East Digging for Britain

We may be a small island,

but we have a big history that's still full of mysteries.

So every year hundreds of archaeologists go out hunting

for clues to our forgotten past.

I have never seen anything like that.

In 2016, their discoveries have been more exciting than ever.

It's all happening now.

-You little devil, Johann!

-Yeah.

HE LAUGHS

In this programme, Digging For Britain showcases

the very best of them from the East.

Each excavation was filmed as it happened

by the archaeologists themselves.

Their dig diaries mean that we can be there for

every exciting moment of discovery.

-Cracking little find.

-It's superb.

And now the archaeologists are bringing their finds - from pottery

to metalwork to human remains -

into our lab so that we can get a closer look at them

and find out what they tell us about our British ancestors.

Welcome to Digging For Britain.

In this programme I'm joining archaeologists

in the east of the country to share in their biggest discoveries.

In Barnet, North London,

we're searching for the site of one of the most important battles

of the Wars of the Roses.

We found something that's actually quite interesting

and could indeed be from the battle.

We travel to Norfolk to reveal strange burial rituals

of the earliest Christians.

We've uncovered our best preserved wooden burial.

One, two, three.

And we're in East London as archaeologists unearth a theatre

that inspired some of Shakespeare's greatest plays.

It's quite thrilling to think that he was here performing on this stage

that was just behind me.

To find out how these discoveries fit into the story of Britain,

I've come to Canterbury to explore the city's museums and find out how

the artefacts in these collections help to tell the story of the East.

Our first dig takes us to East Anglia,

where an entire 3,000-year-old village has been preserved

in the famous watery fens.

Must Farm is a Bronze Age site in Cambridgeshire, and what can I say?

I honestly believe that this is

the most exciting archaeological discovery in Britain

during my lifetime.

'I was lucky enough to visit the site earlier this year

'when the excavations got under way.'

Oh, wow!

'The preservation is so extraordinary,

'it's been dubbed Britain's Pompeii.'

Oh, this has just sent a shiver down my spine.

This is amazing!

The Must Farm site consists of five complete roundhouses -

the remains of what was once a thriving Bronze Age village.

But 3,000 years ago it caught fire

and collapsed into the marshy fens,

where the houses and their contents were perfectly preserved in the mud.

We can see quite clearly the layout of the settlement from up here,

and you can see how the roof timbers -

the radiating roof timbers - have fallen down almost in situ.

So far the excavations have revealed Britain's oldest wheel...

This is just bigger and better than anything else,

and complete - the fact it's complete is wonderful.

..and precious imported glass beads.

Beautiful objects, aren't they?

Showing us that Bronze Age Britons were technologically advanced

and more closely connected to Europe than we'd previously imagined.

We've come back to Must Farm because

the team expects more revelations to emerge from inside the roundhouses.

We often talk about archaeological sites as being time capsules

where we can peer in and see the objects of the past

and imagine what life was like, but Must Farm is a special case.

Its catastrophic end means that we have this moment frozen in time.

The layout of the roundhouses is

there to see and we've even got the contents of those houses, as well.

So we're starting to be able

to really appreciate what family life was like 3,000 years ago.

Before the discovery of Must Farm,

we knew that Bronze Age roundhouses consisted of a single living space,

but how this space was used was a mystery.

The houses and contents are so well preserved here

that for the first time, Mark Knight and his team

are effectively able to step inside Bronze Age homes

where they hope to see exactly how

our ancestors organised their everyday lives.

It's unbelievable, isn't it?

It's beyond any sort of dream of what you could do within archaeology

and the sense that there is height.

You know? We feel like we have to sort of...

dip our heads slightly and we'll be walking into those buildings.

The archaeologists begin with Roundhouse One

in the centre of the village.

They start digging at the north-eastern end of the building

and one of their first finds is extraordinary -

the remains of 3,000-year-old prehistoric food.

You can see the sort of carbonised remains within the pot.

Sometimes you can see grains,

fragments of leaves and things like that.

As they continue to dig, a surprising pattern emerges.

Everything they find here is for food preparation.

This is the north-eastern quarter of Roundhouse One.

So we've got a bowl here.

There's a wooden platter starting to come up here.

There's a big storage vessel just there.

There's more bowls just over here,

and then there's a wooden bucket or bowl and an inverted platter

just there, as well.

What the team has found is quite clearly a dedicated kitchen area

within the roundhouse.

Until this discovery, there has never been any evidence

that Bronze Age people laid out their homes like this.

And this kitchen is equipped

with everything needed for a slap-up meal.

You can imagine that there was a handle here and a handle there,

presumably for presenting a meal

or, I don't know, a pig's head

or whatever it is that sits on this object.

As the team move on to focus on another part of the roundhouse,

the discoveries take an entirely different turn.

OK, so we're just excavating

the south-east quadrant of the roundhouse.

We're coming down to an area, we've got lots of textile

and we've got a really nice piece down here.

