Unearthing Portsmouth's Lost Medieval Hospital | Time Team | Timeline

Nelson's flagship HMS Victory but Portsmouth's history as a seaport goes back to medieval times in the 13th century the harbour was a bit further along the coast then close by was the hospital which back then wasn't just a place for the sick but also provided accommodation for travelers this church was originally part of that hospital and time team have been asked to find the complex of medieval buildings that would have stretched out into this field you'd have thought that would have been a pretty easy task but we know that a Tudor mansion was built on top of it not to mention a whole load of Second World War activity including a number of German bombs falling here so can we get at the medieval history without calling in the bomb squad we'll know in 72 hours [Music] the deep natural harbor at Portsmouth made it a much used crossing point to France in medieval times and the town went on to become the most heavily defended in England after Henry the eighth's made it the base for the Royal Navy in the 16th century our site at governor's green sits within one of the last remaining defensive walls that enclosed the old town and the garrison Church as it's known today was originally part of a medieval hospital built here in the 13th century this building survived because it was used as a chapel for a Tudor mansion and then later on it became a place of worship for the Armed Forces until a bomb destroyed the roof in World War two Tim you're a member of the Friends of the garrison Church aren't you I work with them yes and you invited us here why what did you want to find out who was the 300 year gap between when the church was built in 1212 and the first reliable map we've got in about 1540 so yes if you can paint a picture that covers that period it would be wonderful we'll do our best Martin you work for the emoji yes the emoji has never allowed anyone to dig here before but you've managed to wangle it for us how come well with a lot of sites because no one's ever dug on them we don't know what's going on so I've got that same gap so if you guys can help fill that gap for us and help us manage it better I'll be really happy well there's only one man who's gonna help us find that out come on meet Nick Meg when we talk about a medieval hospital what exactly do we mean we mean a place where all people would have lived sick people have lived but also just a place where travellers would have stayed so its accommodation for the various types of people so apart from anything else it was also a hotel yeah yeah that's the way of thinking of it you Helen do we know much about this one we do one of the amazing resources we've got loads and loads of maps because Portsmouth is so important for the defense of Britain it was important to know what was where and this one is would you believe mid 16th century where the hospital the hospitals just here this map made around 1540 is thought to be one of the first accurate maps drawn in England it was made to show the defences around the town but it also gives us our earliest depiction of the hospital site as usual Mick wants to wait to see what GF is are detecting under the ground before we decide where to dig but clearly it would be good to know if any of the early maps are accurate enough in modern terms to be useful to us Dominic Fontana a geography lecturer at Portsmouth University has overlaid a modern map of the town onto a Tudor map and as soon as it comes up you'll see that it drops in with the streets and the exactly the right way okay so these are the street lines here the yellow and black line he drops in exactly of the street Dominic's map dated 1584 is especially interesting because it shows a more detailed picture of the hospital it shows a complex of buildings with a wall around them and having lined it up with the modern map we can see that this road once continued along the edge of the hospital site if we take a line from the center of that building and Roy down here using this information Stuart and Henry are going to try and plot where the old medieval road used to run across this area this would be extremely helpful to know because the road marks the eastern edge of the hospital site and all the medieval buildings were looking for should be on this side of the road the hospital was dedicated to some thickness the patron saint of sailors but locally it would have been known as the Damas day meaning the house of God a place that looked after travelers the poor and the sick what was first and foremost a religious institution most important thing from medieval man or woman was their fate after death and this was what really mattered to them are you going to burn in hell in eternity and to avoid this you either set up a hospital or working one or you pray for the people who've assisted you and the man who founded this hospital had quite a need for spiritual insurance who was a he was Peter de Roche and he founded it in in 1214 or possibly a couple of years earlier he was Bishop of Winchester but apart from that I don't know a lot about him he was Bishop of Winchester but he was most importantly the second most powerful man in England intro for team he was actually running England while King John was overseas so these men have tremendous political and financial power as well as actually running a diocese and acting as a minister of God it's like doubling up as well Chancellor of the Exchequer and Archbishop of Canterbury which is no small thing the local people who are involved in the hospital society are really keen that we should try to bring to life those 300 years when it was a medieval hospital does that excite you