Time.Team.S16-E12 Buried Bishops and Belfries: Salisbury Cathedral

Salisbury Cathedral for centuries this pinnacle of medieval engineering and architecture has stood proud surviving Wars floods and the Reformation but we're here because of what hasn't survived 200 years ago they knocked down some of the cathedrals most beautiful buildings somewhere over here with Salisbury's original bell tower a magnificent gothic construction that soared hundreds of feet into the air while over there the builders pull down to private chapels one of them built by one of the cathedrals most influential bishops we've been given a unique opportunity to unearth these lost treasures and what's more to solve the mystery of a body which was recently discovered buried here in the ruins of the Bishop's Chapel which wouldn't be bad for three days if we can do it Salisbury Cathedral has dominated the Wiltshire countryside for almost 800 years it's a building that's literally crammed to the rafters with some of the finest medieval craftsmanship in the world a breathtaking statement of the wealth power and influence of the church but not all of it has survived the ravages of time and the redesigns of man so we've been invited here by the cathedrals Dean in Chapter to rediscover some of the architectural treasures that have disappeared and to be honest we're really rather excited at the prospect make for years and years you and I have been digging Abbey's and nunneries and monasteries this is a bit different this is fantastic in it the scale Aires felt this is your city isn't it absolutely it's funny really I mean we all regard this as an archaeological monument but if you live in the city it's more than that you know I'm pull back the curtains every morning and always see this it's an absolute icon it really is Tim you're the Cathedral archaeologist there's a little bit of me that's thinking this place is the best part of 800 years old it's there we can all see it it doesn't really need one archaeologist as a little and a whole bunch of new ones to me archaeology course is not what is just under the ground there there are things under the ground but is the full study of the material remains of the past including a big structure like this with the highest medieval archaeology anywhere in Britain but surely that's been here since the beginning no it hasn't no the spire is an add-on 50 years after the cathedral was completed yeah we've got an engraving of the chosen that the before that there was a separate tower which had the bells in it and that was there until the 18th century Phil I was going to ask you where the belfry is in the ground but this being time team I've got a suspicion I know already you knows too well Tony do you really yeah we're actually standing on it I think what we're gonna have to do is run the radar over it just to confirm exactly where it is but it's bang here the plan suggests the original bell tower had a massive footprint which is the sort of thing GF is was designed for but this isn't the only thing to dig because the major redevelopment in 1789 that destroyed the bell tower also robbed the cathedral of other stunning medieval buildings including the private chapel of the cathedrals most colorful bishop we've got this fantastic 17th century engraving of the Cathedral the East End here it shows a couple of chapels that aren't here anymore this one ours built by Bishop Richard Beecham now Bishop beech and dies in 1481 and he leaves instructions in his will that he's to be buried in the middle of this chapel what's so exciting about digging a chapel this is was one of the key Chantry chapels put onto the cathedral in the 15th century when the East End of the Cathedral was completely reorganized because bischoff Beecham who was a very very powerful figure in the Wars of the Roses period had managed eventually to get osmond the Norman Bishop of Salisbury from Al saram canonized by the Pope in 1457 so there was a brand new shrine in the East End of the Cathedral here and that's why he obviously wanted to have his charger Chapel as close as possible Meacham was buried in his Chapel in 1481 and engravings suggest it was a little masterpiece of medieval Gothic architecture so one of our tasks is to bring that Chapel back to life with a graphic reconstruction based on the archaeology and the ground so all this stuff maybe ginger and some surviving fragments of its interior stored in the cathedral loft miniature fan vault is so intricate for the detail on them tastic the workmanship space into those things then we got but we have another challenge when the chapel was demolished Salisbury's records show Beecham's body and tomb were moved into the main cathedral so it was a shock when an evaluation dig on the chapel in 2000 made an unexpected discovery if this is a real mystery because we've got records that in 1789 when they were demolishing this chapel the workmen found the bones of Bishop Beecham and they identified him by an Episcopal ring and the bones were taken off him and buried in the nave so the last thing that anybody was expecting to find here were these two legs so could this possibly be our Bishop Chucky we can't prove that it would be a bishop here in Bishop's don't have different bones to the rest of us today well no but there is a certain amount of information that I'll be able to get out of this it will give us some idea about who we're looking at I'll be able to work out the age and sex of the individual something about their lifestyle what