What's Underneath The Earl Of Essex's Mansion? | Time Team | Timeline

one of the great privileges of working at history here and making films together with our team at timeline is the access we get to extraordinary historical locations like this one Stonehenge I'm right in the middle of the stone circle now it is an absolutely extraordinary place to visit if you want to watch the documentary like the one we're producing here go to history hit the TV it's like Netflix for history and if you use the code timeline when you check out you'll get a special introductory offer see you there [Music] to be or not to be that is the question don't worry I'm gone all actory on you this is time team and we're at Earl's cone in Essex underneath that lourd we're hoping to find a 12th century Priory which was founded by one of the richest families in England [Music] I feel like James Bond here there is that this could turn out to be the burial ground of one of the great English dynasties including one mysterious Earl who's rumored either to be the inspiration for Shakespeare's Hamlet or else even the Bard himself the stage is set we've got just three days to find him and the Priory will come down there [Music] these immaculate lawns aren't just a geophysicists dream a little under a thousand years ago this land belonged to a family called the de Vere's Earl's of Oxford and royal favorites today this fantastic place is home to car fanatic and multi-millionaire Paul Wight something tells me we're going to enjoy the perks on this day I feel like I'm in a movie this is such a beautiful place he's got a Priory in the back garden it's quite unusual yes what is it that you'd like us to find while we're here well in principle I want to find out the effect would do here in the 17th Earl of Oxford he was buried in the garden somewhere because no one knows where he was buried and generally just to find a lot more about the history of this site so let's find the missing girl Edward is he the one that people think you might have been Shakespeare that's absolutely right yeah there is a lot of room if you search the internet de Vere Shakespeare it just explodes the secret Shakespeare might be under your backyard got Hamlet in my garden we've got so much to find out lots of mysteries to solve but if we got time for another spin first that's good the de Vere's not only founded a Priory here but 400 years later reputedly built a posh country pad to live in those cone was a prime location 10 miles west of Colchester close to London and a spiritual and economic hub of medieval Britain our key task is to work out what was where on this complex site along the way we also want to reveal the stories of the aristocrats who founded it and armed with early geophys results Phil's chomping at the bit they launched a trench 10 meters 10 meters if this looks good presumably there's no good reason well we can't extend it and pick up talk about extending the range we're wasting no time making a dent in this pristine grass trench one goes in over what we suspect may be the Priory Church where Jeff is have revealed the most substantial bits of war after just three scrapes of the digger it's looking promising better 12th century or thereabouts [Music] you too early to start shucking a trench in with gay abandon did you or do you do gay abandon do you know yes absolutely right but it is not too early I mean the sooner we get started the bear what have you found anything yet well we've got glimmers of a Priory oh that's rather nice and it's got fluting ball of three lots of fluting and a flat surface there so what's your strategy for the whole three days though Mick I mean you can't just peel off the entire lawn and discover the Priory underneath we need to do quite a lot of geophysics over particularly with the radar yeah and then we need to just sample where we think that are bits left my slight concern is that a lot of the stone will have been recycled and then dug out and so we may not get huge amounts all over the site left in standing walls and it's not just this tree the prior is it as it is buildings that would have been on this site since the prices of so I mean there's a whole wealth of story there look at this no what have you gone you can't wear stuff like that in Essex my philosophy was when I look put this shirt on it was ripped I thought that sure is near the end of its working load what is the point of throwing away a clean shirt when you can wear it and throw away a dirty shirt and before you took it away you can cut the buttons off to use among other system tedious I'll leave them to discuss the finer points of needlework while we crack on with the challenge of establishing the size and form of this Priory come Priory was founded by Aubrey de vere in the early 12th century although there's no formal blueprint for the way medieval Priory's were laid out most stuck to a common plan around a central cloister was a series of ranges the Western range was where the monks lived the southern range was the dining room and the eastern range was for meeting and study then there was the Priory Church to which burial chapels were often added so was it a purely spiritual motive that made the diverse builders priori well I think it was both spiritual and pragmatic a number of families did Mina found priories after the Norman Conquest partly as