Time Team Day 27 - Bodies in the Shed

Good morning, after today there will be four more Time Team blogs.  Then we will finish up our Thirty-One Days of Time Team for October.  Then for November and blogs on World War I and World War II.  December will be fun and frivolous documentaries to end the year.
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The Time Team is at Glendon Hall, and it is a building that has over four hundred years of history.  The owner decided to build his mother a new house and when the diggers started digging they discovered a body.  Not only did they discover one body but they discovered many more bodies.  Why were these bodies found in an outbuilding?  Who put them there?  Who are they?  The Time Team has three days to find out more.

The Glendon Hall and the estate surrounding it is a patchwork of buildings in different styles.  Martin Hipwell, the owner talks about discovering the bodies while building and working on building a new house.  It did not take long for Martin and the builders to realize that there was more than one body on the site.  Mick talks about the potential for a cemetery on the site.  At one point there was a church on the site so maybe the possibility of the cemetery is right on the mark.  The Time Team will work in the shed and look for the church.

There were plenty of skeletons that were found on the site.  So while Phil works in the shed and the cemetery, the Time Team will look for the church.  There is a folly on the site and some of the material looks like it came from a church.  Stewart and Richard Morris, a historic buildings consultant look at the folly.  Richard pulls out a piece from the folly and it is a piece of marble that looks like it came from a tomb.  Are these pieces from the church?  The church looked pretty nice and would have been attached to the original Glendon Hall.

The Time Team goes into archives.  The Local historians say that the stained glass in the windows at Glendon Hall came from the church.  Tony and Richard take a look.  Richard says the glass is not stained but the glass is painted.  This would hint at a person who had a lot of money and who was willing to spend a lot of money on his church.  Helen looks back to parish records about the church.  It seems the church was small and active until 1812.  The building was described as a two-room church.  There are no details about burials. 

Stewart takes Mick on a walk around the site.  He found something on an earlier map that may hint at a hall or a church on the site.  There is a kink in the road.  So this means instead of going straight through the road had a kink which meant it was going around something.  Was this road going around a house?  Was this road going around a church?  Geophysics will have to take a look at the site.

More and more bodies are being found in the shed.  Children and adults are found buried.  Were these plague victims?  Why were they buried here?  Earlier records indicate that there was a settlement on the site that consisted of nine households.  Are these the remains of the people of that settlement?  Will the Time Team discover a medieval cemetery?  Will they discover a church on the site?  Tune into the rest of the episode to find out!

As for my recommendation, this would be one episode to skip showing in the classroom.  It is a good episode but should be used for teacher enrichment and not student enrichment.