The Palace Beneath The Playground | Time Team | Timeline

hi everybody and welcome to this documentary on timeline my name is Dan snow and I want to tell you about history hit TV it's like the Netflix for history hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the world's best historians we've got an exclusive offer available to fans of timeline if you go to history hit TV you can either follow the information below this video or just Google history hit TV and use the code timeline you get a special introductory offer go and check it out in the meantime enjoy this video [Music] welcome to Northwood prep school in Hartford sure and strange as it may seem time teams going back to school and we're in search of a lost you to palace which some people say was more splendid than a Hampton Court now that's a huge claim it lies somewhere beneath these playing fields and was built by Cardinal Wolsey Henry the eighth's right-hand man [Music] I don't think that's to you to do we're here not just to find it but to see if the room is a true was Woolsey's lost palace really grander than hampton court will know in three days [Music] Northwood prep near Rickmansworth Hartford chef a small school with a big heritage it's the site of the Manor on the moor named after the old English word for marshland this palace was conceived in 1520 by the all-powerful religious leader and statesman Cardinal Wolsey in its heyday it was an opulent playground fit for royalty and state visitors now the school and English heritage have invited our slightly less stately team in to dig up the playing fields and find out just how grand the manor once was just fill Harding is already getting the inside track from Professor Martin Biddle who was just a schoolboy when he excavated this site back in the 50s I reckon we'll see our first wall within well if we if it's not there either your records are in as a fifteen-year-old budding archaeologist Martin was the first to uncover wolves his palace and in 1957 archaeology wasn't quite what it is today unbelievably he just enlisted the help of his pals for a summer long excavation he knew from the records that wolves his palace had been demolished in the 1590s it was his ambition to find the remains his 1957 dig only revealed some of the walls marked here in orange so there's still a huge amount of the palace left to uncover but Martin's findings did enable him to speculate about the layout of the entire building which he recorded on the sketches made at the time this main building SOCAN site director Jackie McKinley turn those dotted lines into solid lines like a kid in a sweet shop so many things we could go for here it's gonna really are gonna have to focus in on particular bits of this house complex house surely we're looking for when this house was up it was more splendid than Hampton Court more splints what somebody said Jackie how do we establish that this could be more splendid than Hampton Court where would you put a trench in the gate this is gonna be where we're gonna start from because it gives it a really good focus for getting a handle on everything else that's going on in here so demotic about it we're coming up against the gate house 50 feet high with three levels of decoration probably on it and the arms of the guy who owned it this would be the first thing they would see they come through this gate house they'd see the view of everything in there so the gate house itself is going to be a very grand covered with decoration it's magnificent 20 years of time - it's the first time I've been accused of being demotic are you happy with putting a trench in here I'm urging to get on and I'm particularly pleased that you are demoted Jackie can already add to what she knows from Martin's dig with some geophys that the school commissioned last year the radar suggests a large structure underground that could be the foundations of a building 50 meters by 60 meters surrounded by a moat it's an enormous site to survey so it's going to be a real challenge to piece together a layout and find clues to what it once looked like so where better to start than the grand entrance combat notion strike of the edges straight already Martin's 1957 tee found some remnants of a gatehouse on the west side but the remains weren't well-preserved so Jackie's put Phil in charge of digging the other side of the gatehouse they won't know it's been shifted [Music] to understand cardinal rules is obsession with grandiose architecture we have to look at another of his masterpieces and his power base Hampton Court [Music] his grand design for Hampton Court was to emulate the greatest Renaissance architecture a palace that would impress visitors of the highest orders from church and state from what we know from our digs so far there's every reason to think that the manor of the moor was built with the same aspirations we know it was popular with King Henry the 8th and Wolsey was his most trusted statesman and like Hampton Court it was built in order to entertain with courtyards and accommodation for guests Thomas More and Catherine of Aragon would have known this palace intimately legend has it that in 1527 a French ambassador who stayed at the Manor of the moor declared it was more