[ News
| Homes
| Life
| Entertainment
| History
| Science
| Community
| Shop ]
| Sport
| Culture
| Cars
| Money
| Broadband
| Learning
| Health
| Dating
| Games ]
[ Text Only: Homepage ]
[ Graphical: Channel4 Homepage ]
[ Time Team Home | Return to programme index ]
For this programme, the first in the 2006 series, Time Team visited Glendon Hall in Northamptonshire, where local resident Martin Hipwell had uncovered a skeleton while building his mother a new house. Not just one skeleton, in fact, but a number of them, which appeared in an apparently regular sequence as he dug the foundations for his mother's new home.
So what were they doing in outbuildings of a four-centuries-old English country house? And why did no one know they were there? As usual, Time Team had just three days to find out.
Friends in the south
Glendon Hall is a patchwork of different styles and phases of architecture dating back to the 17th century. Martin Hipwell's family live in the stable block, overlooking the Victorian workshop where he discovered the bodies. His family gave the burials the nickname 'our friends in the south'.
Time Team's experts for the programme included Jacqueline (Jackie) McKinley, an osteoarchaeologist from Wessex Archaeology, and historic buildings consultant Richard Morriss. New Time Team regular Helen Geake worked with them on historical research, together with the rest of the Team, old and new.
It became clear early on, as a result of the regular layout of the graves and their east-west alignment that this was a Christian cemetery, almost certainly attached to the medieval church of St Helen at Glendon. A garden folly in the grounds of Glendon Hall and some beautiful painted glass windows inside were believed to come from the old church. The windows predated stained glass decoration techniques, using just two colours, yellow and black and represented 'top notch quality' work by 'top of the range Flemish glaziers', according to Richard Morriss, who dated them to 1563. The date posed something of a puzzle because the religious iconography they contained would have been frowned upon in the Protestant England of Elizabeth I.
Exploring historical documents, Helen Geake found the first reference to the church dated from 1254, with others going through to 1812. It was always fairly small: 'consists of body and chancel', as one description from the 1720s put it, and after the disappearance of the village of Glendon in 1514, it became a private chapel for the owners of Glendon Hall. Along with many others during this period, the village was destroyed, and its 62 occupants evicted, in that year to make way for the new hall and sheep pasture (see Britain's lost villages). According to the 1517 'Domesday of Inclosure', one Robert Mallory held part of the manor and had 12 houses, of which he swept away nine for enclosure for sheep farming.
Finding any trace of either the church or the old village of Glendon proved difficult. A series of rectangular platforms lining the ancient 'holloway' (literally a 'hollow way' or sunken road) through the site seemed an obvious location for the former houses of Glendon's peasant farmers. But excavation found no evidence of domestic habitation, and it was concluded that these were more likely to have been the sites of cattle pens and barns. The site of the village itself, it was thought by the end of the three days digging, was probably located underneath the hall.
The church, likewise, proved elusive. The boundaries of the cemetery were identified with a high degree of confidence after more than 40 burials on at least five different levels were excavated (see Dem bones, dem bones). But physical evidence of the church was limited to a short stretch of possible 'robbed-out' wall (with all of its stones removed) and one possible foundation stone. The rest, it was decided, most probably lay underneath the outbuilding used by Time Team as its incident room. A 'spire' featuring in an early drawing of the hall was thought to have been a garden folly.
As with many sites when they come to be excavated, that at Glendon did not tell a single, simple story. As well as the burials and medieval pottery and other finds, including locally made Lyveden ware (see Lyveden New Bield), other discoveries made during Time Team's dig included evidence of both Saxon and Roman occupation. Indeed, the most beautiful find of the whole dig was contained in a Roman cremation burial, which analysis showed to be that of a mid-teenage girl. A well-preserved glass vessel was found alongside a pottery urn, inside which was found to be another vessel, finely made from glass no thicker than that in a light bulb.
Watched the programme, browsed the web pages? Now try our quick quiz to see how you get on.
The old village of Glendon was demolished and its 62 inhabitants evicted in 1514 to make way for the new hall. What was the former farmland mainly used for?
Sheep farming
Parkland
A new road
What happened to the former parish church of Glendon when the occupants of the village were evicted?
It was demolished
It became a private chapel
It became a garden feature
How many deserted medieval villages are known in England?
300
3,000
30,000
Why were Time Team's experts surprised to learn that fine Flemish painted glass, decorated with religious iconography, had been installed in the church at Glendon during the 1560s?
