Time Team S12-E13 Hanslope,.Milton Keynes

800 years ago England was a far from green and pleasant land Civil War was raging between King John and a bunch of rebellious Nobles and among those Nobles were the more druids who owned most of the land around here a photograph of this field showed these rather unusual crop marks archaeologists thought they were probably prehistoric pretty standard stuff but some amateur archaeologists decided to have a look and blow me they found this 12th century building along with some lovely finds like this weird corbels and that's strange it was obviously a very important building but it was abandoned very suddenly time team have been called in to help what was this place and what was all around it was it part of the Mordred estate and if so did King John destroy it in an act of revenge we've got just three days to find out our sights on what used to be the border between Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire near Milton Kings excavations by students at an archaeological field school revealed the building within the smaller crop mark circle patent Jonathon who run the school are pretty confident about what they've uncovered so after all your hard work what have you got it well we have a 12th century building some 11 metres long by 5 metres wide three cool bays inside we have the suggestion of a staircase this is here yes why is it going there and it's going straight up to the side of the building I see what do you think it might be well the presence of the staircase indicates it could be a first floor Hall other possibilities are a hunting lodge will possibly part of a monastic Grange it's intriguing isn't it Mick yeah does that mean we're gonna focus our activities on the already existing dig well there's a number of things we can do but we need to look beyond the existing dig in the immediate vicinity in the field there may be other structures associated with this as well as the site the other circle down there what do you mean another circle on that err picture there's this site and then there's another one just just outside this area and then we need to put the whole lot into the local context we get Stuart to look at the landscape of the area around and we've got our Jonathan here to try and decode what the building might be I'll stick my oar in here I own a meaty site this one I want to get my teeth into it if it is a late 12th century building this is the time when the elements fuse together to make the typical English medieval house and indeed if this is a first floor chamber at the end of a hall then we should we should be standing in the in the top bar of a capital T shaped plan with a hall going off that way if it's right it'll be a big discovery but I must say from what I see it looks a bit more like cowshed than the two-story blocks so I really want to get in there and have a look because it's a few years since this trench was dug we've got to reiax k'v 8 the building check the measurements and see if we agree with patent Jonathan's conclusions that's going to take us quite a while if it was originally a two-story building it would probably have been a manor house with a high-status tee block where the Lord lived and ran a large estate the best alternative is that it could have been a hunting lodge while we get to grips with the building in the small enclosure geophys are looking for the larger enclosure further down the field the crop marks aren't visible now so they've got to cover a big area to speed things up they're using their quickest technique magnetometry looking for telltale magnetic variations which can indicate burnt material in a ditch or around 1/2 for example the previous excavation produced an absolute mound of pottery Paul bling corns already identified where it was made and dated it it seems that the building was occupied for a surprisingly short time the stuff like this which is from lived in which is up in the the north or Northamptonshire is one of the earliest glazed industries around it gets going around about 1,200 12 10 something like that and then as this which has been coming up from Oxford awesome around Oxford now this could be as early as 1080 they've found this stuff in the construction of Oxford castle all right giving a very precise yes and what about this bit oh that's quite nice yeah it's part of a fire cover or a curfew and see expression after curfew it's when you put the the covers on the fire um imagine a big bowl but upside down with holes in what would be the base if it was a bowl yeah yeah you basically put this on the fire at night it allows the fire to smolder all night so you'd have to realize it in the morning saving absolutely so the sites starting sometime around 1100 we know it's still going some time around 1200 what about the end well round here there's a major medieval pottery industry at Potter's Bri which is just three miles down the road this industry starts about 1250 now if you excavate a site dating to the late 13th or 14th century Randy you find masses of Potter's we were and I do mean masses he completely dominates the pottery assemblages there isn't one single scrap from anywhere on this side gosh it was completely abandoned it must have been about 12 it they must have gone by 1250 and this site just stopped dead a diggers may find evidence for why the building was abandoned it might have been because of what was happening on the larger stage these were turbulent times in England in the 12th century we had there were some really powerful Kings we were like Henry the first Henry the second Richard the lion-hearted with