The Taxman's Tavern: Roman Mansion (Alfoldean) | S13E12 | Time Team

this is west sussex one of the very first parts of britain to be romanised and it's amazing how little some things have changed here over the past two thousand years there's still the agriculture the rolling hills and of course the a-29 or as the romans would have known it stain street the main road between chichester and london what has disappeared though is the thriving roman settlement which would have once flanked this road including a mancio a roman hotel used by the empire's officials as they traveled the country [Music] and yet we know almost nothing about mancio's or how they fit it into the wider landscape this is a rare opportunity to shed some light on a little-known aspect of roman life in britain but we'll have our work cut out this whole site is over half a kilometer long with 300 years of roman activity and of course we've got just three days to find out [Music] [Music] [Music] with a hell of a lot of this hypercoarse tile yeah i mean it is amazing this just diddled with it it's absolutely everywhere as soon as you walk onto this field you know there was something big important and roman here the grounds littered with box tile roof tile high status pottery and countless other classic examples of roman occupation it's no wonder that over the last century this site has been surveyed field warped and written about many times but it's only been dug once in the 1920s when an amateur archaeologist called samuel winbolt identified it as the site of a station an official complex of buildings used by the great and the good as they journeyed up and down the country so what have we got is it a station is it a mansio i always thought they were the same thing wimbled christened a station but i think he had demanded like a police station a place where some roman troops and roman soldiers were stationed with hostile natives outside today we're probably saying well no it's more to do with a manchester or a hotel it's a kind of a crossroad a motorway service station there's medical coaching in but the whole country is crossed with roman roads so presumably there were lots of these hotel things by the side of them don't we know everything that we need to know about them would that were true tony i mean the problem is when we look at roman britain is that we understand the forts we understand tribal towns we've done a lot of work on roman villas but we know diddley squat really about what emancio is all we can really say here is this looks like an important site it's got double ditches a large enclosure a massive area of settlement but we just don't really understand anything about it so everything to play for absolutely the mantio's the obvious first target for gfiz but we've got a small problem john's results are awash with potential targets look at all these responses the problem is there's so much going on we can't actually see the detail of the buildings that were excavated yeah i mean here's wimbolt's plan this is what he calls his officers quarters this is what we think is the mancio he thinks that's a wall he thinks that's a tessellated floor of mosaic i guess the question you've got to find where it is well that's it i mean if we can't rely on the geophysics to find it well we can't you've admitted that the only way to resolve it is literally to dig it so our first trench will try to relocate this 1920s dig we may disagree with wimbolt about his description of the mancio as an officer's quarters but this classics teacher was a very good archaeologist for his time and locking his results into the landscape and re-evaluating his work will give us a great start ah oh what's that what is it that's the truth we don't know what the quality of the floor was that when bolt said he found i mean if it was a nose floor or whether it's just these broken up bits of tile but the archaeologists have also identified a second target winbolt records describe the mancio as being surrounded by massive enclosure ditches and neil's keen to investigate these as soon as possible because when it comes to getting dates for a site ditches are an archaeologist's best friend hey john have you seen this plan this bloke drew in the 20s he's got a huge ditch around here you haven't come across anything like that in your geophysics oh yeah yes you have so look there's the bank and ditch the river at the top behind us why not put another trench in here across the ditch let's see what dating is coming out of that exactly where to go on that so trench two goes in over the ditches okay and let's just take it off nice and easy although why anyone would want to dig two huge ditches to cut off a hotel from its surroundings is a mystery to me back in trench one phil thinks he may have just found the mancio or at least one of its wall foundations cut into the bedrock i mean i wonder as a first starter for 10. whether this isn't actually going to be the natural bedrock in which case our building and i think we can start to talk about a building because there's just so much demolition rubble it's all toil bits of toils and what have you that's in there the other thing i like about it that edge look at it it's exactly at 90 degrees to the roman road look at that but it's a bit early to break out the champagne we may have our first piece of mancio but we don't know what piece it is or how it might help john decide for his abundant geophys results to be honest we don't even