The Norman Neighbours (Skipsea, Yorkshire)| S12E11 | Time Team

[Music] meet a real time team fan this is francis davis who lives up here at skipsie in blowy east yorkshire and to put it mildly you're fairly interested in what was going on in this field aren't you absolutely why it looks like all your other fields except they plowed deeper one year and we turned up all these fines which are really fantastic we've got everything from this prehistoric arrowhead right through to medieval in fact francis was so excited that she paid at her own expense for our geophys team this doesn't blow away to have a survey and as you can see there's a heck of a lot of activity so clearly something was going on here but what exactly we don't know this place is an archaeological blank sheet so francis has invited us here and how long have we got to find out three days just three days if we don't get blown away it is a bit windy isn't it just slightly look at that francis don't see that very often do you quarter to nine in the morning and we're already putting in our first trench it's because you shelled out for the gfiz mick we might as well send you a fizz home then well i don't think we can because we've only got this one strip across the side of the field and we need to extend it into the rest of the field see if these features carry on there what we've actually done is started the two trenches one look where the ends of what look like a couple of terminals are can you see those fences yes so there might be an enclosure or something there and the other one is across that big linear feature down the middle which might be some sort of ditch boundary or something like that i know him though he's getting really excited but look at that geoff is it could just be field boundaries or medieval drains couldn't it how would you feel if that's what we got fine but at least we'd know what it was but of all the pottery that we found two and a half three years ago i'm hoping it's a little bit more than that that's what we're here to find out that's why we're putting the trenches in it looks as if there's a lot happening this palimpsest of sights one on top of another one a palimpsest yeah yeah i mean i don't think we've dug one of those it's like a prehistoric elephant no no no no it's where the site's been reused time and time again and so you get this build-up of activity well it's going to be a battle against the wind today because francis's field here at skipsi is on the east coast just above hull this is our first visit to this bit of east yorkshire and i think i'm reassured to hear that this field isn't as windy all the time gfis are working as quickly as possible to extend their survey on this ridge of higher ground while these two trenches give us our first look at what they're detecting already just digging through the topsoil is turning up more fines this slag and i i reckon that's medieval that one the one with pottery so far the luckier members of the team are starting work in the incident room france what we're going to try and do for you to help you understand what's going on in the field is get all the fines you've had into a timeline so we can see exactly when there's lots of activity going on and when it dies away but i think phil you've just about got on top of the prehistoric yeah i mean this is this is lovely little a little collection of flint this all came out of the same field within sort of 50 meters either way straight away phil can tell francis that all her flint fines date to the early neolithic period around 4000 bc what you've actually got is evidence of the first farmers that were actually living in britain but you need an expert eye to appreciate some of them it's just been flight very very finely at that end what you've actually got is a little end scraper it's an actual scraping tool for dealing with hides and skins and things like that that's right the other thing that is immediately nice is this lovely little leaf arrowhead phil's able to date this to the neolithic because the shape of flint arrows changed over time earlier in the mesolithic they were smaller and looked like this while later in the bronze age they developed a barb and tang but phil saved the best till last this is a real classic what we've got is this lovely polished axe but you see it's actually snapped across there and what this tells me is that it was actually in the half like that when the blow probably a very unfortunate blow hit the tree there is so much flexion in the handle and the axe that it that it just literally snapped the axe right off and in so doing it took this whacking great chunk over the side of the axe and i'll tell you what if you can put as many hours into making one of those as i have if you do that the air turns blue this neolithic axe ground smooth to give it a superior cutting edge was as good as the technology got in the stone age but phil thinks francis would have found a lot more flint in this field if people were actually living here 4 000 years ago he reckons her flint fines could have been left by a hunting party just passing through so nice to find but nothing to do with what's showing in the geophysics hear that wind i reckon this must be one of the windiest days we've ever encountered but it doesn't seem to be putting anyone off in fact all our experts seem really fired up and excited by the potential of this site really they're just a bunch of big kids there's this rivalry developing between them about who's going to be able to tell francis the most information at the end it's like a little competition going on stuart's got this massive advantage because he's already done quite a lot of work in skipsy stuart unfair you're ahead of the game yeah i've done a bit of