The Lost Flour Mill In Domesday | Water Mill | 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 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 a few years ago the new owner of this sleepy somerset field made a remarkable discovery buried away amongst the brambles and trees she discovered this intrigued she did some research and she discovered that these ruins had once been part of a powerful industrial machine a water mill which could well have been putting bread on the tables of the people around here since the doomsday book but despite her best efforts we still know very little about buckmill so we've been invited here for the next three days to reveal the secrets of this powerful feat of engineering right time to get our noses to the grindstone sorry about that [Music] buckmill lies near the village of stoke trista in somerset we know that the ruins belong to a water bill that went out of use 150 years ago but its past remains a mystery although there is one exciting clue a doomsday reference that suggests beneath the ruins we could find a mill that dates back to the normans so by excavating buckmill we hope to learn just how this powerful mill would have shaped the lives of people around here possibly for a thousand years [Music] what have you managed to discover about it the oldest uh mention that i could find off a mill at stoke twister goes back it goes back to doomsday and we've been to the um records office where we found some old maps like this one here this is a 1782 map and you can see the mill there there's a little drawing of it it's a little drawing but mick it's a pretty big mill it's a bit of a puzzle isn't it it is because this is not an arable area this is not an area where people are growing cereals we're at the bottom end of what was the medieval forest of selwood so you'd expect a lot of trees and grazing and pastured animals but not people growing cereals so why do they need a big meal helen i know you've hardly had a chance to look at the documents yet but have you found any clues so far well no there's not a lot really after the doomsday reference where it's worth tempo which is nothing at all it's not it's no no and there's almost nothing after that until our 1782 map so it's going to be a real detective task to find out what's going on so apart from one doomsday reference there's nothing else until the 1782 map and we've no idea how that ties in with the standing archaeology this is concrete you don't expect me to be spending three days digging a sheep because of the tough terrain our dear fish team aren't able to survey the site so we'll have to rely on our experts to tell us where to dig that must be the wheel pit martin down there we got the back wall there and one of the return walls i think of the water wheel pit i mean that ought to be where our first trench is then yeah i think so yes get the wheel pit cleared and we will know a lot more about the size of the water wheel where the water came on which will give us a good indication of the power how much work it could have done and as we go down through it what we allow you to find in it well we may find some bits of water will some bits of metal work in particular i would think possibly even some timber and maybe some scratch marks on the stones where the water wheels fouled it in the past at some time which will give us a few more clues about its size but that is actually a crucial part of the mill i think so i think it's the it's the heart of the mill really before we can go any further the mill has to be stripped of a hundred years of brambles phil's job will be to uncover the industrial end of the mill by digging down into the wheel pit while at the other end of the building we're hoping to find what we think is the miller's house and the moment the brambles around the wheel pit are cleared we make our first find what we got phil well i asked what he was hoping you tell me some sort of metal casting look but i don't they've got a new brake there look and that's broken there but i don't think that i don't think that fits on there does it what's this no that in it there's a bit in this oh hang on what's that one is it that ah that's him so what's that then any ideas it seems a little bit lightweight for the mill but i can't think what else it could be at this point i'm told identifying mill parts can be a bit of a brain teaser because there were so many bits and bobs of machinery required to get the power of the water to the millstones but we do know our mill is likely to be one of three common types of water wheel the most basic and least efficient under shot wheel or a middle of the range breastshot wheel or the most complex design of all an overshot wheel the whole idea of a watermill must have been a very dramatic improvement anyway because as technological breakthroughs go the water mill was a big one it would have transformed the lives of everyone around it in a way they are the first machines you know up until the time that water mills come in the only power you've got is either human muscles or animal muscles to suddenly harness something like a stream and then of course later on wind power and then of course later on steam and coal it's it's a it's a real breakthrough it's a complete change so it had an enormous impact on people's thinking so i'm going to fit back on back at the wheel pit we now have another