Battlefield Archaeology

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Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hits. I'm Matt Lewis. And for me, archaeologists are all like Indiana Jones. They live this glamorous, dangerous lifestyle of constant excitement. I don't believe them when they say it's cold wet ditches. So my guest today is Sam Wilson, a specialist in battlefield archaeology, who I'm quietly convinced has a battered old hat and a whip next to him right now.

Welcome, Sam, and thank you very much for joining us. Hi, Matt. Thanks so much for having me on. I do have a battered old hat, but the whip is strictly reserved for the weekends. Fair play, fair comment. I'll leave that one alone for now. So to get us started on the idea of battlefield archaeology, how different is battlefield archaeology as a discipline from other types of archaeology, say looking for the remains of buildings? Does it require a different approach?

It does. I mean, there is some degree of crossover, but principally with a battlefield, you're looking for scatters of objects that have been deposited in the ground during a battle. We would call them unstratified, which means that they're not... contained within sealed features like a ditch or a pit or something like that and so if you imagine that during a battle someone shoots a gun or they drop something

that object goes into the topsoil of that area that they're fighting in and assuming that no one has removed a load of topsoil at some point or brought a load of material in that object will stay there and it will be turned around by plowing a little bit. It will move around slightly, but really it will stay more or less within. several meters probably of where it was dropped or fell or landed in the case of a musket ball or something like that.

And so we're really looking for those objects and more importantly, the scatters of them, the sort of wider picture. An individual object is interesting, but really we're interested in the overall scatters of objects across a landscape. And of course, traditional archaeology, whilst there is...

Some of that in techniques like field walking, where you will map scatters of unstratified things. You're principally dealing with ditches and pits and things that are cut down into the ground and may have been in use for several hundred years. Of course, the crossover comes when, on a battlefield, someone decides to dig a defensive ditch or you're dealing with burials or something like that. So there certainly is a meshing of the two.

But the primary sort of form of evidence we're dealing with on battlefields is this unstratified artefact scatter. So are farmers with their ploughs, your friends or your foes, do they throw things up for you to find or do they move stuff around frustratingly for you? A bit of both. and in part it depends on what the crop is. So there's been some really interesting experiments done by Dr Glenn Ford on how objects move.

battlefields through the soil depending on which crops are in the field. So cereal crops tend to be the best because the plough will drag them a few meters up the field and then the next year it might drag them a few meters down the field. So they sort of stay roughly where they are.

But something like potatoes is more problematic because of the way that that's processed in the field. It sort of lifts the soil out of the field to get rid of the stones, basically. And if you imagine a cannonball is sat down... in that topsoil it's very much like a stone and so potentially when you've got potatoes in a field it can be removing fines

from that field so it can be quite problematic particularly the larger objects like artillery rounds and so on and if you think about bosworth project that we might well discuss in a bit But the primary form of evidence there were artillery rounds from the battle. So if you imagine all of those are removed, you're really left with very little. So it can depend, really. The sort of positive to that is that when fields are under crop...

is that the topsoil is turned over regularly, which means that objects are constantly brought to the surface so you can find them with metal detectors. If you're dealing with a pasture field that's been pasture for three, four, five hundred years... then the objects will tend to sink down through that and often will move outside the range of a metal detector meaning you can't find them basically

That's fascinating. It would never have occurred to me that the type of crop in the field would have made a difference to how the finds might be uncoverable or moving around the field. It's fascinating.

How do you decide where to sink a trench with all these scattered remains? Like a building, I guess you have a plan of what it would have looked like. How do you decide where to sink an initial trench? So is there lots of investigation that goes on beforehand in the archives and the accounts of the battle? Are written sources sort of useful or can they be a hindrance because they introduce a little bit of mythology sometimes, don't they? Exaggeration and things like that.