a kind of spiritual insurance for the life to come perhaps as important was the fact that all three wanted somewhere for his family to be buried and so here at compro it became the family mausoleum and so we know that many many of the Devere family buried here we know that there were a lot of tombs and that's of course the exciting thing about this project so we know we've got a Priory we know we've got tombs but the archaeology has to tell us about the size and the layout exactly following the 1536 dissolution when Henry the eighth's broke with the Roman Catholic Church most of Britain's priories were demolished we don't know what's left of ours but barely a foot underground in the Priory's Church fills already getting a glimpse it looks like we've got two graves when we started digging we found this edge and then it turned a corner and it went back and we said well this is sort of a box type thing what's that a box thing do you get that's east-west and that the East End of a church well I might get the answers of that presumably it's a burial absolutely it did start alarm bells ringing and then we actually got another one you sieve got an edge coming along there another end and and literally as always sort of cleaning down trying to get actually clarify the situation and lo and behold look fragments of a human skull and luckily Jackie was on hand and she's about to tell me what she thinks it's Yorick we've got a really nice big bit on the top of the head see there's the part of the eye socket there and that's really quite quite sharp margin to the eye socket which suggests we've got a female and then looking at these they should hopefully go together that's where that goes on the side there and that will fit on there so you can see we've got one side of a female adult female skull more like a failure then than poor Yorick this burial is our first clue that we're inside a chapel attached to the Priory Church the most likely place to find Devere burials why don't understand is you said that this is all demolition rubble and yet here this burial cut that's not smashed up so what's been going on well the process is that you would build this it's all made out of stone and mortar and with a big cavity in the middle that the coffin would go into there and you would bury the person and then presumably you probably construct a massive tomb over the top that would stay there for the life of the of the Priory now when the demolition takes place if you wish to relocate the burial or the the tomb over the top of it you take that away although there's no monument left this is almost certainly a de Vere double - probably a husband and wife but we don't know if they're in an original chapel or one that was added at a later date over to geophys and John's hot new gadgets producing 3d images of what's below the ground you can see at this end we're actually starting to see the wall lines and the footings really clearly yeah so as the survey expands we should get a clearer picture the radars picking up a jumble of walls which represent several different building phases it wasn't uncommon for Priory's to get regular facelifts and after the dissolution to even be converted into posh houses so could there be the remains of a mid 1500 s housed within the Priory and where do we start looking for it what documentary evidence have we got for the devane's manor house well here we have the itinerary of John Leyland in a sort of mid or beginning part of the 16th century he was a Tudor antiquarian and he describes how the Earl's have built hard by the Priory the question is we're not totally sure when that was built well that's interesting because this is a map from 1598 and I'm just looking at this arrangement of buildings here and this is clearly the manor house it's the largest house on the map and it seems to fall into the footprint of a Priory like building and what I'm saying is that prior has essentially been reused as a manor house building and I wonder if that's what leathern mean so when he says build hard by the primary he almost means on top of the problem oh yeah well maybe unless there is another manor house somewhere else I mean we're sitting in obviously an extremely grand building and we're right next to the Priory so is this the manor house that's being referred to there I think what I need to do is I need to talk to Paul see if I can have them forage around and get a better understanding of exactly when this building dates to why are you still here you know I wrote them off get to it boy we don't know the exact date of Paul's house so it could be the original to veer home Alex heads straight for the cellar to look for clues well first off we've got obviously we used bricks here you know these bricks have come from somewhere else I think these have been resourced yeah because they're lying in that herringbone fashion that main cost beam that definitely is is an older piece of timber okay okay well maybe we'll have a little wander outside diagnostic features back at Phil's trench there's plenty to diagnose with an abundance of fines keeping Paul our pottery expert pretty busy traces the Priory we're starting to get chunks of really nice decorated medieval floor talcum ha what dates well sort of 13th 14th century probably 13th rather than 14th uh suspect and all the tiles that come out are all the same