splendid than house in court the question we're asking is which was grander and already Phil's hit something just a few centimeters into the school turf oh well it's absolutely spot-on what we got is the corner of a room a or gate oh right there's the outside wall of the gate oh yeah so if you're arriving at the place you rode up or walk up through there yeah and here is the actual corner of the chaos itself there's the wall and you're standing on the wall that's actually gonna go flow way round so I guess you know when his majesty parades up through there if it's retainer who's living in or inhabited in this little room goes out through a doorway and offices path to his majesty yep Phil's uncovering walls that belong to the eastern half of the gatehouse their layout ties him with the geophys and mirrors what Martin found to the West from other tudor palaces Jackie knows there would have been towers on this gatehouse evidence of a tower will help us understand the scale of the palace entrance now jack is all set to plunder the heart of the palace in search of what could be the most ostentatious rooms the GF is hints at two of them Jackie believes the larger one to the east is Woolsey's chapel and the one to the West could be the Great Hall so Matt sets to work digging for the Great Hall traces on a hunt for the chapel will either trench turn up any clues of palace splendor away from the hustle and bustle of the dig historians Kent rowlandson and Susie Lipscomb have uncovered vital Tudor records about the palace layout we've got this survey that was done under Elizabeth the first and it describes all the buildings there were at the manor of the moor explains that there's a principal gatehouse and lodgings of an either side with two towers and and explains lodgings on the east and west of the said quadrant with a tower to each end of the same adjoining upon the moat and finally it makes a mention of a long gallery on the north side of the house into the garden with two turrets at the north end of the same and so that int in length it is 253 feet it's very big isn't it how does that tie in to what we've got here and what's wonderful about this is it so detailed and it makes us realize that what we previously been looking at this sort of muted sight can't all these buildings can't fit in there sure so it means we have to sort of rethink that so here we have a new revised idea which is basically three times the size so we've got a base court down here in the bottom the original motored site in the center and then the great long gallery above why is this called the base court it basically means base in the sense of a lower sort of and even more exciting not only do you have this gatehouse but you seems to have these four large towers sort of marking out this whole new structure that we didn't previously know about the Elizabethan survey transforms what we know about wolves is palace not only do we have to radically extend our plan of the palace but it makes our search over the more challenging while the documents tell of a long gallery running off to the north we've no real idea what it would have looked like and to the south there was a lower or base court we'd expect this building to contain lodgings for guests and to surround a courtyard it's marked on the historic plan the martins 1957 dig never found it in the ground so the lost base Court is Jackie's next target but it's a huge sprawling site so the pressures really on for the geophys team to give us some clues about where to start digging what kind of Jeff is using we're gonna use the radar again which is what we used when we were looking at the main house in the previous survey and remind me I say remind me I don't really know how does radar work and it's very much like air traffic control so instead of firing radio waves into the sky and bouncing them off aeroplanes we've turned it upside down we're firing it into the ground and by building up the data we can strip away all the soil and just leave the archaeology so we'll have a model of what is under the ground without actually having to take all the soil off which obviously is a bit tricky in three days so anyway I'll push my merry way along here and and hopefully in a few hours time we will have a base coat for you to look at [Music] we're near the end of day one and we've got a huge search on for a bass court that hasn't been seen for over 400 years [Music] but we can't safely say that Woolsey's Lost Palace is no longer lost and we're turning up clues that could tell us how much money he lavished on his Manor rumor has it they've come up with our first splendid find here in trench one stay there it's wonderful what we have got all the way from the Netherlands some really quite spectacular floor tiles that's probably 16th century are there abouts am I not allowed to lick my finger on doesn't it very gently yeah it's quite fragile this stuff so very careful with it it's basically a white tin glaze and then the decoration is hand-painted with different color pigments it's cobalt it's ogre it's copper you know it's it's it's expensive oh yeah it's betadine I mean it's the sort of thing you only find in a spectacularly posh palace or something like that which is