This is the weavers' quarter or something like that

because we've got loom weights, we've got textiles

and we've got plant fibres that haven't been processed or spun yet.

This is a revelation.

This roundhouse is not an all-purpose space,

but it's subdivided into highly organised open-plan living.

We've taken the roof off Roundhouse One

and we're doing that in quadrants

and we're finding that each of the quadrants that we excavate

is different from the next.

So that sense of, there's an arrangement of things going on inside the roundhouse

is really, really important, I think.

We knew that this type of Bronze Age home consisted of a single room,

but we didn't know anything about the organisation.

This new evidence shows us

that the space was divided into specific areas

and suddenly we're looking at something very familiar to us.

It feels like the way we organise our houses today.

And in the final part of Roundhouse One

there's another surprising revelation.

It's the 31st March, first thing in the morning.

We found...

..these little pieces of metalwork.

So we've got a small axe-type thing

that might be like a chisel or something like that,

and then another kind of currently unidentified piece of metal.

It's like a tube. We don't really know what that could be yet.

This is the axe object and this is the tube.

Bronze Age metal tools like these

were thought to be rare and precious possessions,

so this number of discoveries is unexpected

and, astoundingly, the finds keep coming.

And then Lou has just found...

Ooh! Hadn't seen that one.

Lou has just found this little pin.

Yeah. Pretty cool.

And then there's also...

this spear, so that's quite exciting for us

because that's a spear inside one of the houses.

I think that's quite unusual.

On-site, Mark is developing a theory

that could explain what's going on here.

We're starting to see, I think, tool kits,

but they seem to be occurring within roundhouses.

So it does look like each household had...

I don't know, punches and awls and chisels and gouges

and axes and things like that,

and tweezers and razors and things like that

occurring within the household.

The extraordinary finds here take us closer than ever before

into the lives of our Bronze Age ancestors.

I've invited Mark to join me in the lab to help explain how Must Farm is

revolutionising our understanding of the Bronze Age and what it was like

to live in one of those 3,000-year-old roundhouses.

Mark, what would it have been like walking into this house?

So, if we entered this building,

I think the first thing that we would find is that

the floors were quite springy.

So we've got a watercourse beneath us,

so we're not necessarily certain about our footing, I think.

And then we have that sense of distribution, I suppose.

The entranceways are facing towards the sunrise, towards the east,

so we're coming in where there's the most light and immediately we see

the metalwork distribution and all the pots and the wooden vessels

and things and then the textiles.

So things that maybe needed light,

things that you were doing on a daily basis and stuff like that.

Whereas the western half of the building was pretty much

materially sterile. It was very rare to find anything in there at all.

So maybe that is the sort of dark recesses,

-the sleeping area, the places like that and things.

-Yeah, yeah.

'But it's the contents of these houses that are really changing

'our ideas about Bronze Age living standards.'

Where did all of this metalwork come from?

This is all from Roundhouse One.

-From a single house?

-From a single house.

So it's already sort of bamboozling the experts

in a sense of its quantity.

So we're seeing for the first time what a complete assemblage

or a household assemblage looks like, and this is it.

And it's surprising us.

'And it's not just Roundhouse One.

'Incredibly, each house in this village was equally well equipped.'

It feels as if we have a set inventory for each structure

and that each structure has a list of objects that are very similar.

So it's...

11 pots, seven axes, a couple of spears, two sickles, two gouges,

a razor and then amongst that we've got wooden buckets, wooden platters.

It's utterly fascinating.

It's rather like if I was to come round to your house

I'd expect to find certain sets of things.

I'd expect in your kitchen to find a drawer that contains cutlery in it,

that contains knives and forks and spoons, and I would expect that

probably you'll have a garden spade and a garden fork,

probably just one garden spade and one garden fork.

It's this kind of level of detail that we're getting at.

Absolutely and I think that's the sense of,

you feel like we're adding some sort of texture and flesh, I suppose,

to that period that we'd not previously had.

'Importantly, Mark doesn't think

'that the settlement at Must Farm was extraordinary.'

I'd like to think that this is typical,

this is a representative settlement of the later Bronze Age.

This is not an anomaly.

We're not looking at some sort of special place and things,

we're actually seeing something that has been beyond us

because we just don't get these levels of preservation.

This is where archaeology gets really exciting for me,

where it's forcing us to confront our expectations.

-Yeah.

-And it's going to make us change our minds.

I think so. Do you know what? I feel like for the first time

we're digging their world and not our world

and I think that's the difference.

The excavations at Must Farm

are rewriting our understanding of life in the Bronze Age.

It seems that 3,000 years ago our ancestors enjoyed a lifestyle

that we'd recognise today.

Complete with lovingly designed homes

and much-prized personal possessions.

This muddy and waterlogged site

is revealing the beginnings of our modern world.

Must Farm was discovered by accident in Cambridgeshire's marshy fens,

but some discoveries are the result of intense searching.

One such search took place on the outskirts of London, near Barnet -

the site of one of the most decisive battles of the Wars of the Roses.