kind of social status they were which we'll see whether that matches with what we know about Bishop Beecham or somebody of that social status from the records we know that four people were buried here two of Beecham's relatives to one side his close friend Sir John Chaney to the southwest corner and the bishop in the middle all we now need to do is to try to match the historical information we have for each of our four candidates with the physical evidence we find in the grave so the knees are in there and the edge of the grave what should come is this it round here that's it yeah see we can find the knees them or the legs again then we know exactly how far we gotta go down it will give us some idea of what the condition of the bone is and just tell us a hell of a lot more before we go into this virgin fill over on the other side of the Cathedral our target is just that tiny bit bigger well actually its enormous but it really good it's really good yeah I mean so clear the dark red where we've got the wall foundation surviving and look the detail is absolutely fantastic you can see the buttresses the entrance everything I mean that's the eighteenth-century drawing look and it's it pretty well the same isn't it you don't need it's all here this GF is is fantastically good clearly showing the remains of Salisbury's original bell tower and the archaeologists are keen to get their trowels on it for all sorts of reasons their only opportunity to look at how these footings were built at this particular period bearing in mind this is built the same time as a Cathedral yeah if we can find out how the footings were designed for this bell tower she's pretty substantial structure yeah maybe then we can find out how this midi of the monster was actually supported we might get a lot of evidence e near the builders and people who use the tower and so on as well we would need to see that well okay I've sketched on a 10 by 10 trench though I take in all the points you've been covering okay if you lay it out there we can get cracking it yeah okay as well as helping us rediscover Salisbury's original bell tower this trench could actually give us an insight into how the cathedral was built because both buildings were put up at the same time as part of one of the biggest civil engineering jobs of the Middle Ages the construction of a completely new city originally there was just a small hilltop settlement called Old Sarum until a bishop decided to move his Norman Cathedral and the whole town around it down into the valley where Salisbury is today and he built a masterpiece a building that celebrated God would guarantee the bishops admission into heaven and would become a site of wondrous pilgrimage for the poor of the medieval world of course some people on the team are bound to have a slightly different take on it all these were celibate men who are the bishops and they were always men they acquired wealth and estates to support their office and their retainers they've got no successes to hang the estate on to so they became wealthier and wealthier what were they going to do with all this money basically invested in bigger and bigger Cathedral churches so you're saying that the cathedral isn't much more than an enormous folly built in order to express how rich the churches well there's there's all that business of building it for the greater glory of God and getting to heaven and so on but but effectively it is a big demonstration of the wealth that that bishop well that diocese has and of course the Bishop of Salisbury had he means wealth and possibly the most important of these important men was Bishop Beecham a man praised by the king for his hospitality and wealthy enough to bribe the Pope to make a previous Salisbury Bishop a saint I think he was a whirlwind actually he's one of these men that seems to be incredibly energetic but we also know is he's one of these men who is able to move and multiple spheres so for instance by birth he's part of a part of the gentry he comes from families that have connections to the monarchy and we know also that he's been trained at Oxford by the the late 1440s he's actually appointed bishop of hereford so he's coming straight from Oxford into a bishopric which is quite something for starters in less than a year and a bit he's actually moved over to become Bishop of Salisbury now for a very interesting reason and that is because of the fact that the previous Bishop of Salisbury is actually hacked to death in in Jack Cades rebellion so he must have been quite a brave man if his predecessor had been hacked to death absolutely yes and he stays active for the rest of his life here cuz he was here for 31 years wasn't here it's a Norma's period of time yeah so he was about 60 orderly 60s when he died yeah I would think so he's got to be in that range which is for that period of time really old when he writes the opening to his will he's quite clear that he thinks he's really lived a long life and it's just that sort of information that Jackie can use to help identify the mysterious burial because over at the chapel trench oh we've just located the shin bones about potential Bishop looking just at those two bones what's your instant reaction what can you learn from just those stuff first glimpse of those two bones well the main thing it tells me is that the bone is in very good condition I mean the better condition the bone is in the more you can tell from it so that's a good start while under bell tower trench a day's strenuous