Yeah, exactly. So you certainly have to treat the written sources with some care, but there are really two main elements that precede the fieldwork stage of a project, and that is looking at the historic landscape and trying to reconstruct the landscape.

of the battle i.e if we're dealing with the battle of bosworth you know what was the landscape like here in 1485 and that will principally be through looking at historic maps and that can kind of get you back so far medieval maps obviously they don't really exist for many areas and they're not very accurate in comparison to the later maps where they do exist so that can get you back into maybe the 18th century but you're also looking at

deeds and documents to do with land holdings that talk about the size of land parcels. what they were used for any sort of historic information and you can quite often trace that back a little bit further there is a certain amount of well we can only get back to say the 17th century with any confidence

But we know that actually the vast majority of landscape change occurred probably from, well, say 16th, 17th century onwards. So actually, if we can get back so far, probably the changes have been relatively minor. from the 15th century in comparison to say the 17th century to today. So that's aim number one is to try and reconstruct the historic landscape of the battlefield. Aim number two is, as you say, to look at the historic accounts of the battle. As you yourself know, they vary.

in quality, in quantity for different battles and reliability, as well as the agenda of the person who was writing them, particularly when it comes to numbers involved and duration of the battle or whatever. But what you can find quite often is, particularly in the contemporary accounts, which you know haven't been copied from elsewhere, you know, once you get into the 16th and 17th century, they tend to sort of copy each other a little bit. But if you've got some contemporary accounts...

or near contemporary accounts, quite often they will give you little clues as to where the battle was fought. They frustratingly never name anything really accurately, but they'll say...

the army marched down the roads or the highway or the king deployed on the hill or something kind of a bit vague like that. But then you can look at your historic... reconstruction of the landscape and you can say here's the main road that we have worked out it was there in most likely there in the medieval period and we've got a hill which we know is still a hill and it was a hill and

Oh, and it also coincides with this area that we know was common land. So there'd be room for an army to deploy there. So maybe this is where we want to start looking.

So that can then lead you to your starting point, basically. The other thing that feeds into that is any known evidence from the vicinity that's already been recorded. And usually for a battle that might be... metal detectorists who found oh you know 20 years ago someone found a cannonball over here or someone found some musket balls in this field or whatever it is so all of that evidence really then leads you to

the starting point of this field seems like a likely spot let's do some surveying in there some metal detector survey and we'll see what we find and then you go through this whole process of adapting the strategy very much as you go along

based on the results. There's kind of a certain amount of preparation, but then it's suck it and see once you actually get out into the field. Yeah, really, that's what it boils down to. Yeah, absolutely. Do you ever find that sort of local legends help? Because I think sometimes these things linger around

in the popular imagination in a local area and are they usually red herrings or do you sometimes find that there is knowledge there that hasn't ever been written down that you could have tapped into in any other way? It's a difficult one. I mean, you always have to treat local stories with a bit of a pinch of salt, but...

There are often reports as well of, oh, in the Victorian period, some workmen found a load of bodies while they were digging this pond. And you go, oh, that's sort of near where we think the battle might be.

But of course, once you start delving into it, you can never track down what happened to the stuff that they found. You can never verify what they found. So they always remain this sort of... slightly vague idea really you can never prove it and even stories that have come from oh you know I found such and such in that field over there 20 years ago sometimes even that can't be that reliable because

Either the people have forgotten the exact location, or maybe not, or they've misinterpreted what they found. or, you know, there can be any number of factors in play. So it sort of can be useful in one way in that it can be another indicator of where you might like to look, but it's very difficult to verify the validity of anything, unfortunately.

