Bodies In The Shed (Glendon) | S13E01 | Time Team

This is Glendon Hall in Northamptonshire, a building with more than 400 years of history and this part here belongs to Martin Hipwell, who decided to build a new house for his mother, but when he dug the foundations he discovered every builder's worst nightmare: a corpse and not only. one but another one and another and another and another and another and another so what is everyone doing in the outbuildings of an English country house and, equally important, how come no one knew they were there? The

team

s only had three days to come up with answers the imposing Glendon Hall is a mosaic of different styles and phases of architecture dating back to the 17th century Martin's family lives in the stable overlooking the Victorian workshop where he discovered the

bodies

how Does your mother face the fact that they all exist? these corpses under where they're going to live, I'm more worried about the skeletons and how they feel about my mother coming to live here.

How did you find them? The builder who was on the excavator came across a piece of burn that we initially thought was obviously an animal, but later we realized it was quite human and it was this part of the forehead. How long after that did you realize there was not just a body but a full load within 10 minutes? minutes this is the first

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you've seen this, isn't it? Yes, what do you think? What is your instinct? Well, if this is the density of them where all these yellow markings are, then it suggests that it is a cemetery and if the alignment of this is correct, I guess this is what is from east to west for these, yes, yes, it is almost exactly yes, so we would assume they were Christians, so it seems like a kind of medieval cemetery to me, you know, that would be the period I would think of.

Medieval cemetery sounds good to you, we know there was a church in Glendon many many years ago, we don't know where it was, it would be very interesting to know where the church was, yes, so how do you want to approach the site? I have to empty some of these tombs anyway because you want the burials to be out of the way, you are going to develop this, yes, on the other side of this wall, yes, so we will do it, but then if there is a church in the vicinity. close, we should be looking for that, just an idea, how do your kids feel about these

bodies

?

We've nicknamed them our friends in the south, so they've actually almost become friends with the kids, um, so it's not the conversations, actually. He feels better here now than ever before. First of all, we'll get to work with two of Martin's friends down south to see what they can tell us about where they were buried. Phil will have to investigate. There's a lot of construction debris before you get to his skeleton, but Jackie Mckinley, our burial expert, can already see some bone. I have a skull here, but it's pretty sma

shed

up. Martin's bodies were found throughout the construction site, just a few feet away from Jackie, within the incident. room discovered the skeleton of a child and there was a line of five adults under the table where Stuart and Henry are going through the maps looking for evidence of the church, so what you have on Jackie, well, I have a skull here, you can see that always Very close to the surface and at the same level, pieces of blue plastic appear, so if it is in situ or has been redeposited, I don't know because I can see that there is a little bit of bone there, you can actually trace it. around, yes, and there's another part there, yes, but at least with a skull there, at least you have a lot to work on and you have a level to work on, yes, and you have a level to work on right now while the work continues.

In the cemetery we are just beginning our search for the church and just below a huge yew tree, on the other side of the incident room is a garden made up of piles of masonry, some of which look suspiciously like they came from a church. There are a lot of dropped windows here and stuff, but that's interesting because it looks like it's part of a very large window originally with round straight heads instead of pointed ones. Does that seem part of? Do you like the church windows? It could be church, I mean, they could even be domestic about it, but even if they are church, they will suggest that something radical is happening with this church in the early 16th century, in fact, just by looking over there, there is a bit of the other side of the masonry. decorated marble, yes, and that looks like it's marble, where would that be in the church?

It looks like it's from a monument or a tomb or something, right, but that again seems 16th century to me, but it's a pretty good job, I mean, it's expensive. things to bring, so all these fragments of the church that you see here, do you think they are from the church that we are looking for? I think so, not necessarily in the correct church order you are looking for, yes, certainly. The folly doesn't seem to be the church itself, but at least we now know we're looking at an elegant late medieval church that could perhaps have been connected to some great house that was here before the current Glendon Hall and perhaps to the people buried there. .

In his cemetery he lived in that same house, can we get some work? Knowing the extent of the cemetery could help locate the church, so Phil calls the rest of the

team

to find a boundary. You can see the graves appear. The natural thing is a very compact type of iron material, very hard and with some kind of flat plates of this thing there and then you can see that here we have the outline of an apparently very truncated tomb, so what we are what we propose is take a strip that continues from this grave to the end, we'll take one down the middle and we'll take one from where Jackie goes in that direction because these things seem to be on the spines, so there could be a row of graves here and then maybe a space and then another graves here, another space, etc., we are plotting the graves as we find them to determine the shape of the cemetery and there appears to be a space.