they're really really worn lots of monks shuffling around their chests oh yeah a lot of feet of walked across these for a long time although worn these decorated tiles would once have been pretty high status it's further proof trench one is in the Priory's Church and it's not just in our trenches that we're getting glimpses of medieval Priory this in your gateway here this is Priory yeah that's what almost certainly a piece of religious sculpture could be some Christopher but if there's something on the shoulder it could be sent John I have this old print which which shows the house in 1770 right but it bears no relation in scale to this property although the tryptych window here on the second floor yeah is here on the first floor why isn't over seem to have reused it all right yeah because first glance you think well that is the same building but of course it's not the Bazin wrong place like you say that windows in the wrong place this 18th century etching depicts the house built by the de Vere's just after the dissolution and although Paul's house is a patchwork of material recycled from that building and the Priory it's probably no more than 200 years old so definitely not the de Vere's des res in order to find that we're going to need spectacular geophys results but mapping this entire site in 3d is a monumental challenge thirsty work all this pretty good day for us getting those bones how high up in the archeology was the real bonus and it fits with the historical documents that this was the most lien for the de Vere family for hundreds of years a story starting to come together court it is but we haven't found the tomb then we want to find mr. Edward de Vere's - absolutely well funny you should say that because John has got some spectacular new geophys I'm not sure I can give you is - but look at the radar results and there's one thing that I think Mick's eyes will be drawn to in amongst all these walls and foundations that thing there that's a very strange building in that position I'm just wondering what it is so odd perhaps a de Vere is buried there so your dream may come true tomorrow and of course this being Essex welcome to the world of the cocktail filth Bureau in the lab Cheers drink up well Joanne would Devere let's hope that we can find his resting place man [Music] [Laughter] the beginning of day two here at Earl's cone in Essex the weather's taken a bit of a turn for the worse but it doesn't really matter we had a fantastic day yesterday lots of lovely stuff coming up bones skulls whole swathe of a medieval Priory and towards the end of the day John produced this bit of geophysics with this mysterious room here which Mick got very excited about except Mick you've lost interest in this now I've you know we've got a trench going in look it's just been locked out oh yeah but you've spent the last half hour talking about this bit here that's right what we're doing here is extending this this way and we probably going to extend it that way because of what John's find it fills trench in The Priory Church has already uncovered remnants of a chapel with one double - but according to John's GF is the chapel could be bigger and on the other side we've got a jumble of walls which might represent additions to the original Priory I'm just wondering if this is actually a post dissolution chapel for the Devere burials the last resting place of Shakespeare yeah got Shakespeare's Chapel all of a sudden out of the blue and that would be a first on the basis of that GF is filled cracks on with extending his trench in two directions hoping for more chapels and burials that looks like a war it's nice looking good and we've not forgotten the mystery room that got mixed so excited it doesn't seem like a building you'd normally expect in this part of a Priory so Mik thinks it could be a private burial chapel the only way to find out another trench phil's trench has already revealed one high-status double burial and at the other end traces on to another this is looking pretty interesting to me Jackie oh they don't look like they've just been chucked in no no that is really neatly arranged basically what they've done is they've disturbed a grave and they've reburied it carefully I'm just throwing it away they've collected all the bits together they've dug a hole and they've reburied it in a nice little bundle and it looks to mostly be one person because you can see you've got FEMA here that's one femur that's the other femur and if we just look at this which is the mandible very worn as well that looks like a champ and the teeth are terribly worn so that looks like we've got we've got an old boy here because these bones are within the Priory Church they're potentially another tantalizing glimpse of the devere's and it wasn't every medieval Earl who had the luxury of being buried in their own Priory and how important were these two bears we can see that they stretch through history for more than 550 years beginning with Aubrey de Vere who of course founded the Priory here he was a very significant figure in William the Conqueror's entourage and he married Williams half-sister Beatrice and then from 11:33 the de Vere's became Lord great Chamberlain of England which was an important honorary position that with them became hereditary to them this placed them right at the heart of the court ceremonies such as