that power came the ability to to tax and to impose fines on people so that really imprinted on people's lives but we vault we also had some really quite weak Kings you know people like Stephen and John at the end of the period and you know they weren't able to keep their barons in check as successfully and both of them faced quite major revolts during their reigns the moderate family who owned this area were Norman Nobles who'd been granted in effect lent land by William the Conqueror their estates included the nearby village of hand slope like many of the nobility by about 1200 they got fed up with the demands of the king they now felt they owned this land they were if you like becoming at least part English and should have rights over it but we've got a long way to go before we know if any more de Witts might have lived or stayed in this building here Jetts we've got a two-story building that's what we're talking about anyway isn't it clearly we've got a 1-gig wall running down there going underneath Bridget now where are the others well the return runs here right angles from that wall under your feet under my feet I'm down here yes five meters down away from the wall runs parallel down that way under this Bank yes under this this is okay so now is the character of this wall the same as that opposite one there no it's not this wall is far more crumbly than this one but there are traces of water in it well that's interesting because if this is a big chamber block I'd expect it to be built at the same time and for them to be linked so I want to see the end wall what we have of them and to uncover this I really want to see this wall the walls been reburied since the excavation so we just have to dig it up again jiffy's have been looking for the larger crop mark circle hell you got on there John we've done the strip of geophysics there there's nothing isn't it we can't find it what's the explanation for that then it could be that you've got the building there that's where the activity is maybe they were just keeping animals over there if they're linked so what do you do just do more we need to do more okay well do another strip and we'll have another look shearing up as clearly as this on aerial photos geophys should be able to find it but at least we can now see the back wall of the building well this is a wall isn't it let's get we get it sensible huh and that's better look let's have a look at the width because that one is skinny for me it's skinning is badly built and I wouldn't want to live in the first floor the house a bit bit like that so what you show your internal measurement push move about 375 a pre-shampoo come on John we'll get that taping come of it square 375 we're talking are we free shampoo varnish there well if that goes from there to there although we won't be in business we might be investor Cindy this wall may just be the right size for a two-story building but just as the archaeology is looking more promising Stewart's piling on the pressure with a whole new set of questions do we have any evidence that there was a Manor here on the ground I don't think we do at the moment what it looks like if we've got a building set within an earlier enclosure of another period I'd what we've got is a whole load of ugly loads of amia this is the enclosure there these look very typically prehistoric in date to me in the pattern of fields and bound with it I'm not seeing anything which gives me any suggestions the manorial site I mean should be a church or a chapel there should be or the building should be road layout there's a building on its own at the moment that's very much what it looks like we've also got an overlapping problem but got royal hunting forests in this area so could what we have be a hunting lodge it's possible it could be something like a bailiffs lodge something like that an estate manager at the moment it could almost be anything but it doesn't look like it's a manorial site to me and as the excavation uncovers more of the walls it now seems less and less like a manor house to fill in Jonathan as well we should find the width of the wall for a first floor late 11th 12th century building should be about four feet at least three to four feet anyway and out deep would your foundations want to be for that Wolfie so four foot wide and four foot deep yeah which looks like we were fairly near the bottom here yeah so your foundations got to come up to here yep that seems highly unlikely that that amount of muck has been has been shaved off there to me it does yeah it does so and we ain't got a waters 4 foot word nem 4 foot D what's that tell us about our building well it looks more like it's gonna be a ground-floor one but Pat you got a staircase it was only ever the possibility that it was a staircase I'm willing to sort of forego with that idea please looks like it might be actually a lower status dwelling we've got to try and fit in we're actually the high status stone you won't come down that's true it's all to play for isn't it it still is maybe the crucial evidence about this building won't lie in the ground at all but in the documentary records it's an area rich in castles and manor houses and the suggestive bumps of deserted medieval villages it should be possible to answer at least some basic questions in the records ok it seems to me the first main problem is what is the name of this site we don't know that do it cause I haven't got anything yet but I think there are some leads that I can pursue in the medieval period is quite typical for a person to name themselves after where they live it could be west of