It was frowned upon in Protestant England
It was too expensive for such a site
It had never been found in England before
Which of the following sets of crops would the medieval farmers of Glendon not have grown in a typical three-field rotation system?
Wheat, barley and peas
Wheat, barley and potatoes
Rye, oats and lentils
What would medieval peasants almost certainly never have seen that Time Team found at Glendon Hall?
A tractor wheel
Iron tools
Roman glassware
Answers here.
Nothing quite captures the enthusiasm of a Time Team audience like the discovery of human bones. Just as visitor numbers at the Egyptian galleries of the British Museum and similar exhibitions are highest around the displays of mummies, so too there's nothing like the uncovering of a well-preserved burial – preferably with some kind of mystery attached – to boost the viewing figures of a Time Team programme.
This isn't just a ghoulish fascination with corpses and death. Most people connected with Time Team believe that it represents a sense of connection with our ancestors. The interest shown by fans of the programme is almost invariably respectful, even reverential.
Certainly that's the attitude of those whose job it is to excavate any human bones and burials that are discovered in the course of a Time Team dig. 'It doesn't matter how decayed they are, or how little is left when we come to dig them up,' says Phil Harding. You can't get away from the fact that these remains used to be a living person, and you're always touched by that thought at some point.'
At Glendon Hall, one of the skeletons excavated by Time Team's burials expert, osteoarchaeologist Jacqueline McKinley, was the tiny pelvis of a baby. It had probably been born prematurely and survived only briefly – a reflection of the hard lives and high infant mortality rate experienced during the medieval era.
According to Jackie: 'You can find indicators of the hard lives these people led in the bones we excavated.' In one skeleton, not untypical, she found evidence of extremely bad dental abscesses, which would have been both very painful and given the sufferer foul-smelling breath; sinusitis, again extremely painful for the sufferer, indicated by the existence of very fine-woven new bone in the sinuses; and severe age-related wear and tear in the spine, revealed by the presence of osteophytes (new bone growth around edge of vertebrae) and the result of a life of very hard labour.
In all, the Team uncovered at least five layers of burials in the medieval cemetery at Glendon, representing the remains of more than 40 individuals. They were almost certainly all ordinary peasants who lived in the lost medieval village of Glendon. In common with so many others, the village was destroyed, and its 62 occupants evicted, in 1514 to make way for sheep farming.
The details of those who were buried in its graveyard were lost to history, and today no names can be attached to the remains unearthed by Time Team – an anonymous fate that was avoided by the occupants of another cemetery, still well-tended on the other side of Glendon Hall. This is the pets cemetery kept by the owners of the hall since Victorian times – the same people whose outbuildings unceremoniously cut through some of the human graves excavated by Time Team. Some bones are simply accorded more respect than others.
Ten miles or so to the north east of Glendon Hall, near Oundle, stands Lyveden New Bield, an Elizabethan lodge and moated garden, now owned by the National Trust. As at Glendon Hall, the surrounding land was used from the late 15th century onwards for sheep pasture. The former villages were emptied of their occupants and at the heart of the estate a lodge and garden, competing with the finest in the country, was laid out. Unlike Glendon Hall, however, which was added to and altered over the centuries, Lyveden New Bield was virtually abandoned after the death of its owner, Sir Thomas Tresham, in 1605. Visitors to the estate today can see the empty shell of the building and its gardens more or less as they were left four centuries ago.
Up to that point, the history of Lyveden New Bield would have been similar to that of Glendon. The discovery of Roman artefacts and the excavation of a Roman temple show that, as at Glendon, where Time Team found Roman pottery and a cremation burial with fine Roman glassware, there was a Roman presence in the area from around 100 AD. The Saxons, too, settled here, as they did at Glendon.
The Lyveden valley, with its swift-flowing stream and iron-rich clay soil, also provided the essentials for two important local industries. Iron smelting is known to have developed here from at least the 11th century, and from the 12th century onwards the valley was the base for a medieval pottery industry that exported its products throughout Northamptonshire and eastern England. Some of this 'Lyveden ware' was found during Time Team's excavations at Glendon Hall (see picture).
At the height of the valley's prosperity, during the 13th and 14th centuries, the villages of Potters Lyveden (the name tells its own story), Magna Lyveden, Great Lyveden and Little Lyveden grew up along the valley bottom. By 1400, they had a total population of more than 200.