or is this pretty standard fare no it's not standard fare because in common with many places the records of this place were lost at the dissolution as well as a lot of the building and so we're very very dependent on the archaeology for this one and I'd be really interested just to learn what it looks like on the ground how big was it potentially we could have evidence of some of Portsmouth's earliest stone buildings buried here so rgf is detecting anything out of the ground John hanging on thoughtyou has been making hello well five minutes the geophys team hates this bit because we're in on their back so much but I love it it's such a feeling of anticipation as soon as that information has been through the printer we could get our first glimpse of a 13th century hospital you'll have it I'm confident looking at the readings in the machine in foreign half minutes four and a half minutes welcome back to governor's green in Portsmouth where we're waiting to see if our geophys time have managed to detect the remains of a medieval hospital thought to be buried under this field [Music] this is just the resistance so far just to orientate there's the church and Stuart talked about a road line coming through here and what we've got in black that's the high resistance so these are all buildings and actually rooms within buildings or separate buildings I mean there's so much detail going on I need more time to actually sort out everything but you see that's where we come in John we put the trenches in to tell you if we've got lots of right lines of walls and buildings and now there may be the later Tudor house but I guess that's probably a conversion of the medieval buildings anyway so I mean aren't going for a junction yeah let's do a junction where we've got walls of both directions somewhere like that point there Phil in the middle there I reckon I retinas perfect so with no time to waste Phil gets our first trench going the plan is to open up a large area to see exactly what Jeff is are detecting here this three by five metre trench is targeted here over what appears to be a junction between several walls but we don't know if this is part of the original medieval hospital or the later tudor buildings on this side GF is in fact may have detected some modern stuff here because already Phil's wondering if he's uncovering a concrete surface while we don't know how much of the hospital survives out in the field we do know that this church was at the center of the complex Richard our buildings expert is taking a close look so that we can reconstruct how it looked originally when it was first built in the 13th century one thing's for sure this building has got a lot of stories to tell like when the hospital closed in 1540 and the governor of Portsmouth took over the site and used the church to store weapons we've got a list of the things that were stored in the church as the ballistic shovels and spades scoops bloke bills Morris picks chests of bows and arrows serpent in powder this is wonderful stuff this book a history of the church looks like it could be really useful to us it's called the the Domus day of Portsmouth by a man called HP Wright who is their military chaplain here and he was behind the restoration of the church the book includes references to a lot of original documents one of which is a bill for the repair of the medieval buildings in 1581 the church 25 foot wide the armory six and fifty foot long the Smith's forged 32 foot long and what is then done which is perhaps a bit speculative but still quite a lot of fun is he's taken one of the contemporary plans and he's tried to attach the labels to these buildings you can see here so this is a plan of what this area would look like not when it was a hospital all those these are the same buildings but after it had been taken over by the military so that we've got things like the armory the Smith's Forge and the pay chamber yes we could test this couldn't we make yeah I mean no matter how accurate that is to have a list of buildings and the dimensions of them is fantastically useful our Victorian book also includes this plan which is based on the same information if it's accurate then our mission to find some of Portsmouth's oldest buildings should be simple all we have to do is align the plan with the modern map and the geophys plot and hey presto we've got a blueprint showing where we need to dig to find any of the hospital buildings so using the plan as a guide we're going to open a new trench here but as we open our second trench I can't believe it's really going to be this easy can we really trust an old map from a Victorian book everyone else seems to think we can this one here this area's labelled Hall so these are kind of something more important buildings the ones over there are more service buildings yeah you think thank you might think I'm being a bit hard on them but honestly every time in day one when there is confidence as this it always turns to ashes one of the few places on this site where we don't need a map is inside the church and according to Mick it's quite unusual to have the largest and most important part of the hospital still standing I've been thinking that this was simply where the religious services were carried out it's not quite like that is it Carol it's this is the church and the main part of the hospital explain this underscores the religious aspects of the hospital because if you're a patient you'd be lying in bed on the side here in the eyes of people all the way yeah I would just say me to almost bed length those they're almost that width and you can see why and more to the point you would be able to hear the services and to see the sacrament to