Time Team S12-E06 Grace Dieu,.Hampshire

under these murky waters on the river handle lies some remains of a medieval ship but this isn't just any old ship we're helping this is the grass Sir Henry the fifth huge flagship in fact it was so big that no bigger boat was built for another 200 years but amazingly she only ever had one voyage and after henry v death she was just abandoned and left to rot so was she too big to sail was she a failure and how much of her lies under here we've got just three days to find out on a bitterly cold night in January 14 39 the grass juror was lying silently a tanker surrounded by three smaller royal ships the story goes that this huge royal battleship was struck by lightning and burnt to the water strangely enough the other ships weren't damaged nearly 600 years later the skeleton of a huge ship is still visible on the bottom of the river John Adams who was one of the leading archaeologists on the Mary Rose has no doubt this is the grassed year so how you gonna prove it we're going to put a trench over the stern and look it's a part of the structure that we think most information is going to come from in the time available to us on a practical note how the hell are we going to get the dirt out well we're going to excavate essentially just as you do on land trowels paintbrushes etc but will suck the spoil away with the water suction trench and that has the effect of keeping the visibility a little bit clearer Frances you're musing I am Tony I mean how did they get such a sucking great ship up this little river and then get it lodged in the mud where they cut what we call a mud berth and that would have been a big trench into the side of the riverbank probably cut at a very low spring tide and that would have allowed them to get another 20 meters into the bank and so that it would have still allowed traffic to carry on past Phil you've got a luxury on this one you don't have to wait for geophys to finish before you start digging it yeah but I also don't have a big yellow digger do I we could drive well our henry v was the most powerful king in europe after defeating the French at the Battle of Agincourt 1415 in just one day the English wiped out most of the French and ability even though a zinc ore was the last great land battle of the Hundred Years War the French and their powerful allies the Genoese posed a continual threat on the Seas with their huge warships called Carrick's Henry v kept his Royal Navy here in the handle River unlike Southampton which had been raided several times by the Genoese the handle was a safe Anchorage protected from the invaders by a chain across the river mouth three miles up river lies the ancient port of Burres Eldon and a mile past burrs Eldon for royal ships including the grass deer were laid up in specially dug mud births John has been talking about this wreck as though he knows it's the grass year but we don't know that do we oh yes we do oh well we've got a great deal of documentary evidence which makes it quite quite clear why when it was built how much it cost and who built it but Susan that just says that there was once a boat called the grass deer not that this is is but one of the documents tells us that it was brought up the river here anchored in the river for some years and then eventually beached on the mud flats over there well okay Susan so it did sink here at some time my doesn't kit was what okay was beast here at some time but that doesn't mean that why he's found is is it could be another medieval boat no no no it couldn't could it John is too big to be anything else there is 14 meters from stem to stern of the structure in the mud and we know that that's not all because the original ship would have been much much bigger so the dimensions people have come up with are anything up to 200 feet or more 60 meters long by about 15 meters wide at 50 feet wide that is a hell of a sight mean to 200 feet long 50 foot wide to me that seems too big I mean looking at the plans that were made in the eighties of just what they could see on the surface then it's very difficult to stretch them to fit those dimensions I think somewhere beneath that perhaps I don't know 40 meters 45 meters long so 40 feet wide something like that rather smaller but still absolutely enormous Damien are you saying this isn't the grass you know you're just saying that they sign about the signs you're saying we you know the historical way of deriving a size is different to the archaeological way the archeological ways to go out there and measure the historical way is to follow the documents which are difficult to understand so we are looking for an enormous ship she carried a fighting force of at least 200 men and we think her forward castle or fo'c'sle was 50 feet above the waterline that's three times the height of a double-decker bus but as our experts can't agree about most of the other dimensions one of our targets is to define her actual size but why did they build her so big we had to be larger than the largest ship the enemies could of England could throw against it and those were the Genoese characters the big Mediterranean sailing vessels allies of the French and the Gracia is a is about three times as large as the largest Carrick our first job is to get the geophys underway and here we're using the latest deep-sea sonar technology depending on how much of the hull is left in the mud this might tell us how long this ship was but the system has never been used in such shallow water before what's your adapt do you normally work out we normally work in about 10 to 20 metres of water but most of my colleagues think that is ridiculously shall I let alone this sea I mean how does this actually work how is it that this thing can pick up water does it work well basically if you sort of tend to