Review: Digging For Britain, BBC4

Alice Roberts and Matt Williams co-hosted the latest instalment in BBC4’s ‘Digging for Britain’ series, providing viewers with the first of four regional updates relating to significant British archaeological finds made during 2014. Tonight’s episode focused upon East Anglia and the Southeast, taking in a wide variety of sites spanning from the Bronze Age to the Civil War. Sitting in the impressive setting of Norwich Castle Museum, the duo chatted to individuals who had overseen the featured excavations, questioning them as to their significance, and any specific findings that have changed our knowledge, or perceptions, of our island forebears.

The first site to be featured, and one of the most interesting, was Must Farm in Cambridgeshire, where archaeologists have discovered evidence of fishing during the Bronze Age “on an industrial scale”, involving the widespread use of wattle wears and fish traps in the River Nene, with some twenty such traps having come to light. Furthermore, large numbers of pieces of metalwork have been found, including swords, spearheads and other items. Interestingly, many swords betray the fact that they have been used in combat, through the distinctive nicks in the sides of their blades. Eight well-preserved log boats were also found in only 300 metres of channel, suggesting that the area would have been well settled at the time of their creation. An oversized ceremonial dirk was also discovered, bent out of shape, representing, it was said the “ritual killing of the object.”

Colchester yielded some interesting finds from a Roman house in the Boudiccan destruction layer, burned down during the anti-Roman revolt in AD61. Charred foodstuffs showed that the householder in question may have been enjoying – or intending to enjoy – a meal which included figs, dates, peas and wheat when the house was levelled by fire. The mistress of the house had hidden her jewellery – earrings, armlets, chains and rings – in a hoard that had lain undisturbed from the date of its deposition to its discovery in the excavation. Human remains – parts of a mandible and tibia – were discovered just outside of the house, bearing what appeared to be slashing injuries inflicted by weaponry, such as a sword. Cassius Dio was quoted in his description of what happened to the richest female inhabitants of Britain’s early Roman towns sacked by the Boudiccan rebels; their fate was gory, for they were said to have met their end in ritual sacrifices conducted in sacred groves dedicated to the British goddess of victory (presumably Andraste, although the programme did not mention her by name), involving the sort of torments beloved by ISIS militants: skewering lengthways. Then again, was Dio’s account merely Roman propaganda? At a guess, given the barbarity with which history is replete, I suspect not.

Oakington in Cambridgeshire played host to the discovery of a significant sixth-century Anglo-Saxon cemetery containing 124 graves, 30% of which belonged to infants. A number of the burials belonged to high-status women, one, strangely, being buried with the entire carcass of a cow for throwing parties in the afterlife.

Thence the programme moved on to what was “a bustling royal centre” in seventh-century Lyminge in Kent, although discovering evidence of its royal hall involved ripping up the village green and leaving it looking rather less appealing than it had done beforehand. We were then transported through a thousand years of history to the most modern excavation site featured – Basing House – which finally fell to the Parliamentarians after a two-year siege on 14 October 1645. The remains of one of the poor devils defending the Postern Gate were discovered, with his head decapitated and a large sword mark across the top of his cranium.

The programme finished, perhaps appropriately given that 2014 marked the final year of excavations in a run of 18 successive seasons at the site, in Silchester, or Calleva Atrebatum as the Romans knew it. New discoveries in a grand house in insula 3 – specifically fragments of “Nero tiles” – took us back to the period immediately following Boudicca’s rebellion, and speculation that Nero had either channelled money into Calleva either directly or through a client king, to help shore up Roman rule in southern and western Britain.

All in all, the sites featured were interesting, although none of the artefacts matched the dazzling brilliance of some of the finds made in the Staffordshire Hoard, or indeed, in the Snettisham Hoard discovered in Norfolk. What awaits us in the next three programmes of the series? Whether they should be treasures of gold and silver, or rather more humble offerings of semi-decayed wattle and wood, they will serve to illuminate further the forgotten ages of our land, and help to bring the lives of our ancestors into more vivid relief.

Review: Hidden Killers of the Tudor Home

Wolf Hall is prowling about the television schedules and will finally leap upon us this evening on BBC1. Will it be any good? One thing is almost certain: it will be better than ‘The Tudors’ (the television series, rather than the Tudors themselves of course). Accompanying the launch of this much-touted drama, the BBC is showing a number of Tudor-themed programmes, one of which – Hidden Killers of the Tudor Home – was aired on BBC4 last night.  

So far as history goes, the Tudor period remains one of the most popular – in England, at any rate – but the focus is normally upon the history of the court, rich as it was in drama and intrigue, but the history of more humble folk is often overlooked. It was to this field of popular history that ‘Hidden Killers of the Tudor Home’ addressed itself, and whereas one prominent cause of domestic mortality at the time – fire – is sadly still with us, many of the others, thankfully, are not.  

The Tudor period was an age during which a recognisable domestic environment came into being, one which featured homes for the middling sort of folk possessing rooms with clearly defined functions, such as kitchen, dining room and bedroom; living spaces brought into being by the adoption of a widespread innovation: the chimney. Chimneys were a boon, insofar as they banished the smoky environment typical of longhouses which possessed an open fire placed in the middle of the dwelling, with its smoke eventually making its way out of an aperture in the roof. However, chimneys had a dark side we were informed: “The chimney brought a host of hidden dangers.” Why was this so? Well, as the art of their construction was at that time a novelty, some methods – such as building them from timber and wattle and daub – were a little unorthodox, not to mention unsafe. However, even chimneys built of a seemingly safe material such as brick proved to be dangerous. Temperatures from fires fuelled by wood could rise to 1000°C, and by coal to 1200°C. Tudor bricks could not cope with this, often exploding as a consequence; moreover, the mortar would frequently fail, and if the draw within the chimney proved to be insufficient, pooling smoke could ignite (an experiment with a mock chimney amply demonstrated the potentially devastating impact of such an instantaneous ignition). Poorly constructed chimneys thus brought with them a rash of house fires, with more fatalities arising from collapsing chimney structures than from the fires themselves.  

If you escaped from fire, you might fall prey to bad teeth, drowning, infection or childbirth, all notable killers lurking in the domestic environment; thankfully, “crushed testicles” and escaped bears were not such widespread dangers, although they were recorded as causes of death. Syphilis was an unwelcome novel addition to the age’s catalogue of misery, making its first appearance in England in 1497. Treatments for the ‘French pox’ were, unsurprisingly, all ineffective, and often featured the use of mercury, with one means of administering it being in the form of ‘Baxter’s cream’, fashioned from a mixture of lard, bees wax, herbs and mercury. Viewers were treated to the sight of some recreated ‘Baxter’s cream’ in a lab, safely contained within a glass vial to prevent its noxious vapours from poisoning its handlers.  

Drowning accounted for a startling estimated 40% of accidental deaths during the Tudor period, whereas in 2010 the corresponding figure was only 2% (perhaps part of this difference can be explained by the fact that the population during the Tudor period lacked the internal combustion engine and electricity). Our presenter – Dr Suzannah Lipscomb – treated us to a demonstration of Tudor ‘drowning’, wading into a muddy river clad in period woollen costume, attesting to the shock and involuntary gasp occasioned by immersing oneself in water with a temperature of 12°C, and the difficulty of moving around in woollen clothing that absorbs one and a half times its own weight in water. Her conclusion: heavy woollen clothing plus slippery muddy banks plus chilly water equals Tudor death from drowning. Thankfully, the camera crew were kind enough not to let her slip to a watery demise.