The Guerilla Base of the King | FULL EPISODE | Time Team

[Music] do you remember this story from your primary school days king alfred the great is on the run from the Vikings right and he dives is this vast network of salty marshes that completely covered this area during the 9th century and he sees this little mud hut that belongs to a swineherd and his wife and he tells them that he's a deserter from the English army and they agree to hide him and the swineherd goes off and gets on with his jobs she goes off and does her chores and Alfred's sitting there completely wrapped in thought and he doesn't notice this huge black cloud pouring out of the fire and the swineherds wife comes back in and she's absolutely livid you couldn't be bothered to keep an eye on my cakes could you she says but you wouldn't mind shovelling them down your throat when they were baked would you you're greedy fat lummox so what does Alfred do does he storm off in some kingly huff no Alfred the Great is a man of the people he's like some 9th century Che Guevara figure he just apologizes profusely and in some royal way that I've never quite understood he uses the whole experience as a kind of learning curve that enables him to gather all his people together and lead them in another charge against the Vikings so is that just a little romantic tale or was it based in historical fact well the time team is in Somerset this week on the Somerset Levels and we're here because one particular Somerset family has got a very interesting piece of Alfred's history right on their doorstep and they'd like us to try and sort it out for them dear time team for over 50 years my family and I have found it Hasani we are aware it is a site of Alfred's hobby and it is believed he had a fort here can you produce any evidence of those buildings and show what Athenee looked like in Alfred's time your sincerely Tim Morgan's Athenee farm [Music] this week's time team our McCaslin Bristol University landscape archaeologist Jerry barber Bristol University environmental archaeologist Phil Harding Wessex archaeological trust field archaeologist carrenza Lewis Royal Commission on historic monuments Robin Bush archivist and Viktor Ambrose historical illustrator operating from their base the George Hotel in Wedmore the time team have just three days to find the answers right and mr. Morgan asks why was he great well I think I think we can tackle the first bits about Ethel needs self I mean the obvious thing there is to do some thrilled walking and some geophysics and so on it's really have a look at what's what Sunday because it's been plowed a lot so it's fairly flattened schedule isn't it so in other words we can put a trench in so yeah I mean the best option gotta be filled walking with me well I mean it is a protected soldiers against the law to start disturbing a scheduled Monument other than what its current land uses have been wrecking sites oh we have birthdays all in the name of science the Isle of athelney is in Somerset situated here to the southwest of Wedmore and about 10 miles from Taunton though it's scheduled amazingly very little archaeological work has been done here so this weekend presents the time team with a really valuable opportunity to discover more evidence about Alfred and his secret hiding place in the marshes you can see in front the island of Atholl be actually started cause we're actually goes off along there and we come off down into the what was back onto the marsh this is all fun isn't it well it's drained today but it would have been very boggy up until the middle aged there's the causeway to see coming into the island itself then as we get along a bit further you'll actually see that it's not a very prominent feature but it's just enough to live it lift it above the marshes and yeah it's great okay and it's it's it's all Parliament hello you mr. Morgan hello my name's McCaslin from the time team how do you do she's Phil Harding what's the significance of this place apart from the fact that Alfred hidden a few square miles of bog what does it tell us well really I suppose it is that that was the kingdom of the West Saxons or even the the kingdom of the Saxon English at one point in the time that we're discussing this weekend in in eight seven eight Alfred's Kingdom had shrunk to the few acres that surround athelney the particular reason why we know so much about Alfred is from the fact that a chap called a sir who was a Welsh friend of his and became one of his bishops wrote a very detailed life about him it's the only life of a Saxon King that we have of that kind at the time that we are talking about he was just coming up to 30 he was the fourth son of his father and in fact the fourth son to be king I don't suppose he ever expected to be king in his early years with three elder brothers between him and the throne but he had a horrendous situation to face because the Danes had literally split England in two they'd cruelly slaughtered most of the kings of places like Northumbria and East Anglia and were obviously intent on taking the rest of England for themselves but I think he wanted to get where people who didn't know the the exact lie of the land wouldn't find him he didn't by all accounts have very many followers