The crew from Time Time has gotten permission to dig at Holyrood House, WIndsor Castle and Buckingham Palace. Several news sources had articles on the digs, which were taking place this weekend.
From The Sunday Times – History digs into royal lawns
From The Guardian – TV ‘diggers’ given access to royal premises
Another from The Guardian – Time Team digging for royal secrets
From The Scotsman – Queen orders TV’s Time Team to search for palace’s secrets
From The Australian:
Sections of the King’s Table, a symbol of royal power until it was smashed by Oliver Cromwell, have been found beneath the floor of the Palace of Westminster.
The elaborately carved stone table was used by kings and queens from the 13th century for coronation feasts and state banquets but disappeared under Puritan rule.
Full article
And another from the Scotsman
The table was still around in Tudor times and Henry VIII used it for the wedding feasts after the marriages to Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn.
(original links have expired and have been removed)
Archaeologists have been revealing details about the discovery of a medieval bridge in Shropshire.
…
The bridge, known as St George’s Bridge, once acted as a gateway to the town from Wales and was in existence during the 15th Century.
And why is this of interest to Tudor fans?
It is thought that future King of England, Henry Tudor, used the bridge in 1485 to enter England from Wales on his way to the battle at Bosworth.
Here’s another article, with a picture: Historic gateway discovered at dig
(some original links have expired and have been removed)
The major development on the Bermondsey Square site has provided the unprecedented opportunity for archaeologists to explore this important site.
Bermondsey Abbey was founded from Cluny in France shortly after the Norman conquest.
Katherine of Valois, grandmother of Henry VII, died at Bermondsey and Elizabeth Woodville (widow of Edward IV and mother of Elizabeth of York) retired there in Henry VII’s reign.
From The Bexley Times, with some new pictures:
A ROYAL chapel last seen more than 350 years ago and used by three generations of monarchs has been uncovered by gardeners.
The original brickwork of a 16th century royal chapel, built by Henry VII, was discovered during work to relay pavements at the Old Royal naval College, Greenwich.
Full article here
(original links have expired and have been removed)
The existence of the chapel, part of the Royal Palace of Placentia, a Tudor favourite but pulled down in the 17th century to be replaced by Greenwich Hospital – now the Old Naval College – has long been known from paintings and records.
But until a bulldozer’s bucket scraped against brickwork a month ago, no physical evidence of the chapel had ever been discovered.
Full article from The Telegraph here
(original links have expired and have been removed)
There were a few more articles over the past few days about the discovery of Edward the Confessor’s tomb under the Cosmati pavement in Westminster Abbey:
From the Telegraph
From CNN
(original links have expired and have been removed)
[Comments are closed on older posts. If you wish to make a comment, please contact Lara via the link in the sidebar.]
Not strictly Tudor, but interesting!
Experts believe they have uncovered the tomb of England’s King Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. Archaeologists using radar have also discovered a series of royal tombs dating back to the 13th and 14th centuries in under-floor chambers.
The discoveries were made as experts investigated the construction of the Abbey’s 13th-century mosaic pavement.
See the rest of the article at the link above.
[Comments are closed on older posts. If you wish to make a comment, please contact Lara via the link in the sidebar.]
Here is some more about the relics brought up from the Mary Rose, from The Guardian.
(original links have expired and have been removed)
[Comments are closed on older posts. If you wish to make a comment, please contact Lara via the link in the sidebar.]
To follow up on yesterday’s news about the Tudor Rose figurehead from the Mary Rose, here are two articles about the other items that have been recovered on this set of dives: from the BBC (with video) and from The Guardian.
[Comments are closed on older posts. If you wish to make a comment, please contact Lara via the link in the sidebar.]
Divers brought up the Tudor Rose last week while surveying the site before attempting to raise an anchor from the wreck. The above link goes to an article on The Guardian website.
You can learn more about the Mary Rose and its history at www.maryrose.org
(some original links have expired and have been removed)
[Comments are closed on older posts. If you wish to make a comment, please contact Lara via the link in the sidebar.]
Discovered during the meeting of a metal detecting club on the Isle of Wight. Neat!
Thanks to Linda for passing this along!
(original links have expired and have been removed)
[Comments are closed on older posts. If you wish to make a comment, please contact Lara via the link in the sidebar.]
Royal romantic garden recreated
As the link above tells (do a search on news.google.com for “kenilworth” and “garden” to find more stories), excavations from last year have prompted researchers rethink the design of the current garden.
You can see my photo from the walls of the castle here: http://tudorhistory.org/places/kenilworth/gallery.html , taken in 1998. The garden will be reconstructed according to the new archaeological evidence, along with renovations of other parts of the property, including the 16th century gatehouse which has not been open to the public for quite some time.
Thanks to the several people who brought this to my attention!
[Comments are closed on older posts. If you wish to make a comment, please contact Lara via the link in the sidebar.]