the mass which is supposed to make you better so it's generally I'm sort of elevating atmosphere where your soul is as healthy as your body which is what they're aiming for our artist Victor has been working on a sketch to picture this part of the building as it was in the 13th century it was a domestic one Sol just made people but they were priests here too and they would be ministering to the spiritual needs of the patient and some nurses as well we think still the whole impression still still looks like you're coming into a church in which sick people are laid out on each side it's the whole point about this in this period the health of his soul is so much more important than your body I mean bodies don't last long in the Middle Ages but your sodas forever it's getting late in the day and starting to get really cold out here although trench one initially revealed a modern concrete surface we've now uncovered what might be medieval stone and we're starting to find some large chunks of pottery we made nice and since I supposed to have to wait for the pot expert to have a look at this for us really yeah Oh better still entrenched - it looks like we're starting to find evidence of a medieval building you can actually see the tool marks running do we know anything about it yet we don't we've literally just open it you've got something that looks very modern looking in the top here and then something very promising which looks much older hang on Richard perfectly arrived on time what do you think of that thank you so much that looks very much like 13th century stone what makes you say that's 13th century well it looks like classic early English which is the main architectural style the 13th century it's got this small sort of common ette rather nice for the circular design quite delicate really what sort of part of a building might that come from it looks like it's part of a reveal or something a window reveal or a door reveal so this may have been part of a medieval doorframe like this the doorway perhaps into a medieval room with a posh stone floor because as you can see trench 2 seems to be getting better and better by the minute end of day 1 this church over here trench one that's proved a bit disappointing this so much of that comparatively modern floor surface but this straight trench two completely different matter all the archaeologists are getting really excited about it although you wouldn't know it's so freezing but here we've got these flag stones which are these perfect marble and you think you've got a medieval wall this one is here with the the doorstop therefore this the door go against it and it ties in apparently with the plan it does it's on the same alignment of the row row of buildings going in that direction so tomorrow we're going to extend the trench in this direction and see whether or not we've got at least a glimmer of our medieval hospital fingers crossed welcome back to blustery Portsmouth it's a city that's jam-packed with history you can see these 18th and 19th century walls here which once defended the old town but our digs on the far side of this tunnel Nelson won't walk through here apparently we're inside the old town walls now and we're excavating over here on Governors Green where we're looking for a hospital which was put up here in the 13th century the only bit of it's still standing is that church over there but it's complicated by the fact that this mansion was put up here in Tudor times and I know from bitter experience that if you're looking for something really early on an urban site where they've plunked a building on top of it later on then the archaeology is very complicated and very frustrating mark my words we've opened two trenches so far and it's trench two nearest the church that looks the most promising double size of the trench this way and we may want to duck to email want to travel the size of it we've uncovered a posh floor surface here that could be part of the medieval hospital but we've also got a series of walls that we don't understand so today we're going to supersize this excavation affair over in trench one fill open up a big area yesterday and found a lot of modern concrete but he also revealed a few stone walls that could be medieval so he too is extending his trench to help him work out what he's got here yesterday everyone got excited about this plan which supposedly shows the layout of the medieval buildings after aligning the plan with the geophys Stuart seemed happy that our two trenches were coming down on these two buildings but today Phil's spotted a problem where you've got your trenches on both according to Phil his trench has been marked in the wrong place on the plan we did not put the trench there we did not the trench is in there well jock told me exactly it's better this up over that below no Stuart this wall here is wide got in the trench that does not appear on your map it doesn't appear on that there so which map does it appear on any map phil is rightly pointed out that his trench isn't positioned here but targeted on this geophys signal on the wall he's found is nowhere near the building's shown on the plan we need more they'll suspects the plans wrong or has been misaligned with the geophys plot while Stuart thinks the problem could be that Phil's digging a wall that doesn't appear on any plan I think we should give Henry an hour to get these trenches and the features in them accurately plotted because I think we until we do that we really don't know where we are you need the walls on the wall cover something solid to hang on yeah what a pallava and I did predict this kind of thing might happen yesterday you and Steve were so confident that actually