with him and so he ended up at the the Isle of athelney the very word means the the island of the princes I think we've got two jobs don't we really we've got to see whether we can find where the fort was yeah and and then the other one is to see if we can find where the abbey was and see if there's any early abbey stuff well we'll see how Jerry would like to dig a trench so you ought to talk to perhaps if you talk to mr. Morgan about that now and then we can go off the rest of us up on the top and we can never look around and see where we might start and I'll come back to you later on okay do you sort out with them where you want to put your okay the monument here I think is where the Abbey was right yeah and we're assuming and I think having thought about it a bit we probably are assuming that the other end is we are the forties so really there's two mounds here one fort one Abbey and it's really what you're going to be able to do at each end so the work begins Phil and carrenza are surveying mr. Morgan's land and marking out reference grids at the site these grids will be important as they'll enable both the geophysics team and the field walkers to plot their finds accurately [Music] Robin this is Mickey I had to battle me [Music] a formidable vocalist of elegant workmanship was set up by the command of the King at the western end of the causeway okay / thanks very much cheers and well I will do that's okay with you is to put an auger in first which is a big long soil corer so a little bit of soil out and then I can actually see what's down the bottom and if we do a few of those sort of along the edge of there then I might be able to get an idea of what's going on underneath the ground and then find the best place to put your trench I'm gonna try and work out what a thorn you look like in the time of King Alfred that's a better place Guthrum king of the Danes who is pursuing him trying to find out where he is and wreak one of those peculiarly nasty vengeance E's which the Vikings had up their sleeves they practiced what was known as the blood eagle which was peculiarly nasty form of death in which they they kind of slipped the victim down the front while living peeled back the ribs and then flung back on either side the lungs to form a living blood eagle so it is absolutely revolting and if that wasn't enough you know they went in for a tidy bit of crucifixion by the way you you are talking about rather brutal ruthless men no I've always assumed that part of this was simply black propaganda put about by the anglo-saxons because they were on the losing end the Vikings really were as barbaric as they were painted yeah I mean this was this was really a sacrifice to their gods this was the way they sacrificed to Odin basically and so it was part of their ritual if you like part of their religion [Music] all right well so I've already started to change club actually we're getting down quite far if you compare that to this stuff we've got the top here that's the sort of thing we're looking for their difference in ER the soil change we're trying to get them hopefully the geophysics team start work at the fort site and using the technique called magnetometry they begin to look for evidence of the fort the way this technique works is the objects or buried structures in the ground interfere with the Earth's magnetic fields in different ways and this machine measures the difference [Music] we are you can see we're right in the middle of the Somerset Levels landscape is this Lowell of waterlogged landscapers it would have existed and below us the whole landscape is crisscross with these drainage reeds including areas that are flooded still today oh yeah all over there you can actually see contemporary flooding I suppose that's what the whole area the home would have been a complete mess of Bob's watery areas bits of woodland and these little dolls of land sticking out of it here is burrow bunk which used to be thought that Billy Alfred for tale of Tony we're now fairly sure as if nothing else publishes the lookout post with the norman castle on the top of it and then the church put on the top of that later on he's done a natural feature in the petitioner made it's another one of these knobs sticking out of both of the levels this is Athena we could just see the outline of the field boundaries outlining the slightly higher landing see the farm on the end and then we're going to be filled walking that strip by the monument which has now got teasers in it but which is where the Abbey was and then there's the field we're going to be filled walking in the big brown field and there's they captured the geophysics here can you see the outline it's like a big sort of flat date we'll get that a bit higher up in the moment and what does that represent that's the just a higher land sticking out of the marsh at this point it's just one little hill another little hill well that's right but it's a great place to hide it's only about 30 feet high above the surrounding land anyway barcia's all-around swamp so we're not looking for a powerful port which is like a statement of power like the Normans might have had I don't think so I think I think this is a guerrilla base he's hiding out here the reason it can't be