Where Henry VIII came on his honeymoon

Invited by the owners of the modern Rycote to help find the remains of the Tudor palace that once stood on this site, Time Team was treading in the footsteps of some of England's best-known monarchs. Henry VIII, for example, came here in 1540 on honeymoon with his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, to be followed in later years by several other reigning kings and queens, such as Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I.

Most of the original house was thought to have burnt down in 1745, but two prints of Rycote gave the Team some idea of what they were looking for. One, dating from the late 17th century (above), clearly shows the main entrance and facade, with the south-east tower – the only substantial structure surviving from the original house – to the left of the entrance. The tower is also visible in the second picture, an early 18th century engraving by Johannes Kipp, who specialised in depicting the homes of the wealthy. Differences between the two prints, however, suggested that it might be necessary to disentangle different stages of building on the site.

Introducing 'Traycam' and 'Bowlcam'

Trench 1 was opened in a spot where the estate manager had come across Tudor brickwork during drainage work a few years previously. He thought it might be part of a bridge crossing a moat around the house and leading to the main entrance. In fact the brickwork turned out to be part of the moat itself. The moat had been filled in at some stage and culverted with an arched brick tunnel, which was still perfectly preserved, to drain the waterlogged ground.

Exploring this culvert required some ingenuity on the part of the camera crew. First they put together 'Traycam', a Heath Robinson-style contraption that was sent in to film the inside of the culvert but sank on its maiden voyage. Then they came up with an even more ingenious device nicknamed 'Bowlcam' (above), which was able successfully to navigate its way 10 metres or so into the tunnel and send back pictures.

'Bowlcam': how it was done

Jamie Wiggins, one of the Team's runners, was the mastermind behind Bowlcam. Three-metre lengths of 50x25mm roof batten were screwed together with a pulley about a metre from the far end (which had a plastic bottle attached to it to make it float). These were passed up the culvert with a rope – to which the bowl was attached – forming a continuous loop around the pulley.

As pressure was put on the rope, the far end of the springy battens jammed against the opposite wall leaving the pulley in the centre and the battens coming back to the entrance down one edge and out of sight in the mud. The camera was moved up and down as needed. Drain rods had been tried but kept sticking in the mud.

Symmetry holds the key

Using the information provided by the prints of the house, knowledge of surviving palaces from the same period and a physical survey of the landscape features remaining at Rycote, it was possible to get a rough idea of where the buildings would have stood. In particular, Time Team's landscape expert, Stewart Ainsworth, identified the most likely location for the main entrance. This would have stood at the exact midpoint of the front wall of the house.

Trench 2 was dug by what is now a garden wall to test Stewart's theory – and sure enough, the foundations of a pinnacle tower and the base of an abutment to the bridge across the moat marked the spot where the main door would have opened. There was even a large stone still in position on the floor, marking what would have been the doorway.

As with medieval churches, the symmetrical design of these great country houses enables us to decipher the original structure from sometimes fragmentary remains. So identifying the precise position of the doorway enabled the Team to measure up and locate the entire facade of the original building.

Georgian remains

Meanwhile, the 'geofizz' team had been concentrating on the back of the old house, trying to locate the rear (north) wall and the north-west tower. The most likely location for the tower, unfortunately, turned out to be under a tree. But there were signs of the moat and rear wall, so Trench 3 was opened up to try to find them.

The first excavations yielded only Georgian remains: a George II coin from 1752, a Georgian wall and even a Georgian water pipe. It was decided to extend a deeper, narrow slot along the length of the trench, where the diggers eventually located the position of the original Tudor wall (now obliterated by the foundations of the later structure) and the moat beyond it.

Trench 4, meanwhile, had been opened up to look for the entrance to the house's banqueting hall. Phil hit solid stone just a few inches beneath the turf surface – the remains of the walls that once stood here. Among the finds that came out of this trench were a number of tiles, covering several different periods. The trench also yielded medieval finds, which dated the remains of a wall to the 14th or 15th century. As well as the later Georgian remains, it seems that there were also substantial buildings on the site before the Tudor mansion.

Finally, Trench 5 was positioned after the geophysics survey of the west side of the old house found signs of the moat there too. This trench produced large quantities of stained glass (above), probably from the large windows in the great hall, as well as a window mullion, glazing bar and leading.