somewhere east of somewhere that will be a static IP that would be very useful in the 12th century this was Buckinghamshire so Dahl needs to go to the county town of Aylesbury to find the records Stewart's going to because it's becoming vital to know whether our site was in a royal forest where special laws applied we've also got something more to get on with because GF is have now found the elusive big enclosure look that's where we did the initial strip and it just was so weak we couldn't see it but there's the circuit well that's float clearly and we've got problems with that pile on the electricity right but if you want to put a trench across the ditch we can mark one for you easily I think we need to put something across to see what date that is you'll only get that by going to the bottom of the ditch yeah I mean there's one or two sort of features inside yeah I mean maybe pits maybe areas of burning give us one of the pits or features inside as well would do that as well with these two trenches we should be able to date the ditches and see if there's any other sign of medieval life inside this larger enclosure in Aylesbury Stewart and Dawn are getting stuck into the records documents from the 12th century are tough maps are non-existent and place names hard to come by so even working out if this is a Royal Forest is far from straightforward but later parish maps can hold clues and any information could be vital the only remaining evidence that the building might be high status is the carved stone such as that weird head and some metal finds the small pieces of metal work are really quite a curious little group actually because we've got the usual things horseshoe nails and so on a pair of tweezers which is quite hard to date but it seems to have some medieval decoration on it I've got a coin probably John something like that this knife handle is quite interesting it's got lovely decoration it's complete although it's broken might be bone might be ant there might be ivory what about these rooms well this bit is the most spectacular thing this is the the curb bit it's a horse bit for a small horse that that can control it very well and what about this that's a bit of a problem if you have your ideas good really a bit desperate I'm sure our viewers will have plenty of ideas it's quite flimsy made of iron and we just don't wash it is not a nice building material isn't there good mixed bunch here this one is a beautifully cut large block of local limestone Norman buildings tend to have smaller blocks so this is surprisingly large it could that be 12th century could be although it's bigger than I'd have expected this here that's a beauty that one you see these staring at you in parish churches across the country could be long to an arch might be from a choral table where the wall meets a roof probably 12 centuries got a skullcap preceeds and lusher hairstyles the decadent 13th century so nice piece that one so what kind of building are we talking about well no two stones are the same it must be said so they could come from a range of buildings so there could be a whole host of buildings in our field come here two thirds of the way through day one and we seem to have this extraordinary mismatch on one hand we've got all those beautiful finds that seem to imply a whole host of bill buildings but in the ground we can hardly find any archaeology at all I don't know what's going on well quite frankly I don't think the archaeologists do either but at least Matt's now found the ditch around the big enclosure so far he's only got more 12th century pot but he's nowhere near the bottom yet to settle any lingering suspicion that our building might have been a two-story block Jonathan wanted to see the fourth wall to check its size and construction it's been revealed and the judgment is damning it's no only a big enough it's nowhere near well-built enough it's only 11 foot six wide 26 feet long that's not even on the large side of a medieval cottage and furthermore these walls are not substantial enough to hold a second story probably a thatch roof it's its cottage so suddenly we're downsizing yeah I mean it looks more like a sort of peasant longhouse to me Oh sort of thing that I believe might eat might still be on wealthy peasant but it's not the home of a brave rebel fighting against King John no but what's a medieval peasant living out here like this on his own or cuz you only got one building at the moment so what are we gonna do tomorrow well we've got an awful lot of cleaning here if you're serious I wish there's a lot of cleaning to do yeah well undo some work out there too I think we need to do some geophysics around here yeah so shock horror we came here because we thought we got a two-story manor house and after just a few hours excavation we find it a peasant hovel but that's not the end of the story because there's all those metal finds where did they come from and all that masonry in that head what's that all about hopefully we'll find the answer to that tomorrow beginning of day two and this is already rather embarrassing because this time yesterday I was right on this spot talking to camera telling everybody how in the 12th century there were aristocratic rebels who are fighting King John and they were based here in some kind of two-story manor house 24 hours later it appears there's no manor house here there's nothing except a peasant's hovel and last night in the hotel half of our diggers were so depressed they were saying let's just pack up and go home until Mick waded in and said no this is archaeology we've got to get back to