sound source down to the seabed the physical property change between the water column and the actual sediments is pretty significant you get an echo back from it and what we found out is there are also big physical differences between the wood and the sediment so we also get an echo from that so hopefully we'll get echo both from the seabed and maybe would vary beneath it and you should actually get a 3d image of the boat well that's what we would hope to do anyway this is the first time that this wreck has been excavated by divers once the diving begins two of them including John would be working flat-out for hours on end but before anyone can get in the water there's a huge amount of preparation to do these safety checks are essential but they're swallowing up our valuable time function checks completed we're working correctly five five four three two one loading clear we think that at least 17 ships of Henry the fifths Royal Navy were maintained and overhauled at burrs Elden a mile towards the sea from our site steward would like to know more about this busy village in the time of Henry the fifth with so much royal business burdened and docks must have been a focal point for trade if steward can locate the medieval shore line then he can begin to piece together the layout of the ancient port the tides in the river churn up all sorts of silt and weed and the underwater visibility is very poor so John has designed a special enclosure this paddling pool looking device is called the sea curtain once anchored over the trench the sides can be let down and secured to form a tank the water inside can then be pumped out through a filter and returned into the enclosure clear of silt well that's the theory but it's already taken half the day just to inflate it and get it in the water it's just after lunch and the tide is slowing down John's getting ready to dive chin up just a little bit wait everything else is ready each diver has a companion on standby in case there's a problem contents gauge carabiner so impression you okay in Dover in Waterloo but there's little point in Phil and I taking the place of the two working divers until the visibility is far better and they've started to uncover the wreck subsurface John has chosen to dig across the stern of the ship in a trench about two by 2.5 meters the depth of water at the moment is only two meters but the tides still running the visibility is extremely poor and there's a huge amount to get ready before the serious archeology can begin John still positioning the anchors for the seeker I was rushing around like crazy to just after lunch and now everything's just gone Lou that's really frustrating why well nothing's happening love this thing it took them hours to blow this up and it's just been sitting in the water forever no Ollie I disagree here I mean I know it's disappointing I want to go and see this boat don't get me wrong it looks like at least I've got me feet in the war but oh yeah look this is a difficult exercise lot of is experimental that has never been tried before so I mean we've got to get out there we've got to test it and we can't run it until we've done all this the first people to investigate the wreck were the Victorians who thought the grass cure was a huge Viking ship because her hull was clinker built this was an ancient technique using horizontal overlapping boards still used today in small boats the wreck tickers noticed the old ship's hull was made up of not one but three planks of oak fastened together with huge ships nails nothing like this had ever been seen before and not surprisingly archaeologists since have been asking questions to understand just how this royal ship was built and the problems the medieval ship rights faced with a ship of this size Damien is going to reproduce a very small section of this extraordinarily complicated hull I don't want it take to make a plank like this - if you knew what you were doing I'm doing all the time not I'm suggesting you don't know what you do you know you know I mean I was trying to get an idea of how fast work was likely to progress well if they knew what they were doing small ones like this they would make I know 10 or 20 a day if they really if they had very good straight pieces which this is reasonably straight and regular and nice and fresh so they'd make a hell of a lot if the material wasn't as good it would take long johns finally got the site prepared he's had problems citing the anchors for the sea curtain and he's been marking out the trench underwater on the surface phil has been waiting patiently for his instructions well can you hold it there and then I'll come and get it you'll come and get it we're so nearly ready to go but no end of optimism will make up for the fact that we've probably lost a whole day just getting the site ready yeah as the total with the Kings donation added in as well so you've got four thousand pounds here Carranza's looking at the quantity of materials and manpower used to build the grassed year and the time they took to construct her here which is original which has fun well it's a kind of summary of all the accounts from the building the grass tear and all the other there are no diagrams or shipwrights plans but there are copies of some of the 15th century commissioning documents and accounts so there's a huge amount of detail in this and there's various other documents that people have gone through it and the realization of what it took to build an enormous royal ship is beginning to dawn the scale of it is just kind of unbelievable by the end of our first day at least a picture of this huge ship is beginning to emerge from the history and the first glimpses are even beginning to appear from under the silt okay well done Johnny you well yep I boil Dober well run to that could you see