The Monastery and the Mansion (Nether Poppleton, Yorkshire) | Series 12 Episode 2 | Time Team

this is the village of nether poppleton just outside york as you can see most of the houses are modern some are victorian a few are 18th order to push 17th century but from up here it looks very different even i can recognize the traditional medieval village layout with the main street running up to the church and lots of little plots running off it and those earthworks to the side of the church are an officially registered medieval site but the locals think it's older they think they can trace the roots of their village back to the normans or even the saxons are they right we've got just three days to find out [Music] good morning everybody it's really good of you to take part in this i hope you're going to enjoy it and i thought i just thought to say a little bit to you about what we're going to do because it's not really a respectable research strategy to bulldoze your village from end to end flatten it all out and then look underneath it we have to adopt a different strategy it's nine o'clock day one and the people of poppleton have assembled to find out how they can help us pin down the true age of their village they're going to do the work today by digging test pits in their own gardens with some help from us so what are we after we're after the origins of the village does it start as a saxon village laid out in the norman period does it come into existence in the middle ages how do we get that dig lots and lots of pits all over the village one meter test pits and just get what the fines are from that to indicate what activity there's been on that site you're persuading these people just to look for fines yeah isn't that the exact opposite of everything that you've told me that archaeology is archaeology is about features archaeological articles about stratigraphy it's about knowledge not about ripping fines out of the ground no you're absolutely right you obviously have learned something that's to help told you well you you haven't no but it's it's the same idea it's looking for broken bits of pot there are indications of activity where people have lived and broken stuff in that particular area so if we start to get 12th century pottery or saxon pottery or medieval pottery it'll tell us his activity to that date if we plot it all across the village then we'll start to see the concentrations and those will be the areas we need to dig in to get the structures she'll get them started yep ladies and gentlemen how many of you know what you're supposed to do next [Applause] about a third of them well i'm vic we want you all to get back to your homes with your pet archaeologist in your hand and start digging all right off you go [Music] as they all set off there's a great sense of community spirit about many people are digging in their own gardens or they'll help out their less able neighbors they'll bring all their finds to the incident room we'll analyze and date them and when we've identified the oldest we'll decide where to put trenches in tomorrow so it looks like there's going to be competition among the locals where will the oldest part of the village be we've divided the village into five sections each one with its own archaeologist to make sure that things are done properly [Music] i think you'll be surprised what you find in just the soil of a garden i live in a 1960s bungalow and then went so you think there'd be absolutely nothing at all in it and i've got one piece of roman patrol about 12 pieces of 12th century pottery and then everything from 12th century and that's in the 1960s bungalow across the village test pits are opening all over the place and everyone's doing their part we do our best to help out with that what you want to do is try and keep things level so go along like that rather than digging down you know you want to know which finds came from the top of your test pit and which at the bottom when you dig a trench if it's a meter at the top it must be a meter at the bottom in other words the sides of the trench must always be absolutely vertical this means that the the layer that you've got exposed actually on the bottom of the trench you can actually see it in section so don't just dig in the middle of the hole dig right up to the edges keep them straight there's there's phil's gospel lesson for the day by mid-morning we're well on our way to exploring this side of the village where the main street and houses are but over here to the east lies the church it was built in norman times so it's possible there was something else there at that time geophysics are having an early look around it [Music] and stuart's already out and about doing a full landscape survey of the whole area the church is usually a central feature of the community so if you're going to understand how people have lived here we need to look at the church is that one norman i think norman in his present form but must be earlier in later stuff as well do you know much about the actual history of this site sarah well the church is dedicated to some everelda who's a very unusual dedication there are only two churches dedicated to her in yorkshire she was seventh century saint we think that bishop wilfred who was bishop of york encouraged her to settle in yorkshire with two other nuns in the 670s and around them a community that said of up to 80 nuns soon formed so there could actually be a nunnery on this side i think so and the church could be merely one part of a whole series of buildings going off in this direction with evidence of them still under the ground just