digging has revealed the first evidence of how the medieval builders set about constructing not just the tower but possibly the cathedral we've got this really lovely core foundation of a wall of the bell tower running all the way through this trench it doesn't look very pretty as you can see there's this rubber cut going all the way through the middle that's because they've taken away all of their really nice pretty facing then over here you got this kind of whitewater just coming through there that's an internal floor surface we think and it's much later it's got brick in it and we've had clay pipe from there but it's very much different to that so the stuff at the bottom over there we think that's much earlier could that be an early phase well I'm just wondering with it's not actually the foundation for the whole thing the foundation yeah there's only a couple of feet below the surface if the foundation for that Cathedral is at the same depth then we've got a stick on our hard hats and run like that yeah but we tend to forget you see though a lot of these big medieval buildings have a raft of stone or or pebbles or Timbers on which the whole thing is built we can actually find out because we can enter the robber trench and looking the section we'll see where that mortar is sitting on the natural gravel and that will tell us lucky they dug it for us absolutely which is all very well the Raksha and Matt now only have two days left to get to the bottom of this massive trench because the autumn Sun is fading fast end of day one and we're losing light by the second but the good news is we found the legs of our body but does it go that way does it go that way and is it our Bishop we'll find out tomorrow beginning of day two here at Salisbury Cathedral where we're trying to uncover some of the architectural treasures that have lain underground for hundreds of years just behind me with that yellow digger is we think we may have got the medieval bell tower if we have it should give us some clues about how this place was originally built but round the corner here and this is really intriguing we could have the body of a very famous bishop which has been lying here for over 500 years although at the moment Jackie all I can see is a pair of shin bones that's right you've got this lovely sharp Ridge down the phrenic that's the bit that hurts got so many kicks you want it yesterday I said to you what we're not gonna be able to tell a bishop are we because the bishop doesn't have different bones from us but you said ah maybe we will be able to tell what did you mean I can tell an awful lot from looking at bone obviously I can tell what age the individual is and what's that coming we're assuming it's a male but it may not be but what sex the individual is now we know a little bit about the bishop we know roughly how old he was so we can see if that matches but also by looking at the kind of pathology the changes due to disease that again will help us work out what kind of social status this individual was and does it match that we would expect to the bishop and an absolute classic for that would be something called dish which is diffuse idiopathic skeletal hypostasis is it which is a bit of a mouthful but basically it means somebody who forms a lot of bone what would cause that well the condition is generally linked with things like obesity diabetes and is that in itself can be reflective of a very rich living so it's the archetypal fat Bishop exactly but finding out if these legs once supported the bulk of the King entertaining Pope bribing Bishop Beecham isn't our only challenge here because we'd actually expected this trench to be fairly straightforward but to be honest we don't really understand what we've uncovered these are Jimmy's radar results from here I thought that that could be a grave slab it clearly isn't you can see the end from Jackie's pencil case right to the edge of the spoil I mean it's such a clear response it looks to me as though the grave is cutting it so I'm wondering whether that's pre chapel ah yeah but the grave definitely cuts it but we don't actually know that this grave belongs to this chapel this grave could be later than the chapel maybe that plinth belongs to the chapel right I see so while Jackie continues to investigate the grave Phil will try to work out what the mysterious plinth is and how it relates to the burials in the bishops chapel meanwhile at the other end bridge opens a small trench within a trench across the chapel wall it's all a bit of a quandary I think I'll go back to the bell tower so much what's fake for that and so the staircase is just behind you there mm-hmm and they see that dark stain there there's ten actual zillion that's it so the door that's one side the other side the doorway should be just about there it shouldn't it yeah but whether it's the super straightforward bell tower trench or the increasingly complex chapel investigation it doesn't matter evil they both have one thing in common they're going to need loads of labor to get them finished in the next two days but unfortunately some of our team have been distracted by the sheer wealth of history on this site and Stu is off on the other side of the cathedral investigating something else entirely I think I've made a major discovery and I need the position of it to put it in the record the most famous image of the cathedral is John constables quintessentially English view of 1823 so ignoring both our pressing medieval targets Stu's gone all our tea