The New Town of a Norman Prince | FULL EPISODE | Time Team

this is much wedlock in Shropshire typical little peaceful English backwater 1,500 years ago it was next to nothing but 500 years later was a big bustling medieval market town how come well it swept along in some really interesting major historical events do you think or was it just slowly changed by the old forces of economics maybe it was adopted by some historical figure who just liked the place and wanted to tart it up a bit time team is in much Wenlock this week because we got a letter from mr. Jerry Bowden maybe his request will unlock some answers because there must have been scores of little settlements dotted around here in the dark ages so what was so special about this place there Mick and thyme team recently when lowering our area of our garden we found signs of old foundations local archaeologists dr. Horton considers these may be the remains of one of the first houses to be built in the town is he right and just how did much why not grow to be the busy place it is today [Music] this week's time team our McCaslin Bristol University field archaeologist carrenza Lewis Royal Commission for historic monuments Phil Harding wessex archaeological trust field archaeologist Jerry barber Bristol University environmental archaeologist Robyn Bush archivist and Victor Ambrose historical illustrator but mr. Baldwin's got these old foundations and he thinks they go right back to the beginning of Much Wenlock how do we find out what they actually are well the first thing we do go around have a look and have a chat with mr. Baer nothing mr. splendid letter that's a useful information I wasn't particularly interested in the bit about going back to the beginnings of Much Wenlock I mean that's obviously something else we got a look at well looking at the building I'd like to have a look at some of the other earlier mats to try and work out the layout of early Much Wenlock and then walk around the town to see if anything we can see out that fits in with the maps at all well I've been looking at looking at this map with Robin and we think there's a possibility of get some interesting results if we could put a trench across this boundary I don't know if you know the local people in much when not what the chances are being able to get a a trench put somewhere along there well it's permission is the big thing I've got some commissions you have yeah facility well I'd be quite happy to to get started emic well I think in addition we've got all these letters from local people who want a variety of problem solved so between doing your main tasks if you could have a look at these and see if there's anything you can come up with interesting it's from the Abbey they found some interesting bones there that they'd like identifying so I think I might go down there it's 10:00 to 3:00 now on Friday by 6:30 on Sunday you've got to do a presentations of the local people of much we're not including all the local big weeks so you can have your hair permed before okay let's get started much.when is situated in Shropshire close to the Welsh border approximately twelve miles from Shrewsbury there's been a settlement here since 200 AD enjoying the protection of the surrounding hills which form a defensive Ridge around the town it's been an important religious site since the 7th century and to date archaeological research has centered on the remains of the Norman Priory with relatively little work being done into the development of the town Oh mr. bone oh my eyes my casters return you to the missies Sir Philip look at your letter oh yeah come have a chat we didn't see what we can we can help you at all I'm looking for sort of charismatic local personalities who might have affected the early history of this place well the obvious one is st. Mill burger who was the first Abbess of the Abbey here Oh late 7th early 8th century and apparently after death her body smelt of fragrant balsam good for virgin this much Wenlock quite clearly and the other the other character probably Roger Roger of Montgomery the 1st Earl of Shrewsbury who owned much Wenlock immediately after the Norman Conquest and may very well have been responsible for some of the establishing some of the boundaries around much when lock which we're investigating this weekend and read it try that one ok just can you point out to us then jelly where they where the things were that you found a foundation can somewhere yeah Foundation is slightly sniffing it comes through somebody's face anywhere laughs brickwork is is it under there mice coming this way is he throwing that's really dumb that area down there just look at the left that step yeah automation and when you stand down there and line it combines right through them is about they are enjoyed under this drip system but though it's quite a large chunk emotionally there yeah and it's we just went round it yeah hands along I mean hey what's the sizes et oh no put it this way put the picking it and decide to leave well alone yeah metre across and how far down was it it's about two foot up the book the actual something area down there no I'm not very far down oh no but pop dare to go down a bit somewhere in here oh yeah yeah okay well we'll do what we do at the can and then something I will also need to go next door if we can laws is it mr. laws a little bit higher up but thanks very much anyway see what we can find out for