a coincidence what can we tell from this point well the interesting thing about this is although it's a little bit broken up it doesn't look like it's been very knocked about so it doesn't look like it's travel very far now it suggests that it could actually have come from inside the gatehouse itself now gate houses would just away into somewhere they also quite frequently had the most spectacular fancy fancy rooms for guests to stay in their lodgings and this could actually have come from this lodgings with in the Gators cardinal wolsey might actually have trouble on them which might be white broke it's an exciting clue to the scale and grandeur of the gatehouse but just how large this entrance was and what it looked like is still all in doubt Phil's got two days to find out beginning of day two here in Hartford sure we're we're looking for Cardinal Wolsey's long-lost Palace which reputedly was even more fabulous than Hampton Court was that true well that's what we're here to find out [Music] so we're geophysical digging like mad to prove how extensive the palace was we're beginning to discover it had stately lodgings for walls as many guests and the history books are throwing up some clues about who those guests were and the role the manor of the moor plays on the European political stage [Music] in 1525 Henry the eighth's was making claims on French territory with the prospect of the country being dragged into a conflict Wolsey brokered a high-level meeting between the two old adversaries right here at the Manor of the moor and Suzi's found the paperwork to prove it in Latin this is the Treaty of the moor this is an anglo-french treaty that basically sums up that henry is going to give up his territorial claims on france for a little while in exchange for a very large pension of twenty thousand pounds which would have been a huge amount of money in that time yet his his annual revenues were 110,000 pounds this is really significant it was right here that it was signed absolutely it actually says here at the more on the 30th of august 1525 Cardinal Wolsey sealed the treaty in the presence of some of the biggest Tudor figures of the day so we've got for example William Archbishop of Canterbury we've got Thomas Duke of Norfolk and let's see here's a name you might recognise Thomas Moore so this is like the EU isn't it all the politicians and the bureaucrats team over and have loads of food and all the bureaucrats signed the paper yes absolutely and you can see how bureaucratic it is just by the length of the document and at the very end of it we've got the French envoy Johannes Joachim who signed it and this is his seal but the signing and sealing was worth nothing without the pomp and ceremony that suze believes would have followed it in the palace Chapel in front of a multitude of courtiers and dignitaries raksha has been roped in so let's imagine that you're the French envoy yes and if you could just be Wolsey for the moment and we'd put your hands together like this and this by this use you swear to keep peace between you I will give you 20,000 pounds in exchange when you'd promised not to attack me sounds like a good deal thank you very much I will and that was actually what would confirm that the treaty had taken place there's just two days remaining of our dig here in the grounds of Northwood school and there's still an awful lot to do in Phil's trench they're investigating the remains of what's thought to be an elaborate gatehouse oh is that a toil Oh what oh what an absolute gem oh that's glazed in it yep oh good man and that's on me oh that's on the same level with that bit of flooring over there plus we've got those fragments up there it actually confirms that we are in a room and it tells us so much more about what that room would have looked like we know we now know what the floor looked like yeah spot-on good this is all positive stuff particularly since the accounts that describe the fate of the manor of the morph paint a grim picture in the late 16th century it was systematically dismantled and the materials were sold off and it's thought that much of what remained of the stone was robbed and reused so that's a big problem for our team is there enough remaining in the ground to determine the true scale of the palace and could this explain why in some key locations geophys aren't finding anything well I guess the big question is have we got the base cause you tell us and that could be quite a small answer to that question so this is the data where we filled in the gap and butting up against where we surveyed over the house before and we've got the cricket pitch and other than that you know there's not a huge amount that jumps out at us if we presented those results to you without being told there was a base court and an outer gateway we'd say there's nothing there yeah the thing is is likely that this area is going to be preferentially robbed out and that includes if you're now telling us that it may well have been robbed out totally then we're on to a loser we might as well tear up the geophysics for this area please we didn't know that this that this was potentially spurious size-wise that's one of the things we said any spurious but it could