The Roman Fortress of Eboracum In York And More! | FULL EPISODE | Time Team

[Music] two thousand years ago there was nothing here but this river much wider then than it is now meandering across a flood plain but by the turn of the first millennium around it had grown one of the most powerful and civilized centres in Britain built and honed by three different invaders each one with a distinct culture which created three different archaeology's we're here in York to find out more about how the Romans the Vikings and the Normans developed this famous and historic city how they lived and how they died [Music] this was the most ambitious project we'd ever tackled on time team we had three days to look into three different sites spread right across this ancient city and if that wasn't enough we were doing it alive York's magnificent Minster dominates the landscape our most recent site is close by where we're going to be investigating what was the largest medieval hospital in the country on the other side of the city we hope to uncover a ninth century Viking Street and find evidence of the traders who lived there but we begin with a site that dates from the 1st century AD when the Romans established the mighty fortress of Eber Arkham within 200 years York had become one of the most influential outposts of the Roman Empire and the home of two Emperor's Septimus Severus and Constantius Chlorus outside the city walls under the lawns of what's now the Royal York Hotel we believe there's a huge Roman burial ground earlier digs by the railway station produced evidence of burials but nobody knows how important this cemetery was as usual geophysics our first into action and the results look promising nice high resistance linear coming through here like a rectangle yeah roughly arena yeah I guess that's probably gonna be a wall or something like that I guess anyway but look only on the magnetic same area and you can see we've got these nice individual blob type things now I'm wondering are these spirals only one way to find out a 5 meter long trench here and fill can't wait to get his Spade in with a bit of help from some mechanical muscle and under the watchful eye of some newlyweds I think you're not quite dressed for that are you really the trench descends we know that burials who extend out that way what we don't know is whether they extend down that way and just how far [Laughter] helping me keep the archaeologists under control is garden dr. Paul Thompson why why a burial site here though Nick the Romans never buried their dead in town they always buried their dead on the edge of town and we know from where the medieval walls are that is the edge of where the Roman town was and by lunchtime the first Roman finds are emerging Nick you have shifted some stuff this morning I than here yeah we've had a really good day as you can see we've taken down about a metre of modern topsoil and we're already down onto what we think is the surface of the natural subsoil that's this yellow material that you can see under my feet but what's particularly interesting is that we've got something cutting into the natural you can see a change in the color of the soil here it's full of stones and there's an edge coming around here under my feet and back out the end of the dig it looks very similar to the grave cuts that we found in the other excavation that's exciting well of course we're gonna dig it I mean the main thing is this is not the only one we've got we're going to give each one a number we'll plan it we'll put a digger into each of them and we'll get them all out and don't think that would tops or has been wasted we've been getting some great finds out of them how do you know I do this is happening so this letter included some coins Oh what you got here is a bonus coins of the Empress Helena and she was the first wife of Constance's close close means green and you think it's because she got seasick and is actually a square in your court this dig is going rather well as we go that coin was struck by her adoring grandson and within the last few minutes so one of our detectorists has come up with another coin also struck by one of her grandson's with a portrait of constant it's the second her grandson on it so we're beginning to get the fourth century family portrait album by the end of day one we've got some rich finds but we still don't know if the cemetery stretched this far early the next morning and more geophysics results but John's not really sure what he's looking at and at the moment I still can't look at this set of results and say well that's Bowman archaeology that's a grave stone bury maybe it's possible but it could be a garden feature I need another trench ideally going across that so I can see what it is where would that be on the ground and how big would we need to do it well the seven by three across that and it's just over here so our second trench opens up just a few yards closer to the hotel and nearer to the earlier burials if geophysics are right we might be onto anything from a Roman hotel to who knows what it's a skull is a human skull that is outraged and it's in very very good condition too I mean yes we know the cemetery stands this way everything that comes out of the trench is served washed and recorded there's a lot of animal bone and pottery turning up in both trenches evidence maybe a feasting we've got a little bronze Club and presumably of the god Hercules I thought it was a big drone well this is just a very small Club and probably because it was worn I was kneeling or it came from a little cult statuette a trinket such as this would often be buried with its owner how's it been going to my untutored eye