The East: A New Dawn How We Built Britain

This is a journey through Britain and through 1,000 years of our history,

to see how we've built the country we live in.

We are reflected in our buildings.

They tell us who we are.

Sometimes fearless and heroic,

sometimes exuberant,

often ambitious.

When we reach for the skies...

..we can be innovative and industrious.

But we have a cosy side...

..an eccentric streak

and a taste for fun.

This is the story of Britain told through its buildings

and the people who built them.

Our journey starts in the east of England.

In the Middle Ages this was the richest corner of the country

where out of conflict and conquest arose buildings the like of which we'd never seen.

These glorious buildings are more than just objects of great beauty,

they marked the beginning of a new era of progress and sophistication.

It was here in the medieval east that the foundations of modern Britain were laid.

1066, Britain is conquered by the Normans.

William the Conqueror is waging a ferocious campaign to subdue England.

The last outpost of Anglo-Saxon resistance, the Fenlands of East Anglia and the Isle of Ely.

Ely used to be a treacherous place, an island surrounded by these bogs and marshes.

It got its name from the huge number of eels that used to be caught here.

And the only people who were safe were the fen men, who according to legend, had webbed feet.

It was only when the Isle of Ely fell that the conquest was complete.

After the devastation of war,

work started on the building of a new world.

Towering over this flat landscape, Ely Cathedral,

the start of the first construction boom in our history.

It was the birth of modern Britain.

The Normans were visionary builders.

And they used their skills to make the conquered population cower before them.

Imagine what it must have been like if you lived as a villager here,

you know, in a low-lying house, quite modest,

and suddenly in your midst arose this enormous building

made of stone and taller than anything you'd ever seen in your life before.

For medieval man, to build a cathedral was to build paradise on earth.

Every part was beautifully crafted,

stonework almost out of sight but so finely made

for God, not man, to see.

What's one to say? The first feeling coming into this place

is just a sense of...awe,

of the majesty of a building so glorious, so vast.

This high, high, high nave with its pillars.

And you think, "How did a building like this get to be built

"so many hundreds of years ago?

"Who were the people that were prepared to spend the time

"and the energy creating this great monument,

"when nothing like it existed?"

It's just breathtaking!

If you were making a cathedral like this today, you'd have architectural plans, engineering drawings,

structural engineers poring over all the stresses and the load-bearing walls and the rest of it.

And after a long time they'd probably conclude it couldn't be built anyway cos it would fall down.

Now, this building was built entirely

by the knowledge, the experience of the master masons who made it.

The miracle is, and I think even they would have been astonished,

that almost 1,000 years later it's still standing.

You couldn't rush the building of a medieval cathedral. Ely took almost 300 years

Thousands of tons of stone was quarried 50 miles away

and brought to Ely by boat.

Working with little more than a set square, some compasses

and a knowledge of geometry,

medieval masons were able to raise this glorious building to the heavens.

And 1,000 years later stonemasons are still working -

repairing and restoring it.

You see it from a distance and you feel you've put your mark on it,

-you can feel proud of what you've done.

-Feel part of it's yours?

I think every stone you put in, it's yours, you know.

It sounds strange, but every stone you touch and put in, on any building, you know,

you've done it and you'll respect that building for it.

'Stonemasons have a tradition. They leave tokens behind for future generations to find.'

Ah! It's too steep, I get vertigo looking at it.

'I wanted to leave a time capsule of my own, to puzzle people 1,000 years from now.'

So, there's a bill for a week's shopping,

a packet of cigarettes saying "smoking kills" -

because I think by the time it's opened, nobody will know what cigarettes are -

a week's television programmes, so they can see the kind of stuff we watched.

And finally a Mars bar. I don't know why it's there,

but I've said, "You may live there by now."

So I thought they'd feel at home.

-Can I say goodbye to the box?

-Yes.

-Lovely.

You can see that sort of fits there.

Great, it's not going to fall out.

Well, fill this, some muck in there, and then fill the back.

Time capsule's gone for a few hundred years

and we're happy, job's done, and then onto the next one.