basics which is a conservative phrase I never thought I'd hear you use but what exactly do you mean well I think there's still a lot to do here you talk about this being a peasants hovel it's really it looks like a medley of a long house that belong to you know of your line of a peasant farmer things that don't occur on their own you know be very odd to have one stuck out in the countryside they usually come this part of the world is part of a settlement and what about all these strange enclosure surrounding it when you see them plotted out across the landscape a Stewart's done it looks like an Iron Age landscape underneath this this medieval one it would be very unusual to get circle or oval enclosures in in in the medieval period they're nearly all rectangular square and so on and of course what we need to sort out there is to date those anything else we still don't know the context of this if this is 12 13th century it'll appear in the document somewhere it might be something to do with the Royal Forest that was at Sawle see it might be something to do with it with a main manor on the main village but we'll only get that by looking at the documents and of course we've got all the metal finds we've got great chunks of masonry and there's over 2,000 pieces of pottery there may not be a story here about nobles in the 12th century but there is a story and a big bit of that story is whether the large enclosure further down the field was part of the same settlement we've now got two trenches open one looking to date the circular ditch and the other investigating features inside the enclosure poor old Victor's been struggling to keep up without building as it yo-yos up and down the medieval food chain Victor this must be one of those nightmare digs for you where we keep changing our minds about what we've got I must have run out of rubbers by now it certainly is I got plenty of those they will need more to Tony because this is what we thought we were looking for that big two-story stone chamber block with a large timber Hall attached but take two Victor something like that this is much much smaller yeah it is tiny it's not even very big for a medieval cottage what have we got of it well a bit of stone footing that could have taken a clay bonded stone wall or maybe timber certainly supported a thatched roof what would expect no sign of tiles anywhere mind you it is only day 2 who knows what we'll have this time tomorrow that chair definitely yesterday patent Jonathan the archaeologists who dug this building a few years ago stayed pretty quiet as we reduce their fine from a manner to a cottage but they don't think we've answered all the questions how diggers have been saying that you two aren't happy that actually we're saying no there's nothing here and that's kind of rubbish to your work and then may well be more here than we're currently saying do you feel we've misrepresented your work no not at all we're quite happy that this building is not as substantial as we originally thought but I think we still need to see it in the overall context or appear to be high status stone work and and pottery all which suggests at some point are in this specific Lee there was people living a high-status life that is that is what I was going to come to I mean so far we have only been looking at the building but like you say we really do have to bring the finds into the equation what I would like to know is is is can you supply me with a lot of plot of where all these really significant finds are coming from certainly we've got plans but we'd need to look through them because the the most of this excavation took five years about five years ago so so I haven't got that information in my head doctor no okay so you didn't know I do throw it at you and Jonathan are going to plot where all the major finds the stone pottery and metal turned up to see if they indicate hotspots should investigate but Jonathan Foyle has a theory about why the masonry is turning up on our site he thinks it was a medieval recycling job salvaged from a posh house or a church after renovation he's discovered that in this 19th century Church there are bits of a 12th century chapel that used to be about a mile from our site there's an arcade here that is was taken down from a chapel in a field between here and our site and impact actually look look we've got heads um so this one looks you know not dissimilar oh yeah yeah off offer up your head mmm there we go okay that's very good doesn't much it's not bad is is a similar kind of Sun it's bit more the eye details are there as well maybe it's a bit cruder but you know and again the same sort of hairstyle going on so could this head have come from this actual building the stains a bit rougher I don't know really what it shows is the Masons who are working in this manner were producing work like this and the stuff that's on our site doesn't have to have come from far away if the masonry had been brought onto our site from other buildings at least it would explain why no two stones seem to match and Stewart and Dawn did have some success looking through the documentary records in Aylesbury we especially wanted to know if our site was in a royal forest and if we could name it to show you what we've got this Aryan pink is is the manner of hand sloping here with our site right at the top the top corner now what we've been able to establish is that the site itself actually is within the Royal Forest area of Seoul see this is all part of the forest and therefore our site we subject to forest jurisdiction as you were now the evidence for that is that