In the 15th century, the Houses of York and Lancaster clashed

over control of the English throne.

It was a war that would end with the death of Richard III

and the establishment of the Tudor dynasty.

One of its most decisive battles was that of the Battle of Barnet,

but, rather extraordinarily, nobody knows exactly where it happened.

The Battle of Barnet took place on the 14th of April, 1471...

..and pitted the Yorkist forces of Edward IV

against the Earl of Warwick's Lancastrian army.

The battle is believed to have been fought where the modern town is today,

but no evidence of the fighting has ever been discovered here.

But when medieval cannonballs were found in a field

a mile to the north of the town,

archaeologist Sam Wilson decided to investigate.

And when he got to the area,

he was intrigued to see that it fits

the historical descriptions of the battlefield.

We are in this area that's really

of quite a lot of interest to us

because if you look around,

if I pan the camera around very slowly...

..all the way around,

you can see we're sort of in

a very large bowl in the landscape.

The land rises up away from us over there.

It rises up over there

and then it rises up all the way over there.

And potentially this puts us in an area that is actually

described in one of the accounts.

It talks about Edward moving his men off the road

into a hollow in a marsh

and this whole area could potentially, we think,

be that hollow that is described in the accounts.

It's a promising start in his search for the battlefield

but the scale of the challenge is daunting.

They will need to scour nearly 2,000 acres, and what's more,

these fields are all littered with modern metal debris.

Anything exciting?

Probably a ring off an umbrella or something.

-It's a piece of rubbish.

-A piece of rubbish.

-Hooray!

The team knows that the Battle of Barnet was

a brutal and bloody affair,

ultimately decided by hand-to-hand combat.

So metal detecting gives them the best chance of finding

items lost during the fighting.

So we're here in Barnet again.

It's about day 60, something like that.

I've slightly lost track.

And we're in this very, very large field.

It's about 50 acres in total.

METAL DETECTORS BEEP

Finally, after months of combing every inch of this ground,

they find their first possible sign of the medieval battle.

Oh. Oh, it's all happening now.

This is half of a purse bar.

What you had was a little block

in the centre with a loop that attached to your belt

and then a corresponding one of these on the other side

and then you had a cloth pouch that hung off of it,

so, for your loose change and your spectacles or whatever.

And that would just sit on your belt.

So, potentially that's something...

Well, probably every man in the 15th century

would have had a purse of some sort.

It's a promising find but they need much more evidence.

They're in luck.

Well, that's really good.

That's about the fourth spur we've had.

I'll let you do the explanation, Simon.

Yeah, it's a mount for leather.

It's got little hooks on the back

for piercing the leather, then folding over.

And you think medieval?

Yeah, I've shown it to a couple of the lads and they said definitely.

Yeah, that looks interesting.

And then...

RAPID BEEPING

..the team hit the most telling find of all -

a discovery that exactly matches

those found at other Wars of the Roses battle sites.

Typically, as everyone was packing up,

just one detectorist was still working.

About the last 30 metres of his transit, we found something

that's actually quite interesting and could indeed be from the battle.

It's in here...

Here we go.

So this is medieval.

It's a mount.

It's quite substantial,

so it's possibly a bit too big to be a belt mount.

It might be off a horse harness, something like that.

Perhaps this is actually from the battle

or certainly we're getting close to the battlefield.

You'd expect to find items like this on a battlefield

and they are all from the right period in the 15th century.

So could this be the site where Edward IV defeated the Earl of Warwick,

eventually paving the way for a Tudor dynasty?

I love that. Can I pick it up?

-Yeah, sure.

-So you think this would have been attached to

someone's clothing or perhaps part of a horse trapping?

Yeah, I think it's probably a bit substantial to be

attached to clothing or a belt.

It's quite big, it's fairly heavy,

and you might well have had several of these in a repeated design.

Perhaps it could be something from a horse harness, a bridle,

something like that. But of course the armies used a lot of horses,

thousands and thousands of horses, to get to the battlefield.

So they're using guns from a distance.

I presume this is brutal stuff.

The cannonballs really work by pure brute force.

They are solid spheres of lead.

Some of the larger ones have got iron cores in them or stone cores

and really, they were just there to punch through files of men.

I find it really odd that Edward is bringing his men into

this low-lying area. That seems like such an odd strategy

if you're just about to engage in battle.

I think that is probably due to

the fact that Edward approaches the battlefield as it's getting dark.

He doesn't quite know where Warwick is and vice versa.

But it plays to his advantage?

According to some of the accounts, Warwick actually is firing

his artillery where he believes Edward to be.

The accounts describe that the shots go over the heads of Edward's men

and perhaps that's because they're down in this hollow.

Do you think you've got enough evidence to actually

reposition the whole battle?

I think - based on this concentration of evidence

and the apparent lack of evidence elsewhere,

I think we're certainly getting close to it.

-You'll have to come back next year and tell us how you do.

-I hope so.