It's a bit like Fisherman, I suppose, isn't it? Everyone gets down the pub and suddenly the musket ball becomes a cannonball, becomes something even bigger and it all gets a little bit out of hand. Exactly. And it's a bit of Chinese whispers as well. And you go, oh, yeah, Dave. Yeah, you said he found a load of stuff over there. And oh, he's dead now. But, you know, yeah, I'm sure it was over there. All this stuff, yeah, just sort of snowballs and it becomes...

something different from how it started. So when I wrote this question, I didn't realise quite how rude it probably sounds to you. So I wrote the question, why is battlefield archaeology important? And then I thought... That's a really rude thing to ask Sam, who is a battlefield archaeologist. I didn't mean it to be that rude. I think it's a valid question. What I was really getting at was what can battlefield archaeology tell us that...

the written sources and the accounts of the battle can't tell us? I mean, that's a very valid question, I think. And really what it can tell you is precisely where things happened. You know, you cannot argue with the physical evidence in the ground.

And of course, contemporary accounts of battles will... contradict one another they'll disagree on certain points particularly if you're dealing with a slightly later battle where you have a huge amount of written sources say for example the battle of waterloo you've got hundreds and hundreds of accounts and they all sort of subtly disagree another, even people who are in basically the same location will disagree with one another.

I suppose a written account is always introducing a subjective perspective of the battle, isn't it? Precisely. They only saw what they saw from their point of view. And, you know, the other side were always the baddies and we were always the goodies.

Exactly. And you're dealing with the fog of war and the fear, chaos. You know, what one person thinks is, oh, it was a mile away. Another person thinks, oh, it was two miles away or it was half a mile away. And as we've seen from the work done at Boswell.

worth you know what's become the accepted site actually the archaeology completely disagrees with it and as we start to explore more battlefields archaeologically we're starting to see that a bit more as well you know I'm involved with a project at Stowe on the Wald with the Battlefields Trust.

We're currently sort of still working on it, but all the evidence we've got thus far is suggesting that the battle is in a completely different location, really, from the one that's been traditionally accepted. So we still need to do a bit more work on it. Until you investigate these things, you don't actually really know. And relatively speaking, in comparison to other archaeological sites across the country, Roman villas or hill forts or whatever.

Relatively few have been investigated through archaeology because battlefield archaeology has a discipline or a sub-discipline of archaeology and more widely conflicts archaeology. It's very new in comparison. You know, it really only got going in the 1980s. So it's sort of lagging behind in that we just haven't covered the ground as much as other facets of archaeology. So I think it can add quite a lot, really. Fabulous.

Yeah, we've had lots of problems with people trying to build on battlefields, haven't we recently, particularly at Bosworth and Tewkesbury. Lots of planning applications going in for people wanting to build electric car test track at Bosworth. Yeah. Do you think things like that are useful because they will do archaeology as part of what they're doing or is losing that piece of battlefield worse than having a bit of a survey done while they build on it?

That's a very difficult question, really, isn't it? It's very much a double-edged sword development, and it, of course, depends, I suppose, on which parts of the battlefield you're talking about. Are we talking about where the main engagement happened, or are we talking about something peripheral?

you know, dealing with the physical landscape or the general setting of the battlefield, that sort of thing. So I'm not quite sure which side of the fence I come down on, really, because I do quite a lot of work in commercial archaeology, which is related to development as well.

as most of the archaeologists in the country really, really do. What I think is important in this scenario, if bits of the battlefield are going to be lost, and there's not a lot anyone can do about it in many cases... then the key thing is doing the archaeology properly, you know, and having a proper strategy in place to get maximum information because it's a one and done.

you're not going to get a chance to do it again. I think it's a shame when we do lose bits of Battlefields. You know, I'm also a trustee of the Battlefields Trust, so... I'm, of course, an advocate for protecting battlefields and the setting of battlefields. But on the flip side of that, because there's so little money, really, to do research on these sites, actually...

