Britain's Pompeii: The Medieval Town Perfectly Preserved Under Tons Of Sand [47:43]

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0:06 · 800 years ago the people of kenfig built what they thought was the perfect town
0:11 · right here on the coast it was a thriving commercial success and then it
0:25 · vanished today we think the town lies buried somewhere under the these immense
0:31 · [Music]
0:36 · sandunes over the next 3 days we want to find out how big it was what it looked
0:42 · like so this has to be the smart end of time we've got a superb wall and how the
0:48 · people here fought to survive Sho fire
0:55 · fire so will we end up with a medieval Pompei or will we just be digging a load
1:00 · of sand might find a sand castle [Music]
1:19 · [Music]
1:25 · [Music]
1:32 · the kenig Nature Reserve in South Wales vast peaceful and
1:39 · untouched the perfect hiding place for an incredible
1:48 · secret time team's been invited onto these grassy sand dunes to hunt for a
1:53 · medieval Town swallowed up by a natural disaster if you go 20 M to your left
2:00 · from the point you're at I think that looks pretty good from up here with regards to the
2:08 · terrain 500 years ago a series of violent storms buried the entire Coastal
2:14 · settlement of kenfig under an unimaginable amount of
2:20 · sand leaving only the crumbling remains of a castle and a big
2:26 · ditch yeah that's about it this is the edge of the grid
2:32 · there time team site director Francis PRI thinks there could be an archaeological Treasure Trove waiting to
2:38 · be found here and he's eager to get stuck in we can follow a level Francis
2:46 · you started already then yes I have Tony thing is we got heck of a lot to do
2:54 · there is so much archaeology here but it's all under the under the sand look you see it very much better when when
2:59 · you get right up to the top and look down
3:09 · okay I see what you mean great view of Port torbet steel works yeah what can you see here that
3:17 · would indicate to you there was once a medieval town here well you see that ditch down there that very wide ditch
3:23 · where we got the the trench with the Digger and fill down yeah right that ditch goes down there under our feet
3:29 · here goes over there for about 50 m then goes through an angle and goes around
3:35 · the other side of the site then um as far as we know that's all going to be town and there may well be town on the
3:41 · outside of that dit that's massive isn't it we got a huge job to do what we've got to do is we got to locate some key
3:49 · points right a church High Street Marketplace these are the sort of pegs
3:57 · that we can hang our clothes on and reconstruct the town I said earlier that this could be a medieval Pompei was that
4:04 · just hyperbole no there was a natural disaster okay it wasn't a volcano it was windblown sand but the thing that makes
4:11 · Pompei so fascinating applies here and that is there was a natural disaster people said
4:18 · oh my God they left their houses out through the back door and everything that they were doing when they were last
4:24 · living in those houses it's fossilized it's frozen in time I mean to be quite
4:29 · honest it has the potential to be incredibly exciting our first Target is francis's
4:36 · Big ditch could it be the castle moat or the town wall behind it might lie all the
4:43 · features you'd expect to find in a medieval Town streets shops and
4:48 · houses kix's buildings May no longer be visible but the local community still
4:54 · owns the land where they're supposed to be there's even a local archaeological Society dedicated to unearthing its
5:01 · Secrets hi folks hello what a fantastic landscape I mean it really and its
5:08 · members are sharing their knowledge with time team's newest recruits Alex langlands and Mariana hotter I can see
5:15 · why you're drawn to it how long has the society been involved here coming up next year it'll be 20 years since we
5:20 · started down here and in that time we've uh actually found something like 6,000
5:26 · pieces of pottery wow we've actually found a number of coins uh Roman Buckle I mean for me it's
5:33 · really difficult to try and even conceive of what this place looked like because it's changed beyond recognition
5:38 · but in your own lifetime has the site changed yes it certainly has in the last 30 40 years it used to be just sand
5:46 · which is very mobile and unstable and was blown about now because of the growth of uh of grasses and plants and
5:53 · trees indeed uh it's become much more stable and it is very difficult to visualize uh what it was like in
5:59 · medieval times when perhaps there was no sand at
6:06 · all shifting this sand is going to be one of the hardest things we've ever done on time
6:14 · team you think that's the other side of the bank then M no that's it's just more this see this wind blown sand on the
6:21 · other side that's [Applause] it
6:26 · yeah and it's playing Havoc with our geophysics equipment so using it to detect underground structures is likely
6:33 · to be a bit of a problem another great site you brought us to well yes John I mean it is a great