what's down there quite a bit actually like what I could see you about a metre half and by the time we finished we cleared off about two meters of the ship structure so you could clearly see that black timber against the seabed but we are a long way behind I went it's such a frustrating day well these things always take a bit longer than expected but now I think we've done quite well really we've got the trench in the right place the enclosures more down the boat more ease are all set so we could carry on doing nightshift but you're so cool and it's only lights now tell you they're all champing at the bit out there are we gonna get to see this wreck we'll find out tomorrow it's the beginning of day 2 on our excavation of Henry the Fitz huge flagship lying here on the bottom of the handle River yesterday was so frustrating not being able to see anything having to wait for the site to be prepared but this morning conditions are far better low tides about two hours away and that means optimum visibility the sea curtain can also be anchored down soon so shortly they can begin to exchange and clean the water happily the dredge used for sucking away the mud and silt is working perfectly an inch by inch the ship's hull is coming to light for the first time in over five hundred years with Susan and John's help race Anne is working on a 3d picture of how the grass der might have looked for the first time we can see how overpowering this 15th century battleship might have been and what a huge advantage it could have provided for Henry the fifth over his enemies building a clinker vessel of this size was very complicated rather than building the frame first they started by forming the ship's hull with layer upon layer of triple boards and when it was complete they fitted the frame inside the clinker boards were clenched together with huge iron nails and washers called Rove's and the hull was then fixed to the frames using tree nails long wooden pegs that were driven through both the boards and the frames and wedged at each end to join the boards end to end the ship rides cut overlapping scarf joints we don't know if these joints were staggered or how long the boards were to the modern eye this appears to be a really cumbersome way to build a ship and why did the medieval ship rights use this triple clinker construction in the first place to find out more Damien is looking at some of the Timbers that were salvaged from the grass juror in Victorian times and which are now kept in Winchester Museum what is it telling him it's telling us a lot about the tools of shipwrights use you can actually see fine detail of tool marks in this scarf joint here where the board's joined end to end where even the little places where the nicks and the blade show up as ridges on the surface of the timber that is just superb preservation and one of these things here these are the iron washers for the end of the bolts or Rove nails that held the ship together on the inside we can see trace of the tar and for me one of the most interesting things is we can see how relatively rough the finish was I mean this is a royal ship but they were building her fast and they weren't obsessed about the finish by any means I mean this is really quite rough what's going on here well this is part of a frame timber I mean it's again fantastically well preserved you can see shipwrights marks you can see what is that Damon is that sort of the carpenters mark to share it was his bit of timber he needed to be paid for or is it a sort of kit number of how to put the building the ship together it's probably got most to do with how the frame timber fitted in the ship the shell of the planking was built first cranes put in afterwards you can also see some pretty crude work yeah what is this well these crude scallops are to fit over the heads of the bolts and they're cut pretty crudely and very deep so they again they're going bang bang bang chop chop chop chop the clock is ticking you know this is speedy work and down it is this gonna help you actually try and reconstruct how it was put together dessert it is I mean I'm already beginning to realize that we've been we've been wasting our time making the boards as smooth as we have on our section rebuilding and you know this I mean it's just fantastic it's just the beginning of understanding I can't I can't say what it's telling it he's always so taciturn it's really nice to see him exciting oh no this is I mean I've been a student the medieval shipbuilding for several years and this is just just fantastic material the tides beginning to slow down now and that means optimum visibility John you're wet I had what they call a wet did Phil's been put on standby and he's really excited is it orally nice and productive and and how's the skirt doing well the tides still too high for that to be operating that's still about a metre above the seabed so we're just operating down on seabed below that at the moment but is is the excavation going up to cording to plan is it is yeah it's plain sailing there is they've gone down this much already yeah so what's the plan weren't you still in there I've just come up to change hats and then you're going back there permission denied in 14 25 years after the Battle of Agincourt the grass sure was finished and ready for sea she was the biggest most prestigious warship that had ever been built and probably amongst the first royal ships to carry guns what are your pains impressed by oh yes I mean this is one of the nicest things about the grass tear the Florentines used to come to Southampton every year with galleys to trade and so per who's the guy in charge of the royal ships is also a merchant so he met up with his contact and took him to dinner on the on the grass here when it was in Southampton and this guy wrote it all down