Lincoln's Inn, London
First screened 8 March 2009

What they found

Lincoln's Inn in London is one of the capital's four 'inns of court', the oldest and most distinguished law societies in the world, which have had a key role in training and governing every barrister in England and Wales for hundreds of years. Generations of lawyers have lived and worked inside its walls, where the oldest standing buildings on the site go back to the Tudor period. Time Team's incident room for the programme dates to 1489, during the reign of Henry VII.

Under the variety of Grade I listed buildings from different periods that cluster together on the site, however, lie some even earlier structures. In particular, a grand medieval town house is known to have been built here in the 13th century by Henry III's Lord Chancellor, Ralph Neville, Bishop of Chichester. The establishment of this house helped to transform the area, then a relatively undeveloped suburb on the outskirts of London, into the important legal centre it is today. Functioning as the headquarters for the Lord Chancellor's legal team as well as his home when he was in London, there would have been a great hall, chapel, lodgings, kitchen, stables and possibly other ancillary buildings.

Excavation problems
The problem for Time Team in trying to locate any remains was that there are only a few areas within Lincoln's Inn where any excavation can take place. As well as it not being possible to dig under the other historic buildings, the presence of an equally historic, huge London plane tree in the middle of the main open area precluded any excavation that would threaten its root system. As if that wasn't enough, a large Victorian building was built in the same courtyard in 1841 to provide a temporary home for the royal courts after they burnt down in 1834. It was possible that this had obliterated all trace of Ralph Neville's London palace.

And so it seemed for much of the three days. The first trench in the courtyard area turned up only the foundations of the 1841 building and modern water pipes and drains. Another trench in the Lincoln's Inn herb garden produced nothing from the medieval period – although it did produce some interesting later finds, including a number of Victorian wig rollers.

In search of Saxon London
The result was that Hedley Swain, London archaeologist and site director for this dig, focused the attention of many of the diggers outside the wall of Lincoln's Inn itself and onto the adjacent Lincoln's Inn Fields. Hedley's primary interest was to try to find evidence of Saxon occupation on the Fields, whose western end marks the eastern boundary of the known settlement of Middle Saxon Lundenwic. As the biggest public square in central London, lawyers and others fought for hundreds of years to keep Lincoln's Inn Fields free from development, so the hope was that untouched archaeology could be found beneath the surface. So while Phil Harding and others were left to continue with the search for Ralph Neville's palace, the rest of the Team opened two trenches on the Fields. 'It was too good an opportunity to miss,' says Hedley.

In fact, neither trench turned up any evidence of Saxon occupation. One, following up leads from John Gater's geophysics survey, uncovered a Second World War bunker. The other, bigger trench revealed a series of post holes, some with timber still in place, charcoal evidence of burning, clay pipes and various pieces of 17th-century pottery. This was interpreted as the remains of temporary structures and occupation on the site during and after the Great Fire of London in 1666, when people were known to have come to the open space as refugees.

The bishop's palace
Meanwhile, back in Lincoln's Inn itself, the perseverance of Phil Harding and the other diggers finally paid off with the discovery of the foundation trench of what Phil described as a 'massive building … with beautiful painted window glass and Greensand mouldings around the windows and doors'.

Stone-built, Phil reckoned it was probably the great hall of Ralph Neville's palace, an assessment aided by the discovery of a sherd of south Hertfordshire greyware pottery dating from the 12th-13th century under the wall's foundation.

Ironically, this trench also turned up the elusive evidence that Hedley Swain was seeking of Anglo-Saxon activity. A single piece of Middle-Saxon pottery found at the bottom of the trench, it was the first ever such find from this part of London.

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