know which part of windbolt's excavation this is only time and a lot more digging will tell how this small wall line fits into the bigger picture of roman alfoldine a settlement that stretched along both sides of stain street a lot of what we know on this site comes from this rather serious looking archaeological tome which was originally written by someone who was once the young archaeologist of the year time goes by so fast doesn't it mike yes i've changed a bit in those times yes definitely you've dug in so many different places but your heart's still here it is i used to cycle 40 40 kilometers to come here when i was a school boy so it really does hold something for me this time what was it that attracted you about this place i think it was just that there was so much evidence you could look in the fields and you'd see artifacts visible in the plowed fields and also this roadside ditch what's so significant about the deer well the ditch was important because within it you could see pits and ditches and halves of the roman period suggesting that roman settlement to the south of the river continued for about 600 metres which is far more than was previously thought this site belongs to you more than anybody else in the world we've only got three days here but what would you like to be able to take away with it i'd like to take away a plan showing the settlement to the south of the enclosure so to get a plan of that show the property plots would be fantastic mike entered his study of al faldine into the competition the same year as an entry from another young archaeologist a 13 year old hopeful called miles russell mike won while miles didn't even make the short list but we haven't got the verge on this side at all thankfully time is a great healer i mean field walking evidence there are there are pottery concentrations in that field but they do seem to increase going further south going up slope going up slope yeah yeah [Music] and that will mean more gfs a lot more gfs ah now we're talking is this the natural here then this stuff that's it so that's the outside of the site so we now know where we are over in trench two raksha and matt have located the mancio's enclosure ditches or at least one of the ditches well to be more precise they found one side of one ditch what extended this well because we couldn't find an edge you see what we thought the edge of the ditch was going to be about here tony hang on let's have a look over here so this is see how see how soft that is that's really soft isn't it yeah let me get my trowel into that no problem yeah so this is phil we're on top of a ditch here and we couldn't find the edge of the ditch where we thought it should be it's that absolutely yeah so this is the actual natural undisturbed bedrock yeah so we now we can work our way back the trench that way the problem is the geophys results suggest that each ditch is at least four meters wide and possibly up to four meters deep we'll be lucky to get to the bottom of them by the end of day three the size of these ditches and the half kilometer of settlement jiofiz are now investigating shows alfaldine was a major focus of roman activity in west sussex and to try and find out what was so appealing about this little part of southern england helen has volunteered for her first time team chopper ride look at that it's really like magic isn't it it's amazing look at state street it's so long it's so straight isn't it it's a classic example of roman military engineering isn't it crashing its way straight across the countryside it's absolutely perfect so why do you think our site is where it is well i think it is all about location because you've got the really strong straight stain street and crossing with the river arrows so you've got this point in the landscape where you've got two major routes cross and where you get that then that's the prime location to establish a settlement so it's all about control i think it is as you can see you're at the center of this huge landscape which is full of natural resources you've got woodland you've got played to make tiles and pottery and bricks not more about two miles from here you've got a local source of iron ore you've got everything you need in a way to sustain an industrial economy back on the ground we're finally rediscovering winbolt's 1920s excavation in trench one you've got pink plaster on top of tiles on top of green clay what that would mean then is that this is actually the base of one of these concrete floors you know opposite niner with the pink plaster the pink and the red brick oh now look at that neil though that is superb painted ball plaster on it and that gorgeous piece that's great you got the light blue and you can also see the brush marks and that doesn't stripe can't you is a room with a wall painted like this the sort of room you'd expect in a mancio yeah i mean you know you you're going to expect fairly high quality accommodation in some parts at least because you've got important people coming down this road you know it's not just your average b and b so we can expect some pretty lavish rooms this plaster gives an idea of just how posh parts of this hotel might be but then again if you're on government business you expect the best so what are they actually for they're just places for officials to stay the night well we have this thing in roman britain called the curses publicus which is really an administrators journeying along these major