Time Team were in Burford thanks to a very nosy Professor Mick Aston. He had been invited to look round The Priory, a beautiful 15th century house sitting on the site of a medieval hospital. But it wasn't just the beautiful building that grabbed his attention because in the vegetable patch he uncovered a few scraps of Anglo Saxon pottery. With over a thousand years of history in one back garden he couldn't resist calling in the rest of Time Team.
We planned to locate the medieval hospital and see if we could find Anglo Saxon Burford in the same back garden as Mick seemed very confident that his handful of pottery could mark the location of the origins of the whole town.
As John Gater had already surveyed part of the front lawn and discovered a possible location for the hospital Matt and Phil wasted no time in putting in the first trenches to try and find the eastern end of the building.
Meanwhile Mick was already back in the vegetable garden. He was very excited at the prospect of finding Medieval Burford and had called in reinforcements to help - cue the children from the local Primary School. They were here to help uncover Anglo Saxon pottery, where there was a concentration of pot we would open a trench. He promised to explain the history of Burford to the kids using the archaeology we uncovered he had better be right about the Anglo Saxons or it would be a short story!
On the front lawn Matt and Phil had hit part of the hospital, but it was more complex than we had first thought. It was beginning to look like there were two phases of the building - the first build looked early Norman with a later extension adding on a northern aisle.
Back in the vegetable garden the origins of Anglo Saxon Burford were coming to light. One of the trenches opened on a pottery concentration revealed what looked like two parallel stains in the ground, but to the trained eye these marks indicated we had found that rarest of archaeological finds - an Anglo Saxon house dating to between 650 and 850 AD. From only a scatter of pottery Mick had uncovered the origins of Anglo Saxon Burford.
Matt and Phil were finally making sense of the hospital. It seemed the buildings history went further back than we had imagined. The first reference to the site was in 1226 but the early Norman style suggested it had been founded even earlier.
As the end of Day Three approached the local school children gathered on the front lawn. Armed with a map of the town and model buildings made by the kids Mick started his tale - In the beginning were the Romans, we had found Roman pottery so they must have been living nearby. Next came the Anglo Saxon village in the vegetable garden. Then around 1000 AD this was replaced by the planned medieval town we see today and the hospital was built. Finally in 1580s the hospital was replaced by a large manor house, part of which still stands today.
A single handful of pottery had resulted in the town of Burford being taken over by Time Team, and after three days we had found evidence of 2000 years of history in one garden. Amazing what you can find in a vegetable patch.