Burnt and rebuilt

The Georgian remains found in Trench 3 and the arched culvert uncovered in Trench 1 both relate to a partial reconstruction of the house and its grounds after the fire in 1745 – clearly the house had not been completely razed and abandoned at the time. The family moved elsewhere after the fire, but must have restored and reoccupied the property because by 1778 they were to be found paying £2,400 (£250,000 in today's money) to 'Capability' Brown, the famous garden designer, to relandscape the grounds.

Robin Bush's documentary research made it possible to fill in the final chapter of the house's history. A new picture he discovered from 1773 showed the house after Capability Brown had obliterated the moat and relandscaped the gardens. The house itself, though, is shown still standing – clearly it had not been destroyed in the fire and had been refurbished afterwards.

Sold off for scrap

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the entire investigation was revealed by Robin's discovery of two sales catalogues dating from 1779 and 1807 respectively. The first of these concerned an auction of the house's paintings, furniture and other contents. The second was selling off the entire building – literally room by room and brick by brick.

Skirting boards, doors, door frames, fireplaces, windows, staircases, walls, roofs and chimneys, masonry, woodwork and all – everything was listed for sale. Even the wallpaper was up for grabs: 'canvas and paper in the chamber over the salting room' as the sale lot described it. The external walls and decorative brickwork appear to have been sold in sections; the surviving south-east tower may have been one of the few parts of the building that didn't find a buyer.

The location of most of this material is now unknown. But some items are known to have been utilised in townhouses in nearby Thame. Among them Time Team tracked down a particularly fine 18th-century fireplace (above), together with doors, frames and mouldings. The great house at Rycote, it seems, met an ignominious end – sold off for scrap to meet the debts of its owner.

The country houses of Tudor England

Rycote House, built in the 1520s, was just part of the immense building activity that took place in England at the beginning of the 16th century. Prior to the arrival of Henry VIII on the throne, the great architecture of medieval England was to be found in its castles and cathedrals. The Tudors, who reintroduced the use of bricks for the first time since the Romans, brought in a new secular architecture – that of the great country house or palace.

This process was hastened by Henry's break with Rome and abolition of the monasteries in 1534, but the new building boom was already under way by this time. Hengrave Hall, in Suffolk, was one of the first of these huge new houses, the new scale of building being reflected in its 40 bedchambers. Compton Wynyates, in Warwickshire, with its great crenellated towers; Sutton Place, in Surrey, for which Henry brought in Italian craftsmen; East Barsham Manor, in Norfolk, with its magnificent terracotta decoration; and Layer Marney Hall, in Essex, with its immense, eight-storey gatehouse towers – all these, and many more, were contemporary with Rycote.

The fashion for what the architectural historian Sir John Summerson called 'prodigious' houses was started by Henry VII. His vast new palace at Richmond, completed in 1501, started the trend for 'prodigy houses', which was accelerated under Henry VIII and reached its height in the Elizabethan era with the development of such magnificent country palaces as Burghley, Longleat and Hardwick Hall ('more glass than wall').

Henry VIII had already created the biggest house in Europe when he extended Hampton Court after persuading Cardinal Wolsey to give it to him in 1525. Not satisfied with this, in 1538 he levelled the Surrey village of Ewell to build the huge Nonesuch Palace. Other courtiers and rich merchants of the time were quick to get in on the act too. As well as Wolsey's Hampton Court, Sutton Place was built by the Cardinal's assistant, Sir Richard Weston; Compton Wynyates was built by a man who became Esquire of the King's Body; and Layer Marney Hall was the work of the Captain of the King's Bodyguard.

Large enough to accommodate the entire king's court on its travels, the great houses acted as super-hotels for monarchs and their vast entourages, as well as for other aristocratic travellers of the time. In their architecture, they produced a distinctively English merging of Gothic and Renaissance styles. In their symmetry, they symbolised the order and proportion of society at large. They reflected the vast new secular wealth of a small number of English families at the time – and though the great majority of the population was condemned to live in squalor to enable this tiny minority its remarkable luxury, it is impossible not to appreciate the magnificence and sheer opulence of these houses today.

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