It's wonderful to see a bit of work like this all hand-carved,

this decoration here, way out of sight of anybody on the ground.

You can just see it if you look up, get a slight feel of it.

-And yet so much love and attention has been paid to it.

-Yeah.

It's extraordinary, beautiful.

What's really exciting about Ely Cathedral

is this feeling of the energy, the determination of the people who built it.

For 1,000 years, time has been spent restoring and embellishing it,

to make sure it stands for another 1,000 years.

In the years after the Conquest, the land that wasn't given to the Church

was shared out between a handful of William's loyal followers.

And to secure their hold on the country, they introduced a building

never before seen in England - the castle.

Within a generation of their arrival,

the Normans had built over 500 castles.

50 miles south of Ely, across the border into Essex, is one of the finest.

Hedingham Castle, built around 1140,

is a monument to Norman might.

The idea behind a Norman castle wasn't just to establish power over an area,

it was actually to frighten people with the authority and wealth of the family who built it.

And this is the keep of a castle of a very, very powerful family indeed, the De Veres.

They were known as "The Fighting Veres",

an elite warrior class of noblemen who owed their position to the king

and who in return fought for him.

Their castles were built to overpower and intimidate.

If attacked, they could hold their own.

Massive walls, 12-feet thick, protected them again battering rams.

Narrow windows shielded them from missiles.

And a raised entrance to the first floor made it harder for enemies to penetrate.

The staircase was built in a clockwise direction.

And there's a reason for that, too. It's so that it you were under attack,

you could fight your way back with your right arm free to attack your enemy,

whereas he, had this in the way

and couldn't ever get his arm free.

'But this wasn't just a fortress, it was a place of ritual and ceremony.

'You came here to pay homage to your lord.'

This is the grandest room in the castle, the banqueting hall,

where the mighty De Veres held court.

This was the centre of their empire.

It's where knights would come and swear loyalty to them and obedience,

putting their hands between the hands of the De Veres.

And it's decorated to show that grand style,

that need to impress people who came here.

Beautiful decorations, zigzag decorations round the curved arches and the fireplace.

Hangings on the wall would all have been tapestries.

And then this magnificent archway,

huge Norman arch,

it's the widest arch built by the Normans left standing.

In the Middle Ages almost everyone lived off the land.

Landlords grew rich by forcing their tenants to work for them.

We were a nation of peasants shackled to the lord of the manor.

Cressing Temple, in Essex, the heart of a medieval estate

and, if you worked here, a medieval production line.

This was once a hugely profitable farm complex

with a brew house, a granary, a dairy and a water mill.

Two 13th-century barns survive,

so magnificent, they're known as "cathedrals of the countryside".

It's no coincidence that these are called cathedrals,

because it was designed on the same basis as a big church -

the nave here, and an aisle each side.

So it copied the way that medieval churches were built.

It even seems a place of quiet contemplation, as it is now.

But not so - this was the factory at the centre of the whole estate,

a place that thrummed with industry.

At the time of harvest the corn would be cut and brought into this barn.

There's always a high entrance and a low entrance.

The high one for the wagon piled up with corn,

the low one, when it's been emptied, you don't need the height. Then the corn would be stacked here.

And what they did was to start at the low level

and use a horse to trample it down,

so it really used as little space as possible.

Then you started the threshing process, using this flail.

You spread the corn on the floor

and for hour after hour you stood and simply beat it

until the grain was beaten...

out of the top of the sheaves of corn.

Oh! Until your flail broke!

And at that point you had to go hungry.

It took nearly 500 trees to create one barn at Cressing.

Oak was the most popular building material in the Middle Ages,

and woodland was carefully managed to produce just the right size of timber.

Tightly packed trees grow tall and straight

to reach the light - perfect for construction.

The tools that we used then were very efficient for their time.

And they did evolve over a period of time to become even more efficient.

This is very handsome.

This is a copy of an 11th-century axe,

and you can see an axe identical in the margins of the Bayeux Tapestry

from the second half of the 11th century.