work here in the past what have you got well just to warrant you here here's skipsie there's flamborough head up here this is all sea this is coming around to the humber estuary halls down here now this whole strip of land is known as holderness now it's very different in the past to what it is now it was marshy and boggy there are a whole series of it mirrors which are inland lakes islands of sands and gravel sticking out above them and the feel that we're digging here is on top of one of those gravel ridges i tell you what he's far more coherent here than it's possible to be outside the car go on t break over oh i didn't get your teeth it's still over stuart's going to be looking for clues as to what's been going on in the area around francis's field but he'll have to get moving if he's going to compete with gfiz who've already extended their survey this is where we've put in the trenches to start with and it appears that there's medieval features there but it's still early days the thing that intrigues me though in the extension is this clear well i think it's a boundary yeah and there's lots of noise activity to that side and it seems very quiet as we go down the slope so i'm keen to investigate that boundary i think we need to put a trench across that because that looks as if it's a boundary of something now we're nice to know the date of it given we won't have time to dig everything it's crucial we make the right decisions this trench trench 3 is going in here across what could be a ditch marking the edge of a settlement but to me this huge circular blob looks more intriguing why aren't we digging that stuart as ever is quick to reassure me that they know what they're doing that shape there's been a lot of sand quarry the maps actually show that they were saying quarries here and on the air photography on this particular one and another one you can see big areas which are dug out now that they look like sand quarries that suggest that's what that possibly is basically the game is working out what all these squiggles mean and in addition to digging we're hoping that an analysis of francis's fines will give us some clues as to when the site was occupied the story seems to be that there was virtually no activity on this site until around the time of the norman conquest 1066 and then we have pottery going through into the tudor period 16th century and later but it's the rarely found norman period pottery that's got our pot expert interested so what do you think it's telling us about what was going on in that field just after the norman conquest it looks like the kind of a summary that comes from uh people actually living here and using these pots it's not the kind of thing that gets spread on the field in the manure heap the pieces are too large and too crisp francis i'm told the favorite piece of yours actually is this bit yes mainly because we couldn't figure out how it went together but also the thumbprint because to me that was left by somebody real according to potter john hudson this was part of a skillet a kind of frying pan but he's a bit puzzled by it yeah normally when you put handles on like this you hold the pot by the base and you pull the the pot out now when the brought this to show me i sat playing with it for a long time thinking there's something wrong with this and it's on upside down because that should be there and this rounded side should fit in the palm of your hand there nice and easily and your thumb go in there so why they put it on upside down i don't know you could only ask the person who did it and he's long dead as francis is so intrigued by this bit of pot john is here to try and make a replica for her this is the sort of potter's wheel that the medieval putters of this area would have used it's called a momentum kick wheel it's just simply a piece of tree trunk mounted in a frame which spins quite freely [Music] they didn't notice mass production but they were produced by the mask you know people would break these very easily and just discard them they're only say 20 for a penny 20 for pennies yeah something like that that would be very cheap i mean it's not a millionaire's job as you can see from my from my attire this is the easy bit tomorrow john plans to fire it in a kiln so that francis can have a completely finished pot there's the thumbprint i'll just nip that off there is that all right yes that's fine no i want it i want you to be satisfied are you no no no no i am quite happy now because it has intrigued us for ages what it could actually be meanwhile up on our windswept hill we're slowly starting to make sense of our puzzle of squiggly lines so why did we put this trench in you know we've got this network of ditches yeah we really wanted to get some dating evidence and see what's happening to them i thought there might be an actual break at this point as well so that was a good point it turns out that the strong anomaly is actually an iron spike in the trench there this looks modern but over in the corner of the trench bridge has uncovered some burnt stones that obviously need more investigation you can see on top of this really big one it's got lots of heat affected material and it's as if hot air has been running across it what through there like exactly yeah in terms of dating evidence the only clue we've found so far is one bit of pottery prehistoric yes that could be that could be iron age in this uh area the iron age pottery is usually quite coarse and decorated but we've also got things turning up that surely can't be iron age come and have a look at this look at it well this thing here oh yeah it looks like a piece of old junk no no but it's it's look listen to that that's lead and it's got this big well we obviously got