Just beneath our feet lies a hidden world of centuries-old curiosities and undiscovered treasures.

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
JAMES GRASBY (00:37):
Hello and welcome to the National Trust Podcast.
I'm James Grasby. Before westart our story, I wanted to let
you know that from March, theNational Trust Podcast is
changing so we can bring youmore award-winning stories in
nature, history and adventure.
Stay on this stream for our newimmersive nature podcast, Wild
World Of... or if grippinghistory is your thing, look out

(00:58):
for our podcast, Back When.
Remember to follow either showin your favourite podcast app so
you're the first to hear newstories as they arrive.
In today's classic episode,we're travelling to the East
Anglian town of Oxburgh. We'revisiting a property which, with
the help of some unusualarchaeologists, has been home to
some incredible chance findings.

(01:22):
The acres of verdant woodlandthat surrounds Oxburgh Hall is
full of a variety of ancienttrees, oak and ash.
Among the sweet summer birdsongand the chirp of insects is the
occasional rumble of an aircraftflying to and from the nearby
military base.
But when you stop and take sometime to look at your
surroundings here, as with anywoodland, you'll find a treasure

(01:43):
trove of activity left behind bythe people who used to frequent
these spaces for work andleisure.
But to give me a better idea ofthe archaeology that can be
found in this woodland and whatit tells us, I'm hoping to bump
into Angus Wainwright, aNational Trust archaeologist,
who'll be able to shed somelight on Oxburgh's woodland
secrets.

(02:07):
I hope I'm heading in the rightdirection. I've come through a
narrow footpath and the canopyis surrounding me.
Where is Angus? I think probablyrather like looking for
wildlife. This ancient landscapeis probably precisely the sort
of place where you would find anarchaeologist.
But look, there within it, asyou would expect, a questing

(02:28):
archaeologist. That is myfriend, Angus, I'm sure of it.

ANGUS WAINWRIGHT (02:34):
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 Woodlandand in front of us is a mound
that looks like a very largemolehill and to my untutored eye
it looks a bit like a roundbarrow.

Well, that's what we thought it might be. I
mean, round barrows areprehistoric burial mounds, as
you know. We do get them in thispart of the world. We cleared
the trees off it and had acloser look.

So we're just rising up a low bank and looking
on the top, it is hollow. Whatis that?

What we found when we kicked about on the top
of our supposed round barrow wasa 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 heavilyburnt.
And then we started wanderingfurther out into the woods and
we found at least two other ofthese mounds.

(03:50):
You know, what we've got here isa little local brickmaking
industry, probably making bricksfor cottages and walls and the
stoke hole at the other endwhere people were operating the
kiln were putting the wood in tokeep it burning.
We found some clay pipes and onepiece of pottery down in the
stoke hole. So you can imaginethat being a nice little warm

(04:11):
spot. They are down there havinga bit of a smoke and maybe
something to drink and broke oneof 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 reallymarvellous, but some of the most
interesting and strangest andmost 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 andwe'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 lookingup for interesting birds in the
trees, but I'm always looking atthe ground. You know, often I'm
actually feeling it with myfeet.

I love that expression.

It's sort of detective work. You're looking
for clues to tell you about whathappened in the past, but it's
all about people.
All these things were created bypeople for a purpose, and often
they're just everyday folk whodon't get memorialised in all
the wonderful documents.
We don't have letters anddiaries from them, but what we
do have is these marks they'veleft on the landscapes.

Now, Angus, I had to stop. We've come to the end
of this unfinished carriagewayand get the first sight of that
astonishing hall, Oxburgh Hall.
The bricks that you wereshowing, it's sort of 1600s, and
this building is hundreds ofyears earlier, I guess.

It's about built 200 years before that
kiln, so it would have been afashionable and cutting-edge
high status building of the time

And was a substantial house for an
important family. Who were they?

ANNA FORREST (05:52):
Oxburgh Hall's history is inextricably linked
with the history of theBedingfeld family.
I'm Anna Forrest and I worked ascurator for the National Trust
at Oxburgh.
Oxburgh and the Bedingfelds havewitnessed the English
Reformation, the reign ofElizabeth I, the English Civil
War in the 17th century. Theywere Jacobite sympathisers

(06:12):
during the 18th century.
During the 19th century, thehouse was practically a ruin
because of everything that hadgone before.
And then in the 20th century, itwas put up for sale and a great
number of the contents weresold. And the house itself was
nearly sold just for its bricksand demolished, which is a
thought that doesn't really bearthinking about.