that looks like a load of old concrete well you're not quite right amazingly enough right beneath the topsail we found the remains in city of a Roman building how do you know that's Roman well we've got two chunks of masonry right next to a piece of a Sigma and flooring which we know to be Roman what does that mean well it's Roman concrete they use it to make their floors within that we've also got several pieces of Roman pottery this is a base of a piece of pot used in perfumery where we've also just found that the building had painted wall plaster back in our first trench Margaret Cox has arrived with her osteo archaeology team I have to be careful getting in because we've got some pretty exciting archaeology here Margaret what have we got well we've got an adult female skeleton running east-west now heads facing over towards the board there and why do we have to wear these masts disease well so we don't contaminate the bones with our DNA from spits and sweats and hair and the usual things that fly around on archaeological sites so later on we should be able to read their DNA yes we should Phil what have you got a bunch of old stones it looks very much like that Tony but often times you they did actually put big boulders in and around a grave but no bones yet Oh give me time entrenched - Nick thinks - under the Roman rubble you'll find the foundations of a collapsed building the trench is also beginning to look like a picnic site with oyster shells and chicken bones coming out so would feasting have taken place at Roman funerals the precise nature of the ceremony would depend on the tribal background all the people involved but although most people be brought to the grave either in a coffin or laid on a bier and then they would be placed in the grave and there would be some sort of feasting or ceremony by the family and the mourners around the grave Phil you look like you've done really well well I just keep going down and down and down Tony but what we can see is exactly how this burials been put in there is a wooden coffin I know that because we've had coffin nails and the coffin has been laid into the grave over to one side and then you see these big stones have been rammed down by the side of it so we've got an actual imprint of the coffin and somewhere down there the individual that's in there and what about this here this body this this is incredible inside one body again with coffin nails and and Margaret I can't stop her eulogizing about the quality of the skull wonderful condition and we we were beginning to worry because we weren't getting any bone in the sort of center of the thorax but actually the coat the body seems to have slumped down and the arms are up on top for some reason [Music] and we identify what sort of use that glass might have been put to it's not Vaizey but I think it's probably been drinking vessel again it's quite thin glass so once again this rather Latin idea of people sitting around amongst the dead bodies feasting and enjoying themselves so this square bottle would have contained wine water or even embalming oils in fact it was the Romans who introduced glassblowing to Britain and would have built kilns to reach temperatures of 1,200 degrees centigrade we built and fired a brick kiln in the Roman style and Paul was on hand to see the process through what do we get our mate for there well we've got this fragment which was found in York rim of a jug and this is what it would have looked like with its ovoid body in its trail and the marks going to try and reproduce this for us that looks very beautiful but also very very complicated to me what are you doing tonight okay I'm just shaking it and cooling it down slightly prior to blowing the initial bubble and now I'm going to just just cut in here this ensures that the neck is relatively thin that's the technique known as thumbing out and I'm just trapping square and blowing I'm just using centrifugal force just to lengthen the neck of the of the vessel and why were they so keen on blowing glass well because the earlier methods were very laborious which meant that the glass took a long time to make into vessels it was quite a luxury commodity but once it could be blown scores of vessels could be made by a single worker in a day and suddenly it became an everyday commodity it could be used for table wares containers of all sorts and practically every Roman site you excavate you find some fragments of grass on it I'm just flaring the lip out slightly now just prior to putting the trail on trail it round trails slowly first create the thick color it's such a sort of beautiful gentle process you have to work with the glass if it's too hot it's too runny and things get out of control and if it's too cool then it's it just difference up too much and you just can't do anything with it really I just use a stick just to put a fold in the top of the handle and open out the handling shape it it's absolutely incredible by the start of our last day it looks as if we've got a third grave at the hotel Lord but what do these burials tell us Margaret thinks the first body is that of a woman and Phil's is the skeleton of a child these teeth are in really good condition Phil if you've got any more yeah what we can do with this is we can determine the age of the child it's what happens with teeth is the teeth developed within the bone the mandible and the maxilla in a very sort of steady progressive order and by looking at the stage of that development we can decide which age category they fit into that one is that one there then yeah that's the closest there because you've got barely any root development but just a little bit and that actually means