the place with the church are these it's too small this place here you can lay lots of tents and things out in it you know if you could come a lot of people on that difficult to imagine that the whole future of southern England hinges on this one spot for a few brief weeks or months the little village that's coming now is East leek and at the end of East Wing coming into view now you can see the church and the church sits on the line of the defensive and that was that was the the main defence that defended the access to athelney itself if we can climb very high no Mike you can see from here the line of the defenses beyond that you can see the brown field of the fort of a thorny and beyond that the farm marking the abbey site built as a dedication so you've got the whole of the the core of this gorilla boys are still fix the best word for it you know this this is where they behold up so poor old Alfred's stuck down there somewhere all this left of his kingdom is about 25 square miles of bulk any moment now Christian England could be wiped out we could all end up speaking Danish what happened next see after the break [Music] this is what it must have been like for Alfred I can't even move let alone run away from any Vikings so what happened to him was he split down the middle and had all his guts scooped out until his lungs were flapping around by his ears now of course not we may have to take ass's biography with a pinch or two of salt but basically his character analysis of Alfred seems to have been about right people trusted him they liked him they believed he was working in their interests and so they followed him and miraculously within a year of his terrible defeat he got all the people around here together and they'd marched out and they defeated the Vikings at the Battle of Eddington and that's when this weird double act started as soon as the battle was over saintly Alfred converted horrible Guthrum to Christianity and immediately they started going on this strange procession all around the Somerset lowlands all around the places where Alfred had been hiding just a few months previously with guttering all dressed in white to symbolize his conversion to Christianity it's very odd actually I feel a bit like Alfred and Guthrum at the moment it's Saturday morning I've been wandering around this smelly Marsh for the last 24 hours trying to get this story together and I've got absolutely no idea what the archaeologists have been doing at all I think it's all right with you lot I'll climb out of here and get back to the real world can someone get his hand Lee I'm stuck might be done pretty well yesterday you've got the grid in on one area but I reckon we're gonna pull out a crack on with the other area as well yeah there's other ways like don't leave you saying you could put in all our eggs in one basket I don't think there's any just constantly walking or sewing walk in the Ford I think we gotta get where the Abbey is as well why Marillion twist and the geophysics results up on the fall because I think that's really critical if you can turn up any features anything that looks significant I think that's gonna tell us much more than the pottery anything we pick up the field walking really we're actually finding features or anomalies which we take to be archeological they're not necessarily the fault yet we don't know this but what we can say for certain is that we've actually got a linear Camille on here and that the linear is it's quite an unusual response of neutral magnetic response because it's very strong and it looks like it might be a ditch that's in filled with industrial activity well we've had a long discussion you're very good at that long long long breakfast it was the the geophysics chaps are gonna carry on with the the 410 they're gonna go look at the Abbey end as well yeah and they're gonna do some resistors on the Abbey which will hopefully give us a better plan or we're gonna pursue the interesting features they've got at this end the field workers are already out there they'll be picking a bits up Jerry is gonna be drilling some holes around looking for cannot leave iron mental evidence and Phil and currents will be going out doing the so vain and keeping the job girl bare this is the fort area that we're looking at can you actually see this there's sort of black lines coming around here rather intermittent messed around and right around that you could also almost see a circular structure going right round that could be the site of the fall well that's the error we're moving into exactly what is it [Laughter] when you've looked at it a bit and thought about it gets more convinced than we look at it that's that that sort of dark line could be a ditch so carrenza thinks she may have found the fort and she now plans to enlarge the 1946 err photograph on the computer to see if she can bring out any more details victor is drawing the landscape as it would have looked in Alfred's day [Music] I've been doing some coring work down at around athelney that's have assured with money materia and I found that it's it's very wet problem is there's no pit so I can't actually give a date for this stuff what I want to do there is have a look at the causeway and get a section through that so