A thanely residence

Time Team has never had any success when it's gone searching for Saxon palaces, such as King Offa's, at Sutton, Herefordshire, in the 2000 series, or at Eastry, in Kent, in 2006. That's perhaps one reason why the team avoided the term 'palace' when the researches of landscape archaeologist Stewart Ainsworth and historian Sam Newton suggested that there had once been an important Anglo-Saxon building on the site at Hooke Court.

The term Sam Newton preferred was 'thanely residence' – which you wouldn't have found anywhere on the web before it appeared here.

A thane was a man granted land by the king, usually in return for military service, in Anglo-Saxon England, and a thanely residence was a specific kind of fortified building. At Hooke, we know from the Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, that the thane in question was the lord of the manor, Aelfric.

Sam Newton: 'We know from other references in Domesday that Aelfric was the king's thane – that is a warrior who owes special allegiance to the king. The estate at Hooke was given to him by Edward the Confessor. But what's particularly interesting is that he's still the king's thane in 1086, so his allegiance switches to William the Conqueror after the Norman invasion.'

Sam's belief that there could have been a thanely residence here, occupied by Aelfric, tied in with Stewart's research into the site. He had already discovered a nineteenth-century tithe map showing that what had been thought to be a moat surrounding Hooke Court was in large part a Victorian creation. In fact, the water-filled ditches shown on the tithe map were likely to have originated in a Saxon ditch at one end of a ridge of high ground, and would have been designed to stop anyone coming along the ridge during the Saxon period.

'There is a strong chance that there's a Saxon residence on the site somewhere,' according to Stewart, but like the Saxon palaces that Time Team has failed to find in the past, a wooden structure of this sort is very hard to locate.

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