you Thanks okay ah excuse me to bother you mr. Knorr I'm Phil Rd I'm from the time team we're led to understand that you might be a what might be possible to take a small trench and you won't see why not yes well very grateful we can say we've got the three perhaps main streets today here but I think you look closely with the stream which comes up through here there's no sign of it along this road now but of course we could see it on the earlier map and the possible earlier line of the road coming across here it'll be interesting to know what the evidence for Saxon settlement in this area at the junction between this road and the stream was and in the area of Holy Trinity Church in fact quite where the church is it appears to be earliest focus of settlement and the course is particularly interesting to notice that Gerry Bowden has started this whole thing office his house is just here which is right at the crossroads between the ship brook running here and this earlier possible line of the street running through the town so he's really right in the middle of things in this house here right was kind of what we've had eroded Gerry Bowden and there's a wall he says coming across here which they found they were doing this garden here yeah and it says all sorts of interesting stuff with a building next door and so I mean I'm loathe to dig the chaps guard look the stuff up to it they although there's lots of clay pipe and things I think if we get the ground radar chaps to do the whole of this area yeah and then you know see if we can see this wall see if we can see any other structures and then we can perhaps get some diggers in a navigate to bad night then you can do this to this whole area and tell us what's going on yeah pick up Gerry's wall then we can then get the chaps covered in cut some trenches and down excavation another one Pete there won't be any trouble okay that's great it's down there we'll find it I should think so work begins mr. laws has given permission for a small trench to be dug in his garden this will allow Phil to look for an earlier boundary wall or ditch underneath or close to the present wall will he be able to confirm that these properties stand on the site of some of the oldest parts of the town Holly starts the radar work on mr. Bowden's garden and the roofline pointed out by Jerry on the house next door has prompted Mick to investigate further hello we're from the time team my name's Mick Aston this is Tony Robinson and we're looking in Gerry bones guard next door we've got the ground raid on there and obviously your building is old as well I just thought if we could come in and have a look and see if it might help us to understand what's going on next door this is just the sort of thing we're looking for look I mean it looks as if it might be 15th century something like that acknowledge and what we should do is get the building surveyed as the first thing so we know where it fits into the fund and then if you were agreeable to this we could actually get a dendro date out of this that's right I mean it's we've actually got the sapwood at the top here so we could presumably go from the day the date that the tree was felled and work out how old this was and get a get a date for the felling year that would tell us more or less the date it was put up it's very local history about what this actually is maybe in the arms houses in a nightie said it was known locally as the whipping post Oh that'll suit you have you got anything else in the house that said not necessary wood but stone or anything no that also might give us a clue like like that we've got some arches in there in the living room have you don't can we have a look at those to say they make children rejoice as well through the dining room into the lounge so you really don't mind us drilling the hole in that and you know filling it up it was Oh crikey oh right ah look oh that's great that's great yes that's that's another good clue actually because this this must be medieval what it looks like actually is the two doorways into the service end of a of a medieval house so that you've got one entry into the pantry or buttery and the other on into the food stores basically you know the pantry for the dry food and the buttery for the the barrels not the butter but the barrels the butts you know so you've got loads of servants going in as well with so-and-so be our screens patently across the frontier right through somewhere across here I think this this bears out that we need to have a plan made of the house really in relation to Jerry's next door and then we're perhaps see where this fits in because this this looks in situ to me doesn't look as if it's often people say they've been bought in from the abbey or whatever yeah clearly with a big Abbey outside it's an obvious thing to suggest but that looks that looks genuine to me that looks see if it's in the right place can you tell anything about what sort of age it might be well they are just little bit flat so I just thought it was probably you know getting towards the end of the Middle Ages perhaps 15th century but again the post might help us which must be the other side of the wall here that will help to tie that in and then of course whatever they're finding out at side will help so the radar scan should help the diggers to position their trench in the best possible place Phil is carefully working his way deeper what he needs