JAMES GRASBY: Hello and welcome to the National Trust Podcast.
I'm James Grasby, Building and Landscapes, curator for the
National Trust. And today I'm heading to the East Anglian Town
of Oxborough.
I'll be visiting a property, which, with the help of some
rather unusual archaeologists, has been home to some incredible
chance findings.
The acres of verdant woodland that surrounds Oxburgh Hall is
full of a variety of ancient trees, oak and ash.
Among the sweet summer birdsong and the chirp of insects is the
occasional rumble of an aircraft flying to and from the nearby
military base.
But when you stop and take some time to look at your
surroundings here, as with any woodlands, you'll find a
treasure trove of activity left behind by the people who used to
frequent these spaces for work and leisure.
But to give me a better idea of the archaeology that can be
found in this woodland and what it tells us. I'm hoping to bump
into Angus Wainwright, a national trust archaeologist
who'll be able to shed some light on Oxburgh’s woodland
secrets.
I hope I'm heading in the right direction. I've come through a
narrow footpath and the canopy surrounding me.
Where is Angus? I think probably rather like looking for
wildlife. This ancient landscape is probably precisely the sort
of place where you would find an archaeologist.
But look there within it, as you would expect, a questing
archaeologist. That is my friend Angus. I'm sure of it.
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Hello, James.
JAMES GRASBY: Hello, Angus. I thought I might find you here.
What a sensational place!
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Yeah it’s beautiful isn’t it?
JAMES GRASBY: It's magical!
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Well, I've got to show you something that
excites an archaeologist.
JAMES GRASBY: Angus, we're standing on the edge of a little
clearing in Scots Pine woodland. And in front of us is a mound.
It looks like a very large molehill. And to my untutored
eye, it looks a bit like a round barrow.
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Well, that's what we thought it might be. I
mean, round barrows are prehistoric burial mounds as you
know.
We do get them in this part of the world. We cleared the trees
off it and had a closer look.
JAMES GRASBY: So we’re just rising up a low bank and looking
on the top. It is hollow. What is that?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: What we found when we kicked about on the top
of our supposed round barrow was a lot of bricks.
JAMES GRASBY: No!
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Yeah. If you have a look at that.
JAMES GRASBY: My goodness.
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: What we thought we might have was a 17th
century kind of park building, an ornamental building. And then
what we found was that, no, the bricks we found on the inside
would've been very heavily burnt. And then we started
wandering further out into the woods, and we found at least two
other of these mounds. You know, what we've got here is a little
local brick making industry, probably making bricks for
cottages and walls.
And the stoke hole at the other end where people were operating
the kiln, were putting the wood in to keep it burning.
We found some clay pipes, and one piece of pottery down in the
stoke hole. So you can imagine that be a nice little warm spot.
They are down there having a bit of a smoke and maybe something
to drink and broke one of their pipes. The date of those agreed
with late 17th, early 18th century.
JAMES GRASBY: This is a very different form of sleuthing,
isn't it?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Wandering in the woods at Oxburgh, looking at
the archaeology is really marvellous. But some of the most
interesting and strangest, the most unusual bits of archaeology
are actually in the hall itself.
JAMES GRASBY: Indoor archaeology? How does that work?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Well, it's some very special techniques.
And we'll have a look at those and have a little chat as we
walk back towards the hall.
JAMES GRASBY: Fabulous. Let's go.
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: My sort of nature conservation colleagues
they’re always sort of looking out for interesting birds in the
trees, but I'm always looking at the ground, you know, often I'm
actually feeling it with my feet.
JAMES GRASBY: I love that expression.
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: It's sort of detective work. You're looking
for clues to tell you about what happened in the past, but it's
all about people. All these things were created by people
for a purpose, and often they're just everyday folk who don't get
memorialized in all the wonderful documents. We don't
have letters and diaries from them, but what we do have is
these marks they've left on the landscapes.