6:40 · site look we've got 10 m of sand in some places we've got all these Earth Works
6:46 · resistance isn't going to work because of all the sand My Hope Is that the magnetics may work because if you really
6:52 · have got a major settlement below these Junes we'll see you know the the
6:58 · buildings hopefully but you know it's it's not easy we'd be up a creep Without a Paddle if the GFS
7:06 · doesn't work if somehow we can't see through the sand we can't remove it physically there's no machine big enough
7:12 · in the world you know we really do depend on you go on you can do it John please so
7:20 · no pressure no John none so until we know whether the geophysics is going to
7:26 · work we'll have to do it the oldfashioned way what he's got it's going to be underneath all this nice yellow sand
7:32 · isn't it wait a second is that stone or pot
7:38 · stone what that was well like a bit po I'm going to wash that up that is the
7:43 · piece of stone mareli check this out
7:48 · look so is our crack team up to the challenge or will it crack
7:54 · us we're going to turn to an unlikely source of help the people of medieval
8:02 · kenig luckily for us they've left behind a wealth of written information about the town and their lives
8:11 · there what evidence do we have for the actual establishment of kig well we have evidence suggests that what we're
8:17 · looking at here is the establishment of an Anglo Norman town in other words a
8:22 · town that's been introduced in the Norman expansion into South Wales about 11:40 and the records themselves giving
8:29 · us a fascinating picture of a a sort of a society on the edge if you like I
8:34 · think uh because we're very much on the frontier here and we've got this this fascinating interaction between the
8:41 · anglo-norman Invaders the introduced populations they bring into towns like
8:47 · kenig but also the Welsh and the highlands and a good example here we
8:52 · have uh extracts from the pipe rolls oh pipe rolls are like Charter records of
8:58 · accounts and stuff indeed and and and what this specifically is showing us is the delivery of Timber to effect repairs
9:06 · and the reason they needing to shore up and repair things is because we're getting a series of Welsh attacks and uh
9:14 · that's telling us something about this this this tense relationship it'll be really interesting to see if any of this
9:21 · is picked up in the archaeology that we're getting fascinating
9:26 · yeah kenfig was something of a wild West Town built slap bang on the frontier
9:31 · dividing Norman England from medieval Wales it was attacked and burnt again and
9:38 · [Music] again b a charcoal
9:45 · Tracy I don't know whether it's enough to argue for the burning of the
9:53 · castle midday and Phil still trying to work out whether our ditch is the town
9:58 · wall or the castle moat the problem is there's so much sand
10:04 · you can't even reach the bottom of it we're really starting to struggle but
10:11 · could our geophysics Maestro have a surprise in store Sean excellent some J
10:17 · Fizz yeah and it's worked and the results are fantastic what's particularly exciting is we appear to
10:23 · have two lines of what I can only see as buildings and we talked about would we
10:28 · see the road roads well there's the Gap yes and follow the
10:34 · line straight into the castle that I think has to be an East West
10:40 · axis that's beautiful isn't it and so unexpected T I mean it it is absolutely
10:47 · what I want yes but it seems to me that you're confronted with a real problem which is where to dig cuz you could put
10:54 · a trench in virtually anywhere and you'd come up with archaeology quite easy isn't it what's that
10:59 · well I I think you go from one of the putative buildings to the line of the putative road yeah we would I mean it
11:05 · would be so embarrassing if that turned out to be some geomagnetic anomaly or
11:11 · something you know it is a geomagnetic anomaly it just happens to be called a
11:17 · house so we're putting in our second trench to see if we have a geomagnetic
11:23 · anomaly sorry an East West Road and a house
11:30 · so there's potentially a house up there yeah this should be R okay okay and then
11:36 · the house should start about here right
11:41 · okay fingers crossed then and let's hope we don't have as much sand here as we do in Phil's
11:47 · [Music]
11:54 · trench yeah Phil don't go too near the edge Tony just keep what H it's funny
11:59 · that you should say that cuz I was just going to ask you you spent your life Excavating in southern chalk land what's
12:07 · it like compared with this stuff oh it's a dole chalk although sound is wonderful
12:12 · to play in it's lethally dangerous to work in you dig a hole in the sand and
12:18 · you simply cannot trust the sze of the trench to stay up and you get no warning
12:23 · when it's going to go it will trap you around the ankles and it will gradually then it can fill up and literally it
12:29 · will compress your ribs and and you literally you can be a gonner so how do you cope with that danger uh well you
12:36 · just have to cut your coat according to your cloth really I mean we simply won't be able to dig as big a hole here as we