A little bit of development here and there can advance the archaeological knowledge at the very least. I'm not necessarily saying it's a good thing, but some archaeological results can actually help in future and can potentially help protect.

things in future because oh actually when we did that development over there we know that the archaeology was actually quite good and we found quite a lot from the battle so Now someone's trying to build next door will actually argue more strongly that, look, this really shouldn't be built on because look at all the results you had there and it's now destroyed and the battlefield's getting smaller and smaller and it's the problem of incremental development.

on the edges of battlefields which we have to be careful of i think yeah i think that was a perfect diplomatic answer yeah i do sort of sit in both camps slightly so i can very much sort of see

the pros and the cons from both sides, if you like. So once you manage to get onto a site and you're looking to sink a trench, what sort of thing are you looking for to help you build up a picture of a medieval battle? What would you... expect or hope to pull out of the ground? For something like the Wars of the Roses, we're really after...

lead shot artillery rounds because we know that the vast majority of battles you've got some form of artillery being used. You've got quite a lot in many cases. you know, Bosworth, supposedly Barnet, which we'll probably come on to in a little bit, and various other battles. So you're looking for those because they're basically easy to find, relatively. If you're on top of one with a metal detector, it will give you a really good signal.

basically so that's object number one that you're after the other thing that you're really looking for is all the paraphernalia that goes along with the soldier's equipment so it will be the buckles badges spurs things like that stuff that is in conjunction with the...

round shot scatter if you can find it a bit abnormal for the landscape that you're working in and you know perhaps there's a higher volume than you might expect or it's all concentrated in one area i mean towton for example they found loads and loads of quite high bits of paraphernalia, bits of personal equipment. And that will be stuff that's been broken off in combat, ripped off or stripped from bodies after the battle.

And again, most of those things will be made of bronze or maybe silver, maybe even gold in some very high status cases. So again, that stuff is quite easy to find with a metal detector in that it will give you a good signal if you go over the top of it. A lot of people will think that you are looking for arrowheads, of course. You know, lots of arrows are exchanged in the battle. And that is true in that you would certainly like to find arrowheads. There are a couple of issues with that.

The first one is that iron, when it's churned around in the topsoil on a regular basis for 500 odd years, will sometimes... dependent on the soil chemistry slightly but it could potentially be completely destroyed just smashed into little tiny pieces that you'll never pick up and even if you pick up one or two bits you'll never identify it as an arrowhead.

Also, in most fields, you will get huge amounts of iron rubbish from tractors and from fences and all sorts of stuff. So the time that it takes you to go through all of that. it just adds a kind of unacceptable time penalty really if your funding is limited and your time is limited you can't afford to spend your entire week or whatever it is you're doing

in one corner of one field because there's so much iron there. Talton again is a slight exception to that possibly through perhaps particular preservation conditions in that an arrow scatter was located on the battlefield but that's the only one. in the country that's got a known arrow scatter. I think there would be reasonable chance of one being somewhere on the Bosworth battlefield. But it's one of those things that...

No one's really yet tackled a proper strategy for how do we find this stuff? There's been some recent research into kind of how objects act based on different soil chemistry and things like that. So it would be nice if we could locate some of these arrow scatters on future surveys and things. But principally, we're looking at the non-ferrous objects, which are a lot easier to find with the metal detector. Yeah, and I guess there's lots of...

parts of a soldier's paraphernalia that wouldn't have survived this long in the soil anyway, when we're looking at medieval battles. So leather belts, lots of English armour was held together with leather straps, wasn't it? Which I guess would have all perished alongside that iron material and everything else.

Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, with a belt, for example, you're dealing with a buckle and maybe a buckle plate. And then on the far end of the belt, probably a strap end, you know, that enabled you to thread the belt through the buckle. The leather will be gone. Likewise, anything.

large you know armor and weapons and so on that will all be gone as well you'll only be dealing with the small little bits that were broken or trampled into the ground and things like that People expect you to go on a battlefield and you'll find helmets or swords or whatever, but unless it's a tiny bit of one of those that's broken off somehow, things will be picked up.

a sword lying on the ground is still a useful object you know someone will ultimately pick it up and it's very difficult to lose it you know unless it falls into a bog or a river or something like that where you might get some stuff and things have been found associated with battles in rivers and things. But in terms of just in a field, all the big stuff will be gone as well. So you've not quite had the Excalibur moment of standing in a trench pulling out a whole sword yet? Sadly not.