in his diary and then he says it was the most beautiful ship I ever seen well that was real praise from a from a Florentine she said sale in July 14 2008 invoice from Southampton to the Isle of Wight presumably the sailors who worked on it must've been terribly proud that they were on this great ship well you'd like to think so but have a look at this look this is an account of the master of when they were going on the only expedition that the grass Jia went on muster is just like making a list of them so you know hey that's right a roll call in effect and if you look here this tells us that how the quartermaster of the grass Jose Williams you could Dartmouth of the grass dia he threw the master roll into the sea when they had to hurry the crew were underpaid the weather was appalling some of them who weren't used to handling such a large ship just wanted to chuck it in and they insisted on ping put ashore on sand Helens in the Isle of Wight and then they things got even worse after that they attacked one of the servants of the guys taking the master and tore his clothes and it says he they used were bees continuous otherwise they swore at him you know I find this so refreshing when we're doing archaeology we're always going oh what a great imposing structure look at the size of this boat but actually there were ordinary people on it who were really hacked off absolutely wanted to go home they wanted to go home I mean brother was clearly dreadful they may have been afraid that this vessel was not seaworthy though there is no evidence whatsoever for that so after only one wretched voyage the grassed year was anchored in the mouth of the handle to deter enemy Raiders eventually she was birthed upriver and her masts and rigging taken away she was never to see the open water again they had shipped keepers on these ships like caretakers and we know in fact that the superintendent ship keeper was jordan browning who was a very experienced royal ship master he'd been master of the Holy Ghost he was a Southampton man a local man he superintended the building of a little royal ship down the river at basil Dhin called the little Jesus well Stewart's our man on the spot if he can work out where the medieval village was then the boat yard could be somewhere there - three - in the main will function correctly really the heathered I bet you're happy feel I am overjoyed I count to tell you how long I've waited for this good it's mid-afternoon on day two and Phills moment has finally come you're happy have you two ready to enter the war track but there's a problem John hasn't been able to secure the sea curtain to the riverbed properly and the water exchange isn't working so Phil's going to have to take a chance with the visibility don't need to Phil can you hear me what's it like down there can you see anything at the boat avoid the flight deck boy feel what for the follow Jordan follow me keV like boom there he is you've got a bear with me baby ah because I can't see a single thing the eye cannot see a thing the visibility is literally always happy no more than a foot my fate I cannot see the boat but I know it's here now he's pointed by hat ding oh my god this is like a radio program not television what can you feel there it is down there was a big sense I thought in questionably cruncher Damien's ready to put together his section of the triple boarded how he's just waiting on some nails he's ordered from local blacksmith Colin Phillips Oh oh my god they're enormous frightening it big yeah unbelievable and someone was telling me that you'd actually weighed these what sort of weight is that one pound and at eight and a half ain't it it's unbelievable there's a huge amount of armor and these are rose brilliant I mean these are incredible these are just so much bigger than the the examples that we normally deal with I mean they're twice the size basically now the job will be to see if we can actually cut these and rivet them because they are so massive okay thank you all right less than 20 years after her maiden voyage from Southampton the grass juror was struck by lightning in her mud birth and burnt to the waterline ten men spent over three months salvaging eight tons of precious iron from her hull presumably on the orders of her masters in Burlington Stuart I bet you're a train spotter when you're a kid absolutely not no way that little thermos listen over the other side they were saying that there was this guy called Jordan browning who was the caretaker of the grass here once it had been laid up and he actually made ships just around here mm-hmm what would this place have been like at that time well then in the 15th century well it wouldn't be genteel as it is now and the surf will be riffle we're lied here but the present for shore of the river that's very much where it would have been at that period and the water line would have come through here to the edge that carpark there yeah yeah run along to the edge of the carpark over here to where the road is yeah and then swept back out to there it's like a huge Creek all this would have been Creek mud flaps that sort of thing do we reckon that Jordan Browning's boatyard could have been around here well the one thing I'm reasonably certain of is that the the focus of settlement at that period would have been in this area the church is up on the top of the hill there at the end of this Creek and that's been that's way to expect the bought building to start from in that period this would have been an industrial community boatyards here hammering karts being brought backwards and forwards that sort of thing lots of smoke lots of activity trying to get the number of that's right so Jordan Browning's boatyard could have been there so most of the boatbuilding foreshore of medieval burrs Alden appears to be under