to find with his early boundary wall is a bit of pottery which would give it a date Gerry is following up one of the other letters from Louie to vet who lives at Wenlock Abbey some animal bones have been found under the Abbey floor and he'd like them identified the kind of stuff that we find in houses like that does it have any significance outside of the house itself yeah because what we've seen is a very good example of the sort of thing you'll get in almost every story town or what's everywhere you go there are bits of earlier buildings behind later frontages under later rules and so on yeah and they are the clues to where the town develops and you could find that in almost every town I mean what we really need to do is to get up on that Tower and have a good look over the town because that will give us some idea of the overall plan well it was a planned town or whatever how'd you fancy the climb yeah let's go so we're looking down showing 10th Street here and of course the one that we were looking at you see people in the garden where the arranging rods are and you can see you know parts that house that we were in earlier and then just over to right today where Phil's actually looking at that back boundary that wall which ought to be the back of the original block of properties going off from the church in that direction and you know obviously if they get anything under that war we should know roughly when that was laid out you can see from here that the abbey is actually stuck outside the town yeah I think it's the other way around actually the abbey is founded and we shall learn some details of that later on and then the town develops outside the gates because an abbey was full of obviously monks or sometimes nuns but monks in this case who would have needed lots of services so very quickly a market might have grown up at the gates so yes this is up against that I think I think this tower here is probably the gates again what you've just got an itinerant cobbler and a bloke who flogged pans or something sighs for a few years they get to know there's a sense of trade yeah there's some people who need their services and very often a town develops from a market and a market develops because people have got used to go in there and trading anyway so you know it can be it can be sort of follow on a gradual process really there are cases where towns are deliberately established deliberately planted down in the landscape but often many of them must have been a sort of fixing of some arrangement that had gone on anyway earlier it's amazing isn't it how clear the differentiation is between the end of the town gardens and the beginning of the now you know why that is it's because of the difference in ownership you know the boundary is fixed with an owner on each side and really that can't be altered until somebody owns both sides and if that never happens in that boundary remains so that's why we're investigating by the side of that wall because that wall or something like it could have been there just that archaic what it could have been there since the town was founded very often and this is a very good example the oldest things in the town and not the buildings or the church or any of the other things that you think are obvious they're actually the lines that were drawn on the ground by the original guy lay in the place out I think it's fantastic that a line can can remain that long the first letter that we looked at was about this bond plot with this one building on this one plot and I think you know ultimately we've got to try and tell jboden where that fits in and I mean if it fits in honor an original town plot as as part of planted set of Terron properties outside the abigai team about the 12th century something like that I mean that would answer his letter which will mean that we will be looking at the the new norman town if you're right about the date and the buildings in it of which this one is left that we've been in today and one of us found in terms of the excavation of both the back garden and the wall that's that's the central bars of the store look at the transition between will Berger and Roger it's when it becomes a town and a medieval or Norman new town and as opposed to whatever went before I think that's the main thing we're gonna have to concentrate so end of day one 36 hours to go tomorrow the radar results should be ready when the digging jerry Bowden's garden can begin we should also be able to make a start on getting a date for the sampson post in the Gibson's kitchen see you after the break [Music] [Music] day two ten past eight in the morning and I found my charismatic historical figure already Roger of Montgomery kind of trust between Norman Schwarzkopf and Billy Graham he'd slatton his enemies but he was gonna make pretty damn sure there was a place laid up in heaven for him as well he was the half-brother of William the Conqueror and William had given him the whole of this part of Shropshire to make sure that the worst didn't come charging over the border and he was all-powerful here you could do anything he likes he could even flatten the whole place if he wanted to and turn it into some huge Deer Park that's the kind of thing that he did elsewhere we didn't do that here imagine this has been a religious site since time immemorial and he got rid of the old anglo-saxon abbey and he built this massive new Priory so that the