I guess you say those things are valuable, aren't they? So people would recover them. And I guess to some extent, the same is true of arrows. Archers would recover their arrows from the battlefield if they were reusable.

Yeah, I'm sure to a certain extent. At Toughton, you have the incident where the Yorkists, they advance forward, don't they? And they pluck all the arrows out of the ground because the Lancastrian arrows have fallen short and they sort of shoot them back at the Lancastrian. Yeah, so the Yorkists have the...

winter winds behind them, don't they? And the Lancastrians are firing into the wind, all their arrows fall short and the Yorkists step forward and pluck them all out the ground and fire them back. Exactly. Although on the sort of flip side of that, I suppose, just thinking about it, von Wiesel's account of the Battle of Barnet... I think it's von Wiesel. He talks about, it's a few days after the battle, and he says something along the lines of...

Blah, blah, blah. Some people are dead. And 10,000 arrows still lie out on the field. So he's there implying, whether or not he knows, but he's implying that actually... A lot of them have been left after the battle on this particular occasion. So it probably in part depended on individual site, individual circumstance and where the armies needed to go immediately afterwards, I suppose.

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So to change tone, I guess, a little bit and get onto something a little bit gory, is coming across human remains a hazard of battlefield archaeology for you? So I assume... that most bodies are taken off a battlefield and buried either in churchyards or mass graves after some battles. But do some of them remain on the sites of the battle? Can you find yourself coming across human remains in any of your trenches? It's possible. It is possible. It's not something that you really go on.

after in terms of looking at a battlefield and of course it requires slightly different techniques to find them but there is always that hazard as you say the vast majority probably were taken off the battlefields to consecrated ground somewhere or alternatively were buried in mass graves on the battlefield somewhere in a sort of concentrated location, as probably happened at Barnet, where they talk about this Chantry Chapel being built on the site of where the mass graves are.

But occasionally they were in mass graves on the battlefield. We know from the Battle of Stoke, for example, back in the 1980s, I think it was, some workmen found a mass grave. basically doing some work on the roadside. And that's still out there. No one's actually looked at that yet. There was a bit of very rapid recording done. It was archaeology in the 1980s. No one really had any time to do anything.

That's buried just along the road, probably where more or less where they fell fleeing from the battlefield. So, yeah, I think, again, it would depend slightly on the circumstances immediately after the battle. Interestingly on the battlefield of Waterloo, just to bring it forward to a more modern example, with a charity called Waterloo Uncovered, I've been doing some work out there. I'm one of the archaeologists on the project. We've been doing some work out there for the last five years.

And we've not found a single mass grave, single burial, apart from an amputation pit where they were chopping off people's legs after, you know, giving them surgery. So even a battlefield that big... and all the work we've done on it for five years, we still haven't found one. So the chances of coming across one on a medieval battlefield are probably considerably slimmer than that, I would say. So are the mass graves then, are they something that...

conflict archaeology is interested in, can the human remains tell you things that the site of the battlefield can't? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, in many ways, that's how... medieval battlefield archaeology, I suppose, began in this country with the Talton mass grave. And really what it crucially shows you is the brutality of the battle.

You know, an artillery round or an arrowhead or whatever is a fairly unemotive object, really. You can kind of pick it up and go, bloody hell, that's heavy. I wouldn't like that to hit me. But actually seeing a body, a skeleton that is... covered in wounds and is smashed to pieces through various vicious means, it very much humanizes it. Of course, we had that more recently with Richard III, you know, and the trauma on his body.