12:43 · would say in chalk we' literally have to take out a whole I don't know 10 m
12:49 · across or something like that to get to the bottom of the ditch but what you got here is Lovely isn't it absolutely superb yeah I mean we got the we got the
12:55 · bank and then where the lads are cleaning down the actual filling of the ditch so what we want to do is burrow
13:01 · into that and actually excavate that and and actually reveal the profile of the
13:07 · ditch and is this the bank around the castle or the bank around the town ah
13:13 · now there's a question I can't answer yet after a whole day's digging it feels
13:20 · slightly frustrating that we've only just scratch the surface still over in our second trench
13:28 · we may have our medieval road that looks to me rxa like you're on
13:34 · the money yeah yeah we're definitely on to what looks like archaeology here there's
13:40 · like charcoal Flex in there yeah that is definitely archaeology sandwi now we're
13:46 · also starting to get some really decent finds from both trenches as well as our uh food vessels
13:54 · we also have drinking vessels I have to say this is my favorite not only because I found it but I just love the way you
14:01 · fit your thumbs into the holes there for the decoration I just it's lovely that these jars would have contained possibly
14:07 · something like a weak beer weak beer I don't do weak
14:16 · beer it's been a long day and the mere mention of weak beer
14:23 · does funny things to an archaeologist so while John teases
14:30 · Francis with yet more geomagnetic anomalies face down on joh oh oh that
14:36 · look fruity that really looked fruity I head off for a more sobering
14:44 · view of our [Music] site and I'm wondering whether our
14:50 · celebrations may be a little premature somewhere among all those
14:55 · lumps and bumps is Medieval kenig and it's almost as though from up here
15:01 · you can see some of the shape of the Town can't you and you've got in that big trench the the mound which may Mark
15:09 · the ditch which was the perimeter of the old town and next to it the the little
15:15 · trench where rakshaw found what she thinks could be one of the houses but
15:21 · more than anything what I can see is the sheer scale of the site have we bitten
15:26 · off more than we can chew I honestly don't know we just have to get stuck in again
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16:10 · description beginning of day two here in South Wales and somewhere under all
16:16 · these Dunes is the Lost medieval town of kenfig yesterday John did some fantastic
16:23 · geiz after which we found a ditch and a mound which are very significant and and
16:29 · also part of a medieval house but then yesterday evening he did some more GF
16:35 · which he got even more excited about and which he adamantly refused to let me
16:41 · have a look at so come on John show us this J F look
16:46 · we've expanded the survey now and the results are just getting better this possible range of buildings I talked
16:53 · about clearly is a line that continues under the Junes but as we've gone
16:59 · towards the castle it now looks as though this response here could be the north south axis so we're going to
17:05 · follow that yeah and take the geophysics in this direction well CU both of these roads that one and this one here the new
17:12 · one are curling in towards the castle that's the key thing so we're starting
17:17 · to get the complete picture um of the town the problem is from what we know of
17:23 · keni from the documents we know it's really quite an expansive settlement okay this is too really to contain a
17:30 · burrow of 150 Town plots which is what kenvic was at its peak so I think we do
17:35 · need to start looking outside of of these ring ditches we're struggling to get the inside done if you're talking
17:41 · about going Beyond I appreciate that but I'm wondering if there are areas out there we can Target to get a handle on
17:47 · this much larger settlement it's a bit of a conundrum the documents tell us kenfig was a large
17:54 · settlement and if they're correct it simply wouldn't fit inside the area in closed by Phil's ditch and yet we've
18:01 · definitely got signs of a town here good brief that's a metal surface
18:08 · isn't it oh yeah this is your road for you that absolutely
18:13 · solid we're starting to reveal the East West Street which is looking really well
18:19 · preserved and that's not all John's geophysics suggests we might have a
18:24 · second Road running north south but how much of the Town lies inside the ditch
18:30 · and is there a lot more Beyond it perhaps if we follow the two roads we'll
18:35 · find out I reckon Cassie the road surface is
18:41 · going to be a good meter below there well they've got a meter in their trench yeah already and we're a meter above
18:48 · them yeah so I'm thinking 2 m while it's too early to say how large
18:55 · the town was in Phil's ditch we're beginning to get a better idea of what it was like to live
19:01 · here I've been going through the records and there's quite a few really Vivid accounts of attacks on the town