And I hope I can have more cannonballs with me.

Incredibly, the precise location of the Battle of Barnet has been lost

for over 500 years.

But Sam's investigation is bringing us closer to discovering not only

where it was fought, but how

the landscape proved to be a decisive factor

in this bloody clash that led to the foundation of the Tudor dynasty.

Britain has been Christian for well over 1,000 years.

It's woven into the fabric of our society.

Its emergence in the late sixth century -

a period for which we have few written records -

means we know very little about

how ordinary Britons adopted and practised this new religion.

But now, two remarkable excavations are changing that.

The first comes from Great Ryburgh in Norfolk.

The spread of Christianity across England involved

not just a change in beliefs, but a change in practices,

and that's where archaeology comes into its own.

The chance discovery of a small cemetery in North Norfolk offers us

astonishing insights into rituals practised by a community

just a few generations after conversion to Christianity.

In late 2015, landowner Gary Boyce started to dig

a conservation reservoir on his land.

But not long after the diggers started work,

one of the workmen found something unexpected.

A human bone.

Within days, multiple fragments of skeletons

began to emerge from the mud.

Shocked would be the first word that springs to mind!

Now it's quite exciting.

Gary had no idea what he'd stumbled upon,

so he called Historic England,

who in turn brought in experts from Museum of London Archaeology.

But as the skeletons were properly excavated,

it became clear that this was no ordinary burial site.

This is the first time we've seen

tree trunks that have been hollowed out to contain the body.

It appeared that every person here

had been laid to rest in a hollowed-out tree trunk.

This is a very unusual burial practice.

But who were these people

and why were they buried in this strange way?

Site director Jim Fairclough

believes the orientation of the graves provides a strong clue.

In part, basically by the positioning and the orientation

we think there may be some Christian influences.

But without any form of grave goods or anything like that,

it's kind of hard to tell right now.

Like most Christian graveyards, the people buried here are facing east.

Dating the cemetery may provide a further clue

but at this point there are no objects here which could

point to a particular time period.

Then, one of the team gets lucky.

It looks to be a section of pot base,

a shard of Ipswich ware, mid-Saxon.

This is an important find,

as a mid-Saxon date roughly around the eighth century

suggests that these people probably were Christians

and amongst the first Britons to convert to Christianity.

But using hollowed-out tree trunks for coffins

is extremely unusual for this period.

More clues start to emerge from the excavation.

We're halfway through week five now

and basically we've uncovered what is our best-preserved wooden burial.

Again we have a basic dug-out base from a section of tree.

On this one we also have a lid which is basically covered up.

It wasn't a sealed coffin

but basically another hollowed-out piece of wood

has been placed over the top to protect the burial.

And what we're going to try to do today is lift the lid.

One, two, three.

Because the coffins are so well preserved,

the archaeologists start to notice that the wood is very poor quality.

It's very knotted wood,

so very irregularly shaped and very knotted in places.

You see here we have a large number of knots on the actual wood itself,

at this end piece.

What our specialist thinks is

it's wood that's unsuitable for creating timbers out of.

These people are clearly not using the best wood for their coffins.

With the wood technology they're using - which our specialist says

is similar to the stuff used for building troughs

and mill runs - and also the lack of grave goods we've got so far,

it points to a poor Christian burial site.

Log coffins are well-known from earlier periods,

going back into prehistory, but the archaeologists are really surprised

to see this type of practice

in what seems to be an early Christian cemetery.

I've asked the team to come in and explain what's going on here.

So this is certainly unusual, to have these log burials.

Does that hark back to an earlier pagan past, do you think?

I think it does.

We have to be very careful when we're talking about pagan

because it's a pre-Christian religion or religions.

We don't exactly know how they articulated their faith

and their religion, but we do know from burials of that date

that they were using structures - wooden structures of some sort -

where the body was very clearly laid out in the ground.

So we do seem to have, 100 years later,

the same sort of tradition surviving but with a new religion.

It's interesting, isn't it? Rather than seeing this new religion

coming through with a package of ritual around it, it's very mosaic

and you've got local diversity.

'So it seems that our ancestors were blending pagan with Christian traditions.'

Mid-eighth century there are lots of cemeteries

that still have grave goods and orientations of graves

in all sorts of directions, and things like ring ditches

that suggest there might have been barrow mounds over them,

so it was a time of great religious diversity.

We need to look in more depth at the find spot and see if we can build up

a bigger picture from it.

-But it's exciting times.

-Yeah.

And it's thrown up all of these surprises totally by chance.

Totally by chance. We just haven't seen a cemetery like this before

anywhere in England.

This is such a surprising and unexpected discovery,

which seems to hark back to very ancient traditions.

There may not be an unbroken link back to pagan burial rites,

but what we're seeing here, thanks to the preservation of the wood,

is a precious glimpse of a forgotten ritual.

Chance finds like this log coffin -

in fact, that whole cemetery full of log coffins -

give us a really important insight

into how Christianity was actually practised in those generations

just after the re-emergence of this religion in Britain.