routes administering taxation um local economy their justice or whatever it happens to be they may stay for one night or for a few a few days and then move on and then move on and there is staged along the main routes and along stain street we have hardem to the south and we have alpha dean here and these may be two of those staging posts along the route between chichester and london so is that why ours is defended because it would have been full of unpopular tax collectors who the natives didn't like um it may well be for the tax collectors but we've got to bear in mind the fact that this whole sort of area sussex surrey and the whole of the southeast is one of the first bits of britain to be romanised so it's not a case of sort of angry natives in and around the area of our folding waiting to attack it but i think we're looking at it from a slightly wrong angle because rather than thinking these are defended forts these are points where resources are being protected if you've got one or two members of the military here they've got a nice defined area within which taxes within which foodstuffs within which perhaps new recruits are contained on their way towards london well whatever it was the romans certainly went to a lot of effort to protect it about 11 o'clock this morning neil decided to put a tiny little discreet trench in here to see if he could find the ditch which would have once gone round the mansion but he couldn't see it so he extended the trench then he extended it again then you extended it again and again was all this work really necessary ah totally totally tony look here is the ditch hooray look it very soft feel very black full of fines now just behind rachel we get a change ratchet can you just point out where we see the change in the earth yeah this is the lighter color the ditch is actually cutting into this it's going down that way so one edge of the ditch there and another ditch just there where does that go to well who knows i mean perhaps over about as far as here so we're going to extend back to here we'll see how time goes we come this way totally because this is really interesting so think one ditch think two ditches yeah and then look here we have look it very different yellowy clay this must be the rampart bank inside the two outer ditches so we should now be on the inside of the enclosure hold on if we've got all these ditches and we can see from this plan that the ditches were huge they went all the way out into this field this would have been a massive undertaking yeah i mean it's not just one garnish wheelbarrow is it you know it's a really big endeavor what it shows is that they must have taken a lot of effort to enclose that building it shows that building is important and it needed to be defended we really have set ourselves a challenge under half goodness knows how long it'll take to get to the bottom of this ditch trench we haven't even started on the 600 plus meters of settlement never mind the mancio probably a full-time team by itself time to sort out our priorities phil i guess the big news is after 13 years of time team you've finally got a new hat i know well the other one who got so rancid it needed it but i decided to celebrate with some good archaeology and we've got some cracking archaeology look in this trench we've got this wonderful floor which for the first time in this trench means we've got intact archaeology do you reckon this looks classy enough to be the officer's quarters well it's what wimbled called the officer's quarters but forget the officer's quarters you know he's living in a fantasy world this is part of the mancio this must be part of what he referred to as the pink corridor so we know more or less where we are but tomorrow the real challenge is going to actually work out the exact plan of the mancio because that will be a real achievement john you've been fizzing over there yeah looking for the settlement outside and look we've got it you can see these clear ditches these very strong pits but look at these responses here right along the edge of the road i'd just love to think that those might be mausoleum yeah i mean i i agree i think that is a potentially an extremely exciting feature there that sort of circularity i mean that could be a hut circle that could be a mausoleum that could be a big pile of pants we don't know until we uh we dig into it but it's an obvious target for first thing tomorrow i mean i mean a trench in there as well will tell us one important thing won't it are these buildings earlier than this enclosure or are they contemporary with it so we've got a fantastic site here that's jam-packed full of goodies we've got a possible mausoleum we've got a brand new hat do things get better than that i don't think so beginning of day two here in west sussex and yesterday where that digger is over there we found what we think is a mancio which is a roman service station or coaching house and at some time or other it was cut off from the rest of the site by some huge ditches over there by that digger why did they do that well we don't know but in order to understand what was going on there we need to understand more about this area here and yesterday mike you said that your ambition was to see a plan of the whole of the roman site that's where john's got to so far yeah it's looking good it's showing the enclosures continuing to the south of the mensio so where about where we're about here yesterday evening you got very