Time Team Day 24 - The Monastery and the Mansion

Good morning, good afternoon or good evening!  I hope you, my readers are doing well depending on when you are reading this.  The Thirty-One Days of the Time Team continues to press on with an episode from season 12.  Today the Time Team is going to be investigating some earthworks in Nether Poppleton.  This episode is called The Monastery and the Mansion.  The run time for this episode is 49:58.

Nether Poppleton villagers has called the Time Team to investigate some mysterious mounds that surround a Yorkshire village.  The villagers have bought the land to protect them.  English Heritage thinks that this mound came from the Medieval Times.  However, the villagers believe that the mound dates back even earlier.  Could these be the remains of an Anglo-Saxon nunnery?  Or could these be part of an Anglo-Saxon Village?  The Time Team have three days to investigate.

Tony takes to the air and looks at the village of Nether Poppleton.  It looks like a traditional Medieval Village or is it?  On day one the villagers of Nether Poppleton have gathered for a briefing.  The villagers are going to be digging test pits to see what sort of activity.  Mick humorously suggests that it is not a “respectable search strategy to bulldoze the town.”  The towns people are going to be digging test pits around the village under the watchful eye of the archeologists.  In Tony’s mind that runs contrary to archelogy.  Uncle Mick is good at allaying Uncle Tony’s fears.

The race is on for the villagers to find the oldest part of the village.  Uncle Phil and Aunt Carenza take the time to teach the villagers how do properly dig.  In the meantime, Uncle Mick and Uncle Tony are looking at the church.  The church was dedicated to St. Everilda, one of two in England dedicated to this Anglo-Saxon Saint.  She would have lived in this area and may have started a nunnery on the site.  Geophysics work on this site and Stewart is studying the landscape of the area.

The villagers are surprised at what is coming out of the test trenches.  Phil goes up to the church to work on a trench.  He has found a child burial.   In the meantime in the incident room, Carenza and Paul are worried about not getting as many finds to the incident room.  Soon, after a mad dash by Carenza, the finds come in fast and furious.  Both Carenza and Paul are being overwhelmed, because it takes time to identify those finds and get them sorted out.  The test pits are closed at the end of day one.  The finds are sorted and plotted out on a map of the village.

Carenza and Paul manage to finish in time.  The locals gather in front of the incident room to learn about what their finds were.  Many of the finds that date back to the Saxon period are on the opposite end of the village from where the church is.  Carenza meets with the villagers to tell them what was going on with the find.  Test pit number 20 is widened to become trench one.  Then there will be several test pits opened up near the church.  More geophysics is done to see if there are other targets.  Mick is getting excited because he believes that there is a monastery on the site.  Uncle Tony tries to test that theory with Uncle Mick.

What will the Time Team learn about this site?  Will Uncle Mick be right about there being a monastery on the site?  What will the trenches turn up?  Tune in the rest of the episode to find out more.

It was awesome to see how the village came together to learn about their village.  Carenza is put through her paces to gather up the finds that were discovered in the test pits.  Tony is funny, particularly with Mick’s Pollyanna attitude.   Even Uncle Phil and John were squabbling about who does more work.   This was a very good episode, particularly since the villagers were so happy to help the Time Team learn about the village.  This would be an episode I would HIGHLY recommend showing to a history class it was very well done and the story was very good.