under the surface yeah john what's the difference like well we've had some results back already and it's looking quite interesting and points to the possibilities of you know other churches being here does that look as building-y to you as it does to me it probably is and mean it's that's one of the things that would get us excited about the idea of a line of churches yeah so can we put a trench in there well we need to do a lot more geophysics first to see a lot more of the area around before we go for that so although this church dates from the 11th century saint everilder lived here 400 years earlier there may well have been buildings from that time on this site could we find a saxon settlement somewhere around this church back in the village people are beginning to get the hang of things nope nothing in that one and some fines are coming up a bit of green glaze over there oh yeah it's almost as old as i am another stone in tokyo i think you've got a roman brick you've got a good imagination very vivid yes very busy the early signs at least in this trench look good that's what i'd call proper medieval yeah like 13th 14th century um jug shirts it's local stuff probably made some around york these haven't traveled far at all so i mean i think you could well be on top of some medieval archaeology but you never believed would you that no i'd have never believed this was here at all so it's within religious hands in the incident room carrenza and sarah are having a look at the written history of poppleton and there isn't that much to go on the doomsday book the doomsday book tells us quite a bit more um you know we've got the extract here and it tells us in another that is nether poppleton odie the deacon had two and a half caricats taxable that's two and a half carat cuts of land it's about 300 acres this land was of saint everelda's that's the church so what date does poppleton first appear in the written record well the first reference is in 972 when oswald the archbishop of york listed a large number of lands in yorkshire that he said the church had lost during the wars earlier in the century and among that list he included just two hides that's about 240 acres in poppleton and that's all the record tells us what about the place name itself that must predate 972 well the place name has saxon elements in it ton meaning a settlement and popple meaning the pebbly place so the settlement on the pebbly soil the settlement on the pebbly perhaps banks of the river so it has a saxon element and that could indeed be in a sense in one sense the oldest reference that we have to there being something here phil's now moved up to work on the church but he isn't where i expected him to be well this morning we thought we were going to put a trench in here yeah but the more geophysics we did across this whole area that corner of the building that looked so definite just disappeared it just didn't seem as significant so there's no building there so we decided not to tackle that it really doesn't look like a building so we came back over here and put one down here why is that well because there is a suggestion that this wall went on this way and we've got permission to dig four square meters so we thought we'd wrap it around the corner oh well well whoa if you think the wall went that way yeah why are you digging a trench out there we started with those two square meters and then we under the other two square meters around this way let's see you've got a pipe there phil anything else yeah you see here tony got a little child burial just one of those things really i mean you know it's a burial ground what are you going to do with it um we're going to give it the the due respect it deserves and then just leave it alone funnily enough it doesn't actually detract from from the objectives of what we're of the trench here which is well you see if i get my shovel see if i slot it in there now that is the base of the foundations so the whole church is sitting on big stones like this the main thing is that there is nothing no walls coming this way so in fact we know that there was no it doesn't look as though there are any oils or transects coming this way off of that because we thought the might you see that curve yeah yeah yeah yeah looks if there's a an opening in there and we thought that something might come off here so you think it might just be a door i think it might be more like a sort of tomb set in the water or at least a sepulchre or something clearly it's not a structure yeah coming out this way so this answered that so now you've answered that do you have to continue with this trench okay yeah no no because we know that it was not wider what we've now got to prove is whether or not it was longer so that's so that's when you're wrapping around right here in the corner so we'll have the same conversation in a few hours time that little child burial you know he's typical of what you find all over the place it's probably an infant you know that died at childbirth or something like that and the parents have just popped it in the church yard probably one night to save you know paying the burial fee but to make sure the child's in consecrated ground across the village even more test pits are opening up there are now 32 of them three o'clock day one and this whole area is checkered with test pits there's one down there by that yellow bucket then two gardens along there's one over there then another three gardens along by that guy in the red hat there's one and then way way at the end of that same garden by that blue tarpaulin is another one and what have we found so