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The Island of the Eels
Digging deep into old Ely
17 May 2001
Repeated 29 April 2002
For six months in the latter half of 2000, Time Team followed an excavation in Ely, Cambridgeshire, for a special 90-minute documentary. The excavation, carried out by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, covered a strip of land the size of two football pitches, running down to the river Ouse from Broad Street in the centre of the town. It revealed a remarkable picture of Ely in past centuries: channels where boats used to moor to load and unload goods; a medieval kiln with huge quantities of high-quality pottery finds; and a series of buildings from different periods fronting the road at Broad Street. What could the dig tell us about the history of the 'island of the eels'? And how far back could it trace the origins of this cathedral city?
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Quiz
Monasteries (but perhaps not monasticism) are among Mick Aston's personal passions. How many of these questions can you answer in our challenging quiz?
VR gallery
Take a virtual trip around the excavation with our 360-degree panoramic VR clips.
Photo gallery
Photos from the dig.
The 'island of the eels'
Ely, in the Cambridgeshire fens, is today the second smallest city in Britain. But its magnificent cathedral gives an indication of a rather grander past. Over the years it has played host to such notable characters as St Etheldreda, King Canute, Hereward the Wake (who made his last stand here against William the Conqueror), Oliver Cromwell – and Reg Dixon.
Located on what was once virtually an island, surrounded by marshland and readily accessible only by river, the city gets its name from the eels that were found in abundance in its waters. At the time of the Domesday survey, in 1087, for example, it was recorded that 52,000 eels were caught in the river Ouse in one year. Later documents record many thousands of eels being supplied to the monarch and other wealthy customers in London and elsewhere.
The name Ely means either 'island of the eels' or 'the region of the eels', according to Bede, writing around 720. 'Ely lies in the province of the East Angles, an area of about 600 hides,' he wrote. (A hide is 120 acres.) 'As I have said, it resembles an island surrounded by water and marshes and it derives its name from the vast quantity of eels that are caught in the marshes.'
Early history
The earliest documentary records for the excavation site date from 1250, while Ely's famous cathedral is Norman (work on it began in 1083). But Ely was already a thriving settlement several centuries earlier, as Bede's description would suggest.
The Saxon princess, Etheldreda (later St Etheldreda), first established a monastery on the island in 673, when its location between the kingdoms of Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia gave it a strategic as well as religious importance. Its remoteness and difficulty of access were to make it a favoured stronghold in various conflicts over the years. As well as being the location of Hereward's last stand against the Normans in 1070-71, for example, it was also a centre for revolt during the Anarchy in 1140. By the time Oliver Cromwell inherited a large estate in Ely in 1636, it had long been a rich and thriving city.
The excavation 'battlefield'
The site on which the excavation took place was a 180 x 25-metre strip of land between the river Ouse and the cathedral precinct. Formerly an industrial area, occupied most recently by a Jewson's timber yard, the land was originally sold for a new housing development, but following a public outcry it was bought back by the local council. It was agreed to use it instead as a public open space, which will reconnect the cathedral with the river for the first time since the medieval period.
The land itself was heavily contaminated, with creosote from the timber yard and various metals and pollutants from other past industrial activities. This meant that the archaeologists and visitors to the site, including Time Team crew members, were all required to don white all-over body suits while working on some parts of it. As the autumn rains poured down and the diggers did battle with an already high water table, however, the pristine white of the suits soon gave way to a muddy brown.
The chairman of the council's Broad Street Working Party, Councillor Jack Waterfall, had what seemed like an appropriate name in the circumstances. He commented at the end of the dig: 'The archaeologists deserve great praise for the professional way they carried out difficult excavations in often appalling conditions, when the wet weather made the site like a World War I battlefield and they had to work in water up to their thighs.'
How deep?
One of the big questions of the excavation – for Time Team and the Cambridge Archaeological Unit – was how deep the dig could take us into Ely's past. In particular, it was hoped that it might uncover evidence of Saxon occupation.