actually be the same size of the mote a big ear well moving the goal posts all the time won't we and that's what you have to do when you're losing badly John so the last thread the dices would be to ask John and Jimmy to complete the size well I mean just one side might might do so you've done that in about that very happy about that there's any chance it won't happen jack is ramping up the pressure on the GFS team to track down the bass court now the most likely place to find any remains is over one of its towers next to the moat so by the time Jimmy's pushed the radar around there he'll be on his way to clocking up sixteen kilometers to your physic about so feet or not we have to locate the bass court to prove it was here at all I came out of one of those doors there is though some evidence of Tudor splinter that we don't need to dig for unbelievable carving and I looked at that with tread these remains of stone pillars have survived for four centuries even in the undergrowth until they were discovered recently by a school groundsman this is the kind of decoration that you see being imported from Italy so it's basically a sort of a copy of Roman declaration so you've got this beautiful parmitt here at the top and then this these vegetal swirls coming into flowers on either side and then the whole thing tied together with acanthus leaf so this is absolutely typical of sort of a revival of that sort of classical Renaissance style and what's astonishing about this is that this is the sort of the first huge physical stations that these are monument and going back to Hampton Court we have most of the main entrances from Hampton Court and there's nothing like this Hampton thought duty you can find the sights of where these came from on the buildings the gatehouse would be an absolute classic place all the entrances to things like your main hall or your main chapel and they're gonna be pretty big recesses that these are going to fit it into I think it's good to stand up it should stand out like a sore thumb these carvings are evidence that Woolsey was one of the first in Britain to use Italian Renaissance style architecture Jackie's theory is that these magnificent pillars stood on pedestals beside the entrances of walls his palace if she's right they be grander than the doorways at Hampton so could the pillar basis be in our gatehouse Wolsey wanted to create a playground on a par with Hampton Court the manor of the Moors six hundred acres of parkland was exclusively for the use of Wolsey and his guests to get the best view of it Siouxsie and Emma are on the fairway of a local golf course with the help of some historical maps Emmas created a 3d model of the manors parkland so can see is down here with the moat uh-huh and I think we are somewhere okay okay he gives real sense of the sort of rolling landscape around it it is massive this path there's an account of Wolsey having sort of 400 or 500 deer in this Park and actually at one point when the the palings are sort of Raley's around it have have been dilapidated to replace them I need to knock down 200 oak trees so that kind of gives some sense of the scale and this map gives us a vision of what Woolsey's Park would have looked when it Awards he came here and what Henry out there is exactly for those hunting and and going out doing some walking do's and falconry just as she's showing off base that really gay just fun [Music] we're nearly halfway through our dig unusually on time team we get a bird's-eye view of our site with a helicopter but we're always up for trying out new technology so this time we've opted for us by plane will it help us find that elusive Base Court so what have you got on it well we've got a camera take the images we have an on-board computer so the aircraft is in communication with my PC while it's in the air so if the wind speed gets too high I get the warning and I can do something about it so is it ready to fly yes where should I stand just behind me please okay so it's chocks away well not quite it's a bizarre way to start the engine movement triggers the motor into action and a flight plan sends the polystyrene drone cruising and a height of 400 feet where it will take a snap of our sight every four seconds all to see the lie of the land I'm now going to initiate London so if everybody could just stand behind me please it's incredibly nice isn't that just like picking up a piece of cardboard yeah it is indeed yeah just maybe it'll see something that geophysics can't know after the break afternoon of day two and we're digging up the school playing fields here in Hartford sure and finding Cardinal Wolsey zloz palace which once dominated this view we sent a camera equipped drone up and amazingly the photos do reveal faint traces of the palaces northern edge a ghostly scar in the turf from four centuries earlier but in the south there's no sign of the base court the palaces grandiose centerpiece werewolves II received his guests and fills trench over the palace gatehouse there's some good news we have got the grandest gateway of any building this side of London is immense see I knew he'd sort us out okay the first thing we've got have got to think about is that the fact that the bridge would have