we've got names like hand slope green which we've been able to identify mentioned as being within the forest Seoul see green has been within the forest that's right and I undertook some research into the sub tenancies of hands Lok Manor I came across a family name of Bo Zenon now they seem to have take ah they seem to have taken their name from this northern part of the parish just across the parish boundary is proposing a memo we gratefully cross in it that's right that yes that's right but I think that that name applies for a bigger area bozo no literally means bozer spur of land now the mill is not on a spur of land our site he's on a spur of lamp so I think we've got a real clue there so so I'm typing the name of the site that we do do that I think it might well be ah oh that's brilliant did it have a name to attach that so we know that our site Bozeman was in the forest in the 12th century and we also know from the Domesday book that this was quite a wealthy area with amongst other things a predominance of pigs hands low boasts a thousand pigs compared to the handful his neighbors had but keeping pigs in and around the Royal Forest had its risks this was part of a huge patchwork of hunting grounds created by William the Conqueror which spread across the country not even the baron's could hunt or farm there without royal permission and peasants would get in serious trouble royal force isn't this sea full of trees after Lex more and dark more all for some no trees in them at all so what do they mean by Forester the term meant a particular type of law applied to that area and the law was designed to protect the cover for animals for took particularly for deer so they could be hunted what are the punishments to people get well I mean cutting trees down poaching animals you will find but some of it was quite draconian I mean they would remove the toes of dogs for example so they will immobilize from chasing deer how do people feel about these laws well I don't think they liked them terribly much because it was such a restriction on what they were doing and they were constantly breaking into the forest clearing areas of it turning it over to agriculture and of course poaching and this went right to the top you hear about bishops and Abbot's and so on accused of poaching and of clearing land so do you think the people who owned our Manor might have been breaking the law oh yes and indeed our Manor might have started by somebody clearing a piece of the forest and setting up a farm in the middle of it so would they have been punished oh yes I mean they they would have paid a fine for doing that but they might have paid it's often you almost becomes a license to do that with all these laws it's highly unlikely that a peasant farmer would simply have set up home here by himself it would have been too risky but perhaps our cottage wasn't alone in the middle of nowhere about 500 metres away is the farm where we have our incident room now Stuart believes he's found evidence of a medieval moat there if you look at this map of 1828 now that is very typically the corner of something like a medieval motored homestead I mean possibly the residence of like the minor gentry it's not quite the lord of the manor status but it's kind of levels below that and aspiring to to show off a little bit well how many sites like this are there in the manorial area I think this for others recorded in this manner well that puts our little place down the hill in context doesn't exist as one Manor for sites like this each one of which may have I don't know five or ten cottages for villains to their land the plausible scenario isn't it so the building may have been a villains or small farmers cottage part of a minor Norman Nobles household but where are the other villains houses in their conquest of England the Normans had one hugely successful weapon the knight on horseback highly armed highly mobile and terrifying to English foot soldiers some of the horse kits used by Norman knights seems to have been rather unusual such as the curb it found on our site it looks intriguing we want to know how it worked tomorrow we're going to try and find out on a real horse but first we need to make a usable copy Hector Cole's using the same techniques as a 12th century blacksmith poor bling calls helping patent Jonathan to map where their fines came from 510 stroke 505 450 grams they know which bit of the site produced each bag of pot 70 grams by weighing the bags they can plot how much was found where this is a last lot for dope smashing myself a hell of a lot of pottery isn't it 2500 pieces you've already processed another 2000 or so from the first dig and all the stuff that we've come up with in the last couple of days we must be looking at a very big 12th century Sun not really no we do get an awful lot of pottery in medieval sites in this part of the world pottery was plentiful and probably cheap as well so how big directing the settlement was it's really difficult to say um I looked at the pottery from a village up in the North County called West cotton we had 107 thousand shares of pottery from that how many houses where there was five tenements basically why are we using so much they just got through it if you look at anthropological studies of pottery use the average humble cooking pot probably only lasted a week let's say the off site was occupied for 100 years minimum they break one pot a week that's 50 pots a year that's 5000 pots in the lifetime of the settlement each pot breaks into let's say 100 pieces there's 500,000 pieces come on put your neck on the line how many