St Etheldreda's monastery was destroyed by the Danes in the 10th century and was refounded as a Benedictine community in 970. It was known that the Benedictine monastery at Ely was one of the very richest in the country, and that Ely was a much more important centre in the medieval period than it is today (hence the size of its cathedral). But could it also have been an important centre before the Norman Conquest?
The sheer size of the excavation site meant that in order to keep the excavation manageable it was divided into three zones. The first of these, Zone A, bordering on Broad Street, was generally agreed to be the most likely to produce evidence of Saxon settlement.
Zone A: back to the Saxon
The area fronting Broad Street turned out to have had a series of buildings on it from different periods. A 1933 photograph showed three cottages, and among the first archaeology to be uncovered was a well-preserved 16th-century bread oven at the back of these cottages.
Underneath what remained of these were earlier buildings, including a large aisled hall constructed around 1280. Beneath that was what Tony Robinson described as a 'forest' of huge post holes relating to another aisled hall on a different alignment. This was the earliest-known building in this part of Ely and would have dated to when Broad Street was no more than a cart track. Since the size and number of the post holes matched those of the later hall, it was thought that this earlier hall might have been dismantled and rebuilt on the different alignment when Broad Street was first laid out as part of a speculative development by the monastery.
The archaeology on this part of the site proved to be so interesting that a short extension was agreed, so that the excavation continued for a few more weeks. Then, just three days from the final deadline, came the discovery that everyone had been hoping for. A number of ditches were found, which could be dated to around 725 from a couple of pieces of Saxon Ipswich ware found in situ.
The discovery of the ditches – marking out boundaries between properties in the mid-Saxon period – helps to fill in the map of Saxon Ely. It now seems that the Saxon settlement was much bigger than had once been thought, extending about two kilometres from west to east. It must now be thought of as one of the bigger Saxon settlements in the country, according to the experts.
Zone B: the bishop's kiln?
The second excavation area, Zone B, was concentrated on a medieval kiln – the first to be discovered in Ely. This was built on top of a huge pit filled with pottery fragments and other waste. The area around the kiln, dated by archaeo-magnetronomy readings to 1510–90, turned up huge quantities of very high-quality pottery. Altogether, in fact, the excavation produced no fewer than 63 dustbin liners full of pottery pieces, including some never previously associated with Ely.
Time Team's pottery and kiln reconstruction expert, John Hudson, said that the finds uncovered here included handmade pottery at its very best – fit, indeed, for the bishop's table. They showed a strong Flemish influence and appeared all to be the work of one man. Could the potter who made them have come to Ely from the Netherlands?
Zone C: tales of the riverbank
In Zone C, the furthest away from Broad Street by the river Ouse, three channels were discovered cut at right angles to the river – presumably wharves used as moorings for boats loading and unloading goods, with docks at the end where repairs could be carried out. The waterlogged conditions meant that the various finds uncovered here were excellently preserved. Dating evidence showed that the channels had been dug some time after 1400 and filled in with barrowloads of pottery waste after 1600.
The finds included various timbers from boats and a 400-year-old wickerwork buffer, still in place where it would have protected vessels banging against the wharf wall. There were also some remarkable leather finds, which looked almost as they would have done when new after they had been cleaned. These included pieces of 16th-century shoes and two decorated leather scabbards, dating from around the end of the 13th century.
Archaeo-magnetronomy: how it works
Time Team brought in a new expert, Mark Noel, to carry out a process known as archaeo-magnetic dating to try to find out when the kiln in Zone B was fired for the last time. Because the position of magnetic north changes over time, it's possible to use a magnetometer to read the magnetic information locked in the brick and plot it against other known magnetic readings to work out when the kiln was fired for the last time.
Mark Noel describes how the process works: 'The principle behind using archaeo-magnetronomy to try to date the kiln is that we know that the earth's magnetic field changes direction over time. We also know that there are minerals in the brick material called magnetite. This has a weak magnetism that would have been reset when the kiln was last heated and cooled. So we can take samples from the structure, measure the direction of their magnetism in the laboratory, compare this with the direction of the earth's magnetic field in the past, and – hey presto – we arrive at somewhere between 1510 and 1590 as the firing date.'
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