of building was here or up there somewhere initially so if that's that's the bedrock there presumably something sat on the top of that platform there didn't it it must have done so to confirm whether there was a structure sitting on this platform phil's dragged over to take a look and trench five slowly exposes a small but solid wall on the granite spur henry's contour map is also revealing evidence of a defensive structure confirming stewart's suspicions that's where we put the trench over the big ditches is there isn't it that's right and the platform's over in this area here isn't it yeah that's right you can actually see i think as an earthquake part of that ditch coming through that's just showing it in colours representing height near difference in height whereas you see more if you model it by slopes so the blue areas are the steep bits of slope and the red areas the flat bits and then that way you can just see how dramatic that platform is there's a flat area it's how dramatic that slope is coming down here i mean that is classically what you'd expect from an out work round around the castle so at some stage an arrowhead bastion was built over the earlier rock-cut ditch these gun platforms gave great angles for defensive fire and were popular through the 16th and 17th centuries this is all positive stuff but none of it has anything to do with the 13th century time to join the boffins for a cup of tea to find out what's going on gentlemen i'm really struggling with the archaeology of this castle mainly i think because it's got the big tudor castle dumped right all over it and it's hard to see anything else but our first goal was to find the early castle the 13th century one have we done that we have found a tower on the rock behind us we have got a very nice 13th century tower based sitting on the rock there we found a fragment of another one part way down the west side and we've got the the known one at the southwest corner so we've got the whole of the west side and and all the 13th century plan there is complete but where we're sitting now the ditch in that trench and yeah this wall behind us that isn't 13th century is it it doesn't seem to be i mean it's just possible that this ditch here is part of that it's undateable the only thing we can say is it's overlaid by this earthwork which was sat on which appears to be a gun platformer of what 16th century indeed something most likely yes so that that ditch there is is earlier than that but it could be as early as the 13th century chances are it's somewhere between what i'd like to do is put another section across it over there the testicles that had very little information in it just see if we get any dating from that one so mick orders a second section across stuart's ditch his hope being trench six will provide an early date for this ring defense back over in trench five warwick's dating techniques render phil shell shocked warwick yeah you know you were saying about that shelly mortar and if you had shells in it it was 13th century look and look and look again there are whole shells in the mortar yes they're shells that's not shelly mortar but that's mortar with shells in it therefore that must be shelley mortar that must be 13th century this is mortar with occasional shells in complete shells right now this is a piece of real shelley mortar which stuart found up there on on the battery a little while ago where the mortar is full of broken and crushed shell that's been in a lime kiln and is burnt and that's what you see all those dark bits are fragments of limpet shells that have been crushed and then burnt in a lime kiln that mortar doesn't have it so this mortar with shells in is 13th century yes and this mortar with shells in is not 13th century but shelley mortar is definitely 13 i'm losing the will to live all day long as far as the archaeology of montour guys concerned confusion has rained but thankfully at last the mist seemed to be clearing and hopefully by the time we go tomorrow we'll be able to tell the full story of this castle mind you this being time team there's bound to be a few surprises along the way beginning of day three here at montal guy castle in jersey and actually we came here to do a pretty straightforward job which was to find a couple of 13th century walls so we could identify the original castle on this site but as the days have gone on the archaeology has got more and more complicated we've not only got our 13th century stuff we've got 15th century we've got tudor we've even got prehistoric quite frankly by the time we leave i think they'll probably have to rewrite the guidebook because what we're finding is really awesome there's a lot of activity going on around here yeah it's we're trying to sort out these these defenses still yeah i mean phil up there look he's on the top of of this which which appears to be a sort of early gun platform and would have gone straight at up but he's also picking up material that's coming from the 13th century tower at the top so he's got the you know the early mortar cascading down and this down here this is where this ditch that is interrupted by this gun platform this lower one is carrying on rounds remember we're doing this to see if we can get more dating material hang on this is all highly confusing up the top is 13th 14th century yeah here that you're calling the gun platform presumably this is tudor yeah and then underneath it we've got this ditch which is best guess 15th 15th century probably we're getting dating material out of it now over there so we shall learn that i don't want to make it even more complicated but i will what about down there where we on the castle green where we thought we had prehistoric where matt is it's got pt material in the bottom with bits of timber i think it might be prehistoric it would be nice if it was iron age or you know something to do with defenses but any dated early on would be useful do you think we can sort all this out by the end of the day i think so yeah but i think we've got a particular job to do because normally all our all the things we find are spread out over a fairly flat site here we're spread out up the side of the hill and to know that this bit here is one date but a bit slightly higher than it might be earlier it's all a bit odd really so we're going to need henry to go around and plot everything i think to make sure that we understand the relationships between it all and early finds