Almighty would realize what a decent bloke that he was but this was gonna be a really special Priory he brought over 12 sophisticated French monks from the abbey at Cluny with long floppy continental sleeves and first-class wine cellars this was going to be a class act in the middle of dreary old Shropshire and outside the Priory gates he got rid of all the old hovels and built lovely new houses lovely straight streets a big new Church for everyone to worship him but he didn't want the townspeople poking their noses into his lovely new Priory so he built this massive 20-foot high wall all the way around it if you can imagine there would have been all the noise and the bustle of Wenlock Newtown on one side and on the other side the choirs and the meditation and the French psalm singing of his cluniac monks well that's what I think anyway I wonder if archaeological research will bear me out [Music] I thought we owed you an explanation for why we were digging the holes in your garden and the reason for that is that we've got the radar and there's various walls across here and across here and probably big posts and so on over here so we thought we'd put a trench in like this to try and pick those off the radar sort of the liner which we had before that's low and that shows up on a section cutting across there so it looks a bit of a mess you won't be getting these potatoes in for a while well I think we got three things to dig there's this thing that I'm standing in here now very dark patch with bricks and what have you in it with a nice edge to it along there mm-hmm and then obviously another edge there you got no dating material a bit yet only from what we got at the top and all that is very very late post medieval materials no question about that what would obviously hope is that eventually as we get down into it then obviously the material get earlier that's what we hope what they've got here is a massive signals down this end which means that they're suggesting probably a wall with posts inside it which well I suppose it might be an oil haul that is it might be a building rather like a church you know the centrally involved em that's right and there are two files at the side which this would be an aisle then about two metres across so clearly there's something here and it could be a very big an important site although what it's doing here in quite what data's you don't know you having a route we don't really know but you know obviously if we carry on down which we'll get more out of that then while we're here we've got mark and he's got some interesting theories and since he lives there we worth finding that for us can you do that I don't you know you know Joey how I whenever you get your JCB out I follow you down the street did you get to dig another hole I've been watching it for about five years we've get this map a much Wenlock have tried to develop a hypothesis of how it all develops you see nice nicely colored anyway the green represents the bounds of the anglo-saxon monastery basically the monks endless x-a monks lived in here this is nor will have a sort of embanked enclosure in which all the buildings are scattered about inside um after sheltering properly yeah yes that's the ship foot then and this is coming out of mill burgers well here yeah and then when the Normans come along they then divide these into two so you've got this precinct wall placed and the anglo-saxon part of the monasteries ain't given over to the town like that that's now Holy Trinity Church and that became the town's journal right while the monastic buildings up this end they then converted to their Clooney at monastry this is before present buildings are built absolutely and they divide it off with a property boundary along here no what is interesting is this property boundary aligns absolutely precisely with your back fence over there we're digging there at the moment just at that point there so that the chronology of this would suggest that the division of the larger anglo-saxon precinct into the smaller Norman precinct is the same date as the laying out of your and what sort of dough to you thinking of well this will be must be 1080 when the mystery is founded now you are significantly right at the bottom of this boundary and that would suggest that this building is fronting a great open space in front of the abbey gate when inevitably thinks that that's then going to be the market indeed it survives today it's called bullring isn't it true and all these little houses out here infill into the bull rises which would have been a great space in your structure if it's a Great Hall it's there fronting fronting this great market to the abacus igloo and here is the market as it exists in Much Wenlock today it's now held on the other side of the church under the guild hall [Music] upstairs in the incident room jerry is busy analyzing the animal bones found at the Abbey Louie to vet will be interested to learn for these on fish bones of Pig and piglet bones which it seems would have formed a significant part of the monks staple diet Victor is working on a reconstruction of how the town would have looked in the earliest days of Norman occupation here you can see his impression of the marketplace and coming up a lot view down shine to the street we can see the rather larger plots on the left-hand side we should be able to see Phil digging with the big yellow machine now there is prominent