piece for our increasingly puzzling puzzle oh wow look at that that's the bit no then what the hell is it then maybe that curve was to do with the actual circumference of the water wheel [Music] with almost no records to go on we'll be relying on our army of diggers to explain the mills past so now the brambles are cleared they can get stuck in [Music] and as phil and martin work their way down into the wheel pit something else has caught phil's eye look there's a cavity opened up in here look there's a piece of curve in metal guys that looks like that looks like part of the wheel phil right now i think we found a bit of a metal water wheel this really is a big discovery and the more of the wheel we find the more it can tell us about the power and importance of this metal ah there it is that's fantastic that's part of one of the buckets of the water wheel that's part of a metal bucket that is the water wheel it is part of the water wheel part of the bottom of the wheel is still in there can you date this design of construction well an all-metal wheel like that is going to be sort of middle of the 19th century around about if you can find me a bit more with a name on it and possibly a date then we'll know middle of the 19th century that would presumably mean that that is the last wheel that was in here when the mill went out of use it's one o'clock day one all the diggers have gone to lunch except phil who is of course a bit of a nut case and down here amongst all this rubble somewhere we think we've got the mill wheel the very heart of all the activity here we couldn't have really dreamt of better in the whole of the three days but the other thing that's really impressing me is the size of this site now we started off with just a few crumpled bits of wall and now we've got all this and if that wasn't enough take a look down there helen what do you reckon that is well at first sight that looks very much like an anglo-saxon comb anglo-saxon this mill is starting to get rather weird that's where the wall is it's just after lunch on day one and we've already found a wheel from the remains of our water mill buck mill the origins of which remain a mystery as all we've got to go on is an 18th century map so it seems that we've been incredibly lucky to find our wheel as they were usually removed when a mill went out of use so phil what have we got now how we got the other side the whale martin that's excellent here's the actual circumference inner circumference of the wheel coming round there and then we've got a bucket there and looks like we've got a bucket coming in there but the crucial thing is we've actually got part of the internal structure of the wheel because we got one of the spokes in there and then we got another one there look another one here and another one back there as well so they're all coming in to that main axle but they've just been cut off have they what they've done before they demolished the mill was they looked at all this scrap metal in the wheel thought we could make use of that so what they've done is they've chopped the wheel off and then when they've demolished the mill all the demolition rubble has gone in on the top of it and the rest of the wheel's been taken away all you got to do is find this name and date on it for me you go away and i'll see what i can do [Music] the mill wheel would have needed a steady flow of water and it should be stewart's job to work out where that would have come from [Music] stuart i would have thought by now you'd have been striding across the landscape not mucking around in sand not exactly playing this time i have been doing a bit of looking at the landscape roundabout uh i thought it would be really sensible to try to understand how the water works in this landscape by making this sam model now on your model you've got a blue line which is presumably a river and a white one yeah i mean what we've got here is basically a valley which comes down here and we've got a stream which flows all down the valley if you want to turn the water wheel in an overshot or a breastshot wheel you've got to get the water higher than the wheel to physically turn it you can't do that in that gentle valley there so what you have to do is to go up the valley until you're on the stream at a point that will be higher than your water wheel and basically cut an artificial channel to lead the water off from the stream bring it along the contour so that eventually it's higher than the water wheel you want to turn is that one that calls elite that's right yeah this artificial channel along here and do you know that we've got that have you found elite yes you can see this going to way beyond the mill weather excavator at the moment it's a deep channel going along the contour so we now know miller's went to extraordinary lengths to get water to the mill but the 1782 map would suggest they also put a lot of effort into their homes and our second trench is now going in over the end of the building we believe is the miller's house [Music] and within seconds faye and raksha hit a rather posh stone floor this little bit here i just want to see what's happening disappearing yeah i think yeah if we just go to that level yep and then we can hand dig the rest of this in the middle of the building tracy is looking for the cog pit which would have held the gears required to transfer power from our 19th