what was on the maps would be in the ground and right where you've done the treasure it never would so it's still very confident about that the good news is that Henry has already mapped the walls in our trenches and he's now ready to compare them with what's on the plan and you'll do this on the computer yeah you see I do turn a drawing board with tracing paper and then glass of Cabernet Sauvignon is make yourself sound even older than you are today we've got some visitors who want to know about the history we're digging up under their sports field knowing our medieval hospital wasn't just for the sick but was also a place where travelers could stay we've arranged for a couple of 13th century pilgrims to stop off here on their travels where they forgive their sins they chip they go to travel places to forgive their sins correct they do and the heart of the journey is the Mortons you can actually have removed from your soul bill Grimm's coming through Portsmouth were most likely enroute to visit shrines at Winchester and Chester in England or other popular destinations like Santiago in Spain so even why are you here at the hospital I'm going to take ship from Portsmouth but a place like this there they're regular along the routes we can actually stop and ask for food and rest if we need it as well because obviously it's quite an arduous journey it's being made on foot every pilgrim carried a bag like this called a scrip which was supposed to contain what they needed for the journey humble everyday items like a wooden bowl for food and drink a knife and a sewing kit to repair clothes can you imagine I've got loads and loads and loads of food in there I'm not going to carry much am I so that's why places like this is so important people were supposed to have a holy duty to actually feed us particularly religious institutions such as this Carol when the pilgrims arrived here they'd have stayed in this room wouldn't they we don't know they may have had a separate wing where travelers earn people who wanted short-term hospitality stayed this is what makes the excavation so exciting and we seem to be making good progress here in trench one Phil's uncovered more stone walls but he's still waiting to find out from the mapping team how they relate to the plan some of the finds though may be a clue to the function of this building it's what we call the pension they're mixing bowls essentially or food preparation vessels this is a great find because it dates to the time just before we know the hospital was closed in 1540 but it doesn't help date the stone walls in this trench because the soils all been mixed up and we're getting other finds like this this was once part of a massive wine bottle which dates to the 18th century this maybe is our first glimpse of the fine living enjoyed by the governor of Portsmouth who lived here at that time Duncan Brown our pottery expert has been looking at other finds from Phil's trench yesterday this again is high quality and is part of a Spanish olive jar these were used for transporting olive oil and preserved fruits so we're late 16th 17th century and I would say bang on with the governor's house myself we've not been in the outbuildings at the back of the governor's house yeah well that's good that's the governor's house there presumably yep this is our standing buildings and chappy it's a tricky site because we though the governor's house started out as a Tudor mansion it was modified and updated many times over the years until it was finally demolished in 1825 these are the trench position here those trenches are the ones the walls some of the walls we're finding may date to the later building on this site but some may belong to medieval buildings that were reused as part of the governor's mansion crucially to have a chance of understanding this site we need to know where our trenches are in relation to our plan of the hospital consequently our mapping team have been really checking everything including the measurements given for the medieval buildings we've took the measurement for the church and scaled it from the map 54 correct Chapel 25-foot correct the stables and Bakehouse 68-foot correct but when we checked the 10 the louder right it says he's a 100 hundred foot 100 foot long but when you scale it on the map it's only 60 foot so the 40 foot missing actually should be that long on the plan and the stable should be up there so just got this one building which is wrong I hate to sound so skeptical but you know if all the other buildings are right and the one that fills in is wrong that does sound like I've been a special over lunch so problem sorted and if we now correct the plan we can see Phil's trench is positioned across a building described as a larder so we're talking food storage one of the service buildings while trench 2 is located here across a building described as a hall this would be a higher status room which seems to fit with the posh stone floor we've unearthed in this trench this feels like a real turning point but the challenge now is to make sense of the many different walls we've revealed and try to work out which ones are part of a medieval Hall that was last seen hundreds of years ago [Music] and now with even skeptics like me having new confidence in the plan we're opening up a third trench to see if we can find any evidence of these medieval buildings on the southside of the church and having sorted out the maps Stewart wants to get a look at our site from the air to see how it fits in with the rest of medieval Portsmouth what's clear is just how close the cathedral is to our site in medieval times this was the parish church and because it was founded in 1180 some thirty