The Mystery Of The Medieval Abbey That Vanished | Time Team | Timeline

hi everybody welcome to this timeline documentary my name is dan snow and here i am in a lancaster bomber cockpit one of the few remaining lancasters from the second world war to tell you about my new history channel it's called history hit it's like netflix for history hundreds of history documentaries on there and interviews with many of the world's best historians follow the information below this film or just search online for history hit and make sure you use the code timeline to get a special introductory offer now enjoy this show we're on the trail of a medieval mystery this is zion house one of the most lavish stately homes in the country owned by the dukes of northumberland and somewhere under this beautiful parkland lies the remains of an enormous and equally lavish monastery founded by henry v zion abbey home to an obscure order of swedish nuns became one of the wealthiest and most powerful religious establishments in medieval england a hotbed of political intrigue and descent then although it survived henry viii's dissolution shortly afterwards the buildings just vanished everything even its internationally famous library seems to have disappeared all we know is that whatever remains of this once fabulous establishment lies hidden somewhere under here and we've got just three days to find it [Music] we know that cyan was a rich and powerful abbey and most abbeys conform to a basic layout a large church where monks or nuns worshipped surrounded by cloisters where they lived what we don't know is exactly where the monastic buildings were or what they looked like i'm told that the best way to sort out this monastery is to try and locate the abbey church where the great and the good are buried and that gfiz are going to help us look just have a look at this for a minute geophysics are supposed to help us and there's three of them all sitting down have you seen the amount of parkland that there is out there we've been waiting four years for you to come here what do you mean we actually did the survey for the estate four years ago you've done it already that is a cheese no look we've got fantastic results look at this archaeology all around the house it is fantastic but what does it actually mean well i've tried to simplify it we've got all these formal garden features and i've tried to ignore these and if we look at this plot here i've got all the wall remains and i'm sure these are monastic he's very smug isn't he it looks like we're not going to need any surveyors at all he's done it all we've just got to show how wrong you can be i'm not sure we can ignore the garden remains got lots of maps and plans here which might help us sort out what some of this stuff is shall we pull it all together and show the others miles i have to say there's a part of me that's a bit skeptical about this dig we've excavated so many monasteries and stately homes over the years and really found very little are we going to turn up much well i would hope so i mean john's geophysical results here are fantastic should be very pleased with them there's some amazing structural details yeah but it could just be robbed out walls couldn't but even if the walls have all gone we'll find the remains of things like stained glass and bits of stone work and stuff in the fabric so it should turn up a lot anyway i'm still optimistic that we may actually get the foundations let's hope we do jonathan can you see anything there that could be the foundations of the abbey church well we're pretty much where we're standing this side of the house there's a whole series of what looks like walls here that's either the abbey church or a look-alike um you see two side walls down there inside i mean they're all lined up they look like piers you see little bits coming off them like buttresses it's got far too vivid imagination just can't be why i think the dimensions are too big oh yeah i'm with john on this one if you look at this planet 1739 it shows the layout of rectangular gardens here behind the house john's exactly matches that so these features you're pointing to could easily be gardens john if that is the church how big is it to a hundred foot it's very big it is very busy there are churches of 100 feet brett they're mostly cathedrals it must be said but henry vi the wealthy man and his foundations were enormous this is a debate that's gonna run and run isn't it miles how are we gonna solve all this well the obviously the key to understanding the site trying to locate the uh the cloisters chapters all the other sort of associated buildings is trying to find the church on the ground which i think if we can put a trench across here see this wall we'll see straight away whether it is a church or whether it is part of a garden feature so trench one goes in and the battle begins between jonathan architectural historian who thinks there's a big church here and john g fizz who thinks it's all too big to be a building and must be a garden feature instead this disagreement has its roots in the site's history cyan abbey was founded by henry v but it was his son henry vi who began construction here cyan was destroyed shortly after the dissolution of the monasteries when work began on a new house in the early 1600s the elaborate and fashionable gardens were added but 150 years later capability brown totally changed the whole landscape so the features on the geophys could just as easily be