century mill wheel to the millstones mick suspects the mills history should go back much further but the big question is this is only what 18th 19th century what's underneath it well yeah that's the problem you see we could end up with a really good plan of an 18th or 19th century mill for which there are hundreds still standing they've all been turned into tea shops haven't they yeah and posh restaurants sort of place you go to you know what we really need to do is to go through underneath this where there are holes in the floor and see whether the 16th 17th century mill with all the fittings and butter and stuff going with it is encased underneath somewhere that's the only way we'll get the early stuff i don't go into tea shops and in the cockpit tracy has uncovered what could be another important piece of the mill's machinery i mean we've got we've got the cog hole here which would have attached to the wheel the cockpit which would have been in here we haven't got it yet okay that's good isn't it yeah but then behind me i think you're gonna like this oh crikey first millstone yeah yeah for millstone anyway a halfway is that in situ there is it well we don't know until we've cleaned around some more the demolition material but it does look very flat it might form the back wheel uh the back wall rather of the cockpit but that should help because the size of it the type of stone the patterning on this will give us the date of it yeah and then we see it coming up down here where james is working we've got the floor coming up great yeah it's starting to really come together so across the site there's a strong picture of the building in the 1782 map emerging all we need now are some solid 18th century fines to tie in with the ruins but the only finds we've got so far are pointing to a completely different era it's all a little bit late for me i mean just looking at this i mean to my semi-untrained eye i mean that looks like an art deco bottle to me very much and you've got this you've got this beautiful blue glass ashtray again looks art deco i mean have you got the idea what date it is this bottle here with its clear glass and the mold team running through the lip is is certainly post 1920 and possibly even later than that it's a technique that wasn't used until the 20s it looks to me like the locals have just basically been using this as a rubbish pit when it's fallen out of use i mean you've got everything you can possibly imagine my household of the period dumbed in there i think haven't you in the night from the 1920s 1930s the archaeology of buckmill isn't proving as straightforward as we first thought so can our 9th century anglo-saxon comb help clear up the mills past it's got these lovely blue green coloured rivets which are what would have held the whole comb together then if you have a look at this inscription on the bottom you can see it says copyright bp 1999 west stowe so my inference is that this was bought in the gift shop at west stowe which is a fantastic place to visit and was perhaps deposited on our site by somebody who came along and saw that it looked like a very ancient place with an ancient wall lovely tree growing the top you know this was the right place for perhaps there so it could come or maybe it was planted by someone who knew we were coming possibly whatever this is not the scene our rather convincing replica comb means we're still stuck in the 20th century in terms of dates this site's really not making any sense at all and the only solid historical evidence that can take us any further back our stephanie's 1782 map and the reference in the doomsday book to there being a mill somewhere in this parish in 1086 which for some reason two of our experts now seem to think might be in a nearby field and i thought what the hell is another league doing cutting across country like yes well the same thought and i i think i'm walking along elite same as you do what it looks like and then you carry on does that make sense to you absolutely as we've walked all the way down that's the bottom of the valley isn't that right that's where the stream should be when he's walking doing that quite nicely what are you guys doing everyone else is about 300 yards over there we've looked at the earthworks and we think this is where the early mill is here but i thought you said that the early mill was underneath the later mill up there this might be another mill i mean everything points to being a mill somewhere where we're standing here at the moment what sort of day 11th century something like that or earlier yeah are they common less than half a dozen have been excavated so it's a real find what an extraordinary day this is turning out to be and it's only day one who knows what else we'll find in this sleepy somerset field maybe we'll get a brush to go with our cone it's the start of day two in somerset where we're trying to get to the bottom of a water mill buck mill spurred on by a doomsday reference we were hoping to find a much older mill beneath it but last night two of our experts had convinced themselves they'd found an early medieval mill possibly our doomsday mill 300 meters to the west so with half our team now shifted to this new site mick and stuart's reputations are already on the line where the leak comes through here and there's a potential that it's still wet down down at the bottom of it it's