But in a largely illiterate world,

how did people first come into contact with Christianity?

An excavation in North Oxfordshire tells a very surprising story

of how the religion spread.

In mid-2016, excavations in advance of quarry work

unexpectedly revealed a large burial ground.

Over 120 graves were discovered,

many dating to the seventh century -

a time when Christianity was first taking root in Anglo-Saxon England.

Knowing that a site like this might produce some incredible finds,

Oxford Archaeology's Steve Lawrence kept us this dig diary.

This site is a complete surprise in terms of the Saxon archaeology.

We'll be here until it's done.

We estimate about two to three more weeks to

finish off the graves we have left.

Very quickly, the team realise that this was no ordinary burial ground.

The discovery of rich grave goods with some of the skeletons

indicates that the local Anglo-Saxon aristocracy was buried here,

many of whom may have been Christian.

Then, towards the end of the dig,

they uncover one grave that is particularly intriguing.

The first thing they notice are small pieces of iron

mysteriously dotted around the skeleton.

This is one of the most exciting graves we've had so far.

At the western end we have two iron headboard stays just showing up.

We have the skull, you can see at the very bottom,

but that's overlain by this layer of rubble.

The team have something incredibly rare - an Anglo-Saxon bed burial.

Underneath our bags here

we do have some small, delicate iron fittings that go with the bed.

Once we reveal or remove all of this limestone rubble, we should then see

also further iron fittings.

Bed burials are unique to the seventh century -

a time when Christianity was first

spreading across Anglo-Saxon England - and strangely,

the only people buried in this way were women.

This one seems to fit the pattern.

At the moment it's looking more female than male,

but that's only judging by its brow.

There's not too much wear on the upper teeth

-so it probably is still quite young, as well.

-Quite young.

The team remove the rubble from the grave to examine the remains

of the bed in more detail.

We've now got revealed a series of three cleats going down each side.

These are to hold the planking of the bed together.

The two stays at the top

and a series of eyelets dotted all around

with a couple of extra iron fittings at the foot end there

and another one at the head end here.

These corroded pieces of iron

once held together an expensive, ornate bed.

There is no doubt that this was not an ordinary young woman.

With the burial fully excavated,

the team can see how she was laid to rest.

Start now.

We now have the bed burial fully revealed.

From the skeleton we can now tell

it's definitely a young adult female,

been kind of buried in almost a sleeping-like position on her side.

To find out why this wealthy Anglo-Saxon woman

was buried in this way,

and to see what she can tell us about Christianity at the time,

I've asked some of the team to join me in the lab.

So these are the remains of

this young woman that was buried

with a bed at your site, Steve?

Yep. These are fresh out of the ground.

They only came out of the ground a couple of days ago.

Were there any other associated artefacts with her to give us

more of a clue to her identity?

Unfortunately not.

It was just the body and the bed.

I say just the bed - the bed is an amazing discovery.

Sam, you've dug sites where you've seen bed burials

but I think you've had other artefacts in the burial, as well.

Yeah. We had a very nice site at Trumpington just outside Cambridge

and that burial had spectacular finds with it -

a gold and garnet pectoral cross,

so one of these kind of nice cruciform designs,

so we're starting to get associations from that burial,

but also some of the other bed burials, that these are often

associated with potentially high-status women.

And high-status women who were

demonstrating their allegiance with Christianity?

There are five examples of these very distinct pectoral crosses.

Two of them are with bed burials,

one of them is with St Cuthbert.

It's a real striking set of finds that you've got there.

I think it has to be with those burials associated with Christianity.

Is there any way that being buried in a bed

can be seen as part of that?

It's an interesting question.

My colleagues who study Anglo-Saxon literature will talk about links

between verbs to sleep and to die,

that you start seeing come through the Christianised literature.

I think it's definitely a possibility

of what's going on at this time.

It may be that bed burials were seen

as a clearly Christian burial practice

and wealthy women may have had

a vital role in converting Britain to Christianity.

So is this telling us something interesting about gender

and the spread of Christianity? Because I think we tend to

think of the church as being incredibly male-dominated.

Not in the seventh century.

For a lot of aristocratic women in this period,

it offers an attractive and a viable alternative to marriage.

But at the same time it's a way of them retaining their power.

Yeah. And it's a network that spreads across Europe, as well.

So women who are running monasteries in England

have sisters who are running monasteries in the Frankish kingdoms

and so these networks of power

are spreading across Western Europe at this time.

And it's not until later on

that women lose that place within the church.

The discovery of bed burials like this

casts light on a vitally important

but almost entirely forgotten part of our history -

a network of powerful women

who helped to introduce Christianity to ordinary Britons.

And it's intriguing that for many of these women,

Christianity offered not just a spiritual faith,

but a chance to live their lives independently.

One of the most important of these women lived here in Canterbury -

Queen Bertha of Kent.