JAMES GRASBY: Angus, I had to stop. We've come to the end of
this unfinished carriageway and get the first sight of that
astonishing hall. Oxburgh Hall.
The bricks that you were showing were sort of 1600s. And this
building is hundreds of years earlier I guess?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: It's about built 200 years before that. So
it would have been a fashionable and cutting edge, high status
building of the time.
JAMES GRASBY: And was a substantial house for an
important family. Who were they?
ANNA FORREST: Oxburgh Hall's history is inextricably linked
with the history of the Bedingfeld family. I'm Anna
Forrest and I worked as curator for the National Trust at
Oxburgh. Oxburgh and the Bedingfeld’s have witnessed the
English Reformation, the reign of Elizabeth 1st, the English
Civil War in the 17th century. They were Jacobite sympathizers
during the 18th century.
During the 19th century, the house was practically a ruin
because of everything that had gone before. And then in the
20th century, it was put up for sale and a great number of the
contents were sold and the house itself was nearly sold just for
its bricks and demolished, which is a thought that doesn't really
bear thinking about.
When Elizabeth 1st came to the throne, there was the act of
uniformity which made saying mass a crime and made refusing
to attend church to hear the English service illegal. And
people who refused to sign up to this act were known as
recusants, which literally means refusers.
And Sir Henry Bedingfeld was one of the people who refused. It
would have been very difficult, really, for the Bedingfeld’s to
have carried on worshiping in the way they were used to. They
would have had to have carried themselves with extreme care at
this point.
JAMES GRASBY: We've come round to what I guess is the principal
entrance.
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: I think if you are visiting in the 1500s, the
doors would be shut. These massive medieval oak doors you'd
have to hammer on the door and this little one would open here.
And knock on the door.
And we found scratches on the inside of the window there where
a dog has jumped up at the window and scratched. So you'd
knock on the door and then that guard dog would bark - bark -
bark and somebody would emerge out of one of these little doors
here on either side.
Follow me up the spiral staircase, and now you'll see
the painted brickwork.
JAMES GRASBY: Is this painted to look like brick?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: This is brick, but it's been painted red with
white lines. It's a bit weird. It's to make the brick look
neater.
JAMES GRASBY: Quite incredible. It's like the curly whirly snail
shell drawn out, going up the inside.
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: So this is the room called the King's Room.
Traditionally, this was the room which was set aside for Henry
7th when he visited.
JAMES GRASBY: Really for a royal visit? A royal visitor?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: So just over there is another doorway which
leads into a lovely little vaulted room. Just off it is the
Garderobe, Your little private lavatory, but also one of
Oxburgh's most famous mysteries.
JAMES GRASBY: Oh, lead the way.
Is this really a lav? 1480s loo?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: It was.
JAMES GRASBY: En Suite?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Look down there.
JAMES GRASBY: Are you? You're kidding me. Is that it? It's a
it's a deadfall loo.
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: It's a hole in the floor which should go down a
shaft into the moat.
JAMES GRASBY: Oh I see!
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: It doesn't, it goes into a secret room!
JAMES GRASBY: Really?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: You can squeeze through if you want
to...
JAMES GRASBY: Can I squeeze through?
Well this is a first to be entering a lavatory feet first.
I'm going down, dropping down.
A useful torch.
Here we are. I'm now in the depths. I'm going round the
u-bend in the lavatory that’s fortunately not full of water.
And as Angus told me, I've now entered a little room, large
enough to stand up in, but certainly not to lie down in...
This is fascinating, I would guess that this is somewhere
that you would hide in the event of an emergency. I'm going to
come out through the lav.
Angus, I'm intrigued!
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Have you worked out what it is?
JAMES GRASBY: Well, it feels like somewhere... well... a
priest hole or somewhere that if you're under threat, you could
get away.
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: So it is a priest hole. So the Bedingfeld
family were Catholics. They didn't turn to Protestantism. So
they were, you know, in a sticky political position.