years before our Hospital it seems they got to impose a lot of rules on their new neighbors no one from the hospital will be allowed to go on board ships to give benediction preach or read the Gospels that seems pretty severe why did they make that kind of rule well as 1229 and the hospital is very very successful very quickly and this is a seaport and so sailors who are leading a very dangerous life want spiritual protection yeah but I'm saying that they can't go yeah that's the point because the priests here have been doing just that and the parish church doesn't like it because it's quite successful financially they're making money and they're undercutting the profits of the opposition also this is politics it's not just politics its money it seems there was no shortage of people bequeathing money to the hospital which means they have had the resources to upgrade or refurbish buildings over the years here in French to where we hope to find evidence of a medieval Hall we've now got so many different walls and floors to puzzle over the Phils been drafted across to help sort it out the crucial thing is if there's a green in there so there is there is a logical part this definitely looks like an in-situ floor but it's going to take time to work out how old it is our buildings expert richard has spent much of the last two days studying the standing building so we can tell the story of how it looked originally and how it was changed over eight hundred years we're going to start in the early 19th century when after hundreds of years of repairs it had been reduced to this and look more like a Scout hut then in the 1870s the Victorians painstakingly restored the building to look like this pretty much how it would have looked in medieval times all we have to do now to make it absolutely authentic is lose a few Victorian editions and change the roofline slightly and we're now looking at the original infirmary for the sick and the chapel where religious services were carried out it's wonderful to see how the modern building looks so much like the original let's hope by end of play tomorrow we'll have enough information to picture some of the other buildings that were part of the hospital so far our latest trains trenched three close to the church has only turned up lots of gravel although we have found a bit of medieval roof time but as we approach the end of another bitterly cold day the most intriguing find has been found in Phil's trench triangle which almost you know this is not a kind of standard ring you would buy in a shop and if you look here you can see the remains it's had a kind of silvery gold coating and the color of that shrink so I think it's more of a woman's size I think to know a date though I'm gonna have to go to some books and try to find a parallel because I have never seen anything like that before don't tell me you got books on seeso trinkets well hopefully we'll find out more about this ring tomorrow but right now I'm interested in how we're doing unraveling the puzzle of different floors and walls here in trench 2 this is the trench where yesterday afternoon we thought we'd find the medieval Hospital so 24 hours later how are we doing well these flag stones aren't medieval maybe they're Tudor this wall is apparently even later than that floor as is that wall and this wall well maybe it's medieval but we don't really know fill how did you come to that conclusion or what boils down to Tony is if you've got a building and then you knock it down and you put up another building you are bound to destroy traces of the foundations of the earlier building let's say take this or here on that wall over there this floor doesn't run right up to the wall there's a gap that couldn't possibly happen if they were the same building that wall has been punched through that floor so that floor is earlier at that wall is later oh you can see where they've punched through here can you there's absolute Rokan teeth absolutely so this wall is again later than the floor this wall comes all the way along here there's a gap here this wall has been punched through by this war that's got to be earlier it might be the medieval one well tomorrow it looks like we're going to have to extend this trench even more to find out but right now everyone wants to get out of the cold and escape to the incident room or should I say the bar downstairs it's been a really tough day today have we found what we're looking for well I hadn't heard one of these archeologists tell me that anything in any of the trenches is definitely many I did know tomorrow they're gonna sharpen up their axe bright-eyed and bushy-tailed tomorrow morning we're gonna have a really good crack at finding that medieval Hospital [Music] day three at governor's green in Portsmouth where we now not only have the freezing wind to contend with the driving rain to go with it we're looking for the remains of a medieval hospital but last night I was told that virtually everything here in our best trench is probably to do with a later Tudor mansion that was built here for the governor of Portsmouth with just one day left I'm really going to be pushing to try and find a bit of the medieval hospital Nick come out from behind you Brawley what are you gonna give us today what we've got the road we don't saw that which runs that this is the road outside the precinct wall which is this wall here and why does that help us with the medieval story well that's the edge of the precinct of the medieval hospital this here is some shape or form must be the medieval boundary well that's good we've now got the wall that marked the boundary of the medieval hospital and the road that ran beside it but today I'm