19:07 · particularly this one from 12:32 where it says that the town's folk knew that the Welsh were coming so they send their
19:14 · cattle away and they actually burn some of the buildings inside the walls themselves then the Welsh turn up and
19:21 · make an attack on the the Foss and the Palisade of the town and burn the town
19:26 · outside I'm wondering if any of that is coming up in the archaeology well we do have evidence of burning in the in the
19:34 · layers here so we can say there were fires but we can't necessarily say they were fires that resulted from attacks
19:41 · what I would say is that it does look like we've probably got a palisade defense we've stripped off the top of
19:46 · the bank there was never a stone wall up there so your story that there was perhaps a wooden Palisade there is very
19:53 · plausible what's the thinking behind burning your own buildings well it's an
19:59 · act of desperation for a star um and one of the motivations is you don't want the
20:04 · enemy to get hold of have somewhere to live or to eat your food so you burn the
20:10 · houses down there is also a tactical aspect as well because if you actually burn selective buildings you actually
20:17 · create open space so if the enemy do get in you withdraw into somewhere that is
20:22 · defensible and as they come across open ground you ping them off with with bows and arrows and you try and drop D them
20:31 · out so we're pretty confident that Phil's got the town's defenses a bank
20:36 · and ditch topped by a strong Timber Palisade but it's still not possible to
20:42 · say whether these defenses surrounded the whole of the town it's perhaps more likely they an
20:49 · extension of the castle it's outer Bailey what we can say for certain is
20:56 · that these defenses didn't always work [Music]
21:03 · one of the things that struck us when we learned how kenvic was raised to the ground time and time again was what a
21:09 · lot of business there must have been around for the local Builders so we thought it would be really interesting to find out how quickly we could put up
21:16 · a medieval house then we thought no what would be really interesting would be to see how quickly we could get one to
21:24 · burn in the Hollywood version of History a fire arrow could light up a medieval
21:29 · town like a Christmas tree and then you aim and shoot right okay did it really
21:34 · happen like that in terms of like The Siege Warfare that we know happened here at kenfig at what point in The Siege
21:40 · would these arrows be used the fire arrows would be the second wave cuz they don't go very far cuz they're they're great heavy-headed things and when they
21:47 · land in the buildings then if there are dozens of them then as they go off so
21:52 · you got to get to them allall un if the buildings are quite High you don't find the first one might smolder for hours
21:58 · but if the um Defender here you know I'm the Norman I'm stood there on my keep
22:03 · and I've noticed this Welshman here creeping up on the castle with his fire arrow what what sort of um materials are
22:09 · they using to actually keep the the arrows alike um you would on the Arrow you would use uh something like um uh
22:16 · linen char cloth linen and then you would light that with some accelerant or
22:21 · another or possibly without accelerant at all um because you're not delivering flame strictly speaking you're
22:27 · delivering something which is on fire what you got to remember though Alex is while I'm going in there and while I'm
22:34 · running back all my mates are behind me they're all firing at you yeah a whole country full of people shooting at you
22:40 · four Normans we can handle it we don't have the time to build an
22:46 · entire medieval house we've got three days not three months but we do have a
22:52 · bail of straw and two archaeologists dressed like a couple of pantomim extras prare to eat my Flames Al
23:01 · oh it's good oh oh it's very good oh in theory straw should catch
23:09 · fire more quickly than the thatched Reed used to build medieval roofs oh no no I had the line just not
23:17 · the length but Alex and Matt's early confidence soon appears
23:25 · misplaced oh oh he's gone out smoldering quick quick going light that leave that
23:32 · for a couple of hours finally the best our archers can do is to get the straw
23:38 · smoldering so they resort to cheating here we go going going set
23:47 · Village so at the end of the day it's not quite how it looks in the movies and
23:52 · perhaps it wasn't as easy to burn kenfig as we think
24:01 · back on site and the archaeologists are at full stretch we've now got not one
24:06 · but two trenches looking for the north south road we've got an
24:12 · edge that's just dropping right off in here very uneven it's really quite
24:18 · exciting because under all this sand might also be medial
24:27 · houses and to be outdone Phil started to explore the area behind the
24:34 · defenses rumor has it you've got a nice little find here I've got a lovely little find it's a very very important
24:40 · find what do you think of that ooh it's a voided long cross Penny
24:47 · and what is avoided long cross well a avoided long cross sits very very