And that is why from being very wealthy, they fell on hard times
and they had to have priests to serve mass, which was illegal.
So they had to have a little bolt-hole for the priest to go
should anybody turn up at the door hammering away.
JAMES GRASBY: But if I'd been caught, if I'd been that
Catholic priest and they'd found their way to me, what would have
been the outcome?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Well, you'd be dragged out and probably
tortured to find out who your associates were, and then you'd
probably be executed in a rather gruesome way.
JAMES GRASBY: Is umm- is finding priests hidden under the floor,
something that you encounter in your daily-
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: I've never actually, funnily enough, ever
found the priest on the floorboard, but we have found a
lot of other exciting things under the floorboards here at
Oxburgh.
JAMES GRASBY: You're going to show me some things?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Yeah. We're going to have a look!
JAMES GRASBY: Oh wonderful!
That was quite a narrow staircase you brought me up,
Angus. I guess we're in the servants bedrooms or?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Often We don't really know how rooms were used
because these weren't described.
But we were lucky in archaeological or historical
terms because we just completed a massive building project at
Oxburgh.
All the floorboards in this room and the attic next door to us
were all lifted up.
Underneath these floorboards, as you can imagine, there's
hundreds of years of dust.
So among the dust, the things that are fallen between the
cracks in the floorboards or been deliberately hidden.
So all this stuff accumulates under the floorboards. Normally
it would just be shovelled away and go out in the skip. But we
decided we were going to treat this as a sort of archaeological
excavation.
JAMES GRASBY: This is not the Indiana Jones end of
archaeology. It's not the excavation of the Roman Villa or
the finding of a Mithraic Temple It's a completely different
world this isn't it?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: It's been said by others that archaeology is
all about rubbish.
And whether you're looking underneath the floorboards or on
an excavation of a Roman villa, you're digging up other people's
rubbish and that's tell you a picture about their life.
Sorting through 57 sacks of dust was both dirty and boring at
times.
But, you know, me and the volunteers were kept going by
the dream of finding, you know, a little gold coin or something
really exciting like that.
But us archaeologists can be excited by much more trivial
things than gold coins, so we've got some, you know,
spectacularly trivial things for you to look at.
JAMES GRASBY: I’m longing to see them!
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: What we might do is start from the trivial and
work up to the more fancy.
I thought these are the probably the most sort of mundane.
If you have a look at those.
JAMES GRASBY: I recognize those Christmas. Walnut shells.
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Walnut shells. Yes.
JAMES GRASBY: Really?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: So in some rooms, there were tons of walnut
shells that if they've been nibbled by rats, it could be
that the rats have actually brought them down to eat under
the floorboards.
JAMES GRASBY: Yeah.
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: But these ones that have been perfectly cracked
and not nibble by rats, they've been deliberately put under the
floor. And what we think is that this is sound insulation.
JAMES GRASBY: Oh!
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: So you put a thick layer of walnut shells
under your floor as a sound insulation because downstairs
are the bedrooms of the gentry and up here are the servants
clattering around on this floor with no carpets on it.
Bash - Bash - Bash, chatting away. People downstairs, don’t
want to hear what's going on upstairs.
JAMES GRASBY: What a brilliant idea.
Early sound insulation.
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: So probably the commonest find are these.
JAMES GRASBY: They’re dress making pins are they?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: They must be dress making pins. We haven't
looked at these in detail, but what's clearly happening is that
maids are adapting or making dresses in this room, they’re
dropping pins.
And when they're sweeping up, they're going down between the
cracks in the floorboards. And what we found was they're
concentrated where you might imagine, where the windows are.
JAMES GRASBY: It's not just finding a pin, it's knowing the
context from which that pin came from that really begins to
answer questions and give a picture of daily life here,
doesn't it?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: It's a simple little story, but it just gives
you a little window into the lives of real people in the
past, just from a few pins.