horticultural as ecclesiastical john thinks the church could be these features over here and trench two and three are going in to investigate but it's trench one that delivers the first clue all right phil yeah it's going right down look we're just going straight through the top soil straight down onto this white see it's got lots of bits of toilet and what have you cooking on gas don't we we've no idea what's been left in the ground if the foundations weren't picked clean to build cyan house then capability brown probably carted the rest away when he landscaped the grounds the best garden features we get better you don't want any garden features in here i know it's what makes stuart tick because he likes to have a map with a garden feature on it you don't want any don't want to have it well ah and they want the devil chat you got the abbey phil i know but that's a bit more like it though oh look oh wow oh we'll have that we'll have that that ain't mortared in but that's demolition i reckon but we'll have that that's our level can you get a bit more back here pat please hello here he comes come and have a look at this we've got our garden feature for you look at that that garden feature is it that's demolition rubble yeah but but is it church well it ain't ain't nothing else is it hey hang on pi oh what look at that gorgeous floor toil it's glazed it is beautiful on it our first clue there might be a building here but is it monastic it is as look it's beautiful glaze isn't it cyan abbey was home to a most unusual holy order dedicated to a 14th century swedish mystic after a visitation from christ saint bridget built a monastery at vadsteiner in sweden and then travelled around the royal courts of europe offering kings and queens a fast track to heaven if they supported her order by founding even more monasteries bridget was a saint she was canonized in 1391. christ spoke to her in person so she said and effectively dictated a brand new rule for a house of monks and nuns so what was the new rule different to the old rules it was far more enclosed and far more prescribed and specific about what the the duties of the monks and nuns should be so it was a brand new late medieval evolution of monasticism why on earth was it the brigitte order that was founded here well they there were two reasons um henry iv his sister married uh the king of sweden and they came across vadstena which is the mother house and sent all the monks and and some of the nuns over here secondly henry v wanted to surround his new palace at sheen with a great monastic landscape lots of monasteries and new monasteries worshiping god properly as it were the community at valdstena was a blueprint for subsequent brigetine foundations these were double houses where both nuns and monks lived and their abbey churches were huge the vagistina church was nearly a hundred meters long so our church should be similar if we can find it yeah yeah look a bit of molding look nice bitter concave moulding on that side spilling down the middle and then another another concave there so it was a bit of window moulding window dressing probably triceratops oh and another that's a toad surface there look jonathan i like that must have been a gorgeous building you know in trench two they're finding similar stuff they've got a floor surface and lumps of stonework that also look a bit church-like [Music] over here is where the 18th century garden features would have been and where john thinks that the abbey church is but beyond here is where jonathan thinks the abbey church is sean it can't just be on the basis of some rather thin lines on the gfps one of the main reasons is because this big broad feature is on an east-west axis what you'd expect of a church why would it have been that big you can take nothing here as typical it's a royal foundation and when you look at some of henry vi other work there's eaton college as intended by comparison it's exactly comparable width for 70 students so it's not to do with numbers and would it have been one of those perpendicular all gothic flying buttress types of things again we don't know whether it follows the swedish mother church in being like a big barn or whether it's something much much more typically english in in comparison but bear in mind king's college chapel cambridge eaton henry vi making a statement of dynasty in it because his father was the first founder here so it could be something very very english looking at the time of building cyan henry vi was a young king and highly influenced by modern contemporary architecture in europe he wanted to make his statement in england he founded eaton college in 1440 followed by king's college cambridge in 1441. their chapels were the showpieces hi johnny got any results for us yet john's extended his survey and look what he's got go on i mean just look that's our returning way well that's interesting isn't it so we've made our trench across there and you've got a new returning walls not far away but where are the cloisters well we've still got these these structures coming out down this end so that's going to be our best bet for the uh finding the cloisters and so that's where our targeted trenches are going in our next priority target is to put a trench over that that corner that is a buttress there yeah and certainly just getting that that 90 degree turn uh really just to confirm whether that is an independent building or whether it's still part of a garden feature but i think it's looking far more church now on that one that could be fun couldn't it if it is a church it's the east window cutting masonry stained glass yep that's where the action is could be a lot there so dan gets our fourth trench underway to locate the end of this mysteriously large structure if we find a buttress it may give us a clue as to how big these walls really were there are robbed out walls emerging from the demolition rubble at either end of trench one and they're over a hundred feet apart if these are the walls of a building it would have been absolutely enormous and it's this very scale that's worrying john [Music] but there might just be an answer to that phil's discovered a large feature in the middle of the trench yeah see we've got look that stone in there and that is still mortar stone in there so what do you think it is phil though it's not a wall you're talking about it being a appear well what what it is is it's right midpoint between the wall at that end and the inner wall on the other end so it's measured it between this wall here and this middle thing and and the inner one on the other side is 54 feet that's it for four feet 54 jonathan's 108 feet that he started with okay i just work in meters but you've been saying that you you can't believe that that's a building because it's too worried there's nothing to support it with masonry like this you could support it okay maybe it is a church i'm still not convinced but this is a very substantial garden wall well it could have been a big statue here phil oh wow a big fountain right in front of the house oh wow how come in the middle ages a religious house that comprised of women could become so powerful and rich well it was under royal patronage it was an incredibly important place to be from the women's point of view and it was incredibly important for the king to demonstrate his piety it's henry v is expiating really the sins of his father by setting up not just one but actually three big religious houses around here so in a sense it's part of the status of the king that the house that he found here should be very very successful and well endowed so what kind of women would come here and be nuns well the women who have a vocation to start off with so you would have people who had a genuine religious vocation the women who were perhaps determined to be spencers didn't want to marry the women who were unmarriageable for one reason or another perhaps just awkwardness perhaps widows and anyone who wanted not to be part of the marriage market of the pawns of the way that women are used in history but wanted to take in a sense a sidestep and control their own destiny a bit more this could be a career move it could be a very sensible career move for a scholarly ambitious power hungry woman who could see herself joining the nunnery as a as a young novice and then working her way up to run what is actually a very big business if trench one's looking more church-like then trench two at the side of the house is now looking a bit different and is this where those ambitious and power-hungry nuns would have paced up and down i mean it could still be that elusive cloister yeah passageway that we've been looking for that's one of our best structures outside of the church at the moment all day the two johns have been at loggerheads about whether or not we found our monastic church on john g fizz's side he thinks the walls we found are too far apart it's simply too big on john architectural historian side we seem to have three walls of a large building in a monastic complex so what else could it be hopefully the resolution will emerge right here trench four which we're putting in bang on top of the corner of whatever this mysterious structure turns out to be is it the church join us after the break beginning of day two and our archaeologists are still rowing about exactly what we've got in this trench is it the largest undiscovered monastic church in greater london or is it just a load of old garden features barney when jonathan said he thought it was a church you just laughed why are you so skeptical well between the two walls it's about 35 meters that is enormous that's longer than some churches in width and i don't see anything yet that says to me church what would you need to see in order to be convinced that it was a church well i think substantial masonry in situ um we've got to have more evidence we've got no floor levels from inside the church no graves or anything why do you still think it's a church well tony it does seem to me that all this could be an accident of survival that one would expect with a huge house being built on the site of a church they'd rob it pretty cleanly and having gardens superimposed on the church means we might expect the floor level to be gone so what i'd like to see is the corner that john's geophysics seems to be coming up with because to me this is a massive building you got very excited yesterday about this feature over here why i did this came up very late and of course what we wanted to find between these two socking parallel side walls we need some evidence for support of a structure to carry the roof because it can't possibly span 100 foot yeah with the roof now exactly between those two walls is this massive foundation i mean look at that look at the edge there and there that could be a massive pier base this is what's missing from the geophysics because it's too deep so i've not had anything in the middle at all and that's why i've been writing it off that's why i need imagination now look before the two of you start getting too [ __ ] yesterday evening we dug a trench over there in order to establish what this feature was that's really important because at the east end of a church you'd expect that that big cliff of masonry on the gables the biggest weight of masonry has to be taken by a substantial corner feature a buttress typically okay just stay stay here for a minute come and tell us you can come come a bit further forward than that come and tell us before they comment what exactly you found here so far well what we've got is a whacking great big wall coming right the way down through the trench you can see the contrast between the mortar here of the wall and the brown soil of the natural which is just outside the wall and this wall comes all the way down here it turns the right ankle where dan's digging it's shooting off up in that direction and then there's an immense buttress where phyllis cleaning uh disappear again sort of going right out the trench so quite a huge structure so john an immense buttress where is it and is it a garden feature the geophysics is perfect it's bang on i mean yeah okay i got the interpretation wrong what we're finding now is really interesting because it could suggest from that central pier base that we've got two churches side by side and that's why it's so wide one for the nuns one for the brothers i wonder if jonathan's proposals are roofed too far but then this would have been a fabulous complex and the clues just keep on coming up ah dan what's got a piece of window glass oh champion it's only a small fragment look is the only one we've got learning wow we've actually got definite evidence of of windows and at the east end hmm i don't know whether it's don't think it's not transparent anymore is it no i'm just looking to see whether there's any decoration on it i mean about that is that a pattern on it could that be you see that a little yellow line could be a bit of muck oh cynic get back to your shoveling most of the skeptics have been won over but you can tell stewart is still not happy john's got some new results and it looks good for jonathan as you can see we've got acres of parkland here that our archaeologists can investigate so where have they decided to put their next trench right here in the driveway slap bang in front of the house why are you being so disruptive look this is where we are on the map this is the corner of the church with the wall coming down here now we appear to have a junction at that point if so that's absolutely fascinating because yesterday well we found these two walls side by side and we put eaton college chapel on top of it and it's it's not just one of these but it's two side by side let's have a look let's let's put that in place and you can see there these are the pillars we found running along the middle of it so it's double the width of eaton well if that's the case you see eaton's got a nave here as well and john's geophysics shows that it bulges out at the same kind of point now if that's just the chancel and at this point is its junction with the nave and it broadens out what we've got is cyan house just occupying the nave of the church whoa so that means that your church would not only go all the way past the digger in that direction yeah but all the way under this house respecting the outside walls of the house it does and this is the critical point because this is the junction between what we're saying is the nave and the chancel so we need to see if we're right if we've got something that big how significant is that i think it's the most extraordinary discovery of late medieval london and the region within living memory that's my that's my feeling it's something the size of salisbury cathedral that history has forgotten about and you thought it was a garden so even the driveway goes in the pursuit of archaeology trench four the foundations are wonderfully wide and crisp jonathan can you spare me a minute but something's worrying phil what i've done is i've dug down the outside of the foundations so actually find out how deep the foundation trench is yeah didn't want to go inside the building so i thought i'd go outside look the bottom of the foundation trench has just come around here and it's the same level all the way around that's a bit shallow and it it's not very deep is it it's certainly not as deep as i would have thought we're about what four foot four and a half foot below ground level i mean any and it's sitting on this dark grey material which goes all the way around here yeah it is shallower than i would have imagined phil okay wow well thanks thanks for that thank you an interesting maybe a spanner in the works that one it certainly is foundations this shallow couldn't hold up a building this big and what's more in the new trench five they found a modern drain not the nave of a church garden drain i've got my garden then but underneath the wall of the medieval buildings charging off under cyan house see if it still chugs straight on yeah while we've all been concentrating on the church matt's been excavating the structure in trench two on the lawn it looks much more like a proper building but matt needs to go deeper to the side of the house trench three this was opened first thing yesterday morning but has produced very little so we'll shut it down once it's been recorded in the incident room carrender and barney are looking at details of other brigetine houses in mainland europe to see if there's any similarity in their plans from these it may be possible to work out what cyan looked like and how big the church was in trench five miles has come up with an astonishing find it looks like a human skull so where did this actually come from well it was just sitting here up against the edge of the section just underneath all this brick hardcore rubble right because this is absolutely fantastic there are bronze pins which have rotted and decayed next to the deering to it and the only other place that i know of in is another nunnery medieval nunnery in clement thorpe in york where they found 10 of these so this is some kind of head it's it's probably a headdress and therefore this might be part of a nun finding a grave here by a wall would be even stronger evidence of this being a church this is the only piece of the sion abbey buildings to survive it was saved by the fleeing nuns in 1539 and is now a sacred relic kept by the sisters in the modern brigitine monastery in devon to get a glimpse of the kind of skill and craftsmanship used to build cyan abbey alex our stonemason is going to reproduce a detail from this original pinnacle and then this is easier than flint napping [Laughter] i think i better admit that this is really your skill then mowing i think i better get back to my skill in the trench i'll come back when you're into the intricate stuff on an average day in the late 15th century 30 stone masons would have been working at cyan the place was a building site for over a hundred years and henry vi spared no expense the abbey church alone cost over twenty thousand pounds a staggering figure when you think that a fine parish church at that time would have cost only 450 pounds there was a library of over 1400 books that attracted scholars from all over europe including erasmus and sir thomas moore by the time of the dissolution in 1539 the abbey was one of the wealthiest and most influential in europe but henry viii was no friend of this place when it came to his divorce this was a great theological thinking place and they had said we can't justify no it isn't justified it's against the law of god it's against all the papal laws it can't be justified zion had richard reynolds who was an outstanding theologian and thinker and richard reynolds had said in confession that he was absolutely opposed to the king and henry and thomas cromwell his chief adviser now absolutely target this place as a place they've got to bring down because this is where this is the powerhouse of opposition everything that's being argued against the king is coming from here and they succeeded in bringing it down they had an inquiry here in which there was all sorts of fraudulent charges brought against the nuns and the monks nothing ever stuck they took richard reynolds and charged him with treason and he went to a martyr's death with immense courage and told the people who were executed with him that they were having a sharp breakfast but they would dine in heaven i mean it's the most wonderful story of catholic martyrdom in england in trench four jonathan's church theory is in huge trouble john g fizz and stewart have found out about the inadequate foundations but jonathan's fighting back now look at the area here of this buttress it's about 12 feet long now that's enormous and it could well be that because we're near a river on a fairly um you know marshy ground we're looking at a big raft foundation and the weight is being distributed across these enormous buttresses what diagnostic ecclesiastical features are here say this is church no argument the nun with the pins on her skull no we know it's an ecclesiastical site you'd expect that there's no doubt about that we're just having doubts about this being a church at the moment all we've got is a superb geophysics plan with the buttress in the corner but the only thing linking this wall and this wall is one central pier base that gives us a sort of roof between the two yeah that's one trench i mean if you take the bottom line of this this plan could you explain to me what in blue blazes it is if it isn't the church i don't the know i've got a real feeling of deja vu here i'm gonna have to ask you the question i asked you exactly this time yesterday where can we put a trench in to establish whether we've got this monastic church or not what do you want to to to i would like another central pier because you've manufactured the whole division on the church based on one pier which is absolutely central to these two walls well i think i think i think we're talking finer semantics here we know we can see this is the church we confirmed it more trenches just find more walls on here which we can see on your geophysics which is very nice by the way um we can see on there what we need to do is resolve the cloisters if it's the church yeah okay what what what is there okay look put a trench across this away from the church wall we'll see what that is put the digger in now yep with just an hour left definitely let's get on with it so trench six goes in if there is a buttress among this tangle of geophys anomalies then miles is confident that should silence the cynics once and for all but of course there's still the problem of the shallow foundations to support such a large structure jonathan's worked out that at least eight foot would be needed below ground trench five the one in the path has got that but the foundations of the buttress nearly a hundred feet away appear to be only half that deep henry's been called in to resolve the issue they look to be deeper down here can you take a level on this trench here and then we'll go up there and do the same thing because i should absolutely see whether or not the foundation trench is cut to the same level yeah because it should be shouldn't if it is the same got that yep got that one well if you stop here then jonathan i'll give you a wave and i'll try and shout the results give out a whale if there's if yeah now then plot your machine down on there right it should be similar if it's the same foundation yeah all right oh you're talking about 10 centimeters or so different this is what 10 centimeters lower here what actually peanuts that's nothing is it jonathan 10 centimeters that'll do for me so really it is pretty much a level foundation so phil and jonathan are back in business capability brown built a slope into this garden personally i'm now convinced this is a church so all we need to win over the skeptics is another buttress in trench six and a pillar base in the middle ray sand got to work making a 3d reconstruction of the nun's skull that was found in trench five showing how the pins would have fixed her headdress the veil still worn today by the few sisters who live at the modern abbey in devon it has a white cross decorated with red points representing the five wounds of christ five hundred years ago the nuns at cyan would have been singing this bridgeteen chant quite possibly on this very spot we've spent all day scrabbling around in the foundations of the church which 600 years ago would have rung to beautiful sounds like those but the church was only part of a vast monastic complex it was also a center of political intrigue and opposition to the king and where did all that plotting and planning take place in the cloisters not just corridors of worship but corridors of power when we find them join us after the break beginning of day three in our search for the monastic complex here at scion park and today we're shifting our focus we think we've already nailed down where the monastery church is but now we're going to look over here for the cloisters why should i get excited about cloisters aren't they just four corridors and a bit of grass in the middle uh technically yes it's an open uh courtyard with a passageway around it but the key thing about the cloisters is beyond the church is the main focus for the abbey building so if we're looking for the chapter house the refectory all the other key structures they're going to be set around the cloisters so once we find that we should start locking down other buildings and start interpreting john's to your physics plan by the corner of the house the plan clearly shows two parallel walls miles is opening trench seven and there's already something there it's a nice bit of masonry are some of the best you've seen outside the church actually that could very well be the cloisters this is our first clue that we found the cloister all range but of course there's still some unfinished business on the church what john needs is another pillar base and he's brought in his radar if there's a feature here john should be persuaded this was a building with a huge roof phil's been chasing a huge jumble of geophysical anomalies in trench six miles hopes that it'll be the buttress but jonathan suggested it could be a bell tower all phil's found so far is some of the tudor garden well we'll have that pat cyan abbey was a huge medieval pilgrimage center almost as popular as canterbury and wall singham thousands of pilgrims a year visited cyan what made it such a magnet people wanted to come here i think there are three factors one was the proximity of the royal court so it was sort of right in the center of the political world in a way but probably more important than that was the fact that the abbey had papal indulgences so that people who came on pilgrimage got real spiritual benefits immediately just for coming to the to the shrine a papal indulgence is when you're given a bit of time off in purgatory fast track through purgatory to get heaven quicker if you come to the abbey and make an offering for the upkeep of the abbey and to the betterment of the uh the saint then you will get something back in return and it worked on a quid pro quo and then the third thing was this was an absolute sort of spiritual powerhouse in britain and the library of 1400 books books actually being written devotional literature which would have been known the length and breadth of the country so it was a well advertised pilgrimage site this site's also produced some really juicy small finds i think several of these contemporary was the monastery there are fragments of tudor green appearing this came from uh near the church that's the sort of classic late medieval words yes that's right it's called the old name for it's tudor green it's southern white where it's 16th century a rather attractive little jar they're very finely made probably surrey hampshire area would be where the kilns were from but honestly the most exciting one i've never found anything like this before and it's absolutely brilliant and that's this it doesn't look very much does it now are these part of spectacles that's right they're incredibly rare aren't they yes it would have been a folding set so it would have been quite small but held at the waist perhaps on a chain and there were fewer than a dozen examples in england would have been expensive probably they were imported from italy i never really thought of victor as a medieval fashion victim but they are very fetching gfis have put down their mark and with less than two hours left kerry and ian have opened our last trench to find another pillar base the final piece of evidence needed to convince the most skeptical of skeptics john has been wavering over the church for three days but he won't accept jonathan's theory until he's found another pillar base over at the side of the house the cloisters are taking shape in trench two we've got the only standing structure we found at cyan and must have been part of the accommodation for the monks on nuns but what exactly this building was we're not sure yet in trench seven on the corner of the house they now think they've found the cloister or range a monk or none would have lived in a cell on one side of the cloister and they were often laid to rest under the passageway we think we're digging here is that normally where they buried people in underneath the cloisters the the monks and the nuns tend to get buried in the cloisters in the chapter house and those general areas there not in the church no the higher status ones get buried in the church the benefactors just under the tudor garden features in trench six there's a huge corner foundation similar to the one on the other side in trench four the skeptics have nothing to doubt especially now that kerry's found the demolition rubble in trench eight associated with another pillar base this is one of four features on the gfs so there's enough evidence to suggest that these were columns supporting a huge roof and that this must have been a big building miles tony here hi tony you might want to pop along 27 i think we've got something of interest for you over you can tell me what it is absolutely not you've got to come over and have a look okay miles is this the other wall we were looking for yes indeed yeah so we've got the cluster well hopefully yeah this is the wall that appeared on the geophysics that bridget's cleaning up here but but far more important than that remember this morning when i was saying about one of the key things you'd like to find inside the cloister was human burial wow that's exactly what we've got fantastic do we know what sex they are um unfortunately there's not an awful lot of the skull left as you can see but we've got a nice rounded forward um no brown ridges to speak of so it looks pretty female to me although i want a bit more and i want to see the pelvis if possible any other fines yes there are other fines um can you see these here orangish things are actually coffin nails and there was one in this one as well so this is pretty conclusive evidence that we've actually got a coffin and not a shroud burial why have we got so many skulls and yet so few other bones well it is interesting and i've given a little bit of thought i think they must have been wearing a hood either made of leather or cloth stuffed with straw or something like that and the rest of the body's gone but the the hood's protected the head and hence it stayed in the hole so if alice is right this cloister would have housed the nuns of cyan or at least until henry viii got rid of them when the nuns left here what happened to this place it was probably left as it were empty but it was certainly enough of a building and it had enough sanctity left to it that when henry viii died and his coffin was brought back it was left in the what had been the chapel overnight is that the story about the blood it is the story about the blood that's every school boy story about the blood the background to the story is that a priest being interrogated by henry warned him that he must not proceed on the course against the monasteries against the pope ultimately against god and if he did so then he would be punished as an old testament character ajab whose body was eaten by dogs on his death and of course henry did proceed and in dramatic fulfillment of this prophecy his apparently his coffin is left here overnight it's although it's lead-lined it leaks and the blood goes down to the floor and dogs come in and eat henry's blood it's wonderfully vivid but would henry's coffin really have been left unattended overnight it's such a great story it's we've got a source for it there is a record that says this indeed happened i think it's fairly unlikely he was a very well-regarded king of england i can't believe they just bundled it in here and you know went off for a pint but standing here in the undercroft of the house it feels like it's got to be true doesn't it it's such a great story i don't think we can just lose it we asked alex wenham to make us a stone figure it's almost finished [Music] oh paintbrush in handy just cleaning up now oh you finished it well my time's up so i've had to stop that is absolutely magnificent thank you pleased with it yeah i'm pleased with what i've got done in the time you know so have you learned anything from it well i've learned that i can get a little figure like this done in two and a half days and before i probably would have thought that it would have taken a bit longer but yeah i've got all sorts of respect for the the medieval masons who made this the first time round you know it just dawned on me what you've actually achieved is only one half of one facet of one stone of one gate post for one of the largest monastic buildings in britain that's right did you fancy finishing it off i think it would take me a long time trench 2 is about to reveal its dark secret jonathan and barney may be the first to look down here for nearly 500 years so these are the two walls we saw yesterday with the passageway in between but that passageway has got a hole through the floor not a passageway that's fantastic it's a vault it's vaulted it's brick it's running right away into the darkness and it's filled with some stuff that's like a hampton court culvert actually but full of soil so this must be the guard robe the latrine block for the nuns basically makes sense off the cloister doesn't it yeah absolutely and so well where matt's fishing like an eskimo now that's that's the long culvert yeah that carries all the waste away is that then an individual latrine or toilet well i think it must be that must be the way the waste goes down into the main drain brilliant well what about dating did god need stratigraphy well as far as we can see it seems that it's completely sealed by this huge dump of demolition rubble therefore it's got to be earlier than the demolition of the abbey so it must be late medieval or too it's got to be monastic this is excellent and that's great and this is actually the first piece of the cloisters that we've been able to identify and it looks on the geophys here as if it runs for about 15 meters you can see we're here and it's running 10 meters behind us and five meters in that direction that's a lot of lose isn't it i mean absolutely you can plan everything out from this now yeah here's the the nuns dormitory with what we now think is the retreat block here yeah and this would be the whole cloister with the church running through here that looks good doesn't it yeah i think that's really exciting it's the best i've seen in this site actually my long chalk richard the estate manager um said he got a seller stuart's been crawling about underneath the house and is about to drop a bombshell why am i not surprised it looks a bit perilous we've already got a torch rigged up to to help yeah all right yeah no have a just have a look at this wall down just down here you see the stone work well these are nice so look you've got these big stones all coursed in little tiles there to bring them up level and they go right the way down to the floor there now that's all good solid medieval stone and tile and bits of brick now i like this this a lot this is the kind of stuff we should be looking at and the original construction that once sat in those robber trenches we're looking at outside but we're following it now through under the house what makes this really interesting from my point of view is is where it is because henry came down and just planned where it is in relation to the building can you shine your torch on this i think you might like this this is the the house we're in yeah this green line here is the line of the the wall now look at what it lines up with on the outside of the building look at that bang on isn't it absolutely incredible and that actually is incredibly important because we haven't got off the lawn before now this trench that we found we continue it this far under the house it shows that the wall of this house is built on top of it reusing the old foundations and it gives us a minimum length for the building so if that's 120 foot we're talking about at least 260 foot overall length of the church we've got a whopper on our hands and we what an irony stewart the arch skeptic has finally confirmed jonathan's theory three days ago we knew almost nothing about cyan abbey we now know there was a church here and how big it was we believe the nuns lived on the south side with an infirmary and chapel and we assumed the monks were housed on the other side we can work out where the nuns might have slept and where the monk's world famous library might have been [Music] it's been a bumpy ride for jonathan he was right all along about the size and position of the church but he has changed his mind about what it looked like however the learning curve has just got much steeper because having found that single pier between these two walls remember on the first day we're looking at getting interested in these but thought they were garden features well they're not this has now turned out to be another pier so what we've got is one two three four and then that is separated from that and we have to be able to manage the junction between that space and this one this is three aisles that one looks like it's two cyan abbey church was 260 feet long and 108 feet wide with a single pitched roof and was one of the largest monastic buildings in england twice the width of king's college chapel cambridge the view from the river thames must have been breathtaking [Music] jonathan thinks the pillar base we found in trench one was a footing for a central column that supported a large platform at the east end of the church the nuns held their services here separated from the monks below for us this has been an extraordinary and enigmatic mystery to unravel but our experts tell us that what we've found here at scion park could be the greatest monastic discovery of modern times

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 103,535

Rating: 4.8908234 out of 5

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, time team, british archaeology, henry viii, king henry, medieval england, tony robinson, medieval documentary

Id: LRKRmoeG7C4

Length: 48min 50sec (2930 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2021