the coronation so they witnessed the coronation of Anne Boleyn and then her trial what an impressive dynasty and they were significant and always attached to this place here yeah I mean absolutely we know that almost all of them were actually buried here at Combe Priory however the question is where is the 17th Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere I mean he might be here but he might not be we don't know and as Ana cracks on with her search for the clues to Edwards resting place I'm still hoping we can ferret him out of one of our trenches but although we've got plenty of bone turning up what we don't have are any of the great personalized - monuments that would have stood above the burials they've all vanished what we're looking at here well we have some tombs here which I was told when we first bought the house that they used to be somewhere in the house and then I found these photographs and I can tell from these photographs that these tombs used to be in our dining room there are the three steps which are currently still there in the dining room so 14th century Devere tombs in your dining room mmm didn't fancy keeping them know the unusual dinner guests and where are they now them scattered between various locations but the two of them untold are in the chapel in viewers is that nearby very nearby ah nice and al it's on a bit of a road trip though do that [Music] northern Alex ever needs much persuading to hit the road [Music] he's heading for the nearby Church of some Stephens with stone carver Lucy Churchill to check out these tombs and discover whether the devere's were as lavish in death as in life these highly ornate alabaster tombs are rich in symbolism they encode information about the Devere family and stand as a public display of their devout Christianity here you can see the lettering carved on his on his forehead jhr would have been using homonym rex Jesus king of men right and I think that says Nazaire which which the Christians he's also a deeply Christian burial we've got here so how long would these are taken to carve them at least a year a year yeah shibi was a surprise for a whole year yes and and they wouldn't have just been one Carver they'd have been a fleet of Mason's blocking the shapes out and then the master carver would have come and done the particularly fine details and I'm looking at some of these details here and it's almost this buckle here can almost sort of yeah imagine it's so realistic actually undoing it's just incredible to find out just what went into creating these tombs Lucy and Alex will be attempting to carve some of these symbols it's a tall order especially with under two days left but we're very ambitious on time team well maybe very stupid [Music] back at base Phil's trenched through the Priory's Church has quadrupled in size so Cassie's been drafted in what do you hear well I am working on the assumption that it supports so you've got these two lovely parallel brick walls they're both faced in this direction and we've got this nice dividing wall down the middle it's it's it's two separate graves within one - have you got any phones out of it yeah we have some beautiful phones we've got some lovely encaustic tiles what is it in caustically well encaustic is it's a way of making a highly-decorated tile so if you see yeah that's what you've got is highly decorative tile someone has pressed the pattern into it filled it with a different kind of place slip and then you glaze entirely over the top so what you get is this amazing highly contrasting highly decorative tile the best bit is down here we've got some really beautiful window glass glass yeah lovely glass so can you see all the beautiful floral designs and yeah if you can imagine that's at the head of the window there the twiddly bits of her isn't that beautiful now that was smashed up over 500 years ago and it could be as old as 800 years this stained glass means we've found an extremely grand burial Chapel we've also had a sniff of the devere's and a well on track to completing the whole picture of this lost medieval prior afternoon day two here at Earl's code in Essex we got fantastic archaeology we've got a 12th century Priory that seems to be getting bigger by the minute beautiful fines under the ground we've got skulls and bones so what does Mick wanted to go up in the air what are you doing Rick we're gonna go over the site and look at the Priory and the town I mean back overall scone what will you be able to see from up there that you can't see down here you always see their interrelationships better from the air and things click into place well you better come back with some answers otherwise we're thing you're just skiving or surely not how come he's always the one who gets the helicopter ride as Mick heads for the skies Alex is on his own voyage of discovery learning the intricate art of medieval - and carving what I do know about alabaster is a very soft stone so it's it's actually quite easy to call it is easy to carve but it's also very easy to make mistakes and a losses expertise he'll be carving a star on 200 pounds worth of rare alabaster no pressure Alex okay here we go this may take some time the star was the de Vere family emblem today it's everywhere in this neighborhood it's better to go first and then become comfortable go deeper and find the line I