24:52 · comfortably between short cross pennies which literally have a very short cross and a long cross penny where the cross
25:00 · goes from rim to rim so you've got the top of the Cross there like that and
25:05 · then that's the cross bit there absolutely but you can see on this one
25:10 · that there are actually three lines that Define the cross two silver and one black absolutely now the three lines are
25:17 · distinctive of the short cross Penny but the long cross Penny does not have that middle line normally it doesn't but if
25:24 · it's got the black bit in it is that the void absolutely that is avoided long cross Penny and The crucial thing is
25:31 · that they are very very tightly datable and the date is Mr Harding 1247 Dr
25:37 · Harding to you that Dr Robinson here but what is so exciting about that is it
25:44 · gives us a bit of story to tell doesn't it which is that this place was burned to the ground in the 1230s so by the
25:51 · late 1240s it was doing well enough for people to be flashing around their voided long crosses absolutely so we've
25:58 · got these really good finds coming up and the trenches are getting bigger and bigger we've got this Sublime geiz from
26:05 · John we're starting to move out from just Excavating the town and now are going into the suburbs what are we going
26:12 · to find there well what'll we going to find out after the
26:27 · break time team's in South Wales hunting for the Lost medieval town of
26:34 · kenfig and it's almost as if the natural disaster which buried this town 500 years ago has returned to haunt
26:44 · us yesterday when I was down here the Sun was shining and the whole place
26:49 · seemed like a holiday idal but this morning the wind picked up the weather's
26:55 · changed completely and it's not difficult to see how in medieval times the wind could have lifted a whole load
27:01 · of sand off this beach and dumped it on the town of kenig our problem of course
27:08 · is that we want to excavate as much of it as we can and we've only got a day and a half
27:14 · left we've now opened several trenches looking for the towns streets and houses
27:20 · but the sandunes which have built up over the centuries are really slowing us
27:25 · [Music] down Cassie this is some trench yeah we need all this to get this you see what
27:32 · you've got there's rather nice isn't it yeah it's great it's really good and substantial really nicely made wall it's
27:37 · well faced it's a fairly large structure and you can tell that because in this layer down here we're getting a lot of
27:43 · roofing slate out and we've got it's a nice piece of pen and Sandstone with a
27:49 · hole through for the nail and then what we've got that's really lovely are these which are the ridge tiles so they're
27:56 · they're fired tiles glazed with green they're quite smart you can just catch that bit of glaze there and they'd have
28:02 · provided a really decorative finish on the top so and again signs that we're looking at a well-made building looks a
28:08 · bit black and sludgy down there that's Timber it's not burnt Timber it's black cuz it's water logged and it's all
28:14 · sitting in with our roof slates and and our um Ridge tiles so it looks like a roof has come off at some point and this
28:20 · is the timber that might well go with it in which case are we looking at a demolition layer some kind of um
28:25 · destruction [Music]
28:30 · so we've got our second building
28:37 · lovely we can now have our first go at sketching out a basic Street plan our
28:42 · Posh building lies on a North South Road which leads to the castle tower there it
28:48 · links up with a second one running East West we've also got Ken Fig's
28:54 · defenses but the area Within These Walls feels too small to have housed the
28:59 · entire town perhaps it's just an overdeveloped Castle Bailey so the
29:04 · question is this is the whole of our town packed into this area or do our two
29:09 · roads lead out beyond the walls into extensive
29:15 · [Music] suburbs jefis have braved the worsening weather to find
29:22 · out at last John we've got outside the Bailey walls and what have you found
29:27 · well to be honest I'm not sure the problem is we've got no responses in this area that equate with the ones
29:34 · we've got in that part of the Bailey where we've clearly got houses which is interesting isn't it because Terry you
29:41 · and the kenfig society have excavated outside the Bailey and you got as I recall what two Medieval houses but the
29:48 · interesting thing about it is that the building itself and we don't it wasn't a house I'm sure it must have been a barn
29:53 · or an agricultural building uh uh around it were what looked to us and I I'm
30:00 · pretty certain were uh medieval plow plowing uh uh remnants uh so we we felt
30:06 · we were definitely out of town as it were uh just just behind us there right
30:12 · it it it certainly doesn't sound like a an urban space does it certainly not certainly this is really confusing where
30:20 · we were expecting to find kenfig suburbs instead we might have open
30:26 · Farmland what's going on this can't be it can it all the documents describe a