excited by this little circle thing here you said you thought it might be a mausoleum somewhere where the romans buried their dead it'd be nice wouldn't it it's in the right sort of place right next to the road as it goes into the posting stations we've got this big circular feature and that's exactly where you'd expect a big monumental burial to be so what do we do with it bridge well i've got the super duper enlarged version here of your plan we're going to stick a trench across it at our diagonal we'll pick up that ditch there and we'll pick up these anomalies in the middle that indicate that they might be burning and they could be typical of cremations where are you going in the archaeologists suspect that this whole site may once have been a single big roman settlement before the ditches were dug to cut off the mansion but getting that crucial dating evidence from the ditch trench is turning into a bit of a nightmare we just don't know if we can afford the manpower to dig down to the bottom of these massive defenses and over at the mancio trench we now face a number of challenges for example unpicking the remains of a 1920s dig by local archaeologist samuel winbolt but perhaps more crucially working out what our mancio may look like whenever i've asked any of you three about mancios you've always said oh it's like a travel lodge or a hotel or a service station but that doesn't really help me picture what was going on there in roman times does it well think of a roman motel you know what are you going to have you want rooms don't you mean victor's on a kind of a plan here or drawing based on another mansion has been excavated so imagine you bring your horse in you dismount you want to get rid of your horse to the stables come in here change your clothes go through to the bath house have a nice wash come back have something to eat and then go to sleep so you know this kind of typical courtyard building is quite usual mark you probably know more about manchester than anybody else i know can you work out what bit of the mantia we've got in phil's trench it's very difficult to gauge to be honest at this stage there are certainly hints of substantial structures and i suspect we may be close to one end of the wing perhaps where you've got the bath house because there's a butt here isn't there you know this is not our building this is based on another site there isn't a single blueprint to a mansion they're not always this size some can be much bigger some can be quite small and some don't even have the courtyard something just always be like a corridor so unfortunately we can't just say okay we're digging here we've got that wall and we can immediately reconstruct the rest of the building now the problem we have is in phil's trench wind bolt has dug very deeply in there i think it's actually destroyed most of the archaeology in that trench so we're closing down this trench and opening one in an area not investigated by wind bolt so actually in the thought is have we got a range of rooms coming around with a courtyard in the middle you see that yeah so john believes that with the eye of faith he can see a pretty substantial building possibly even with a courtyard john and within minutes the archaeology seems to back up his theory is this the sort of thing that you might have picked up on this bridge yeah i think there should be a cut feature through there well then yeah it sounds like we are on the spot there and things are also looking up in the under staffed ditch trench we still haven't got to the bottom of them and hopefully you'll be able to help us with those we've now got a virtually limitless supply of extra diggers from a local college christ's hospital this also just happens to be the school where our 1920s archaeologist samuel winbolt taught and his legacy looms large here a lot of these six formers are actually studying archaeology you start from this end you see this yellow here you don't want to hit the yellow sir so in return for some practical experience in trench digging we're now confident we can get to the bottom of these ditches by the end of day three hopefully these massive ditches didn't enclose just a mancio but a whole complex of buildings that would have served roman officials and traders as they traveled the country horses were the main form of transport so one of the key facilities here would have been the blacksmiths [Music] and among his many jobs would have been the manufacture of what's believed to be the precursor of the modern horseshoe the hippo sandal although i've seen pictures of these many times in books i've actually never seen a real one so i'm really interested in how it's going to look luckily i managed to get up to the british museum last week and we actually managed to get up close and personal with some so i could come and make some today so how are you going to start making them well i'm going to take a plate i've got to forge it down into this nice triangular shape and then turn a loop on the front and then the wings on the side we're going to have to form those and then weld them on top and bottom and try and come down on top of it rather than coming back towards this design is based on various archaeological finds but surprisingly no one's ever tried the theory out on a real live horse [Music] that's it that's the one so we're using christ hospital's fully equipped school forge yes school forge to test how practical this hippo sandal is oh and we will