Heady metal
Bob Crascall and Gavin Pettet (right) are from White Cliffs Metal Detective Club, which is supplying two members for each of the Time Team Live sites over the weekend.
Gavin, Chairman of the Club (in the brown shirt) says: 'At the moment, we are looking for any type of coins or metal artefacts that can give us some positive identification as to the date of the site. It would be brilliant if we could find a belonging of some kind, it would make the excavation more personal. Working on Time Team Live is a metal detector's dream, we've been excited for days about doing this. This is our Valhalla.'
Margaret reaches the top
Osteo-archaeologist Margaret Cox (left), Time Team's regular 'bone woman', arrived at the incident room this morning. She will be primarily working with Mick Aston and Carenza Lewis on the Greyfriars site, where previous excavation has shown there was a lay cemetery.
However, Margaret reckons that there is a distinct possibility that a Roman lead coffin might be found in Blue Boy Yard (despite the fact that the Romans tended not to bury their dead within city walls). So she has brought special gear with her so that she won't inhale any damaging oxidised lead. At last year's Live in York, Margaret examined the three Roman skeletons excavated there.
However, Margaret doesn't spend all her working life pondering the ancient past. She often collaborates with the police, using her forensic skills to help solve serious crimes – an expertise that can carry her quite far afield. Last year, she arrived at the Live straight from the horrors of Kosovo. She and other forensic archaeologists had been invited by the United Nations to locate and investigate a mass grave of women and children murdered at a café near Prizen. What they found was the stuff of nightmares.
But not all is doom and gloom and dead bodies. This May Margaret was appointed professor of forensic archaeology and anthropology at Bournemouth University – one of only half-a-dozen women to achieve that rank in this field in Britain, compared with about 45 men.
'It's terribly important that other women in the field know that it's possible for them to reach the top,' she says. 'Especially those who weren't born with silver spoons in their mouths and have had to work bloody hard!'
For more about Professor Margaret Cox's amazing life – a true role model for all aspiring female archaeologists – see the winter 1998/99 issue of Trench One.
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Go to Map Gallery 7 to see maps of the latest trenches at Greyfriars
Trench One
Excavations have provided an insight into how the buildings to the south of the friars' church would have been laid out. Essentially a square of central garden was surrounded first by an arcade and then a walkway – which together formed the cloister – and finally buildings such as the friars' refectory (dining room).Trench One has revealed the tiled walkway of the friars' cloister. To the naked eye, they appear to be plain red quarry tiles, like those you can pick up at any DIY store, if a bit more battered. In fact, as Simon Pratt of the Canterbury Archaeological Trust (CAT) pointed out, they are glazed a black and white (or yellow) chequerboard pattern. Ex-CAT director Tim Tatton-Brown is a bit less enthusiastic, pointing out that the tiles were both 'late' and 'crude'. However, both Simon and Tim agreed that they might have been made at Tyler Hill.
Trench One also contains a wall from probably the 13th century and a fragment of a ragstone structure that dates from the 14th or 15th century – certainly before the Dissolution of the Monasteries since, after that, according to Tim, brick was the building material of choice. From the different levels at which walls and floors have been found in the trench, it is quite possible that, once they clean, record and remove the 'crude' tile floor, they will find another, older floor underneath.But Carenza Lewis (left) is excited that they've found a floor at all: 'So often we dig down only to find the floor robbed out and all we are left with is foundations.'
Trench Three
Digging here aims to catch part of both the south nave wall and the cloister.
Trench Two
Not a great deal produced so far, but it does make its contribution to archaeology. Gavin Pettet is head of the White Cliff Metal Detecting Club at Deal, Kent, who have been invited by Time Team to do all the metal detectoring on site. So far he has found a sixpence from the reign of Elizabeth I, Roman coins, musket balls and a jew's harp, all from the spoil heap of earth from the trench.
Latest news
Time Team have just received permission from English Heritage to knock down the modern brickwork blocking up one of the medieval openings in the walkway between chancel and nave. In addition, the first piece of 13th-century pottery has been found.
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'Not much is known about Franciscan monasteries in this country,' says Time Team series producer Tim Taylor. 'Only bits of two have ever been found.'
Of the few bits of medieval masonry remaining at Greyfriars, some of it is the wall of the crossing place that separated the chancel (where the friars worshipped) and the nave (where the regular parishioners prayed). This formed, in effect, a substantial screen between friars and the public. It was much more solid than screens in other churches – some say this was because the friars did not want their contemplation disturbed by the outside world.
In compensation, the congregation had a series of altars. These are known about from ancient wills, in which individuals wrote that they had paid to be buried in the friars' church at particular locations – for instance, 'to the north of St Adrian's altar'.
Trench Two has been dug across the north wall of the chancel (Trench 2a is south of the wall and 2b is to the north). The initial clearing of the top level of 2a revealed a carved bone knife handle, with a small bit of the blade still attached. Made from antler, it is elaborately decorated with an animal head, probably a horse's. Ian Riddler, the 'small finds' coordinator for the Canterbury Archaeological Trust, says that it is likely to date from before the 16th-century dissolution of the monasteries, when Greyfriars disappeared as an institution. Thus the knife may have been used by one of the last friars here.
Trench 2b revealed something much more mundane – the foundations of a 19th-century forcing house (a type of glasshouse used to make vegetables ripen early).
Louise Millard's work [see Friday's Diary] showed that there is a set of buildings south of the friars' church. Trench One was dug over what was supposed to be the range of cloisters, but no one was really sure. Then one of the diggers signalled excitedly that a piece of polythene had been found… polythene? But this was significant, for Millard would have covered the walls she found with the stuff before backfilling. So having found one of her excavations, this has made it easier to pinpoint exactly where on the Greyfriars site we are. In this case, it appears that the polythene covered the west wall of the cloister.
As a result, another trench is now contemplated, to find the connection between the nave of the church and the buildings to the south of it. Again, the separation between the two sets of constructions was to ensure that peace reigned in the cloisters, away from the preaching in the church. Luckily, in addition to the Millard wall, we have a high-resistance geophysical alignment that could possibly be the south wall of the nave. Trench Three will hopefully straddle this whole area.
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Cat walk
Greyfriars is patrolled by two officious individuals – Tilly (tortoise-shell and white) and Milly (grey tabby). The two cats are owned by the head of the Eastbridge Hospital, an ancient institution on the High Street and owner of the Greyfriars site. See if you can spot them during the three-day dig.
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Greyfriars: The scholars of Canterbury
Tim Tatton-Brown, former director of the Canterbury Archaeological Trust and now a freelance architectural historian, says the Franciscans who occupied Greyfriars were the source of intellectual life in the city. In fact, in the late 13th and early 14th century, the head lecturer in theology at the Canterbury priory – one of the richest in the country – was a Franciscan from Greyfriars.
'Don't forget,' says Tim, 'that perhaps the greatest genius of that time – Roger Bacon – was a Franciscan.'
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Simple stone chapel?
The latest rumour is that some hints of a simple stone chapel may have been identified on the Greyfriars site. This could be the first place of worship built by the Franciscans when they originally came to Canterbury in the 1220s. Mick Aston and the other archaeologists had thought that the chapel was built of wood and thus finding any remains was highly unlikely. Locating this building would be a terrific coup. Watch this space!
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