houses do you think we're looking at I honestly don't know I couldn't easily believe it's only one I'm really good bit of a turn-up Mick's expecting more houses he could still be proved right though because where Matt's digging inside the big enclosure at the bottom of the field geophysics results suggested burning it looks like we've got a half or or small avenue or kiln there right right at the edge of the trench and possibly another collapsed one here but of course we've only got this one 2 meter wide slot going across here there's different have you got your coffee from it more of the same pottery come out here it's all medieval similar to the stuff coming out of the ditch Matt when you said because we've only got this 2 metres breath did that imply that you wanted right okay I want a bigger dream I think we should just just a couple of meters maybe on each side and then we can get the ovens and all half of that in plan is that all right if he extends it I think we're probably gonna have to yet in order to understand what we've got here we don't even know at the moment when this has got buildings in it looks likely by the pottery and the structure our replica of the curb it's now ready I think that would be called the finish article you like to compare it with the yeah less fat sugar one up and then these little novel bits coming up here so the equivalent psychic-ish yeah okay what would our boy kitchen making she looks even more gruesome than it did when it's rusted put that one back in there I'll get that one to you and then all we gonna do is present it to Alan's horse tomorrow and hope it likes it so you know he thinks patent Jonathan's fines including the horse bit and the posh knife handle have now been mapped okay let's start with the the bit where did that come from the bit was inside the building just over here so we can be pretty certain that whoever had that bit actually lived in this building now we're about the head well the head appears have been just outside the building I think about here it could have been in a little niche set into the gable end and literally toppled out whoever was living in this building undoubtedly had the head how about the knife handle knife handle is further away still it came ha so we're kind of losing that connection between the building and the owner of the the knife handle right back there in this section here yes and Paul's worked out that there are two concentrations of pottery usually big deposits of broken part are found in so-called middens or rubbish pits to middens could mean two houses what we've got is this massive spread of pottery and domestic refuse right up against the wall of the building just we'd expect to find a domestic midden now now suppose I mean one of the things we were deliberating about you today about was where there might have been a doorway I'd say firmus the must have been a doorway in this wall nearly always the mittens near a door who watch this well this is another concentration of pottery there's about 10 kilos in this one obviously it's not the size of this mitten but still a decent concentration I'd say that's another midden now the only other thing that strikes me is where's the ditch coming in well the ditch seems to coming around there so we're looking at a dump in the end of the ditch where we are so no evidence here for a second house and amazingly Jonathan foils now decided to question whether we've got a house here at all look I know you think this is a pig of a site but Jonathan has come up with a fabulous theory that my easel grumpiness of it okay day one I said it's a meaty site game now the theory is this no one actually lived here it's a pig processing plant right come on just if it's okay given the rubble that you've got in front of you it's it's very small for a house okay you could still be you know peasants small hovel or something but I'm suggesting pigs are brought in possibly water heat it's called the pigs you know and II hear them and then maybe this is some kind of a smokehouse as weird metal clamps we found might just be for pigs legs now when he told me this I thought it was brilliant you're the professional has it bother you well the thing that helps I think is a doomsday book for this particular manner they call a thousand pigs on the manor you know using the woods for grazing and so around that's a hell of a lot of pigs them around and what's this doing it which is the only half we've found in the entire place is not in the middle as you might expect but it's slightly outside the building do you buy the idea of it leaking its smoke this way into that well you feel where the wind's coming from now over there without any behind it so providing yes from the southwest you put this at the southeast corner is gonna blow the smoke into the building is this yeah so it's in the right place it's all pretty plausible isn't it yeah what an interesting journey in two days we've moved from a manor house to a low house to pork scratchings factory where are we going to end up tomorrow huh beginning of day three here near Northampton and we've done just about everything we can up this end of the field we've sorted out the house there's modern field drains running through the medieval ditches and when we examine the finds they didn't give us any new leads so now we're moving everyone lock stock and barrel right down the far end of the field where things looking much more promising it would be odd for a medieval peasant building to be on its own so the search is on for a wider settlement we've got two trenches one to date the circular ditch and a big