The Mysterious Medieval Skeleton Found Buried In Salisbury Cathedral | Time Team | Chronicle

foreign [Music] Cathedral for centuries this Pinnacle of medieval engineering and architecture has stood proud surviving Wars floods and the Reformation [Music] but we're here because of what hasn't survived 200 years ago they knocked down some of the cathedral's most beautiful buildings somewhere over here was salisbury's original Bell Tower a magnificent Gothic construction that soared hundreds of feet into the air while over there the builders pulled down two private chapels one of them built by one of the cathedral's most influential Bishops we've been given a unique opportunity to unearth Earth Treasures and what's more to solve the mystery of a body which was recently discovered buried here in the ruins of The Bishop's Chapel which wouldn't be bad for three days if we can do it foreign [Music] Cathedral has dominated the Wiltshire Countryside for almost 800 years it's a building that's literally crammed to the rafters with some of the finest medieval craftsmanship in the world a breathtaking statement of the wealth power and influence of the church [Music] alive the ravages of time and the redesigns of man so we've been invited here by the cathedrals Dean in chapter to ReDiscover some of the architectural Treasures that have disappeared and to be honest we're really rather excited at the prospect Nick for years and years you and I have been digging Abbeys and nunaries and monasteries this is a bit different this is fantastic isn't it the scale of it Phil this is your city isn't it absolutely it's it's funny really I mean we all regard this as an archaeological Monument but if you live in the city it's more than that you know I'm pulled back the curtains every morning and I see this it's an absolute icon it really is Tim you're the cathedral archaeologist there's a little bit of me that's thinking this place is the best part of 800 years old it's there we can all see it it doesn't really need one archaeologist does it let alone a whole bunch of new ones to me archeology of course is not what is just under the ground there are things under the ground but is the full study of the material remains of the past including a big structure like this with the highest medieval archeology anywhere in Britain but surely that's been here since the beginning no it hasn't no thus far is an add-on 50 years after the cathedral was completed yeah we've got an engraving look that shows that the before that there was a separate Tower which had the bells in it and that was there until the 18th century Phil I was going to ask you where the Belfry is in the ground but this being time team I've got a suspicion I know already you know it's too well Tony don't you really yeah we're actually standing on it I think what we're gonna have to do is run the radar over it just to confirm exactly where it is but it's it's bang here the plan suggests the original Bell Tower had a massive footprint which is the sort of thing Jeff Fizz was designed for but this isn't the only thing to dig because the major Redevelopment in 1789 that destroyed the bell tower also robbed the Cathedral of other stunning medieval buildings including the private Chapel of the cathedral's most colorful Bishop we've got this fantastic 17th century engraving of the cathedral East End here it pulls that aren't here anymore this one ours built by Bishop Richard beecham now Bishop beecham dies in 1481 and he leaves instructions in his will that he's to be buried in the middle of this Chapel what's so exciting about digging a chapel this is was one of the key Chantry chapels put onto the cathedral in the 15th century when the East End of the cathedral was completely reorganized because Bishop beecham who was a very very powerful figure in the walls of the Roses period had managed eventually to get Osmond the Norman Bishop of Salisbury from Al serum canonized by the Pope in 1457 so there was a brand new Shrine in the East End of the cathedral here and that's why he obviously wanted to have his chartered Chapel as close as possible Beacham was buried in his Chapel in 1481 and Engravings suggest it was a little Masterpiece of medieval Gothic architecture so one of our tasks is to bring that Chapel back to life with a graphic reconstruction based on the archeology and the ground there's all this stuff some surviving fragments of its interior stored in the cathedral Loft miniature fan vault let's go into those things [Music] but we have another challenge when the chapel was demolished salisbury's records show beacham's body and tomb were moved into the main Cathedral so it was a shock when an evaluation dig on the chapel in 2000 made an unexpected Discovery yes this is a real mystery because we've got records that in 1789 when they were demolishing this Chapel the workmen found the bones of Bishop beecham and they identified him by an Episcopal ring and the bones were taken off and buried in the Nave so the last thing that anybody was expecting to find here were these two legs so could this possibly be our Bishop Jackie we can't prove that it would be a bishop here I mean Bishops don't have different bones to the rest of us do they well no but there is a certain amount of information that I'll be able to get out of this that will give us some idea about who we're looking at I'll be able to work out the age and sector the individual something about their lifestyle what kind of social status they were which we'll see whether that matches with what we know about bishop beecham or somebody