from the ditch extension support our military story so where have these come from well these have just literally come out of the stuff being scraped off the top from this trench here so they've come off the spoil heat right okay well this one is the bottom of a sword scabbard you can imagine that the leather scabbard and from its construction i put it in the 17th or maybe even the 18th century so you can imagine that the leather of the sword scabbard coming up there now this one though this is very interesting it's a french jet on uh of i think the 15th century i'll have to clean it up to be sure it's hard to see but you can just about see on this side some fleur-de-lis across of fleur-de-lis these jet ons or counting tokens were minted in their thousands across europe often featuring ornate design they were used for complicated arithmetic on a lined board rather like a two-dimensional abacus back in three dimensions our survey of the castle is nearing completion and should help us make sense of this topsy-turvy site and trench two has now hit rock bottom although the pottery is definitely medieval and not prehistoric but what if the building phil was sent to investigate one of the big mysteries for us since we got here has been this wall here doesn't seem to be the same build as the big tudor castle up there nor were we convinced that it was necessarily part of the original 13th century castle and in a way it sort of seemed to be a bit isolated on its own here but whatever was it phil have you managed to solve the problem for us we have solved the problem tony and we've always known that this wall went round and actually butted onto the bedrock on that side well we've dug into here and we can show that this war but directly up against the natural so this is a totally freestanding tower and we reckon that it's exactly like one of those over there i've talked to warwick about it we know it's not 13th century we've seen the mortars it's not the shelley mortars it's mortar with shells in it it's probably 15th century and it's almost certainly part of that defense over there what was it for what this tower is doing is covering this lower ground in here you've got people up in here defenders with guns and bows and arrows it's literally like a big pill box that is designed to keep people off those lower slopes and this is new stuff no one knew about this this is crucially new stuff to the whole development of the castle helen big structure up here looks like it's defensive 15th century how does that tie in with the history pretty well really particularly if it's connected with that tower which was built by richard harlister who arrives at the castle at a really peculiar moment during the water of the roses somehow the french have got hold of the castle and harleston is sent to relieve it for the english hang on so that's the brits sieging their own castle yeah absolutely i know it's kind of backwards isn't it but anyway the french get driven out and harleston sets about updating the castle now this tower here you can see it's got the arrow slits but just peeking through the trees is what looks like a window now that is a gun port for the modern artillery now this tower also looks like it was built for artillery so they're part of the same defensive system that does make sense doesn't it you'd have a tower there guarding the front entrance and one here checking out the rear absolutely it all ties together these new defenses along with those of the 16th century re-fortification show that the castle was under constant threat and stewart believes montogo's defensive evolution mirrored developments in weapons technology so he's mapping known medieval firepower against the castle's walls their effective range from the arrows is about 100 yards i can just sort out 100 yards [Music] just marking out this distance of death is chilling i'd never think i could be killed by an arrow or a cross broken but that distance by the time you get to the 15th century and starting to use muskies you've got a different order of beast to deal with and you've got these musket balls which are coming at you and the penetrating power is such that if you're at this distance the ball wouldn't just kill you it goes straight through you oh out the other side and take two or three people out the other side a big chunks of meat flying everywhere people are killed by splinters a bone behind the person that's been hit first by the tudor period when you're getting the cannon coming in suddenly they're gonna they're gonna do you a lot of damage at two and a half thousand yards and this fire power could be aided by geography looking at the levels the top of that is lower than the top of the hill here so i think the natural hill is probably better as defensive position than from the castle how far away is that the crest of the hill here is about 300 yards if you're on top of that hill you've got cannon you can pound the castle quite easily this would be a horrible place to be wouldn't it should we move [Music] we've now established there's no ditch in trench four but as it turns out castle green still did its bit for the war effort although we haven't found the big ditch that we were looking for in here what we have got is an ogs or old ground surface with early medieval pottery but on this end we've got this great big feature here we've only got one side of it now we think it's a quarry pit and they're removing all the loose lowest the natural wind-blown sand and things in here and they're mixing it up with stone to make a kind of mushy paste almost with big bits of stone in and they're using that for the wall core and in the time of about the 1470 rebuilds of the castle i haven't heard the word prehistoric mentioned once no neither is it in that trench over there where we've got 14th century at the bottom 15th century halfway up there's nothing prehistoric down here at all but you got us all excited about the possibility of prehistory down here that's right yes and there's no evidence i mean there is prehistoric stuff on the top of the base of the castle that's where the prehistoric site must be but how far back in time have we pushed this site the answer lies in trench one where's here ian you got a visitor i said where are you they said i think he's still in that trench out by the castle wall we haven't seen you for two days yeah well i've been up here digging down all on my own so what you got well we've got to the