the railway line tomorrow's Stewart's going to pinpoint the creek between the foreshore and the church with France's who can open some test pits John and his team have been diving for eight hours now and are making really good progress even in the poorest visibility because this is this is almost vertical because there stands about here the other side is just about here yeah it's not far away these are really tough conditions even for the most experienced divers it's the end of the day and we're waiting for Phil so we've retreated to the pub read a matter of the day but Phil is the bearer of bad news the see Curtin is a non-starter after two days John's decided to abandon it altogether it's just not working I mean we did spend a hell of a lot of time putting it in if I hadn't in any stall in it if we if we ignored it if we'd gone in without it we could have been diving yeah by lunchtime today yeah but did you know on the other side you know I mean I mean okay it doesn't come as a great surprise to me but I'm in the main thing is like she'd been down don't let's be too glum we may not have seen the grass - I think I've seen do you have not seen I have seen it abate that far away but I have seen you sewing like a short-sighted mole I saw it as I live and breathe I saw it tomorrow let's hope that we can see it a little bit clearer and tomorrow I'm gonna get down there ever looking all right yeah beginning of day three and I'll search for Henry the Fitz flagship and yesterday was so frustrating Phil managed to dive the wreck eventually but the visibility was so bad he couldn't see anything he could just feel it and we had been proposing to put that orange sea curtain round it and pump it full of cleaned water to improve the visibility but it wasn't the greatest experiment in the history of diving was it archaeology is all about interpretation I think it worked brilliantly actually we now have a working system and I now know that that device will work really well in another situation so it was a great experiment it's just that we can't use it here well in three days it's just too much of a rush to get it deployed so are we going to be able to dive the wreck today in in circumstances if you can see it if you come in when the waters moving just gently enough to take away the sediment then you'll see what I see and I'm really in lancers Lick now we've been making great progress show me what you have seen okay well we opened up a trench across the stern of the vessel and we've got a series of frame Timbers coming up almost vertically with the outer planking still attached but what's rather nice about it is that we can actually see part of the construction once these are the scarfed ends the tapering ends of the planks and this is one of the things that we've been wanting to find out actually how long these planks are so we can now follow there isn't find the joints at the other end what's this well this is to give you an impression of the three-dimensional setup of the structure that we've got here are the frames coming up massive things and this is the planking still in position stepping down sort of clinker fashion down into the seabed are we going to be able to get on any faster than we did yesterday faster you can't make me work any faster than I did yesterday we've been something at the bit and all the time he's so easy so relaxed I hope it all right let's have this conversation suggest yes yes yeah that's fine Phil and I haven't seen any of this underwater yet jeonse trench is two metres from where the ship's rudder would have been he's seeing both sides of the ship's hull with the triple thickness planking tapering down to the stern post the frame Timbers here look as if they're 40 by 50 centimetres thick which are far bigger than he'd expected and John thinks there could be anything from a metre and a half to two meters of the hull still under the mud just in Dix has been processing his sonar geophysics results at the Southampton oceanography centre and it's really exciting fool even in this very shallow water we've got a really good image this along here is the actual seabed and we can actually sort of her at that on there and then what we've got is a really strong anomaly really lots of yellow and red colors here very very strong reflections that is a cross-section through the ground that's actually cutting a slice through the actual dress dirt and in fact the reflections are so strong we get nothing no stay on being reflected back beneath whereas on either side where it's just a little sort of muddy sediments we get sort of horizontal layers with some basic layering within it we're fairly confident that's the actual hull so from a series of these cross-sections you can put it together and actually build up the shape of the whole well that's what we've been trying to do over the weekend if we go into this screen here what we've done is we've actively picked the seabed surface so we can actually sort of have a sense of what the seabed is like and if we go underneath here and we still not to add the actual horizons we can start to pick out the actual whole section and if we then rotate round you start to see a sense of that whole form this right here is the actual width of the hole and you see it's tapering back towards the stern that's right but how much the ship you got there we've got about two thirds of the vessel here at this time I mean normally we would survey for a number of days and process for several weeks so over a weekend we're pretty pleased with this you're pretty chuffed admit it I'm over the moon right so here it is a huge section of the Royal flagship still under the mud if Justin can do some more work we should be able to calculate the size and shape of the ship Damien was expecting to build a larger section of the triple