The monastery and the mansion

For this programme, the second in the 2005 series, Time Team visited the village of Nether Poppleton, near York. The local residents were itching to know more about the place where they live. Mysterious earthworks cover a field around their church and the locals have bought the land to protect it from development. But what do these earthworks represent?

Most of the houses in Nether Poppleton date from the 18th century or later, and yet the village seems to follow a standard planned medieval layout common throughout Yorkshire. There is also a reference in the Domesday Book to the village as the land of St Everilda. Did this Anglo-Saxon saint have her nunnery here?

Using the enthusiasm of the village residents to the full, on the first day Time Team recruited 50 of them to dig test pits in their own gardens, while Phil Harding and his team tackled the site around the church. In the light of the reference to St Everilda, the Team – and Mick Aston in particular – was especially interested in whether the Norman church was built on the site of an earlier Anglo-Saxon building.

Was the village originally Saxon, Norman or medieval? With Time Team's help, the people of Poppleton were on a mission to find out for themselves.

Time Trail

The sort of dig carried out at Nether Poppleton is what Time Team likes doing best. Not only did Mick Aston get to go in search of his favourite archaeological subject – a monastery – but the whole project involved the local community from start to finish.

Although it can be very hard work, the Team members enjoy nothing better than working with local people to find out about the place in which they live. Mick describes the interaction with locals as 'the most important thing about Time Team'.

At the dig in Raunds, Northamptonshire, for the 2003 series, for example, where Time Team excavated a Saxon cemetery under a garden fishpond, he said, 'The reason I got involved with this whole business in the first place was because I wanted to get more people interested.'

Series producer Tim Taylor describes this sort of 'back-garden archaeology' as 'what Time Team's all about'. It's what led to the Time Team Big Dig in 2003, when thousands of people around the country dug one-metre-square test pits in their gardens in the biggest archaeological participation project the country has ever seen. The Nether Poppleton programme saw the same principles put into practice on a smaller, more localised level.

For anyone interested in what's involved in digging a test pit and what finds to look out for, Phil's guide to digging and the Time Team Big Dig website's Guide to finds will be of interest. If you decide to dig one in your own garden, don't forget to call in archaeological experts if you find anything of interest!

The focus of the dig at Nether Poppleton was the search for any evidence of a Saxon church or monastic settlement predating the existing Norman church. Surprisingly, given Mick Aston's special interest in the subject, Time Team has carried out only a handful of digs at monastic sites. These include:

Syon House, west London, for the 2004 series, where the Team went in search of a Brigittine abbey that was once one of the richest in the land; and

Chicksands, Bedfordshire, for the 2002 series, now a disused RAF bomber base but once home to a monastery occupied by the Gilbertines, an order best known for its unusual practice of having both monks and nuns on the same site.

The first monasteries in the British Isles were in Ireland, from where they were spreading to Scotland, Wales and England even before the arrival of St Patrick around 433 AD. Later Irish monks followed his example in spreading the monastic life, including St Colomba at Iona (563 AD) and St Aidan at Lindisfarne (635 AD) in Northumbria. Among the lasting accomplishments of these Celtic monasteries were beautiful illuminated manuscripts, bibles and prayer books, such as the famous Lindisfarne Gospels.

When St Augustine came to England to spread the Christian message in 597 AD, he established a Benedictine monastery at Canterbury. The Anglo-Saxon monasteries established after his arrival became famous throughout Europe as centres of knowledge and learning. The best-known of them include Glastonbury and Jarrow, where the Venerable Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation.

Monastic life reached its peak in the medieval era. At its height, there were more than 500 different monasteries in Britain, with the biggest – such as Fountains or Rievaulx abbeys – accommodating up to 1,000 monks at a time. The Black Death of 1348, however, hit many monasteries hard and large numbers never recovered. So they were already in relative decline by the time Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church over the Pope's refusal to grant him a divorce. Their immense lands and wealth were confiscated and distributed to Henry's supporters after he dissolved the monasteries in the 1530s.

For further information, see Monasteries: a short history.

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