certainly wet further up so it could get quite dark the only problem is geophys can't see anything emma's done the model now the topography and it looks really nice just looking at hitting plan you can see the leak clearly coming through here she's got the turn as well as she got the turn as well the bank's showing in red but there's nothing here that suggests building to us but we wouldn't expect to see it that was going to be my question would you expect to see a timber lockland door building that's got no occupation no right they might not be able to see any remains of the mill but jiff is help them pick the most likely spot for it to be in so that's where we're putting our third trench we've got the cleanest clay there there's almost you could say there's something there yeah well just looking at the geophysical way you've got that arrow straight elite and the wiggly bit i mean that's classic mill if there's one ear this is where it should be you know if they uncover a mill dating back to 1086 it'll be a major discovery because of the 6 000 water mills recorded by the normans in the doomsday bull only a handful have ever been traced what is it in the landscape that makes you think there might be an earlier mill up there well there's a couple of things first of all this depression we're in is the original stream course the meandering course the stream that comes down the valley seat rises up up here yeah and where mick's heading up here up here look see that terrace he's walking from all the way up there he's walking along it that carries on up this side the valley up into the hills up there and what that leech should be doing is bringing water to me like a mill just about there oh let's make it a bit more dramatic than that yeah yeah here is your theoretical mill right let me explain that in a bit more detail yeah what you find in the landscape is a big leak which starts high up there yeah comes in a nice gradient this is the terrace that mick was walking along just there it comes all the way to here and then it turns a corner and goes back into the stream it's the same sort of principle you've got at that mill so ideally there should be a mill somewhere about there i've seen the gf's there is nothing there no but you wouldn't expect that you see because this is not a site that's lived in it's not going to have halves and fires ovens and so on you wouldn't expect it to show up if it's a timber building we're happy either way you know i mean if it's milk great if it's not we'll have learned something how arrogant and wrong compared to the industrialized buck mill an early medieval mill would have used very basic technology and would have looked something like this built largely from timber all that's likely to remain of it are fragments of wood or traces of post holes so matt and his team are sifting the clay for any possible fragments of mill they can date while mick and stewart's early medieval mill remains a rather wild theory thankfully we do have a real mill that we're excavating phil hasn't stopped digging into the wheel pit at buckmill since he uncovered a section of waterwheel oh come on it's getting quite a lot of this wheel now you've got a lot more showing now than yesterday well that's right you see i mean yesterday if you remember we started to expose the wheel over there but now we're away from the wall look you've got a nice run of the metal wheel running right down in under my feet and we're beginning to get these spokes going right through it's going to be fascinating you've exposed so much more of this now that i can see that my initial thoughts weren't quite right in what way i was thinking that it was a a brush shot wheel turning that way ah and now as you can see from the way the buckets are it turned that way didn't it it's an overshot wheel the water must have come over the top they could only be filled on the downside well you can actually see that here because of the curvature of this bucket here forgive my ignorance but what difference does it make which way round the wheel goes well in a way the direction doesn't matter too much it's where the water comes on to it the fact the water's coming on the top and it's an over shot wheel means it's the best solution it's the most powerful it's the most efficient type of wheel you can have so is that really up in the status and and power of this mill yeah i think we're putting it up where i'd like to see it really it points to this being a an older site with an over shot wheel so this final phase of buckmill is both older and grander than we first thought and martin says he can tell us exactly how powerful it was by crunching the numbers from its measurements old money three foot six new money 1.07 with no fines yet that tell us anything about the previous occupants of buckmill helen has enlisted the help of its current owner stephanie so i've been doing quite a lot of digging about and i found um a couple of references i think quite interesting this is a will of 1703 made by a chap called john bengefield now he describes himself as john bengefield the elder of buckmill in the parish of stoke trista miller so he is not just living at buckmill he's actually defining himself as a miller and he leaves all sorts of bequests he's obviously quite a wealthy man but he doesn't specifically leave the mill to anybody so i think it's being rolled up with the