clinker hull but he proved that it's a slow messy business sandwich in the tar and moss that they used to waterproof this ship now he's got to fit it all together okay you want to tap those in how many of those nails directin would have gone into this boat now this side we can't save that because we don't know how deep she was without talking about thousands so I mean it's a huge amount of vibe things are not fitting down very well are they wondering whether we need to cut a bit in recess for that you gonna whip them out again straight so well this is learning I mean this is learning by doing and we're learning the hard way Dameon is not amused it's all got to come apart again you know two steps forward one step back at the moment that we're learning after yesterday's piece super Phil's hoping he'll see something today okay happy okay Ok Go Go Go cheering the water to that report well this is much more like it the visibility is so much better here are the massive frames John so excited about on the side of the ship which is dropping away to the right there's a huge tree nail which looks as fresh as the day it was driven in and a scarf joint one of the main tasks today is to establish the length of the board's that form the clinker how Colin McEwan who's diving with Phil at the moment is measuring one of the hull planks could you just give me a measurement from the start at the end that's free and it's no John the plank is two point four three meters this is a new discovery everyone thought the ship had been built using boards no longer than two meters Stewart has been searching for medieval burrs olden yesterday he found the outline of a dried-up creek below the church which he sure is the center of the ancient village today he's identified a building on the 19th century tide map near the water's edge is this this building just here number three now if there's a storehouse there in 1839 and it's at the end of this feature here which is the foreshore that would imply it's up on dry ground ie definitely on on good land there so it might be the sort of area that has a continuity of tradition that mean use for storage and so on that might be a good place to examine Frances has got to test pits on the go in this back garden he's looking for the storehouse the other he's put in just along the street to see if there's any evidence of the medieval shipbuilding on Stuart's projected shoreline in 1422 henry v died just two years after the grass cures maiden voyage she cost a massive four thousand pounds to build you could have probably put up a fine Cathedral for that at the time and Robert Byrd the clerk of works of the ship who lent the King some of the money to build her didn't do very well out of it so did he actually managed to get his money back and make a profit on building the grass tear very unlikely I mean here you've got the total amount received and then died here you've got the total expended and in fact it says rather sort of looked laconically he should have more sixty five pounds twelve shillings and eight pence hate me so he made a loss he made of us on this case not a very big one but still a loss and his chances of getting this back were pretty slim even though it's written down extremely very so down yes yes Tony comms check one two three four five well I can roll upon Roger that loud and clear you happy Divac you ready for the water budget out in the diver in the water please I don't think I've ever been on a time team where it's taken me two and a half days before I get to see the archaeology reports well but now the moment has come as I get closer I'm trying to imagine all those medieval ship rides putting her together why those mutinous sailors abandoned her maybe she wasn't struck by lightning perhaps they set fire to her on purpose to get all that precious iron filled of Tony can you hear me I press that name Phil - Tony can you hear me it really can cockpit you know scaffold down people appearing I know I just seems so bizarre maybe we we too have actually seen it ridiculous Phil's absolutely right you can't possibly tell how big she is until you get down here now I can see for myself the massive frame Timbers with the side of the ship disappearing away the ballast I assume as there's no other reason for Flint's to be in here and until you see how close together these enormous Timbers are that step down towards the stern you can't appreciate the scale of this ship archaeologically John's made great progress this weekend and he's made yet another discovery the surprise this morning was when we followed the frames back north to the other side of the ship and it appears to me is there we have a series of truly massive crook'd grown floor timbers some big y shaped Timbers standing on the keel that sounds extremely plausible to me it's like scum they never think that why shake really interesting information yeah I hardly dare say this but this does look to me very similar to those ground floor Timbers at the bow the Mary Rose over yeah I'm not the prime that would be I think the moaning lightly open you know when a within the sort of medieval mindset the crook'd Timbers at the stern of the grass here which John has just discovered were cut from trees specially picked by the shipwrights the shape of the timber gave the ship's frame far greater strength in one piece than if separate Timbers were joined together at the keel this is the first time John's ever seen anything as enormous as this Damien's run out of time his experiment isn't finished but the process has revealed some surprising insights into medieval shipbuilding on this scale we've learned things like that these absolutely massive nails which are basically four times the size of your average medieval now just can't be worked the same way that the smaller nails can be I think