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