hoping we can identify at least one of the medieval buildings that stood inside the wall so we're widening this trench even more to help us work out which walls belong to the medieval Hall shown on this plan [Music] and if anyone can unpack the medieval archeology from all the latest stuff it's got to be filled so I've just got to keep my fingers crossed we have a fantastic picture of Portsmouth in 1545 it famously shows Henry the eighth's ship the mary-rose sinking but more interesting to us it shows the walled medieval town and our hospital situated inside this was when the military had taken over the site and was storing weapons in the church so it is actually showing a a good level of detail isn't it it really is you can see the this picture may also be showing the halt we're digging which we know was next to the kitchens that looks tall to me either a kitchen or a hall something there quite probably yes it certainly shows some quite interesting windows back on site and there's been a development up until now while we've suspected that walls in this trench may belong to the later use of this site we've had no way of dating them but John's been comparing this plan of the governor's house with the latest geophys results and he's made an important discovery look there's the trench in red look at that wall of the governor's house going through the middle that wall there is clearly cutting that floor Wow you asked us to find the medieval right you're not saying that that floor which we've been banging on about as probably a Tudor floor for the last two days it's at least pre 1580 this walls going in 1582 of the governor's house it smashes through something that's already there so that's either 16th century or earlier oh that is so bizarre so we might have had the hospital for the last two days amazing it means that in among the confusion of all this we've now established that this floor and this wall are part of a medieval building and now we've got the rest of the day to prove it's the medieval halls show on this plan and right on cue the son makes a welcome return so we shouldn't be slowed down by bad weather all of a sudden I'm feeling much happier safer Stewart he's about to experience a bit of medieval bloodletting by allowing this leech to bite into his vein in medieval times the practice of drawing out bad blood was believed to cure many illnesses most often a knife was used to cut a vein but a leech like this would also do the job although they were used less frequently you might have but this table is full of herbal medicines that would have been used as a medieval hospital herbs like rosemary and aniseed which were used for raising people's spirits and aiding digestion if your digestion wasn't working properly that would lead to illness or something like this something simple like that is a very very important medicine but what about a serious medical problem like a broken leg our osteo archaeologist Jackie McKinley has brought some bones excavated at other medieval sites this lower leg bone would normally look like this but it was fractured and ended up like this so what he's got he's actually a reduction in height of this individual of about almost 10 centimeters there which is quite a height at this hospital they could have reset the bone and then dressed the wound in bandages soaked in juice obtained by boiling the roots of a comfrey plant and that would be wrapped around the limb and there is actually an active ingredient in the juice that's been extracted that encourages bone grafts Jackie's also brought this mystery item which was found inside the skeleton of a medieval man that's what a tapeworm sigh dog have you gotten anything for that other than a pair of scissors I haven't got any very few G's here but there were herbs which would also seek to kind of vent your guts in a very violent what makes me laugh is that Stuart our patient is listening to all this apparently blithely unaware he's got a lead shut it up we need to get back to work so we're going to apply a saline solution to encourage the leech to let go of Stuart's vein the church Mick's reviewing progress and in particular trench 3 which was put in here yesterday to find these medieval buildings I was really disappointed in this trench party I really thought we'd get something of the south rains that might have gone with a church well you and me both really with backfill there because it was becoming unsafe yeah and what you've got in there is just layer upon layer of dumped gravel as you can see from this post-war photo this area was once a parade ground used by the military in the 19th century and it appears that any medieval buildings here were destroyed during the construction work I have to admit I've been more interested in the medieval story than the later history on this site but after finding out that one of the walls we've uncovered was part of the governor's mansion I'm intrigued to know a bit more about it this one shows one side of it I've got our church there and this one shows the front just before it was knocked down in 1826 looks rather nice doesn't it and it was the scene of some of the most amazing moments a few years before it was knocked down in 1814 there was a massive four-day party here to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon and we're going to Lister the people who who were here we've got the Prince Regent with the Emperor of Russia Frederick King of Prussia Marshall blue Prince laughs whoever he may be and I'm okay they all came the Duke of Wellington did turn up two days late but then perhaps me was allowed to hang on did you just say defeat of Napoleon in 1814 yeah you're thinking