Governor's Green was the site of a medieval hospital built in the 13th century. It served the city for three hundred years but despite this, very little was known about what the complex actually looked like. So Time Team had been called in to investigate the archaeology of this unassuming little park on the edge of Portsmouth's harbour and reconstruct one of the city's oldest buildings.
Our hospital was originally set up by Pierre des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, to care for elderly and infirm patients whilst also providing accommodation for pilgrims and travellers. But this being medieval England, where life could be short and brutish, hospitals like this also existed to cater for the health of your everlasting soul as much as your weak and vulnerable body.
The site had a complicated history and that was going to be a problem for the geophysics team. The hospital had been shut down in 1540 and turned into a weapon store. Then a Tudor mansion was built on the site before it eventually became the location of the Governor of Portsmouth's House. Our survey uncovered an extremely complex series of walls and we had no idea what was medieval and what was later. The only way to untangle the geophysics was for Phil to get digging and as a result trench 1 went in over a series of wall junctions - hopefully this would then clarify exactly what the geophysics results meant!
We also had a plan of the site drawn in the 19th century which was based on a much earlier, rougher map of the hospital and a list of the buildings known to have existed there. This could be a blueprint for all the medieval hospital buildings - but was it accurate and could it help identify the features in our trenches?
To test the plan we opened a second trench on an area marked as a hall. If we could find that then maybe all the other buildings on the plan were accurately marked out. The trench certainly started turning up some fragments of carved 13th century stone but firmly dating the walls was going to be difficult.
By the end of Day One everybody seemed convinced that we were uncovering parts of the medieval buildings and that the plan of the hospital buildings was accurate - surely it couldn't be this simple!
It wasn't, and Phil soon spotted a problem. His trench was turning up walls where our plan said there weren't any - was the plan wrong, or did his wall simply not feature on any known plans of the site? Stewart checked and re-checked his calculations and it seemed the plan wasn't quite accurate. Suddenly Mick and Phil weren't confident we had anything medieval and it could all be part of the later Tudor mansion.
Meanwhile Tracey opened up Trench 3 to search for the south range of hospital buildings. Despite a few fragments of tile emerging, it became apparent that the buildings here had been completely destroyed by the construction of a military parade ground in the 19th century.
Trench 2 was also proving a very tough nut to crack. We had a series of walls and floors all cutting through one another and John Gater provided the clue that finally brought some clarity to the puzzle. One of the walls in the trench lined up on the geophysics with a plan of the later Governor's house, built in 1580. If that wall was late 16th century then everything else must be earlier and therefore part of the hospital - simple!
It wasn't until the very end of Day Three that we actually uncovered a find that positively dated the walls of the hall. Underneath one of the walls we'd exposed was a piece of 13th century pot - the building was definitely part of the medieval hospital. It would have been a good sized hall as well, 21 by 50 feet and could have acted as a living and eating space for the hospital.
It had been a bone chillingly cold three days but we'd finally discovered part of the medieval hospital that stood here over 500 years ago. In our trenches were some of the oldest buildings in Portsmouth.
