What they found

As is so often the case with Time Team digs, the story the Team unearthed about Chris and Barbara Bradley's farm turned out to be more complicated than expected – and the remains on site much grander.

For around 400 years, the monks of Fountains Abbey ran the area as a monastic farm – a grange. This would have been no small enterprise, but part of a large-scale operation contributing not only to the immediate needs of the occupants of the abbey but to the wider economy. By the 13th century, the abbey owned vast landholdings, stretching across large areas of northern England, as far afield as Teesside and the Lake District. Much of these huge estates were given over to sheep-keeping, but the abbey granges also grew various crops and incorporated mills, tanneries, fisheries, breweries, forges and smithies – covering the whole gamut of medieval agriculture and industry. They were mainly operated not by monks but lay brothers (see Matt Williams takes up the habit), who added hugely to the wealth and property of the abbey.

By the end of the 13th century, Fountains Abbey had become one of the wealthiest monastic institutions in Britain, and some time in the 1300s it built a grand house where Chris and Barbara's farm now stands. This was rented out to someone of wealth and importance locally, and functioned as a sort of manor house, although the abbey retained ownership. In the 15th century, it is thought that the land was taken back for the direct use of the abbey, providing an impressive home for its abbot, who made his home there.

Following the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII (see Monasteries: a short history), the monastic holdings were redistributed and sold off and the existing structures eventually demolished. They were replaced by the buildings that make up Chris and Barbara Bradley's farm today. These incorporated materials from the old monastic buildings, including former windows, doorways, corbels, plinths and other stones. Part of the modern farm buildings even incorporated a large cellar from the original monastic structures. The whole site bears the signs of the upheaval that followed Henry's destruction of the monastery system, with piles of monastic debris buried just beneath the surface, and reused in field walls and so on, as well as in the new buildings themselves.

Unfortunately, the religious lettering still visible on many reused stones turned out to be too fragmented or too worn down for Time Team's experts to make sense of what it said, but they had no doubt that it came from a religious building, most likely a chapel. A possible site for a chapel was identified by geophysics towards the end of the third day. There wasn't time to excavate this, but in addition to various piles of monastic debris found in trenches such as the one Tony Robinson was keen to dig in the Bradleys' garden, Raksha Dave's trench identified the foundations of what was likely to have been a medieval dovecote – and Phil found himself digging what was most likely a garderobe, or toilet, from the abbot's grand 15th-century house.

The size and extent of the surviving walls and foundations uncovered by Phil revealed that this would have been a very grand property indeed. It was at least two storeys high and built to the standards of Fountains Abbey itself. An indication of what it might have looked like and how it would have operated in its heyday can be obtained from the King's Manor, York, which survives today as part of the University of York.

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