30:32 · thriving substantial town here by the late Middle Ages very important and and we actually have a copy of the charter
30:39 · of 1360 here what does that mean for a town when it's got a charter it's really important really important in the sense
30:45 · that quite apart from anything else it it it confirms that it exists as a town and that implies all sorts of other
30:52 · things like the rights to hold fairs and markets and something else that you could do you could actually draw up or
30:58 · es what is an ordinance it's it's it's sort of like a local law so these are laws that govern the lives of the
31:04 · ordinary people yeah Everyday People everyday lives but this is a really good one let me read this one to you it is
31:12 · ordained that no butchers shall cast no heads feet nor none other garbage in the
31:19 · High Street nor in no other place to the annoyance of his neighbor so there you
31:24 · are you can't Chuck your awful in the High Street you can almost smell the medieval Town coming out of the
31:29 · documents yeah indeed you two don't know the half of it behind the town's defenses Phil is starting to find houses
31:37 · and they're not exactly what you'd call well classy and I think that they've tered into the side of the natural and I
31:45 · think what we're looking at here is possibly the floor of a building we don't know how far it goes that way now
31:52 · the next thing that happens is that that building goes out of use and the whole area at the back of the ramp gets used
31:58 · as a mid a sort of Municipal Council dump if you like and then these Stones
32:03 · here are they part of that dump or is that something different no that's something different what it is is a
32:09 · later building that's been built on top of the mid this is one wall you can see it's pretty scabby really yeah we got
32:16 · one wall there one wall at the back there backed into the back of the ramp part and the fourth wall coming along
32:23 · here I think it's probably a workshop or something like that so some bles built his workshop on a p
32:28 · well exactly but what I think it might mean is that the the space within the Bailey was getting really quite
32:33 · restricted and so they were actually having to cram buildings in just to actually get them
32:40 · in it's puzzling to think that a rubbish dump behind the Palisade could be considered Prime real
32:46 · estate if this is kic's cheaps side it's certainly situated well away from what
32:52 · we think of the posher parts of town our well preserved East West Road and the
32:57 · area around around the castle we've got a superb wall and that
33:02 · is completely unexpected and it is a beautiful wall as well it is I mean like look in that in
33:08 · that little saage You' done there it's about what 68 cses High yeah and it's proper Mason it's the first time we've
33:14 · had proper masonry on this site it is it's really nicely bondage and you've got a really good face on this side I
33:20 · couldn't have asked for a better wall no and the thing is that this wall this I mean I assume it's quite a grand house
33:27 · and look we're just back from the from the castle entrance this has to be the sort of the slightly upmarket end of
33:34 · town doesn't it yeah yeah okay as our trenches slowly get bigger
33:41 · it's clear the sand has done a fantastic job of preserving the archaeology but there's still no sign of
33:48 · any suburbs Beyond Ken Fig's defenses and instead we're beginning to discover
33:53 · quite a cramped town so what did kenfig look like
34:00 · there's only one day left to find
34:05 · [Music] out ladies and gentlemen we're going to
34:11 · abide by the rules of kenvic tonight number one of which is when I do that
34:16 · you keep quiet why because it's the rule but your little Rosy face has been
34:24 · beaming most of the day isn't it well it has been extraordinary Tony because
34:29 · slowly we've revealed the outlines of a completely unknown buried medieval town
34:36 · and that's never happened to me before in my life and it has been fantastic pH oh I mean we carry on regardless about
34:43 · the weather I mean you know I mean if the Archaeology is good then we'll carry on and the archaeology has been
34:50 · absolutely cracking Al I must confess no no no no not yet no no it's the rules we
34:56 · have the drinking after we've read the rules Maryanne give us the rest of the rules it is ordained by the said Port
35:03 · treeve that's him that's me that all Brewers shall Brew good and wholesome ale well I should help so too no
35:10 · inhabitant of the said Town shall keep no naughty packs bordy or suspected harlots vabs nor
35:19 · loiterers doesn't look good for you Raa ladies and gent to vagrants harlots and
35:40 · no beginning of day three here at kenfig in South Wales where we've been looking
35:45 · at a medieval town which lay buried underneath the sand for centuries up
35:51 · until now we've been concentrating on the area around the castle you can see that sand there that's our spoil Heap
35:58 · and we've uncovered a town that seems pretty wealthy lots of big houses Broad
36:04 · Streets but now we're going to turn our attention to beyond the castle walls not