In 1328, a licence was granted to Robert de Wyville, the Bishop of Salisbury, to enclose part of the land for a deer park. The rest was given over to a typical medieval three-field system of crop rotation, with one field being left fallow each year. Documents from 1388 refer to 64 acres sown with wheat, barley and peas, while oxen, pigs and 48 cattle are also listed along with five sheep.
By 1597, the number of sheep totalled 6,000 and all of the Lyveden villages and their occupants had gone. The archaeological evidence shows that they had survived until well into the late 15th century, but 50 years later, under the ownership of the Tresham family, they had almost disappeared. By the mid-1540s, the Treshams turned 120 acres of woodland, 250 acres of pasture and 50 acres of meadow into parkland. The depopulation of the valley was completed during the rest of the century as the Treshams moved into sheep farming on a large scale.
It was the same process that took place at Glendon, where it had occurred a little earlier at the beginning of the 16h century.
For details on visiting this property, see the National Trust website for Lyveden New Bield.
Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third-party sites.
Behind the scenes with series editor Michael Douglas
Series editor Michael Douglas ('Doug' as he's known to everyone connected with the programme – or should that be 'Dug'?) has a long history with Time Team. He is still a regular director of individual programmes; he directed those at Applecross, near Skye, and Alfoldean, in Sussex, in the 2006 series, for example.
But in his role as series editor his job is all about coordinating the Time Team season as a whole. Each programme uses different directors, so Doug's job is to make sure that the series comes together with that clear common identity that we all recognise as belonging to Time Team. Here he lets us in on his impression of the Glendon programme.
Finding lots of bodies must have created a few headaches for the production. Do you have to change your approach to the programme when you're dealing with human remains?
Obviously dealing with bodies does change your approach to a site. We have to apply for a Home Office licence and follow specific rules about keeping the bodies from the view of the general public, and of course we have to treat them with all due care and respect. In terms of causing headaches for the production we suspected they were there and Emily Boultingg, the director, took that into consideration when scheduling her shoot.
You can't rush the lifting of human remains. They must be painstakingly cleaned up and recorded and that can take a lot of time. So the dig effectively had to be split between the archaeologists working on the bodies – which lasted for the full three days of the shoot – and the other diggers looking for evidence of the medieval church and village. That meant at times our resources were stretched but you've just got to get on with it – we had to stop and reach a conclusion by the end of day three.
What was the most interesting part of the programme for you?
It was singularly failing to find a church we knew to have stood there. There were ecclesiastical artefacts everywhere, we were in the middle of the graveyard and for three days we just couldn't lock down the location of the church – until, of course, Phil and Jaqui McKinley possibly stumbled across it at the end of the dig. Trying to find the village pushed our patience to the limit as well.
When so much evidence is coming out of the ground there must be any number of stories that you could build around a site. How do you work with the director in refining the story?
The director has an idea of how they would like the story to evolve before the shoot and a script is written around that model. But we all know that as soon as the first trench is opened the script goes out of the window. A script's main purpose is to help us to structure the shooting schedule and to make sure we understand what the archaeology may tell us about the place we're digging.
Once the dig starts it gets a bit more interesting. Mick and Tim take a real hands-on approach to running the archaeology and maximising the information we get out of the ground. The director will be taking all this on board and trying to alter the shooting schedule to accommodate new information coming from the trenches or the inevitable changes in story that the archaeology presents.
The director has to take in all this information from experts, archaeologists, three camera crews, surveyors and what not, and basically continually re-write the script in their head. It's a real skill to be able to take all that information on board and still do your 'day job' of directing a camera crew. [Shoot directors are also in charge of running one of the three camera crews on location. Two producers run the other crews and report back to the director.]
My job as series editor on location is really to be an extra pair of eyes on site and to try to make sure that among this constant onslaught of information the director is getting the best story.
Did anything unusual happen at Glendon?
Yes, a breathtaking find [of a cremation burial and fine glass grave goods] that would have been the highlight of any Roman dig – except we were in hot pursuit of a medieval church and village. But that's Time Team for you…
Deserted villages
The Lost Villages of England by Maurice Beresford (Sutton Publishing, 1998)
Still the 'classic' on deserted villages in England, by one of the leading figures in the post-second world war research into DMVs (deserted medieval villages).
The Making of the English Landscape by William Hoskins (Hodder & Stoughton, 1988)
Another classic', by the second professor who led the postwar research into DMVs.
Deserted Villages by T Rowley and J Wood (Shire, 1995) paperback £4.99
Explains why sites have been deserted, what a site might look like today and procedures for recording them. Also lists some good examples of sites to visit.