Yeah, that really reveals to you a lot of information about the nature of conflict and possibly how those individuals died. You know, a lot of the Talton bodies had a significant number of injuries. And there's some debate as to, you know.

were they killed during the route were they sort of chased down were they actually executed things like that and also what it can tell you is information about the medieval soldier more generally so it can tell you about their ages of course we're mostly dealing with males in these mass graves it can tell you about their ages it can tell you about their diets their general health

what sort of activities they might have been up to and how that might have affected their bodies, general sort of labouring type work or soldiering related injuries that are non-combat related. We saw in one of the Tauten burials, actually, that one of the bodies had a severe wound to the side of his face that had healed some time previously, which could only really have been caused by a bladed weapon. So...

The assumption there, of course, is that he's actually an experienced soldier. So it tells you something of the mindset, perhaps, of this particular individual in that he'd seen combat before and was still willing to go back and do it again. And I guess some of the brutality, like you say, humanizes it, the brutality that people had lived with, because presumably this guy...

had been in a battle, received a fairly horrific injury to his face, but had then had to try and go about his normal life and still make a living in the meantime, and then being called up again to go and fight in another battlefield, not knowing what would happen. And he didn't even make it home from this one.

Yeah, absolutely. And he was going to that battle, unlike perhaps some of them, knowing full well what it entailed. So it's quite interesting in that sense. What's the best thing that you've ever found on a medieval battlefield?

The most exciting thing I found was an exceptionally large round shot on the Bosworth battlefields. It was...

I can't remember the overall weight. It was something like three and a half kilos or something, but it was almost the size of a melon. You know, it was a large, large round shot, probably one of the largest guns on the battlefield that day. And in the... previous project that Glenn Ford had done, they found another one of very similar size, only the one, but they're probably fired from the same gun, we suspect.

And that was just to sort of peel off the topsoil and see this enormous great round shot lying there. It was quite a moment, definitely. And it's definitely my favourite find from a medieval battlefield, hands down. It must have come from a fairly frightening sized gun that made a heck of a bang on the day of Bosworth. Absolutely. I just cannot imagine, you know, the split second of seeing that thing flying through the air towards you, you know, what your thoughts would be.

I know the Battle of Barnet has been a project that you've been working on for an awfully long time. So the Battle of Barnet took place on the 14th of April, 1471. It was a major engagement. in the Wars of the Roses what can you tell us about the background of the battle who was there why is it an important battle in a nutshell I suppose Edward IV he's come back from exile he's sort of kicked off the throne he comes back from exile lands up in the north on the

and he works his way back sort of down through the country, raising men as he comes. He only lands with a relatively small number, including some Burgundians who Charles the Bold is... It's his brother-in-law, isn't it? He sort of lends him some handgunners and he says, yeah, off you go. And he takes London and basically captures the king. And Warwick, meanwhile, who's...

basically turned to the sort of Lancastrian side. He's raising armies and he then marches back towards London in an attempt to confront Edward. Learning about this, Edward then takes his army out of London a short way, and they meet just outside Barnet, basically, and they have a large battle. These are two of the biggest figures, the biggest characters.

of the Wars of the Roses, I guess, in Edward IV and the Earl of Warwick coming to blows face-to-face on the battlefield. It was a pretty major event. Absolutely, yeah. Is the main thrust of the project at the moment to try and locate the battle? Because I think there's some uncertainty about precisely where...

the fighting took place. I mean, the project is very much wrapped up now. But yeah, the real thrust of the project was to try and locate the battlefields. Like many medieval battlefields, as we discussed earlier, that there are sort of... various locations that it could be based on what the accounts say and so on and so forth. And you look at the traditional site in the Hadley Green area and that's been accepted now for quite some time.

But once you start to look at the accounts, it really doesn't fit very well topographically in terms of where things like the road is because the roads out of Barnet is basically where the road was in the medieval period more or less it's slightly shifted now but more or less it's very considerate of them to leave it there

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. It was basically the highway to St. Albans originally. We know where the road is and so on and so forth, but it really doesn't fit very well. I mentioned von Wiesel earlier. He's... in London at the time of the battle. He's a German merchant in London. And we assume that he's writing only a few days after the battle. We assume he's spoken to people who were there, you know, who've come back into London a day or two later.

