The Massacre in the Cellar (Hopton Castle) | Series 17 Episode 5 | Time Team

this is hopton castle scene of one of the bloodiest and most notorious sieges of the english civil war time team have been asked to see if we can find out what it looked like during those dark days and also to put some ghosts at rest because somewhere around here lie the castle's defenders who after they surrendered were brutally murdered and thrown in a ditch or so the local story goes and over the next three days we'll try and find out what really happened [Music] the mysterious ruins of hopton castle still bear the scars of a tragic past 400 years ago this fortress was torn apart by a civil war siege the small band of defenders inside who were loyal to parliament gave their lives defending it against an army of king charles the first today only the tower survives as witness to their heroic last stand and nobody's got any idea what the rest of this castle looked like so that's where we come in we've been invited here by the local preservation society to try to find out and maybe to solve a little mystery along the way richard you're our castles expert and you want us not only to sort out what the castle look like during the civil war but to address the issue of a war crime indeed yes because not only is it a fantastic site you've got a fantastic story with the civil war siege and these brave garrison holding out against the royalists for several weeks before finally surrendering and then being rather brutally murdered helen you're particularly excited about this site aren't you i am because it's got this fantastic historical account we've got a description of what went on written by the garrison commander the chap who is in charge of defending this place and it gives lots of details of of the buildings that were here but um it is rather one-sided obviously it's only his account and it's a really fantastic opportunity for archaeology to find out how much of this is true neil you're the boss over the next three days how are we going to tackle this site very carefully this is a very sensitive site tony not only is it a scheduled monument a nationally important architectural site it's also potentially the site of a mass grave yeah i understand we have to be sensitive but that doesn't mean we're going to ignore the bodies does it no but it's not a grave chase tony what i want to do is actually use the arches evidence to see how reliable is this historical site can we get traces of the actual siege how truthful is the history most of what we know about the siege of hopton comes from a man called colonel samuel moore the garrison commander he wrote it all down in his journal and it reads like a novel he says that the royalists attacked the outnumbered defenders three times losing hundreds of men it was only when the attackers had the parliamentarians cornered in the tower that they finally gave up and instead of showing mercy the royalist commander put everyone except colonel moore to the sword but did it really happen the way he said it did well first thing first and that is to find out what this place looked like so do you fizz get to work looking for buildings six then okay thanks and stuart our landscape investigator starts hunting for the castle's ramparts from its shape we suspect our civil war castle may be medieval in origin it fits the classic model of a modern bailey which is basically a big tower on a mound with a defensive ring below it suppose we start a trench somewhere about there it means phil and bill the local english heritage inspector can make an educated guess where the outer wall might be this war which we think might be part of the original medieval castle and might have been refurbished in the civil war down into what we think might have been part of the original backfield ditch yeah and then up onto this bank which is probably going to be part of the defenses or the assault in the civil war yes yes that's what you call a turf that is that's axe minster daddy's face oh he does love his dirt doesn't he so phil's trench goes in looking for the moat and ramparts to help us work out the original shape of the castle but it's also our first opportunity to test the accuracy of colonel moore's historical account of the siege one of the most exciting things about this site is that it's a battlefield as well as a castle [Music] if we can find the outer wall and signs of combat can we identify where moore said the royalists first attacked [Music] the civil war divided communities between king and parliament and hopton was right in the firing line so what more do we know about the men who fought here they were the only garrison the only stronghold held for parliament throughout the region all the other strongholds if you look at this map there are more than 20 of them were held for the king you can see here's hopton um and it's parliamentarian and there's just brampton brian to the south over the herefordshire border that's parliamentarian as well and everywhere else is royalist so they were a very isolated group and they probably felt very isolated and lonely so there was a lot of tension going on here even before the massacre started yes huge amounts of tension and we have to remember that people were just terrified of neighbors that they'd lived side by side with for years because of the issue of religion which became a kind of emergent theme in the war people were just terrified that a catholic royalist army was about to attack so my bet is these guys were probably in the castle because they thought it was the safest place to be so hopton was the civil war equivalent of the alamo alone and with no sign of relief for three weeks the 30 odd men behind these walls held out against hundreds of royalist soldiers and over in his trench phil thinks he may have found the first evidence of fighting we've got a musket ball it's a bit splattered but it's definitely a musket ball but is it civil war i don't know but given