be using a real live horse back at the trench in the settlement miles has now found the source of his geophysical anomaly the problem is it's not quite as straightforwardly roman as we'd hoped for is it a muslim uh no i don't think so but i think if you bear in mind this morning i said it could be a roundhouse or a mausoleum tending to veer slightly more towards the roundhouse interpretation because well because we've got here this big sort of area of burning you can see all this these stones with charcoal and bait clay around it and that seems to be at the center of john's geophysical circularity so i tend to think of it more of being a roundhouse with a central heart i mean that's iron age isn't it that's before the romans even get here well yes but i mean the population aren't going to suddenly become roman start building square rectangular buildings round houses iron age structures are probably going to continue for some time so basically you're telling me that you've found a bunch of burnt stones yes but it's a very interesting bunch of burnt stones while miles ponders the future of his trench we've now analyzed the fines from phil's first trench over the mancio and we think we now know what was going on there we've got structural components these are pieces of box flue tile that certainly indicate a heated room but i think we can also from that say that there is certainly at least one bath wow because we've got the pieces here of opus signing that's that kind of concrete floor yeah of waterproof stuff and it's often found lining bars plunge bars and is this one decorated no it's actually lime scale well actually from the bottom yes so they should have cleaned their bath more often it may be one rather poorly maintained plunge pool but it places the mancio's bath house here to the northwest of the complex phil is this trench easier to understand what was going on there oh this is an absolute dream and thanks to phil's new trench john's theory that this is a pretty sizable man seo possibly with three ranges is now looking very promising in here we think we're probably into a courtyard so that this whole area is the actual courtyard of the site and then this looks like there's probably going to be a wall line somewhere through here and then you pass through here into a a corridor which you can see looks like we've got tassari on it so that it may actually have had a mosaic floor then you go through from the corridor into a series of rooms and we've got a wall line here i can see that quite clearly and you can see the return of it going across there but as you go through the room you find that here in fact we've got another wall line oh yeah coming through there so it actually gives us one two three sides of the wall and here we've actually got the fourth side i think what's great about this trench now is in the last one we just about the depths of archaeology now we've seen that plan of our field we've understand the plan that's right plenty more work this afternoon or not just as we prepare for a manic afternoon of trenching the heavens open and the clear wall lines of the mancio and the obvious circularity of the circular feature disappear under a sea of muddy clay phil we've dug in much worse weather than this and even when everyone else has packed up we've had to prise you out of the trench so how come you've stopped it's so simple it's a geology what do you mean well this ground here has just got so much clay in it that as soon as it starts to rain it just puddles up there's there's just no way it's going to drain away it's the archaeology that comes first here and if we actually start to work this site we're actually going to destroy the archaeology so what do we do we simply have to wait i mean and it's not just a matter of wait until the rain stops we've got to wait until the water in the site drains away so we're now all playing a waiting game [Music] well almost all of us because when the going gets tough the tough get gear fizzing that's a really strangely beautiful object snake yeah feel free thanks it's a bit heavy oh gosh it is heavy thankfully our archaeological experiment hasn't been affected by the downpour and we can finally see if our alleged roman horseshoe is up to the job we could be the first people for some centuries to actually be looking at a horse's hoof in a hippo center yeah i think i think we probably are but it's just um trying to decide that whether this is the right way to tie it on or not well he thinks it's strange doesn't it he thinks it's strange i'm not sure whether you'd want to work a horse for any long distance so with these on you certainly wouldn't be able to pull a load with that if you were trying to pull a wagon i think that'll do there john actually i think that's enough i think turning is going to be difficult with those spikes out in the front he's going to he's going to try and stab himself with those on a regular basis i certainly wouldn't want to ask him to trot with them on no then if they're not for heavy loads and they're not for long distances on metal roads what are they for well the only other thing i can think of is that they would have been used for a veterinary type purpose if they've damaged the bottom of the foot to hold something in like a brand poultice to draw out infections would have been ideal for holding something like that in well it might not have been the result we expected but it does show that sometimes it pays to put theory