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
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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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