residue that's going to his his wife marjorie here oh yeah which is interesting isn't it so presumably he's leaving the business to her yeah which i think is lovely and then it mentions here my said daughter mary yeah he's leaving her 100 pounds here and i think elsewhere she gets another five and there's another mary benjafield that crops up a bit later now this is a d um dates to 1790. now if you look along this line it says late in the tenure or possession of the said mary benjafield so 1790 it can't be the same one i wouldn't have thought but it could be a a granddaughter or great-granddaughter of john bengefield so we're getting a few names we're beginning to piece it together at the industrial end of buckmill martin is ready to reveal its vital statistics yes we've got the diameter and the width of the wheel about 12 foot diameter three and a half feet wide six horsepower does that make it a big mill or a little milk sort of average average um gives plenty of power for driving a pair of millstones so even though we've got a very big building we've only got a middling size mill which sort of makes more sense doesn't it given the kind of area we're in fit yes but given this type of area where you've got a lot of pasture land it just shows that if you did have a corn mill here it was a very important building so our mediocre mill might have been an important building in the 1830s but the records tell us nothing about the millers who were running it at this time but further back helen has uncovered a little dynasty who ran buckmill for at least three generations from the 17th century the benger fields and at last the diggers could have made some finds that could tie the bengal fields to the remains of our miller's house we're getting quite a nice selection of pottery from under the floor now and some of it's 17th century um which is that yeah things like this it's the local donate earthenware could this tie in with our benjafield family well john benjafield the miller who dies in 1703 his children are born during the 1670s and 1680s so they could well have broken this pottery they could if they were badly behaved enough what else have you got well some of this would actually date reasonably closely to that these fragments here um i could date those to about 1660 to about 1680 or thereabouts i'm getting a little background scatter of earlier stuff that piece for instance is 16th century so that's a little bit early anything else that you can work out from the pottery scatter that you've got it's all more or less the sort of thing you're expecting this part of the the cup is quite nice yeah it's not it's fantastically high status but still a nice piece for the time thanks to the benjafields leaving some of their kitchenware behind we're in the exciting position of being able to connect them to this earlier phase of the mill i'm hoping this luck will have spread to our other site where they've spent all day digging the lumps and bumps in the landscape mick and stuart are convinced contain an early medieval mill they've opened two more trenches up and as mick and stuart are discussing opening another it seems they might still be looking for it the mill's not going to be massively far that way because what they they use the water for the wheel and as soon as they finish with it it's off back down to the street chuck it back in the shop going down there so it's really if it's not in this section here we need to be sampling along this terrace here for perhaps another 30 meters to see if it's in this because it really ought to be in the next 30 meters or so i would suggest why don't we put a trench in that takes in the edge of the elite back along that 20 or 30 meters because there ought to be something coming off that and we'll see it on the edge of the elite if it's there and use the liters after half an hour of our two experts deliberating on where they should dig next how diggers are struggling to share their enthusiasm i can't believe that they've gone to all that trouble to ring the water for no reason you know it doesn't make sense that there should be something yeah to use that water when they get it here doesn't just otherwise it doesn't work so matt and his merry band of diggers now have another trench to open okay helmets on hey yeah are you working up yet oh yeah i fell asleep halfway through i've lost lost the will to live at this point it seems as though the doubt must be contagious because at the site of buck mill phil has just thrown everything up in the air just when i thought it was all coming together so mick is taking a break from his wild goose chase to try and get to the bottom of phil's woes phil last time i was here it was all covered in scrubber look 19th century we've done a hell of a lot of work we have and now it's all complicated is the house at the other end then still a house is that still contemporary i think that's still residential yes yeah but we've still got to actually try and tie in the actual phases of building with what we've got where tracy is yeah and then we've actually got to start building on from that and trying to actually understand what's going on in the phasing over this side and this wall here you see once we get up on the top here yeah we've got a wall coming through here yeah comes through underneath here and goes straight down through the wall pit yeah this doesn't appear