on us I think what we've got here is the exact position that constable produces very famous painting the Cathedral for Aziza was this exact here yeah and I need to treat it like an archeological find and I need the coordinates of a that's a major event in time fantastic well the reason I'm confident I've got it is because if you look at the live drawing itself for start it's a very very high degree of observation going on usually tell on those it is it's a really good architectural depiction so you know he's drawing it with a certain unconfident so you can rely on then if you look at features you can see on there for instance you see these finials on the western end of the cathedral here see them there oh yeah I say there's a certain that the up if you walk too far that way they don't make that pattern if you go too far that way of course if you go that way they're all gonna be in line aren't they meaning exactly so if you go to a map I can identify those elements on the map exactly but that's coffee by the way again so you plot those positions on the map so with the edge of the vestry and the butcher's on the chap tails you draw a line back through those two features you can do the same with the corner of the chapter house and the central gable that's on that joint and same from the line of the finials over the edge of the cloisters and draw that line back and where those lines meet is exactly where he was drawing it for each lever so I think we need to know the exact expect position of this yes if I it's a fire anticipate yeah yes yes it is it's just that we weren't looking for it and unfortunately Stuart's not the only one off on his own flight of fancy after over 170 digs Phil had to choose this one to take his first helicopter trip Turin and it's all very exciting for someone who's lived for decades in the shadow of the Cathedral actually physically look like a bird on a beautiful village I saw three Cathedral this is meanwhile back down with the workers Jackie said she'd had the rest of our Bishop visible by lunchtime Jackie it's lunchtime can't see him I've got about an eyebrows worth up here so predictably it's taking slightly longer than we originally thought but in the meantime apparently Helens discovered another body although looking down there he'll and all like this is rubble that's all it looked like to me a few minutes ago but in removing all this rubble yeah first of all we encountered this one and then a little more fertile Inge brought us to this which is going on a bit who knows how many more that's going to be but you think that we have got a burial rather than just a couple of bones that have been discarded well even if it is just a couple of bones that have been disguised I think it's going to be very significant and exciting because this looks like a grave cut in the corner of the chapel and when we look on the plan you can see in the corner of the chapel here here is the grave of Sir John Cheney and he was the bishops friend but wasn't he supposed to have been removed into the Cathedral in the 18th century he was yes but these bones have certainly been moved now maybe the workmen didn't do what they said or maybe what they did more likely was they just took out the big chunky bones and left some here for us to find hang on if they were incompetent or weren't telling the truth about the removal of this body then the same true as far as the bishops concern that's why I'm hoping yeah so could these be the remains of one of Salisbury's most influential bishops only time-consuming intricate and painstaking excavation will tell us now this is fantastic Raksha you've got a huge area I know our ways I'll see you me I'm just looking really really good thankfully over at the bell tower the archaeology is of the much more chunky variety and just as importantly it all seems to make sense the most amazing thing about this is that the geophysics the plan and the archaeology match up perfectly always to know before we respectable that must be a first actually surprisingly the other thing of course is we still don't have the actual foundation of it do it whether it was built on gravel that it was built on a raft of stones or or quite what they did the only problem with that though is on the radar it could be as deep as 1.5 or 1.7 meters so you've got at least six feet of the director I better not hold you up any longer I'll come back later what's now clear is that the bell tower was built in the same way as the Cathedral with thick buttresses supporting its walls and it's this simple but clever form of construction that meant this extraordinarily heavy building as much as 70,000 tons has remained upright for almost 800 years in spite of being built on a floodplain it was part of a building revolution that transformed medieval architecture a revolution that for some reason our buildings people feel is best explained through the medium of plastic building blocks it developed from the Romans who whose heavy foundations big walls that absorbed a lot of the stresses but as they moved up they wanted on verticality they wanted higher and thinner walls with more windows but that meant more flex and probably problems it's cut it's kind of funny because they're building bricks but in real life they could have been real people under a lot of people died during contagion construction certainly yeah but then they did work out you know methods of actually sorting it out if we look at this stage it's the addition of the buttress and that's allowing us