far absolutely nothing [Music] strictly speaking people have found some things but we're not seeing them in the incident room they're not getting to us fast enough so we can't analyze them paul and carrenza aren't exactly rushed off their feet and they're a bit worried matt bridget and kerry have any of you got any more fines to come in from any test pits because we really need it up here as quickly as possible anybody else chasing fines by radio isn't working so when all else fails there's only one way to get things moving right how are we doing here we need to get move on with all this how are you getting off about 500 mil down now we're uh coming to a close we think right okay uh can you get the fines to the incident room as soon as possible because we need to get pulled to sort them tonight no problem yeah okay brilliant thanks [Music] all right how are you doing are you nearly finished can you get those fines down to the incident room now to get them dated tonight okay brilliant thanks right well this worked now paul and carrenza are complaining they've got too much to do down there somewhere it's the end of day one all the test pits are finally closed the people who've dug them have found loads of stuff look this is just some of the rubbish of course they all want to know what it means can we tell them me i think so we're still in the business of analyzing the results here and plotting on the map but we do have late saxon pottery coming out now that's what we were looking for isn't it yeah is this just the only piece of saxon paul or have you got more no we've got five pieces of light saxon one's literally as we often you were talking is just beard and how much more have you got to sort through i have no idea there's masses of stuff coming in they're watching it sorting it as best they can over here then getting it through to me and i'm plowing through how long is it going to take i know now well you know i'm just acutely aware that we've got a load of people coming in the longer you stand there talking the longer it's going to be yeah i'm not having a pop it's just there's a lot of people coming through as fast as i can carrenza are we going to be able to tell people where they can put in their trenches well if we're looking for saxon at the moment the concentration seems to be right at the other end of the village in ian's area but we've got to go through the fines from all the test pits before we make a decision because some of the other ones may have equally good concentration of saxon material we can't start do we know that so tomorrow bright and early loads of people from the village are going to turn up asking what this little lot is all about are we going to be able to tell them anything we'll know tomorrow morning [Music] 9 a.m and there's frantic activity in the incident room outside the locals are gathering to find out what we can tell from the test pits yesterday inside we're still trying to work it out last night you could have cut the tension in here with a knife paul and karendra and i were getting really frazzled because we wanted to get everything ready for everyone to be able to dig this morning well this one was like pollyanna oh don't worry everything's gonna be all right well was he right have we got everything sorted out yeah he was because we got really frazzled and worked really hard at it and then we've been hard at it this morning getting all the data presented on a map that looks respectable that we can show the villagers did you actually find anything that surprised you yeah we did actually we've got no saxon pottery at all from this end of the village and it's not we start heading west through the village that we get a few fragments of saxon pottery tiny triangle here showing just a few grams of pottery tiny little amount there a bit more here as we head west and then even further west in this completely different bit of the village what looks like a different history with a lot of saxon pottery especially here at number 20. we've got a huge amount of saxon pottery um suggesting really that there's a focus of saxon settlement in this area with a lot of activity down here all right that's sorted out the west end but what about this big bit here well that's the problem we haven't really done anything at this end we've got no handfuls of material no pottery nothing to date this end we've got phil's little l-shaped trench around the church didn't really produce any fines and yet we would still think that that was where you know there was a saxon church probably a sexual monastery there ought to be something in that area so we do have to look at that what do you think the strategy should be john well i think we've got to build on what we did yesterday take this test pitting strategy and apply it to this area you've got to look at the around the old stables the granary you know the space at the back of the incident room let's get some trenches in there you know get some more local people involved in digging those take it forward okay good morning everybody thank you very much for coming back i'm going to tell you the results of the test pits yesterday which you all dug and thank you ever so much again today people from the village have turned up to help they're all keen to know where the oldest parts of the village might be so today we'll explore that area in more detail the village's job's now done we do the work from this point on so the test pit at number 20 is widened to become a full trench but today we'll concentrate more on the area around the church it's norman but dedicated to a nun who lived in the saxon period