boundary along the back with the with the countryside on one side and the town on the other side you can see the relationship of the the priory and the precinct to the town very clearly from this view as well we can see the way the the parish church is off on one side fronting on to what would have been the marketplace right next to it and of course the work that we're doing on Jerry's house he's right next to that we're looking right down now on the excavation over these new patio and so our committees card there now what we're suggesting now is that all of the the ground next to his house that is towards the church is actually the old marketplace that's been eaten filled with later properties so this was a rather less regular group of properties between the church in Jerry's house yeah yeah doesn't fit into quite the same pattern as as the others and somewhere through there must have got the original cause of the brook because it's coming down from the this side of the town that we're over now through down that sort of rather irregular line of the problem of the early street the early street and the early stream probably the same line and then going out past the church and daeron past the the later monastic buildings into the into the fish bowl it's the only thing that doesn't really fit into this nice uniform plan with these blocks of properties that were laid out in the north of town so probably reflect either the preterit village or the Freetown farmsteads of the peasants or the stream or both perhaps they were built along the stream that's we'd expect that you know it gets you water out of the stream then you wanted to know about the documents that we got for with regard to the origins and growth of Much Wenlock as a town that's right well the Doomsday Book which is here it talks about 46 borders well the number of borders you get elsewhere is quite small but here you've got quite a lot of them 46 maybe a town is beginning to start on a kind of unofficial basis this is unusual for this part of the what part of the country certainly for this area yeah then you get this which is a a charter of King Stephen in 1139 granting them a three-day fare certainly by this time you can assume they've probably got a market and this is a fair to top it up a bit more what's the population induced there does it say anything how many people might have been living here well I mean if you take 46 as the people who are living in the towns and multiply that by what four or five you're around about the 200 mark so not not a tiny settlement oh no no that's significant yes then this this the original of which is in the British Library in London is an incredible account of the customs of the borough for the first time the borough of Much Wenlock this is the first specific reference to a borough that's it first time really so it's a town young and at that time we know there were eight Freeman and thirty-nine this is the crucial thing thirty-nine Burgesses there juses right as well as what they call Villani who are probably the the farmers out in the countryside so there's your three crucial dates 1086 eleven thirty nine and twelve forty seven how are you doing then down are you gonna be able to get anything out of it you think yeah I mean looks like we've got heartwood set but boundary here yeah I thought when I looked at that yesterday that was probably more or less the outside of the tree and that you could probably do something with that and then here might be complete separate but I think it's probably only the heartwood shepherd boundary gain that we drive both one there and one there so what you got it you're gonna drill in there through the rings of the tree yeah we're going like that yeah straight through to the center of the tree so you reckon you might get enough rings go right the way through to be able to count up to get the right of the posts we go over to the center of the tree yeah Bleakley and we have quite a few rings here so it looks promising anyhow that's good [Music] [Music] I got them in Oh what are you getting very interesting looks a lot of activity since this morning anyway I think the main thing there is that over in the far side of the trench yeah what we initially thought was perhaps a fairly late eighteenth nineteenth century yard surface it was like cobalt and that's right there well we didn't have a really good clean over there yeah much better surface and then initially appeared right and we started to get small pieces of medieval pottery turning up in and around them yeah so it appears to be several hundred years earlier and we first thought so what's going on to clean that up see if we put in the edges you have four and so forth in this part of the trench again things are starting to get very interesting we're getting into the real archaeology this this is where we all suggested the might into the walls and it's not surprised he doesn't even like at the moment well many things can happen to a war yes stone in the ground if you do building people dig it out so it might be robbed out you might be looking where the wall has been got browner with big rocks rubble yeah we're suddenly getting great holes so it's like as if it's been fell back in the hole in people just chucked it straight back in a hole it's a very nice feeling to be right what happened about this I'll post then or because you've got a bit of it showing but just some some idea