to absorb a lot more of the forces and have a higher thinner structure with more windows in it it is intriguing that on this side where you've got these buttresses tied into the wall the wall still does wobble a bit not as much as over here but it does wobble was on the other side it's absolutely stable yeah over the other side we're using flying buttresses the next stage on as well so is that technology used in Salisbury Cathedral not really most of the back recedes in Salisbury are the ordinary purposes wasn't this place supposed to have been built on lamarche yes it is very low-lying very wet land and that might have been one of the reasons they use ordinary buttresses rather than these sort of partly separate flying buttresses for differential settlement or something like that but if we dig up the foundations of the bell tower we might find some clues well I'm learning stuff all the time about this fantastic site thanks to plastic building blocks and historical records but to be honest the archaeology itself has been disappointingly slow I am so frustrated by this yesterday evening you said to me this is incredibly exciting if we can sort out what the foundations of the bell tower then we could work out how Salisbury Cathedral has remained standing which nobody knows because the foundations are so shallow and yet nothing's happened we're still in exactly the same place you hadn't done the foundation come on that's a little unfair I Bernard I can see where you're coming from but he's taken a very long time to get it all clean to get into this state how many how many archaeologists that we got here me I've never seen so many archaeologists other times into bigger areas open it's taken a long time to clean it also in certain one way I share your frustration in that it's taken a long time to get to this stage but in both trenches now we're poised at the point that we can start dismantling it to understand it which is what Ian's doing over there look he's already cutting a section to get through to the foundation to look at those foundations you're on the boat if he's gonna be doing that in order to get down to the foundations it could have taken a year but elsewhere on site Mick seems to be right as usual it's 44 points because over at the East End bridges trench has reached the foundations of the chapel wall and things are getting complicated crucially what we have got coming up now is a construction cut it comes up here in the section and you can see it here running along here with this white mortar on this side and these old medieval roof tiles here which are also part of that 1460 foundation the material that you're on is earlier yep that's got to be 14 60 or earlier yep this is the foundation for the Beecham chapel yep it's cut into that it's later what you've got to do is carry on through those earlier layers let's try and get to the bottom of the Foundation's do know how substantial the foundations of this chapel were or what was here before the chapel went up absolutely this isn't what we expected the record suggests the chapel built by Bishop Beecham was the first structure on this site but clearly there was something here before that and this trench is throwing up other surprises as well in this grave cut at lunchtime today we thought we'd got the bones of the Bishop's friend but it turns out that we haven't they were just bones that were found about eight years ago when archaeologists were digging here and they collected them up and put them in there bit disappointing but we're fairly philosophical about that these things happen in archaeology the exciting thing though is it now looks as though Phil's got a complete grave over here that's right I mean you can see it quite clearly here got one edge there and one edge there and what we think is that is earlier than the foundations of the Beecham chapel but we also want to converse concentrate our efforts on the deposits at this end here what we want to do is dig a slot through there so we can see what the relationship is of the layers of this wall our famous plinth which we still don't know what it is and also go right me through to the main cathedral building itself meanwhile Jackie's going to be on with her a burial yeah Jackie you've been digging that all day is it the bishop I can't a still can't tell you whether it's the bishop or not to be honest I'm not absolutely sure it's even the male I think actually the answer is going to lie under here and that's really just covering the delicate pelvic bone so I don't lean on them and break them but that's going to tell us the sex of the individual so we'll find out tomorrow so is it a man is it a woman is it a woman pretending to be a bishop we'll find out tomorrow when we lift the bishop see try beginning of day three here in the sumptuous surroundings of Salisbury Cathedral and we've really got our work cut out today see this enormous trench we're going to puncture down a couple of meters in order to try and find out what the foundations are made of because if we can then we can conclude what the foundations of the cathedral itself are made of meanwhile round the corner jack is still excavating her bishop although there's a slight technical problem she now thinks it might be a woman Jackie what was it originally that made you think that that skeleton might be a woman well the first view I had of the skull was of a sort of this eyebrow region here and in a male that is that is usually quite pronounced growth in females that tends to be