Below part of the incident room geophysicists are sent to investigate, but even with ground-penetrating radar they find it difficult to see through the concrete floor, according to local historians, a stained glass window in the hallway comes from the old church of Saint Helena in Glendon. Richard, these don't look like stained glass to me, they're not, they're actually painted stained glass and they're almost certainly not English, they're probably Flemish and it's strange that it's just these two colors that I was able to achieve at that

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at the turn of the century. XVI, only the two colors, yellow and black, and obviously the white is the unpainted glass, only later, when they solved the enamelling, were they able to introduce a color.

How high quality is this glass? Well, I'd say it's excellent. notch, I mean, just look at the actual quality of the details on the beards and the clothes and stuff is fantastic, so what does this imply to you about the church? It implies that someone had a lot of money to spend on the church no matter what size it was, they had enough money to bash fantastic high-end Flemish glaciers while the team continues to clean up the cemetery. Helen is scouring the diocese records for information about the church. Hello, have you managed to discover a lot about our mysterious church?

Yes, at least on some dates it seems that it has been around for quite some time, like when well, the first record here 1254 is valued at six and a half marks, which is not much, it is very, very little, presumably a small church, so it says forward we have records up to the dissolution of the monasteries and then from um in the diocese of peterborough we have records from 1793 to 1812, going back to the last few hundred years and it seems so although it was always quite small, yes it is, we have this description here in the 1720s, it says it consists of a body and a chancel, so there are no islands, no mention of a tower, it's not grand, it's just a small two-room church, baffling isn't it? that we have those beautiful Flemish windows, yes, and they also have a very strange date. 1563, you're not supposed to put religious iconography in churches, at that point you're supposed to be almost becoming a Puritan, so what?

Does that tell you I don't know something to discover in the next two and a half days? It is not like this? What happens to our bodies? Well we don't have as much detail about the burials as we do about the rest of the church's life, the burial record doesn't seem to have survived, that would be from the dissolution onwards, but 1538 onwards, so we don't know who was buried in this church after that and of course we wouldn't know who. He was buried earlier because records were never kept. If the records cannot help us, we will have to rely on the burials themselves, but there is no shortage of those we have.

We have a tomb there, yes, and we have a tomb there. Wondering if there might be one there? There is a small dark stain. It's not there. Go straight through there. Yes, Stewart noticed something on an 1817 map that could indicate the location of the church or a predecessor to the hall you see. that very sharp kick, oh, this is where it turns into this lane, that's that driveway, yeah, going that way, but originally I think that road went through here, which is this gap, the one that goes through where they are cars, that's how you go through it. and when you look at the maps, it takes a straight line that goes back to that road over there on the right, but something has caused that kick to become a kind of detour, in fact, exactly now, when that happens, it often turns around From a memorial site or a church yard or something the gfis begin surveying the area to see if they can find what caused the roads to be diverted.

Four grave cuts in the cemetery are now being investigated. Phil's found many redeposited bones likely disturbed by builders centuries before Martin began work on his mother's house. and a few meters away, Jackie's skeleton is hard in the sticky, trampled clay, as you can see, this one is a fairly short gray color and that is because it is a young individual, that explains why it is in such bad shape. state. Yeah, I mean, the bone is very very fragile anyway, you can see the skull, it's very, very thin, so that's the legs, yeah, we've got the two femurs here, so that's kind of the thigh bones. , but they got cut at the knee on the way in and then the The added complication is that there's actually another individual in there, I can really barely see it, yeah, well, it's two little pieces of because it's a piece of pelvis, believe it or not, but this is part of a fetus probably not even full term.

That's been put here, so if we have two kids here, do you think we might be looking at some kind of kids zone over here? Well, it's interesting, you should say that because of the graves we have in this area. there is a baby there, the two graves that Phil had there have what looked like a baby and a juvenile in them and the only adult bone we have had is the bone redeposited from the hole he has there, the cuts in the grave are narrow and the arms appear to be placed close to the body as if they were wrapped, this suggests that these are poor burials, they are not residents of any previous ward, but it turns out that Glendon used to be much more than just a large house, as described in the end of the world. book as a settlement consisting of nine homes whose remains could be in the field surrounding the hall.

