The manor that's back to front

For the first programme of the 2005 series, Tony Robinson and the team visited Chenies Manor, following in the footsteps of Henry VIII.

In around 1530, Henry's visit to the medieval manor prompted a major upgrade of the buildings. A 1585 inventory lists a whole range of rooms and buildings fit for a king. But many of these rooms seem to have disappeared and the surviving building simply isn't large enough to accommodate the king and his entourage, which would have numbered up to 1,000 people.

Royal visits during the Tudor era could last for months and were often hugely expensive for the hosts. There is documentary evidence that Henry VIII, with two of his wives, and then Elizabeth I stayed at Chenies on several occasions. Two fine wings do survive, which are late medieval and early Tudor. The house contains a long gallery, typical of those built by important courtiers in the 1520-30s to provide suitably majestic surroundings. But most of the original Tudor building fell into disrepair after its glory days in the 16th century, and was gradually demolished.

There's an assumption that this would have been a classic four-sided house around a courtyard. But is that right? From the outset of the investigation, Time Team's experts are finding it hard to agree, and some big surprises lie in store for the team and the owners of this beautiful house.

As usual, Time Team had just three days to solve the mystery, and work out what the house would have looked like when Henry VIII stayed there.

Time Trail

Chenies is only one of several great Tudor houses visited by Henry VIII at which Time Team has carried out excavations. In the 2001 series, for example, the team was invited by the owners of the modern Rycote Park, in Oxfordshire, to try to find the remains of the grand country house where Henry spent his honeymoon with his fifth wife, Katherine Howard. And in the 2003 series, the team went in search of Henry's armoury and tiltyard at Greenwich Palace in London.

Although Greenwich wasn't one of Time Team's more productive digs in terms of finds, with the help of a detailed search of historical documents it did prove possible to locate both the armoury and the tiltyard and its associated banqueting hall and other buildings. The programme also featured a reconstruction cameo involving the skilled armourer Emrys (he only uses a first name), also known as Master M. He made a breastplate for Tony Robinson, offering a glimpse of what Henry VIII's armourers would have been producing on the site. (See also Armour through the ages.)

Henry's reign marked a period of immense building activity in England, during which many great country houses were built or extended often to accommodate the monarch and his huge entourage as he travelled around his kingdom. The fashion for what the architectural historian Sir John Summerson called 'prodigious' houses was started by Henry VII, whose vast new palace at Richmond was completed in 1501, accelerated under Henry VIII and reached its height in the Elizabethan era with the development of such magnificent country palaces as Burghley, Longleat and Hardwick Hall ('more glass than wall'). These prodigy houses are to the Tudor period what castles and churches were to the medieval.

The construction of such large and extravagant houses reveals the great wealth in private hands during the Tudor period. This was massively increased as a result of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in the mid-1530s. Properties formerly held by the church were seized by Henry and sold off to his nobles and the gentry. Although no signs of former monastic buildings were found by Time Team at Chenies, Mick Aston believes it is possible that there may have been a monastery on the site prior to Henry's reign.

Time Trial

Test your knowledge of Tudor archaeology with our quick quiz. You'll find all the answers by digging around in this week's pages and following our Time Trail for the Chenies programme.

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