so we're hopeful of finding saxon material there so up by the church we open a test pit here and here and another here and john does some more geophysics in and around the church to see if we can find other targets mick's getting more and more excited it's not just saxon he wants he thinks that there was a monastery here that would mean a settlement 400 years earlier than the present church could he be right maybe you've closed down this trench yeah well it's told us all we needed to know that which is the church doesn't go on further east but that means we've still got this 400 year old gap between the time the nun died here and the time they put up this church in memory of it yes but i think looking it as a gap is probably wrong we're pretty sure of what would have happened during that period what do you think happened well what tends to happen is when you get somebody who's turned into a saint you you often have a monastic community with it and that is unlikely to have survived more than a couple hundred years because the the scandinavians coming through here well they are vikings yeah the vikings and they burn everything down they destroy everything if there's ever anonymous here it just evaporates the only things you tend to get left is perhaps the church site if there's enough locals around and they survive and they carry on being christian he gets turned into a parish church or in some cases it's turned into a proper medieval priority but we don't seem to have that here but how can we prove all that well the main problem we've got is there's a church in the churchyard in the middle of the area we'd really like to look at you know it's quite likely there's a lot of stuff under here we're not allowed to do that so what we can do is come in as close as we can because the area that was occupied by the monastery is almost certainly bigger than the area occupy the church and the church so the church of the church i feel like a retreat from the likely maximum extent of the of the monastery but we need some targets to look at stuart's survey of the earth works around the church has thrown up some interesting results here's the church there's a medieval moated site just here but there's also a whole other system of earthworks this seems to be a roadway from the river heading straight towards the church there also seems to be a large platform at the top of it and off to the side is a large lump in the ground another platform it looks like it could be a boundary ditch of some sort so we put a trench just here to see if it is we also now have some geophysics results for this area here the orchard field right next to the church have you fixed the whole field we've only managed to do a quarter because of all the trees but look we've got some really nice results the high resistance in black is what we're normally interested in but look at these low resistance rectilinear white responses what might that be it looks like a building well it could be robbed out walls the thing is they're also aligned with the church why'd you say ah what could be so significant about that well if the present church is on the site of a monastic church then these could be monastic buildings going with it we've got a ticket haven't we we certainly have yeah well what i think we should do is actually put a couple of test pits to get the bigger picture of mixed right and i think we can at least we'll get an idea of what those are representing before we start beginning and then he finds the association with them i suppose it could just be a lot of victorian bottles yeah well he'll find out once you've dug your testosterone phil opens the first of two test pits in the orchard john keeps an eye on things i would help you you know but no you wouldn't it's the first bit of work you've done today so hey when was the last time you did any i've been working all morning but you don't know what work is john all you do is walk up and down look with a supermarket trolley look out for the crocuses back in the village we've really gone as far as we can in number 20 this was where we found saxon material but now as we go deeper all we're getting is medieval and even later clearly this ground has been turned over so there's nothing more to be gained by digging here we close it down in one of the test pits closer to the church we've also hit the bottom and we've got an interesting find here what's nice here is we can see two distinct phases of archaeology we've got the later wall which looks to be 18th century handmade bricks running down the garden and they're overlying straight on top of this earlier coupled surface which contains 15th century and therefore probably dates to that point too it's my oldest you see this i had no idea anything existed like this absolutely it's you know it's wonderful to see it the problem with this though again is that it doesn't really take us any earlier than medieval so what can the pottery we found tell us i've laid some of the fines from the test bits out sort of in chronological order uh give you an idea what's going on we've got the romans down there all on their own um and a great big gap here this is the black hole of 400 years yeah this is the the early middle saxon say 450 to 850 a.d nothing so far and then we arrive at the late sacks now when we're saying late saxon i suppose what we really mean is viking age 850 through into the 10th century then we've got this stuff which is all the norman period stuff 11th to 12th century so those people who are saying that this is a medieval settlement we've we've proved that that's wrong we've got a lot of norms oh