much smoother and the brow is quite flats was almost on this really does look more feminine than masculine as I've started to uncover more of the skull and I can see more of the features there are some masculine features that I actually doubt whether that's Bishop btrim at all why did you say that well the clue actually lies in this grave the grave of John change who was Beecham's friends now he died after Bishop Beecham yeah now you see this black layer here yeah this black layer went all the way over the tomb of John Cheney's therefore that black layer is later than the tomb of John Cheney's that skeleton that grave cut through that black layer so that grave is later than that black which is later than John Cheney's who died after Bishop Beecham but this burial was made inside the chapel this is not the coffin of an 18th century or 19th century individual so this grave was put in before this chapel was knocked down in the 18th century before the chapel was not dance so this must be an important individual and it as far as we know has no record of them going in here so it's still something of a mystery but this burials identity is only one of the mysteries in this trench we've also uncovered evidence of foundations that are earlier than those of Beecham's chapel and there's nothing in the comprehensive cathedral records to explain what they could belong to over in the bell tower trench the pace as always seems to be much more civilized but we are finding more evidence of just how impressive a structure it was before it fell foul of the serious cathedral redesign of 1789 for the last couple of days worship we've been concentrating mainly on this part of the bell tower but there's this as well isn't there is that that it's the base of a rather large pier you can see on the cross-section there it goes all the mountain to the timber belfry at the top of the tower it's rather ugly isn't it it's needed very necessary not just for the strength that gives to the tower because bearing in mind it's Chandra foot high yeah on top of that you got the belfry and the belfry is heavy in its own right but it's also got the bells and once those bells start ringing you got all sorts of forces and pressures swinging around literally oh I see so it's not the sound of the bells now it's always deafened you if you're you're up in a tower when they go off it's actually just the weight going back as in the a yeah and all that energy that's being created on the Bell and as we begin to reconstruct the bell tower it's clear it's a wonder of design medieval or any other age but the inventiveness didn't end with the architecture because the faithful were called to prayer by a bell rung by this one of the world's earliest clocks this is the medieval [ __ ] but where are the face and hands on it will of course being a very early clock it doesn't have a face in hands because all the clock is is a mechanical device for ringing bells that's all the name clock posh in French or paga in Latin so that's that's all it is it was the church of course that started to regulate time first of all with sundials and then in 13th century when the mechanical pot was invented every monastery in great church but one of these very quickly we actually have a remarkable bit of documentary evidence that tells us in 1386 there was already a full time pot keeper and this probably dates from a little bit before that though this is ringing the bells that fairly regular interval for the lazy this is ringing an hour Bell right and of course originally it was in the bell tower and that is to regulate the service times accurately and that's what matters here back at our trench over the Beecham chapel we've just made a fantastic little find it looks absolutely terrible to me it looks really costly I can't see a thing yet maybe put some liquid on it Armour some solvent let's just see Oh monastic yeah oh look at yes that's really there okay I take it back Oh what is a cross what look at that oh it's a cross it is a cross it is a perfect strawberry collie I mean I see what you mean now you're right it isn't too bad I mean it's not it's not at all look you got that circle you've got legs around the outside this coin is the first of its kind ever to be discovered in Britain it's a 15th century quote Reno from ancona in the papal territories of central Italy it's being dropped by a foreign craftsman working on a chuckle or the Cathedral maybe something like an a something you never know so is this the actually brave it could grow be look and as we get to grips with the dating sequence of the trench it's becoming clear that most of the graves we're uncovering form part of a burial ground that was here before the chapel was built in the 1460s but there's still a mysterious body that was buried here long after Beecham was interred here you're into the pelvis area now Jackie any indication of what the sex might have been in a female the pelvis is opened up so it broadened out so that angle would be quite broad whereas in the male it'd be fairly tight and shallow and that's looking quite a sharp angle which suggests it's more like to be male and female node you're about the age and well it's only not a spring chicken there are some little bony changes down the spine where you've got osteophytes little new bone growth around the margins of the vertebrate so the suggestion is we've got somebody at least who's over 40 so not a woman and categorically not the 60-year old Bishop but the question remains who was important