would be possible do you think to put a ditch through the edge of the causeway away from the road that's a possibility but I think you may have a problem with the depth that you need to excavate and that's something we would need to look at I think with water logging and the sheer volume that you would have to get through to get into the peat which may be a metre or two meters down I also want to do some coring around the outside of the rest of the the monument to get a soil surveying of the entire area it's wet very wet even more wet yeah well I think you'll confirm that but it will be useful I don't understand about this procession the Alfred and Guthrum made through Somerset what were they doing well it was an elaborate ceremonial which I suspect Alfred wanted to take place on a succession of his own royal estates so he starts off at allé we're gonna me gets baptized under the Saxon Christian name of Athelstan then he wheels him over here to Wedmore we're eight days after the ceremony of christen loosening say the kind of three sounds almost obscene doesn't it but they fill it of cloth around Guthrum's head would have been removed again with great ceremonial and then they talk about eleven days of jollification 'z when the king gave Guthrum and his followers who numbered thirty elaborate presence and where did these take place well it isn't too clear it could either have been at Wedmore where i suspect there was a church situation the religious community or possibly at cheder where they had the West Saxon Kings had their major palace so what was it all for was it was it essentially religious or was Alfred showing his people you know what a great guy was by humbling the the terrible vulture gothram it was an endeavour to put an end to what had plagued him ever since he came to the throne and of course he and his father even before that and to set the seal on the promises that the Danes have made to leave the West Saxon Kingdom forever which in fact is what they did they went back to Chippenham then to sire ancestor and finally as far away as you could get to the East - East Anglia where Gotham lives out his days peacefully as a Christian King until he finally snuffs if we're gonna try and get it sharpened up zoom in on it had a good look at it get a print out of it to scale it's gonna actually overlay it over the 2500 here at the X here and then we can get a larger one blown up and get ice already skeptical about this you don't like it well I've been trying to think of the context in which we would get marks like that at that time here it is January 1947 it's a bit after autumn plowing it's a bit early for spring and plowing you know what why why would we be seeing it at that time I mean it's this this looks like stubble I mean it's it's a bit after plowing yeah but the Sol's had time to weather City expect the contrast in a way is the sort of thing you'd expect to show perhaps in May June I just think it's there we found it it's exciting we've actually bought this it could be the right it's roughly the right shape is roughly the right size it's a shame for the size it's in the shape of it though also worries me I mean III mean here's Alfred presumably with his back to the wall he's coming in you know retreating to this why does he lay out a circular sight you know well now it's got something nice and regularly but yes but why not just fence around the island and and and sort of company I'm the circles the easiest sight but if it is a temporary encampment a circle is the easiest defendable Sun isn't it and then just put a ditch in to formalize it strengthen it up a bit a bit later I do I feel skeptical must admit I have got on the map here this is the causeway coming along yeah unless you look it goes away from the road and carries straight on into the field yeah caused by a lot of rabbits they must be rather than bottom and they would have disturbed most of the upper layers in fact so we need to go along so we can't really dig here there's no point even the reason why I would like to look in this bank is because we can't date our soil dark clay over over by the fish problems we can't date anything around definitely what we want to do is get a section through here see if we can find some pottery we can tie in with the soil there's now would that actually be feasible do you think they'll find sax and pottery there may be opportunities once we get through this is a bad idea it's a bad idea we need to be at the other end where there could be a stratified layers this is what I'm hoping the reveal it's now two o'clock on Saturday afternoon and fill-in his volunteer field walkers seem to be making pretty good progress at the fort site the basic idea is that they pick up anything that looks interesting and pop it into a bag and it'll be sorted out later the geophysics team are now working on the a B sides looking for traces of Alfred a B but they've decided to use a different technique called resistivity mr. Morgan you're the landowner of this grain then yes I've been hearing quite a long time now did you your family been in there longer than that or well my family came from Wedmore where they've been for many hundreds of years yeah yes which of course it's not very far away no well we've been having