'To make a beam, the bark is first removed

'and then the log is hewn square.'

I wonder what you thought about all day while you were doing this! Mm?

-Evil thoughts!

-Who knows?

I think revolutionary thoughts would come to MY mind

if I was doing this for three pence a day.

'When that's done, the timber is sawn over great trestles.'

-So what am I called?

-You're the underdog.

-I'm the top dog.

-Oh, right. Did they really call them that?

-I get paid more than you.

-Why?

Because I'm responsible for looking after the saw.

But it's much harder pulling down. I'm doing all the work.

You stop, you see if you can do it by yourself, I bet you can't.

'The next stage is to cut the joints.'

God, it weighs a ton!

Ah! It's like steel.

'The framework of the barn is pre-fabricated on the ground.

'Each piece is made to fit its neighbour, so the carpenters

'cut marks to allow the timbers to be reassembled in the right place.

'You can see the medieval carpenter's marks

'all through the barn.'

Right...

And there we have it - a pair of rafters and a collar for a medieval roof.

'This simple joint took us all morning.

'And there are 1,500 in the barn at Cressing.'

I'm going north now, to an undisturbed wilderness in the heart of East Anglia...

..the Brecklands.

In the Middle Ages much of the land that wasn't farmed

was reserved by the rich for sport and leisure.

The Brecklands were home to what might seem a rather lowly pursuit for a lord...

..hunting rabbits.

In the 13th century, the right to breed and hunt rabbits

was a fiercely guarded privilege.

Their meat was an expensive delicacy, their fur a luxury.

They were carefully nurtured in special enclosures

and guarded by a warrener.

This warrener's lodge near Thetford once stood in open heathland.

The warrener's lodge was on two floors.

This ground floor was a storeroom

with thick walls and small windows to protect it.

And here there'd be the nets, the lamps, the snares,

racks to hold the valuable rabbit skins and the rabbit flesh itself.

And then a staircase up here which goes up to the first floor

and that was where the warrener lived with his family,

so a huge fireplace,

and windows all the way around. And a final tower at the top there,

so that he could look out with a view, 360 degrees, of the whole warren.

Just as the warrener protected his rabbits, so his lodge protected him.

His home was built to be a fortress.

It's a very fine building, these lovely stones on the corner

and the flint work, almost too grand you might think for it's purpose,

but the warrener faced real enemies, gangs of marauding poachers

armed with bows and arrows and sticks, who'd come after him.

And there was another reason. This lodge could be seen for miles around,

and it said to everybody, "This is a private warren and the warrener is there to protect it."

That's an albino ferret, he's about three years old.

He's in his prime, ferret never get no better.

-You can hold him if you like.

-He's a biter, that one?

-No. It bit me, mind you.

-Did it?

Why won't it bite me, then?

Do you train them to go after rabbits or is it just natural?

No, it's just a natural instinct. Like me, hopefully.

'Warreners still use the old methods

'to control the rabbit population.

'These rabbits are being rounded up to be moved to another warren nearby.'

It's an old, old skill being a warrener, isn't it?

Well, it is. It's a family thing as well.

Our family, going back, to my knowledge, five, six generations

have been warreners and probably before that. It's a gift, if you like.

What's the appeal?

Just, you know, a lovely, natural feeling you get with the rabbits and all the wildlife.

And, eh...to be able to...

love wildlife as well as control, like, where you have to, and make the balance.

And that seems a good way of life to me.

I'm on my way to Lincolnshire, to a place which reminds me who I am.

My family used to come from this part of the world,

a tiny little hamlet called Dembleby. Haven't been... Here we are!

Oops. Turn left, hold on tight. Whoa!

Haven't been here for 40 years, over 40 years.

Dembleby.

It's a Viking name, we're Vikings. It means a little stream going through a valley,

which is what it is. Dembleby, "Please drive slowly

"through our village." Through my village!

Dembleby's changed very little since the Middle Ages, it's just a few houses and a parish church.

-Hello, how do you do?

-Good to meet you.

-David Dimbleby.

-How many people live in Dembleby now?