of that social status from the records we know that four people were buried here two of beecham's relatives to one side his close friend Sir John Chaney to the southwest corner and the bishop in the middle all we now need to do is to try to match the historical information we have for each of our four candidates with the physical evidence we find in the grave ly so the knees are in there and the edge of the grave what should come is this around here that's it yeah see we can find the knees then or the legs again then we know exactly how far we've got to go down it will give us some idea of what the condition of the bone is and and just tell us a hell of a lot more before we go into this version Phil over on the other side of the cathedral our Target is just that tiny bit bigger well actually it's enormous it's pretty good it's pretty good I mean so clear the dark red where we've got the wall Foundation surviving and look the detail is absolutely fantastic you can see the buttresses the entrance everything I mean that's the 18th century drawing look and it's it's pretty well the same isn't it you don't need that it's all here this geophys is fantastically good clearly showing the remains of salisbury's original Bell Tower and the archaeologists are Keen to get their trowels on it for all sorts of reasons it's our only opportunity to look at how these footings were built at this particular period bearing in mind this is about the same time as the cathedral yeah if we can find out how the footing's been designed for this belt out which is pretty substantial structure yeah maybe then we can find out how this many of the monster was actually supported we might get a lot of evidence in there with the builders and people who use the tower and so on as well we would need to see that well look I've sketched on a 10 by 10 trench that I take in all the points you've been covering okay if you lay it out then we can get cracking yeah okay as well as helping us ReDiscover salisbury's original Bell Tower this trench could actually give us an insight into how the cathedral was built because both buildings were put up at the same time as part of one of the biggest civil engineering jobs of the Middle Ages the construction of a completely new city originally there was just a small Hilltop settlement called Old serum until a bishop decided to move his Norman Cathedral and the whole town around it down into the valley where Salisbury is today foreign and he built a masterpiece a building that celebrated God would guarantee The Bishop's admission into heaven and would become a site of wondrous pilgrimage for the poor of the Medieval World of course some people on the team are bound to have a slightly different take on it all these were celibate men who were the Bishops and they were always men they acquired wealth and Estates to support their office and their retainers they had got no successes to hand the estate onto so they became wealthier and wealthier what were they going to do with all this money basically invested in bigger and bigger Cathedral churches so are you saying that the cathedral isn't much more than an enormous Folly built in order to express how rich the church is well there's there's all that business of of building it for the greater glory of God and getting to heaven and so on but but effectively it is a big demonstration of the wealth that that bishop or that diocese has and of course the bishop of Salisbury had immense wealth and possibly the most important of these important men was Bishop beecham a man praised by the king for his hospitality and Wealthy enough to bribe the pope to make a previous Salisbury Bishop a saint I think he was a whirlwind actually he's one of these men that seems to be incredibly energetic but what we also know is he's one of these men who is able to move in multiple spheres so for instance by birth he's part of part of the Gentry he comes from families that have connections to the monarchy and we know also that he's been trained at Oxford by the the late 1440s he's actually appointed Bishop of Hereford so he's he's coming straight from Oxford into a bishopric which is quite something for starters in less than a year and a bit he's actually moved over to become Bishop Salisbury now for a very interesting reason and that is because of the fact that the previous bishop of Salisbury is actually hacked to death in in in Jack Cade's Rebellion so he must have been quite a brave man if his predecessor had been hacked to death he absolutely yes and he stays active for the rest of his life here because he was here for 31 years wasn't he it's enormous period of time yeah so he was about 60 odd early 60s when he died yeah I would think so he's got to be in that range which is for that period of In Time really old when he writes the opening to his will he's he's quite clear that he thinks he's really lived a long life and it's just that sort of information that Jackie can use to help identify the mysterious burial because over at the chapel trench oh we've just located the shin bones of our potential Bishop looking just at those two bones what's your instant reaction what can you learn from just those that first glimpse of those two bones well the main thing it tells me is that the bone is in very good condition I mean the better condition the bone is in the more you can tell from it so that's a good start while at the bell tower trench a day's strenuous digging has revealed the first evidence of how the medieval Builders set about constructing not just the tower but possibly the cathedral we've