Towcester, Northamptonshire
First screened 27 January 2008

What they found

Time Team's search for the lost Cistercian priory of Sewardsley turned out to be more successful than anyone imagined. Although it was clear that the priory had once stood somewhere on the site now occupied by the Coleclough family's Victorian home, it was far from certain where exactly – and it was possible that subsequent rebuilding and landscaping had obliterated many of the original structures, or that they were located underneath the Colecloughs' house.

Nor was the search as straightforward as it might have been if it had been a monastery inhabited by monks rather than a nunnery. While monasteries follow a regular, predictable architectural design – making it possible to identify the location of different elements in the structure from a very small amount of information – the same is not always true with nunneries, which can be much more varied.

'With monks the buildings tend to be very regular,' says Mick Aston, one of whose great passions is medieval monasteries. 'There's a church; an east range with the chapter house and dormitory above; a cloister positioned to the south of church; a south range with a refectory; and the west range sealing the cloister. Nunneries are often much poorer and smaller – perhaps 12 nuns compared with say 80 monks – so everything is on a much smaller scale.'

The priory
In fact, in the case of Sewardsley, the structure did turn out to follow a fairly typical, regular pattern. So Time Team was able to construct a plan of the whole priory without needing to put in more than a few trenches. What they found was the priory church, about 90 feet by 20 feet in size (it had been extended from the usual 80 feet), and the cloister, measuring about 45 x 45 feet. The excavations revealed both the external walls of the east range and one of the south range, together with a return wall in the cloister at the corner of the west range.

Among the finds at Sewardsley were some striking floor tiles decorated with images of a dog and others decorated with a flower. There was also an interesting primary assemblage of pottery, discovered where it had been dropped and broken, that consisted of a large proportion of jug sherds. This led Time Team's pottery expert Paul Blinkhorn to speculate that these had been dropped by thirsty workmen during the construction of the church.

The graves
Outside where the priory buildings would have stood, at the east end of the church, the Team also investigated four grave slabs, which were initially thought to have been an antiquarian garden feature. In fact, they turned out to be in situ graves, complete with the remains of the people who had been buried in them.

Two of these were of particular interest. These had not been cut together but were finished off together, suggesting that their occupants were connected in some way. There were even possible candidates for the people buried there: Robert and Joanna de Pavely, who were joint patrons of the nunnery in the late 13th century.

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