to come straight through here look we got this one that comes across there yeah yeah so there's walls everywhere and until we actually look at the the way each wall joins on or or butts up against every other wall we won't understand what's going on in this building it's gonna be tricky in it we can do it somewhere in this area mick and stew are pretty sure that there's a norman mill in fact they've staked their reputations on it well they've looked here and there isn't a norman mill here they've looked over there no norman mill see a trench over there there's no norman mill in that but if you look here well i'll leave you to decide what oh it's mr misery again do you know what that is go on that is a line yeah and see these these are your reputations and they're on it we don't care we don't care we don't we're still confident absolutely has to be the size of the mail we've yeah we've got this leaked we can see it in the ground we can see in the side of the trench we can see it in that trench over there everything focuses into this area in the corner in here i love the way they keep rediscovering the elite we've known about the lead for 24 hours never mind the leak give us the mill give us the time so with only one day left we still have an entire early medieval mill to find and a lot of detective work to do in spite of this the team feel they've earned a treat or as they prefer to call it some experiential archaeology we're rewarding them with some genuine medieval bread and some cheese and because this is somerset they've got some genuine somerset cider as well this is a good version of what the medieval peasant diet would have been like in somerset you know we know they hate after cheese they drank cider and we know they're ground corn to make bread and the upper class people at the white bread which isn't very good for you yeah and the peasants get the brown bread full of bran and stuff which is really good for you there's a good history lesson for you at the end of the day so what are we going to do tomorrow well i mean the story is really really complicated and the thing really we've really got to try and get our head around is the relationship of all those walls because it's a very very complicated story i suppose in the end of the day we should be sorting the week from the charity actually when you come to think of it there are a lot of phrases in everyday use yeah yeah because you come from milling grist to the mill yes yeah the site is a total millstone right now yeah sorry i stopped now this is a serious archaeology program no more of these run-of-the-mill jokes everybody today three beginning of day three here in somerset and yesterday evening everything seemed to be going swimmingly we've got our lovely mill buck mill we knew what date it was what it was for how it worked all that kind of thing that was until the archaeologists started drinking that cider after three glasses they began to have doubts after four glasses they were wracked with doubt they no longer think that all that is all this but why don't they think so and if it isn't that then what is it big what's the problem i think the problem is we've got so many walls we don't know what phase is what at the moment so this isn't all part of one mill oh no clearly not so is it fair to say that this isn't this well in a way but what they've done there is they they've put a facade on a whole mishmash of buildings that were there before that have gradually developed to make it look it's one new build so how are we going to tell the story of the mill or the mills on this site we need to look at the junction and the change of direction of every piece of wall across the site so that if that bit going across to where phil is is he's contemporary he's obviously happy about it [Laughter] he's obviously sorted that right yeah got another phase in here another one another so there's another phase oh i thought it was good news it's bad news really isn't it you've got a lot of work to do and not much time to do it we have we have you've got a lot of junctions to look at all over the place yesterday we were beginning to get a clear picture of the benjafields who lived here from the 17th to late 18th century but the archaeology of the mill is giving our diggers a headache to go with their hangovers because the walls seem to suggest 40 different phases when stephanie invited us to dig her mysterious mill we thought explaining its past would be easy any news i wish it was i mean first thing this morning everything went very very well and we established that in fact we've got two phases of building up on the top there we've got the early phase which is that main block of wall over there and then this later wall here which has been tagged on probably when they put the metal wheel in now we think we can see that this stone that belongs to this wall here is actually later than this wall so that is not likely to be part of the original mill right what it might be is a wall that was put in when they put a narrower wheel in so the current theory is is this wall part of the original mill was there a much wider wheel pit in here and that when they actually put in the narrower wheel they backfilled the cavity with a lot of rubbish which is why there's so much instability and we've got all these cavities right but but there's always a bud there is a bert if we've got a