got this really lovely core Foundation of a wall of a bell tower running all the way through this trench it doesn't look very pretty as you can see there's this rubber cut going all the way through the middle that's because they've taken away all of the really nice fruity facing but then over here we've got this kind of white mortar just coming through there that's an internal floor surface we think and it's much later it's got brick in it and we've had clay pipe from there but it's very much different to that to the stuff at the bottom over there we think that's much earlier could that be an early phase well I'm just wondering whether it's not actually the foundation for the whole theme the foundation yeah it's only a couple of foot below the surface leave the foundation for that Cathedral is at the same depth then we've got to stick on our hard hats and run like that yeah but we tend to forget you see that a lot of these big medieval buildings have a raft of stone or a Pebbles or Timbers on which the whole thing is built we can actually find out because we can empty the rubber trench and look in the section we'll see where that mortar is sitting on the natural gravel and that will tell us lucky they dug it for us absolutely which is all very well but rakshar and Matt now only have two days left to get to the bottom of this massive Trench because the Autumn sun is fading fast end of day one and we're losing light by the second but the good news is we've found the legs of our body but does it go that way does it go that way and is it our Bishop we'll find out tomorrow history hit is an award-winning streaming platform built by history fans for history fans enjoy our Rich library of documentaries covering key events and locations of the medieval period history hits medieval offering features leading historians such as Dan Jones Elena yanega and Katz German not only that but with a rich library of audio documentaries covering every period of History through our network of podcasts sign up now for a free trial and Chronicle fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code Chronicle at checkout beginning of day two here at Salisbury Cathedral where we're trying to uncover some of the architectural Treasures that have lean underground for hundreds of years just behind me with that yellow Digger is we think we may have got the medieval Bell Tower if we have it should give us some clues about how this place was originally built but round the corner here and this is really intriguing we could have the body of a very famous Bishop which has been lying here for over 500 years although at the moment Jackie all I can see is a pair of shin bones that's right you've got this lovely sharp Ridge down the front that's the bit that hurts when somebody kicks you on it yesterday I said to you well we're not going to be able to tell a bishop are we because the bishop doesn't have different Bones from us but you said ah maybe we will be able to tell what did you mean I can tell an awful lot from looking at bone obviously I can tell what age the individual is and what's that coming we're assuming it's a male but it may not be but what sex the individual is now we know a little bit about the bishop we know roughly how old he was so we can see if that matches but also by looking at the kind of pathology the changes due to disease that again will help us work out what kind of social status this individual was and does it match that we would expect to the bishop and an absolute classic for that would be something called dish which is diffused idiopathic skeletal High prostosis which is a bit of a mouthful but basically it means somebody who forms a lot of bone what would cause that well the condition is generally linked with things like obesity diabetes and is that in itself can be reflective of a very rich living so it's the archetypal fat Bishop exactly but finding out if these legs once supported the bulk of the king entertaining Pope bribing Bishop beecham isn't our only challenge here because we'd actually expected this trench to be fairly straightforward but to be honest we don't really understand what we've uncovered these are Jimmy's radar results from here I thought that that could be a grave slab it clearly isn't you can see the end from Jackie's pencil case right to the edge of the spoil I mean it's such a clear response it looks to me as though the grave is cutting it so I'm wondering whether that's tree Chapel yeah but the grave definitely cuts it but we don't actually know that this grave belongs to this Chapel this grave could be later than the chapel maybe that plinth belongs to the chapel right I see the grave Phil will try to work out what the mysterious plinth is and how it relates to the burials in The Bishop's Chapel meanwhile at the other end Bridge opens a small trench within a trench across the chapel wall it's all a bit of a quandary I think I'll go back to the Bell Tower and so the staircase is just behind you there and there see that dark stone there there's the little snatches that's it so the door that's one side the other side of the doorway should be just about about there shouldn't it yeah yeah but whether it's the super straightforward Bell Tower trench or the increasingly complex Chapel investigation it does look medieval they both have one thing in common they're going to need loads of Labor to get them finished in the next two days but unfortunately some of our team have been distracted by the sheer wealth of history on this site and stew is off on the other side of the cathedral investigating