JAMES GRASBY: That’s magic.
What have you got there?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: So you've got a little, little box, which I'll
try not to break when I open it.
But if you just want to hold that just very carefully and-
JAMES GRASBY: Well, I'm going to take it over to the light where
the seamstress was. That looks like a fragment of textile to
me. A little bit of cloth.
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Bizarrely, the most exciting thing in this
attic was a rat's nest. So when Matt the archaeologist who was
here found it, it was just like a dusty heap of fabric.
He carefully unfurled it, all these different bits of chewed
up textile, and he realised that there was something unusual
about this.
MATTHEW CHAMPION: My name is Matthew Champion. I'm a
freelance buildings archaeologist. I specialize in
historical inscriptions and underfloor archaeology and
buildings recording.
We were carrying out a survey in the attics at Oxburgh. We were
investigating beneath the floorboards. While working in
one area near the gatehouse, I came across what appeared to be
a very large and rather ancient rat's nest.
These weren't uncommon at Oxburgh. We had come across
quite a few already. But it was very clear from this. As soon as
I started investigating that we had small pieces of parchment
and we had quite a lot of textiles involved.
So we took a fairly forensic approach. We couldn't lift the
whole thing in situ, so we had to literally beneath the
floorboards, gradually dissect this rat's nest.
And as soon as we started opening it up, we realized it
was full of treasures. We had collars, we had cuffs, we had
embroidery, and we had some very, very high status things
like silks.
We had velvets, we had satins.
What was really significant was the quality. These were not your
average everyday items. These had clearly come from luxury
garments.
A lot of the garments that these came from would have been very
fashionable high status items. But of course fashions change
quite quickly.
The material itself could be reused, whereas the garment
couldn't. So what they were doing was they were cutting off
things like the collars and the cuffs, and then they were
reusing those larger sections of material and probably reusing
them in other, more fashionable up to date garments.
This is just not something you normally come across in
archaeology.
JAMES GRASBY: That's fabulous. It's not only a great reminder
to all of us today about the tradition of reusing recycling
materials, but also the idea that once is of no use to us, it
may be of use to somebody else, even a family of rats?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Yes. Probably hundreds of generations of
little rats have snuggled up in that area over the centuries.
JAMES GRASBY: Brilliant!
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: And so I’ll put that back.
JAMES GRASBY: I'm glad you went through all this rubbish!
Now, that is extraordinary. It is a small fragment, I would
think, of paper.
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Can you-?
JAMES GRASBY: No! That's music notation isn't it?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: It is music notation.
JAMES GRASBY: Is it?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Yes. This little scrap of paper and a few
others like it came out of the rat's nest as well. And luckily
there was an expert on hand to have a look at the photographs
and identify that this is actually early Tudor-
JAMES GRASBY: Wow!
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: -handwritten music.
DAVID SKINNER: My name's David Skinner. I am the Osborn
Director of music at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge.
I believe it was. It was a morning. It was definitely a
morning. And somebody forwarded this article to me and I opened
it up on my computer.
Just reading through the article, just casually
mentioning two small fragments, musical fragments, without any
further information. Then my heart started to race because
there's a possibility that this might be composed music.
Each side of the fragment had enough musical notation, enough
information to show that this was indeed music, probably from
the mid 1520s.
Very likely to be music by a well-known composer from that
time. Could have been Cornysh, could have been Tallis and also
a lost fragment from what seems to be a lost book of masses.
We have so little, comparatively little music from the reign of
Henry 8th. So he would completely, fundamentally change
the soundscape of our understanding of early tudor
church music.
The implications are vast here because it just simply means
that this music represents the very, very height of English
choral endeavor in the 1520s. So what is it doing in a rat's nest
in Oxburgh Hall?
JAMES GRASBY: Angus, you've brought me along a corridor and
I've only got my bearings by looking out of this window.
But this looks to me to be a cross between a laboratory and a
study!