(06:33):
When Elizabeth I came to thethrone, there was the act of
uniformity, which made sayingmass a crime. And made refusing
to attend church to hear theEnglish service illegal.
And people who refused to signup to this act were known as
recusants, which literally meansrefusers.
And Sir Henry Bedingfeld was oneof the people who refused.

(06:54):
It would have been verydifficult, really, for the
Bedingfelds to have carried onworshipping in the way they were
used to. They would have had tohave carried themselves with
extreme care at this point.

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. Thesemassive medieval oak doors.
You'd have to hammer on the doorand this little one would open
here.
Knock on the door. And we foundscratches on the inside of the
window there where a dog hasjumped up at the window and
scratched.
So you'd knock on the door andthen that guard dog would bark,

(07:32):
bark, bark.
And somebody would emerge out ofone of these little doors here
on either side.
Follow me up. The spiralstaircase 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 weirdit's just make the brick look
neater.

Quite incredible it's like the curly-whirly snail
shell drawn out going up theinside.

So this is the room called the King's Room.
Traditionally this was the roomwhich 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 littlevaulted room.
Just off it is the Garderobe,your little private lavatory,
but also one of Oxburgh's mostfamous 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. Feetfirst. I'm going down and
dropping down.
Useful Torch.
Here we are. I'm now in thedepths. I'm going round the
U-bend in the lavatory. That'sfortunately not a full of water.
And as Angus told me, I've nowentered a little room.

(09:17):
Large enough to stand up in, butcertainly not to lie down in.
This is fascinating.
I would guess that this issomewhere that you would hide in
the event of an emergency. I'mgoing to come out through the
lav!

(09:37):
Angus, I'm intrigued.

Have you worked out what it is?

Well, it feels like somewhere, you know, a
priest hole or somewhere that ifyou're under threat, you could
get away.

So it is a priest hole. So the Bedingfeld
family were Catholics. Theydidn't turn to Protestantism. So
they were, you know, in a stickypolitical position.
And that is why from being verywealthy, they fell on the hard
times. And they had to havepriests to serve mass, which was
illegal. So they had to have alittle bolt hole for the priest

(10:10):
to go should anybody turn up atthe door hammering away.

If I'd been caught, if I'd been that
Catholic priest and they'd foundtheir way to me, what would have
been the outcome?

Well, you'd be dragged out and probably
tortured to find out who yourassociates were, and then you'd
probably be executed in a rathergruesome way.

Is finding priests hidden under the floor
something that you encounter inyour daily-

I've never actually, funnily enough, ever
found a priest under afloorboard, but we have found a
lot of other exciting thingsunder the floorboard at Oxburgh.

You're going to show me some things?

Yeah.

Oh, wonderful.
That was quite a narrowstaircase you brought me up,
Angus. I guess we're in theservants' bedrooms?

Often we don't really know how rooms were used
because these weren't described,but we were lucky, in
archaeological or historicalterms, because we've just
completed a massive buildingproject at Oxburgh.
All the floorboards in this roomand the attic next door to us
were all lifted up. Underneaththese floorboards, as you can
imagine, there's hundreds ofyears of dust.

(11:23):
So amongst the dust are thingsthat have fallen between the
cracks in the floorboards orbeen deliberately hidden. So all
this stuff accumulates under thefloorboards.
Normally, it would just beshovelled away and go out in the
skip. But we decided we weregoing to treat this as a sort of
archaeological excavation.

This is not the Indiana Jones end of archaeology
is it? It is not the excavationof 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 lookingunderneath the floorboards or on
an excavation of a Roman villa,you're digging up other people's
rubbish.
And that's telling you a pictureabout their life.
Sorting through 57 sacks of dustwas both dirty and boring at

(12:16):
times.
But, you know, me and thevolunteers 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 beexcited by much more trivial
things than gold coins. Andwe've got some, you know,
spectacularly trivial things foryou 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. Ithought these were probably the
most sort of mundane. Have alook 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 beennibbled by rats, it could be
that the rats have actuallybrought them down to eat under
the floorboard.
But these ones that have beenperfectly cracked and not
nibbled by rats, they've beendeliberately put under the
floor.
And what we think is that thisis sound insulation.