something else entirely I think I've made a major Discovery and I need the position of it to put it in the record the most famous image of the cathedral is John Constable's quintessentially English view of 1823 so ignoring both our pressing medieval targets Stu's gone all Arty on us I think what we've got here is the exact position that Constable produces very famous paint in the cathedral foreign I need to treat it like an archaeological find and I need the coordinates of it that's a major event in time that's fantastic well the reason I'm confident of got it is because if you look at the the of drying itself for a start it is a very very high degree of observation going on it is it's a really good architectural depiction so you know he's drawing it with a certain amount of confidence so you can rely on then if you look at features you can see on there for instance you see these finials on the western end of the cathedral here you see them there oh yeah it's a certain yeah if you walk too far that way they don't make that pattern if you go too far that way of course if you go that way they're all going to be in line aren't they so you know so if you go to a map I can identify those elements on the map exactly that's coffee by the way so you put those positions on the map so with the edge of the Vestry and the buttress on the chopped house you draw a line back through those two features you can do the same with the corner of the chapter house and the central Gable that's on that drawing and same from the outline of the finials over the edge of The Cloisters and draw that line back and where those lines meet is exactly where he was drawing it from very clever so I think we need to know the exact exact position of this yes yes it is it's just that we weren't looking for it [Music] and unfortunately Stuart's not the only one off on his own flight of fancy after over 170 digs Phil had to choose this one to take his first helicopter trip very exciting for someone who's lived for decades in the shadow of the cathedral hey Liz six feet off the ground this just gives you such a wonderful perspective and to look down actually physically looked then like the bird goes on a beautiful building like George this is absolutely a dream come true Meanwhile Back Down with the workers Jackie said she'd have the rest of our Bishop visible by lunchtime Jackie it's lunch time can't see him I've got about an eyebrows worth up here so predictably it's taking slightly longer than we originally thought but in the meantime apparently Helen's discovered another body although looking down there Helen all like this is Rubble that's all it looked like to me a few minutes ago but in removing all this Rubble yeah first of all we encountered this one and then a little more fertling brought us to this which is going on a bit who knows how many more there's going to be but you think that we have got a burial rather than just a couple of bones that have been discarded well even if it is just a couple of bones that have been discussed I think it's going to be very significant and exciting because this looks like a grave cut in the corner of the chapel and when we look on the plan you can see in the corner of the chapel here here is the grave of Sir John Chaney and he was The Bishop's friend but wasn't he supposed to have been removed into the cathedral in the 18th century he was yes but these bones have certainly been moved now maybe the workmen didn't do what they said or maybe what they did more likely was they just took out the big chunky bones and left some here for us to find hang on if they were incompetent or weren't telling the truth about the removal of this body then the same could be true as far as The Bishop's concerned that's what I'm hoping yeah so could these be the remains of one of salisbury's most influential Bishops King excavation will tell us now this is fantastic you've got a huge area I know it's absolutely amazing and it's looking really really good thankfully over at the bell tower the archeology is of the much more chunky variety and just as importantly it all seems to make sense the most amazing thing about this is that the geophysics the plan and the archeology match up perfectly almost that must be a first actually it's a surprise really the other thing of course is we still don't have the actual Foundation of it knew it whether it was built on gravel whether it was built on a raft of stones or or quite what they did the only problem with that though is on the radar it could be as deep as 1.50 1.7 meters so you've got at least six feet I better not hold you up any longer I'll come back later what's now clear is that the bell tower was built in the same way as the cathedral with thick buttresses supporting its walls and it's this simple but clever form of construction that's meant this extraordinarily heavy building as much as seventy thousand tons has remained upright for almost 800 years in spite of being built on a floodplain it was part of a building Revolution that transformed medieval architecture a revolution that for some reason our building's people feel is best explained through the medium of plastic building blocks they developed from the Romans who used heavy foundations big walls that absorbed a lot of the stresses but as they moved up they wanted verticality they wanted higher and thinner walls with more windows but that meant more flex and probably problems it's kind of funny because they're building bricks but in real life they could have been real people under there couldn't they a lot of people died during