Now you've got some tools of the trade here, some very dainty
brushes, some sturdier household brushes. There are bags of
unsorted material, lots of clipboards, endless forms
detailing all the finds. What am I looking at Angus?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Well, this is my working area. We don't do the
actual sorting of the dust in here because as you can imagine,
it's very dusty.
So we do that under a gazebo outside, but here under the
bench are some bags waiting to be sorted.
So these are rubble sacks. And yeah, they contain about one or
two buckets full of debris from under the floorboards. And if I-
there's one here that's open!
JAMES GRASBY: That is a bag of rubbish Angus.
Angus, this is not archaeology to my mind. There's dust that
would come out of my vacuum cleaner that I threw in the bin.
It looks very unpromising to me. But you're telling me this is
the clue to the past?
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Yeah. So that's actually a hoover bag.
So the builders- First they shovel out the material, then
they hoover it all out and the shovelled out material and the
hoover bags all go in the sack.
But the interesting things that we've looked at before be hidden
among all that material.
JAMES GRASBY: So I guess you're telling me that you now put all
that out on a tray and go through it.
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Every thimble full.
JAMES GRASBY: Wow!
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Well, we looked at some of the other
things that we found under the floorboards, but I've got one
larger item here to show you.
JAMES GRASBY: It’s all wrapped up in a tissue paper inside a
box. My goodness, that is astonishing!
Beautifully done and the detail is exquisite!
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Well, this is a little leather bound, printed
book, and it's a book of Psalms from 1569. And it was actually
compiled by Catherine Parr, who you might remember as the sixth
wife-
JAMES GRASBY: Of Henry 8th!
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Of Henry 8th, who was a very studious person,
a very highly Protestant. So rather unusual thing to find in
a very Catholic family's house.
This was found by a builder resting on top of the external
wall, just under the tiles, so inches from the weather, just
waiting for that builder to come along and...
JAMES GRASBY: Wow! That is incredible!
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: It’s a bit puzzling how it got there. We
don't think it was deliberately hidden.
You know, there wouldn't be anything politically problematic
about it. In fact, it's the ideal book one would want in
one's house to show that, you know, one was a proper
Protestant.
You can imagine it might have dropped off the back of a shelf,
off the end of the floorboard just through a large enough gap
to drop down onto the top of the exterior wall.
You know, maybe it was just a chance like that. And there it
sat. You know, unnoticed for all, all that time.
JAMES GRASBY: Angus you were showing me pins and walnut
shells and small fragments of everyday things. But to find a
book in this sort of condition must be astonishing for an
archaeologist.
ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: This is the kind of thing when we set this
project up, that's the sort of thing we dreamt of finding.
We knew we'd find interesting things like those pins, you
know, that tell us about the everyday life of the house.
But we hoped, you know, that we might find some really unusual
and valuable and evocative things. I mean, that's so
evocative, isn't it?
And in that condition as well, you know, the history of a place
like Oxburgh Hall, it's just encapsulated in that sort of
rotting and nibbled, wonderful book.
JAMES GRASBY: So I've reluctantly said goodbye to
Angus and behind me is Oxburgh, which is sort of evaporating
again into this wonderful landscape, this meadow land of
almost waist high flowering plants.
And I'm trying to do and trying to think about what Angus told
me, which I thought was lovely. The idea of feeling the
landscape with your feet as a way of sensing what's going on.
His sense of inquiry and the way he goes about the sort of
forensic investigation of buildings, extending
archaeology, not just from excavating a brick kiln, but to
under-floor archaeology.
And the lives and collecting habits of rats in the house
reveals so much these lost lives the history of needle women who
have not been recorded in documents, but whose evidence of
their lives persists in the things that they left behind.
It's been a great revelation.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the National Trust
Podcast to make sure you get to new episodes of this podcast,
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with a new episode. But for now from me, James Grasby. Goodbye.