that the child is about 4 going on 5 I would say that is amazing that tooth eruption is so predictable that you can age a child so precisely yeah so can we tell if our Roman child is a boy or a girl or why it died so young across the river in the incident room Peter Jones is taking material from one of the tiny teeth he's prepared to try and get a DNA profile for us in about four hours the first time this has been done on time team [Music] there's a tantalizing curve entrenched too if this is the foundation then Knicks pretty sure the building is circular there's also no shortage of finds to indicate wealth and we've got some lovely finds from this trench here we have for example of bronze fingering in the form of a key and that would have been used for opening a jewelry box now does that mean that that jewelry box might have been here as well well there's certainly some graves from York which have produced jewelry boxes actually in the grave as grave goods and you seem to have something rather nice-looking wall plaster here we've got a lot of wall plaster coming out of that trench and quite a number of colors we've got blue and red and we also have green and we have caught some vintage big pieces with sort of yellow patterns and they actually begin to find ochre in in the spoil heap now well the most exciting thing as far as I'm concerned and this is in pieces so I'm bit nervous about picking it up is this ivory lid the bung for it popped like that which would have held perfumed oils and why would they have had oil there well as part of the ritual of actually burying somebody you would anoint them with perfumed oils we're gonna lift the skull aren't we Margaret yeah how are we gonna do this well if I pick it up very carefully and bring it round to you you know it is fragile yes it's about to colour well we've lost the jawbone so that's fine we did that deliberately okay I hope you can see that on camera I don't think we dare hold it for too long should we just get it back into this box now what do we know about huh well she's over 30 she was childless and she probably had backache and what are we gonna do with the bones well we're take them back to the laboratory for full analysis and then we'll bring them back to York to go in the museum in their store and what's happening over here well this one's great we've got a superb skeleton it's a young adult male who died aged between 20 and 25 we've got evidence that he was buried wearing his hobnail boots which is quite nice but even more unusual we've got evidence that a feast was prepared for him to take on this journey to the underworld Phil what have you been doing up your end of the trench well I'm absolutely absurd Tony I mean we've just got to that critical bit where you're clearing out around the ribs and they are just so so delicate I mean I've I've spent quite a bit of time with this with this poor little infant four years old and what who died in 250 AD or thereabout and the only thing I still don't know is what sex it is Paul can you hear me have you got any news on the DNA Tony I've got a result for you okay I can definitely confirm that the first skeleton that was uncovered was definitely female she's also been tested for TB and no TV was found the juvenile that you're just talking to feel about that was next daughter that was definitely a girl your one is a little girl in that amazing yeah I mean here I have I've done oh I don't know many skeletons it's the first time I've ever got the sex determined actually on site before the bones had taken out is incredible but we're still trying to get to grips with this building and if it is circular based on Bernard survey it could be anything between 10 and 20 meters in diameter the more Nick and his team dig down the better the finds that are coming out it's enormous you're going right the way down probably were over a metre and right at the bottom there we've actually got the wall foundations of what of an enormous building but let me take you from the top down yeah we've got York stone roof tiles from leads from the Leeds area we've also got ceramic roof tiles so it would have been a quite an extensive roof we've got walls that are very heavily plaster and this is all Roman it is all Roman and right down on the floor we've got a concrete opus signaling an actual floor with very likely a mosaic floor on it Victor can you Schmidt let's have a look and see this is what we think then that it might have looked like I think what you've got here is this enormous mausoleum what 20 meters in diameter concrete floor plastered walls domed roof possibly a mosaic in the middle now who is in here I mean I I like to speculate to two Emperor's died in New York Septimus Severus and Constantius Chlorus we know that Severus was taken elsewhere but I'm not sure what happened to Cloris well we might have found the final resting place of Constantine the Great spa thurr Constantius Chlorus but confirmation will have to wait for future excavation we couldn't have dreamt that under the hotel lawn we might find a mausoleum as well as our Roman cemetery join us after the break in the 9th century district of warm gate where carrenza and Sandi Toksvig search for the remains of a Viking trading community the second site in our three-day live excavation in York was established by Viking invaders in the 9th century they called their settlement your Vic and close to the river Foss on an ancient street still called warm gate we're hoping to find evidence of inhabitation the city's famous for its Viking archaeology as Timbers and domestic remains have been discovered preserved for over a thousand years in the wet conditions below ground carrenza