wider wheel we should expect to have a wider hole up there for the water to come in absolutely and at the moment we haven't got it so it was going very well first thing now it's not going quite so well with the inner walls of this building still a jumble of confusion fey and raksha are investigating the outer walls in the hope they'll give us the bigger picture we're looking for the corner of this house so we're hoping it's going to be about where we're actually standing you might have to get rid of some of this though some of our vegetation all this way because we might have to go a little bit that way at the site of our possible early medieval mill matt and his diggers have spent a day and a half sifting through play but have yet to make a single find if you thought life couldn't get any more miserable for them it started to rain the only person who seems unfazed by the many phases of buckmill is helen yesterday's fines are telling her there was once a flourishing family business here well we've got a will of the miller who died in 1703 john bengefield and he leaves a big estate it's worth something like 300 pounds and it includes land as well now i don't think he should have been making that money from the mill did it come from the land maybe this object that i'm just halfway through cleaning really illustrates that because it's a it's a clothing clasp it's got very detailed very well cast decoration and you can probably see in the sunlight that it's got a little bit of silver coating on it so when new it would have looked like silver this would have looked really smart and there's also a tantalising glimpse of another much earlier miller we've got another clue here this dates to the first few decades of the 16th century so it's nearly 200 years older than the 17th century items it's a purse hanger so it would have had a fabric purse hung from this little bar here and the loop would have been tied with strings to the belt so it would have had coins or something like that in there and so it's the kind of thing that you wouldn't have unless you had a bit of money a very much a kind of middle class item and that was also found in the 18th century mill so one wonders if the people associated with the mill were always a bit more middle class than you might expect the scale of the mill house that john benjafield lived in late in the 17th century also points to our mill as being surprisingly posh that is the corner coming through just there perfect we've got the corner of the house and i actually think what i am is the front wall of our house yeah if you actually look just here it's perfectly aligned with that that front doorstep and in front of you is our side wall of the house yeah and in there should be our nice floor this should be a nice flag surface yeah brilliant perfect practice revealing the corner of the mill house has given us a sizeable chunk of solid archaeology it's just a shame the same can't be said for our early medieval mill well you two have given matt a great couple of days haven't you he's happy in his hole what you got matt well we've put this section through the elite area here and you can see this kind of brown silk fill there and then we've got these clay bands the blue clay and the yellow clay bands but i mean that's about it really i mean i'm no mill expert but uh i don't see much you may not be a mill expert but is there anything down there that looks remotely even vaguely like a mill like what i'm prepared to say is there was a water course coming through here there'd be no fines and there's no evidence of any structure or anything like that we're stuffed don't we i don't know i don't know there's always going to be a long shot this time don't don't be like that this is always going to be a long shot we've only got what a meter and a half wide it could be under here it could be down there it's going to be a very ephemeral structure what do we do now i think i think we stop we haven't got time to chase it any further somebody else might come back and look further but there's nothing more we can do yeah i know i've given you a hand clearly they're going to keep on saying there's a mill here and with over 70 years experience between them who am i to argue with them while our early medieval mill is condemned to the clay at the cockpit of buckmill tracy has had what can only be described as an archaeological epiphany yeah i had a real agatha christie moment earlier on come on give us a moment well we have the strange tale of the broken clasp the smash teacup and the careless smoker recount the story to me well we got down to the bottom of the cockpit yesterday yeah and we've got a really well rammed in stone floor down there yeah underneath the floor just at the point where it was being laid we found this it's mid 17th century and would have been some sort of dress fastening so somebody's been standing up here this has broken off and fallen down they haven't found it they've carried on laying the floor so that gives us a really nice date for the laying on the floor then straight away when the floor has been laid before anything's built up no silting or anything like that we have a chappie he's smoking his pipe this is the killer smoker this is the curly smoker and he's smoking his pipe and he's dropped it and he smashed it why is he careless well you can't have a naked flame in the flour milk because the flour will just combust and boom bang as your meal so the only time you could have been smoking was when they were building the walls but then unfortunately the same paul chap he's had his cup of tea and he smashed his teacup and what sort of date is this the cup dates 1660 to about 1680. so that ties in really nicely with the clasp and gives us a good dating for the construction of the first phase of this part of the mill so very possibly thanks to john bengefield and his butterfingers we now know that the earlier phase of the mill was built between 1660 and 1680 but just how he became so wealthy remains a bit of a puzzle because the mill was only average in size and power we don't know how he came to have such a big house unless perhaps he had his fingers in other pies although they've run out of time it seems mick and stuart haven't entirely given up on their early medieval mill let's say 1200 in round figures yeah and that lead is another one like that one like it's elite to bring water to oh no no you said it absolutely no that's exactly which which ought to be there by 1200. and our two top experts have cooked up a theory stretching back a thousand years as to how this landscape could have supported three mills what that points to is a sequence of events in that we've got one system coming down here on this side which is very low technology low gradient to to mix mill down here we've got one system coming down here leading to another mill just here these two are fairly inefficient low technology it's replaced by buckmill up here implying a sequence of three mills it's a fantastic story and we're just gonna have to leave these two mills vivid in the sand because unfortunately we haven't got the time to dig no but i think you know if we came back we'd know exactly where to go now yeah sure phil has finally solved the problem that's been giving him a headache how the water was brought to the mill wheel during the 17th and 18th centuries when a much wider water wheel was in use it's been a real archaeologist trench it's been really challenging it's been wonderful what was the challenge well what we really wanted to try and do was try and establish whether or not there had been a wide water wheel in here before the narrow metal one now to put that metal wheel in you have to block off this wide opening and so what i really needed to do was actually find the proof and the proof is in here we started at the top and we began to and realize that this was actually part of this big blocking and originally we thought it came to here we thought this was going to be a major stone war but the crucial bit of the jigsaw was taking off all the lime scale that covered this part of the wall and you can see here actually now i've got rid of the lime scale that there's a joint running up through here this is part of this major wall that runs down here all of this is blocking that was put in when they put the metal wheel in so what does that tell us about the history of the wheel and the wheel pit well it seems that we had a wide wheel working off a lesser head of water and later on in the quest for more power more productivity in the mill they put in a bigger water wheel an over shot wheel and that way by raising the head of water by ra in banking the pond and getting a bit better head of water coming into the wheel pit they could put in a narrower water wheel so it was more powerful because the water was coming from higher absolutely right with an overshot wheel you've got the best arrangement and because of our archaeologists detective work we now have a pretty good idea of what buckmill would have looked like right back to the 17th century this earliest phase of mill could have been built by john benjafield between 1660 and 1680 at which point the mill would have had a much wider water wheel in the 18th century another pair of millstones were added around the 1830s the more primitive wooden wheel would have been removed and replaced by the cast iron over shot wheel which required fundamental changes to the water supply and wheel pit buckmill had elite bringing water from the stream over a mile up the valley so it would have been a remarkable feat of engineering that supported not only generation after generation of miller but the entire community around them and only this morning we thought we'd be leaving stephanie with a more confused picture of her mills history than when we arrived please we came no it's all been a terrible inconvenience of course i'm pleased you came this has been it's been a brilliant three days in fact i'm really sad you're going what have we learned oh an enormous amount i mean not only about the building that you asked us to come and look at which is all these phases of development and reflects mill development generally but also the whole valley i know you don't like it but we think we've got too many room wheels down there as well that's a real bonus that is if ever you or your horses stumble on a medieval mill in one of your fields i'll let you know yeah because he's getting a bit desperate

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 78,694

Rating: 4.8960395 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, time team, domesday, water mill, archaeology, history team, british history

Id: 32cw0u-SymI

Length: 47min 37sec (2857 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020