Richard III And The Most Savage Day In British History | Medieval Dead | Timeline

you [Music] a frostbitten more in northern England Palm Sunday yet that's not why thousands of men now make their silent prayers they know what is to come through the swirling snow they will fight and bleed and die in one of the savages days in the entire blood-soaked history of Britain the year is 1461 and the Battle of Tallinn has begun a team of archaeologists has spent years finding out what happened to the victims of this terrible day Shiva really certainly didn't exist a battlefield is like a multiple murder see now they're attempting to discover how King Richard the third himself laid memory to the Fallen that indicates that it's absolutely of that time and see what remains of the chapel he created in tribute to the men who died for the House of York in the Wars of the Roses we have a classic view of the storybook medieval life we don't hear the stories about the common man try to keep your family alive in our stores there are hundreds if not thousands of skeletons are logically speaking we can now focus in all the medieval dead people you're looking for clues in the skeleton all the time and you couldn't help almost look through their eyes thinking what did they see how did they die so followed a day of much slaying between the two sides and for a long time no one knew to which side to give the victory so furious was the battle and so great the killing so wrote a contemporary 15th century chronicler the Battle of town on Palm Sunday March the 29th 1461 was one of the largest ever fought on English soil and almost certainly the bloodiest it left a scar that took generations to heal the legend of tauten is left to his by the chroniclers some 60,000 men from the rival houses of York and Lancaster fought back it was the culmination of years of dynastic conflict for the English throne known as the Wars of the Roses the bitter hand-to-hand fighting lasted many hours in freezing conditions until the Yorkists won a crushing victory as night fell 28,000 men lay dead or dying when almost 5 centuries later the remains of some of the dead were discovered in the Yorkshire soil it was clear just how terrible that day in March 14 61 had been I think the only time I've ever imagined what it was really like in the medieval world was when I found that Musgrave full of soldiers and it was so obvious it was so apparent how much these people had suffered that as I was literally troweling away of these people you just could not help but thinking good grief these people suffered so much that was not a good way to die the victory at Taunton brought Edward the 4th to the throne and ensured Yorkist dominance for many years until the wheel turned once more and the dynasty was brought to an end in 1485 with the defeat of Edwards brother and successor Richard the third whatever else the reputation of England's most controversial Nanak it seems Richard never forgot the sacrifice so many made on the battlefield that saw his brother become King nothing remains on the surface now to mark the battle the stone cross is a 20th century edition yet Richard the 3rd himself is said to have been in no doubt as to how important Alton was to his family's cause it meant a lot to Richard the third because his brother was made King here now this was the place where the Yorkist dynasty formulated all their ideas and their hopes and wishes and became the kings of England they were the Edward the 4th Richard the third and so this place was everything to them on becoming King Richard immediately set about commemorating the sacrifice of the Yorkist soldiers Richard wanted to put this in stone he wanted to build a memorial chapel and in the village account he did that he raised this lovely apparently gorgeous chapel very sumptuous good said yet of this sumptuous chapel it seems there's now no trace it's one of the greatest riddles of the whole town story one of the remaining mysteries about the Battle of town is connected with the memorial chapel the trouble is we don't know where it is for such a grand structure that meant so much of the Yorkist industry how can it disappear completely and that's one of the things we needed to find out where had the chapel gongsu archaeologist Tim Sutherland is determined to solve this centuries-old mystery he's been linked with the story of tauten for almost two decades it all began in 1996 when he was called in after developers working at Town Hall made a grisly discovery we were very fortunate in town in that when the building was being replaced they dug new foundations and they dug deep enough to actually uncover human remains the builders had discovered the last resting place of some of the tauten dead the only mass grave from a medieval battle yet found in Britain these things are incredibly rare a lot of mass graves are buried very deeply under the soil usually the buried in places where they are not going to be disturbed there were approximately 50 skeletons in the grave each one a snapshot of life from half a millennium ago time was limited there were just five days in which to carry out an excavation a team of archaeologists from the University of Bradford was called in including Tim Sutherland no skeletons really brought home what a what a rough life it was you could see by the physique of the people who really robust people they were very strong and of course he had to be they were working on the land they were doing physical hard manual labour a lot of its own they were tough tough people compared to us these people have been killed fighting or been caught up in a fight so they had evidence of excessive trauma their head wounds and wounds to the body the weapons the the arrowheads for example