is working with viking expert Patrick Ottaway who excavated the world-famous copper gate site very close to here they're joined by our very own Viking presenter and no stranger to time team Sandi Toksvig the most fantastic use of myself as an archaeological device now yeah I am exactly five foot tall so I can tell you that is precisely how far down we've dug so far I'm sure we'll be able to make better now what have we discovered so far well we're down at the Viking nose here we're pretty sure and because it's wet we're getting really good preservation like we hoped and we've got Timbers turning up but I'm really excited about really really excited you see there's a sort of dark as she layer in there yeah if you look at that bit of wood in particular you can see it's light brown at the bottom but black at the top that's been burnt and there is historical evidence in the Domesday but that tells us when the Normans took over the Viking City they've burned a lot of it down oh the rotters this might be back fire at warm gate we're also going to be concentrating on environmental archaeology Andruw Jones and his team are searching for tiny items such as food particles seeds and insects things that could tell us more about everyday Viking life in your V what we're doing is we're sorting through a sample of soil that we saved earlier and this is a kind of thing we've got little fragments of glass here a lot of this is modern but mixed in with it are quite a lot of bone fragments and some of these are quite interesting for example that one there that's a haddock vertebra that's a herring verse that tells you about the diet and the things at them precisely that's what we're doing this for we want to find out what people had for that a basic box of rocks there I know this is a rod think it might be time to every word it's gonna be something slightly unpleasant it's extremely unpleasant a that is mineralized human excrement [Music] absolutely it's well preserved in these waterlogged deposits Mick and Mick want to get a date on a wooden post that could have been part of a house if you cut through a finger or shout right okay let's go easy that's going look you nearly there this will be taken to Sheffield to be examined by our dendrochronologist s-- who date timber by tree ring analysis oh look at that it's at the end of the state then put on this one face okay so I'm gonna have to run off with this right find some power steering and right complete it straight into it let me hold it whoa I'll just i'm just don't let go Mick hopes that we'll have a date for that timber tomorrow warm gait stretches away from the foster in the center our sights just by the church well we've been working for a couple of hours this morning already and we're increasingly confident that we've got wouldn't structural remains here it might be part of a plot boundary running right back from the street or it might be part of a house wall we're going to clean it up but the problem is that whether such a small area even when it's cleaned up I think it's going to be quite difficult to really understand what it is I think what we need to do really is to go and see if we can find the matching boundary on the other side across so basically we are talking about digging another hole over here is that right that's right I think so in this tiled area here terrific now remind me of the length that we're looking for for this building we're dealing with a measurement of a perch which is approximately five and a half meters so if we can measure five and a half meters along here then I think we can determine well we tape measure here about here John yeah wants to be those two states in the trench are either side of a possible balance if you measure from this side of those five point five meters under these Victorian tiles there's a thousand years of floor levels piled one on top of another center of a new trial give us the middle of the trench yes post and wattle boundaries were found at the coppa gate excavation Patrick Ottaway thinks that this street could be just the same a row of thatched single-story timber houses would have been put up right along warm gate each on a long narrow plot separated by wattle fences traders lived with their rooms opening out onto the street displaying their wares but our measurements not just limited to the site Stuart's determined to find more evidence in warm gate itself you can see we're in the whole series of property boundaries one there's one there you can see the whole row of shops a divided Liberty up there and what I'm trying to see if there's any common unit of measurement in these boundaries which reflects how they were laid out in the Viking period is it the same units of measurement that we seen down the Vikings had a building plot and then for generation and generation people just kept building in exactly the same but it's absolutely arrived didn't take lots of measurements we should be able to try and either prove it or disprove it is it theory or is it I believe in let's go and try okay you pull the tape along keep going keep going see what the paint changes they're gonna get to there take the measurement can you read that that's three point six meters okay Robin so that for the end of that building [Music] halfway between 3.6 3.1 measurements are be looking for here now we know from other excavations in New York that properties are set out in perches so that's a fish that's about that low and unfortunately the tape isn't calibrated in fishers it's a measurement of 18 feet which is about five and a half meters we've got lots to measure but and I need to check all the measurements and so I think we need to come back here