this big bit of iron here but we got a piece of aeroplane no it's not it's lead really i don't understand why you're getting a bit excited about it i mean it's it's with some debris that looks pretty late well i know it does but at the same time it's inescapable that there is a ditch running along here and there's no immediate sign of anything that has been actually cut through to to allow this to be put in what what is the lead thing there phil is is it some sort of vessel or tank or something yeah it's like a big sort of well like a shallow bucket there's the bottom of it yeah and there's the rim of it and it the whole both sides have been like squeezed together right we're going to have to dig a bit deeper to find out more but hopefully not as deep as these two are going in search of the environmental story henry you're down at the bottom of the hill the archaeology is right at the top of the hill is this kind of environmental stuff really going to do anything for us yeah i don't think you can understand a site like that it's right on the edge of this old wetland unless you understand what the wetland is and how the environment's changed you just don't understand how the archaeology could work but surely this is a modern pond in here that's just been built well that is but oddly enough is actually built right over the top of an ancient pond how do you know that well we've been coring really if you look here you can see these sediments that we're pulling out in the coral if you wanna have a feel of that i'm gonna get your hands dirty that's basically a silt and that's been laid down by oh yeah by water either by flowing water or maybe still water so you're basically stood here on an infield lake hornsey mir is the only one still to survive and gives a good idea of how big these ancient lakes could be but understandably our team are chuffed because they've discovered new evidence of another one here we'll take some sediments away what we'll do is we'll take it back to the laboratory and i'll analyze it for pollen and that pollen will tell us about the ancient environment it will hopefully give us some clues what the environment was like when there's activity happening that's if we can work out what's going on up there we've got a confusion of ditches thanks to trench 3 we now know this squiggly line is a boundary ditch but the only dating material so far is the bit of iron age pottery found in one of the ditches in phil's trench we've got one ditch in there yeah we've got another one in here yeah which has got our tripod and our picture in so you're calling this a tripod now yeah well it's got three legs you've got one there one there and one underneath and this is the picture that would have sat on the top of it what we don't know is whether it's actually sitting in the ditch or whether it's in a much later feature and then is there another ditch here well i'm standing on the natural here's another spine this yellowy stuff but here this dark stuff is another ditch running parallel with the others and they're all heading towards this pile of stones now we've opened this up and look we've got an area of clay coming round there phil's also found bits of a crucible making him think that this could be a furnace for iron working the ditch runs under the furnace so there are at least two periods of activity here complicated site isn't it it's great just as mick predicted this is looking like a site that's got traces of people living here over thousands of years according to stuart it's easy to see why he's been working on a graphic that shows how this landscape looked before it was drained it shows that francis's field on this ridge of higher ground would have been one of the few dry places to live in this area not only that but stewart's keen to point out to me that this hill next door was once a very important site this apparently was the site of skipsy castle the center of the whole of holden s in medieval times but it's actually much more than that these earth works here are actually spectacular i think that actually starts in the early prehistoric period it's possibly it's even near lithic a huge great mound situated in the bottom of this bog out here this was one of those mirrors one of those lakes and this would have been a spectacular monument there then this big ridge round here is probably an iron age enclosure very close to that earlier monument and then finally when the normans come along they they put their castle on top of that mound and reuse all this as part of their modern bailey castle so this was an important strategic site in both prehistoric and medieval times and it's right next door to us suddenly i'm starting to get excited about the possibilities of what we might find tomorrow turning to mick can you hear me yeah we're right on the top of skipsie castle we're about kilometer away from you and even from where we are we can see the glint of the digger so you would have been able to see this site in in earlier times and presumably with a great mirror between us absolutely right have you been getting on oh we've just got some really cracking geophys results john just brought over the shows the site going on into the field next door a huge density of features looks really exciting so we're gonna have to put a trench in that tomorrow is francis happy very tell her if she's having a good time now i think tomorrow's gonna be something really special listen to this this is from the canterbury tales by geoffrey chaucer written in the 14th century lords there is in yorkshire as i guess a marshy country called holderness and this is it it's all been drained now but in ancient times all this would have been bog and marshland except up here on this hill there would have