one investigating features inside the enclosure Mick eight diggers in one trench is pretty impressive yeah I think we're getting somewhere as well where are we getting hurt well here we've got lots of blobs on the the geophysics and so we've open this area this is where Matt was working a narrow trench over there yesterday but now we're getting all sorts of burnt areas bits of pottery twelfth-century stuff like that it's sort of looking like occupational thing so much interesting stuff coming up but we yeah can't interpret it yet what's this thing here bridge we can see it Tony that's a very circular looking structure got this great pitch stones all the way around the outside of it all the stones really heat affected it's surrounded by a lot of burning discreet mirrors of charcoal so it's definitely looking something like a 1/2 that makes sense yeah and unique in the way you'd expect that to be in a building and I think by cleaning it back we might well see where the walls although you know the perhaps beam slots to support Dingles or something like that this is what you expect to be medieval houses with the pottery as well well comrades I don't to get on your case but we have about eight hours left no problem Tony so early promise down here that it's probably going to take bridge in her comrades most of those eight hours to get the full story our replica curb it's ready to be tested the original was unusually small only four inches wide we've got a lineup of pint-sized war horses courtesy of Grafton Pony Club oh this is the size arm that fits at least one or two of these ponies which are the same size as Norman cavalry horses I find that hard to believe at the moment what's your pony's name Bobby Bobby what size bit does Bobby he'll need five inches fat look if there's a four inch bear and that's a five inch bit horse then that must be it for a kids or summat like that you're Norman knights Road ponies that were about twelve hands and ho for you laughing no you've got to be not they're big warriors they've enormous horses have a look at this look where the men's feet are look how close they are to the ground but can't that be artistic license no because we have excavations of bones from horses that scaled up would have been for a 1213 and maximum pony mm-hmm sorry Bobby's too big sorry Wow what's this one called Callie Callie yeah hmm no don't think it's gonna fit no I think a likely looking candidate is here hello what's your horse's name okay hello Murphy at first sight Phil thought our bit looked like an instrument of torture but the Normans seem to have known what they were doing Murphy accepts it without fuss he doesn't seem to be objecting too much I'm amazed we've prepared your warhorse so Phillip is all right there all right for me to get on your horse is it do you need a hand up there to you Tony this must seem like a mighty charger to unity very nice 1 2 3 couch oh hey we're buff here yeah I'm up here okay stomach crunch well if if Tony was a was a sex and in the shield wall yeah yeah he's still an intimidating side isn't he bearing down on me you sure yeah phil has never ever been on a horse before he's so chuffed it may take us a while to get him back to the site ah magic we started out with just one building but it's now becoming clear that Bozeman was a busy place pot and bone from the circular ditch show that people were also living down here in the 12th century and exactly the same time as the building was occupied I can see that there are all of the main domestic utsire who are cattle draw sheep jaws pig Wilson there's even a bit of horse here so does that mean they're eating horse then well no they wouldn't have been in this case horses are a big there's lots of meat on them so rather than just wasting it it's much more sensible to butcher it up and feed that meat to the dogs so this is the original knackers yard sort of thing yeah that's right it's all butchery waste it is the sort of smelly nasty bits that you're not going to eat you don't want them up by your house you're gonna shove them off as far as you can and sticking them in an enclosure ditch is the perfect place what about the pottery then Paul the dating is very tight on this it all looks to me like it's 12th century does these with the roller stamping on yeah that's very nice huh yeah I mean that is very typical of the 12th century Shelley was oh right there's no glazed words at all the early glaze was weak in the early 13th century they're just not here an assemblage of this size I'd be expecting to see the odd sure door - so nothing beyond 1200 I don't think so no we still don't know why this site came to such a sudden end it may be that the area stopped being a royal forest which had been one of the causes of the quarrel between the nobles and the King and our peasant farmers would have been caught up in these turbulent struggles so why did people around here revolt against King John but I think it was largely because of the IMP of various fines for individuals who transgressed forest law and that looks very relevant in this area do you think the people around here would have known the local rebels absolutely because the lord of the manor of hands late which is you know the manner in which our sites are located was one robert de moored wit and he was one of the barons who rebelled against john and you know because of that john sent one of his henchmen out here to have burn his castle to the ground so the people in our sight it couldn't fail to have known about that so far our site appears to be entirely medieval Mick had suspected that the crop marks were