Time Team Day 17 - The Naughty Nuns

Good morning!  Good evening or good afternoon, depending on when you are reading this.  I am pulling an episode from Season Nine’s Time Team.  I am glad to be discovering more and more episodes of the Time Team.  The Time Team is investigating a monastery where both monks and nuns lived together.  The run time for this episode is 49:47 and it is called the Naughty Monastery.

The Time Team is heading to a military intelligence base at Chickstands to explore the site of a thirteenth-century monastery.  There is a catch to this monastery: it is unisex.  The site belonged to the Gilbertines, a British order known for having both nuns and monks living together.  The Time Team is going to be investigating for clues about the nun’s cloister and the other monastic remains.  As they dig, they may have discovered a possible staircase as well as a hospital area.  How did the monks and nuns manage to live together on the site?

Tony opens the Time Team with some intelligence gathering and introduces the Time Team episode.  Monks and Nuns living together would have been a scandal.  How would they have done it?  Mick and Tony meet in front of one of the surviving buildings from the surviving monastery.  Mick is thrilled to study a monastery site.   Geophysics begins on the site.  One man is impatient to learn what the Time Team can find out about this monastery.

Chris Holtom, the man who invited the Time Team, talks about what they hope to learn about this monastery site.  English Heritage has joined up with the dig and the Time Team will have to be careful with what they dig.  Trench one goes in over a feature that could be the nun’s house.  Mick however disagrees and thinks the nun’s cloister is in another location on the site.  Geophysics works in this location as well.

Trench one proves to be disappointing, as natural features are discovered.  Stewart is interested in another site in a nearby field.  Aerial photography shows something in this field.  Perhaps there are remains on this site too?  Trench two goes in a courtyard and another trench goes in nearby.  Another trench goes in over a potential burial site.  When a water pipe was put in the area in 1969, the initial dig disturbed a burial.  On top of a burial, there were tiles discovered when the water pipe was put in.

Unfortunately, the second trench has no archaeology in it and the army is helping the Time Team backfilling it.  Uncle Mick believes that this is good news, however, Uncle Tony is skeptical.  It feels so disappointing that there is nothing found on Day One, will the Time Team manage to turn things around?  One of the diggers, Jenni Butterworth, will live as a nun for twenty-four hours, in a historic recreation.  Robin shows Jenni what she has to wear and talks about the experiment.

It was at the end of Day One when the Time Team discovered some walls and other archeology.  However, Mick does not believe that this was the nun’s cloister.  Uncle Mick thinks it belongs to the hospital.  So what did Uncle Phil discover in his trench?  Day Two starts with Tony summing up Day One’s activities.  On day two another trench will be opened up and the Army base has given the Time Team permission to dig under some cobblestones.  Tony quips “I would not have given us permission.”  Has the Time Team discovered the hospital?  Will the Time Team find the nun’s cloister?  How will Jenni handle the experiment?  Will geophysics get some different results?  Tune into the rest of the episode to find out more about the Naughty Nuns.

I was pleasantly surprised that Robin was in this episode because I did not think that he was in later seasons.  It was cool to see the historic experiment and I enjoyed hearing Jenni’s reflections on this experiment.  The story was very good with the twists along the way.  This would be a good Time Team episode to show to a science class because there were so many theories as to where the nun’s cloister was.  I would also show this to a history class and use it for research purposes too.