can veered completely off course there with Alex sweating away in our makeshift Mason's yard the trenches keep expanding from the air mix bird's-eye view of the Priory will help us work out its scale in the ground he's got GF is blotted out the entire complex and looking for the de Vere's 16th century manor house but in trench to our mystery room it's not quite going to plant this room didn't fit with anything you'd expect in a priori so MIT had wondered whether it was a private chapel problem is Raksha has a meter down and the trench looks empty as for this mystery building coming through I can't find double check the measurements there's no doubt about it another twenty centimeters that will resolve it the word touching soft scene Phil do it whatever this room is it's looking less and less like a chapel but I'll let John off because in Phil's trench gia fees have come up trumps this brick to vault correspondent perfectly with blobs on the gfs the beautiful glass and decorative floor tiles indicate this was an exclusive private chapel added to the Priory Church in the 15th century containing two double Devere tombs at the other end of the trench more skeletons are emerging including one that wouldn't look out of place in Tate Modern whoa what is that well you know we've been fine lots of groups of bone that's been disturbed and then redeposited and quite often you've got nice little bundles the difference here is just has all been thrown in one bag and that bags been dumped down here so the bag has rotted away and it's just left the even older bones yeah what we've got there is most of a young adult male when the Priory was demolished these bones were gathered up and placed on top of what was left of a wall because of all the different walls this bit of the trench is particularly complicated they think we've got two different chapels but working out their sequence won't be plain sailing along with the archaeologists GF is have a mountain to climb to survey the entire site and iron out the floor plan we're talking eight miles of trolley pushing and nothing can stop Jimmy's superhuman quest for geophysical perfection [Music] it's becoming ever clearer that this was a sizeable Priory home to 12 months whose Benedictine lifestyle was in stark contrast to that of their flamboyant patrons it was a world governed by bells bells with sound in the morning for a prayer to begin and the day would then proceed accordingly there'd be time for study and time for manual labor and of course all around this was the idea of moderation and silence so were they totally self-sufficient they never needed to go out into the outside world one of the things we know from the rule of son Benedict okay is that if anyone went out of the complex for whatever purpose at all when they came back in they were forced to lie prostrate on the floor of the oratory and begged the Lord for forgiveness for all of the sins that they would have encountered outside of the complex [Music] when they weren't deep in silent prayer one of the monks roles was burying their patrons Phil's trench has already revealed two double tombs along with lots of disturbed bone unfortunately there's nothing left of the ornate tools so good job we're making our own well one little bit of it at least and masonry HQ alex is putting the finishing touches to his star that's great you like it yeah well you've done brilliantly I have to say you're pleased yeah I am I'm pretty impressed but they're not quite finished we want to recreate our own version of a Devere tomb which means more stone carving tomorrow imagining the number of elaborate tombs that once lay in the chapels of this Priory paints an evocative picture but there's more to this Priory than churches and chapels geophys are now surveying the western range usually living quarters looking for evidence of it being converted into a house these stood have been cooing over John's latest piece of geophys for the last five but that doesn't look as good to me as the last lot is wall remains that don't appear as clear what I think we might be looking at here is brick we could be talking about a building that appears to have well I can only Snowden is bay windows so the reason that you're excited is that all this is the Priory yeah but it could well be that we've now hit on what we were looking for the story of the house after the Priory on the site so tomorrow we're going to put John's amazing geophys results to the test we could be on the verge of uncovering the de Vere's long-lost manor house for the first time in over five hundred years beginning of day three here at Earl's cone in Essex where we're excavating a medieval Priory which used to belong to one of the great families of England the site's come up with a lot of bones you see this interesting little clump here but there's one burial that's got Jackie particularly excited what is it you found Jackie well what we've got here is the first sign of in situ remains ie exactly where they were placed to start with as you can see we've got a leg that's the femur there of a child battle that's getting to the knee joint there and then there's part of the upper limb in place here just bring a bit of humanity into the story on this side isn't it well yeah we go from just having lots of important chaps with their big monuments to having them and their families