some quite interesting times up here as you can say Oaks but you were all these canes are doing here in there in the Cabbage Patch that's right yes well what we've what we've done is we've laid out a grid oh yeah and then each person each field walker walks around in the ten meter square for 20 minutes on that time anything that they find goes into the bag yes and actually we found some we found some quite toe or something in particular which is very interesting this object here yes well we don't see that sort of thing every day you know well we think it's a piece of metal slag people who did their geophysical survey up here did actually detect strong indications of metal work actually in the grade and this bit we've actually found on the surface obviously been dragged up by the plow very interesting unique I should say it seems a bit unbelievable that that lump of metal slag might just hold the key to the history of this site is it possible it could have come from a saxon furnace and sat in the Morgans field for over a thousand years just waiting for us to pick it up or more likely will it relate to another period of the fields history will it turn out to be a piece of interesting but irrelevant Victorian slag meanwhile Jerry's luck isn't getting any better and she's more or less run out of time this really stops us digging into this side of the back road it does we can't work anywhere near where the Badgers are that's one of the constraints for the new badger act so we can't go there it was really written off the idea of a JCB and I think that wouldn't help us a great deal and there are a lot of problems hello where are you over it's different technique you know we use rayon deepest any good now you don't remember at breakfast this morning last comment was geophysics will be the answer to it all yeah well you're not gonna see in front of your very eyes a plot that will astound you this is if the technology work what what we've just been saying we've actually used the reza's the resistance technique here and the monument yeah and that's when we're sending the electric current into the ground and we've got the Buried walls we'll get high resistance readings interfering we should be able to build up a plan you know so if there are any happy remains under here and the hope is that we'll get a detailed picture where we get high resistance we'll have dark concentrations of dots on the paper and where we've got white areas that's away from the walls so we're looking at moisture content here and moisture when you've really there's very little moisture when you get towards stone walls so you get nice dark readings that's when the resistance is going up [Applause] can we have it over here good because we're actually orientated about like that oh that's right in the actual monument itself where we've got the very small squares yeah yeah and so a very clear plan of the building so orientation and this is actually this is never been excavated there's no pictures there's no prints there's no drawings so this is actually the first time anybody's ever seen anybody's ever seen it the layout of the Church of a phylactery that's the s incredible because we could almost get a reconstruction from Victor I mean we'll be able to compare this with the documentary evidence plus all the lobby plans that are known yeah great so absolutely happy actually started just about yeah about here and spread all the way back past that monument there and no one knew about it for centuries and centuries for about three minutes ago I think that's a pretty good first for time team [Music] and I think this is pretty staggering and they said it was one of the best results they'd ever had because it's actually mapped the outline of the church and you can see the sort of central aisle you can see the the what must be the chance of the area the crossing idiot look see if we've got some transept you've certainly got some aisles this is the 14th 15th century happy well I've asked them if they can look at look at the data that's produced this and and fiddle around with it because this is a this is a fairly crude version they've got button weight various ways of enhancing things so it might actually able to break this down a little bit I managed to get them to blow it up on the computer imaging and I sort of picked out the main features this is actually one 2500 so we can map this onto the Ordnance Survey that's your map mystery ring there is an enclosure then we don't want data's actually it's not just me imagining it it does come up with other ways too it does look remarkably prehistoric it does yeah it's like some sort of Iron Age farms that's great I mean we did say right at the beginning that with the more active you some prehistoric stuff oh yeah so what are we gonna do tomorrow we've got quite a bit of sorting out to do as an alternate because we've now all the field walking is complete on the areas that the cloud is crops in and we've got a lot of bags of stuff that need to be gone through at least put in a preliminary way to see one of the things that's come out straight aways this thing which has been the son some debate about well you feel how heavy it is to start with I think it's probably a bloom that is the original lump