enough to be buried in the beach and family chapel but mysterious enough not to be entered in the official Cathedral records there are only four known burials here but are grave it seems is somewhere around here it has got to post-date John Cheney's grave and I did wonder whether one could say with any confidence whether this grave ought to be before the Reformation extremely likely because this was abolished in 1548 and it's important also that we think about the fact that it's family because this is a chapel that is essentially a family chapel yeah so all we need to do is go and look through the family tree and find out who died in that 39 years slice between 1509 and 1548 in theory it ought to quite simple so it's a tough challenge when you've barely half a day left the last two days we've been marveling over how straightforward the archaeology in this trench is well at least that's what we thought what's gonna roll right sure Matt's just gonna found a wall that we never knew even existed this wall running along here and the other interesting thing is is the floor layers they seal the wall and this foundation is cutting into it hang on doesn't that mean that that wall is earlier than the bell tower yes it is on what was supposedly a greenfield site yep Oh what does that mean bridge I don't know it shouldn't be there that wasn't bad enough what about where in is in you we're going to go right down as far as the base of the Foundation's weren't you until you came to the natural yeah what about those two stones in the corner of your trench that there appear to be two ashlar blocks which are underneath this floor with the herringbone tunneling them what would herringbone tooling say to you it looks early are you probably talking Norman or earlier when you say earlier so it could even be Saxon possibly I bet you're glad it's you who's got to interpret what's happening it I'm loving it this this is the last thing we expected and if that wasn't enough the archaeologists are now getting very hot under the collar around at the East End where they think we may be about to rewrite the history of Salisbury Cathedral where we are the problem is this black engraved chalk phone absolutely which literally dominates our entire trench the seriously big question yeah is is to take that that chalk foundation and the buttress yeah and say which is earlier than the other and as far as we can see they pretty much like that again yeah do they be able to I don't know they don't look as if they put up to me a cedar the Flint foundation of the buttress appears to over lie this big chalk raft which means stratigraphically it has to be later than what it appears to do doesn't prove that that actually is what it does so with just a few hours left this is only one of all sorts of problems that we've got to solve that response there it matches exactly with what you've got including the mysterious building under the bell tower we're looking for walls on alignments never mind Helen and Elaine trying to discover the identity of the interloping burial machine while Stuart tries to untangle the complex stratigraphy of the chapel trench I may once have felt that things were proceeding a bit slowly on this fantastic side I now feel we're flying by the seat of our pants guys but for the first time all the evidence we've got now everything is fairly firmly tied south that's brilliant so what exactly is this chalk foundation well the most obvious solution is that this behind us here I think each him himself what he was perhaps planning to do was to get rid of this outdated it was now 200 years or more old and build an even grander East End and so what he was doing was building a new foundation which we've uncovered here for a completely new building and then some reason we don't know why they stopped and packed it in and said okay we don't want this anymore we're just going to have my Chantry Chapel on the spot and this is the first indication we've ever had exactly this ever is what could have happened yeah this is something completely new and it adds another dimension to the architectural history of the Cathedral this is really incredible and historic discovery in the mid 1440s a huge chalk raft was laid out across this whole area it would seem this was the first stage of an ambitious and expensive plan by Bishop Beecham to build an entire new East End probably too honest and osmond Salisbury patron saint it's a grand plan that would have transformed this famous aspect of the cathedral although we can only guess how but for some reason it never happened and Beecham instead used the space for his own private chapel even then he didn't skimp and built a spectacular memorial to himself with his tomb taking center stage in a highly gothic and intricately designed interior and over at the bell tower trench we've also at last cracked the increasingly complex archaeology if you were a bell ringer in the Middle Ages you would have come in through a big door here you would have walked across this floor here it would have been higher than it is now but all this stones have been robbed out until you came to another wooden doorway here which you open probably in like that you come into a lobby you can see the ghost of it on the ground still although all the stones of the wall have been robbed out you then come to a stair once again that's been robbed away you walk along it like that and then you get to the first step of the spiral staircase to take you up to the bells you can see how the Masons