into practice [Music] back on site we've hatched a plan to buy us a few extra hours digging on this rain sudden sight [Music] we're going to cover phil's trench with this tent and use a digger to expose clean dry archaeology in miles's trench unfortunately the conditions in the ditch trench make it too dangerous to dig so at most with only one more day to get to the bottom of it but although we still don't have a date for these defenses stewart thinks he now knows why they were constructed this is about control if you want to go up and down this road you have to go in one gate out the other gate and over a bridge it's about roman imperial taxation it's a way of easily generating revenue to support the army in fact i'm just quoting from some original sources here where regulations for texas per capita for each slave one daenerys and a half for a horse mayor jackass mule donkey ox half of daenerys and so on if it moved they text it i mean you've got to think here the of of why would they want to do that here and one thing we've discovered is that there's lots of iron in this area and iron is in affecting the roman period it's a controlled substance it's controlled by the military it's movement so it doesn't fall into hostile hands and therefore once it's controlled by the military then you get the military stamp which is the building of ramparts and ditches and all that sort of thing and in effect those defensive earthworks are like it's like a big bonded warehouse if you can put it like that what did you say you were a young archaeologist of the year 1981 1981 it's almost the end of day two and while we've managed to get some work done in a couple of the trenches to be honest the rain has completely scuppered our plans bridget what have you done with the circularity seems to have disappeared all together yeah when the machine is clearing back we'll be able to see the features very clearly but of course now we've got rain again yeah water starts pooling and it just is phasing it out again and you can see these guys out here working in it we've got to get them out because it's just yeah let's make it turning everything up on like yeah i think we'll call it a day but it's not completely doom and gloom geophys have gallantly continued to survey this large waterlogged site and john thinks a clear picture of alfoldine's development is beginning to emerge but it's getting late so time to swap the cold wet misery of the site [Applause] for the cold wet comfort of a pint it was a frustrating afternoon oh very frustrating yeah this morning was going so well and i thought yeah we can now see the walls it can match it to john's geophysics we are actually getting a plan of the mancio yeah we got the site on the run but yeah we've been held up for sure how was it for you john well we've had a fantastic day i mean look claire and fear have done wonders they've surveyed about three hectares today and we've got the settlement we wanted look we've extended the survey some 300 400 meters beyond the main complex there's a whole series of ditches and these large pits and then trackways coming around i mean it looks a bit irregular though i think it's probably iron age rather than actually roman you know it's then developed anybody looks to me tony's like we've got a native indigenous village and look what happens roman government puts a road right through the middle of it and later that says yeah what a great spot for a hotel and even later then says let's put a bank and ditch right around the outside yeah all right but that's a theory isn't it how do we ascertain whether or not this settlement is actually earlier than the mansion well you know i'm going to say what do you think john well i think if we take one of these strong anomalies that i think is probably a pit and then we'll hopefully get some dating evidence yeah and we can compare pottery from that with material from the ditch from the bank and from the mancio it's a bit of a picture of how this site developed over time are we actually going to be able to get inside the mansion oh for sure by tomorrow night we'll know what a roman bedroom in a hotel looks like a roman hotel bedroom by tomorrow unless of course it continues raining in which case we just have to spend the whole day in here if it's a good afternoon beginning of day three here in west sussex on the a29 what the romans used to call stain street and yesterday we thought we'd found the roman mancio or road house and then at lunch time the skies opened and the archaeology was washed out well as you can see it's another day the rain stopped but the mud's still here so the question is can we still dig and the answer is a resounding yes the first target is the new trench pinpointed by john this is a good 400 meters from the mansion but if we can get good dating evidence from this part of the settlement it should help us with the overall story of the size that's the point yep well tell from the size alone it's going to be first or second century it's got it out the bag yet come on you have little faith let's have a look well actually you can actually see there's a head and it's quite prominent actually in relief and [Music] i would put money on that being either vespasian or his son titus between sort of 70 80 a.d not a word out of you i'll believe you thank you the coins date of around 70 a.d suggests this part of the settlement was here around the time stain street was built jiffys have played a bit of