The English Heritage Book of Wharram Percy, Deserted Medieval Village by M Beresford and J G Hurst (Batsford/English Heritage, 1990)
Overview of research into Britain's most-studied DMV, Wharram Percy in Yorkshire.
Villages in the Landscape by Trevor Rowley (Orion, 1994) paperback £6.99
Examines the role of villages in England from prehistory to the present day. Includes tips for finding out more about past villages and helpful guidelines for practical fieldwork.
Everyday Life in Medieval England by Christopher Dyer (Hambledon, 1994) hardback £35
The villages may have become deserted and buried, but this book brings their inhabitants back to life. Topics range from freshwater fishing to rural violence, and the author examines deep social processes as well as everyday living.
Human bones
The Archaeology of Human Bones by Simon Mays (Routledge, 1998) paperback £26.99
This book provides a detailed account of the forensic analysis of human skeletal remains and its application in tackling major historical and archaeological issues. The book starts with an introduction to the anatomy, structure and development of bones and teeth and discusses what can be learned about ancient burial rituals from human remains. Subsequent chapters focus on the demographic analysis of ancient populations, normal skeletal variation, ancient disease and injury, the chemical analysis of bone, the study of DNA, and the study of cremated remains. Examples are taken from archaeological studies around the world.
Written in Bones: How human remains unlock the secrets of the dead edited by Paul Bahn (David & Charles, 2003)
Well-illustrated book drawing on numerous case studies dating from a few hundred to 1.5 million years ago. Subjects covered include natural and deliberate deaths, burials, mummies and mummification. Each case study illuminates the methods by which the secrets of the dead have been revealed by forensic science.
Human Bones in Archaeology by Ann Stirland (Shire Archaeology, 1999) paperback £5.99
Basic (64-page) introduction to the subject from the popular Shire Archaeology series.
Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third-party sites.
Burials and bones
Spoilheap
www.spoilheap.co.uk
Useful website, with information about British archaeology, pottery and other ceramics, burial archaeology and human skeletal remains. The website contains well-presented information about burial archaeology and human bones. Why excavate human bones? What can we learn from studying them? These and other questions are answered, along with introductions to palaeopathology and different techniques of ageing, sexing and otherwise analysing bones. The section on burial archaeology deals with burial practices by period, the legal aspects of burial archaeology, archaeological techniques, and interpretation and conclusions. Good bibliographies are also provided.
Forensic Archaeology and Human Skeletal Archaeology
http://archaeology.about.com/cs/forensic/
Forensic archaeology is about applying archaeological methods to the investigation of crime. The methods used by archaeologists in excavating human remains from the distant past are now widely recognised and adopted by law-enforcement officers (including human-rights investigators) investigating more recent murders and other crimes. The Forensic Archaeology website offers some of the best all-round information on forensic archaeology on the web, with detailed information on bone pathology, taphonomy, geophysics, odontology and environmental archaeology. Promised soon are pages on university courses and the law. Also contains an excellent set of links to related websites.
Deserted villages
Wharram Percy: The Lost Medieval Village
http://loki.stockton.edu/~ken/wharram/begin.htm
This website tells the story of a deserted Yorkshire village, which was the subject of archaeological digs every summer for 40 years. It was once thought that medieval villages were 'deserted' due to the effects of the Black Death in 1349. Research at Wharram Percy (and a few other villages), however, has shown that there are more than 3,000 such villages in England and that most of them were depopulated as a result of economic forces in the 15th century. The Wharram Project, which began in 1950, has shown that many of these sites were inhabited for centuries before the Middle Ages. The evidence gathered at Wharram Percy has added immensely to our knowledge of English medieval peasant life.
For links to other websites, either on archaeology generally or specific to the periods and subjects covered in the programme, see our extensive section on Archaeology websites.
The old village of Glendon was demolished and its 62 inhabitants evicted in 1514 to make way for the new hall. What was the former farmland mainly used for?
Sheep farming
What happened to the former parish church of Glendon when the occupants of the village were evicted?
It became a private chapel
How many deserted medieval villages are known in England?
3,000
Why were Time Team's experts surprised to learn that fine Flemish painted glass, decorated with religious iconography, had been installed in the church at Glendon during the 1560s?
It was frowned upon in Protestant England
Which of the following sets of crops would the medieval farmers of Glendon not have grown in a typical three-field rotation system?
Wheat, barley and potatoes
What would medieval peasants almost certainly never have seen that Time Team found at Glendon Hall?
Roman glassware