the site that we're on i bet it is so we're in the right period but are we gonna find the bloke who was on the other end of this we'll know later welcome back to hopton in shropshire where we're trying to uncover the secrets of the civil war siege which practically destroyed the castle behind me and perhaps even find the remains of the murdered garrison who we think lies somewhere down here the story of hopton's destruction and the brutal massacre of the garrison became famous well notorious during the civil war but 400 years on nobody knows how truthful our surviving account of the battle is or even what the castle looked like phil how you getting on we're not doing too badly neil phil's looking for the old castle wall and the moat where we think we might find traces of the first attack this bank here was we thought originally might be part of the medieval castle defenses well we've gone down through it and we're getting masses and masses of bricks but more importantly we're beginning to get pottery too you see here i mean here is the base of a pot and here's another piece of pot little tiny handle but i mean this stuff is clearly not medieval and when you say bank are we actually uncovering the foundations of a wall and is that what that big stone is ah but there's no other stones around it sort of keyed into it to make it into a wall now what it seems to be is literally a bank just muck that's been thrown up mixed up with rubble and dirt that's the sort of thing you could really throw up in a hurry if you knew you could be under siege well exactly i mean it may in the end make us have to rethink about what a lot of these banks are around here it looks as though this one might not be medieval phil's already got his suspicions that the shape of this castle might be slightly different to what we anticipated still if his rampart is from the civil war does it fit into the history uh the 26th of february is the first attack over the next few days field marshal helen geek is going to do a spot of war gaming now there's a body of foot who who approach the out walls along with richard our castles expert she's going to compare colonel moore's account of the battle with what we find in our trenches let's do some more okay but it's what happened after the siege that really intrigues me so the guys from the garrison who died could be over there where they're gear fizzing or they could be somewhere completely different it's just potluck whether we find them or not yes from the first account of colonel moore we really don't have any idea i don't think he knows where they were put he just says that they were all killed but then we've got another account from this chap called primus davis now he was part of the garrison at brampton castle not far away so it's possible that he would have known and he says that uh they were driven into a cellar unfinished wherein was stinking water the house being on fire over them when there were every man of them presently massacred and he implies that that's where they're left how trustworthy do you think that is or could it just be a bit of propaganda well i don't know it certainly makes its way into propaganda because um a few weeks later it only takes a few weeks we get we get propaganda definite propaganda in these newspapers now i've got one here here we are they caused a deep pit to be digged and throwing them in all together they buried some alive is there anything that you've read in any of the documents that could narrow down the search for us yeah i think so i mean the first one says it's a seller now we ought to be able to find a seller with geophysics and it would be very recognizable if we do encounter it that's one good hypothesis that we can test that they might be in a cellar the second one is that all the sources concur in saying that they're they're somewhere near water mud or water and so i think that we could go for for anywhere that's waterlogged or with standing water and have a look around there and see what we can find [Music] so if we can trust the documents the murdered men could be buried in one of two places a damp cellar or a muddy ditch [Music] well john's been busy doing gfiz and he thinks he might have picked up a good candidate for a seller not far from the tower john you've done the unibailey what's the show it's pretty good i mean we've done mag and res and i think we're starting to see clear buildings inside look at the magnetics to start with so the white line is showing what i think is a big structure there and the black on the inside it's either midden deposits areas of burning in the resistance you can also see that the shadow outline of buildings now what i think we've got in front of us here you can see it clearly in the earth yeah you know but we've got a wall going underneath that hawthorne bush i think it actually turns through a right angle and comes back underneath our feet so we've got to put a trench in here haven't we absolutely and i've thought perhaps on this side if we can dig down here try and expose the wall on this side see if it matches the wall on that side is it a single structure and of course the key thing is what date is it our second trench goes in to see if we've got a seller so that's one possibility for the mass grave but what about the muddy ditch i'd assumed that our whole team were over here trying to sort out the castle until i saw this little head bobbing up and down behind these rather nasty nettles henry what are you doing i am coring the bottom of the moat stitch which means well basically although we stood right in this big ditch here um it was once we assume much much deeper once i get to the bottom with the auger when i look at the soil down there i will be able to tell whether it's flowing water through there whether it's still water whether it's just a muddy hole some of the documents say the dead bodies were found in a muddy pit right you could be giving us some evidence couldn't you yeah no this should tell part of that story yeah but we're not all chasing bodies [Music] phil's doggedly digging away trying to work out the shape of the castle [Music] he's changed his tune from this morning he now reckons we do have a wall it's just underneath the earth bank he found earlier but he's also got signs of serious destruction which fingers crossed might match our account of the battle the thing is that this bank sits on top this incredible burning layer it's actually on top of the burner look at it all right look at it look at that yeah the burning is running underneath so the the construction of that bank is later than that burning you know i just i do wonder what the hell all this burning is though well we know the buildings were burnt during the siege oh exactly you see you you just make you wonder end of day one and as you can see our trenches are really coming along now we've got quite a lot of evidence of structures we've got some really interesting stones for instance down there but are we in the civil war yeah we are tony look with this lovely 17th century token which has been used exactly at the right time for the civil war and even better than that we've got this piece of lead doesn't look much does it but this is actually a musket ball that's been fired at such velocity it's hit a structure i mean splattered flat so it's clear evidence of warfare and fighting in this area and what can we tell about these structures well we've got a stone wall over there and probably another one coming through here so i guess we've got a sort of medieval building but where's phase digging the layers are diving down and down and we haven't found the floor yet could that be a cellar i think it has to be because we're just so far below the ground level helen's documents say that the bodies of the garrison were found either in a muddy ditch or in a cellar could that be the seller we'll find out tomorrow beginning of day two here at hopton castle in shropshire where we're looking for evidence of the english civil war and in particular of the garrison that was slaughtered here i thought the archaeology would be pretty straightforward but the more we dig the more and more confusing it appears to be gentlemen i assume that what we were going to get was a big moat all the way around it and then a solid wall to protect the castle you told me you thought there would be a big empty cellar we don't seem to have any of those things i absolutely agree i thought there was going to be a large wall around the outside because how else could this place we stood siege for a couple of weeks so we put a trench in here and we asked phil to look for two things the stone curtain wall and the large moat ditch and then over them that is where you went profoundly wrong tony you assumed you assumed far too much when we get down to the archaeology the archaeology is different but it is just as exciting in here we don't actually have a massive curtain wall but we do have a building and that building must have had a wall that faced out over here which would have acted as a defensive curtain look i'm lashed by your criticism about my assumptions nevertheless surely it would have to be a wall that was more solid than one that had got little houses all the way around i tell you what if you've got a pack of defenders with muskets behind that wall peppering you with musket shots that is a defensive wall okay that's put me in my place the shape of this castle is turning out to be rather different from the simple one we imagined sorry i imagined it looks like by the time of the civil war the inner bailey was surrounded by a small and rather an impressive wall and instead of a moat it had earthworks and at the center of it could be a very large building it looks like we're coming on to a sort of different level here we've been through this incredibly loose compacted brick deposit yeah which i guess is what you think the walls of the building neil and bill are digging a deep cellar which we hope might contain the bodies of the garrison but instead they've got loads of rubble we're just coming on to these which i guess are they roofing slates they look like roof don't they here so if you've got roofing deposits the building was going to collapse in yeah first of all i guess the roof would fall in yeah and then the walls are coming over the top of it so that was that would suggest that we're not too far off yeah it's the bottom of the cellar level the brick and the roof tiles clearly belong to a high status building it might match something called the brick dwelling house in the sources still it's a little frustrating that we haven't found anything from the massacre itself and henry's survey of the moat hasn't got any signs of a mass grave there either so it's probably time to ask the question i perhaps should have asked yesterday can we be sure that the bodies are still here wouldn't the relatives of the people who've been killed creep here afterwards take the bodies away and give them a proper burial which would mean that we wouldn't be able to find them here all these hundred years later well not really because actually if you look at the list which we're lucky enough to have of the defenders of hopton castle you'll notice an enormous number of very welsh-sounding names like evans thomas jones um and some of them actually have this w after their name which probably designates that they actually were from wales and not local welsh people um i think all of that suggests that i mean family would find it pretty difficult to get here from wales to rebury their dead [Music] it's never occurred to us until now that many of the defenders like david evans and richard jones might not be local under attack and a long way from home it makes you realize how isolated and afraid they must have been and over in his trench phil thinks he can now tell the first part of their story i think in 1644 in this spot there was a war this is the war and i mean whether or not there was a complete build in there i don't know whether that building was ruinous i don't know but there was certainly a wall here and i think in the early part of the campaign the initial onslaught there was a serious fight here and i think that it was it was very very hard for and i think there was much burning and devastation because you see you've got masses of areas of intense burning you see all that black that charcoal that's lying directly on this wall and this comes right the way across and we can actually pick it up on this side here i think it was a pretty vicious fight because we actually have the first possible evidence of conflict it's a human tooth cool and i sort of kind of imagine that there was this vicious fight between the cavaliers and the round heads and that maybe it got hand to hand and that maybe somebody took a musket and took a swing at some bloke and knocked his tooth out and i think once the the the royalists had gone away to restock and replenish their forces the parliamentarians thought what are we going to do about it let's strengthen our defenses and so they'd have got the picks and shovels and they would have stood where i am and they'd have done that and they would have been building the bank there the bank there and the bank there and i think these three banks are very clearly situated to fill the gap between the main ditch of the castle there and the stream isn't it ironic that for the last day and a half you've been doing exactly what those blokes were doing all those years ago i know but thankfully i wasn't expecting anybody to come through that field aiming to get me so that's great news our first direct link with the history in his journal colonel moore says that after the initial assault his men raced to build works temporary defenses and our earthworks also give us a better idea of the shape of the castle it's much bigger and more complicated than we thought and it means we need to make a few changes to our battle map yeah yeah so we need a lot more soggy paper because we've got lots of other banks to to build up as well general stuart ainsworth has identified more earthworks like fills all around the site and he's looking for where the second attack happened when the royalists actually got into the castle moore says hundreds of invaders broke through a burnt out building only to find themselves trapped and shot to pieces but can we take his word for it is it possible that so few defenders could kill so many men having wrapped up early phil's going to find out andy hello i've got you a recruit oh well done your piece of string is on fire by the way it's meant to be oh sorry called slow match this is a match lock musket otherwise it doesn't go off bang oh i said we need this so are you going to get him to fire a gun that's the idea oh bring it down firing and reloading a musket was a complicated and time-consuming business a little bit of gunpowder in there i'm going to close the pan blow off and clear off the loose poles which means you don't get sparks landing when you're loading and the gun can't go off early that's the idea phil don't get your face quite so close then i'm gonna cut the match i'll present i'll open the pan and i'll squeeze the trigger right phil show us how it's done properly i think i'll leave him to it for a bit lunchtime on day two and with the layout of the castle changing we're now having a long hard think about our brick building in the middle of it i know you don't usually like dating these things i don't know so what am i going to be able to press you to say about it surprisingly i think i could be quite happy in dating this particular brick oh really nothing happened at this castle site after the civil war as far as we can tell that's true yeah this is a typical 17th century handmade brick so we can put it into the first half of the 17th century it can't be after 1645 after 1644. also in shropshire we've got plenty of timber framed and stoned buildings brick is a very late arrival it's not until the middle of the 17th century where they become common in the highest status building so i'd be quite happy to take that between about 1600 and 1640. oddly it's starting to look like we've got a really rather grand 17th century house slap bang in the most strategic part of the castle and it seems to have been destroyed in the civil war siege can you see that really intense charcoal area there i always wonder if that's like a burnt beam that's perhaps claps down the burning also means we haven't given up hope of finding a mass grave here we know that one account says the men were executed in the cellar of a burning building this is beginning to be more like one of those crime scene investigation shows than a time team bit of gold but then as is always the case on time team something turns up which you don't expect i heard some bleeping and the words gold we've got a gold hammered coin oh wow and that came out from here literally at the spoil from the bottom of this trench this extraordinary thing about gold that when it does come out it just shines straight away doesn't it if it was put there yesterday look at your face you're quite pleased aren't you it's made my year helen yeah could you come and have a look at this gold coin oh my goodness how extraordinary um that says jacob that's james yes and well i think that that is james the fifth of scotland i mean and when was james the fifth of scotland well he he's around flodden isn't he so that's like the beginning of the 16th century the intriguing thing is what's a gold coin doing in the bottom of our cellar is that where it came from yeah that is fantastic we've got to find out how long it's circulated for yeah that is just just amazing helen's got to double check the date but could this gold coin have been dropped by one of the garrison or even by their killers [Music] it's easy to imagine losing the odd coin in the heat of the battle especially if you're a bumbling musketeer like phil harding well we're going to cast off and we're going to blow off right bring it up hang on hang on still blowing right yeah professional soldiers could fire up to three shots per minute how will phil do we blow on the match wow nothing's much happening right present open your pan give fire cool just don't want to crows i was like well it was a bit of a surprise when it all went bang you know i'll tell you what if it had taken the round heads that long to load the siege would never have ended oh yeah but i would have been behind the wall you see i'm in a safer position behind the wall that's where i'd have been it does show you how exposed those soldiers were though doesn't it absolutely but actually it's a very common sense sort of pattern of movements you could do it you would get there eventually even a common old agricultural type like me perhaps yeah i think it might take you some time in the hands of trained soldiers and at close quarters muskets were deadly it makes moore's claim to have shot and killed hundreds of royalists at the breach sound much more plausible but where did this happen our armchair generals are playing toy soldiers to find out right so they're through the breach most most of the 200 so it's at least 100 they're within the breach but not within our our works but as in a pin fold in the circumference of the burnt lodging what is a pin fold it's basically a very large sheep pen it's for sorting out sheep so they're caught in a trap yep they can't move yes yeah so do you know where that first breach in the wall happens i have very strong suspicions helen it's in this area down here anybody coming through this narrow gap in the breach will be trapped they can be fired down from there from there they're literally trapped like sheep in a sheepfold if stewart's right then somewhere here should be a range of buildings which resemble a sheep pen as well as giving us a direct link to the history if we do have structures here they'd make this castle far larger than we first thought we're gonna have to ponder this one over a few beers tonight but before we can down tools and raise glasses whoa my goodness we've got our hands full with yet another remarkable find from the seller i think that's a cannonball in fact i'd put even money on that being a cannonball and that's about a nine pounder isn't that fantastic further analysis reveals that cannonball does indeed weigh nine pounds the size of ammunition fired by a gun called a demi culverin moore's account says at least one of these was used by the royalists to pound the castle in their third most deadly attack so could this mean we're close to the end of the siege feel how heavy that is tony just that little bit of it is some weight isn't it yeah imagine that coming crashing in through the walls and landing right in the bottom of the cellar i'm in no doubt now that this is the brick dwelling house referred to in the siege accounts and what we know is that the defenders set fire to it just well let's using it so i guess what we've got here is evidence of burnt timbers being fired on with ordnance surely this now locks us in the history now kills you together but there's such a little bit of it that's what's so frustrating yeah i really like to see some more of this i think we should open up the trench a bit further what i'd like to see is more of the base of the cellar because it's got these cannonballs got nice fines pottery also how big is this house is it just a cellar or are the rooms on either side so really with a day to go all the effort in here i would think tomorrow it's been a really exciting day too for us particularly as far as the fines are concerned including our wonderful gold coin which we now know was called a quarter laurel it was worth two weeks wages for an ordinary soldier and we've got a very precise date for it now it's 1623 60 but tomorrow we come to the really exciting part of the story the final attack on the castle which led to the supposed massacre of the people inside it let's hope tomorrow we can really find out what actually happened although phil already knows how the cavaliers got into the castle don't you feel too right i do [Laughter] beginning of day three here at hopton castle in shropshire where we're investigating the bloody siege that took place right here during the english civil war and throughout our final day we're going to be concentrating on this area here particularly this trench where yesterday we got all those lovely finds including the beautiful gold coin and the cannonball but just because we got a lot of lovely stuff out of here yesterday neil does that really justify us using so much of our labour on this one little spot it's not just this one spot tony we're looking at this large and impressive building we've got several trenches open ian's looking the other side the cellar over there and rooms beyond that open the new trench there looking for rooms outside the cellar and matt's open everyone behind us except that on the very first day your brief to us richard was nothing to do with this specific building it was what does the castle look like throughout the english civil war have we got anywhere near approaching that i think we already have we've already investigated not just this building but a lot of the other lumps and bumps around the site so we know where other buildings were the landscape now makes more sense to put the whole thing into its context so i'm quite happy we know a heck of a lot more of this place now than we did on day one trust me tony this trench here will give us the best evidence for the siege trust me tony now where have i heard that one before [Music] neil's convinced that our brick dwelling house with its seller can tell us a lot of what we set out to discover and another link with the history books but even though we've got less than a day left we're still doing gfiz yesterday stewart wanted us to look at the other end of our site not only does he think there could be more buildings here he thinks it could be where the royalists first broke into the castle [Music] what a beautiful spot you've brought me to get a lovely view of the castle here but there's nothing here ah there is something here though because if you look in this area over here phil there are lots of lumps and bumps that suggested there might be buildings here and walls that there were things blocking this end up here and for once i agree with stewart [Laughter] look at the resistance results the black the high resistance showing brick-built structures maybe stone-built structures more ephemeral responses maybe timber and we've got a possible courtyard here with buildings set round and that one in particular interests me because it's got really strong magnetic responses well we've got to put in the trench and have a look stuart thinks this could be the spot where the attacking royalists were trapped losing hundreds of men as the defenders fired from both sides the records talk of a range of buildings which they described rather curiously as looking like a sheep pen but take a closer look at the c shape on the gfiz could this be it one thing's for sure this is no longer your typical castle we've always assumed hopton is a medieval modern bailey style fortress thanks to the 14th century tower but is this crumbling and frankly rather dangerous structure all that it appears to be richard is it going to fall down it would have done if it's just left as it is at the moment it does look in a terrible state though doesn't it it's awful inside you know what strikes me about it is that it looks very old-fashioned it because it looks almost like one of those old norman castles from 100 or even 200 years previously it's one of a handful of castles in there in this area that look far older than they actually are all built after the end of the worst of the welsh wars you know around 1300 and there's a possibility that it's a deliberate ploy if you like they're saying to the welsh look my great-granddad upset your great-granddad by building these norman keeps we could do the same but at the same time they wanted their luxury so these are quite nicely appointed tower apartments if you like but does that mean they weren't that good at defense they're not that defendable because although they look great big thick walled things the actual walls are honeycomb with chambers and window apertures and that sort of thing so they're not that strong so if hobson wasn't much of a war machine when it was built in the medieval period it's now clear it was even less suited for battle by the time of the civil war what's that there going that way here yeah that's my wall matt's found the far end of our brick building and it isn't just a house it's a mansion in fact it was so big the builders had to fill in the moat around the tower just to squeeze it into the bailey by the time of the civil war the castle had expanded far beyond its medieval walls to me this is looking more and more like a country house than a castle we've got these huge great big roof slates coming up as well and that's confirmed by stuart's trench where faze picking up a range of timber buildings around a central courtyard stuart can we talk to the historical sources yeah this match is exactly what we're anticipating here there's a range of buildings possibly something called richard stewart's house which was burnt down during the civil war there's a whole complex body stables and other buildings in this area but if you say it's burnt in the civil war faye can we see any evidence of that ah well actually yes we can and that's where it gets really interesting over there on that surface we've actually got evidence of burning in the stones but we've also got some musket balls coming up that's just what we want i mean this is terrific because this is the area within which the first siege the attackers actually got in and then got trapped and it literally got massacred against these buildings here and so this amongst all the excitement of the dirt and the archaeology it's kind of really poignant isn't it this must be the spot where the garrison trapped and killed the first royalists to get into the castle and it's easy to see why stuck in no man's land with only smoking ruins around the courtyard for cover they would have been cut down just like colonel moore claims they were [Music] the journal says that after their disaster in the courtyard the royalists changed tactics they returned with more men gave the garrison one last chance to surrender and this time they meant business they bombard the outer wall of this castle with heavy cannon to try and make a breach in the wall yeah it says that they they're shooting at the outside wall from nine o'clock in the morning until five o'clock in the evening and they hit it with 96 shots by my maths that is one shot every five minutes which is an incredible amount of fire i mean in the end it was successful they did make a breach in that wall and of course they the defenders have rushed up and tried to stop them getting through it's at that point that the hand-to-hand fighting starts with the pikes and the muskets and the clubs and everything and they're they're doing that for two hours it must be absolutely horrendous stuart thinks the royalists bombarded the castle from the high ground breaking down the defenses in the south and our analysis of the musket balls does suggest they were fired from some distance away raining down on the men cowering inside the brick building look we just found this is a lead musket ball that's been embedded into the brick it's fantastic because it's hit hasn't it and then just flattened as it hit the brick wall it's actually still got bits of brick embedded in that side which is incredible [Music] our archaeology has now built up a terrifying picture of the final 48 hours of the defenders lives and it backs up colonel moore's journal in every detail after being bombarded by constant fire with the attackers through the breach the defenders set the brick mansion on fire before fleeing to the tower a terrifying sequence of events which we found in both the archaeology and the documents they were now at the mercy of the royalist commander some michael woodhouse and richard thinks he's worked out how he forced them to surrender all i had to do is run up the bank and attack that that looks like a door but it's actually a window opening now they're trapped on the top floor they can't do anything about people attacking the bottom of the castle so this is another example of this building not really doing its job as a defense because it had a vulnerable window close to the ground yes because the window either side of the window the wall is only about that thick so it's dead easy to actually bash through i think what we can see there is what was done during the civil war and that's what makes them give up because they think that they're going to lay explosives and they say it's better to surrender than to be blown up yeah extraordinary isn't it to see something so vulnerable from all those years ago that led to such a terrifying end yeah it's ironic that the strongest looking part of the castle the tower was actually the weakest and everything we found over the past few days suggests that in both medieval times and during the civil war hopton was more of a country house than a castle it's turned our knowledge of this place on its head and explains why the defenders failed to hold on to it but it also begs the question why did moore and his men defend a hopeless cause why did moore refuse to surrender when he had three opportunities to do so it's difficult to explain we can only think that he must have been inspired by religious fanaticism or by the belief that god would come to his aid or because he was terribly afraid of the royalist army he'd possibly been reading the newspapers as well and hearing these stories about the massacre of helpless prisoners and he possibly didn't trust the royal as suffer of porter what about the other side why did woodhouse allow such a terrible atrocity to take place well that's the really difficult question to answer somehow we were off the map of chivalry and chivalry and honor did operate in most of these civil war encounters there were rules that you could follow like table manners um the fact that the first offers of quarter rif were refused may have made him feel that they were off the map but i suspect one of the accounts of the massacre says that woodhouse left his men themselves for three hours it was normal royalist behavior but in this case they seem to have been particularly violently inspired and that might be the cause of the massacre but evidence of that massacre continues to elude us with no signs of a mass grave anywhere else we were praying that we'd find one at the bottom of the cellar but alas as the day draws to a close we've got to admit defeat you're kind of performing the last rights on this trench then aren't you phil muller so you're completely convinced that's natural are you well look there's the bottom of the wall yeah built right on top absolutely i know i think this is a deposit that not even a parliamentarian or a royalist ever saw but while we haven't found any bodies we're pretty confident our cellar does match one description of where the men were said to have been killed it's unfinished without any plaster and it's also at the bottom of a burning building and what about it being full of stinking water well most intriguingly of all computer modeling suggests that our seller was liable to flooding as well who knows perhaps this was their place of execution after all after the battle was over hopton was left a smoking ruin the tower was badly damaged and fell into disrepair for several weeks a small band of men had turned this country house into a small fortress and held out against overwhelming and terrifying odds 400 years on we've pieced together their last stand and discovered the magnificent 17th century chamber block where they fought and may have died this morning neil you said to me tony the excavation of this trench will unveil the story of this castle has it done that oh it has the archaeology has worked out so well what we've now found is this huge post-medieval cellar it's about 20 meters long and above that you've got to imagine a two or three-story brick house and it's placed here to deliberately to replace that that was old-fashioned old news if you have money this is how you lived imagine chimneys fancy windows plastered ceilings this was all mod cons it is ironic that the new building should have been burnt down and the garrison retreat to the old one absolutely at the time of the war forget the word castle hopton was a house and it was fighting was taking place in all sorts of places during the civil war not just on set-piece battlefields not just storming of castles but everyday houses were being attacked and bloody murder was taking place at close quarters it is frustrating isn't it that we didn't manage to find any evidence of the guys who died it is but i guess it was always a long shot we've only dug a tiny little fraction of the cellar they're here somewhere they'll stay there for generations to come and in the meantime the story of their death remains a little bit of a mystery and maybe that's no bad thing yeah i think so to ensure you catch all the latest updates please do subscribe to this channel follow us on social media and sign up to our newsletter and join us on patreon [Music]

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 164,043

Keywords: Team Team, Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode, time team full episode, time team, time team series 17 episode 5, time team series 17, time team the massacre in the cellar, hopton castle, time team digs, history, british history

Id: oJiH35-tFjE

Length: 47min 24sec (2844 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021