with the results okay come on team one gate was one of many thriving communities in your Vic trading with Ireland Scotland Scandinavia and as far away as the Baltic and further east still Andrew and his team of young archaeologists have no shortage of evidence of how Vikings were living there are some seeds the seeds of wild plants but also cereal grazes oats rye and we mean rye still hugely important in Scandinavian cooking yes and there's the first fruit stone to come out just found a moment ago Wow and what's this piece that hanging along here that's a tiny sliver of leather and it's been caught fresh cut marks like so somebody who's leather working on this side really getting a sense of the people living here and acting in trades here and so on absolutely a more detailed picture of everyday life what about the new trench anything exciting coming out of that yes yeah we're still going through medieval layers here we've hit a sort of sunken preacher might be a pit or a ditch might be a boundary ditch masses of medieval pottery coming out of that and hopefully some brilliant finds tomorrow and eventually we'll get down to the Viking layers in it well already we've had some great finds today I mean earlier we found that piece of wood what potentially a thousand-year-old bit of heat or a barrel or something absolutely wonderful and I mean the other sort of things that coming out of that Viking trench the organic preservation that's a leather strap a thousand year old leather strap that is fantastic all someone's purse onto their belt or keep their shoe done up by our third day we've got walls in both trenches so do we have a house we also have lots of fines including leather and food remains so what was life like a thousand years ago these houses in the Viking Age here in New York are really quite small and a few meters wide mean they have paths in the middle usually and one bit or several well we usually find these buildings have just one big room yes where everything went online suitable living sleeping working everything all in the same place that's right they are yes and Chucky they're always straight out of the back door you'd have a pig's snuffling around eating the rubbish and they'd have cats and dogs and probably a few chickens scrambling around as well by the standards of the day these were good buildings people had good living conditions they had a good diet and a good time was had by all well looking at longer houses a kind of suburb of York I don't think it's a suburb but I think we're right in the heart of your Vic here I'm one of the great arterial routes into the town there's Warren get out of there it's one of the most important the streets and you should think of long buildings facing onto the street end onto the street this is the typical technique of construction that we know from other sites in the world so the house walls were constructed out of wattle and post fences and formed single-story timber framed thatched houses built in rows right along Warren gate each house probably belonged to a different trader and his family a butcher cobbler Potter Baker or fishmonger now you've been up measuring what have you gathered from it I've had a great time a whole street in town to play with me was using the own archaeologists to help me take measure that's good what we found measured properties and found that up there there's a shop called the three P's next to it the kebab house called our kitchen there exactly a perch with each five point five meters 18 feet unit we were looking for I always find it incredible that things as old as that should still survive in the modern town scape yes I mean you said to me when we first started looking at this that people were building plots and then building and building and building has it proves what's your first thought oh exactly I'm sure if you stand in alleys kitchen at the moment you're standing exactly other yeah else's kitchen four meters below him [Music] Andrew Jones's young archaeologists have saved washed and sorted every bucket of material from the two trenches nothing can escape their attention we found this fantastic last bead here that is beautiful and did it come up with the deagle or how was it found it was found in the sieve from the medieval rubbish pit but Peters pretty confident is actually Viking yes I think it's one of the richest [ __ ] beads we've ever found in Europe it's something very special it's better than anything we've ever seen before it's really wonderful with these blue and white stripes these lovely little yellow gobs on the end and these incredible things that are like walnut whips made of blue and white and is there something that you would typically find in breaking settlers in England well it looks like a Viking beam and we've been looking in his book to see if we can find a parallel we've checked up all the anglo-saxon glass beads no nothing there what would it been used for well I suppose it may have been in a necklace like that you see there's one just they're very similar it's the nearest we've actually found so far and where does that come from the nearest one that you find comes from rebo in Denmark so it suggests wealth definitely I mean top of the range top of the range richest kind of bead you can get an extraordinary craftsmen presume the nearest site with I mean Peters looking at a site in Ireland now it's just the site of the Irish King great chronicler core which is where the Irish kings of Vitara used to live a ninth century craftsman probably traded this bead for jet or amber outside his house here in warm gate the Irish merchant ship may well have been moored at the end of the street you look a bit young just