yeah we've got norman and we've got pre-norman so i think from the potter we've got it there's very little doubt that there's there was a settlement here in the norman times the pottery we found proves that there were people living in and around nether poppleton right through the medieval period and right back to the 11th century that part of the village occupied by houses was laid out in the medieval period but there was already a norman community living here so we closed down all the test pits in the village they've answered that question the big question though was there an earlier settlement still stands our only chance now of finding anything earlier lies in what we find close to the church that monastery that mix besotted with is our only hope of pushing this village history back any further thinks she may have something but is it good enough for paul oh what's going on here then um well we've got a piece of well i'm pottery excited i think it's quite early yeah oh dear um well it could be um i mean certainly looking at the geology of it you've got these big ones of course sticking out of it um that's kind of typical of late saxon and the saxo norman potter you get around here i mean it could conceive to be even earlier but it's very bad and i wouldn't like to sort of really try and give too close a date to it you know you're being rude about my pottery no i mean it's a nice start but it would be nice if you get some bigger bits i'll try my best then cheers cheers this trench could be very important there's a big ditch here and if it is saxon it could help determine whether there was a monastic settlement here at that time but if there was one what are we looking for so what would it have been like this monastery well it's difficult to answer that because so few of them have been excavated you know so few of them do we know anything about but the little bits that we do now i mean probably the best thing is to try and draw a sort of sketchup of them a lot of the time they're on promontories very often there's a you know chunk of land sticking out with with marshes around it or you know river next to it something like that and they cut off that promontory with a ditch that cuts off the monastic area from the rest and then because the most important thing there's there's often more than one church and they're often in line like that so i'll put a couple in there why did they do that we don't know to be honest i think part of it is just structural they couldn't put a really big building up and then because often monasteries at that date are mixed communities of men and women um nuns priests to serve the nuns and then often with an abbess you know we must have been formidable ladies actually over the top of everybody so we need some sort of dormitory area refectory area something like that and let's have some priests with similar accommodation nearby kitchens you know all that sort of stuff going with it and there's always guests and those guests in some cases will be the aristocratic families and the royal families so let's put in a big sort of guest wall over here with facilities going with that and then often they're down by a river and they're bringing supplies by river so in the end it can start to look like almost like a small town you know sort of complexes of buildings but very very irregular and nothing like your fountains abbey or your tinton abbey that we think of as monasteries later on right next to the church we've found something a little strange so we ask an architectural historian to have a look at it it's limestone which is the kind of stone you would use for architectural details on buildings the problem is we can't quite see enough of it at the moment too yeah definitely see what it is i would guess judging by the molding so far it's 13th century in origin but 13th century but we really need to see a lot more of it it's a rather strange find really one would hope it's from the church to make uh make the story uncomplicated but if it's from another building it all gets very interesting indeed this will clearly need to be investigated a little further over in the orchard phil's also got a strange find you got anything over there well i'm down in the in the deepest bit i'm down to about 80 centimeters yeah i've got two nice bits of early medieval uh pottery yeah and i think i've got a pair of legs down here their legs think they're legs sure they're not roots all i've had is loads and loads of roots and worms and stuff down here no i think they're legs they seem to have marrow in the middle i'm sure it's legs i'm not down on the natural yet so i'm going to keep hauling down here and maybe i'll find a pair of arms or something like that to go with it doesn't look much like just a simple field wool and on the other side of the orchard there are a few bricks sticking out of the ground which ian has started to explore a bit and they are intriguing it's looking quite substantial isn't it yeah i mean it's there's some bricks tumbling off it down this way but it's going on down it's pretty solid here that makes you wonder whether it is just a torch well it could be but for an orchard it's a very big wall remember i said to you what a long shot it was to get at that early saxon period well i think the odds have just shortened on it because of what we found in this ditch what you got rocha i found a larger bit of pottery do you know what date that is paul oh yeah that's a bit more like it i mean that's pre-viking that's saxon ad450 to 850 i mean that's what we've been looking for really where did you find it i found it um more or less at the