-35.

-What, 35 people in the village, is that it?

-That's about it yes, yeah.

-I think I better come back and live here and increase the population by 10%!

Has it been very difficult to find any references to Dimblebys?

No, I mean, these are the... I've looked in two books and there they were.

'The local historian had done some digging to find out what my medieval ancestors were up to.'

This is the 1341 Royal Inquest in Lincolnshire

and, um, here we have... Where is he...? Can you see him on here?

-Thomas de Dembleby.

-Yes.

-Chaplain.

"On the 14th of June 1339 at Lincoln,

"feloniously killed Gilbert Sharpe..."

-What, the chaplain?!

-"..Former servant of the parson of Leake."

Is "feloniously killing" the same as murder?

I'm trying to avoid saying it, I'm glad you're saying it.

-So, a Dimbleby who was a chaplain...

-Yes.

-..Committed murder?

Well, um, that's what it seems to say on the face of it.

-Would you cease your historical research, please? Thank you very much!

-I will, indeed.

-Forthwith.

Let's forget the murky past of the humble Dimblebys

and see how the grand members of medieval society lived.

Gainsborough Old Hall was built around 1460.

It was the home of a rich, powerful and flamboyant knight, Sir Thomas Burgh.

For much of the medieval period, everyone - the lord, his lady,

their retainers and servants -

would live in one big room like this.

This is one of the last great halls left standing in England

and what a wonderful sight it is.

These black and white stripes, the plaster and the beams,

the great beamed roof... Exactly as it would have looked

except for one missing element - and that's the people.

Because this was the centre of the household, this is where everything happened.

It wasn't just that people ate here.

They did all their business here, standing in groups in the corners,

arguing, talking, warming themselves by the fire.

And then as night fell, out came skins, rugs, whatever,

and they all slept in here.

It must have been a disgusting smell.

This is a really impressive part of the house, the kitchen,

which is one third the size of the great hall.

Twelve people working here all day long, feeding anything from 50 to 100 people.

And the whole thing tightly controlled because they had to make sure food wasn't stolen,

that the work was done exactly as it should be.

So the clerk was in charge, and he had his own office in here.

You couldn't get into the kitchen without passing through his office,

he'd check what you were up to,

and came into the kitchen here.

Now, here is a huge fireplace.

And this is a boiling area,

ladles and devices there for cooking with.

There's a corner here for boiling meats, and meat hanging up.

An extremely large wild boar waiting to be cut up.

And then you come to the pastry ovens, where pastry and bread were done,

just like a pizza oven, if I can take this one out...

And then going on round is the roasting fireplace with a spit,

and here four people sat while they roasted, turning these.

I can't do it right. There we are, turning...

I don't know how that works.

Four people sat turning these spits, and it was so hot

that the four men working here

did their work stark naked, because if they had clothes on,

it would get fat on it and would catch fire.

It seems to me it might have been a bit dangerous being stark naked. But, anyway, that's what they did.

And then you come to the delivery of the food. The food is all laid out

and carefully worked out. You know how easy it is in the kitchen to bump into people,

at the dishwasher, at the sink, at the stove. Here it's big enough

for all the food to be brought from these tables

to the serving hatch, which is huge, here,

and from there into the great hall.

'The provision of a fine table was essential to a lord's standing in society.'

I can't eat all that!

'At a medieval feast, there were as many as 24 different dishes.

'They were served by the carver

'in delicate pieces, laid on thick bread, which acted as a plate.' Mmm!

That's spectacular.

-The first course done.

-I need a drink.

'Everybody drank. A visiting Italian monk said,

' "the English delight in drink and make it their business to drain full goblets."

'No change there, then.

'Medieval specialities included roast rabbit, of course,

'castles made of pastry served flambe...' Lord!

'And the cockatrice - the head of a cockerel

'sewn onto the back end of a pig.'

Oh...!

They must sometimes have said, "I just want to have a boiled egg and go to bed early." No?

-No.

-No?

But there was one thing that wealth and power couldn't protect you from,

which made lord and peasant equal...