computer construction certainly yeah but then they did work out you know a methods of actually sorting it out if we look at this stage it's the addition of the buttress and that's allowing us to absorb a lot more of the forces and have a higher thinner structure with more windows in it it is intriguing that on this side where you've got these buttresses tied into the wall the wall still does wobble a bit not as much as over here but it does wobble whereas on the other side it's absolutely stable over the other side we're using flying button which is the next stage on as well so is that technology used in Salisbury Cathedral not really most of the bucket shoes in Salisbury are the ordinary abacuses wasn't this place supposed to have been built on a marsh yes it is very low-lying very wet land and that might have been one of the reasons they use ordinary practices rather than these sort of partly separate flying buttresses for differential settlement or something like that but if we dig up the foundations of the Bell tap we might find some Clues fantastic site thanks to plastic building blocks and historical records but to be honest the archeology itself has been disappointingly slow I am so frustrated by this yesterday evening you said to me this is incredibly exciting if we can sort out what the foundations of the bell tower then we could work out how Salisbury Cathedral has remained standing which nobody knows because the foundations are so shallow and yet nothing's happened we're still in exactly the same place you hadn't dug the foundation come on that's a little unfair I mean I I can see where you're coming from but it's taken a very long time to get it all clean to get into this state how many how many archaeologists have we got here Mick I've never seen so many times two big areas open it's taken a long time to clean talk so in in one way I share your frustration in that it's taken a long time to get to this stage but in both trenches now we're poised at the points that we can start this man clean it to understand it which is what Ian's doing over there look he's already cutting a section to get through to the foundation to look at those foundations you're on the bed if he's going to be doing that in order to get out of the foundations it's going to take him a year but Elsewhere on site Mick seems to be right as usual it's 44.80 because over at the East End Bridges trench has reached the foundations of the chapel wall and things are getting complicated crucially what we have got coming up now is a construction cut it comes up here in the section and you can see it here running along here with this white mortar on this side and these old medieval roof tiles here which are also part of that 1460 Foundation the material that you're on is earlier yep that's got to be 1460 or earlier Yep this is the foundation for The Beacham Chapel it's cut into that it's later what you've got to do is carry on through those earlier layers let's try and get to the bottom of the foundations do you know how substantial the foundations of this Chapel were or what was here before the chapel went up absolutely this isn't what we expected the record suggests the chapel built by Bishop Beacham was the first structure on this site but clearly there was something here before that and this trench is throwing up other surprises as well in this grave cut at lunchtime today we thought we'd got the bones of the Bishop's friend but it turns out that we haven't they were just bones that were found about eight years ago when archaeologists were digging here and they collected them up and put them in there a bit disappointing but we're fairly philosophical about that these things happen in archeology the exciting thing though is it now looks as though Phil's got a complete grave over here that's right I mean you can see it quite clearly here got one Edge there and one Edge there and what we think is that it's earlier than the foundations of The Beacham Chapel but we also want to con concentrate our efforts on on the deposits at this end here what we want to do is dig a slot through there so we can see what the relationship is of the layers of this wall our famous plinth which we still don't know what it is and also go right the way through to the main cathedral building itself meanwhile Jackie's going to be on with her burial yeah Jackie you've been digging that all day is it the bishop I can't still can't tell you whether it's the bishop or not and to be honest I'm not absolutely sure it's even the male I think actually the answer is going to lie under here and that's really just covering the delicate pelvic bone so I don't lean on them and break them but that's going to tell us the sex of the individual so we'll find out tomorrow so is it a man is it a woman is it a woman pretending to be a bishop we'll find out tomorrow when we lift the bishop to see you try figure named day three here in the Sumptuous surroundings of Salisbury Cathedral and we've really got our work cut out today see this enormous trench we're going to puncture down a couple of meters in order to try and find out what the foundations are made of because if we can then we can conclude what the foundations of the cathedral itself are made of meanwhile Round the Corner Jack is still Excavating her Bishop although there's a slight technical problem she now thinks it might be a woman [Music] Jackie what was it originally that made you think that that skeleton might be a woman well the first view I had of the skull was the sort of this eyebrow region here and in a male that is