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It's been described as the most ambitious archaeological project Britain has ever known. One eighth of the entire ancient city of Canterbury is being excavated in advance of a massive redevelopment scheme. The excavation, just inside the city walls in the south east of Canterbury, is known as the 'Big Dig' locally, and will take four years to complete.
The archaeologists responsible for the Big Dig are working to a much tighter time scale, though. The excavations are taking place in phases, each of which has to be completed by a set date, at which time the developers move in, destroying or burying what is left of the archaeology beneath new buildings.
Time Team followed the progress of the Big Dig for nine months during 2000-2001, both on the excavation site and behind the scenes, and helped the archaeologists to reconstruct the 2,000-year-old story of this historic piece of Canterbury real estate. At least they had more than the usual three days to do it in.
Mike Aston explains why Time Team is so interested in Canterbury
Hanged, Drawn and Quartered: Robin Bush on the last on the White Friars
Time Team first went to Canterbury for the 2000 Live, when excavations were carried out at three sites: Greyfriars, Britain's first Franciscan friary; Blue Boy Yard, within the precincts of the former Roman temple; and a medieval tile-making complex just outside the city at Tyler Hill. These excavations provided a tantalising insight to the wealth of archaeology, covering almost 2000 years of continuous occupation, lying beneath the surface of modern-day Canterbury.
In comparison with the excavations planned for the city's Big Dig, however, Time Team was merely scratching the surface in 2000. There has been no excavation to compare with it in Canterbury – nor indeed in the vast majority of British towns and cities, where archaeologists are normally restricted to 'keyhole archaeology', investigating small and scattered sites as and when they become accessible.
The area under development is known as Whitefriars, after the friary that once stood here. It comprises six separate sites that will be excavated over four years. Time Team followed the excavation at Phase One, an area about the size of a football pitch, located right on the high street.
All the most recent signs of human occupation of the site – basements and concrete foundations – were stripped away by machine. The site had been so badly cut through by modern development that the archaeology existed only as what Tony Robinson described as 'a series of islands in a sea of dereliction'. 'It's a mass of confusion that would strike fear into the hearts of most archaeologists,' said Tony. But not the team from the Canterbury Archaeological Trust, who are in charge of the Big Dig.
Over the nine months that Time Team followed the excavations, the CAT team painstakingly investigated layers of occupation that took them back to Roman times. (This part of the site, at any rate, appeared not to contain any earlier remains of any significance.) An unexpected number of post-medieval rubbish pits, which took more than a month to excavate, rather than the planned week (and even then CAT director, Paul Bennett, described it as 'heartbreaking to whack them out the way we are'), provided the first in a series of delays to the schedule. But eventually the team was able to get down to the medieval and earlier layers.
In doing so, they were able to piece together large volumes of information about not only the Whitefriars friary church, built here in 1324, but also the earlier development of Canterbury, including the laying down of the main street plan that can still be seen today. Time Team's own contribution to the process of discovery, meanwhile, included tracking down a document from Henry IV in 1408 giving permission for the friary to reconstruct buildings facing the high street. It seems that redevelopment schemes have long been a feature of Canterbury's townscape.
Over the past 2,000 years Canterbury has always been an important place – one of the most important cities in the country. It was a prehistoric centre and then a very big Roman city. It continued to be important after the Roman period because Augustine came here and reintroduced Christianity to England. This importance continued through the Saxon and Norman periods and it remains a major centre all through the Middle Ages. For all that period, it was the main commercial market centre for the region.
When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, only about 15 monks protested out of the 10,000 involved; they met a gory end. They obviously had to be made examples of.
Friar John Stone, the head of the White Friars, for instance, had said: 'If I die for it, the king may not be head of the church of England but must be a spiritual father appointed by God.' Henry VIII wasn't going to stand for that. It counted as treason, so Stone had to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
We still have the city chamberlain's account, which gives all the details of what the gruesome punishment cost:
'Paid for half a ton of timber to make a pair of gallouses [gallows] to hang Friar Stone, for a carpenter for making the same and the dray to drag them, a labourer who digged the holes, four men who helped set up the gallouses and for drink to them, for carriage of timber from Stable Gate to the donjon, to two men that set the kettle, a great cauldron, and parboiled him, to two men that carried his quarters to the gate and set them up, for a halter to hang him, for two ha'penny halters, for straw, to the woman that scoured the kettle afterwards and to him that did execution, four shillings and eight pence.'
The whole gory process took a long time. To hang a man, cut him down while still living; to slit open his stomach and bring his entrails out in front of him and then burn them; and then finally to hack him into quarters, took approximately half an hour. It was plenty of entertainment for the ghouls who gathered to watch.