..the devastating effects of the Plague.

In 1348, the Black Death struck England.

The deadly disease began with swellings in the groin,

the eruption of black pustules all over the body

and the vomiting of blood.

Within hours came an agonising death as victims coughed uncontrollably

and drowned in the fluid in their lungs.

The Great Plague killed almost half the people of England.

But, for the peasants who survived, the devastation brought benefits,

the promise of a better life.

The sudden shortage of labour meant they could demand their freedom

and higher wages for their work.

Swathes of the countryside were neglected for lack of manpower.

What was to be done?

This was the answer.

SHEEP BLEAT

Come on, in you go.

'Sheep-rearing didn't need as many labourers as growing corn.

'Sheep produced meat and, most valuable of all, they produced wool.'

This beauty is a Lincoln Long Wool sheep.

And this huge fleece, just look at the thickness of it!

This was what brought prosperity back to East Anglia, it's this animal that's responsible

for the building of towns and villages and some of the finest churches England has.

You don't realise that, do you, hey?

-Like that?

-Yeah.

-Sure?

..Was that something I said?

There is no sheep that produces the quantity

or the length or the strength

-of wool that the Lincoln does.

-The length of the thread or whatever?

-It can be up to 1ft long.

-Really?

-They're wonderful-looking, they look as if they've got dreadlocks, don't they?

-Oh, yes, yes.

-A sort of Rasta look.

-Yes.

-How much do you get for a fleece now?

Unfortunately, the price is going down this year but about £4.50.

-£4.50?!

-Yes.

-What, for all that wool?

-Yes.

-I don't believe it.

-Well, farming doesn't pay very well.

-But that's less than they'd have got in the 14th century.

-Well, it is.

I think rams then were worth about £15 to £20,

whereas the labourers probably got a shilling a week,

or something like... probably even less than that.

So you can understand why people sometimes stole sheep, and were hanged for it.

Lincolnshire's prize wool was transported south to Suffolk

where new towns grew up, devoted to turning the wool into cloth.

The peaceful town of Lavenham was once one of the richest towns

in medieval England, thanks to this boom in the cloth industry.

Whole streets of medieval houses and workshops survive here.

They were built by rich cloth merchants in the most flamboyant style.

A street like this looks quaint, picturesque to our eyes,

but five centuries ago it would have been far from quaint or picturesque.

This would have been a noisy place day and night. Men shouting as bales of wool were unloaded

from the horses that have come down from Lincolnshire. Women gossiping as they washed

and sorted and carded the wool Women on the doorstep spinning the yarn.

Men working on the looms inside, turning the yarn into cloth.

And then there were the dyers - Lavenham's famous

for something called Lavenham Blue -

with great big vats of boiling water with woad added to it.

And the effluent from the vats would come running down a drain in the middle of this street

and not just that stinking mess

but urine, the droppings of horses, offal from the butcher's shops,

and human excrement, which was simply taken out of the houses and dropped in the street.

The whole place was a stinking mess.

'As the town grew, a way had to be found to cope with pollution from the cloth industry.'

Ugh!

Lavenham was rich enough to find a solution.

In the 1520s, they simply covered over the drain, they built this beautiful brick culvert,

and down it came all the effluent, all the sewage.

They were the envy of towns and cities all over England.

Lavenham's houses belonged to a rising middle class

who could afford to build in style.

'Their homes and their meeting halls were comfortable and airy.

'They could buy glass for their windows,

'a luxury in medieval England.

'Later they began to decorate their homes with elaborate plaster work

'known as pargeting.

'A mixture of sand, lime and animal hair

'was applied to the building and shaped into intricate patterns.'

If I fill in this bit here...

Perfect.

-Not much of a pattern I'm making.

-That looks all right to me.

The pargeter had to work fast

to finish his design before the plaster dried hard.

It looks like making mud pies, doesn't it, though?

-Well, it is a similar sort of thing, only on walls.

-Do you enjoy doing it?

I love doing it. Every job's a challenge. You're thinking before,

"What am I going to do? How am I going to do it? What's the best kind of design?"