that is usually quite pronounced whereas in females that tends to be much smoother and the brow is quite flat so I thought this really does look more feminine than masculine as I've started to uncover more of the skull and I can see more of the features there are some masculine features there I actually doubt whether that's Bishop beecham at all why'd you say that well the clue actually lies in this grave the grave of John Chaney's who was beecham's friend now he died after Bishop beecham yeah now do you see this black layer here yeah this black layer went all the way over the tomb of John Chaney's therefore that black layer is later than the tomb of John Chaney's that skeleton that grave cuts through that black layer so that grave is later than that black which is later than John Chaney's who died after Bishop beecham but it's made inside the chapel this is not the coffin of an 18th century or a 19th century individual so this grave was put in before this Chapel was knocked down in the 18th century before the chapel was not down so this must be an important individual and as far as we know there's no record of them going in here so it's still something of a mystery [Music] but this burial's identity is only one of the Mysteries in this trench we've also uncovered evidence of foundations that are earlier than those of beecham's chapel and there's nothing in the comprehensive Cathedral records to explain what they could belong to over in the bell tower trench the pace as always seems to be much more civilized but we are finding more evidence of just how impressive a structure it was before it fell foul of the serious Cathedral redesign of 1789. for the last couple of days we've been concentrating mainly on this part of the bell tower but there's this as well isn't there is that that it's the base of a rather large Pier you can see on the cross section there it goes all the way up to the timber Belfry at the top of the tower it's rather ugly isn't it it's needed very necessary not just for the strength it gives to the tower because bearing in mind it's 200 foot high yeah on top of that you've got the Belfry and The Belfry is heavy in its own right but it's also got the bells and once those bells start ringing you've got all sorts of forces and pressures swinging around literally oh I see so it's not the sound of the Bells which always deafened you if you're you're up in a tower when they go off it's actually just the weight going backwards and forwards yeah and all that energy that's been created on the Bell and as we begin to reconstruct it's a wonder of design medieval or any or any other age but the inventiveness didn't end with the architecture because the faithful were called to Prayer by a bell rung by this one of the world's earliest clocks this is the medieval but where are the face and hands on it will of course being a very early clock it doesn't have a face in hands because all a clock is is a mechanical device for ringing Bells that's what the name clock in French or clock yes in Latin so that's that's all it is Nick was the Church of course that started to regulate time first of all with sundials and then in the 30th century when the mechanical clock was invented every Monastery in great church got one of these very quickly we actually have a remarkable bit of documentary evidence that tells us in 1386 there was already a full-time clock keeper and this probably dates them a little bit before that so this is ringing the bells at fairly regular intervals through the days this is ringing an hour Bell right and of course originate was in the Bell Tower and that is to regulate the service times accurately and that's what matters here oh back at our trench Over The Beacham Chapel we've just made a fantastic little find it looks absolutely terrible to me it looks really girls yeah I can't see a thing yet maybe put some liquid on it um solvent let's just see fantastic oh look at that no that's really yeah okay I'll take it back there's a cross look at that oh it's across it is a cross it is extraordinary golly I mean I see what you mean there you're right it isn't too bad it's not it's not at all look you've got that Circle you've got letters all around the outside this coin is the first of its kind ever to be discovered in Britain it's a 15th century quatrino from Ancona in the papal territories of central Italy maybe it's been dropped by um a foreign craft we've been working on the chapel or the cathedral maybe some something like a Mason you never know so is this the edge of the Grave it could well be couldn't it and as we get to grips with the dating sequence of the trench it's becoming clear that most of the graves we're uncovering form part of a burial ground that was here before the chapel was built in the 1460s but there's still Our Mysterious body that was buried here long after Beacham was interred here you're into the pelvis area now Jackie any indication of what the sex might have been and a female the pelvis is opened up so it's broadened out so that angle would be quite broad whereas in the mail it would be fairly tight and shallow and that's looking quite a sharp angle which suggests it's more like to be male than female any idea about the age um well it's certainly not a spring chicken there are some little bony changes down the spine where you've got osteophytes little new bone growth around the margins of the vertebrate so the suggestion is we've got somebody at least who's over 40. so not a woman and a categorically not the 60 year old Bishop but the question remains who was important enough