been people living and we know that because the owner of the field francis has had loads of fines from the prehistoric right through to the tudor period and she's invited us here to help us sort the story out yesterday the archaeology was really confusing but apparently there's some new gf's which could hold the key to the whole site look at it it's a massive responses total contrast geoffers are excited about their latest results yesterday we started with just this small area to go on then they added this and now they've extended into this field and discovered the signals are getting busier and stronger but is there plot showing human activity or just geology i think it's mainly human activity there's a lot of and furrow plowing coming through in on this line have you got yours yeah that's one thing you can confirm from the aerial photograph there's a whole block of fields with ridges going that way all over that area so suggest any of that that's visible there is going to be underneath that ridge and further maybe we've got to have a look at some of that stuff oh i think so yeah and but i think because we've got ridge and furrow cutting through it we've got to be careful that we don't pick something that's going to be been wrecked by the original ferro aren't we well if you look at the detail this boundary we talked about yesterday i think it may well curve round there can you see sort of ditches curving through that come on to there and back down there well it could do the picture's so complex but i i think if we had a look at at least one of these teachers yeah but clearly we've got things beyond as well phil's intrigued by this big blob it's not another big bucket again is it this looks so intriguing would you be prepared to go away from your fascinating bucket well i'll find another one yeah it's all right i'll do that so we've yet more squiggles to investigate we're going to open a trench here and over this big blob and geoff is don't want to waste any time doing it i've got time for cop i do it's so cold here i want a cup of coffee of course they don't have to do the digging phil good who'd be an archaeologist on a cold day in yorkshire [Music] we've had wind we've got rain what's next i don't think snow is predicted but anything's possible it's easy to forget that when we started here virtually nothing was known about this hill this area was an archaeological blank but even so i don't think any of us expected to find so much surviving and stretching all the way across here there's a kind of competition going on amongst the team to see who can impress francis the most and now that phil's moved on from trench one we've got two would-be detectives trying to make sense of the lead bucket we discovered yesterday it's burning on the base there is carbonization there yeah right if we take it on both sides oh it's heavy it is heavy isn't it completely solid so quite safe absolutely nothing on it to give its age away but someone's not it's a nice little someone will know someone will just tip it up and ever yeah a better look there's an obvious reason why it was chucked away it's not got a hole in there no it's nothing why not reuse it it's one of the easiest metals to recycle isn't it you know well valuable piece of kit really we're also attempting to show francis what some of her pottery finds look like by making replicas of them to get the job done in time john's had to make his kiln out of modern materials but victor's planning to show francis the kind of kiln the original pots were made in it's rather larger than that huge things yeah quite quite big kilns yeah yeah and your fire melts couldn't move out according but it seems such a shame to spoil such a good joint all of francis's finds were discovered during field walking in this field and stuart's been wondering why we've had to dig so deep to reach the archaeology here you've found these fields for a long time he's got a theory that might explain it but first he wants to talk to the farmer who used to plow francis's field how deep did you plow it uh approximately nine inches deep all over but it was different over there the soil the soil was definitely different stewart believes that a lot of soil was dumped here to fill in some sand quarries in this field there are sandpits marked on the map in this area here in the 19th century they're either digging sand out or possibly clay something of that sort of order what this means is that we can't be sure francis's fines belong in this field they could have been mixed up with the soil brought in from somewhere else i think it's been in fill more than ever what we really need now is some secure dating evidence and here in trench two it looks like matt has come up with the goods not only can he confirm this geophys black line is a large ditch but he's also discovered the base of what looks like an oven built in the ditch after it had silted up most important though he's got some dating evidence for us in the shape of lovely large bits of pot francis i wanted you to see this pottery that peter's got because you're getting very excited about it look sorry i have it here francis uh you can see that it's a jar or cooking pot it's got a nice uh groove around the inside of the room for putting a lid in and even on the outside the actual soot from the last time it was used to make a meal spilled over the edge and got burnt on and it's it's 11th century oh wow either side of the the norman conquest round about the time of the normal concrete you don't see it every day of the week so well they may not look like it but they are excited about this bit of pot which would have looked something like this and i have to admit that i'm beginning to get excited too because it means that