and it becomes a more realistic family affair yep it seems that the entire families were buried here now wonder then that the de Vere's splashed some serious cash on extensive refurbishment at this end of trench one is the wall of the original Church but there's a post 12th century chapel bolted on here and another chapel in this corner these decorative Flint's indicate it's probably 15th century this was a huge estate and unusually the de Vere's retained it after the dissolution a handsome reward for their loyalty to king of a pope but did they convert a section of Priory into a post dissolution des res to find out traces opened a trench over the western range where gf is revealed what looked like bay windows fantastic I mean this bay window is a clear sign that this is a domestic building and could be our first glimpse of the de Vere's posh house it's a promising start as the search continues for evidence of a house Raksha is desperate to resolve the identity of a room that's had a stumped for two days at the end of day one John produced a new piece of geophys which Mick got very excited about because of this mysterious room here which nobody could explain well we started digging it yesterday and Rachel's just about finished now only half finished what is there in your trench got this massive wall here that's actually the Priory wall as for the mystery building though don't seem to kind of really have found it all right Nick where's the mystery room and what was it I don't know where he's gone I wonder whether it's not a cell for an anchorite or in this case an anchor s what's an anchor s it's like a hermit who who lives it's walled up in a cell first your spiritual reasons and then he's actually a mention for us : of a a female anchor right round about the late 12th century 1200 so where Raksha is standing now yeah a hermit an anchor s could have been exactly that position can you look very quiet and very holy well I can either quite a bit but I'm not sure about the holy you can't do either yes I can't quite imagine Raksha being walled up in a cell for the rest of her life the misleading GF is was picking up wall foundations the action stone long robbed out even so it's an unusual find that reinforces the spirituality of this place and fills in yet another blank in the Priory layout [Music] away from the action in the trenches Luce is frantically carving another Devere emblem that would have adorned many tombs here the war symbolized the family's love of hunting but there was one de vere who really lived the high life the flamboyant Edward de Vere who may or may not have been the real Shakespeare Paul you said that the one Devere who you liked more than any of the others was Edward what is it about him that attracts you but he was the 17th in line in the family to take on the earldom and in the space of taking control of the estate's and when he became 21 to 25 years later he'd lost the lot what did he spend his money on he like perfume gloves he liked fragrances himself you like to wear fragrances and he traveled a lot he went to France and Italy he took with him a Venetian choirboy apparently who he also spent money on and he was involved with the theater and this is the link with Shakespeare right well the theories that he wrote a lot of the sonnets some might say even some of the plays and going even further that he was the inspiration for the story of Hamlet so there was a big link there and if you overlay that with the record showing that he was a allegedly a shareholder in The Globe Theatre and spent a lot of time in Southwark with the acting communities around the inn's down there it would seem to have some truth and he was of course a great poet and playwright himself and he was you know celebrated in the day for his writing and have you seen their faces Toni that's sort of quite similar that Shakespeare is this and that's Edward of it they've got similar noses I wonder what the viewers think this one here that's Shakespeare and that one is the Earl of Oxford is it's the same person or is there sheer madness well as Hamlet said if it's madness there is Method in it a quote for every occasion one thing's for sure we're not giving up on finding him in our trenches in trench one the Priory's main church jockeys discovered another vault and it's not empty [Music] skeleton there yes I've got somebody's legs from the knees down and their feet going off there this is a male well it's a bit difficult to be absolutely sure because I've only got the the lower part of the legs on the knees down but they're quite big and chunky so I think that's gonna be a male yes and it's very closely related to the skeleton of the child here yeah that child has been placed right up against the side of this vault which suggests there's gonna be a direct link between that individual and the individual that's inside it and it's inside one of the chapels which means that it's almost absolutely sure that this is going to be a de Vere could be able to hear or Shakespeare both for it to be Edward we need to find something that dates this burial to the early 17th century and with just hours to go it's not looking hopeful but we're not just searching for de vere skeletons on day one paul produced this 18th century etching of the de Vere's 16th century house bits of which are now built into his home but the big question