36:09 · here that's not archaeology that's just a big old Sand Dune but over here really
36:14 · as far as that line of trees there ought to be shops houses little plots that
36:20 · kind of thing the real question is where on Earth are we going to dig the trouble is GE is can't find
36:28 · anything here at all and yet we've been led to believe from the historical sources that kenig
36:35 · was an extensive settlement possibly with suburbs stretching Beyond its
36:42 · defenses Francis we're going to be here forever well we do know that the main
36:48 · North South Road was coming through here don't we yes I mean we've got that on the geophysics but in the rest of the
36:53 · area we've surveyed we've got no evidence for buildings at all I mean compare the results from inside
37:00 · and there's no nothing like it out here hang on a minute I don't understand we have heard from the documents that
37:06 · there's a lot of plots out here but there doesn't seem to be anything why are we bothering to dig out here why don't we just stay where we know the
37:13 · archology is well if the town does stop here right then that is something is
37:18 · completely unexpected and it actually makes that town if anything rather more important because it's so Compact and
37:24 · the occupation is so dense so Francis gets Matt to open a trench
37:30 · close to where the north south Road exits the defenses if we're going to find any
37:36 · suburbs outside them this trench will be our best
37:43 · shot so was the town much more cramped than we've been led to believe by the historical
37:49 · sources it's beginning to look that way and yet it was also fairly prosperous um
37:54 · what we've got here is um a buckle oo look at that isn't it lovely it's really
38:00 · pretty and what's really nice about this is that um if we look at the actual frame itself I'm just beginning to see
38:06 · just in this corner it looks a little bit silvery now that's either copper alloy that's been later tinned or
38:12 · silvered to make it look like it's silver or it may well actually be silver and I've managed to date this quite
38:19 · securely to 1350 to, 1400 um from examples that were found in London
38:25 · excavations it might be that this is a little bit later in date here by the time the fashion has traveled over to
38:31 · where we are now over in Wales um but it's nice to have that kind of date for
38:37 · it so it seems the people here were doing well enough to afford the latest fashions and to build bigger and better
38:45 · buildings what we got here is a really substantial wall puts me in mind of the
38:50 · castle W and that you oh yes the only difference is that Wall's got mortar and this one's just clay but it's similar
38:57 · stonework and it's over a meter thick this is a big substantial Posh building and the interesting thing is that these
39:04 · cattle prints in this dark humic clay actually run underneath the wall it's a
39:10 · very dark clay it's very humic it smells yeah I think you've got a buyer
39:17 · or a wooden cattle shed some something like that and then you've got this big imposing Posh building slapped on top I
39:24 · think we're probably looking here at an administrative building possibly rather than a than a house don't you think it
39:30 · must be it's incredible to think that the
39:36 · sight of the old cattle shed ultimately ended up as home to a posh Administrative
39:41 · Building def War here and it's got us thinking as the town got richer what
39:47 · happened to all the cowsheds and are there any buildings here uh there aren't any buildings what we do have though is this lovely cobbled
39:55 · surface here which absolutely covered in charcoal it looks like there is some industrial process going on here I mean
40:01 · I think there's far too much there for it to be a half or something like that you've got a good decent cobbled surface it smells pretty terrible down here
40:07 · there's a lot of burnt stuff um Iron smelting something like that what do you think all that tells us well I think
40:13 · it's absolutely what I wanted because we're just outside the settlement area
40:19 · and you tend to put Light Industry today as in the Middle Ages away from your housing so that confirms that this outer
40:26 · area here didn't have a lot of houses the pieces of the puzzle are
40:31 · starting to fall into place this little Forge must have been typical of kenfig scattered
40:38 · suburbs as the town got richer these smelly industrial buildings would have been pushed outside the
40:46 · walls but for some reason the town's folk were unwilling to build their houses here outside what I want from
40:54 · uray is some idea of what might have been happening here based on other sites
41:01 · I've actually brought a a sort of a reconstruction drawing of Kidwell kwell is a bit West of here but what you see
41:07 · here is an implantation with a fairly regular grid pattern but actually in the extended Bailey of a castle and it's
41:15 · it's it's worth reminding ourselves I think you know that this is this is hostile territory from the Anglo Norman