we're digging up a site that was probably occupied at the time of the norman conquest it could even have some connection with skipsy castle which is literally just on the next hill along do we know when the modern bailey was built it must have been built between 10 71 and 1086 because this is fairly precise because 1071 when the man drogo was given holdenness and 1086 he went and it was given to somebody else drogo who was he well he was a fleming we know almost nothing about him um except that he came from flanders with william the conqueror he was married to one of the conquerors relations and the conqueror gave him not only schipsi but the whole of this district known as holdenness all the way down to the humber so he was a big powerful man he was indeed yes the norman modern bailey castle must have looked something like this and was positioned here not only to control access along these sand islands but to provide a lookout against invasion from the sea it's hard to imagine now but our site just across the mir was next door to the center of power in holderness in the 11th century now more than ever i'm really curious to know what was going on here in francis's field the question is can we work it out since the very first time team that we ever did about 12 years ago every time there's been a problem to do with something metal coming up we've called for jerry over there from bradford university to sort it out for us and our problem this time is that we've got this metal tripod and we've got this lead bucket but we don't know what they are or what the date of them is jerry can you give us a hand well they're difficult to relate together um it's possible that the tripod was there and for example that the lead bucket was sitting on the tripod with say heat underneath uh and you're just gently heating something now one of the things that would immediately come to my mind it's not metallurgy but it'd be something like salt making where it's common to use lead dishes to to to basically boil the brine and let salt form so that's possibly one thing i sort of an organic process nothing to do with metallurgy date looking at the state of the preservation of the iron because it's in very good condition i suspect that it's at the earliest early medieval probably later good at last we're starting to get somewhere but what about the possible iron working furnace in this trench there are two basic questions to ask what is it and how old is it i suppose is uh this is the big question right what is it the clay is quite pink but it hasn't really been highly fired it's not fired hard so i don't think it's a particularly high temperature process i don't really think it's to do with metal working also you've got the ash being scraped out that way and it doesn't look at the moment as though there aren't lots of little bits of fragments of slag in it are there no not really no it's all around you can see the bags over here well i think this is just slag that's kicking around the site and i think this is probably more an organic process something maybe even just smoking fish smoking meat making brine it's not industrial activity but there is industrial activity in the area so we now know something about this end of our geophys plot we know this was a big field boundary ditch that was open in the 11th century but later had a clay oven built into the bottom of it we've also got evidence of other low temperature processes going on here most likely to do with salt making apparently they've been three other lead buckets found in coastal regions in yorkshire and they too date to the 10th and 11th centuries ours apparently is far superior because it's been made from just one piece of lead as a valuable commodity it's been deliberately folded before being put into the ground presumably for safe keeping only the person who left it never returned to retrieve it now having made some sense of this area we're going to record what we've found and close these trenches down at the moment phil's working here in the blob trench and we're hoping he might find evidence of the actual settlement where people are living but phil's not sure exactly what he's uncovered as yet and the excitement right now is in the new year fizz plot that john's about to reveal to francis this is what you've seen so far and we've extended the survey towards oh crikey just goes on and on and on doesn't it and look there's this massive well i'm i'm calling it a d-shaped enclosure yeah which i was getting quite excited about but then we continued the survey [ __ ] just going on it it's just unbelievable well it certainly changes my point of view from out of my kitchen window because of thinking what was out here i'm just wondering whether it's john's never seen anything quite like it to him it looks more iron-aged than medieval so where do we dig to find some answers if we're going to get some dating evidence for this enclosure then i think that would be a good place to go in the first instance so trench number six gets underway and it doesn't take long for raksha to take off the top soil and reveal the ditch but can she tell what date it is originally by the shape of the ditch we thought that it was iron age in shape but the pottery says otherwise it's actually medieval this is the stuff peter to my untutored eye that looks a better class of pottery than we've been finding anywhere else yeah and it's also the the largest amount we've had on the site so far i mean this is really more from any other trash we've got these uh late saxon or early medieval cook pots yeah this one decorated with thumb impressions and we're seeing stuff we haven't seen before on the site the the appearance of glazed pottery these are glazed jugs so mick what do you