JAMES GRASBY : Hello and welcome to the National Trust Podcast.

I'm James Grasby. Before we start our story, I wanted to let

you know that from March, the National Trust Podcast is

changing so we can bring you more award-winning stories in

nature, history and adventure.

Stay on this stream for our new immersive nature podcast, Wild

World Of... or if gripping history is your thing, look out

for our podcast, Back When.

Remember to follow either show in your favourite podcast app so

you're the first to hear new stories as they arrive.

In today's classic episode, we're travelling to the East

Anglian town of Oxburgh. We're visiting a property which, with

the help of some 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 woodland, 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 is 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: Yes, beautiful isn't it?

JAMES GRASBY : 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

that 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 had 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 brickmaking

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 being 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 and most unusual bits of archaeology

are actually in the hall itself.

JAMES GRASBY : Indoor archaeology? How does that work?

ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Well, some very special techniques and

we'll have a look at those and we'll 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 up 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 memorialised 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 : Now, 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, it's sort of 1600s, and

this building is hundreds of years earlier, I guess.

ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: It's about built 200 years before that

kiln, 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 Bedingfelds have witnessed the English

Reformation, the reign of Elizabeth I, the English Civil

War in the 17th century. They were Jacobite sympathisers

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 I 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

Bedingfelds to have carried on worshipping 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 were 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.

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 just 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

VII when he visited.

JAMES GRASBY : Really? For 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 : Ooh, lead the way.

Is this really a lav? 1480s loo?

ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: It was.

JAMES GRASBY : En suite?

ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Down there.

JAMES GRASBY : Are you? You're kidding me. Is that a? It's a

deadfall loo.

ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: There's a hole in the floor, which should go

down a shaft into the moat.

JAMES GRASBY : Oh, I see.

ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: But It doesn't. It goes into a secret

room.

JAMES GRASBY : Really?

ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: You can squeeze through if you want.

JAMES GRASBY : Can I squeeze through? Well, this is a first.

To be entering a lavatory. Feet first. I'm going down and

dropping down.

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 a 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, you know, 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 the 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 : 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 finding priests hidden under the floor

something that you encounter in your daily-

ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: I've never actually, funnily enough, ever

found a priest under a floorboard, but we have found a

lot of other exciting things under the floorboard at Oxburgh.

JAMES GRASBY : You're going to show me some things?

ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Yeah.

JAMES GRASBY : Oh, wonderful.

That was quite a narrow staircase you brought me up,

Angus. I guess we're in the servants' bedrooms?

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've 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 amongst the dust are things that have 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

is it? It is 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 telling 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, we can be excited by much more trivial

things than gold coins. And 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 were probably the

most sort of mundane. Have a look at those.

JAMES GRASBY : I recognise those from Christmas. Walnut shells.

ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: Walnut shells, yes.

JAMES GRASBY : Really?

ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: So in some rooms there were tonnes of

walnut shells. If they've been nibbled by rats, it could be

that the rats have actually brought them down to eat under

the floorboard.

But these ones that have been perfectly cracked and not

nibbled 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 carpet 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: Yeah.

So probably the commonest find are these.

JAMES GRASBY : They're dressmaking pins, are they?

ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: They must be dressmaking 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 of 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, 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 we've got a little box, which I'll try not

to break when I open it.

But if you just want to hold that carefully and-

JAMES GRASBY : Wow, I'm going to take it over to the light where

the seamstress was. That looks like a fragment of textile to

me.

ANGUS WAINWRIGHT: So-

JAMES GRASBY : 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 am a

freelance buildings archaeologist, specialise 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 and 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 changed

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

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 it's 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 over the centuries. And

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.

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. Luckily,

there was an expert on hand to have a look at the photographs

and identify that this is actually early Tudor,

handwritten music.

DAVID SKINNER: My name is David Skinner. I'm the Osborne

Director of Music at Sydney Sussex College in Cambridge.

I believe it was a morning, it was definitely a morning, and

somebody forwarded this article to me and I opened it up on my

computer.

I was 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 Cornish, 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 VIII. So it 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 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 for 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. Yeah, they contain about one or two

bucketfuls of debris from under the floorboards. And if-

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 throw 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 will be hidden amongst all that material.

JAMES GRASBY : So 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 tissu 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 of Henry VIII, 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.

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 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, in that condition as

well, you know, of 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 meadowland 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

underfloor archaeology and the lives and collecting habits of

rats in the house reveals so much, these lost lives to

history of needlewomen 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. From next month, stay on this stream for our new

nature podcast, Wild World Of.

You'll be immersed in intriguing stories from our natural world,

from spider sex to folklore origins and dinosaur

discoveries. Or if gripping history is your thing, look out

for our new podcast, Back When, with me.

We'll be transporting you back in time to step into the stories

of the people, places and moments that made us.

You'll experience the great stink, retrace the footsteps of

sci-fi author HG Wells and unearth the dark history of the

Plague Village, along with a treasure box full of other great

stories.

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