been coming in across the moat where our water bottles are somewhere there now here this is the most exciting part we have got the foundations of an enormous Tower that would have been massive wouldn't it absolutely and the nice thing about it too look got part of the floor as well you see the floor top so that is probably the level at which I don't know Cardinal Wolsey's guard would have and his breakfast what have you got there well friends anybody come in here would have paraded through that main corridor right the way through and then they would have exited through there out into this inner courtyard but what is really really nice is just see we've got that square yeah that's there now funnily enough Martin had a similar feature like that over there in the 1950s we've got a pair of them and we've measured up with the with the stone columns we think that that is probably where those two sift columns would have gone up either side of the gateway it's a superb fils completed an enormous piece of the jigsaw it's likely that the stone columns in the schoolyard would have stood on the square basis either side of the gatehouse so by adding the stone columns we not only have the dimensions of Woolsey's doorway we can reconstruct it in all its release or the Gateway would have witnessed many estate reception but not all the celebratory as a prelude to divorcing his first wife Catherine of Aragon King Henry banished her here to the manor of the moor Catherine had failed to produce a son and Henry was already courting his next wife to babe Catherine was kept here for two years we can assume that being in the house and the care of the head of the church kept the worst of the scandal at bay now Phil's extending the trench to see if the entire gatehouse matches the splendor of walls his grand doorway we know most of the finery of the palace was sold off or robbed which may account for the lack of objects in the ground but in the chapel trench traces found remnants that would have been of little interest to the robbers but helped tell us something about the chapels decoration it's prompted some excitement from time teams small finds expert Danny wouldn't oh my goodness isn't it gorgeous that is amazing I mean the thing that gets me is the patterning on that is so clear I mean it's as if it was painted yesterday brilliant isn't it but that I'm actually looking through a piece of window that cardinal wolsey or Henry the 8th or Catherine looked through that is amazing isn't it a fragment of stained glass a tiny link to this palaces illustrious past perhaps a remnant of a large east-facing chapel window over halfway through our dig and we're desperate to locate the base court to de da q montz tell us that Wolsey built it here but Jackie wants to find physical remains to add to what's known about the layout of the palace so she's scouring the southern playing fields for any other clues if that one of those bits of door surround or is that something else because it's definitely being worked yeah I think it's a bit of window I think that's a slot for the glazing yeah I mean that's a new discovery just spotted a window frame and more columns all in the vicinity of the base court but Kent's made a more intriguing find we have accounts at Hampton Court when they're cobbling the base court and the 1530s Fall River cobbles like this being collected so people actually paid to go out into fields gather these pebbles put them in baskets and then sort of sell them to the office of works of the laying of the courtyard so if these couples are of the kind of sort that we find at Hampton Court then here they've just moved potentially from the base call over there just as literally a stone's throw to de cobblestones from a courtyard found tantalizingly close to the area where that base court ought to be so far we've just got a gaping hole on our palace plan so to attempt to prove the size of the palace Jackie's decided to go for broke and dig up the last key building in the complex but according to the documents is supposed to be here this is the long gallery for it's basically for recreation but it's almost it doesn't have a particular purpose its architecture for architecture sake it's one third of the size of the palace and it just stretches out into the garden function you just walk all the way to the end of a gallery and then walk all the way back there there to be beautiful and stunning they're there to take your breath away that's the function how do we find it well we've got a number of problems here one is that unfortunately the geophysics can't pick anything up in the astroturf and in fact the geophysics hasn't picked up anything at all so our starting point is going to be the pier that Martin picked up in the 1950s which is where the bridge was and that's the point that we've got marked here so we would be essentially standing on the bridge going over the moat the gallery going over the moat so the gallery says we shoot in that direction Jackie's best guess is that the long gallery stretched from the bridge across the moat and out through a private garden at a length of 253 feet it was one of the most flamboyant parts of the palace [Music] can you see the machine all the way down there