still exists to lie in the soil working with Tim to help find these traces in the tauten soil was metal detector expert Simon Richardson a metal detector is a perfect tool it's the eyes under the ground if you like Simon has decades of experience in metal detecting and he works alongside archeologists adding an extra layer to remote sensing surveys and all the archaeologists out there geo fears and the magnetometers but the metal detector for me goes one step further I can find my new objects things like our heads coins I can cover a lot of ground fast where it could take a kill just weeks months even years to find the artifacts to find things I can find with my metal detector and then I will complement their survey once they started digging Simon had already spent many years developing a skill on all kinds of sites including met evil battlefields if you're on a medieval site you never quite know what's going to come up next and can be absolutely thrilling over the years Simon has found a wide array of artifacts from Tallinn each one carefully GPS logged it's just a sod chair it would have gone on the end of a leather scabbard my medieval sword was like almost filigree work at the top decorative pattern but that has been cut through with a fine edged weapon you see where they blurred a stop there so this has probably been on the end of the scabbard alongside somebody's lower leg and something's taking a swipe at it with it with a sword and actually could cut the artifact through and probably the chaps leg as well many of the finds are grim reminders of what men faced on the day of the battle yeah this is a this is what a medieval bomber would have shot in there in the heat of battle so this particular Arrowhead and I could surf for certain has been stuck in a body and the body is rotted and the other had fallen out with a large number of other ones from the recorded positions of the artifacts tim has been able to build up a detailed plot of exactly where the main contact areas were during the battle it was the first survey of its kind in Europe and it enabled him to interpret the events of that day in 1461 it's difficult to follow us to imagine what a medieval battle was like we're quite soft in the great scheme of things we do not attack each other with big clubs or with big machete type implements and so of course we grow up with a very safe feeling but in the medieval period it was different medieval battles were relatively common or medieval conflict was at least so you've got the formal Lancastrian armor here lined up behind us here we've got the formal Yorkist army lined up on that Ridge the Yorkist slowly move forward put in line the battle began with both sides unleashing thousands of arrows because the wind is in the Yorkist favour when the Yorkists lose their arrows they go further and actually managed to hit the Lancastrian soldiers the Lancastrians loose their arrows and because the winds against them all their arrows fall short it's quite a major tactical achievement if you can get your enemy to move away from their standing position they're almost certainly going to lose the office they can stay put the Lancastrians can either withdraw or they can attack and at this point they are numerically superior so they decide to attack now the line Cashion's are moving off their fixed position and have to travel down the slope into the valley bottom to meet the Yorkists and this is where they formally engage as two armies the deadly stalemate continued until late in the day Yorkist reinforcements arrived and tipped the balance against the Lancastrians we finally broke through fled all of the landscape just full of people fleeing in all directions some people tried to get to Tadcaster to the river crossing some people just try to make it through all the marshes across all the rivers from here onwards you're getting people being hacked down in the landscape everything was decimated the people were being killed the houses were being burnt everything was being looted it's possible that the men buried in the mass grave were killed during the chaos and carnage of the route it was in this war ravaged landscape that Richards new chapel once stood it's a huge area though and trying to find buried remnants of a single building could be difficult Tim's been surveying this landscape for years now so with magnetometry and geophysics he's gradually built up a picture of what lies beneath the surface matching this with documentary accounts he's found that at the time the chapel was built Richard the third also sanctified this area of the battlefield some of the dead were cleared off the middle of the battlefield again very soon after Richard became King of England and he did that presumably to sanctify the ground he take the burials off the unconsecrated ground of the battlefield and put them here in an area we know was consecrated ground because there was a chapel here before the Battle of town Chapel Hill seemed at first to be the right place to look but it turned out not to be as simple as that so over the last 15 years we've covered this whole field in geophysical survey and excavation importantly we've excavated some of these features so the whole of the top of Chapel Hill here has been excavated we know that this is a plain field covered in medieval field systems and there's nothing that remains of a chapel or any structure out there the only bit of Chapel Hill now that we haven't looked at intensively is inside the garden let's face it this is the only place left where it can be we've looked everywhere else so it's not here then there's gonna be no trace of it the area Tim's now focusing on is within the grounds of town hall itself known as Chapel Garth it's worth a try the hall