1,400 years ago she was very famous and influential, and one special

treasure associated with her is kept here at Canterbury's Beaney Museum.

So tell me more about this particular pendant

and how it's made.

It's made of gold.

And what they've done,

they've built up the body of it

and then they've inlaid garnets.

None of this object is made of materials

that can be sourced locally but it's certainly made in East Kent

and I think that objects like this

-are made deliberately to be given out as gifts.

-Oh, really?

So if a powerful man and woman, husband and wife, went to a feast

and the king was present,

he might gift the man with a jewelled sword belt

and he might gift the woman with a pendant or a brooch like this.

'But we also know that Kentish queens could be as powerful -

'even more powerful - than Kentish kings.'

So who was Queen Bertha?

Bertha was the wife of King Ethelbert of Kent.

She was Frankish.

Franks were the sort of superpower of Western Europe at that time.

So she was Christian.

Ethelbert, when they married, was still pagan,

but she brought with her a bishop to Canterbury

and was given St Martin's Church as a place to worship.

Before the arrival of St Augustine,

who brings the mission from Rome to convert the English to Christianity,

Bertha's already here in Canterbury.

-With a bishop?

-With a bishop, worshipping.

It sounds as though Bertha was powerful in her own right.

She was marrying a king but

she's part of this other very important dynasty on the Continent.

Yes, she is part of a much more powerful family.

So Ethelbert had done very well to be married to Bertha

and she, I'm sure, would have been a formidable person

and in no way in his shadow.

From the powerful women like Bertha who spread Christianity

to the faithful who perhaps combined it with their pagan past,

these incredible discoveries help to fill in big gaps in our knowledge.

And they remind us that Christian practices didn't arrive as a package

and that they evolved over hundreds of years into the religion

that we recognise today.

In contrast to the countryside burial grounds,

our next dig takes us into the city.

To London's East End,

where we're on the trail of one of Britain's most famous names.

William Shakespeare is our greatest playwright.

But the playhouses which employed him

had a huge impact on his writing.

And although we associate him with London's Globe Theatre,

it's not the first venue that he wrote for.

Before the Globe, Shakespeare performed at an earlier playhouse,

The Curtain, and it was this place

that saw the premieres of some of his best-loved plays,

including Romeo and Juliet.

But no-one knew the precise location of The Curtain until 2011,

when some building work revealed traces of the lost playhouse.

In the year that marked the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death,

a team from Museum of London Archaeology excavated The Curtain.

Not only were they hoping to uncover and preserve

the remains of the playhouse,

they also wanted to test ideas

about how the architecture of the performance space

might have influenced the plays that were written for it.

With layer upon layer of history piled up beneath London's streets,

this is a complex dig for Heather Knight and her team.

We've got a lot going on with the archaeology

within the space of 100 years.

So in places we can have three, four metres of stratigraphy.

That is quite a lot to sort through!

Despite the difficulties on site,

the team have managed to reveal a key section of the playhouse.

This wall formed part of the back of the theatre,

so you would have the galleries against it.

It's a great first find, but it also reveals something very surprising.

The big thing, we found out,

is that despite what a lot of people thought -

that it was going to be polygonal - it's actually rectangular.

This shape is an important revelation.

It would influence the style of theatre here.

So hopefully, in a few weeks' time,

we'll really understand how this building worked.

We'll understand the sizes and dimensions of the gallery space,

the area of the yard where the audience would have been standing.

We may get some evidence of the size of the stage.

Already the team can tell that The Curtain would have looked

very different to polygonal or round theatres like The Globe.

This was more like a typical Tudor inn.

It was at The Curtain in the late 1590s

that Shakespeare premiered two of his most famous works -

Romeo and Juliet, and Henry V.

And as the dig continues, the team begin to build a vivid picture

of what it might have been like to be there on the first night.

We've got these little beauties.

These are the tops of money boxes.

They're kind of a money box about this size.

They'd be on top with a slit down the front.

And as people are coming in to use the playhouse,

they're depositing a penny to be able to come into the yard.

Those money boxes were then taken back to the box office,

which is where we get the term from,

smashed, and the money is removed. Obviously, as they're smashed,

we're looking to try and find the pieces

of those that have been deposited.

And luckily, at the bottom of these pits,

we've managed to find a couple of pieces.

Judging by the rest of the finds, once the audience paid up,

they were guaranteed a good time.

As well as the live entertainment, they were drinking beer,

smoking clay pipes and snacking on shellfish.

This was an afternoon of riot and fun, basically,

from sort of two o'clock in the afternoon

all the way through to six.

Completely different, I think, from what we imagine,

you know, when we go to see Shakespeare performed today.

A completely different experience.

By week eight, the team have uncovered

more of the building's structure.

But they're struggling to find what they really want - the stage itself.

Then, during the final week of the dig, they make a breakthrough.

It appears that one section of the wall,

that they thought was a later addition, is exactly

what they've been looking for.

This wall that I've got my hand on, it's been with us for...

Ooh, quite a while.