that's at the gatehouse that this gives you the sense of scale of the whole site it's massive so are you gonna put it in a trench well what I want to do first of all he's put it along a long slit trench just the side of the astroturf to get the width of that gallery within the privy garden without geophys to go on Jackie's trench will only be a stab in the dark but if she finds it she'll be uncovering one of the longest Tudor galleries in Britain beginning of day three here at Northwood preparatory school in our future and I'm about to take you on a tour of Cardinal Wolsey Lost Palace beyond the tennis court there would have been the great Galleria and an incredibly long covered walkway about two hundred and fifty feet long which was very elegant and actually totally pointless didn't really lead anywhere over here is what we're calling the the chapel trench a very important international treaty was signed there this is my favorite trench you've got more foundations in there a massive buttress and that supported the great entranceway to the entire palace but in our quest to fill out the palace plan Jackie needs to prove the existence of the long gallery we know from the Tudor records it was made of wood and stood on timber pillars so Jackie's decided to send raksha's team off on a mission to look for evidence of these pillars the trouble is the best spot to dig is the other side of the tennis court which could be tricky for our digger Oh as they fight their way through to dig up the long gallery on the other side of the site Jackie's decided to put in yet another trait we're gonna put in one last trench which Jackie thinks might be the outside of the base court although John thinks it could be a pipeline Jackie what is it with God well if you look on here can you see how there's this line going down there if I put that in there this is what the geophysics has picked up and that line is precisely in line with one of the words on our main building complex now does make it a big base cook about the same size as Hampton Court ah isn't it well yeah but Jimmy is absolutely convinced that that is a pipe or at best a conduit he doesn't think it's the wall of a building there's only one way to test it like there and there is quite a deal of money on absolutely five pounds has been wages but this is our last chance isn't it to establish whether or not we can find the base call it it is so compelling the lining up I think it'd be a mistake not to have a look so the final trench goes in over a radar trace that lines up with the edge of the main palace if this is a palace wall that it would make the base court much larger than Jackie expected and it's her last chance to take a look back in the jungle behind the tennis courts there are further delays in digging up the long gallery fractures had to call in the school grounds Minh for some tree clearance [Music] and they finally hit something I don't think that's - did you but there's no doubt the tower that Phil's digging in the gatehouse is Tudor he's uncovered the place where it meets the moat and is puzzling over the final clues as to what the gatehouse once looked like what are not sure about is we've got this this projection of brickwork is coming out here it could be part of the tower at the moment what I'd just like is a moment of patient choirs to allow me to continue with but as the hours run out the search for our long gallery is becoming ever more urgent emissary from a faraway palace people are wondering why you're not getting on quicker to put it politely are you kidding me no well we've got to chop down trees and let's get rid of vegetation and we've with look we've started the trench and we're damaged this is proper archaeology listen it's not it's not me I'm not having a go the observation simply is that it's very late and if this trench doesn't get underway fairly soon then actually we're not gonna be able to finish it by the time we leave it's doing anything but the good thing is we have got building debris starting to turn up here which is a really good thing sure is that that's not a piece of glazed tile down by your foot but you can see it's got the green glaze and that 16 do you want to get up and come over and have a look at it are you fine from where you're it's the kind of thing we would have had on the floors of the gallery anyway so yeah I mean that's one of the the yellow tiles we're getting all over the site over the yellow and green checkerboard floor so early 16th century right where we want to be yet so the jobs getting done rather world congratulations this event took French how fast you're working and over in Tracy's trench the diggings almost done as well as evidence of a chapel she's also uncovered a massive chunk of building Tracy this corner really is impressive isn't it it is I mean look at the size of this wall this is fantastic this is where Martin put his trench in the 50s yeah and so we've we've come in the same place but we've extended so we've got the whole sweep going off that way and then the turn coming underneath your feet so what's that little square there that would be the buttress just to support the corner turning warm this trench confirms Martin's work and adds a buttress and