a blinder on a difficult and soaked site as well as revealing the plan of the settlement their results inside the enclosure are combining with the archaeology to uncover a rather impressive building phil your tents kept you pretty dry how's it going in there well i'm going down at the foundation but look at the depths of it i mean surely a foundation that deep that could be you could be looking at a two-story building this building is getting bigger by the minute we've now established the mancio had a bath house here and consisted of at least three ranges each of which could be two stories high we're pretty confident we've got a long range of buildings going in this direction and out here i stepped into a courtyard but is it an interior courtyard with other buildings beyond it or is this the whole extent of the complex how do we work that out well that's a look at the geophysics i mean here's the ranger room where phil's investigating that's very clear round here looks like more rooms and perhaps another range there but i'd like to prove it i mean this could be something else it's very noisy on the geophysics yeah so maybe a small trench two by two and i would think maybe there because that looks like the clearest area just literally pick up the wall line and we've cracked it [Music] the more we dig the clearer this massive geophysical information becomes a part that is from miles is trench and his intriguing circularity over the past three days it's been a mausoleum a romano british roundhouse and then he lost it completely miles is it still here it's come back again uh my circularity has returned we've got what looks like the the circular gully gully's swinging right the way around the trench i still like the idea of that being a half that sort of burning area in the middle and this being a circular all around it but it's all roman yeah it's all romano british so it looks like miles early suspicions were right this is a romano british roundhouse built by the locals and part of the original settlement that was here when the mancio was built but this trench refuses to be straight forward there's a complicating factor in that uh just outside that circular feature ian's found a series of other pits what have you got down there in i've got a broken but it appears to be fairly complete pop just so well see out look i can see that yeah so that's the whole diameter of it isn't it there it looks like most of the pot i mean that's that's the fabric and you've got that sort of new forest indented beaker i mean that's useful isn't it because that probably is going to be sort of third century ad so again it shows the activity here outside the enclosure is contemporary what's going on inside the enclosure not earlier it's contemporary we're also at last getting near to a story for the ditches that were at some point dug to separate and we presume protect the mansio from the rest of the settlement yep here it is you can see this huge thick yellow clay of the ram pipe yeah you can see this brown stuff here yeah that's an earlier ground surface the rampart has been slapped straight on top of it yeah and this is the stuff that's coming from under the ramp this is the stuff that's been sealed by the bank it's just what we've been wanting this is a classic piece of archaeological dating because when these ditches were dug into the clay the spoil was used to build a large rampart sealing any fines on the ground surface underneath [Music] what we've got here is a shallow platter and this cordon vessel and i think we're looking at a late first century a.d group of pottery right so pretty early yeah early then yeah so we now know the defenses were constructed around 90 a.d when the settlement was already here we can also get a date for how long they lasted because it appears once these ditches outlived their usefulness they were filled in with a mixture of earth and rubbish which we can date well there's a ton of pottery yeah it's very interesting actually because it's all fairly consistent it looks as if it's gonna fall into the end of the second century and into the early third certainly nothing later than the middle of the third century so it's quite a tight group for dating i it looks like these defenses dominated this landscape for the best part of 150 years but the enclosure's only part of the story and geophys have now completed their exhaustive survey of roman alfalden much to the delight of one long-time fan of the site mike luke mike you've been looking at this place for 25 years what does it feel like to see a plan of it for the very first time it's brilliant to see a plan of the settlement adjacent to the road that's fantastic and look on the far side of the road we've got a whole series of large pits but we've also extended down below towards the river in that direction excellent the ditches are continuing the pits are continuing track right here what's unusual and what we hadn't expected is that the settlement actually seems to be far bigger than we thought it seems to be continuing down to the river and also we don't know how far it goes to the south it's amazing you can get all this without even digging a scene without digging geophysics has really come up trumps it's fabulous we think the story goes like this there was a settlement here by the time the romans built the defenses around the mancio in about 90 a.d this newly fortified complex then acted as a customs point taxing travellers along stain street