We have the earthworks study that the royal commission carried out in the 1970s. You can see the hollow road and various other earthworks around the side. the hollow road means well, it's just that you know, the road has basically sunk, you know, and it probably sunk where, but it's lined, you see, with these rectangular platforms that are the sites of the peasant farms with the farm and the barns and all the rest and you can see a whole row of them along the corridor, so what do we know about the village other than the earthworks? Well, the key information we have comes from what's called the end of the world of precinct 1517 and a guy named Robert Mallory owned part of the mansion and he had 12 houses here and he razed nine of them and that's the fencing process for the sheep farming that helps explain why the town left, why it suddenly became economically viable to evict the people and then convert the land to pasture, well, you have to go back a stage, really, to the plague black in 1350, which destroyed the social structure in many of these villages depended on peasants working together to farm if between half and a third of them died. so you know it makes it very difficult to make the system work and the landowners kept fighting throughout the 15th century but in the end they gave up, evicted the remaining peasants and turned these places into what were effectively sheep or cattle ranches beef, so the people who are buried here, are they likely to have been the people who live next door?

I think they almost certainly would have been if they lived around here and farmed the fields here and had a church. In Churchill, this is likely where they are buried. Stuart and Henry are starting toinspect the earthworks north of Hollow Way to see what Glendon might have been like during the medieval period. Look at this bench passing by here, yeah. This is interesting because it is exactly parallel to the line of that hollow road by the trees, yes, the old road and it is very possible that this is like a back boundary for the properties that were facing that road, oh right, okay, We are now extending the cemetery trench beyond our line of graves to see if we have reached its eastern limit.

Geophysicists have really struggled to find anything useful around the incident room because the ground was so disturbed. We are conducting a series of test pits to determine the size and shape of the cemetery. The Raksha are searching for the western boundary while Kerry tackles the south, but will any of this help us find the church? Mick seems worried, you think the evidence may have been vandalized, yes I do, when you look at these 19th century buildings and think about how big this church could have been, it could well be under one of these and we could have lost it, so the strategy is to try to find this way. and the extent of the churchyard because the church will be somewhere in the middle of that, hopefully we know that the medieval church consisted of a nave and a chancel so it could have been small enough to fit in anyone's space of the incidents. hall workshops, so at the end of the day one we know that the church is not here because this is where all the bodies are and there are more in that building there and another on the other side of that building we know that the church is not here because This is completely natural with a few holes, the only place we haven't looked is there.

Could that be the location of the church? We'll find out tomorrow, day two, here at Glendon Hall in Northamptonshire, where we find out. over 30 medieval burials and this morning we are going to peel back all this land here to see if we can find the church that accompanies them and we are going to extend a trench here to find the extension of the cemetery also one on the other side of this building, another there and a fourth here in the deep, which might be a little difficult. Matt is beginning to remove layers of debris from the building to search for the church, meanwhile, Kerry has begun exposing a much-seen adult skeleton. better nickname than the multiple burials emerging from Phil's well, well this is getting really complicated here, I mean on this end we have a burial, we have the hand and part of the femur down here and that represents a burial that is here and obviously it extends underneath here and then above it we have this burial with a stone line with this deposit of jumbled bones that must have been placed when this burial came in or when he actually put up the building, so if this is a comparatively late tomb, we're probably looking at something that actually has relatively high status.

I mean, someone is being very careful and going to a lot of trouble to place these stones in the grave. It's quite surprising. This is the only grave on the site that has stones like this, most of the bodies in our cemetery would have been buried within three days of death, lowered into the grave with their shrouds tied to their legs, the parish priest of Glendon would have purged them. his sins with a sprinkling of holy water from a twig of an herb called hyssop before touching them with a processional cross. He is still working on the skeleton of a six to seven year old boy but we are ready to raise the remains of a child who would have around aged four when he died we will only raise the burials that Martin's building work would disturb the others they will be allowed to remain where they are in the grounds of Glendon Hall yesterday we were searching for the reason why the old hollow road was diverted from its original course straight through Glendon but frustratingly the geophysicists can't find an explanation, one or two things but nothing special, no there are no obvious buildings or anything like that, there are definitely no stone buildings on this platform here and nothing occupation like that.

I can point out that it's helpful, though, John, because we debated whether to put a ditch on this and I think you know we probably wouldn't, based on what you said, anyway, if it's not next to the bend in the road. , it's even more. Our church is probably inside the cemetery, so Ian is about to make our third test pit deep in the bush on the east side. Once he catches the police with the bulldozer, he'll be on the lookout for more burials at the other end of the cemetery. The Raksha cemetery has found a piece of a child's jaw.