what's your name Rico and holder Michael 6 and what have you been finding yeah an archaeologist when you grow up what you're going to be I think there might be a bit tell me about this well this is fragments of amber which is a resin and that was imported but you see that to me I mean as a Dane that is hugely exciting because amber for the Scandinavians has a kind of mystical significance about it I mean even today in Denmark amber is absolutely the jewelry that you're supposed to wear yeah well we're thrilled and what this shows is that in these biking age levels people were working in amber but are we also talking about fairly wealthy people to have amber I think the indications are that we must have that and with that bead it's beginning to stack up we've got a couple of other beads that have come out of the ground as well yeah with less than two hours left something else is emerging sandy sandy Oh hiding can I come down yeah come down I think what we've got here is a shoe which has been thrown away in a rubbish pit or a backyard okay well I think we're now in deposits which are probably very close to being biking aids so I think it's a Viking a shoe doesn't it me going all goosey fantastic yes so can we talk about the back of somebody's house were they gonna through I'm wondering I mean we've got Timbers coming through here which I thought still think might be our other property boundary which would be at exactly 18 feet so we've got our perch that we talked about well if that's what it is my own feeling is that were probably in backyard yeah and it may be that these stones are part of a yard [Music] you can't get this out today I'll get this out with so a Viking leather shoe comes out of the ground after 900 years with the stitching holes still visible it could well have been made here in warm gate sold to a fellow trader or his wife and worn tramping the streets of your vaq but I'm Jim leave what's gonna happen to the site but what we hope is that we've now seen the potential of this site we now know how important it is that how well preserved the deposits not only of the Viking Age of the medieval period are when we hope obviously we can do an enormous amount of further excavation here to fully understand how this site is divert on the lifestyle of people in York through the last millennium mix piece of wood failed to date so we can't tell the exact age of these houses but in three days we've been able to glimpse so much of Viking life through our two tiny keyholes here in warm Gator this illustrious community lived and traded from here for over 200 years before seeing your Vic burned to the ground by the invading Normans join us after the break when a second world war air-raid shelter gets in the way of our search for a missing medieval hospital right inside the ancient city walls [Music] three years after the Norman invasion of 1066 William the Conqueror arrived in York he built two castles to defend the rivers and began to build the Minster which still dominates the city just a few minutes walk from the great church stood some Leonard's the largest medieval hospital in England some Leonard's covered an area of five acres between the Minster and the river very little remains today as the original precinct is almost completely built over but in the shadow of the Roman multi angular tower we'll begin our three-day live investigation at the other end of this lawn is a vital clue a vaulted building which we think was part of a monastic refactoring as usual we start with the geophysics well that's very colorful John but what does it mean you tell me this is the magnetic plot right John resistance and radar we're still looking at the results but at the moment we I mean we've got this huge anomaly and it's running right through the center of so right right up the middle of this grass and you throw it through the flower beds beyond the roses big linear not so is is this is this a big medieval wall looking ah no no it looks almost modern it brick brick possibly culvert I Piper I don't know it doesn't say many of law monastic seas but then we've got this big response as well there know whether it's connected well the obvious thing is to put a trench that cuts both of those and it Barney so somewhere across in this area here if we can put something or hit both you know then we'll have a look see what it is well I don't forward to see what so as you're thinking off for that three by two [Music] we're pretty sure there's a hospital under here somewhere so the diggers get straight to work and after several hours the first structure emerges but it's clearly not many evil this is a typical time team start well the locals tell us that was an air-raid shelter here so it could well be bits of an air-raid shelter well that's great yeah but it's okay because it's another bit of York's archaeology the most recent periods so we shall treat it like the rest of the audience so you're not prepared to accept this is just a load of old modern right no we shall take it apart and look at it and before we go down into the hospital we're digging where we think the infirmary should have been Carol what sort of things would have been happening here well care for the body and medicine for the Soul medicine for the Soul begins at the hospital Church which is to the north of here and attach to that there's a dormitory for the look for the brothers and applies to where they can read and contemplate and they down here you've got this huge infirmary for over 200 patients which is an enormous number you've got an orphanage for their sick children and they actually have cow is to go the milk which is a nice touch isn't it and then on top of all