think this medieval d-shaped thing might be i don't know we've not seen anything like this and we've not seen a site with this type of geophysics that that produces predominantly this saxo norman material i mean it's made us all think this afternoon quite what we're dealing with best of all all the pottery in this trench dates to around the time of the norman conquest and there's loads of it suggesting we must be close to where people are actually living but not only that because we aren't finding any later pottery steward thinks we may be discovering a settlement that was given up for farmland by the early 14th century because as this aerial photo shows francis's field was covered by medieval plowing the coastline is actually quite a relevant part of our story here this is apparently the fastest eroding coastline in britain with something like two meters falling into the sea each year in medieval times the coastline was way out here and we know that several settlements such as clayton were recorded as falling into the sea did all the people who were living in what's now under the sea tend to move in the direction of exactly like that's a critical point because it's like not only do they have to move and lift somewhere else but they they've lost that much agricultural ground therefore on the ground that was left there's a more intense period of agriculture and it's that intense period of agriculture we see the physical evidence of in our field and that's one of the main reasons why skips actually grew up as a settlement the coastline was retreated so almost the end of day two and i feel as though we're starting to pull together a great story for francis and it looks like she should also have some replica pottery to look at tomorrow because it's almost ready to come out of the kiln we'll also be trying to make sense of our geophys map by coloring the ditches in blue to make them stand out from the lines related to plowing that are confusing the picture it's going to take some sorting out especially as geoff ears have just revealed more of the puzzle i think we have to try a different strategy in the remaining time we've got collections of pottery the saxonormous stuff 11th century stuff and we've got loads of ditches what we can't define really is where the buildings are so i think what we do is to dig where we've got a lot of pottery inside one of these enclosures to find the buildings you know all our trenches have been across these black lines on here we need to get inside because that's where the buildings will be of the farmsteads that are defined by the ditches right so we've found where people have been working here over the last couple of thousand years and where they were chucking away their pottery tomorrow we're going to see if we can find where they lived our final day and with no time to waste we're opening another trench its main goal is to find evidence of one of the buildings that was part of the norman period settlement we're discovering here it's the day francis has been looking forward to when we start to put together the picture of what we've discovered about life here in medieval times these animal bones for instance include cattle horse sheep and goat all animals that could graze on the marshland and it's clear every last use was being made of the bones we have some evidence of cut marks on the ends of some of the bones in this case this is a cattle bone and there's some cut marks on it that suggest dismembering and skinning in the case of this bone which is again also from cattle and a bone that's quite typically broken across the middle to extract the marrow gf's have added even more to their amazing map of human activity in this field the problem is we only have today left to try and make sense of it this morning they've moved into the field next door to see if they can find out where the settlement actually ends but it's a great problem to have we're discovering a settlement connected with big history the norman conquest an event that had terrible consequences for the people living here who resisted the change william the conqueror came up to the north and brought an army up here and in the winter he wasted the north it was called the hurrying of the north he burnt the villages he burnt their seed corn which means they're going to starve the next year and many many thousands of people died and what do we know about the fact all of these changes had on the daily lives of the people who are actually living here by the time we come back to doomsday book in 1086 20 years after the conquest the population has fallen to only seven families and the value has gone down from 32 pounds to six pounds but it was not completely empty because some places in doomsday book are just recorded as this is waste when nothing is happening at all so the people using this pottery would have seen a lot of change and a lot of suffering absolutely yes whether we can fully understand the features we're digging or not everything has to be recorded so that someone can puzzle over it later oh i haven't got that one here in this trench put in over this geophys blob the archaeology is very complicated and would require a bigger trench to sort it out but below these medieval ditches phil's found something we haven't seen on this site before one thing that we have got in this trench is is evidence of the earliest occupation on the hill and it's a circular thing phil reckons he's found a curving ditch belonging to an iron age roundhouse a reminder that there's evidence of earlier occupation here but it's hidden by the later medieval settlement on top our environmental team have dug some six meters deep into this site taking soil samples through the different layers of archaeology