And he talks about this hollow that Edward moves his army down into, that there's a marsh, there's all sorts of topographic stuff that doesn't fit with Hadley Green as the site. So that then leads you to this idea of, well...

Where is the battle? Can we reappraise the landscape evidence? Can we reappraise the accounts? And apply basically a modern archaeological approach to Barnet, which hasn't been done before. It's very much a sort of... historian-led interpretation i suppose so that sort of led us to searching particular areas there were also a small handful of finds including a couple of cannonballs

that were found by metal detecting previously, you know, 10, 20 years ago or whatever. So again, it all sort of pointed towards this one area. Unfortunately, the bottom line really is that we didn't find Having done quite a lot of field work, we didn't find anything that we could definitely say was from the battle. No cannonballs, basically. That's surprising because a lot of the accounts talk about the use of artillery at Barney, a lot more than they do with Bosworth, actually.

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So we were expecting, particularly because there were a number of cannibals being found, and we roughly knew or had been told where they had come from, but we didn't find any, even surveying very near to these... locations where the others had supposedly been found, we did find a number of objects that were of the appropriate type and period for the battle.

But without that accompanying stuff that you can say is definitely from the battle, you can't really say, yeah, this is from the battle because... Someone working out in the fields or riding down the highway or whatever could have dropped it, could have lost it. There's no way of knowing. So, yeah, basically the bottom line is...

We still don't 100% know where the battle was for. What we have done is advanced the story of the landscape quite considerably. We've advanced understanding of the accounts quite considerably. We've had things retranslated and stuff like that. And we've done a serious amount of fieldwork, which at the very least indicates where certain evidence was or certain evidence wasn't. One of the things we unfortunately encountered...

was a large swathe of landscape which was off limits to us. And that was just the farmer who worked that land didn't want us to work in there for whatever reason. And that's fine. That's his prerogative. But it means that actually one of the key areas... wanted to look was unavailable to us and some of the other key areas that were associated or sort of adjacent to that

were also under very poor conditions for metal detector survey, very roughly ploughed. We could only get in there for a few days. over the course of the entire year that sort of thing so there's a lot more to still do in that area if the opportunity arises it doesn't feel completely done at this point but we were very much constrained by

modern problems, unfortunately. So it sounds like a perfect example of that combination of the written sources, the topography, sort of enlightening each other and coming together to form this really good, slightly different from the traditional... perspective of the battlefield, albeit there's still a bit of frustratingly unfinished business for you.

Yeah, absolutely. And the main alternative that we were looking at, I mean, we were looking at multiple possible areas, but they're all very much nearby one another. We know that it's somewhere in that vicinity. But the big red line that's drawn around the Hadley Green area as the registered battlefield at present, we weren't 100% convinced by it. But probably bits of Hadley Green may be involved or certainly very close to it. So we're not talking a million miles away.

but just topographically, probably somewhere slightly different. Yeah. And I guess part of the problem as well is that medieval battles could spread out over the landscape over several square miles in a big battle. Yeah, absolutely. And we know with Barnet... because of the misalignment of the armies, the whole thing sort of twisted.

as well you know so you have the two armies almost pirouetting you're not going to end up with a clean oh this is where one army was this is where the other army was it might be a bit more confused by purely the nature of how the battle unfolded. It was fought in the fog, wasn't it, that one? So they all lined up off centre because they couldn't see each other and that set the ground for a really disorganised battle.

Anyway. Exactly. There's only one account from someone who was at the battle, and that's John Paston. And he writes a very brief sort of summary of the battle. I think the wording is he says... more somewhat than half a mile or something a bit vague like that but then you consider that as in he's describing the distance from barnet itself

Then you factor in, well, it was foggy. And also he was shot in the arm by an arrow, you know, and carried presumably off the battlefield in some form. So perhaps his judgment was a little bit clouded.