And, eh, this is lovely, I never get tired of doing it,

never ever get tired of doing it.

You could have some mischief with this, couldn't you?

Something like that wouldn't occur to me!

What's the most mischievous thing you've done?

Eh, I never HAVE done, actually, I don't think.

-Have you not?

-Oh, yes, I did. I done a job for some people

and right at the end they wanted a barn owl.

Then they told me they didn't have all my money ready, so I put a rat in its beak.

And it's still on their gable, a barn owl with a big rat hanging out of its beak.

CHURCH BELL RINGS

Travel through Suffolk and you'll see magnificent churches everywhere,

built by locals who grew rich on cloth.

It's sometimes called Silly Suffolk today,

but that's from the Anglo-Saxon "seely", meaning "blessed".

"What would you be, you wide East Anglian sky, without a church to recognise you by?"

The words of the Poet Laureate John Betjeman,

who encouraged people to go, not pub-crawling, but church-crawling.

The Holy Trinity in Blythburgh is a must for any church crawl.

The great glory of Blythburgh

are these pairs of angels

supporting the roof, all the way down the nave,

looking like eagles with their wings outstretched. Really exciting.

Every church has something special about it - round tower, thatch tower -

each has its own unique treasure.

'St Peter's in Wenhaston boasts a breathtaking survival from the Middle Ages.'

A strange thing happened in this church.

Towards the end of the 19th century, the Victorians, who loved restoring churches,

were busy putting in that new archway there.

And to do so they had to take out a great piece of wood, all covered in whitewash.

And the workmen simply took it outside and put it in the churchyard overnight.

That night there was a torrential downpour and in the morning the workmen came back...

and this is what they found.

Under the whitewash was this terrifying vision

of the Day of Judgment.

The souls of the dead are weighed by St Michael as the Devil looks on.

The good are received into heaven,

the sinners chained and cast into hell.

This vision of heaven and hell doesn't mean much to us now,

but in the Middle Ages people were really fearful about the Day of Judgment.

And it's what led to some of the greatest churches and cathedrals,

because people poured their money into these buildings, to maintain them, to endow them,

not for THIS world but because of their concern for what would happen in the next.

Fear of death preyed on the medieval mind.

And it's not hard to see why.

The skeletons in the graveyard of St Margaret's church in Norwich have been exhumed and analysed.

The bones tell a grim tale.

Over half the skeletons that were dug up

were found to be suffering either from illnesses

or from severe injuries.

Now, this one, for instance,

the bottom of the leg bone, that curve

is a symptom of rickets caused by malnutrition, a bad diet.

The forearm here...

..has been broken

and not properly set, but has somehow healed itself.

And then this skull...

..the skull should be smooth on the inside.

In fact, if you look at this one,

it's got little scars all around it, like lesions,

and that's a symptom of syphilis.

Two thirds of children died before the age of 12.

Even if you lived beyond 12, you couldn't expect a long life.

The average age of death was the early 30s.

One way to ward off illness and misfortune was to go on a pilgrimage.

Up in the north of Norfolk is the village of Little Walsingham.

Legend has it that the Virgin Mary appeared here in 1061.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

-Thank you so much.

-OK.

By the 13th century, Walsingham ranked alongside Rome and Jerusalem

as a place of pilgrimage. It became known as England's Nazareth.

Kings, nobles and the common people came on pilgrimage here

to affirm their faith and to pay homage to Our Lady of Walsingham.

Slipper Chapel is the last in a whole series of chapels that lead up to Walsingham.

Not Slipper as some people think because people took their shoes off to walk barefoot,

but from the word "slipe", meaning to slide, to move,

from the rest of England into the Holy Land of Walsingham.

It's the last stop before the pilgrims reach the shrine.

Today, pilgrims still come, as they did in medieval times, to walk in procession

the last leg of their journey along a road known as the Holy Mile.

A medieval writer said of Walsingham, "Many sick have been cured

"by Our Lady's power, the dead revived, the lame made whole,

"the blind have had their sight restored."

..Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee...

..Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for our sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

The final stop on the pilgrims' journey, the ruins of Walsingham Priory.

It was built in 1150

to celebrate the miraculous appearance of the Virgin.

Today, all that remains is a magnificent turreted arch.

The pilgrimage to Little Walsingham is like nothing else in Britain.

It's an extraordinary reminder of a vanished religious era.

The Middle Ages are alive and well in Little Walsingham.

As the Middle Ages drew to a close,

England settled into a new period of peace and prosperity.

The days of looking nervously over your shoulder were passing,

and the fortified castle gave way to the country house.

Oxburgh Hall, near King's Lynn, was built towards the end of the 15th century.

It could be a castle - gatehouse, moat, battlements, all present and correct.

But this building isn't about defence, it's about display.

Those battlements aren't there to shield archers, they're just decoration.

The moat provides a nice reflection, not protection from attack.

And instead of blocks of defensive stone,

a new building material was used - brick.

In the early 15th century it was very expensive, used pretty well only by the king.

But by the time Oxburgh was built it had become readily available here.

And it allowed the owner not only to look grand

but also to be in the fashion.

The fashion was to use brick to do what you couldn't easily do with stone.

The gatehouse uses bands of brick on the front to make it look

as if it's eight storeys high, a medieval skyscraper, to impress visitors.

'But all isn't what it seems.

'Go through the archway into the courtyard on the other side, and in fact it's only three storeys high.'

Towards the end of the Middle Ages,

the rich were using the trappings of fortifications like this

to suggest power, prestige, perhaps a little touch of romance.

Buildings were harking back to the past

while at the same time looking forward to a new age.

For the final part of my journey I'm travelling back across the fens of East Anglia

to a place where the medieval age reached its peak of sophistication -

the University of Cambridge.

The Middle Ages began with buildings that grew out of conquest and oppression.

Now came a nobler aim, the pursuit of knowledge and learning.

The building of Cambridge University began in the 13th century.

Its growth caused fury among the townsfolk

because it threatened their prosperity as a thriving riverside port.

But the building of King's College sealed the fate of the town.

When Henry VI decided to build King's College, he faced every developer's nightmare.

The land from here down to the river was full of houses, of shops,

lanes going down to the wharves.

There was a church, there were two pubs.

But being the monarch, of course, he simply razed the lot to the ground,

and in doing so he cut off the town from the river.

It was the beginning of the university's takeover of Cambridge.

Narrow streets and dank lanes gave way to the most magnificent building

in the university - King's College Chapel.

Henry VI wanted to astonish people by building a chapel

bigger than anything they'd ever seen before.

It was 70 years and six monarchs before it was completed,

but when it was, it stood as the most magnificent memorial to medieval man.

The delicacy and elegance of the stonework

was unlike anything seen before.

We've travelled a long way from the Normans with their solid, powerful, rather severe buildings

to this end of the Middle Ages,

with this wonderful lightness and exuberance.

The final flowering of medieval architecture.

The building is a miraculous feat of engineering.

From slender columns at the side,

stone ribs soar heavenwards

to the crowning glory, the fan vaulted ceiling.

Its sheer scale is breathtaking.

It's the largest fan vault in the world.

This is quite astonishing. I'm standing under the great roof

of the chapel, these are the wooden beans that support it.

But what I'm standing ON is the top of the ceiling,

the fan vaulted ceiling.

And the stone here is only 12 centimetres thick,

almost like an eggshell supporting nearly 2,000 tons of stone.

You almost feel you could fall through.

When they built this ceiling, they cut holes through it

so that they could communicate with the stonemason on the other side.

And the holes have been left here. If you look through,

you can see right down to the choir stalls,

about 100ft below me. Very tempting, if you were a schoolboy,

to throw little stink bombs down in the middle of evensong.

Staring at this ceiling sends me into a kind of trance-like state...

..almost like a dream...

..listening to fine music.

It's SO beautiful.

It's just what the builders wanted -

to make it look like a dream

so you didn't believe it was real.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd