The Lost Scottish City Of Roxburgh | 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 it's hard to believe but just 500 years ago this picturesque and vacant pasture near kelso on the scottish borders was the site of one of the wealthiest cities in scotland founded by a king a hub of international trade and holding a key strategic position roxburgh along with barrick sterling and edinburgh was one of the four great urban centres of medieval scotland but whereas the other three are still thriving towns ancient roxburgh simply vanished all that's left of this once great borough are the few decaying remains of its castle so where is it and why isn't this field a buzzing metropolis like edinburgh the answer is we simply don't know there are no contemporary maps documents are scarce and amazingly no archaeologists have been allowed to dig here until now so a whole city virgin archaeology three days can we do it and the clue but whatever happens it's gonna stretch us to the limit [Music] this is probably the biggest site we've ever attempted on time team [Music] nestling in the crook of land where the river tv at joins the tweed it's a mile long and half a mile wide somewhere in here we know is a lattice of streets punctuated with civic buildings churches even a monastery but where do we begin and how on earth can we make sense of something as big as this in just three days mick have we bitten off more than we can chew no i don't think so i mean whenever we come to a site we have a series of choices about what we can do in the time available and that's sort of governed by what we want to know about is what you know what the particular problems that we pose and we could spend 30 years or more here but actually what we're interested in really is about the layout of this you know what where are the streets where were the town defenses where were the churches and buildings within it and we can get a great deal of that without digging a lot of holes actually you know because we can do it from the other sources the geophysics looking at the early maps and particularly this fantastic collection of air pictures colin's got which show all manner of features colin there's an awful lot of activity around it isn't it fantastic what are all these features well here we've got a very obvious one which is the the ditch and bank feature which we can see on the ground and a section across that i think is going to tell us a great deal what's all this stuff here well all these little splodgies appear to be occurring on on church sites and i'd suggested that they might actually be recumbent stone slabs giving hatch marks but stewart suggests uh more precisely that they may be mole hills you've no romance in you what's this here colin this appears to be part of one of the street lines and then the broad areas on either side of that would be where the house lines were yeah so that has to be one of our main targets i think so if we can actually see something of what the buildings were like with all the pottery and stuff that they're using and the dates of that in other words the ordinary sort of people that we're living here absolutely yeah so we really need to geo fizz that area first i think john to get a bit more detail before we start that mark up there is that big ditch that runs up there stewart's already worked out roughly where the patch marks are on the ground and soon we're on the trail of our first target the remains of one of roxborough's main streets which emma appears to be trying to find with a couple of fluorescent light tubes what's it do this is a new dual gradient system john how come you've invested in this kind of stuff isn't the stuff that you used to use any good yes it is this is what you normally see us walking up and down the fields with but what we've got here is a brand new instrument and it does things twice as quickly and it actually looks a bit deeper into the ground as well if we need to because it's got this extra length to it that's right an integral part of the system is on the back here though that's just a counterbalance no no the weight of the water actually balances it and what does this machine actually do it's a magnetometer so what is it rooting for us we're looking at magnetics and so that will pick up rubbish pits ditches and it will give us hopefully a street plan historians believe roxbury started as a small and remarkable town in the late 11th century but its fortunes were transformed when one of scotland's greatest rulers took a special interest in it david the first who became king in 1124 is credited with bringing stability to scotland after decades of internal strife he chose roxborough as his power base he built a castle here and gave the town a royal charter it's basically his principal seat of government he's witnessing issuing most of his great charters here he's holding councils here there are major meetings of church councils taking place here so if we're thinking of it in terms of what might have been roxborough could have been edinburgh yes and there is nothing else quite like it in scotland the fact that we're sitting right on top of a medieval town it's pretty romantic but there must have been hundreds of towns built in the medieval period yeah i mean you're absolutely right the the 12th and 13th centuries was the great time of town foundation town development and in fact most of the places that people think of as small market towns that they might live in or go and shop in were founded at that time but of course that's the difference that they're still there we still use them whereas here you can get a snapshot of what life was like in the uh hasn't been mucked up by all the the post-medieval tudor steward victoria and all those buildings put on top [Music] and we're really lucky to be able to delve into this apparently pristine site because the landowner the duke of roxbury has refused all previous requests to dig here it's a real coup but it comes at a price this is a scheduled ancient monument and we're allowed to dig only 200 square meters of it a tiny fraction of the overall area so every trench must hit its target and for that we're relying on geophys to produce really crisp results why are the long faces well have a look at this tone and this is what john's just produced and he's just describing it himself as trashed and certainly it's not looking like the town plan that we were expecting to see is it not at all what i'm wondering is whether we've got plowing these sort of lines look like old plow lines right right we're expecting a street coming through that sort of angle and there's clearly nothing like that at the moment so what do you think this grey thing is john well it could be the edge of the plowing it's just possible that is the edge of the archaeology is there a hint of summit running across there like that yes we really need to do more survey films you certainly need to come this way don't you if the street's down the middle i thought when we got the first print out we'd see the whole town laid down yeah didn't we all yeah all in all a pretty disappointing start and mick's given john an hour to come up with better results but we don't need newfangled gadgetry to provide all our targets good old-fashioned eyesight was all fill needed to spot the work stone brought up by the roots of this tree it's growing out of an enormous earthwork bank which runs along one side of the site he thinks it's the town's defensive ramparts we've got the bank running across here now somewhere in here there's probably going to be a wall if you get a chance have a look at the roots of that tree over there's about three or four quarters of stone built into the root system and then down here the trench will come down into the bottom of the ditch with a bit of luck we'll get some water logged in stop in the middle of the ditch that's right so trench one goes in here and its contents will be crucial to our chances of reconstructing the layout of ancient roxbury because not only are the town defenses a key feature in themselves they also mark the limit of its extent so john where do you want this hole then 200 yards to the east of trench one the extra hour of gfiz seems to have paid off we've expanded the survey now we have actually got this anomaly running through here and i'm sure that's what's on the aerial photographs so whether that's the road coming through we've got the ditch to the side ignore the lines going that way i'm sure that's later ploughing and this is all disturbance the road if it is a road should come through on this alignment so i think just a small five meter trench at right angles across it so trench two goes in here in a bid to locate a roadside ditch [Music] i think the dig should be where his bucket's going through now [Music] perhaps not quite the impressive target we'd all hoped for but it's a start okay okay until he dies oh absolutely and now john's more confident about his geophys he's in huge demand mick wants to see more of the area around trench too in the hope a street plan will emerge and stuart wants him to have a look at our third target another area of patch marks somewhere on the western edge of the site where should we be stuart on well it really see this roadway that shows coming through here that tree there is is that one over there so you need to be between that tree and the hedge line all that area has got what look like archaeological features in it whatever they are we need to cover as much as we can you might say that like we've got to go right the way up to the fence okay i'm sorry john and his squad are off again looking for another road watch mary once she starts that's it up till now though there's been a lot of looking on this site and not much finding so it's a bit of a relief when matt in trench one finally hit some archaeology we're clearing out his clay and um this perfectly circular uh have just appeared and on the edges of it are actually still very much intact the stuff inside is really loose and you can see it's going straight down so i mean what we got a post which is going to be what gonna be about five or six inches yeah yeah if you look at the stones they come up here in the section stop there and this post hole's right in line with it so it looks like what we might have is a timber structure maybe padded up with this clay bank at the front to make a really firm compact frontage to the bank with all this gravel yeah flying in at the other side okay then fraser this already looks convincing as a stout defensive rampart the next step is to find and excavate the ditch that goes with it and fill soon on the money and now look that that's going into the deal dan's also beginning to uncover a ditch in trench two though his is a more modest roadside ditch he hopes it'll eventually lead us to a street with houses along it dan is there anything at all there is there is we do indeed have a ditch i've got an edge coming in here and bridget's got the other edge over there okay you've got a ditch but is it a ditch for a road well john's pretty adamant than it will that it will be unfortunately we'll have to extend the trench a little bit further in that direction to be absolutely sure about that are these fines from this trench dirt they're from the dutch film good collection of 12th 13th century medieval pottery 12th and 13th is what we're after isn't it what's this that's uh from a straight-sided cooking pot and that's why it's smoked blackened on the outside probably stood about that high so are all these pieces of pot domestic basically yes but not necessarily from here they could have been well thrown from us yeah but they're not very worn i mean i don't think they've traveled very far so that implies to me that they've come from a house nearby i wouldn't normally get very excited about drab stuff like this but right now these cooking pots are just great evidence we're closing in on the street and the houses along it which is just the boost we all needed as the first day draws to a close the team go into overdrive in the trenches the archaeologists are digging like men and women possessed stewards tramping all over the countryside looking for more earth works and the geophysicists have got not one but two new sets of results the bad news is the area over there nothing but ploughing cutting into whatever's there yeah very like what we had earlier isn't it but look at this this is where phil's trench is here's the defenses look at the regular pattern we're starting to get inside i think this is really nice now yeah that's much more like a town plan isn't it okay if this really is good what are we gonna do with it tomorrow well i think we should expand this trench not only to to get the rest of the road but to go alongside the road and see if there's you know the buildings that are producing this and hopefully we'll get shed loads of this from the actual building alongside the road so have we turned the corner like mick says or are we going straight down the archaeological pan it's his neck that's on the block are they going to have to start sharpening the guillotine tomorrow join us after the break beginning of day two in our search for the ancient city of roxbury somewhere underneath all this grass and yesterday evening john gator said he'd got some good news and some bad news the good news was that the geophys over there was looking really good so we were going to extend the little trench that we'd got there into something really big the bad news was that the gfs here was really indistinct so nine o'clock and what's happened we've got no work going on there at all and we've got this really long 15 meter trench over here shouldn't this trench be way over there no this trench is exactly where it ought to be tony remember i showed you the air photographs yesterday how you got these clear marks that look like a roadway yeah yeah and there are also features coming off it which might be either back bound just to properties or buildings but john the geophys was really not good at all here was it well we've got lots of problems with the ploughing that i talked about but it's it's really clear look it stops on this line basically between the tree and the gate over there the plowing comes up to there but on this side we're clear and if i look at the geophysics now i've got a bit more time i can actually start to see the road features so is it fair to say you've re-examined your evidence and found stuff you didn't find last night well i suppose so matt what have we got in the trench well if we start at that end you see we've just clipped the edge of the road that's where the compact gravel and sand is coming from there this large dark area is where the ditch is the roadside ditch and then we're on to these stones here these large flat stones some kind of boundary to the road and hopefully as we go up here and clean up this end you might find the buildings and stuff coming off the road any fines derek more medieval pottery tony first piece of imported pottery that's from yorkshire that's yorkshire where from england interesting enough mostly this time from glazed jugs rather than cooking vessels so what does that tell you that suggests to me it's slightly later than the material we were looking at yesterday why are jugs later than plates because cooking vessels become they start making them out of iron later on so what's all this starting to tell us we've got this roadway and we identify roadway over there where trench two is we'll have some idea of the layout between them and what sort of units people might have been living in fantastic but the big news of the morning and i mean huge is what phil's discovered in trench one am i right in thinking you're stood in the bottom of a huge defensive ditch you're absolutely right this is one edge coming right up here and then it runs down into the bottom and then climbs up to an enormous bank on that side it is an awful lot deeper than the earthworks suggests it must be what 10 feet at least it's a very very impressive ditch if you're an attacker or anybody outside looking at somebody on the inside they are very very well defended so do you know yet what's going on inside the ditch in terms of the defenses ah let me come up and i'll show you that now you see the ditch is going to be rising up here and then just beyond the edge of the ditch which we think will be somewhere there we've got this beautiful post hole in there funnily enough we've got another one just back there now this post here has actually been burnt you can see the way the clay around it has been reddened by heat now that it's beginning to look as though we've actually got some sort of timber framing within the the front of the bank and that would perhaps explain why this one's burnt and that one isn't because it would have been in the middle of the rampart so we can now put the first landmark of medieval roxburgh back on the map these huge defenses ran along the one edge of the town not naturally protected by water if attackers managed to negotiate the deep and difficult ditch they were then faced with a stout wall built from clay supported on a timber frame and clad in stone it would have been an impressive barrier and as the evidence of burning suggests it was absolutely not just for show in fact the city was besieged on numerous occasions the most traumatic period in her history was between 1296 and 1318 when she found herself caught up in edward the first's wars against the scots attacked and occupied by each side in turn her inhabitants faced almost daily threat of invasion so someone in 1313 when the scots deliberately attack during the feast day so the english will be taken unawares and they seem to be quite right what happens is so james douglas dresses his men up in black cloaks and gets them to go on hands and knees it's nightfall and the sentries on the walls think that they're looking at cattle straying they break and overwhelm the few of the garrison that were still armed a few escape into the great tower but they don't have supplies they don't have weapons and they give up after two days all this begs the question why was roxborough so desirable of course its strategic position in the borders is part of the answer as is its political importance as a royal borough but the real reason is money it's in one of the most ideal locations for the production of two of the most desirable commodities of the middle ages wool and cattle hides now they're being produced in bulk in this area you've got some of the biggest corporate producers of the middle ages and they're being traded probably through the great fair of st james's that's held here end of july beginning of august every year where you have traders merchants coming from all over northern europe dealing in the wool and then it is traded down from roxborough out through beric and broxborough really gets rich on this the sale of scottish hides and wool to flanders was in fact so lucrative that roxburgh became one of the wealthiest cities in scotland on a par with edinburgh mix becoming increasingly confident that the layout of this medieval money-making machine is within our grasp he thinks the street plan emerging from the geophys results is actually the very heart of the town and this is where he wants everyone to focus he's asked john to survey yet more of the area he's sanctioned a massive extension to trench two which he hopes will expose a large chunk of street and some of the houses along it [Music] and he's dispatched carrenza to search the medieval documents for references to the people who lived there but dark forces are at work in the shape of stuart ainsworth just keep going along this this track for a while then isn't this taking us away from everything he appears to have kidnapped john and forced him to drive to the other end of the site about half a mile away to tempt him with a completely new target you can see how it dips off here towards the fence and then beyond it's a patch of nettles it's sort of all in this this area here oh no not where all the nettles are indeed so you're joking and stuart thinks they're covering something much more exciting than mere streets and houses he thinks this isolated spot could be the site of saint james's church one of the most important and substantial buildings in medieval roxburgh its rough position is marked on 17th century maps but its precise location has long been a mystery i don't know whether it's those earth works it might be further around there it might be further around there we don't know specifically on those earth works you don't like metals do i no it's just the fact we're just starting to get a good plan we think of the town yeah and if we stop halfway through and come over here i i prefer to argue the case with mick john to mick yes john listening mick i'll just put stewart on we've got a bit of a dispute here he doesn't want to do what i want him to do we've got a series of earth works down here that i think might be since jake j at the sanderson james's church now i'd like to have some geophysics over it to see whether we we can confirm that and i thought this uh possible church was sort of marked on the map stew you can narrow it down to a rough location but there's a series of earthworks and we don't definitely know that they're the the church itself hang on we've got another protagonist coming in can you hang on just a moment i want to work with meg if we don't know where this place is on the map there's such a huge area i know i know i mean we could have actually done a 20 meter square factor it's a very hard call isn't it it is it is really yeah oh well there's the block there's your neck i thought this church was rather more fixed than it is if it can be one twenty meter square that'll hit part of it we go with it otherwise we can't afford the time to do it at the moment i think if we go beyond the fence in the end stewart reluctantly selects a small patch of the earth work for john tergia fizz and for the time being everyone's happy again well relatively [Music] oblivious to all the strategic wrangles going on around them kerry and matt have been quietly scraping away in trench three well we felt we were looking for it looks like we've got a building at this end so you would actually be standing inside the house so we've got the beginnings of the town yeah how do you know this is a building and not just a load of old rubble well the stones are fairly mistaken but if you look down underneath your feet down here we do actually have small pieces of mortar which would have bonded these stones together and if we move along this way the edge of the house here we've got rather nice little gully way here just here yeah that would have been used to kind of loose out anything from from the house clean it up better still the house is full of very striking pottery face mask jug that's lovely isn't it what would it look like i think probably more than one face mask maybe two or three um handle spout on one side our first real evidence of international trade is this pottery which is french that's again from very high quality glazed water or wine jugs these pots would have been expensive and as matt digs down the size and construction of the building confirm it was once home to some of roxbury's wealthier citizens along this side here we have this wall possibly an internal wall and you can see it's these stones bonded with this lovely yellow mortar there right yes and this is clearly the wall that we we picked up in in the air photograph would that be the other side of it there then i think it could well be and perhaps we've got a row of them yeah so that'd be what that'd make this house about what 20 feet wide in just a few hours mats put our second key feature firmly on the map a road that no one ever knew existed which was lined with large high-status stone-built houses it's like a posh suburb inhabited perhaps by people who'd made good in the wool trade phil though is after more ordinary folk and in a now massively extended trench too he thinks he's getting very close to them hello how are you getting on here oh pretty well do you want to come and have a look well here we go this road we think it's probably running sort of more or less north south really then as we come this way we come over this bitty hefty uh roadside ditch now as we come on again we've got a much narrower ditch we think that might be a fence we've even got features in here that are going perpendicular to the main road so we might actually have buildings fronting onto the street right and that road is running north south that's right well in that case it must be market that but we street there are two main streets in roxbury one of them runs east west that's king street and the other one runs north south and that's market street and i suppose you're now going to tell me you know exactly who lived here and what their addresses were well actually i can give you some of those seriously i mean possibly with a bit more research we could try and work out whose tenement this is well then we are beginning to get the archaeology associated with these people because look at this one i mean we've got a big stone there and another one there we reckon this might be a well or something no then if we can get some fines over that we can perhaps tell you what sort of lifestyle your inhabitants were living you do your job and i'll do mine right brilliant which fulfill means extending trench two yet again to reveal more of the house i hope someone's keeping an eye on the square meterage because we can't be too far off our limit karenza's job's a bit less physical but that doesn't make it any easier why have you drawn all these people's names on little tatty bits of paper well what i'm trying to do is get my head round this sort of thing margaret the wife of roger had a chance william bosville adjoined on the north side a tenement belonging to the abbott of melrose lay on the south side of that which belonged to the wife of the pious roger no one's attempted this before and i can see why it's a brain ache we'll put him here right a tenement belonging to the abbot of melrose lay on the south side of roger so make the most of it there's the river john evidently won his battle with the nettles on stewart's mystery earthwork but the things you're probably interested in the high resistance here there's a certain regularity to it when you say our resistance that means it might be stone below the ground there yeah it could be stolen it could be rubble well rubble would be good because we know from the documentary sources that the church was robbed and gravestones were taken away and so on and what you might expect to see is rubble thrown back into the place has been digging so that potentially could be very exciting couldn't it as st james's church is our best bet for a really solid bit of architecture we all think it's worth a trench which mick decides to put in here [Applause] and bingo just inches under the surface is a massive stonework another big dress turning up there which bridgette appears to be excavating single-handed this is what i love about male archaeologists what they come into the trench to help and then they just stand there with a shovel and just watch the machine eventually the blokes get the point and everyone's soon scraping at the stonework yeah sort of architectural stone you might expect from the church yeah it's everywhere the individual pieces are huge and look as if they're either floor slabs or gravestones and amidst these megaliths kerry's uncovered the find of the day it looks as though it just dropped out of the sky and landed there that's fantastic can we come in yeah come on in what do you think it is well the shape of it it's a wedge shape it could be a rosewater from an archway or something of that kind remind me what a voir is it's one of these segmental blocks that fits into an arch looking at it though you've got this stepped base that could be the base of the cross what here here yeah so it could actually be the cross is the tree on which christ crucified do you still get a thrill after all these years when you find something as beautiful as that every time we find something like this especially this is absolutely brilliant end of day two and what a cracker it's been every trench has produced fantastic archaeology and we can now add the main road through town market street and james's church to our plan we're not celebrating yet though because there are swathes of this site still to explore and loads of new targets including an area the archaeologists are calling the old borough where the founding fathers built the city's very first houses and there's a big problem all we've got left is 50 square meters which is about half the size of this trench so where should we put in our final trench join us after the break beginning of day three in our hunt for the lost medieval city of roxborough and we've opened up a new front i think do the resistance first we're after the old borough a small pocket of the town's earliest streets and houses home to the city's founding fathers but with no guidance from the aerial photos or documents pinning down its location in this huge area is going to be hard what would be your hunt as to where we should be looking [Applause] slap bang in the middle of that field can you see that earthwork there alongside the river what did this long strip of appeal here yeah so i think that was part of the defenses you might put around the edge of a small town next to the castle but actually just as we're flying around it it is very narrow and it might even be too narrow they might have had to come out onto k brave it would have to be on the top of there if you've changed your mind already just to make sure we circle the site once more and stuart spots a third possible location i like the area between where james's churches that we've located and the castle over there chase your mind again it's not easy is it no it isn't ideally we'd like to dig a hole in all three of stuart's sites but we've only got time to geophys one so mix plumped for k bray an area of high ground between the castle and the main site and with every passing minute the pressure's building henry just come here a second will you right tony last night you told me that we were allowed to dig 50 square meters so we could possibly have squeezed two trenches out of that yeah is it 50 square meters things have changed i've reassessed it we're actually down to 20. 20 square meters that's all we've got left that's it and we've got three sites and we've got to make a decision within the hour thanks mate okay one bombshell at the start of day three is bad enough but stewart's just dropped another he thinks the stonework in trench four while clearly ecclesiastical isn't part of the church building itself of course we've got to find out what it is part of but in the meantime stewart's identified another earthwork about 20 meters away which he thinks is a much stronger contender that's the feature that's found in the trench if you do a sketch of these earthworks here you've got this lovely regular east-west platform we've got a big bank out here which seems to define an enclosure which might be a churchyard or something and at first pass i would have thought this would be a good candidate for the primary church building it's now 11 o'clock our hours up and if we don't dig our final trench now then we never will oh and henry's just told me he's recalculated yet again and it isn't 20 square meters that we're still allowed to dig it's 17 and a half now mick the archaeologists have given me four different potential locations for this final trench you've probably got half a dozen other ideas we've got to make a decision don't we we have yeah yeah and we've just been discussing that and i think we're duty-bound to put one in up on cabrera up here why do you say duty-bound well because it was in the research design to see whether there was the early borrowers up here but you don't even think that the old borough's up here do you think the sky you said it was somewhere else i think it's one of three possibilities there's cay bray there's the area between the church and the castle and there's the area immediately below the castle so i don't think you know that we know where to put this trench quite frankly we've got some of our best results from up here i mean look at this this is the magnetics and it looks as though we've got buildings and for buildings to show in magnetics it is rare i mean it could be that they're burning down oh they're burnt it could be and i'd like to put a trench in just on there well i think we'd use some of our currency up to do that some of it how much well i don't know four by three you know three by five something like that well that's it really well hang on a minute if you can do a five by three that leaves a couple of square meters that's stupid that's taking us right up to the wire that is quite fond of the church down there i think it'd be really nice to resolve what that platform is next to the ecclesiastical stuff we've got in the trenching you don't like using the maximum allowable area it doesn't seem very good practice but i do like test pits that sounds like a decision trench five goes in on top of k bray in search of the old borough this way a little bit freeze up brilliant and stew now has to decide where in his platform to dig a one meter test pit that will solve the mystery of st james's church and what a mystery it's turning out to be the vusua which yesterday we thought was part of the inside of the church has today been identified as something completely different a grave slab from the cemetery which is lovely but doesn't help us locate the building and the rest of the stonework still not a clue time to call in an expert um it does seem very very strange and deep though so at the moment i thought you got something extremely interesting but extraordinary puzzling thank you that's exactly what we thought that's my special opinion right up to the peg amid the hurley burley there's one oasis of quiet to get everyone in the right frame of mind we've organized a medieval market of our own it's going to open for business at the end of the day and these good traders are busy preparing to part the archaeologists from their hard-earned cash they'll be selling everyday medieval essentials food leather goods like shoes and pouches wooden artifacts wool and clothing and arrows for nearly 400 years people like this would have lived worked and traded up and down market street the road in phil's trench [Music] he's hunting for the remains of their houses and workshops and he's doing very well if you remember here we had this this linear arrangement running perpendicular to our front trench which we thought actually might be a property boundary well now lucy here you see where the photographic stick is yes yeah we've now got this what we think is the back of a building running parallel to the ditch and to that tenement building so this is one big building as it were going like that and across like that starting from over here probably coming round along here and then returning back along here phil's tenement would have looked like this a fairly basic structure made mainly out of wood it was a bit like a modern terrace divided into several properties similar tenements would have stretched out along both sides of the road so one of you got to beat that well i don't got anything to beat it but um the document we have here records three properties which in fact carrenza's played a blinder drawing on the gfiz results she's worked out that phil's trench is right next to the junction of market street and the main east-west road king street and using information from the document she's established the names of some of the people who might actually have lived in phil's building we're on the the west side of market street if that's north so i suspect this building you found is either william boswell's building um william skinners or the habit of melroses do we know whether any of them were craftsmen because within the finds of this stone line pit we had a hint of of some of the craftsmanship in this street uh derek looked at that earlier on and he's pretty sure that is a piece of kiln furniture from a pottery kiln do you have any any idea what date that might be well it would have to be 13th or 14th century well the document we have here is around about 13 30. so perhaps that's the house and perhaps this kiln was a little bit later than that after the house has gone out of views either way phil and carensa have managed to produce a snapshot of the heart of 14th century roxburgh this is how it might have looked on market day a buzz of activity as william the skinner hutrid the baker and other residents of market street plied their trade perth still exists edinburgh still exists beric still exists why of all the great scottish medieval towns is this one the only one that's under the ground well i think it had bad luck i mean it it it was in a very very vulnerable area in the chewings and thrones between scotland and england because it's so far south yes and and no one had really decided whether this was middle scotland or this was a bit of england probably the decisive moment comes when beric falls into english hands again and remains in english hands the king is not going to allow scottish merchants to be trading through an english port because he won't get the taxes precisely the revenue goes to the english port instead and that happens when that's 1482. with beric in english hands roxburgh had no gateway to the markets of europe and no money coming in the inhabitants gradually drifted away to other cities like edinburgh and perth in search of a living and by the early 1600s roxborough had ceased to exist two and a half hours ago we said we put a test bit in over there and as you can see absolutely nothing's been done about it over here we said we'd put in a three by five and they've only put in a three by two and here the archaeologists are now saying they want to extend this trench although i thought we'd already agreed that we'd gone up to the limit of what we could dig mick had every single decision that has been made seems to have been overturned um yeah you could look at it like that why well um here we don't think we can resolve this now without an extension on each entry what do you mean we can't resolve this well because we've got a big mass of stonework which we think might be a wall of the church and we need to see if he's got doorways on it will the door tell us if he's got doorways then we'll know that's the north wall and these stones and slabs in here are inside the church there that will help a lot to understand it but that doesn't explain why they haven't started that test but over there well there we're waiting for the geophys results because we if we thought we could see some you know church-like arrangement underneath that we might not even need to do that hang on a minute hang on here you are yeah all right look that's where the trench has gone in we've extended the survey now over stewart's earth works yeah and we're getting indication of lots more masonry but no clear wall lines i can't give you a plan of a church no presumably given that geophys you still want to take your test pin of course i do mick we're not going to be able to hit all three targets are we well we might be able to if they don't need the extra square meters up there yeah mr dan what side area we've got at the moment up there dan it's a three by two make it six meters squared what have you got in it have you got any title material yet no we've got the stonewall the geophysics predicted but unfortunately so do you think you need a bigger area to resolve that i don't think a bigger area resolve anything okay that's actually the right answer it certainly isn't this wall might still be part of the old borough but the lack of time and resources mean we've simply got to let it go instead we're going to use up our remaining trench space to untangle the complexities of st james's church which with just a couple of hours left is going to be a real scramble first up stewart's test pit it's all your fault if it goes wrong sprayed yeah we're hitting stone work we'll get get um get bridge travel ian cleans it up a bit so john and stuart can make an assessment i think we've got another one of those things over there well grave slab yeah you see the way it's beveling down is it part of the church is that on the same line the same alignment as that one yeah the line of the no it's not it's going that way it's east west though it's the same orientation as that oh yes but that's like that and that's like that to resolve the issue mick sanctions a rapid one meter extension to the pit which yields instant results so iam what have you got there well take a look what do you think right well it looks like two skulls to me these skulls are the end of stewart's earthwork theory they're not covered by grave slabs so can't have been buried inside the church the test pit is in the cemetery which means everything now depends on the extension to trench four they hope it'll prove their theory that this is a doorway in this the north wall [Music] i'll have to do but it's quickly apparent their theory is wrong it's exactly the same as the other end it's not a door and this is not a wall it's actually part of a much larger detached platform but all is by no means lost because richard now recognizes it as something much more magnificent than a mere wall it's looking increasingly like it could be the bottom of one of these big monumental tombs we don't really have anything like that no we don't i mean that would be unique for scotland i mean there may have been things like that around but i mean they're long gone if richard's right then this is a remarkable discovery monumental expensive elaborate altogether much grander than the graves in the cemetery it was the final resting place of a wealthy individual quite possibly one of the great political leaders of roxbur and it means we've managed somehow to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat because tombs like this were built inside churches so our picture of medieval roxborough is complete where once there was a blank on the map we can now insert at least the bones of the city this is market street and it ran from grey friars in the south past cay bray to st james's church in the north it was intersected by the other main thoroughfare king street this junction was the heart of the city and the whole area would have been packed with houses shops and workshops at the peak of the city's fortunes these would have stretched to the defenses in the east and to the river in the west along here probably connecting king street to the castle ran matt's nameless road which we think was lined with the homes of roxbury's wealthiest inhabitants the digging may be done but there's still some unfinished business the medieval traders are tempting us all with their fare an appropriate way to end our exploration of one of the great commercial centers of medieval europe when i first drove down this field three days ago all i could see were a few green bumps and some silly sheep but now i know that if history had taken just a slightly different course i'd now be driving down a street as grand as edinburgh's royal mile 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, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, roxburgh, time team, tony robinson, time team season 11, british archaeology, british archaeology documentary, british history, archaeological dig, british tv, timeline, timeline world history, timeline channel, timeline world history documentaries

Id: 30RTYBvEaNM

Length: 49min 8sec (2948 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021