Oh.

So you put a thick layer of walnut shells
under your floor as a soundinsulation because downstairs
are the bedrooms of the gentry.And up here are the servants
clattering around on this floorwith no carpet on it, bash,
bash, bash, chatting away.
People downstairs don't want tohear what's going on upstairs.

What a brilliant idea. Early sound insulation.

Yeah.
So probably the commonest findare these.

They're dressmaking pins, are they?

They must be dressmaking pins. We haven't
looked at these in detail, butwhat's clearly happening is that
maids are adapting or makingdresses in this room.
They're dropping pins, and whenthey're sweeping up, they're
going down between the cracks ofthe floorboards. And what we
found was they're concentratedwhere you might imagine, where

(14:08):
the windows are.

It's not just finding a pin. It's knowing the
context from which that pin camefrom that really begins to
answer questions, give a pictureof daily life here, doesn't it?

It's a simple little story, but it just gives
you a little window into thelives 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 holdthat carefully and-

Wow, I'm going to take it over to the light where
the seamstress was. That lookslike 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 archaeologistwho was here, found it, it was
just like a dusty heap offabric.
He carefully unfurled it, allthese different bits of chewed
up textile, and he realised thatthere was something unusual
about this.

MATTHEW CHAMPION (15:10):
My name is Matthew Champion. I am a
freelance buildingsarchaeologist, specialise in
historical inscriptions andunderfloor archaeology and
buildings recording.
We were carrying out a survey inthe attics at Oxburgh. We were
investigating beneath thefloorboards. While working in
one area near the gatehouse, Icame across what appeared to be

(15:33):
a very large and rather ancientrat's nest.
These weren't uncommon atOxburgh, we had come across
quite a few already, but it wasvery clear from this as soon as
I started investigating that wehad small pieces of parchment
and we had quite a lot oftextiles involved.
So we took a fairly forensicapproach, we couldn't lift the

(15:55):
whole thing in situ, so we hadto literally beneath the
floorboards and graduallydissect this rat's nest.
And as soon as we startedopening it up, we realized it
was full of treasures. We hadcollars, we had cuffs, we had
embroidery, and we had somevery, very high status things
like silks.
We had velvets, we had satins.

(16:16):
What was really significant wasthe quality. These were not your
average everyday items. Thesehad clearly come from luxury
garments.
A lot of the garments that thesecame from would have been very
fashionable, high status items.But of course fashions changed
quite quickly.
The material itself could bereused, whereas the garment

(16:36):
couldn't.
So what they were doing was theywere cutting off things like
collars and the cuffs, and thenthey were reusing those larger
sections of material, andprobably reusing them in other
more fashionable, up-to-dategarments.
This is just not something younormally come across in
archaeology.

That's fabulous. It's not only a great reminder
to all of us today about thetradition of reusing recycling
materials, but also the ideathat once it's of no use to us,
it may be of use to somebodyelse, even a family of rats.

Yes, probably hundreds of generations of
little rats have snuggled up inthat over the centuries. And
I'll put that back-

I'm glad you went through all this rubbish.
Now that is extraordinary. It isa small fragment, I would think,
of paper.
No, that's music notation, isn'tit?

It is music notation.

Is it?

Yes, this little scrap of paper and a few
others like it came out of therat's nest as well. Luckily,
there was an expert on hand tohave a look at the photographs
and identify that this isactually early Tudor,
handwritten music.

DAVID SKINNER (17:58):
My name is David Skinner. I'm the Osborne
Director of Music at SydneySussex College in Cambridge.
I believe it was a morning, itwas definitely a morning, and
somebody forwarded this articleto me and I opened it up on my
computer.
I was reading through thearticle, just casually

(18:19):
mentioning two small fragments,musical fragments, without any
further information. Then myheart started to race. Because
there's a possibility that thismight be composed music.
Each side of the fragment hadenough musical notation, enough
information to show that thiswas indeed music probably from

(18:39):
the mid-1520s.
Very likely to be music by awell-known composer from that
time, could have been Cornish,could have been Tallis, and also
a lost fragment from what seemsto be a lost book of masses.
We have so little, comparativelylittle music from the reign of
Henry VIII. So it wouldcompletely, fundamentally change

(19:01):
the soundscape of ourunderstanding of early Tudor
Church music.
The implications are vast here,because it just simply means
that this music represents thevery, very height of English
choral endeavor in the 1520s. Sowhat is it doing in a rat's nest
in Oxburgh Hall?