they may well have actually got blacksmiths to cut them individually off the ship before they use them because cutting them off the ship's lot quicker and then chase these in and then they might they might research them in where they had to if if the nails were square they wouldn't need to do that given the historical evidence we've got Damien for the sheer quantity of materials involved in building this ship and how big it was how tough do you think it would have been working on it everything about this ship the size of it the laminations the nails the the weight of everything that loads of tar and moss everywhere it's complicated it's difficult I don't think it would have been a popular ship to work on myself so perhaps they'd have started I think they could just scale up and it became more difficult than minute they started trying to do it I think all the shipwrights were schooled in it in a simpler tradition which ultimately goes right back to the iron age and they were struggling in new circumstances having to build enormous ly bigger ships cannons were coming in oceanic voyages and so on and really the technology wasn't up to that I you know my my view is that it's really a bit of a technological dead end the grass juror heralded the end of the great clinker ships by the time Henry the eighth launched the mary-rose nearly a hundred years later the old clinker technology had given way to a radically different karvall design using parallel boards fixed edge to edge onto a rigid frame this morning Francis and Stewart started to look for the medieval shoreline in burrs olden one of their targets was the remains of a storehouse near the old dried-up Creek Francis I reckon this must be the most impressive rhubarb plant in England I hope your archaeologist is exciting well actually it is Tony um this is the storehouse we've gone down and we've hit lots of rocks and I think these are footings for walls or something like that we don't know what don't they are but next door right dug a little hole and came up with this well that makes me very excited it's a bit of pottery dated about 1450 so that is right on the money for the grass here and then we've also found in that trench a large headed nail that could be something to do with ships but we don't know for sure yet what does it tell us well what it tells us is what Basel denieth in the late 15th century bursal done seems to be and I think we're writing our original assumptions between there and just beyond that the main road which exists today so that's the bezel dome of the 16th century with the creek out in front of it so if Stuart's right this dried-up creek just by the church could have been at the heart of medieval burrs Elden and the center of a royal shipbuilding business which would grow and diversify for centuries to come or at least until the railways came along carrenza has discovered that the practicalities of building the grass here were astounding it's a remarkable testament to the courage and ambition of those medieval shipwrights well what's really struck me is that sheer quantities of everything that was required to hold it I mean there's thousands of gallons of tar and pitch are needed to waterproof it 38 tons of rope for the sails never mind anything else with the sails there's 23 tons of iron required to make 52 thousand pounds of nails such as the nails on the ship and that's without the acres of timber that you need to hold together unbelievable on a 2735 oak trees 1145 beech trees now at a ton and a half per tree you know that's over six and a half thousand tons of work just moving that around must have been flama that doesn't include all the timber that came from abroad who are absolutely right I mean some of it came from the Baltic you've got in Wainscott boards and you've got regards which had timber from Riga and you've got passion deal which gains all from the Baltic coming into the East Coast ports here and then there's the fitting out that the anchors it's got 24 anchors and the largest one is 17 feet that anchor was had a name it was called tink tore and it survives in royal accounts right up to the time of Henry the seventh over the three days we've discovered a lot more about the grassed year from the sonar geophysics we think that she measured about a hundred and twenty feet long at the keel and when you take into account the overhanging bow and stern she was probably longer than 200 feet and there's no doubt that she was very broad over 50 feet at the widest point John's discovered a lot of new technical information from the length of the hull planking to the sizes and arrangement of the stern Timbers as a ship we can't say if she was a success or a failure because through no fault of her own the grassed year was a battleship without a war there's no doubt that if she'd gone out in anger she could have overpowered her enemies but would she have lasted the ravages of the wind and the sea that we shall never know this was always going to be a difficult shoot what would the untried technology and very fast flowing river and the bad visibility when the retired when I thought we weren't going to get anywhere but actually we know far more about the grassed year when we did three days ago and that's where we came here the rest of the time team of gone home but I've got to have just one little book that surface grab two left's a face subscribe to the time team magazine trench 1 for just 18 pound 50 a year and you'll receive a free trench 1 hat worth eight pounds called Oh 8 7 o 420 240 during office hours next up Homer on hunger strike I'll give it a minute Simpsons you

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Keywords: time, team, full, episodes, season

Id: 0QLUOhdH0XM

Length: 48min 48sec (2928 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2013