have drawn some lines here to line up the staircase and off you go round and round right up as far as you want to so that is simple but this half of the trench has been a complete Pig hasn't it make yeah it has but I think we understand it now come on then tell me the story you saw this wall earlier that's underneath the tower yeah there are two possibilities for this we think one is although we talk about this as a greenfield site that doesn't mean that people aren't using it not living around here so it might be something to do with the settlements around there but much more likely to is that this is something to do with a huge Cathedral building project doesn't it absolutely and I think it's very clear that's what it is now because it's quite a narrow wall it's a rough building and it's very thin so it probably had a wooden sill beam this is almost certainly timber frame exam we probably ought to be thinking of a timber shed you know cuz there's a B which is the outside and which is the inside well we think we might don't we yes because what we seem to have here are large numbers of fragments of Purbeck marble this alright if I come in here yeah I spoil down here so this is this is the marble is it that's right quite a lot of these pieces here are broken off bits of Purbeck marble which were being worked in vast quantities for this Cathedral so you think that this was some kind of workman's workshop yeah which was used during the building of that then when that was finished they demolished it before so they though this is a fantastic find actual evidence of the craftsmen who would have toiled for decades in workshops like this one to build the grand monument that still stands today and yet we still haven't finished with this trench what about over in this little son - we've got a couple of stones here - do you think they're also debris from the original building of the COS the big building project here they're dismantling the Norman Cathedral up at Old Sarum and they're bringing material down from it and reusing it in this building project yeah and that has been there since the 10th century aha so that could explain why we've got an old markings on you they could be early Norman they could even be before 1066 probably Norman - Norman I said ok but the real reason that we put this son dajin in the first place before we were distracted by this earlier wall was because we wanted to find out how they had built these foundations because that might give us a clue - so they built the foundations here have we learnt anything we've loved a great deal we can now see very clearly indeed how this foundation goes right down onto that wonderful gravel bed the bottom of the foundation is there sitting on the gravel and the water table is there as well so it's exactly the bottom of everything here Richard are you convinced that they could have used exactly the technique that we can see in this trench in order to build that massive building perfectly happy it's bearing in mind this thing's 200 foot in total but the first 80 foot or so is masonry the same height roughly as the Cathedral so in relative terms that she's taking as much weight as over there so yeah so the medieval architects knew that this floodplain contained a natural gravel island it was sturdy enough to support the bell tower and Cathedral even though the depth and size of their foundations were a mere fraction of the colossal structures they held up but I just can't help feeling slightly hacked off with the 1780s redevelopment that robbed salisbury of this fantastic example of their craft it would look breathtaking today but even now at the end of a monumental dig there's still one final question to answer well we know now don't we where Bishop Beecham was buried he was buried here and then was disinterred and laid to rest in the Cathedral but that begs the question who is this I know we had such a problem because we were looking for somebody of relatively low status he had no monument he had no elaborate coffin fittings he had no grave lining nothing like that and yet he was buried in the Beechum's Chantry chapel so he must have been one of the family the thing is though that when we went back to to the family trees we found that line after line at the beach and family went extinct so we had a real problem yes we were looking at them and as a line would go extinct they would say died without issue divers Avenue children died without issue and then we got to Bishop Beecham's brothers son so in other words his nephew who died without legitimate issue now that means that suggests that this might just very possibly be Bishop Beecham's great nephew and so our best guess is that this is the last resting place of Anthony illegitimate son of Lord Richard Beecham the cathedral will now recover and preserve this burial here with the newly found knowledge of his link to one of salisbury cathedral 'he's most ambitious and powerful bishops so this chap is the last of the beaches dig a little deeper into the world of time team log on to the website at channel 4 comm slash time team to read up on all things archeological later Atilla and Widdecombe sets out to discover what sparked the Reformation in Christianity a history at seven

Channel: Reijer Zaaijer

Views: 387,206

Rating: 4.863976 out of 5

Keywords: Time, Team, Full, Episodes, Season, Timeteam, Archaeological, Sites, Serie, argeologie, archaeological

Id: Vnb__HuLhCk

Length: 48min 8sec (2888 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2013