of iron that's produced in the in the early furnaces and it rather makes your point about they would there would have been a lot of metalworking not on a site like this you know for its time so that's really quite interesting that ties in quite nicely with the geophysics work when he even this morning they were saying there's a lot of non exactly iron objects in the ground but a lot of ferrous activity you know like and that sort of thing and we might expect that on this site you know because some you know arming people up and getting them many if it's of that period it could but we would have to get this looked at I think by you know a specialist annoying I thought I'd do a little bit of work to try and make these people live a little more in terms of their philosophy I wouldn't be so presumptuous no no we were talking about how few sources there were to make for instance Guthrum come alive so I've been looking at some of the the sagas to give you some kind of impression of their literally their philosophy of blood and bloodletting this is from another number of different Viking sources their sagas basically the the brave warrior who often gave swollen flesh to the raven marked men with the point of the swords edge the givers of plenty to the raven who long were hateful to the english went up into the land from the ships and gaps stud horses waded in blood and the Wolfpack got plenty of wolves fodder and he goes on i mean there fell the oaks of oath him before the flashing sword in the play of iron that was thrusting of points and gnashing of edges this is my point this is my point you read a sir the holy man of god writing about alfred he destroyed the vikings with great slaughter and pursued those who fled as far as the stronghold hacking them down he seized everything which he found outside the stronghold men whom he killed immediately horses and cattle yes but of course you cannot judge people that far and that long ago in terms of the present they'd been raised as survivors and some of them did nice to see a bunch of archaeologists looking so excited they usually say flippin noncommittal anyway tomorrow we'll see if we can pick out the remains of Alfred's a be from those rules we'll also see what else we can find on earth only don't go away [Music] Sunday morning and there's still a lot of work to do before the team faced the public with their findings at six o'clock Chris is busy analyzing this plan of the Abbey do any of these lines belong to the earlier Saxon church built by Alfred what we're gonna do here is just try and move the son around and this would go around we'll see that depending on the angle of the Sun we can actually identify the walls or picking up yeah yeah really it's like an aerial photograph now Victor is finishing off his picture of the burgle hiding fortifications at Ling now I've seen the site of these defenses because Mick pointed them out from the helicopter if I still don't understand what was myrtle hide it was a scheme in southern England that was almost certainly invented by Alfred to have a number of defended centers they against the Danes and here in this orchard at the back of the church the actual bank and ditch of the virgle Heidi's defenses are still here and I bought this tape with me and some pigs because I thought we'd stake it out and actually see if it's the right sort of length great and then we could we would actually be able to work at how many people defended this yeah and this of course is the bridgehead for athelney which is behind us in that direction so anybody approaching overland would come along this Ridge be cut off by this massive Bank and ditch in front of us they would then have gone into linge itself and then out on the causeway too often at the far end and out there is the undefended is the ditch down here yeah yeah that you're doing that rather than me here's the ditch you imagine that deeper yeah because it's all filled up with rubble and you imagine me higher and then a fence along the top it's not fantastically steep no but you've got to imagine that silted up a lot it's probably another six or seven feet deep this banks eroded and there's a fighting platform on the top and this chaps throwing scorn and derision on you amongst other things from the top here I'm used to that right well I think we'll do that he's go from the corner of the churchyard up there if you'll take that with a hang on Tony I'll give you a pig it doesn't need to be very firmly but just so that we can get a first 200 feet along the frontier left to go round the trees as well go to the corner of the churchyard over there we'll turn him into an archaeologist yet okay stick that that's it okay then Tony come on down I'll just tell you what we've done right that's that's two hundred feet from the wall yeah and because of the what the burglar hide each says which I've got the the crib here there's a hundred hides attached to a sling that's an ear of land at that time how high doesn't mean a skin it just means Oh No it's like a like an acre but it's about hundred and twenty hundred fifty acres it might even be a bit more at that time and there was one man from every hide so that means there's a hundred men coming to defend this defense of eastling and we know