about any more of your job yeah well let's go and have a lot trouble in it yeah okay we seem to be coming around there we do expect this to be a circular foundation perhaps three feet across yeah we can't tell from this so we're opening out a box just there to see more office this should actually give us if it is circular the semicircle of the foundation so then we've got to come back when you've cleared these hairs and see that that stone packing go goes on round but at the moment as you can see it is looking it's looking like it isn't it it is indeed yeah do you need some early possibly don't you we do real in the right place it in amongst the stones or whatever yup so Dan has got his wood samples from the Samson post in the Gibson's kitchen and has even managed to find somewhere to sand them down he does this so that he can count the rings on the wood now it's a question of cross-referencing this sample with the others stored on the computer 12:47 document we've got a reference to these 8 Freeman and obviously it'd be nice to try and locate the eight plots actually that's that's quite nice that fits quite well up here I think you could probably count out eight plots coming along here one two three four five six seven eight perhaps going up in that block that fits in quite nicely but what I've seems to be coming out of the analysis of the plan of the village so it seems perhaps got an early nucleus around here around the church you then got this this nice plan Burgess town proto town development along shine 10th Street that probably dates to 1100 something like that perhaps in existence supposing that they were reestablishing the Priory and maximizing its income from endowment by founding this borough and building these burgers plots yeah so they've built it sort of on the edge here this boundary runs down here dividing off the church and the settlement from the Priory in the rebuild you say they're trying to sort of found these Burgesses to stimulate the town into a bit of renewed activity that's well yes you'd have these sort of founded along here on this sort of new land newly planned away from the the already occupied area probably bit grubby bit muddy nice new settlement new town laid out encouraging people to come and live there and to increase the prosperity of the town dan can you hear me it's Tony over yeah can you give us at and Rodi chairs okay thanks my over and out do we do tomorrow well I think as far as Jerry Boden's buildings concerned we've just got a crash on with the excavation there and then we verily this afternoon we've clearly got a Robert wrench where the the might have been the wall and they were busy exposing a large of area of the of the aisle of post we've got to get that done because if it is an oiled haul it's it's good it's unusual there's not that many of them you know it's an important building and I think we've just got to give the digging team time to time trying to get on without are you gonna be able to dig down deep enough by tomorrow at 6:30 to give the people at our presentation a realistic picture of what was down there I would like to think so I mean I can't see you and so definitely never say no you say to me you say oh there's a feature bleachers I will go as deep as I can go yeah this is so nice here empty that that is within a day it's gonna take me to a point where I'm gonna get all the answers because if I if I have to bring in Shirin it's gonna take longer to put the sugar over a certain depth you see but I'm sure because I think we've got a lot to do tomorrow I would suggest one more glass of wine then a very early night especially for Phil who's got a lot of features to look at Cheers [Music] if we run a takedown from their house sixty feet and we're nowhere near the excavation which I don't think there will be because if you think there's there there's their yard isn't there and then I wouldn't have thought we're anywhere near that in any case we ought to be in the Gibson's garden rather than rocks yeah if we have any people just gets it out here look if you've got legal let's say it's like the hairy foot one this is all getting very complicated now Victoria just keep that there's this this is day three by the way and the weather's gone lousy and when I went home last night I thought that what we've got was an isle Hall but now everyone's saying that that was hypothesis one and like all hypothesis ones is just a load of old rubbish now what we've got is a dead dog and a medieval outside what you told wait if we chose if we take the back of the house that's the house we've got it with with the raggle on the back we've been expecting this wall to come out in this sort of direction off this wall but because of this angle in fact it's more likely to come off more or less like that yes it should be really small s where the fences and the daffodils and the flower beds and all this tweed where and we'll say a long way from the excavation which is somewhere over here you thought that might be an odd building like a kitchen or store something yeah I mean I think that with a building like this whatever whatever is going on the inside that are going to be all sorts of structures on the inside that idea cobbled yards there's going to be Indians and so on so this there's plenty of opportunity for other structures to turn on oh yeah Happy Easter okay let me that the turkeys not quite Fitness is sorry about this for you