Do we know how old he is? Obviously he's a baby. He still has his baby teeth. This is a baby tooth. It's a baby tooth. and you have one of your permanent teeth on the way. was developed there, so it's about three or four something like that, so now we know that the cemetery extends further to the west, but in the east there are no signs of any more absolutely clean burials, no fines while the search is carried out . for helens continues richard and ray san are seeing if the flemish glass that we know decorated the church in the 16th century fits into the window tracery in the garden madness, yes, what about the ones at the east end?

We're going to make a grander version, Grand Diversion. A little bigger but still three bays. I think they're starting to get an idea of ​​what the church might have been like, but there's still no sign of it where we widened the trench this morning and we're halfway through the excavation after a day. After searching and a half through the records, our Northamptonshire archeology expert, Glenn, found evidence of a drawing of our church which is useful because it could tell us what it looks like but more importantly it could give us a clue as to its location Really, the only problem.

It's not here, it's in London, in the British Library, and it's too valuable a document to take out and we can't photograph it, so we'll send Victor to draw us a copy. Do you have your pencil? I have everything ready and your document, yes, all the digging was up to you buddy, thanks, good luck, but we can't wait for Victor's drawing, so Matt is doing another test pit north of the cemetery where the owners found foundations of stone when they were. tidying up his gardens maybe these could be the foundations of the church jackie is taking a look at the skeleton in the Kerry trench it's much smaller and more graceful than some of the other adult skeletons we've seen what's an army of constitution grass quite light small one could Let's say yes, this angle here looks quite wide, which would suggest that you have a female, but it would be easy to know when we will be able to see more.

What's wrong with these bones here? Well, it looks like we have at least two there, unless someone has three big toes, which is not very likely, so there are at least parts of two more going in that direction again, adults, it looks like the Phil's burials were still multiplying, he has now revealed a stone-lined tomb, a jumble of bones, a child and the skeleton of a baby, so we have four interconnected burials, all in a very small space, which is probably what You would expect from a medieval cemetery, yes, but it appears to be very different from what we have here with what look like tombs that are clean and tidy and that respect each other.

I mean, you have to remember that with these burials we haven't raised an intact skeleton yet, we don't actually know if they're sitting in the bedrock. Naturally, it is entirely possible that there are more bodies below. We are starting to work in the town where these people lived. The stewards are looking for a place to dig a trench to confirm that the platforms on the south side of the hollow road really are the remains of the village of Glendon, while the gfis hope to add some details to the study of earthworks in the northern field by using magnetometry that shows signs of occupation, such as ditches and pits.

Glenn's papers from the time of the Black Death to see if we can discover when the town began to fall apart. The English landscape is covered with deserted medieval towns. There are over a hundred in Northamptonshire alone and just off Glendon Barford and half of Rushton disappear within about 10 years of each other. Some documents already here there is one that is a survey of 1327 that actually gives us some of the people who lived in this town, like who we have, Robert Marriott had a cabin and a virgo to land and how much does that cost right now.

Later documents suggest it's 20 acres, okay, just a good sized farm for that period and these are the rents they are paying, it's five bombardments, two Chilean pence etc., but they are cottages, they only have one house. I don't have land, so they are landless workers, probably working elsewhere. John Lane, Richard Chapman, Roger Merrick, so these people could be buried here, they are almost certainly the people buried in the churchyard if they lived here in 1327. People and their children may have been victims of the Black Death 30 years later, but we will never know because the disease acts so quickly that it leaves no trace in the bones.

Lifting the child's skull is a delicate process because the bones are very fragile. Phil now found a fifth body under the baby skeleton, this one looks like a strong man, maybe one of the pottery finds from the workers of this pit confirmed that we have an eastern boundary of the cemetery, we have a very small assembly exit that um it came from this well down here now there's not much but it's telling us a little story, I mean looking at it you can see the edge of this part has pretty thick soot around it yeah, so it's obviously been on fire. um, it's the kind of thing you'd expect in this, yeah, they didn't wash the dishes very well, it's a domestic assembly, right, it's probably used to cook or boil something, you know, so it's evidence of domestic activity.