that in each pole that is each five and a half yard lengths remember in the back of the exercise book at school and rods pole right each one of those is defended by four men and so by a roundabout way we can work out that the length of Defense's across here was four hundred and twelve point five feet in other words about two hundred nod feet on each side and this ditch on this side I'm running from the marsh up to the centre of the ridge and then down over the other side to the marsh the other side and we just measured one half of that and indeed you can see the profile of the bank in the ditch here in this side so what appears to be a fairly insignificant earthwork in this lady's orchard you know actually right goes right back to Alfred's time and indeed his pot was part of the main defences of the site at that time it's actually an early piece of bureaucracy did you call that baby it's probably wondering why I've asked you to come in turn let's try an answer other questions from local people if we can all we've had this letter from Tim who lives in the village and found an anglo-saxon ring in his garden which the British Museum of dated the 6th 7th century but what he's really interested in as an ass ass about is how it was made the sort of the way it would actually have been created was it difficult you might be able to help us with if you could cope if we could have a look at it are you doing their job [Laughter] yeah what we're trying to do is we're we're not having much success in actually tying down this fort that cleanses got on the IP we've got lines on the air pictures yeah we've got some sort of correlation with the magnetic but nothing really that coordinates well yeah and Chris is actually looking at it at the moment trying to get the digitized plants to match so what we've decided to do is actually because we've had so much success with the resistance technical yeah be yeah it is to do some resistance transects here alright and if there are major ditches here and if we haven't seen them magnetically because there's no magnetic contrast then we may be able to see them with the resistance could you tell me in words that a Beano reader would understand exactly how you achieve the results that you do yeah and basically what we've got here is a box of electronics inside us and batteries they're sending the electric current into the ground through one of the probes the other probes actually measures the resistance of the earth to that passage of the current we've got a couple of probes on the far side that make the circuit and so you've got current flowing into the ground and we take readings but meter intervals you've seen this moving the frame up and down and at each point when measuring the resistance below the ground there so if you've got a stone wall at that point the electric current goes into the ground bang you get high resistance because the current won't flow through the wall if you've got a waterlogged ditch in the ground then the current passes easily through the water because its moist and so you get a low resistance so by taking readings on the detail grid we build up a picture of these resistances and so we can actually plot the high resistances plot the high walls plot the low readings plot the ditches that are waterlogged why can't all scientists talk that they do such good condition you just found it in the garden yes just lying on the surface your letter said the British Museum dated it 6th 7th century they do it so it's a copper alloy yes and you're interested in how it's actually made I'm very interested to know how it's how it was formed so you could go and see if you could reproduce it how long will that take we're gonna be here all day know hopefully that we we can do it in about half an hour once we've unraveled or not but because you weren't literally on produce a perfect reproduction I hope you can imagine that they could they could widen the wire around anything at all really over a stick of wood would be okay any work process on what on metal like this part is exciting it makes it rather less easy to bend and as we want to be able to bend the knot and weave it by hand preferably it would be a good idea to anneal it at this stage now Amelia is simply heating up to red heat but unlike a blacksmith's we don't have to keep it red-hot we can let it cool down again after as long as it has passed through a red-hot stage it will then be nice and soft and malleable and workable again this is going to perform as I said the main part of the Ring the decoration that we put on afterwards that is the much finer part that covers the shoulders on the other side of the knot I should be making from this same bit of wire but drawing it down to a finer wire [Music] so you just just a question of work from the metal heating it up it's the soften it and working it together and then you can correct mistakes you can do this as often as you like that's right exactly it's as simple as that [Music] it's answer your questions as to how how the ring was made I'm amazed how easy and has made it look I imagined it to be a very complicated and in the process to produce such a knot but I am absolutely amazed yes does it fit what we're doing here is is the result of your good work all day