Windsor Castle
First screened 25 February 2008

Windsor Castle – Background

Over the August bank holiday weekend in 2006, the Big Royal Dig saw Time Team exploring the royal palaces of Holyroodhouse, in Edinburgh, Buckingham Palace, in London, and Windsor Castle, in Berkshire.

Founded by William the Conqueror, Windsor Castle is the oldest and largest inhabited castle in the world. Time Team's aims during the Big Royal Dig included attempting to unearth Edward III's round-table building, originally built to house a giant round table around which Edward planned to seat his own knights from his newly created Order of the Round Table. Documentary evidence suggested that this lay under the Queen's ceremonial lawn in the Upper Ward at Windsor, but it had never been firmly located or excavated.

For Chris Gaffney, who carried out a detailed geophysics survey of the Upper Ward prior to the excavations, there was never any doubt about where to look. A 'lovely circular anomaly' that showed up on the ground-penetrating radar survey gave the diggers a clear target to aim for. This was where the surrounding wall of the building once stood; and although it was deeper than expected, at about two metres below the present-day surface, the 'robber trench' where its foundations once stood was clearly identifiable. At about 2.5 metres wide, it was more than big enough to have supported a huge structure. It had been infilled with all manner of building rubble, but amidst all the debris some fragments of 14th-century pottery provided dating evidence from the right period.

The scale of the structure also matched contemporary accounts. The historians researching these documents thought that the references to it being 200 feet in diameter – bigger than the Pantheon in Rome – might have been a mistake or an exaggeration. But the geophysics survey and the excavations left no doubt: it had indeed been a massive construction, easily capable of accommodating the 300 knights it was designed for.

The discovery of the round-table site is one of national significance. For this programme, Time Team assembled what it had found and brought together the various documentary evidence and experts to paint a picture of the 14th-century Real Knights of the Round Table.

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