And it actually could be... What we're thinking at the moment

is it's the foundation for the front of the stage.

So what they've done, in effect,

is created a masonry shoebox, if you like...

..which they then created the wooden stage on that masonry foundation.

At 14 metres wide and nearly five metres deep,

the stage is far bigger than the team expected.

Its discovery is helping them reconstruct, for the very first time,

what The Curtain may have looked like during its heyday.

With a wide yard for the standing audience,

two side galleries

and a large rectangular stage at the back of the playhouse.

So, here we are in the... you know, in celebrating, you know,

400 years of Shakespeare and it's quite thrilling to think that

he was here, performing on this stage that was just behind me.

So, how do all these discoveries increase our understanding

of Shakespeare's work?

I've asked Heather to join me in the lab.

Must have felt pretty incredible digging that site and knowing

-that you were that close to Shakespeare.

-Yeah.

SHE LAUGHS

Do you think the building itself

would have influenced the playwrights and the types of plays

being put on there?

When we think about the plays that we know were performed there -

things like Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, you know -

you think of the sword fights that take place within those plays.

Is it a big enough stage, do you think?

-Oh, I think so.

-Yeah?

Yeah, yeah. I think it'd be... You know, it's bigger than...

..say, the stage at The Rose.

-Really?

-And it's also bigger

than the stage at the neighbouring theatre, as well.

So, yeah, it's quite a large space, I think.

So, that does suggest that perhaps you'd have more opportunity

for those type of ensemble scenes and possibly fight scenes, as well.

That's right. You can get quite a few people on the stage at the same time.

These questions that, you know, we're posing, hopefully

we'll get some way to answering.

Rather wonderfully, the team have discovered a prop that

could have been used in one of Romeo and Juliet's most famous scenes.

It looks a bit like an egg cup.

I don't know if you can see, it's actually got a sort of dimple

in one side and there's a slight hole in it

and that's where a rod has been passed through it

and that's to connect a spout

because it's a bird whistle.

-Really?

-So, you fill it with water

and then you blow down it

and it makes a sort of warbling noise.

-Yeah.

-So, in the context of finding it just outside the Playhouse,

there's those questions of, is it related to performance?

Are we seeing evidence of special effects?

-Yes.

-So, when you think of...

-Birdsong in the background.

Yeah, when you think of performances of, say, Romeo and Juliet,

the nightingale and the lark that's mentioned,

are they actually making birdsong to accompany that part of the play?

'Heather thinks that the effect would have been similar to

'a modern novelty bird whistle.'

-Do you want me to...?

-Yeah.

-OK, then.

Nightingale or a lark?

We'll decide, shall we?

TRILLING

Ooh, yes.

Fantastic.

Just about, just about... Maybe a... Maybe a lark, I think!

Yeah!

It's one of those things we'll never know, isn't it?

-No.

-You know, I do rather like to imagine that

that might have been used

in a performance of Romeo and Juliet back then.

That's fantastic.

For the first time, archaeologists are able to suggest

how the Curtain theatre was a major influence on Shakespeare.

Its large stage gave him the freedom to write the famous fight scenes

in masterpieces like Henry V and Romeo and Juliet.

Our final discovery takes us

right back to the beginnings of England as a nation,

through an extraordinary find made near the village of Watlington

in Oxfordshire.

In the ninth century,

England consisted of

a number of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

They were ruled by powerful kings,

some of whose predecessors

had migrated to Britain from

the Continent in the fifth century.

Their laws and language would lay the foundations for England.

The most famous, of course, was Alfred the Great, King of Wessex.

In the 870s AD,

Alfred was defending his Anglo-Saxon kingdom against rampaging Vikings.

He emerged victorious, a hero,

and his place in the history books was cemented.

But a recently discovered hoard of coins

reveals another side to this story.

It suggests that Alfred may get too much credit

for beating back the Vikings.

In late 2015, James Mather was detecting a field near Watlington

and not having much luck.

I'd been out detecting for about five hours and unfortunately

I hadn't found very much when I noticed a patch of high ground,

which I hadn't detected on before.

Well, not long after I'd started detecting there,

I received a really good signal.

METAL DETECTOR BEEPS

Digging down about six or seven inches, I found a small,

about six-centimetre-long, silver ingot.

It looked like a squashed cigar

and I'd never found anything like that before.

James later realised that this was a Viking ingot -

a solid block of silver used as currency.

It's a rare find for southern England.

Digging down, I found a hammered silver coin,

which I immediately recognised was either Viking or Anglo-Saxon,

so I carried on very, very carefully scraping soil away with my hand

and I exposed a mass of silver coins.

And at that point in time I realised I'd found something really special.

James got in touch with the Portable Antiquities Scheme -

the organisation that helps to report and interpret

metal-detecting discoveries.

The professionals decided to lift the hoard in one large block

to protect coins.

And then it was sent to the British Museum,

where specialist conservator Pippa Pearce began the painstaking task

of removing the individual treasures from the soil.