you're not gonna believe this no can we just measure down your garden and then I'll tell you what it's all about go on go down with the tape and look for something like 50 to 60 feet we have something to tell you we've got some we've been thinking of meshes always a bad thing especially this time where are you there now but that's 20 there is it turn it over because it's metric on one side and feet and feet on the other yeah 65 60 65 foot 7 come back 5 feet it's important we don't anymore we don't anymore feet that we can cope with right where are we in relation to the about a yard then great we missed it right let's get the let's get the drawing out a long building so what you're saying is that if there's the the two arches that we know about in the lounge there yeah probably there's another two arches somewhere behind the stucco in the yeah you've got both sides there you've got to imagine it coming back down this way I think this might even be too big it looks I don't understand why we didn't realize it before I mean if you had a look me I mean you can see higher you can see the side of what is obviously a roof they're coming here and they're supposed to run the other side on the draw reads so why did we think it was next door well I think I think until we went into this house you know which one which we do the other day and found the post and found the arches we didn't actually realise that that wasn't perhaps something late medieval something just sort of tacked on to another building and after all it was Jerry that wrote us a letter with what was in his garden with the foundations he'd found not the Gibson's so obviously they all this has been laid and they haven't touched it for a long time I still can't see where the other one is yeah yeah look see those three stones down yeah to see that but you see that writing this below the garden to see that conservatory roof there's a line down there which is the other side presumably at the yep psyching we haven't quite got the dendro date sorted out for the post yes but it's does a suggestion might be thirteenth century right that's Henry the third Edward the first time you know and what we think we've got that's that's the drawing that you'll know at the end of your building what that if it's an old hall which the thing like that with the the general Laird thing has got to be we've got a sort of series of parallels at which I suppose the most useful one is Harry furred the Bishop of them Harry Fed has got a Polish next to the cathedral and he's got an old hall there about eleven sixty and he's like a church he's got on all posts down the side of it the what it means is here's the back of your house right and you've got the two arches in there right and your the ends of your raggle on the roof or like that if we take sixty feet out just to be like that the hairy foot one and we take the two for two I'll post team we end up with an all hall which is basically under your patio and you can serve a tree and the extension and the flowerbeds right what sort of stuff would have gone on in the side it's just it's a great feasting hall it's where the would come to the context of it in a minute but it says it's it's an eating place as a social place and what we've done of course is dig a hole about here right because Jerry asked us to find this war which comes off the back of his house there which is his houses is is you know from that yeah so there's there's his bit of wall there that that's probably part of something yeah and then your post is in Hayes and you know there was probably a building something like that along the front there may have been another post crosswind like that the may even have been to more doorways like in your living room in this wall over here which would be about where we are now or possibly a bit further back but there's no there's no sign of it and we wouldn't want to take a kitchen apart anyway just think of topic right but it does mean that that the important buildings not injuries God is in yours and the context of it we think at the moment because there's a various documentary bits there are eight plots laid out here of which we can only account for seven which rather suggests that the prior of the the monasteries keeping one back for himself the most likely reason he do that is to keep one up against the marketplace and then capture a guest Hall so I've just suggested that this actually might be the priors guest all threes high class visitors very appropriate for your visitors today that's right well there you are living in a baronial Hall know one end of a baronial hall oh that looks pretty gluey what we've clearly got here is a major structural problem at some stage in the past yeah what we're standing in is the infield remains of a very large pit of some description perhaps a well you can see the edge of it swinging around let's cut through all the ER key early archaeology it's gone out of use they filled it up with some very loose clay and rubble and soil and so forth they think they've cracked the problem and they've made a nice cobbled floor or yard over the whole thing but as you can see there's been a drastic subsidence problem the whole thing is slumped down into the middle of the pit we're still not quite sure about the dating of the various things we're getting medieval pottery off this floor so at the moment it does look medieval clearly the feature I'm standing in this