originally prehistoric fields now found the bottom of the big enclosure ditch and can settle this have you got the bottom yet Phil unusually the crucial dating evidence is not at the bottom where you'd expect it to be my feelings are that it probably was cut as a medieval ditch and is medieval now we had a piece of pot about there right which i think is gonna date all of that right there's no break in a sequence if this material down here is Iron Age here then you would expect somewhere about here to get a break a tourist line or summat like this and then the medieval goes in on the top but you haven't got that there is no break in there so I think it's one continuous story writing the way through so it looks if we're gonna have to accept the whole thing's medieval in there's no priest out there at all the crop marks have surprised everyone by turning out to be medieval after all but then no one knows much about medieval pig farms it's in the right location in forests where pigs would feed perhaps the large enclosure was a pig pen with a deep pig proof ditch around it the real purpose of the forest wasn't to feed pigs but as a playground for the Norman aristocracy we can now see how that intriguing curve bit help them to fight and hunt Norman Knights used long reins to move their hands around freely the curb bit actually softened the violent movements of the riders hands so that he didn't yank the horse's head off when he swung his shield or spear now come on Alan this entirely fair this morning you have me on his puny little horse you got it whacking great thing that's not fair will you play that it's not the same horse Phil well I know is it the same bit it is scaled up you know and I haven't actually seen this I've only seen the rusted up original how does it actually look yeah our our take on this has changed so much from the first day where we saw when we thought we're going to get arrested if we put that in the horse's mouth far from it it's actually a very humane cleverly designed piece of equipment this this this is obviously swinging and you really have to yank it right up before you get any sort of lead erection inside the mouth and it's designed so that I can also move maneuver my shield and battle around as a defensive end and offensive weapon whilst not bobbing her in the mouth because you're holding the reins and the stickers I'm holding the reins in the same the curb bid wasn't just for the battlefield so why exactly am i holding this piece of rope we're gonna do is a hunting game because this site as you know probably saw a lot more hunting action than it did military action and this curb that is is useful for hunting where I keep one hand free as well as it is for war we need a target we need a boar to run away and I'm the boar you are the book you tow that sec you run like bejeebers I come after you and when you feel a spear hit the sack stop no then if there are any last requests I can't think of what they are now run for your life this snatch is gonna a it does hit the snatch while Phil plays with the Norman Nobles Matt and his workers have been revealing what the villains and peasants of bozeman were doing inside the big enclosure they've uncovered a medieval workplace good job man what have we got well we've got a large post hole there another enormous one here so presumably they were post supporting a big roof building yeah Hugh mean these is really substantial and it still had the remains of a scorch post in it as well another shallow post hole there another one with packing stones there so I may have even an internal wall going up that way and what's that well this to me looks like a small collapsed oven or kiln of some sort vaguely circular you can see it there over here but a much better example of what I think that probably looked like beautiful circular oven or something they're selling quite good Nick and over here we have another one this one's slightly more collapsed we can see the base of it is all scorched and burnt and going round this this area here is this ditch which comes along here round here and goes off to the corner of the trench over there lots of fines yet a huge amount of really beautiful fine to me and look at that a jug handle that's Aldridge a heck of a lot of activity going on here this settlement of pig farmers at Bozeman has given us some unfamiliar glimpse of ordinary life in the medieval manor of hand slope powerful Nobles such as the moored wits grab the headlines of history by quarreling with the king but the story of Bozeman is really the history of ordinary people pig farmers who grazed the animals in the forest and slaughtered and scalded and smoked them in the enclosures remarkably this dig has taken our archaeologists into uncharted territory because almost nothing is known about medieval pig farmers we know that they had specialized cattle and sheep farms in the Middle Ages called Becker ease and vacker ease so why couldn't have been specialized pig farms as well which I suppose we'll call something like ball curries well if we've done nothing else over the last three days we've invented a new word abilities where we came here three days ago we thought that we were going to find a medieval halt complete with an elegant masonry but the reality turned out to be rather different less hi affairs of state and more of this hmm boo boo boo why not well the time team guide

Channel: Reijer Zaaijer

Views: 304,596

Rating: 4.8442764 out of 5

Keywords: time, team, full, episodes, season

Id: MdfRkystGnQ

Length: 48min 15sec (2895 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2013