as well as providing secure storage for iron shipments from local quarries and so al faldine continued to prosper throughout the second and early third centuries but then the whole site ceased activity and neil now believes he knows the reason for al fuldin's demise you know this is about tax collection don't you decide yeah and about iron well in the middle of the third century a.d the wheel ceased to be an important center of iron production and production shifted to the west of england to the forest of dean so hey guess what happens just as the ironing tree goes goes down the tubes this site falls out of use and the governmental tax collectors head off to gloucestershire it would seem the whole of alfaldine was reliant on the mancio complex because when the tax men left so did the rest of the settlement but there's a last surprising twist to this story in miles's trench where ian's uncovered this almost intact third century beaker was this down there with it this bit of glass yeah it was down off the bottom of the ditch here because that's from one of these big square bottles probably made in the rhineland around cologne in the second century it's just that they're often used as scenery is to take cremation burials and with a complete pot crushed in on itself i wonder if there might have been a disturbed burial here well it's possible isn't it yeah we now believe that the romano british round house that once stood here was abandoned when the mancio's defensive ditches cut through its plot but the leftover land still had its uses and became the ideal location for roman burials being beside a major road and just outside a fortified roman complex back inside the enclosure our final trench has deciphered another piece of the complex mancio geophys kerry went for a bit of keyhole surgery here looking for a very very easy story and looking for the wall to the mansion have you found it you haven't got an easy answer that's your natural or the floor and that's your wall and we've got a back to the wall as you can just see the yellow just creeping through on the other side well that's great isn't it now proves the whip for the courtyard and proves we've got another range showmancer over here so that's great this fourth range means we do have a courtyard building while phil's trench has now revealed a corridor that surrounded that courtyard so it does look as though we got the corridor as we first thought what we didn't know was that it was going to turn through 90 degrees and go that way so this is actually the internal southeast corner of the building exactly and the whole of the south range now we can sort of plot from behind us precisely you're in the corridor yeah i'm in the courtyard we're now getting an idea of just how impressive john's results are because with the help of the archaeology we can filter out much of the noise on his original geophys to give us this the actual floor plan of the alfoldine mancio an impressive two-story coaching inn complete with its bath house and at the heart of a complex with paddocks stables and all the other services a traveler would have expected and we're now standing in one of the bedrooms right i'm a weary traveller at the end of the day i've pulled up into the mancio what do i get for my money you're a very important person tony you would get a room to yourself i'm sure good sized room in your calm imagine your bed perhaps a brazier if it's cold in winter warm your hands chest you could then go out perhaps have your dinner in the in the dining room have a bath and yeah maybe a few alternative attractions perhaps a few girls or something like that fantastic did everybody get a room on their own almost certainly not i think it would have depended on your status i mean some of these rooms you could easily fit a number of bunk beds in so you could be literally sleeping with 10 goat herds or something like that i'm high status sorry you'll have a single gopro but hey last night you kept in your wagon or in a tent so to get to civilization and have a wash must have been good and of course a decent meal so as a reward for our digger's hard work food historian sally granger and the pupils from christ's hospital have prepared a veritable roman feast and among the delights on offer are asparagus quiche fish balls and freshly cooked hair strangely dorm eyes aren't included [Music] i don't know it all depends how long it's been hanging around this place lasted 150 years imagine how many people must have walked through the doors looking for a good night's sleep and a warm bath and a decent meal there'd have been roman soldiers and administrators and tax collectors and british traders all wandering through the rooms admiring the mosaics eating their food off the fine samian wear and charging up their batteries for another day's journey down stain street and quite frankly after three pretty grueling days in some fairly horrendous weather conditions all of us will be only too glad to get back to the 21st century version of the man's here just as soon as we finished our feast [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 217,161

Rating: 4.9522548 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, time team, time team full episode, time team series 13 episode 12, alfodean, time team alfodean, roman mansio, british history, roman history, time team taxmans tavern

Id: OubmpRSxV1g

Length: 47min 30sec (2850 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021