bottom of this ditch on the side which is great which means it's from the early phase of this ditch so that means we've got a saxon ditch well it looks like it isn't it the pottery is the right date we've got the ditch coming through it's near the bottom it must be near when it was doug but a ditch isn't the most exciting thing in the world well when it comes to saxon ditches in the pre-viking period yes there's only three things you tend to get them around a royal center a trading center or a monastery so it can only be one of these three things and what we're looking for here is a monastery so it seems to fit what do you think the significance of that ditches well i think it's fantastic it could be the vellum around the edge of a monastic enclosure it's a big ditch which defines um the religious area from from the world outside it's fantastic why do you say that because it's big it's broad it's exactly something you expect to find and you can trace it in earthwork form going down there and going back that way heading back towards the church so that's fantastic okay so we've got one piece of saxon pottery and a little bit of dish well no because we've got another piece of saxon pottery emma's just found that in her feature down the end of the trench and phil's got a piece out of the church yard as well so it's all coming together in the last hour or so you know beginning to get the evidence the boundary around it it's all starting to come together you're quite excited about that it's fantastic just what just what i thought we'd never find so tomorrow could we find mick's missing monastery go i hope so yesterday evening we found an old ditch and some ancient pottery down there which seemed to be clues as to the location of mixed missing anglo-saxon monastery but this being time team things are never as easy as they seem and this morning stewards found something entirely different which has set his hearing off in a totally different direction stuart after 12 years on time team even i know that is not saxon archaeology that's a face of section you've never seen what were you doing here well what we've got is a series of regular earth works there's a regular layout of them which were interesting they want to know what they were there's a piece of wall exposed can you see that there yeah yeah so we put a trench here to see what it was and look we've got we've got this really well built brick wall it's got what appears to be two bricks in it and it's just sitting there what do you think it might be well we've actually put another hole in over there yeah we've got lots of building rubble tile only debris from a collapsed building i think we've probably got here an unknown tudor building which you're after absolutely nothing about before really unknown completely i mean i've walked over this field more times than i care to remember with dozens of other people and we've got past that wall and the idea of a true dimension just hasn't popped into our minds and yet when you look at the aerial photographs when you listen to stuart talking about it's quite clear that we've got this regular platform surrounded by these intricate earth works that do seem to indicate a previously non-tudor house with this garden around it we've only got one day left what can we do about it well i think the important thing here is to decide are we inside a house are we outside the house so dig this trench see if we can identify floor levels or yard levels here and take the trench into the back into the orchard over there again see if we've got yard levels or indeed floor levels so we've got an anglo-saxon monastery and a tudor mansion and just one day left it's big trouble i think even when you know there's something under the ground you don't always find it to have stumbled across a tudor mansion no one had ever heard of is very rare indeed this is where the wall is at the back of the orchard the building rubble is here we open another trench here to see if we can find more wall these are the earthworks which look like some sort of raised platform john geoff is this area yesterday so we re-examined the results to see if this new discovery makes any sense i can't actually see a clear building plan here we've certainly got what might be structured on that side yeah there that ian's digging yeah kerry's wall at that point there and behind us on the bank yeah what i'm not sure is whether this is a terrace a garden terrace yeah or whether we're actually in the building and any walls have been stripped away yeah and i suppose that depends on the plan of it if it was a series of ranges then we would be the garden yeah whereas if it was more of a a block then we'd be in the middle of it here wouldn't we so you're suggesting we need something across here to test that the earthworks according to stewart suggest that that might be the front of the house we've got responses that go with those earthworks i think if we put a trench across we can establish whether it's a garden terrace or the front okay so you've pegged it out we go now look at that yeah let's have a look at that first and see where we go from there we also look at other things in a different light it turns out that this column we found yesterday also has tudor bricks in it so it could have been part of the foundations of the tudor house and in this garden just behind where the wall was found there are lots of little lumps and bumps that with our new view of what might be happening could be leftover walls so our architectural historian is helping us to plot them out we should mount them so we can see how they relate to the earthquakes yeah if you if you look up towards the north there can you see there's that slope in the ground oh yeah yeah there's a drop off down there and then it runs straight towards us okay where we're stood in fact and then it returns at that point there's a corner just there that way that's right once we put the information on a map okay it may show us the outline of the tudor building i'll walk up to the next corner [Music] [Applause] okay i've got that [Music] okay i've got that so if i plot that up on the computer see how it relates to the earth works and everything else while the hunt for the tudor building continues we're also looking for evidence of a monastic settlement around the church we still want to find it stuart thinks he has an idea of where it could have been see down below is where where the trench is yeah that's cut across a line of a ditch which goes straight up there and leads straight towards the churchyard so it's it's going beyond the churchyard wall down there well i would suspect so you can't see any tracer in the church which actually comes along from there down below us yeah heads towards that that pylon there in the distance but it does a right angle across the field you see where that greener greener grass is across it's just bit beyond that there's actually quite a dip when you get down there right and then on the aerial photograph and in the earth works you can actually see a ditch heading down towards the river you see where the low ground is down there yeah well that's where there's a series of fish ponds now probably to do with the the manor house see the bottom of the slope in front of us it is but yeah what that dip is and why they've used it as fish ponds is because it's it's an old river channel coming through there all right so that might be the sort of former edge of the river yeah in the saxon period so i think what this monastic enclosure is doing it's coming along here doing a right angle heading down to the river yeah um potentially where it is over that side obviously the church is there which you'd expect you'd expect that to be in each side yeah yeah and and to me it looks if you know the the other edge of it is going to be where the village is separated from so where the big hedges are the big trees is is where it's getting back towards the river that's right i mean it's almost like the field that we're in yeah apart from a small bit at that far end is the you know is the monastic enclosure you know it gives you that you know that sense of isolation that i know you like with monasteries that's right yeah it's almost on a promontory sticking eastwards isn't it yeah that's that's absolutely ideal this is the area described by stuart it's the edge of the monastic enclosure with the church inside it and the edge of the village forming one side to it [Music] it's a huge sight but entirely what one might expect mix happy with it [Music] back on the ground phil has removed the legs they were from a dog and he's got some more good news for mick phil that is not a one by one test pit no it's a two by two test split actually it started out as a one by one why did you extend it because of what we found in here i mean look we've got this this feature what looks like possibly a shallow pit and it's not merely the fact that we've got a pit down there it's what we got out of it is that saxon yeah it's this 450 to 850 middle saxon stuff so does that mean that this feature whatever it is is saxon it could be you've got to be a little bit careful because we've also had early medieval pottery from there as well but the thing that we have not had is late pottery or any post medieval pottery so in other words i'm fairly convinced that that feature has got to be early medieval at the latest nick have we any idea what that is well i don't think we have at this stage and this is one reason for extending the trench exactly but it is the sort of thing you expect on these these sort of sacks and sites you know they've they've put timbers in the floor or or posts or something like that and look how close to the church we are yeah yeah we're right in the air you really expect activity at that time so what are you going to do with this now well just take it on down try and find out what this feature is to enlarge the trench we've got a lot to do today we have yeah but you know this is coming on we might even have a go at this one later on as well it's got the same sort of thing in the bottom of it the hunt for the tudor house is going well kerry is cleaning up the main part of the wall [Music] some locals are helping expose more of it while we're beginning to think that the material in this trench is to the front of the house [Music] and henry is now pulling together the bigger picture from the lumps and bumps he plotted so what would it have looked like well judging by the fragments that we've turned up so far we would have had a range at the back which would have contained the hall some ranges coming off either side which might have contained chambers and such like uh an entrance into that courtyard and then an amateur courtyard where all the service buildings would have been and including perhaps this building the barn so we are looking at a complex of buildings oh yes quite an extensive site yes everyone's saying we didn't even know there was a tudor building there before is that right well bizarrely yes it is the only references we have are sort of rumors if you like in victorian history you see here there's a reference here to the manor house now that's the current manor house that's still standing and it says here that that was built out of the remains of the ancient seat of the huttons the old house that's the reference to an older house that was used to build the existing one but we had no nothing more definite than that about it before now as we uncover more of the walls we begin to get a clearer picture of this tudor house the evidence points to it being very big the front wall runs from here to here the earthworks in the orchard suggests that it extended right back to here and the thickness of the walls suggest that it was a couple of stories high it was a prestigious place stuart took me on a tour of the front of it if i'm a visitor to the tudor house why am i coming up this way rather than from the road well this is where the privileged visitors would arrive the high status which says you wouldn't want to come in past all the peasants basically so what can i see over here you'd see ornamental ponds little waterscape just out there you can walk around and over there in this enclosure here you'd have trees ornamental orchard type trees and they'd be screening what was the old mode by the time you got to this point here what you'd see in front of you is this grand facade of this new tudor house so presumably that's the whole point of the grand walkout it is it's showing off it's showing off to you as a visitor this is this is its display side over here and if you look out from the house well what you've got looking this way is an open landscape it's a hell of a view isn't it it is it's private and it's privileged you can't see the village you can't see the peasants you've got you've got ponds river open landscape orchards ornamental gardens very show off very tudor and this is what this enormous complex would have looked like this was an impressive building dominating the landscape with its own entrance to the church and to the river [Music] out in phil's trench he's now reached the bottom of this feature the saxon pottery he found came from the other side of the trench but what does this side tell us so what do you reckon what have we got out of this now well not quite what we expected me you remember on the geophysics there was that that white line which we thought was was going to be a beam slot a building that sort of thing well there's no way that this is a building this is a massive ditch it's going to come out what at least that size was going to say because you've only got one half haven't you the other half going to be that's over here somewhere and have you got any dating for that ditch yep we've had pottery from about the norman conquest right through to about the 14th century it's it's within those sort of three or four hundred years and i think that what we're looking at is activity here in the early medieval period at the same period as that church started so what do you think we have got here i think it's probably something to do with well the norman period you know the the church is all of that sort of data later we'd expect some sort of manner house to go with it probably somewhere in this area if not down on the the moated mound and this is one of the land divisions associated with that the main thing is i think that we've actually got people living around here which of course you don't have now up on the top of the hill here you look at it now yeah there's just one house here there's no no village at all in those days this would have been thriving but what of mick's missing monastery here at the east end of the village around the church do we have any evidence for that well we do why they've used these fish ponds is because it's an old river channel coming through there the saxon ditch we found is most likely in this instance to have been from a monastic settlement the church seems to have been built on the site of a former church or monastery its dedication to a saint who died 400 years earlier is an important clue and the topography on a promontory is similar to that of many other monastic sites so now we just have to explain all of this to the people of poppleton what can we tell them after three days of exploring what just mix can i borrow a minute so we've got anglo-saxon here anglo-saxon here we must have some sort of hamlet here well to begin with they were right their village is older than it looks this pottery shows us that there was occupation here in norman times and in saxon times in the saxon period there was an enormous enclosure surrounding a monastic settlement it would have had a church as the centerpiece houses and a few workshops the promontory it's situated on is perfect easy access to york and a bit of height to give it some security in norman times the present church was built and a settlement grew up around it and then three or four hundred years later an enormous tudor mansion dominates this part of the landscape this is something no one had expected to find like so many other places it's a story of a thousand years of history on the doorstep [Music] so for the people of nether poppleton is their job now done well no [Music] a huge tudor mansion was a bit of a surprise the good news is that because of what we've discovered you're going to be really busy for years to come thanks for having us [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 175,760

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, time team season 12 episode 2, time team full episode, time team poppleton, time team yorkshire, yorkshire, nether poppleton, nether poppleton yorkshire, yorkshire history, history channel, history, british history

Id: I8GMCIHl5W0

Length: 48min 48sec (2928 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 18 2021