wasn't built in 1461 but the site was in the battle area the defeated Lancastrians almost certainly retreated through here to help out tim has enlisted Helen Goodchild from the University of York she'll carry out a ground penetrating radar survey to try and give an idea of where to dig it's not the first time tim has carried out archaeology at the hall in 2002 and 2006 more burials were found he and Simon dug beneath the building itself to recover the skeletons just like a forensic crime scene you're trying to pick out little elements about how each person died or thought but you're trying to do on a massive scale where there could be hundreds or thousands of people doing the exactly the same thing at the same time it gives us an insight into the medieval mind the medieval way of doing things and also the mayor or the way of medieval death I think the important thing for me when we analyze for example a medieval skeleton is is to give them something back they have probably given everything they had for somebody else at a moment's notice in theory your Lord could come and say right excuse me we're going to war drop your farm tools and off we go and it was a rough existence for most people actually still more burials were found under the driveway at the front of the horn throughout the project every skeleton was painstakingly removed and conserved by trained osteology Marlon host was there right from the start at Kings Manor home to the University of York's Department of Archaeology Marlon examines some of the skeletons when we were excavating the grave we were trying to unpause Voula every single skeleton and work out which bands belong to which skeleton and the only reason that was possible because every single person on that site excavating that grave was a trained skeleton expert and osteolysis the sheer number of skeletons in the pit made it hard to make sense of the position of one created a misunderstanding about how the individuals may have been killed it appeared as if one skeleton had the arms tied behind their back and of course that had massive implications with regards to the interpretation of this grave because it suggested then that perhaps at least one if not all of them were prisoners the interpretation that there were prisoners executed during or after the battle is a myth that's dogged the story of the excavations yet careful recording of each individual bone meant this could be disproved this myth that have been created about this possible prisoner and could be dispelled by the fact that um we closely analyzed the skeletons and we realized actually we'd recorded one arm twice and one of the arms of this individual that looked as if he'd had the arms tied behind his back one of those arms actually belonged to somebody else and had therefore been recorded twice so that myth was completely destroyed analysis showed that that almost every skeleton carried some evidence of violent injury the grim reality with the medieval age of chivalry the general opinion was that the Battle of tauten and probably all in medieval battles were actually quite chivalrous and that they were very honorable and it's quite a romantic in a way it was quite shocking to a lot of people they're sort of gory facts that were revealed through our analysis that this wasn't chivalrous at all it was a really bloody battle that people probably had that red mist effect where they couldn't exactly control what they were doing any more than when in charge exactly of what they were doing it was just hacking around one another the for skeletons removed from beneath the dining room of tauten Hall showed the signs of a hard life spent soldiering most of the individuals who we've analysed from the battle of tartan we're aged usually between sort of 18 and 45 this individual here was buried in a grave on his own he's aged 36 to 45 what is obvious is that this person was quite fit and muscular as well the men who fought the Battle of town who are mostly in the prime of life yet their bones carry physical evidence of violent death often from multiple injuries this individual is got six skull injuries some of the most minor is this superficial stab wound but there's also if you can see here a triangular cross-section of a much more deep penetrating M stab wound and then a large cut here which you can see as enter this area and all of these have caused fracture lines that are emanating from them if you turn the skull around you can see that there's another stab wound here and another cut wound here in this area so this person had a blow to the left side of the skull probably three stab wounds to the back of the stress skull and one to large cuts to the back inside of the skull as well some of the trauma marks are small and easily missed but we've careful analysis it's possible for mullen to interpret how they came about so they're actually joule parallel cuts into this pelvis we've got a little mark here on the inside of the pelvis and if we turn this bone over we can see that there was probably a blade or perhaps even an arrow that went into the left side of the hip and penetrated the bone more than one of the skeletons has unusual blade trauma to the jaw this led again to interpretations that the men had been executed or finished off by having their throats cut so this individual has actually also got a cut there on the door in exactly the same place as the previous skeleton and but a much deeper cut that's actually come from the sort of front and the side and then bone has splintered off upwards and downwards on the lower jaw it's difficult to know how exactly this came about there are many ways to get injured in a medieval battle the other trauma this individual suffered is not as obvious as in the first skeleton