Dust Detectives | Underfloor Archaeology (Classic)

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.

Hello James.

Hello Angus. I thought I might find you here. What a sensational place.

Yes, beautiful isn't it?

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 that 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 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.

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 and most unusual bits of archaeology are actually in the hall itself.

Indoor archaeology? How does that work?

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.

Fabulous. Let's go.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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 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.

We've come round to what I guess is the principal entrance.

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.

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 just 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 VII when he visited.

Really? For 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.

Ooh, lead the way. Is this really a lav? 1480s loo?

It was.

En suite?

Down there.

Are you? You're kidding me. Is that a? It's a deadfall loo.

There's a hole in the floor, which should go down a shaft into the moat.

Oh, I see.

But It doesn't. It goes into a secret room.

Really?

You can squeeze through if you want.

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

Have you worked out what it is?

Well, it feels like somewhere, you know, 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 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.

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 finding priests hidden under the floor something that you encounter in your daily-

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.

You're going to show me some things?

Yeah.

Oh, wonderful. That was quite a narrow staircase you brought me up, Angus. I guess we're in the servants' bedrooms?

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

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?

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.

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 were probably the most sort of mundane. Have a look at those.

I recognise those from Christmas. Walnut shells.

Walnut shells, yes.

Really?

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.

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 carpet 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.

Yeah. So probably the commonest find are these.

They're dressmaking pins, are they?

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.

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?

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 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-

Wow, I'm going to take it over to the light where the seamstress was. That looks like a fragment of textile to me.

So-

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 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.

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.

Yes, probably hundreds of generations of little rats have snuggled up in that over the centuries. And 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. 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. Luckily, there was an expert on hand to have a look at the photographs and identify that this is actually early Tudor, handwritten music.

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.

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?

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-

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.

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.

So 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 tissu 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 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.

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.

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, in that condition as well, you know, of the history of a place like Oxburgh Hall.

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.