around this pond now after working around the clock to process the results they reckon they'll be able to impress francis with what they've discovered it might not look very exciting it might not look like a flint axe or something but it tells us just as much about the past as any artifacts can the sediment underneath your pond are full of very particular sort of pollen grain it's this pollen grain that's birch pollen that shows us the sediments down there about 13 000 years old that's very old the end of last ice age but in terms of the archaeology on our site probably the earliest thing we have is the neolithic this is your axe which you found from there presumably for cutting wood we can tell you a little bit about that too yeah exactly as we move into the neolithic period we start getting different sorts of pollen grains we get this one we get this one and finally this one this is all tree pollen we got hazel pollen down there and oak pollen and lime pollen so we basically seeing a very wooded landscape at the time the neolithic activity in fact the landscape we think will probably look something like this very close woodland in most areas but most of our evidence in the trenches dates to the medieval period and they can tell us that the landscape by that time had become very different what you see in the pollen record is you start getting grains like this appearing this is grass pollen so you get an opening up of the landscape the woodland's being cleared completely and as we move on still further we get these sorts of grains that's cereal pollen appearing so we're getting cultivation so in medieval times the landscape here looked something like this impressed of course are they good yes of course they are but are they the best oh well that we'll have to wait and see right john you haven't peeped at this yet have you no but i'm dying to open it yes absolutely no i haven't known him there's so much for francis to see today she's going to be rushed off her feet right now it's time to see the replica pottery there you are francis thank you very much and just to compare that with the original how does it feel to be holding in your hand the original object that started the whole interest in this area off for you i don't know it's absolutely amazing it really is because for ages and ages we didn't know what this could possibly be and we had loads and loads of ideas and none of them very sensible but that's definitely a sensible i would be quite happy to eat out of that i wouldn't if i were you up until now we've been excavating through the big black lines on the gfiz but today we thought we'd try something new we'd excavate between the lines to see if we could find any evidence of any houses and this is the result huge trench with absolutely nothing in it not very helpful the grand plan hasn't exactly set the world on fire is it no we've not really got a lot from that trench at all we've extended the geophysics and we've got lots more targets and we've been talking about going for those but too late in the day to do any more about that so i think what we need to do is actually go back to where we had most of the finds from like most of those saxo norman pottery finds which is raksha's trench and actually extend that and see if we can see more of the buildings and structures there so that was raksha's original trench yeah we're going to take it right up to the this street frontage yeah and see if we've got a building that butts to the road basically dig as big a hole as we can in the time that we've got we've got available seems like the best strategy [Music] so we're extending raksha's trench and moving extra diggers in for one last push to find evidence of a building but korenza's heard some worrying news that the evidence might not be that easy to recognize i gather as a possibility the buildings might have been made of mud but i don't quite understand how that could work well this area is very little in the way of natural building materials there's no no timber there's no stone and mud or clay was the obvious material to use i've got a piece of mud here from the last mud house in skipsie was demolished in 1970 and it shows straw in it pebbles a great variety of things including i some shaw cow dung and anything else great from the fields do we know what that would look like well i have a photograph of the last mud house in skips in it had brick wall and a pentaho roof but it was extended to that height in the 18th century before it was just mud and there's a little lump of mud here which would have gone six foot high and then there would have been a thatched roof so if the medieval houses on our site were built of mud what evidence would we expect find of them probably very little but the mud would have looked a bit different because of the pebbles in it and maybe the dung in it would have a different consistency from the matter the order natural mud around it sounds difficult to me but at least we've got phil helping in this trench now and maybe we're close to a building here because we are getting loads of fines terry i think i've found a brooch oh that's very nice um no that is a buckle this piece is the tongue that fits over this rod oh wow and the strap you see comes and fastens around here and the other end loops underneath so it's a belt buckle yes it's yes it's a copper alloy belt buckle with little molded ends 12th 13th century there are so many finds here that i can't believe we're not going to find a building carrenza meanwhile is wondering what this settlement was called the established view when we arrived here was that clayton the place that's named in the doomsday record but has vanished now has vanished because it was eroded by the sea well we've now found a