yesterday afternoon well and you found some very interesting new stuff well it's interesting then you know just to see how we're actually extrapolate from our ground plant yeah constriction here we've got this very clear major alignment along here but in fact it's it's out of out of alignment with with this little area over here no it's it looks as if this is incorporated within the large of the church but I'm just wondering if it's a different phase yeah the interesting thing about that is of course it would correspond exactly to what we think that being the size of the first yeah alfred church well we'll have to try a new discovery that's okay so not long to go before the presentation to the public at six o'clock kris has highlighted what may be an earlier phase of building among the ruins of the abbey site possibly the first evidence of Alfred's Church the geophysics results on the fort site have also been processed and although there's no new evidence to support currents as round for theory sorry about that carrenza they do have very good evidence of two ferris ditches now these combined with the large quantities of iron slag found by the field walkers indicate that this was once the site of massive industrial activity so what we need now is an expert on slag Chris has phoned up his mating Bradford he's actually he's driving down in his Renault 5 from Bradford to here in order to be able to report back on it when you get here in time now let's hope sir anyway ok very very slow [Music] [Applause] cherri what were you doing when you got Chrissy's phone call I just about to get in big deal opment I heard about this more he's excited what was it about the phone call that made you be prepared to jump in your car and drive from New Castle all the way down here this slag is this material is a waste product of iron smelting is the residue the stuff they throw away iron smelting slags come in a variety of shapes and sizes and they can be characteristic of certain periods and when Chris described the slag to me it immediately brought parallels in my mines to say either it's Iron Age possibly Iron Age or possibly anglo-saxon so by looking at it now in the hand I'm much more happy that it's probably of anglo-saxon date and why is it particularly exciting that it's here well the other sites that we've got this sort of slide from are all further to the east mostly concentrated around East Anglia there's quite a few around there suggesting perhaps that this slag technology is associated with people's coming in perhaps the same anglo-saxons dupes or whatever but we've got it around as far as Southampton is the furthest west that I've been able to identify it so this now pushes it a lot further west now so whether or not this has to change our opinion of who is actually doing this technology will have implications for us who are interested in technology of iron can you tell any more specifically other than you think it's anglo-saxon when it might be I mean could we for instance say that there's the possibility that it was around during Alfred's time I think yes I would have no worries about that I mean that the problem is we're dealing with such a few sites that each sites an individual and can alter the pattern or the our impression of what's happening in this technology very dramatically so I have no worries at all all I would say is police probably pretty definitely post-roman but pre perhaps tenth or eleventh century AD but I can't be more exact than that thank you all of you for coming and a very big thanks to all the friendly farmers and field workers and local archaeologists who've helped us this weekend we've had a brilliant time we came here in response to a letter from the Morgan over here no doubt about it it's been a very successful weekend the geophysics work has produced the first ever picture of the medieval Abbey and also the outline of an earlier building which could be the remains of a smaller a be built by Alfred [Music] victus drawings I think show very clearly how different the landscape looked in our four institutions the island itself surrounded by salt marshes with the causeway linking it to Ling and the bridgehead fortifications but the discovery of the two ferris ditches and the lumps of slag from the fort site is in many ways the most important development of all it may mean that we found the first evidence of the place where Alfred made his swords and other weapons used to defeat the Danes in 887 there was one other question why was out for it known as the great well he was our first ever literate King which must have been quite a step forward it was cultivated magnanimous and the United his people and defeated the dreaded Vikings thus ensuring the survival of the English nation sounds reasonably great to me and of course he managed to find his way through these swamps and marshes and that's not easy believe me [Music] [Music]

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 220,946

Rating: 4.9282622 out of 5

Keywords: Team Team, Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode, Athelney, somerset, alfred the great, battle, fortress, defeat the danes, vikings

Id: 0Ypig2EyxHk

Length: 50min 26sec (3026 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 20 2019