to be buried in The Beacham family Chapel but mysterious enough not to be entered in the official Cathedral records there are only four known burials here but our grave it seems is somewhere around here it has got to post State John Chaney's grave and I did wonder whether one could say with any confidence whether this grave ought to be before the Reformation extremely likely because this was abolished in 1548. and it and it's important also that we think about the fact that it's family because this is a chapel that is an essentially a family Chapel yeah so all we need to do is go and look through the family tree and find out who died in that 39-year slice between 1509 and 1548 in theory it ought to be quite simple I hope so it's a tough challenge when you've barely half a day left the last two days we've been marveling over how straightforward the archeology in this trench is well at least that's what we thought what's gone wrong actually Matt's just gone and found a wall that we never knew even existed this wall running along here and the other interesting thing is is the floor layers they seal the wall and this Foundation is cutting into it hang on doesn't that mean that that wall is earlier than the bell tower yes it on what was supposedly a Greenfield site yep what does that mean Bridge I don't know and be there if that wasn't bad enough what about where Ian is Ian you were going to go right down as far as the base of the foundations weren't you until you came to the Natural yeah what about those two stones in the corner of your trench uh they appear to be two ashler blocks which are underneath this floor with the herringbone tooling on them one wood herringbone tooling say to you it looks early I mean you're probably talking in Norman or earlier when you say earlier so it could even be Saxon possibly I bet you're glad it's you who's got to interpret what's happening here I'm loving it yes this is the last thing we expected and if that wasn't enough the archaeologists are now getting very hot under the collar around the East End where they think we may be about to rewrite the history of Salisbury Cathedral where we have the problem is this black and gray chalk phone absolutely which literally dominates our entire trench the the seriously big question is is to take that that chalk foundation and the buttress and say which is earlier than the other and as far as we can see they pretty much better together they don't no they don't look as if they're butt up to me they see that the Flint foundation of the buttress appears to overlight this big chalk raft which means stratigraphically it has to be later and then what it appears to do doesn't prove that that actually is what it does but with just a few hours left this is only one of all sorts of problems that we've got to solve that responds there it matches the exactly with what you've got including the mysterious building under the bell tower we weren't looking for walls never mind Helen and Elaine trying to discover the identity of the interloping burial you need is to untangle the comp and they once have felt that things were proceeding a bit slowly on this fantastic side I now feel we're flying by the seat of our pants guys for the first time I've put all the evidence we've got now everything is fairly further targeted that's brilliant so what exactly is this chalk Foundation well the most obvious solution is that this behind us here I think Beacham himself what he was perhaps planning to do was to get rid of this outdated it was now 200 years or more old and build an even grander East End and so what he was doing was building a new Foundation which we've uncovered here for a completely new building and then some reason we don't know why they stopped and packed it in and said okay we don't want this anymore we're just going to have my Chancery Chapel on the spot and this is the first indication we've ever had exactly this ever is it could have happened Yep this is something completely new and it adds another dimension to the architectural history of the cathedral this is really incredible an historic Discovery in the mid-1440s a huge chalk raft was laid out across this whole area it would seem this was the first stage of an ambitious and expensive plan by Bishop beecham to build an entire new East End probably to honest and Osmond's Salisbury patron saint It's a grand plan that would have transformed this famous aspect of the cathedral although we can only guess how but for some reason it never happened and Beacham instead used the space for his own private Chapel even then he didn't skimp and built a spectacular Memorial to himself with his tomb taking center stage in a highly Gothic and intricately designed interior [Music] the bell tower trench we've also at last cracked the increasingly complex archeology if you're a bell ringer in the Middle Ages you would have come in through a big door here you would have walked across this floor here it would have been higher than it is now but all the stones have been robbed out until you came to another wooden doorway here which you open probably in like that you come into a Lobby you can see the ghost of it on the ground still although all the stones of the wall have been robbed out you've then come to a stair once again that's been robbed away you walk along it like that and then you get to the first step of the Spiral Staircase to take you up to the bells you can see how the Masons have drawn some lines here to line up the staircase and off you go round and round right up as far as you want to so that is simple