but she actually has just this area here which is affected of course by by a blunt instrument and therefore the just the impact su head protection one of the skulls carries an injury that was evident straightaway as it was excavated it's one of the most horrendous found on all that out and skeletons this injury here was noted immediately on site and doing excavation when his skull was exposed it's a cut that's come from above and the left-hand side of this individual and actually NCS it was probably the tip of a sword which severed this person's lip and maxillary bone here and also his teeth I think it must have come from the left side and above marlyn also found that some injuries seemed to have happened even without the impact of a weapon these men may have led hard lives and been used to fighting yet this didn't stop them experiencing terror in a battle like tauten so this person has fractured the first molar in their mouth and this has occurred before death a man we spoke to saw Dias who would currently be am fighting they said that they're in the midst of battle they clenched her teeth to such a degree that it actually causes fracturing of the Crown's of the teeth of these four skeletons three had been buried together in a triple grave it seems possible that brothers sons fathers or cousins may have faced battle together that day in the snow these two individuals who are on this table and this individual here were together and buried in a triplicate grave and it's quite interesting that these all three have got a minor genetic trait in common and that's a little anomaly in this spine the fact that these are all very very similar could potentially suggest that they were related back at the hall the remote survey around chapel Garth is complete the hunt for the chapel is proving more difficult than even Tim imagined a physical survey doesn't show anything that looks like buildings on this part of the hill there's one last place he wants to look the radar survey showed up a small anomaly under the garden at the front of the hall now with all the other options exhausted he tries one last throw of the dice it's the only place it can be is very close to the town hall the present building and so by carrying out the survey in the very close proximity to the hall hopefully we'll find some evidence the survey data shows what might be building remains but they might also just be old flower beds the only way to find out mr. dig Simon joins up again with Tim to help they're working right by where some of the skeletons were found yeah worked on the battlefield for 35 years mostly metal detecting work I've done a few surveys with Tim where we do test pits and some magnetometer surveys but it's just it's just an area all of it's not long before Simon begins finding rubble which indicates building work at some stage in the halls past it looks like old features were removed and buried here under what's now on the front lawn everywhere we've dug there is like a lens of this rubble material that's been spread over the whole site imagine a modern building site what they do is they come in they dig the foundation trenches and anything that's around that they dig through to make the foundation trench you just get spread around on the surface and then what they do is they put the modern building inside the foundation trench the level is all off and then they come around they'll cover all in topsoil so it looks pretty so one of the demolition layers gets spread around the whole of the area of town hall and that includes some of the molded cluster work from some of the old Nate the rooms inside the heart of the hall and then you'll get some stonework so far most of this seems to be either very early or 17th century much later than a building of Richard the thirds time Tim you got one minute please have a look at this look at this not really fine limestone block there who's gonna talk max on it look yeah that's nice that's 45 degrees it's got a sham Ford Edge on there look see the shelter yeah that's really fine limestone so this is more of the stuff we're looking for yeah it's squared I'll find it's been told well it's more of the quality that's really fine is that they still got the tooling marks it's going across there so a chisel just got to polish it so we're getting some different type of quality building material again yeah definitely maybe the edge of a windowsill and that's without a doubt a nice piece of tools corner there the stone fragments are the first real clues they're found evidence of what looks like a medieval building somewhere here but with no foundations or walls still in situ it's difficult to be sure could they be from Richard the thirds chapel where is rich to the first chapel it's a very good point because it's somewhere tantalizingly close to this site it's so close you can almost smell it because it's nowhere else we've looked on top of the Chapel Hill with look north and south with protest pits in we've done geophysical survey this is the only location where there are medieval buildings the fines encouraged him to begin working out what form Richard's Chapel might have taken no illustrations or plans exist so to get an idea of what a 15th century medieval chapel built by a king might have looked like Tim heads to Warwick Richard Beecham 13th Earl of Warwick was one of the most powerful noblemen in England in the 15th century after his death the family memorialized him by building an entirely new chapel here in the Collegiate Church of San Mary's it's one of the most opulent chapels still surviving from the time of the Wars of the Roses this was built just before the Battle of town and is built over the period that encompassed the Battle of town but one thing we don't