settlement of that date over there susan says the logical inference is that is the settlement of clean but you're not convinced well i came across this reference in a document of 1306 which says nova heidi bergie the cleton the new harbor for clayton now the implication to me there is that the harbour and clayton are on the coastline well yes i agree that's one interpretation but i have another one which is the settlement itself was further inland and that clean really needed a landing place on the coast um the other reason for thinking this is clayton is that all these lands in the southern part of scrippsy parish were called cleaton lands even as late as the 18th century they were part of the copyhead of the manor of clayton and it seems logical if we've got this settlement um obviously evidence of some settlement for the dig inland that this could be clayton and in fact it's on the sort of prime spot it's the highest point in the that's right it's the high ridge in the parish i'm just worried we're pinning the tail on the donkey that we found the settlement we've got a name we're making the two together well then we've got the tail in the right place i'm trying to agree with susan well stuart may not be sure about the name of the settlement but he's got plenty to tell francis about the history of her field this enclosure map of 1785 shows the shape of the original medieval fields now if you look at the evidence from the aerophotography those are the fields of region faro they were still surviving when this aerial photograph was taken in the 1940s there's some some more up here for instance victor's drawing shows the kind of settlement that stewart believes was here just before the norman conquest but he reckons the settlement was abandoned when this field was needed for ridge and furrow plowing as skipsie was expanding then later on it happens again in 1765 the enclosure bill imposition of regular fields all across this landscape the open fields that were part of the original first system disappeared so the field you've got now is like a capsule of all those events in history time's almost up and after collecting something like a quarter of a million readings gfis are ready to sit down and report to francis well this is how the field was two years ago when we first came to do the survey for you obviously if you ignore the trenches and the cars and that's what we managed to achieve in the three days that is totally unbelievable i i'm still amazed myself i mean we've gone into your neighbours field now and it just continues in all directions we've not actually been able to find a limit to the site well i thought there might have been a small village or a small settlement up there but to actually see that ryzen's done some wonders with the graphics converted the dots and the blobs and so on into the sort of ditches okay we haven't got the houses and so on but that's sort of the first stage towards rebuilding that picture then it all disappeared and got covered with the original flower yeah the plowing and finally out in francis's field phil's got some last minute good news well mech oh ring we've got our building yeah i really do i mean what we got is this kind of well this big hollow area yeah which is running from from matt and the edge is running right round here so it looks like we got the end of it right and then along here we got this definite row of stones inside we've also got stones we've never had stones anywhere else in the site and along this row stone you you even got a sort of gravelly core to it as well which smacks to me as though that may well be a wall line or something beyond it we got what looks like a ditch added to that this ditch is crammed full of fines what does our building's historian think i think those line of stones is a clue because often with a mud house you would want a firm base a solid base that wouldn't rot wouldn't get damp and so the cobblestones there would help the gravelly piece is interesting because the type of mud wall we've got has pebbles in it has that whole that sort of thing is maybe the remnants of some bit of mud walling it's difficult to reconstruct with so little solid evidence but we do know something about medieval mud houses from the few that survived into modern times basically we're talking about farmsteads that look something like this essentially a building that when pulled down would leave little more than a few stones and a scatter of pottery to tell you it was ever there be confused by all the information you've got or has it all become crystal clear i think it's almost become as clear as mud but there's just so much absolutely so much who's evidence really impressed you i think geoff is because they have shown the extent of it but then the evidence of the fact that we've got the bottom of our pond is 13 000 years old the end of the last ice age and we can actually tell what the scenery was like then but it's just the whole thing is overwhelming but it's the importance of what this plot has revealed that tips the balance in favor of gf's their survey is showing a range of periods of occupation dating at least from the iron age through to a rarely found settlement of the norman period untangling the many phases and ditches is a massive job but this is victor's attempt to show francis what life was like here around the time of the norman conquest john you won your evidence was the best [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 185,962

Rating: 4.9116397 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, Skipsea, Yorkshire, East Yorkshire, Neolithic, Roman and Saxon, Norman Conquest, Skipsea Castle

Id: gZ4Y6ziZGsY

Length: 47min 59sec (2879 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021