I wouldn't expect to find pottery in a living cemetery, yeah, I mean, the graves are that way, there are no graves coming this way, so they could, actually, we're outside the cemetery. Here things are taking shape in the cemetery, so here we are. I'm almost ready to start digging on the south side of the medieval village. I am happy with the size of the plot. Things let me see them as a series of yeses. I don't care if it's a small plot. I mean, yes. I found a farmer with a you know, a smaller property, that would be interesting, okay, no, there were no stones to mark the graves of our Glendon villagers and it seems that many of them were unceremoniously cut down when these buildings were erected, but There are some tombstones here, what is all this?

This is the Glendon Dog Cemetery, Tony Dog Cemetery, yes the pets and pack animals that lived here many years ago, we even have a ledger dating back to 1793 with some of the names of the dogs that have. I got excited Lady Lily Lovely Have you seen this one? Yeah, I thought you'd like that Tony. It's ironic, isn't it that on the other side of this building we have Victorians chopping up previous corpses without being able to remember it? their names while at the same time on this side of the building they are creating their own little idyllic cemetery in memory of their pets.

We are starting to find some pottery where our village might have been. What you have, tell us how everything. that kind of stuff gets you excited, yeah, that's more like, I mean, look at this, it's all the kind of standard medieval course words that we get around here, it starts in sort of the 12th century, goes up to the 13th, 14th, This part is particularly interesting because it's um. it's a medieval shelley word jug handle jug handles like this only tend to be from the 12th century, they die out when the glazing industry gets right into the 13th century, so that gives us a reasonably early day, it's quite nice, although there are many other things. down here, although yeah, I mean, oh yeah, look that's lovely, well, that's your polish from the 13th century, the 14th century, where that kind of stanion lived and it was only made about 10 miles up the road, I mean, with that and these, I mean we're looking.

Probably between the 12th and 14th centuries, well, that's just settlement life, right? It all comes from this ground work here, which we think is the concentration of the house. Well, you get more pottery out of this trench than you have. of the whole cemetery area up there, I'm sure this is where they live, the ground works reveal the game, you know, yeah, that's right, things are progressing in the cemetery at the end of the second day, another skeleton is emerging . The first raksha test well, but nothing more than either of the two other test wells. The mats found the dark spot of some kind of feature, but there is no sign of the church, so at the end of the second day we have the extent of the cemetery in the north west and east, the church should be somewhere withinthe glass container?

I mean, they never would. It's fantastic. They wouldn't have known what that was. No? I'm sure this is where this idea of ​​thinking about wizards and golden ages and things like that comes from because they wouldn't understand something like that and something you don't understand is magic and that would have been magical after the excavation work revealed that the cremation was a 16 Inside From the jar were found the fragile remains of another vessel made of glass no thicker than a light bulb, just at the end of the day, small Roman pottery shirts date the post holes in this trench, but there are no signs of any medieval buildings . so our peasants did not live here after all and the trench where we discovered the residence of the Saxon nobles also does not have any features dating back to the medieval period.

I mean, I think I keep coming back to that pause point. I know it should really be full of charcoal and rot, so our archaeologists are forced to rethink the location of the village, it now seems impossible that our villagers lived in these fields; instead, enclosures on these platforms are more likely to have had animal pens and barns. We were all so sure that the people would be on those platforms and it was not like that. I mean, we're used to seeing earthworks like that and assuming that's where the medieval farm is located. Most of us would have put in a decent bottle of wine because there are medieval farmhouses on each of those plots, so we've all learned a lot from this.

We've been on a steep learning curve and it kind of changed our ideas. It is a lesson for all of us. I mean, there are no stone buildings there and they should be in those compounds. So where is the town? Well, we know. where it's not because we know where all the medieval fields are around here, we know it's not at the other end, so there's only one place it can be, which is under these buildings behind us, I mean, the villages of Northamptonshire almost always finds the church in the heart of the village and the church is just over there the medieval village of Glendon must have been close to the church where the rambling buildings of Glendon Hall now stand.

In 1514 a new landowner decided that the pastures for Sheep would be a more profitable use of the land and so he demoli

shed

most of the houses and evicted 62 people shortly after the first Glendon Hall was built and the church was converted into a private chapel complete with expensive Flemish glass. The next four centuries saw generations of landowners demolish, build and extend the hall just as Martin did. he was doing when he met his first friend in the south. I can't remember a time team episode where we've dealt with so many burials, not just these medieval ones, we had a Roman one, we even had a Victorian one. pet cemetery, but now that Christian burials can be reburied, Martin can continue building again;

In fact, from now on there will be three generations of moderns living here and her mother can look forward to her new home, it is almost as if the town lives. It's just that it's not in the fields, it's here in the great hall where