Angus, you brought me along a corridor and
I've only got my bearings bylooking out of this window.
But this looks to me to be across between a laboratory and a
study.
Now, you've got some tools ofthe trade here. Some very dainty
brushes, some sturdier householdbrushes. There are bags of
unsorted material, lots ofclipboards, endless forms
detailing all the finds. What amI looking at, Angus?

Well, this is my working area. We don't do the
actual sorting for the dust inhere because, as you can
imagine, it's very dusty.
So we do that under a gazebooutside. But here, under the
bench, are some bags waiting tobe sorted.
So these are rubble sacks. Yeah,they contain about one or two

(20:11):
bucketfuls of debris from underthe floorboards. And if-
There's one here that's open-

That is a bag of rubbish, Angus.
Angus, this is not archaeologyto my mind. There's dust that
would come out of my vacuumcleaner 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 shovelout the material, then they
hoover it all out.
And the shovelled out materialand the hoover bags all go in
the sack. But the interestingthings that we've looked at
before will be hidden amongstall 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 thefloorboards, 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 isastonishing. Beautifully done,
and the detail is exquisite.

Well, this is a little leather-bound printed
book and it's a book of psalmsfrom 1569 and it was actually
compiled by Catherine Parr, whoyou might remember as the sixth
wife of Henry VIII, who was avery studious person, a very

(21:39):
highly Protestant, so ratherunusual thing to find in a very
Catholic family's house.
This was found by a builderresting on top of the external
wall just under the tiles, soinches from the weather, just
waiting for that builder to comealong.

Wow, that is incredible.

It's a bit puzzling how it got there. We
don't think it was deliberatelyhidden. You know, there wouldn't
be anything politicallyproblematic about it.
In fact, it's the ideal book onewould want in one's house to

(22:23):
show that, you know, one was aproper Protestant.
You can imagine it might havedropped 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 theexterior wall.
You know, maybe it was just achance like that and there it
sat, you know, unnoticed allthat time.

Angus, you were showing me pins and walnut
shells and small fragments ofeveryday things. But to find a
book in this sort of conditionmust be astonishing for an
archaeologist.

This is the kind of thing, when we set this
project up, that's the sort ofthing we dreamt of finding. We
knew we'd find interestingthings like those pins, you
know, that tell us about theeveryday life of the house. But
we hoped, you know, that wemight find some really unusual
and valuable and evocativethings.
I mean, that's so evocative,isn't it, in that condition as

(23:18):
well, you know, of the historyof a place like Oxburgh Hall.
It's just encapsulated in thatsort 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 wonderfullandscape, this meadowland of
almost waist-high floweringplants.
And I'm trying to do and tryingto think about what Angus told

(23:55):
me, which I thought was lovely,the idea of feeling the
landscape with your feet as away of sensing what's going on,
his sense of inquiry and the wayhe goes about the sort of
forensic investigation ofbuildings, extending
archaeology, not just fromexcavating a brick kiln, but to
underfloor archaeology and thelives and collecting habits of

(24:15):
rats in the house reveals somuch, these lost lives to
history of needlewomen who havenot been recorded in documents
but whose evidence of theirlives persists in the things
that they left behind. It's beena great revelation.

(24:40):
Thanks for listening to thisepisode of the National Trust
Podcast. From next month, stayon this stream for our new
nature podcast, Wild World Of.
You'll be immersed in intriguingstories from our natural world,
from spider sex to folkloreorigins and dinosaur
discoveries. Or if grippinghistory is your thing, look out
for our new podcast, Back When,with me.

(25:02):
We'll be transporting you backin time to step into the stories
of the people, places andmoments that made us.
You'll experience the greatstink, retrace the footsteps of
sci-fi author HG Wells andunearth the dark history of the
Plague Village, along with atreasure box full of other great
stories.
Remember to follow all our showsfrom National Trust Podcasts to

(25:25):
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Dust Detectives | Underfloor Archaeology (Classic)

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