this you've got this infrastructure of service buildings kitchens brewery granaries all sorts of buildings to keep the place going and then really important the water systems and the drainage because you've got to in the incident room race an and architectural historian barrel lot have started to make a 3d reconstruction of the medieval hospital using old maps and drawings which will be backed up with measurements from our excavation in the 13 hundreds we think the hospital precinct looked like this with the infirmary somewhere in this area above some Leonard's place built in 1832 as some of the earliest buildings which still exist inside the Theatre Royal the main wall behind the stage was once a defended 13th century gateway and the arches in one of the newly restored reception rooms for man undercroft that looks like the one on the lawn this is a detailed street plan of york in 1610 and we blown it up so that here you can see the hospital precinct with the multi angular tower and all these building is tucked inside which we may come across moving on in 1777 we've got again the yank the tower and the city walls more buildings that still survived at that date possibly reused from monastic times and this great big mass finally well this is a good bit of York Street planning in 1832 here's some Leonard's place coming in and here again is our multi angular Tower with more buildings that may conceivably come down to us from medieval times and where we're digging missus Sampson's stable-yard thank you all this talk of hospitals is getting to Paul Thompson well Carol I'm feeling none too well and it's the 13th century so I crawls the hospital is it just like a riding it casualty no you've got to forget any idea about your resemblance with a modern hospital it's completely different none of the high-tech stuff at all the first thing you do when you arrive is confess your sins so your cells healthy then they take you into the open ward and they make you comfortable you're in bed you're clean and you've got nourishing food and that is part of your therapy well I'm desperately poor and I'm desperately ill so that's already gonna make me feel a lot better but what is there for me in terms of treatment and medicine well this of course is an age before antibiotics and antisepsis and most of the medicine that's available for the sick poor is horrible now the nurses it's and Leonard's were very skilled herbalist and they grew a lot of the produce themselves well this is all looking very impressive I've got terrible ulcerated weeping sores what can you do for me just the thing this is plastic Bartholomew it's plantain parsley honey and flour which is antiseptic of course right so that goes onto here and that's a sort of a poultice bandage mm yeah if you know I probably do the trick so my wounds are dealt with but I got terrible toothache all fall off what do you think what you got for me yeah this is sage and salt tooth wash which helps to keep your teeth white also has Wow that's that's very strong but it's very scented as well smell is very important in medieval therapy it goes right to your vital spirits you see and awards were often actually perfumed that's a bit better I feel my senses are lifting you but my two fates getting worse honestly this is mint wine and vinegar this is like a gargle - this is a gargle not to BM drunk though disgusting next step is to pocket hoods with Ravens don't which would start to rot you - I don't know which of those sounds worse red hot put it down here which aims it into the tooth and it'll burn the nerve out rather him than me well we've achieved what the Luftwaffe never did a direct hit on an air-raid shelter in York it's totally collapsed so Mick and Barney are recorded and shut down trench one completely we've actually extended this trench now away from the air raid shelter to try and take in some of the medieval material that goes to the hospital so we're pursuing that at the moment and any relationship with a GF is well the GF is is great and it we've now got the resistance and the radar results we didn't have this morning and the shallow resistance is showing this nice spread of rubble here and as we go deeper into the ground it appears we might have two blobs now these might just be piers if we look at Road life the radar we can see them quite clearly here one two about four metres apart where do we think those piers might be under us here that hat and what might the significance appears well if we if we find one of the piers intact it shows that those medieval masonry of the hospital left so that'd be great but in order to get further that we need to find two of them so we think there's one here and one over here is we get to that gives us some of the dimensions of the bays or the width between the main pillars in the building we can start to do a reconstruction it doesn't look as if some Lehner's is gonna throw up its remains that easily the Hunts on for two or even three pillar bases where we think the infirmary should have been the measurement between the columns should give race an and barrel the information they need to scale the height of the building that's if GF ears have got it right you literally can get a picture on a computer of what it looks like so that's why they chose this area and what they found it makes it all sound so easy but Barney is on to something come and see this Mik it's absolutely brilliant what we want it is absolutely oh wow look at that look at that that is right just about where the Hat was yesterday that's right lately brilliant not only that but the curve of the pier can you see the curve that appear yeah it suggests to me that that is above the