is whether there are also fragments of the old house in this trench we've got wall plaster there's a bit of an iron window frame there even and we've even got some nice clear window glass in the water in the cup I mean it's all the typical sort of thing you'd expect one of these places to have it in the right places brought it's broadly the right date it can't really be anything else it's all very general though isn't it there isn't anything specific one nice thing we have got which could kind of be the key to it is this now I know this doesn't actually look very much but this is a small fragment of a large terra cotta molded plaque you see there's the curved line it probably in a big circle maybe a coat of arms or something in the middle now if you look at the picture see above the front door yes now it's just a little blur on the picture it says we can't be under percent certain but something like that would have been right above the front door whether it be the de Vere coat of arms or whatever you know to proclaim to the world who there were so I mean that's not an everyday thing you don't find a lot of those find that this plaque combined with the high status domestic finds amount to a compelling case that the de Vere's converted the Priory's Western range into a very swanky home their ancestral connection with this place wouldn't be easily broken it was after all their family mausoleum but Edward Blue the family inheritance and was forced to sell the place by 1591 so realistically it's not likely he was buried here and are there any hints in the record about what happened to Edward the 17th Earl well we found some documents you have a sense that he was here or you hoped he'd be I hope to be well let me tell you he's buried in Hackney yeah so we know that from a source which describes Edward de Vere having died on the 24th of June 6 no four and being buried on the 6th of July in San Augustine's Church in Hackney of all places there's a reference in the parish registers that he died of plague I'm assuming that even though it was in Hackney it was a big full-on pomp and circumstance funeral well you would imagine sigh wouldn't you but of course as we know ever Devere spent a lot of his money and the creditors were after him and so very sadly he'd had to have a very low-key funeral fearing that you know his wife would then be under massive pressure from the creditors if he'd gone out with a bang so a bit of a somber and sad end really and clearly no fancy tomb for the profligate edward sounds like he would have been lucky to get a headstone let alone a hand-carved bore on his tomb the bore and star were the de Vere family emblems we're going to use these symbols and a few of our own to recreate a virtual medieval tomb with Alex as our willing victim or should I say effigy unfortunately it would take at least a year and our entire budget to carve a tomb from scratch thank heavens for modern technology I feel like James Bond here Neil your doctor know this hundred thousand pound bit of kit uses lasers to scan in 3d and not wanting to be outdone in the technology stakes Jeff is have created their own masterpiece a complete 3d radar picture of the Priory remains boys and their toys oh that is just unbelievable that's 12 kilometers of pushing the trolley and I don't think we've anything we've ever done anything quite as big as out on a time team not to get a complete monastic complex this stunning survey reveals the Priory to be much bigger than expected in films massive trench he's found remains of three different chapels built at different phases at all containing Devere burials and our trenches combined with the radar survey mean we can now confirm the basic outline of this priori we've located each range of it including an anchorite cell in the north then there's the colossal church with its burial chapels finally we can now fully understand the development of this whole site so really you've got one big skeleton which was always the priory but as fashions changed over the centuries the the cosmetic exterior would have been altered that's right because if the patron family the de Vere's decide they want a big chunk of it rebuilt then they put the money in they're not like us they don't think that Norman's stuffs lovely we must keep that 15th century stuff lovely let's keep that no sweep it over let's have the latest fashion and they certainly embraced the latest fashion when it came to tombs but they can't hold an antique candle to what we're achieving with lasers so am I still enough will you then there you will be if you stop talking here it is time teams interpretation of a medieval to monument every bit as classy as the de Vere's it's been a thrilling three days we've got our Priory and located the de Vere's missing manor house as for whether Edward de Vere was really Shakespeare that debate will roll but before we leave Essex there's just enough time to take advantage of Paul's hospitality once more well everyone's been moaning about that dodgy feet so one last treat before we go

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 166,741

Rating: 4.8615384 out of 5

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, earl of essex, time team, archaeology documentary, tony robinson

Id: VtwxDjJWSr0

Length: 46min 59sec (2819 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020