bottom of this this medieval wall and i've just got underneath the wall down into these rocks and this old ground surface i'm back into prehistory how do you know it's prehistory because all the soils absolutely full of iron age pot and prehistoric flint work you tried to insult me a couple of days ago by calling me fred flintstone but i'm totally unrepentant i still love flint's look at how sharp my edge is across there and it actually goes in an arrow shaft like that but that arrowhead is probably about 3000 bc it's really satisfying actually that we've managed to nail the prehistoric part of the story to here isn't it absolutely but i know you're not remotely interested in it all you're interested in is the medieval stuff and when i talked to you a couple of days ago and we talked about why we put this trench in here i said we wanted to find out which of these two walls was the earlier and which was the later and i said there was two ways that we could do that one was by the stratigraphy and one might be by the mortar and the stratigraphy we can show with this one is that this low wall here is the earlier one and it is earlier than the big tudor wall back there and it's 13th century ah now i can't tell you the date of it because the mortar was going to be the crucial dating thing we do not have the shelly mortar in here so i cannot say without doubt that this is 13th century but it could be it is definitely earlier than that warm that's tantalising isn't it so you satisfied now yeah yeah i'm going back down again i'll leave you to chat to barney rubble [Music] back to the future our photo realistic 3d model of montourgoye is nearly complete and stewart's keen to use it as a tool to accurately measure the dimensions of the massive tudor gun battery added late in the castle's life i'm really interested in the thickness of the grand battery for a number of reasons to do with the defense of this castle what's the measurement from the face of that north wall of the grand battery to the inside of all of it there we're looking at twelve point four five meters there crikey that's thick i mean when you think that the average stone wall is probably only about maximum two meters thick and how deep is that from the corner to the inside of that curve of the battery i'm looking at 23.271 meters from end to end that's put there simply to absorb cannon fire from cannon up on the hill here because if it's simply a wall so a two meter thick wall it would just shatter with the impact of cannonballs so they need that depth of earth to to absorb the impact and while this huge tudor gun platform buried much of the original castle the archaeology is not entirely lost to us so when do you start getting the good reflections just in front of where you're standing at the 11th hour jimmy has made a remarkable discovery his radar has picked up a complete 13th century tower inside the later bastion that ends our investigation and it's time to draw together what we've learned about the earliest stone castle and its subsequent development what can we add to this now that we didn't know when we started we can confirm that there is a half round town we've also found a completely unknown round tower a round tower there 15th century battery down here a solid half right about down on the surface round a d-shaped 15th century 14th 13th century i think i better pull this together monto has been in use since prehistory the steep-sided granite hill has been recognized as a perfect defensive position for at least five thousand years the site was set in stone in the 13th century when a fortified keep was built on the highest point protective curtain walls and towers surrounded it high up on the crest of the hill and part way down the slope in the 15th century the castle had a military makeover two formidable ditches were cut in the rock below the hill and a pair of gun towers were added to protect the gateway and cover the approach to castle green the late 16th century heralded the most substantial changes towers and walls from the earliest castle were knocked down or buried under a monstrous gun battery and a lofty d-shaped tower designed to protect the heart of the castle the arrowhead bastion at ground level was the cherry on the cake leaving montolgoy groaning under the weight of guns but all this refortification was to prove futile as the castle became a prisoner of its own geography henry have you got those measurements yet yes i have stuart um where i am now is just over 200 yards away from you but i'm actually over four meters higher than you i'm not even at the top of the hill yet so i've got the advantage so you're definitely higher than me well we've been trying to work out why these defenses are so complex particularly on this side the castle and why the castle seems to get higher and higher and higher over the periods and it's really quite interesting because if we were standing on the 13th century battlements on the castle we've got the height we've got the advantage got bows and arrows bows and arrows exactly so if anybody was attacking down there the effective range of a bow is about 100 yards which is where about phase just down there on the lower law if you find a bow and arrow shall i get her she'd be dead that's pretty good but then later on when they got muskets their effective range is not that dissimilar it's about the same distance so where matt is over there that was a terrible day but the big difference comes a little bit later in the tudor period yeah canon of course canon makes the biggest difference and you've got a hill up there that's where henry is way up there exactly if you had a cannon on that ridge at 200 yards that's the distance the velocity of the ball would completely smash any walls here so the tudor period had to build this great big thick work here to stop the impact of the ball completely destroying the wall destroying this castle suddenly he's got the height he's got the advantage so is he going to fire his cannon at house he hasn't got a cannon we have

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 442,517

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, time team, tony robinson, castle in jersey, castle history, british castle, british archaeology, medieval documentary, timeline, timeline world history, timeline channel, timeline world history documentaries

Id: a3rfmKZB2hE

Length: 47min 37sec (2857 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020