a palace corner to the plan the foundations were built for strength able to support two storeys and enclose a Great Hall and a chapel all of it designed to impress Woolsey's international visitors what about the bet on finding that base cored out face court John where's the fiver it's a pipe no it's a culvert what is it covered well it's a brick-built culvert it's a channel into drawing could it be old well the bricks don't look modern they could be reused or it could be to copy Tudor but whatever it is it's not our base court it's not the wall of the base court no and Jimmy gets his father no I get the fiver he sent pipe I said can't conduit nonsensical semantic debate between GF is typical just keep scraping with it you've just told Jackie this is a fiver so Jackie's out of luck and out of pocket [Applause] it's almost the end of our dig and while it's home time for some there's still all to play for in the long gallery how many where as far as the long gallery is concerned well we had quite high hopes this afternoon because in the area here we've got quite a few bits of building debris we had quite a lot of chalk spread including that that nice piece of nice pieces of tile but it kind of disappeared if that has disappeared we kind of came down onto this lovely kind of chalk spread that we thought was possibly a short raft that the timber gallery would have sat on top of and we did actually get what seemed to be post holes coming through with half section then no dating evidence it's looking more like Cardinal Wolsey's gazebo rather than a gallon so it was always going to be a long shot on the long gallery and unfortunately because it's very ephemeral and we didn't know exactly where it was because we had limited limited evidence so I'm afraid in this case we seem to absorb life occasionally on time teams there are moments where you have to admit that you've found absolutely nothing and in this little area this is one of those times [Music] so no long gallery and no base court not even a trace on the gfs it's certainly unlucky and not what we were expecting [Music] for deep in the foundations of the gatehouse Phil and his team have uncovered the front of a great tower with Kemp's health he's working out its unusual layout this is ox before in Norfolk and it's very like what we're dealing with here it's the sort of a motive site and you can see the way that the range is as we think here sort of come right up to the moat so they sort of disappear it's beautiful reflection but then it's also got this fantastic gatehouse this is obviously a bit actually interest me the gatehouse because you know obviously some arunoda I've got to try and visualize what happens going up in the sky all I've got is the foundation but ah what's that one well this is the whole house as a help Oh what and it's got these turrets and you were you're thinking that you might have a turret here as well well I know I've got a turret here how many showed you if you got on here one two three four fights basically what a garage it's not Dana well I know that I've got four so it's at least I've got four sides at the bottom because I've got one in there yep then there's one going back parallel with the edge of the trench and then the one when you about going back there so we got one two three four yeah so we've definitely got one half yes you've got half a turret I mean you see the other thing too is it is got this sense of the buildings coming right up to the moat yes we know evidence for an energy of physics we've got evidence for a back wall but we don't have any evidence for the front wall actually fronting on to the mouthing that's just because they've fallen into the moat over time we've literally lost an entire wall yeah probably not far off the line of these bricks here just board which is exactly what you can see here they say a picture tells a thousand words that picture tells me ten [Music] back in the 1950s Martin Biddle dug up half of the gays house now fills trench helps reveal Woolsey's gays house in its full symmetrical glory we've discovered it had two octagonal towers built to rise straight up out of the water it was a jewel of to the splendor and a statement of wealth designed to impress any visitor it's not been an easy gig centuries of the site being robbed have made it difficult to prove the Tudor accounts of a base court to the south and a long gallery that graced the gardens to the north but our fines do give us a glimpse of Woolsey's opulence find flaws ornate stonework and gorgeous stained glass windows was it more splendid than handsome court well only that 16th century visitor could really tell our dig leaves a legacy for Northwood school the guardian of this special site we've added new color to the story of Cardinal Wolsey and to the role the manor of the moor played in some of the most dramatic events in Tudor history you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 226,538

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, wosleys palace, time team, tony robinson, archaeology, british history documentary, medieval documentary, king henry vi, medieval history

Id: StBUp2gPGNo

Length: 46min 50sec (2810 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020