know about the chapel at town is how big it was was it was it on this scale or was it significantly small or was it half a small or a quarter a small was it more of a private little private chapel from one scale we've got this very large expansive building which is a junction Chapel but next to it on the side of it we've got what's known as the Dean's Chapel and this is on the other scale and this is all you really need to say prayers for the dead the quality screams in which case we need to consider how this fits in with our story of town because obviously we've got what is essentially a Royal Chapel where Richard the third commissioned a chapel at town how are we expecting something along the size and scale of this here and it's almost inconceivable that something like this could disappear and nobody would ever see it again so is it considerably smaller we've got a very small private chapel a touch to the Beecham chapel here which is basically enough room for a priest to say prayers which is all you really needed if you're praying prayers for the dead continually which is what a champion chapel is supposed to be all about so we're somewhere between the two we've probably got a quite a largest chapel somewhere at town that's disappeared but it's somewhere between this ground the building and the little private charter chapel were to try to narrow it down between the two Tim needs some expert advice at King's Manor Antony massing ttan sex out the finds he's a building's archaeologist and specializes in the techniques and styles used in medieval stone masonry there were buildings at tauten earlier than the battle in 1461 and much later from the 17th century on Richard the thirds prestigious Chapel is known to have been started during his two-year reign from 14 83 to 85 so Tim needs to date the stones to roughly the end of the 15th century so are we talking post-medieval sort of Jacobi and early Jacobi or are we talking about a medieval late medieval period and then we need sort of status how good is the quality of this is it top quality medium or pretty poor straightaway Antony identifies the fragments that's the gem of a window so it's the vertical right on the side yes I presume this is a glazing bar yeah the jamb is the stone frame of the window the glazing bars supported the leaded stained glass panels it looks in keeping with a church but one grand enough to have been built by a king yeah yeah this is this is very fine I mean it's it's it's it's finished really in a nice way and yeah you wouldn't get this except in a high-status building high-status fits with the kind of sumptuous Chapel Richard the third may have built but can it be dated to the right period and this sort of chamfer style is current from the end of the 13th century all the way to the mid 16th it's a really broad range Tim needs to narrow it down maybe some of the other pieces can help that's good news so that would tie that in in theory let's go on to one of the other major ones so for example literal this is amol Ian in a window so this is the stone bit that goes straight up and down the central part of the central point exactly so you have a big opening for a window and then that's divided up by stone bits into individual lights in a window in the medieval period stained glass panels were usually fairly narrow because otherwise the soft leading would bow under the weight mullions strengthened the windows and divided their glass I mean you've got glass here and glass here but we don't know if you had another one over here and over here to make it a really wide window we can't tell from just one p.m. so the molding profile here is this diamond pattern and that diamond pattern is most common in the 15th century again this pattern does sort of appear in the 13th and the 14th but really its heyday is the 15th century so that is very cool to see of this is it's a beautiful quality it's fine quality it's really finished off well so it's not particularly fancy in terms of its ornamentation of molding profile but when they finished it they finished it very nicely so they're all high-quality it's not just any old the fragment seemed to fit with a building of the chapel status and Anthony can detect more clues from their condition I mean this is nice as the day came the data Mason finished with it and then they put this nice lovely very thin skin on so that it could either be just stand there be white to be very nice or be or be painted so this is the side that's being presented to people inside whereas if you look on this side interesting them that's definitely real fur isn't this I mean much rougher this has been sitting outside for a little while if this is Rich's chapel then this was built in 1483 474 mm-hmm there's much evidence here that indicates that it's absolutely of that time the evidence points to the right date now can they back this up with anything about the shape or style of the window I would initially have said this is a corner of a windowsill and this is the inside you can't tell if this is necessarily a head or a silly without finding a piece of stonework that has a slight curve to you you're not gonna be able well what I might be able to tell because there is this one I mean we're talking about very very slight that's the only bit of curve that I can find anywhere in any of this my initial feeling on this one is that that's been cut that way nice to know because I I think I'm seeing a little bit of tooling not maybe yeah yeah it's so nicely finished here that I I'm pretty sure that's intentional the fragment seems to hint at arches that just how tall or wide the whole window was can't be judged without more evidence but there's one more thing Anthony can tell these fragments aren't reused so this