but this half of the trench has been a complete Pig hasn't it mate yeah it has but I think we understand it now come on then some of the stuff you saw this wall earlier that's underneath the tower yeah there are two possibilities for this we think one is although we talk about this as a Greenfield site that doesn't mean that people aren't using it they're not living around here so it might be something to do with the settlements around here but much more likely to is that this is something to do with a huge cathedral building project isn't it absolutely and I think it's very clear that's what it is now because it's quite a narrow wall it's a rough building and it's very thin so it probably had a wooden sill beam as it says almost certainly timber frame exactly we've probably ought to be thinking of a Timber shed you know because there's going to be which is the outside and which is the inside well we think we might don't we yes because what we seem to have here are large numbers of fragments of purbec marble this is all right if I come in here yeah they spoil down here so this is this is the marble is it that's right quite a lot of these pieces here you are are broken off bits of purbec marble which were being worked in vast quantities for this Cathedral so you think that this was some kind of of workman's Workshop yeah which was used during the building of that then when that was finished they demolished it absolutely this is a fantastic find actual evidence of the craftsmen who would have toiled for decades in workshops like this one to build the grand Monument that still stands today and yet we still haven't finished with this trench what about over in this little sondage we've got a couple of stones here too do you think they're also debris from the original building of the cathedral as well as the big building project here they're dismantling the northern Cathedral up at Old serum and they're bringing material down from it and reusing it in this building project yeah and that has been there since the 10th Century ah so that could explain why we've got these old markings on it they could be early Norman they could even be before 1066 probably Norman okay but the real reason that we put this sun Dodge in in the first place before we were distracted by this earlier war was because we wanted to find out how they had built these foundations because that might give us a clue to how they built the foundations here have we learned anything we've learned a great deal we can now see very clearly indeed how this Foundation goes right down onto that wonderful gravel bed the bottom of the foundation is there sitting on the gravel and the water table is there as well so it's exactly the bottom of everything here Richard are you convinced that they could have used exactly the technique that we can see in this trench in order to build that massive building perfectly happy with bearing in mind this thing's 240 in total but the first 80 foot or so is masonry the same height roughly as the cathedral so in relative terms this is taking as much weight as over there so yeah so the medieval Architects knew that this flood plain contained a natural gravel Island it was sturdy enough to support the Bell Tower and Cathedral even though the depth and size of their foundations were a mere fraction of the Colossal structures they held up [Music] can't help feeling slightly hacked off with the 1780s Redevelopment that robbed Salisbury of this fantastic example of their craft it would look breathtaking today but even now at the end of a Monumental dig there's still one final question to answer well we know now don't we where Bishop beecham was buried he was buried here and then was disinterred and laid to rest in the cathedral but that begs the question who is this I know we had such a problem because we were looking for somebody of relatively low status he had no Monument he had no elaborate coffin fittings he had no grave lining nothing like that and yet he was buried in the beacham's Chancery Chapel so he must have been one of the family the thing is though that when we went back to to the family trees we found that line after line at The Beacham family went extinct so we had a real problem yes we were looking at them and as a line would go extinct they would say died without ears you died without any children died without issue and then we got to Bishop beecham's brother's son so in other words his his nephew who died without legitimate issue now that means that suggests that this might just very possibly be Bishop Beacon's great nephew and so our best guess is that this is the last resting place of Anthony illegitimate son of Lord Richard beecham the cathedral will now recover and preserve this burial here with the newly found knowledge of his link to one of Salisbury cathedral's most ambitious and Powerful Bishops so this chap is the last of the beachons foreign [Music]

Channel: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries

Views: 126,300

Keywords: Bishop Beauchamp, Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries, Chronicle channel, Hastings history, Lego model reconstruction, Middle Ages exploration, Roman Empire collapse, ad-free history content., cathedral archaeology, historical mysteries, historical network, medieval archaeology, medieval architecture, medieval artifacts, medieval culture, medieval discoveries, medieval documentary, medieval era, medieval historian, medieval specialist, medieval studies

Id: 0hyZYOxq-zs

Length: 48min 56sec (2936 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 06 2023