It's a very greasy clay.

It doesn't shift very easily, it doesn't brush.

It clogs the brushes pretty well immediately.

As the conservators work their way deeper into the hoard,

they discover multiple treasures -

Viking bracelets and silver ingots.

Finally, they're ready to examine the coins in more detail.

They soon identify a name.

So, we've got an Alfred with an E - E-L-F-R-E-D.

These coins date to just after

Alfred's decisive victory over the Vikings

at the Battle of Edington in 878.

The defeated Viking forces may well have buried the hoard

as they retreated back to their own territory,

expecting one day to return.

But as the team dig deeper into the hoard,

they notice something entirely unexpected.

It's not just King Alfred's name on the coins.

I'd very much like to get this one out whole.

There's a coin of Ceolwulf, you can see the O and the L and the W.

"Ceolwulf" is coming out intact.

We're getting two people on the coins -

one of them is Alfred the Great

and the other one is someone called Ceolwulf,

who is described by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a "foolish thane."

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a history of England

started during Alfred's reign.

Its reference to Ceolwulf is doubly insulting.

Not only is he foolish, he's a thane - an insignificant, minor nobleman.

But these coins prove that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is wrong.

Ceolwulf was a king.

At the end of the conservation process,

the team discovers something really interesting -

a coin depicting two rulers sitting beneath a symbol for unity.

It suggests that Alfred and Ceolwulf had formed an alliance

to fight the Vikings.

'But why have we never heard about this before?

'Coin specialist John Naylor has joined me in the lab.'

What a wonderful find.

This is a really curious image on this coin. I mean,

does that suggest that you've got two kings

of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms at this time ruling together?

It's very possible.

But the fact that it's happening at exactly the point that

the two remaining Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were under great threat,

so suggesting that it is an alliance

between the two kings represented on a coin is very likely.

'Ceolwulf's Mercia and Alfred's Wessex were the only kingdoms

'to successfully resist the Vikings.

'This evidence isn't just a new revelation - it makes sense.

'Their alliance gave them the strength to fight back.'

So, what happens to Ceolwulf, then?

Because we don't really hear any more about him.

We don't really know.

There's no record of when he died, why he died, where he was buried,

so he literally just disappears from history.

'After that, Alfred took over Ceolwulf's lands

'and airbrushed him from the records.'

This does, I think, paint a bit of a different picture of Alfred

than the one we're normally used to where he is the great and the good.

You're seeing him a bit more as a politician here.

He's positioning himself as

essentially this emperor of the Anglo-Saxons.

Yes, well, the documents do show him in a glowing light

and he's the only king we have known as "the Great" in this country.

He may well have been a very pious king and a very good king but he was

also a typical early medieval ruler

who took the political advantage that he could.

Alfred the Great and the Wily.

HE CHUCKLES

Indeed.

'This hoard is transforming the story of how Britain beat back the Vikings.

'It really is an incredible find.'

It's providing us with a more nuanced portrait of Alfred

and slotting a forgotten king back into our history books.

But no-one could keep the Vikings out forever.

This year marks the 1,000-year anniversary of the Viking conquest of Britain in 1016.

And here, in Canterbury's Heritage Museum,

'there's a secret weapon that was instrumental to their victory.'

Craig, you've promised to show me

some of the most precious artefacts in the museum and...

there's a rusty stirrup.

This is a rare

Viking stirrup made of iron

from the early 11th century.

OK, so I don't usually think of the Vikings being horsemen.

No. Well, I guess in the earlier times they were raiding,

so they were in and out quickly, but by the 11th century

there were large armies of Vikings trying to conquer the whole country.

Obviously moving large armies requires quite a lot of horses,

so they were developing technologies

that allowed them to move around the countryside more easily.

So, how do you know that this is definitely Viking

and not Anglo-Saxon?

Well, most of the research seems to say that

the Saxons weren't using iron stirrups at this point.

-Right.

-So it's a Danish technology,

so the iron is important because you can put more force into riding,

so if you hit the enemy whilst your foot is in an iron stirrup,

you've got the whole force of a horse and you.

This led onto heavy cavalry, and the Knights of the Middle Ages

were directly in line from this technology.

-That's a really interesting story to come out of just one object.

-Yes!

It's extraordinary to discover that this simple stirrup technology

played such an important part in the Viking conquest of Britain.

Finds like these show how

archaeology can change the story of Britain.

The discoveries from 2016 have been more impressive than ever.

Certainly the largest in-situ collection of Roman sling bullets.

This is as if the British have captured the German trenches

and then they have to dig in,

facing German counterattack from up the hill.

See, I'm starting to go on flights of fancy now, and to me

this is where King Arthur lived.

They've allowed us to reach out and touch our ancestors' lives.

They have a kind of

bulbous, very round head.

-It's heavy.

-Really?

Next year, in 2017, the Digging For Britain adventure continues.

We'll be joining the teams as they go back out into the field

to reveal more incredible stories from our forgotten past.