is primary ruble this is this is primary and it's not been reused primary fifteenth-century stonework not broken up for walls or infill nor as weathered as might be expected if it had stood for hundreds of years in the elements tim begins to suspect what might have happened to the chapel i'm pretty certain that this ties into a period of the hall when it was renovated in the nineteenth century now this is a tricky bit because this suggests that somewhere there was an upstanding chapel that was renovated and knocked down in the 19th century we don't have that so we've got a problem there unless of course we're talking about a building that just got buried within another building is that possible those sorts of buildings are really ephemeral and they get repurposed and then once they get repurposed fragments of them can hang around for centuries and bits of them will come out as a building gets renovated so it's entirely entirely possible that in somewhere in the core of the present building you've got the chapel Town Hall first appeared sometime in the 17th century then it was changed and expanded over the years into its current form if it were built over a chapel you'd expect it to follow the normal church alignment east-west yet that isn't the case here the other problem of God is the orientation of the Pleasant Hall is distinctly north-south again what frequently happens is that when a building is repurposed after the sort of Reformation period their focus literally gets shifted around so if you've got a chapel then frequently what will happen is that the building will start to sort of grow off of that east-west north-south and then if you happen to sort of leave a little bit sticking out it's very common that in renovation they'll just lop that off and suddenly turning east/west building into an or if the chapel somehow survived still standing within the footprint of what Snell Town Hall then where is it Tim goes back to the evidence of the mass graves on the other burials around the hall maybe very can help him find the chapel if I didn't know the sort of when those burials were from I would say that those burials are younger than the house yes because they're in alignment with the house yes now the burials would have been put in alignment with any sort of chapel that would be on this site I've never seen a building follow a burials alignment a skeletons alignment but I've seen lots of building following the alignment of an older building that they're building on top of the three things that left out of me when I looked at this plan the first thing is that the house respects the alignment of the burials yes and and that means I think the houses alignment is preserving the memory of the whatever building was formerly on this site which it's common I mean that happens when they convert these spaces I put the chapel in this region in the central Block in the central block yeah in the central block and like you said I mean either the house is built in a buts of the earliest houses built and butts up against the chapel so you may have a west wall of a chapel here or the house just in case to the earlier chapel Anthony's interpretation fits with Tim's research after the battle the landscape was sanctified many of the dead hundreds perhaps thousands were recovered from the fields around town with do you care they were reburied in the consecrated ground of Richard the Third's chapel as the centuries passed tauten Hall grew around it until the chapel itself was gradually hidden within it's not in Chapel Hill it's not in the gardens it's not around the hall it's actually partially inside the hall and therefore the evidence we've been looking for is actually inside all the data that we already had it although the whole buildings so for the last 15 years we've been looking for sort of him and it's been there in the one location where there is still a standing structure yeah so this answers one of the main questions about where Talton Chapel went to the fact is it didn't go anywhere it stayed still we're still inside the hall yeah it's unbelievable so that's 15 years you've learned a lot about the context though exactly so now we know the landscape is in and this is at the moment the summation of all this evidence so it really does tie into the fact that it's a richness Chapel is now possibly still existing to a small or greater degree in and around town hall thank you very much absolutely fantastic the years of careful detective work have paid off it seems likely now that Richard the thirds Chappell so long lost to history may have been there all the time I've been looking for the chapel for so long it was one of the primary objectives of stats in the whole of this project Soph it was the story that motivated a lot of people this was a missing Chapel of Richard the third in all the places where we've looked this was probably the last place we'd actually consider finding it's actually structurally standing still there inside another building more than five and a half centuries later the memory of tauten lingers in the Yorkshire field and in there many thousands lost within sight of York's great Minster the dead still [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

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Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, history documentary, documentary history, halloween, halloween documentary, scary documentary 2019, medieval dead season 1, medieval dead full episodes, richard iii documentary, skeletal remains, pagan documentary, plague documentary, plague documentary history channel, buried alive, plantagenets documentary

Id: GQr32QMv5m8

Length: 46min 22sec (2782 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 26 2019