medieval ground level it's still a molded piece of stone meant to be seen so some way down before we get to the floors yeah yeah that's what I think so that means mean we might get some of the floor surface at the hospital itself patients coming to the gates of this hospital in medieval York would have received all forms of treatment some of it none too pleasant Carol why this mad obsession with bloodletting it's not a matter of session to them it's based on solid scientific theory right you see the blood is believed to carry four humors sanguine melancholic choleric and phlegmatic and if you have too much of any of them they make you sick so the idea is to bleed it off and then restore the balance my team is a pretty balanced aren't they really well you look a shape too sanguine to me at least so far you see this is what a barber surgeon actually York barber surgeon would do fingerprints on it yes and these show where you would be bled depending on what was wrong with what I said any blood taken from around here I'm not very keen on that idea at all Carol I have to say little plant like you we can arrange something else meet a leech and that's a leech fine what are you gonna do especially starve Medical leech it's it's very fun come on boating thank you how long does this thing have to stay on loosely on for at least 15 minutes once it attaches I feel sorry for the leech still at least Paul's got the evening to get over it at last more pillar bases are emerging in the trench together with what could be the infirmary floor victors taking advantage of the morning light [Music] I'm sure I've seen those patients before somewhere it wasn't so easy being a medieval in York I think life through the everyday person living in New York in the 11th 12th 13th centuries would have been pretty hard actually yes imagine nights without light candles on the imagine streets probably covered in more juice or the basic cobble surfaces you know you would have to buy food every day no chance of storing it whatever it was a pretty sort of hard existence in many ways religion was hugely important in daily life the church really controlled society to a very large extent because they held the keys to the afterlife and I think to the medieval individual that's thought of not making it to heaven was hugely frightening you know burning in the fires of hell [Music] our major challenge up here was to find out just what this huge infirmary building look like so how do you reckon we've done all that we've done fantastically because we've now got this row of pillar bases which enables us to reconstruct what the thing looked like so we've got one pillar base over there where Katie got one in the middle which is a column top we've got a huge foundation base here which should have had a column coming up from it and the third one is just appearing in the far trim now hold on this one here at our feet doesn't look at all like the thing that case is finished no because this is lower down and they've dug a big hole and put the Foundation's in and then later on everybody's sort of taken the stone away and reused it elsewhere when the hospital is finished this is what we call robbing it Whitney's robbing as you said earlier is recycling of the stone really for the building good practice yeah so what have we been able to tell by the fact that we've got all those well the fact we've got three shows us the interval of the pillars in probably an under craft undercroft a lot alike we've got over the back there this thing here this exists that still exists which is the lighter one but because we've got those intervals we know how far away the wall was and indeed where the other columns are in the site what about dating Beryl well apart from the fact that this enormous plinth tells us that it was actually Norman and slightly earlier than the undercroft that still stands then we've also got this pottery what is it it's green glaze medieval where it's very similar to a type called scarpella ware and it's very very rough and it makes a huge pot whistles such as this could have been used for carrying water up and down the wards but back in the incident room have race an and barrel finished our 3d reconstruction we can tell that we've got these two large hospital buildings which would've held the old and the infirm we also know that we've got the church and the cloister all buildings at the back we have an outer court which would have held all the stables and the lay sisters we've got quite a grand entrance down onto the river gate which was actually called the great gates by 1400 thing briefly me does this help you I think this is fantastic because we know that these are very irregular collections of buildings and well now it's three-dimensional all the proportions I was worried about earlier they fit now and what I think it looks like he's a great big institution which is the size and power of C Leonard's hospital reflected the importance of York in the development of Britain a place that the Roman Emperor Constantius declared should be the cradle of Christianity York is such a rich fount of English history I thought it was going to be impossible to add anything significant to what we know of the place in this little time but I think now that I was wrong I think that we've thrown a few shafts of light under a few moments of that history and I hope you agree well done everybody [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 400,295

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, Romans, Roman Fortress, Middle Ages, Medieval Hospital, Vikings, Viking Street

Id: 5enYi-MkB3Y

Length: 49min 56sec (2996 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020