of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 oh there was a bit of a problem because just as they were celebrating I think he was escaping from Elba and let's do it all over again we may not have found anything belonging to the Emperor of Russia but having cleaned up the ring we found yesterday Helen believes it probably does date to the time the house was being demolished in the 19th century you can see much more clearly now what's going on I will do ever put my glasses on so in these three holes there would have been stones then you can see here there's a there's an S there's an A and the big one there isn't ah and then after that he's had a go at doing an A or an H it says Sara so I think it really is a bit of sentimental jewelry it's for a sailor's girl he's bought it he's tried to write Sara sounds quite work maybe the relationship maybe with time running out we've now stopped digging here in what was Phil's original trench it's possible that we've turned up evidence of the larder or food storehouse shown on this plan but it'll take a much longer dig to sort it out with the people who invited us here starting to crowd around the trenches all our efforts are now being focused here in trench to where we'd like to be able to prove to them that we've found the medieval Hall belonging to the hospital right now Phil's extending this excavation yet again to see if he can find the western end of the building right yeah all right now I got it at last we found what we think is another medieval wall and it's parallel to the wall we've already identified at the other end of the trench now it feels like we're getting somewhere so it's gonna be about that sort of wood it seems this medieval building didn't get update it to become part of the governor's mansion and would have gone out of use when the hospital was closed down by Henry the eighth in 1540 along with the country's monasteries and other religious institutions nor did people do though if they were used to come in here when they were ageed or infirm or sick or whatever and suddenly shut down well that was the big problem because they were literally out on the street and there's a lot of literature written in this time about the new problems faced by these people who had been looked after in hospitals and in monasteries and suddenly find themselves beggars you know going from town to town and trying to get some assistance and it became a massive social problems were there places they could stay well a lot of people start finding arm sizes what's an old house alms houses are smaller institutions it's a sheltered accommodation really which is for the deserving poor those people you know to be reputable who are perhaps elderly or disabled and they can live there till they die if we can we'd like to be able to prove when our medieval Hall was built because it may have been part of the original Hospital built in the early 13th century to do that we're digging under one of our medieval walls in the hope that we can find some pottery that will date the construction of the building that's that's got a report let's go glaze on it good man now that's what you were there for as far as I'm concerned this is the first really good piece of stratified pottery just a bit of pot but this should tell us when our building was first put out and now as we approach the end of the dig just enough time to pull all the evidence together and see if we really have found one of the earliest buildings in Portsmouth what have you got there Richard for the inside wall 21 foot fix by 50 forties that is that likely for a medieval Hall yeah that's fine yeah that's excellent that's really really really good but of course what it doesn't give us is an absolute date which is the pottery we have got two bits of pottery Tony which Duncan has not seen before come on give us an answer oh that's thirteenth-century wonderful apparently it doesn't get better than this these bits of 13th century pottery come from a vessel that would have looked like this and confirms that our building was part of the original hospital built around 1212 AD this hall was a living space and a room where food was served and maybe it's also where pilgrims sat down to eat we've untangled these two walls and the floor of the building but much more work will be needed to get the full story although the records tell us it was still standing in 1581 we now know it was demolished by the time this big wall of the governor's mansion was plunked down on top of it so although we had to correct this plan we now believe it's an accurate layout of the hospital buildings as they were when the hospital closed in the 16th century and we can now create a reconstruction to show what the site looked like at that time our medieval Hall like these other big stone buildings would have been one of the oldest in the town and hugely impressive in a world that was still largely made of wood built 300 years before the big defensive walls around the town in medieval times it occupied a prime location near the sea and would have stood out like a beacon to any pilgrim arriving at the harbor nearby at the Damas day they could give thanks for a safe passage and look forward to a bed at a free meal [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 85,737

Rating: 4.8929768 out of 5

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, time team full episodes, time team special, time team specials full episodes, tony robinson, tony robinson documentary, tony robinsons romans, tony robinson worst jobs in history, tony robinson time team, tony robinson timeline, governors green, medieval

Id: xrk6ZwBEVG4

Length: 48min 2sec (2882 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 17 2019