What's half a mile to him is a mile to someone else. Who knows? And who knows how medieval people perceived a mile? You know, we perceive a mile from... a map view generally speaking a plan you know this is roughly okay i'm looking at a map i know roughly here to here is a mile or whatever but none of them had the benefit of that they're just judging it by their eye

on the ground, of course. I guess your mind isn't entirely on how far you're travelling when you're being bounced around in a cart with an arrow poking out your arm, hoping your arm doesn't get chopped off. Is the report of that... project available for anyone to find online yeah it is it's called the archaeology data service website just stick that in google it's basically a massive repository of loads and loads of archaeological reports thousands of them and if you search on that website for

barnet battlefield project it should bring you to the page You have the full report and all the detail. Fantastic. That's the rest of my evening saw today. And I do have to shout out, it wasn't just me who's doing the project. It was a very much a combined effort. It was led by Dr. Glenn Ford at Huddersfield University.

as well as Dr Tracy Partida, who did all the landscape work, phenomenal landscape archaeologist. And we had loads and loads of local volunteers, metal detectorists, people at the local museum, all helping out. So it was very much a collaborative effort. I just happened to be...

there leading the fieldwork aspect of it. Sounds like a fantastic project. Has lockdown been challenging for an archaeologist? I guess not being able to go out is difficult when your job is to go out and... dig trenches. Sort of yes and no. There's kind of two strands really. Commercial archaeology, i.e. archaeology associated with development and construction, that has not stopped at all basically, apart from a very brief pause when...

Covid first sort of hit early part of last year while companies worked out how to do things safely and so on. But other than that, it's very much continued because construction and development has very much continued. What has stopped really is all the research stuff, because that's not, you know, time sensitive and things like that.

you know sort of volunteer groups and things like that involved or leading things and a lot of groups have very much put that on the back burner meaning that most things haven't really happened but now we are starting to see a few more research things kind of kicking off again so yeah that is positive it's been a bit of a again a double-edged sword really covid commercial archaeology has done quite well out of it surprisingly usually some

economic volatility will affect commercial archaeology quite badly but not in this case but yeah research archaeology very much on pause for a year and a half. So what's next for you? Do you have any exciting projects going on at the moment? Do you have anything lined up? The main one, there's a couple really that I'm hoping to do under the auspices of the Battlefields Trust, and that's finish the work at Stowe that I was talking about earlier. We've just got a bit more to do on that.

We're in the process of getting a little bit of funding together for that. And the other one is we're going to do a small amount of surveying at Langport Battlefield, another Civil War battle, where we're just looking at a single field at the moment. Hopefully, if we have some interesting results there, then it might well perhaps lead on to something a bit more significant in the future. So that's kind of on my radar for the next few months.

Hopefully going back to Belgium, to Waterloo as well. Not this year, unfortunately. That will be next year. and in the meantime doing bits of commercial archaeology mostly working from home at the moment writing up reports and things like that but hopefully i can get outside every now and then

get your hat on and dig a cold, wet trench somewhere. Yeah. Well, it's the summer now, so I don't mind, really. I suppose, yeah. Well, thank you very much for joining us, Sam, for taking the time to explain your fascinating work to us. It's been great for me to understand a little bit more about the...

ways you go about investigating and deciphering battlefields so thank you very much for sharing that with us no problem thanks so much for having me if you've enjoyed this episode and you'd like to hear more please don't forget to subscribe to gone medieval from history hits wherever you get your

podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. I'd just like to give a quick mention to an episode called The Legacy of Thermopylae on the Ancients podcast, also from History Hit. I love the film 300, and I'm sure Sam's grimacing at me as I say that. But it's great to find out some of the facts that lie behind some of these myths. And if Russell Crowe happens to be listening, and let's be honest, he probably is.

Tristan is desperate to have you on as a guest on The Ancients. So on that note, I'll let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with History Hits.