possible well is earlier than that and this itself the material it's cut through it's not cut through natural clay it's cut through more archaeology very set he looking clay dump sewage perhaps doesn't actually look as if you've got anything to do with a big of it core which we've just been revising our ideas yeah we've we've bought both along with us who did the radar of this area he doesn't seem to lead to Bob to toy with you know what was what was on the radar what's coming out the ground he's he just it's really the confusion issue is the the masses of regular stones right they they appear in the transect to be to be well-liked especially down here yeah it was a linear sort of rage of stones so it could just as easily being their foundation for a wall so it was probably picking up all this cobble area well is that the bed dog that they were telling this that is indeed the big dog just there he's actually in this black layer which is where we found all the clay pipe and the 19th century pottery so he's a 19th century or later dead dog times really speeding on now about two hours before the presentation and the key piece of evidence which we haven't yet got is the dating of the wood of the Gibson Sampson post do you think you'll get it in time we hope so we I want to be absolutely certain before releasing a date and I want to just process a couple more samples and then finish them off yeah then have a look at the printout and if it is convincing then then we can say yes it is a date but it would be a mistake to release anything before that sure this is this is the kind of printout that we're talking about now as I understand it and and if I say back to you what you've just said to me correct me where I'm wrong these are lists of tree samples from all over the country different places all over the country dating from 950 ad here down to 1949 here and you compare the sample that you've drilled with all these different samples here on the computer and only one match can be right because the tree can only have been chopped down in one year so as soon as you've got the evidence that that corresponds you know roughly how old the three years so there's actually a more accurate process even than carbon dating oh yes carbon dating in relation to this is a waste of time this this is precise we can get it to sometimes the season of the year if we have the complete SAP wood it's crazy well I shouldn't interrupt you anymore because certainly really kind of needs their evidence the weathers let us down again but fortunately the archaeology is going quite well at the Gibson's house Mick has found evidence of the other two doorways to the Isle home is this is it too fanciful to say that that looks like it's possible but I think it's been so hot about later on that we you know you could really be sure of the deaths but it's I think that's what that is now isn't it for one so these doorways which MIT can now draw on to his plan would have been identical to those which can still be seen in the Gibson's lounge at the boundary sight further work has revealed how the wall has indeed been built over a medieval ditch but better than that phil has found some 12th century pottery which proves that this boundary is one of the earliest in the town the Isle Hall and that boundary line fits into a picture of a developing town like this with a community focused around the river and the church close to the gates of the new cluniac Priory time is just about up but what we're still waiting for is a dendro date for the Isle Hall which will hopefully prove that it was part of the same development [Music] [Music] first of all thank you everybody for giving us such a fantastic weekend despite the absolutely appalling weather and we must tell you that the archaeological evidence that we discovered was absolutely fantastic everywhere we turned that there was more and the other thang time to answer Gerry's original questions what can we tell him well his garden contains the remains of a couple courtyard and outbuildings possibly a kitchen and a well which would have served a great isle all sited next door to his house in the Gibson's dan finally managed to come through with a date for the Samsun post in the Gibson's kitchen and it was worth waiting for his date of 1254 to $12.99 places it nicely within the story of the developing Norman Newtown the time team view is that this building could have been a guest hall used by visitors to Wenlock Priory in fact documents tell us that in 1231 King Henry the third visited Much Wenlock so it's possible that some of the King's entourage may have stayed here while he visited the Priory finally the pottery found in Jerry's garden and the pottery found at the bottom of the boundary dig are both of a similar date that is 12th to 13th century this is good news because it bears out our theory that both were part of a planned development of the town which started with Roger of Montgomery and the founding of the new cluniac Priory in 1081 the beginnings of a process which would take much Wenlock from a small Saxon settlement to a thriving medieval market town [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 234,352

Rating: 4.9273763 out of 5

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, Much Wenlock, Shropshire, Medieval, Medieval settlement

Id: zPmM0PRqegA

Length: 49min 48sec (2988 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 20 2019