41:20 · perspective you know you you you have the wealth still in the highlands who who are coming down so implantation in a
41:26 · Bailey makes a lot of sense but it's worth noticing too that we began to get Suburban overspill yes and here you also
41:35 · get much less predictable Suburban expansion so that that might be a good
41:40 · working model for us uh to apply here to kendri so it's actually quite mobile then this burrow instead of being a sort
41:46 · of fixed entity actually it's it's much more fluid and we should anticipate sort of settlement types popping up all over
41:53 · this area I think that's probably a good way to look at it right but perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised to learn that
41:59 · the people of kenfig wanted to keep their homes within the defenses that is an amazing amount of
42:07 · burning you do wonder whether or not this might have something to do with with conflict or something like that was
42:13 · in the right place isn't it given how many times they were attacked my favorite trench on the whole
42:19 · site has got to be this one with the little house nestling in the Lee of the
42:24 · big Mound that went round the castle and then this thick mid material on top of it and another house on top of that but
42:32 · it's not just me who's been so excited about this trench all day local people
42:37 · have been turning up to have a look at Phil's work except Phil you've now turned your attention to this end of the
42:43 · trench look what we've got down there oh yeah this black stuff here yeah
42:48 · absolutely that is intense burning and that burning is underneath the bank
42:54 · perhaps that burning is a an event in history an attack on the castle and as a
43:00 · result of that they actually strengthened or actually built for the first time this massive Bank well we
43:06 · can't prove that but it is a nice story isn't it so although kenfig never dared
43:11 · to expand far beyond the Castle's defensive Palisade its people were a
43:17 · resilient Bunch each time their town was destroyed
43:24 · they simply rebuilt it
43:29 · they didn't just survive judging by what we found they prospered what started as
43:35 · a frontier Outpost became as wellmaintained as the towns we know
43:41 · today but it's this path in front of it I can't remember a time team where we've
43:47 · had such an opportunity to see a really well-preserved medieval Road I know it's
43:53 · astonishing Tony I mean this is beautifully laid out that's not just because we've cleaned it well
44:00 · archaeologically it was like that no if there were deep holes and and potholes and that sort of thing we'd have
44:05 · revealed them archaeologically they must have kept it regularly maintained oh well well I I know that because in these
44:12 · uh kig ordinances it says it's ordained that every Burg's tenant and Resident dwelling within the town walls where the
44:19 · Pavements or causeways have been shall and do keep them clean from dung and other filth upon pain of 12 Pence at
44:27 · every fault good grief I mean 12 P that's equivalent to 500 quid today you
44:33 · know I mean that's a serious fine yeah it's a bag of crisp isn't it isn't it and it completely dis it demolishes our
44:40 · idea that medieval roads were rutted and full of mud and stuff chucked from first
44:45 · floor Windows absolutely but look out here is the road proper and it really is
44:51 · it's still good and hard really is hard I wouldn't mind driving driving on that myself the thing
44:58 · is Tony we never get to see medieval roads preserved like this because normally you've got a a late medieval
45:06 · Road and then you got a post medieval Road and then you've got layers and layers of tarmac and heaven knows what
45:11 · and the medieval Road isn't preserved like under a a mass of sand that that's
45:16 · been blown in from outside yeah it's a real one off this isn't it beautiful it's absolutely fabulous I
45:23 · think the road like the town itself is a unique Time
45:32 · [Music] Capsule the sand ultimately forced Ken
45:38 · Fig's inhabitants to abandon their homes but it's allowed us to retell the town's
45:48 · history right I think we're done Francis tell them the story right okay folks now this is a high Precision model that's
45:56 · the castle one here which is over there yep and there are two sizes of yogurt
46:02 · pots representing houses those are those the the the big ones are the sort of
46:07 · high status ones that's where Cassie and Tracy were digging and then there's a a
46:12 · main East West Road it yeah and to the left there just behind the ramp Parts is
46:19 · the rough end of town and that's where Phil was all three days no shame in that
46:25 · no shame in that a better quality though then we got another road heading
46:31 · out this way that's it through the ramparts and then Open Fields and farms
46:38 · and then for about 200 years 300 years that was the town of kenfig and then the
46:43 · winds got up and the Sands gathered and slowly the whole thing was buried
46:51 · a very good Francis pH I said would' probably end up
46:57 · this dig playing S car
47:03 · [Music]
47:15 · [Music]

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