Archaeologists have received a grant to hunt for the real location of the Battle of Bosworth Field. More information is available in this article from The Guardian. I’ll post any updates I hear from the dig!
[Comments are closed on older posts. If you wish to make a comment, please contact Lara via the link in the sidebar.]
Divers have found “the last piece of the puzzle” of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s ship which sank off Portsmouth in 1545 and mostly raised in 1982.
(original links have expired and have been removed)
[Comments are closed on older posts. If you wish to make a comment, please contact Lara via the link in the sidebar.]
Two articles of a recent find from Worcester Cathedral: from The Telegraph in the UK and from Yahoo! News (original link expired). Scientists hope the find will help solve the mystery of the “sweating sickness” which is thought to have claimed Arthur’s life.
[Comments are closed on older posts. If you wish to make a comment, please contact Lara via the link in the sidebar.]
Tudor trash is an archaeologist’s treasure
Excavations in London’s Southwark district produce some interesting finds, including a banana peel that predates when the fruit was thought to have been introduced to England. Thanks to Rachel for passing this info along!
Article about excavation from Heritage Matters Magazine
Article from the Museum of London
Article about a Tudor banana also from the Museum of London
[Comments are closed on older posts. If you wish to make a comment, please contact Lara via the link in the sidebar.]
A GREAT EARLY BALL
By Louise Hancock
The world’s oldest football has been discovered in a vault under layers of dust. It would have Premiership players in stitches, but it was good enough for Mary Queen of Scots. Experts believe she used to kick the crudely made ball around with her favourite courtiers about 400 years ago. The grey leather ball, which has an inflatable pig’s bladder inside, is not much bigger than a modern lawn bowl. It vanished from Mary’s Stirling Castle bedroom in 1570. And last century it went missing again during renovation work at the Scottish landmark. But staff at Stirling’s Smith Art Gallery found it while rummaging through boxes in a vault last week. Gallery official Michael Mc Ginnes said yesterday: “This is a scoop for us. We never realised we had the ball. We had it checked by historical experts. They said it was extremely rare and was used by Mary.”
It is thought that Mary used to throw the ball from her balcony to start games between staff or soldiers. In those days players could pick up a ball and run with it. “In fact,” said Mr Mc Ginnes, “it was probably more of a handball than a football.” Today the ball goes on display for the first time in a glass cabinet at the gallery.
From The Mirror April 24, 1999
(Thanks to Heather for passing this along!)
Discover Magazine
February 1999
Breakthroughs – Archaeology
When Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon — the first of six unfortunate wives — he broke with the pope, anointed himself supreme head of the Church of England, and shut down England’s monasteries. He may also have unwittingly delayed the industrial revolution. For one of the monasteries he closed — Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire — was apparently the site of a prototype blast furnace built about 200 years before later blast furnaces ushered in the industrial revolution.
After Henry expelled the Cistercian monks from the abbey in 1538, his emissaries inventoried the abbey’s contents. Examining these old lists, Gerry McDonnell, an archeometallurgist at the University of Bradford, became curious about two items, a ‘bloomsmithy’ at Laskill, about four miles from the abbey, and a ‘hammersmithy’ at Rievaulx itself. What exactly were they?
McDonnell set out to explore the debris of Laskill and Rievaulx. From the records, he suspected that the monks had built a furnace to extract iron from ore. But what kind of furnace? The most ancient type, in use since the Iron Age, was typically a six-foot-tall, three-foot wide cylindrical stack of clay. Charcoal and iron ore were loaded into the top. Air, pumped in with hand or foot bellows, helped feed the fire that separated pasty lumps of iron from the ore. This crude iron was further heated and squeezed to remove mineral impurities called slag.
The slag of a primitive furnace typically contains lots of iron — such furnaces don’t generate high enough temperatures to separate all the iron from the ore. But the slag McDonnell analyzed at Laskill had a low iron content — it resembled the slag produced by a blast furnace, whose higher temperatures remove more iron from the ore.
McDonnell was further convinced that the monks had built such a furnace when he discovered a square, 15-foot wide brick structure below the ground, as well as traces of a stream that may have driven the furnace’s bellows. The larger size of the furnace and the greater power of water-driven bellows would have allowed the monks to reach blast-furnace temperatures.
McDonnell isn’t sure of the purpose of the other furnace the ‘hammersmithy’ at Rievaulx –but suspects it may have been used to forge iron bars from the iron produced at Laskill. “The monks could have used quite a lot of iron — they had 14,000 sheep to shear, so they needed sheep shears,” he says. “We know that the Cistercians were innovators, and technologically they ere very astute.” If Henry hadn’t expelled the monks, he adds, the industrial revolution might have started at the abbey in North Yorkshire.
The remains of King Henry VIII’s personal `Turkish’ steam bath have been identified in a new study of finds from his royal palace at Whitehall. The Turkish bath is thought to have been the first in Britain, complete with decorated tiled stove and steps leading down into a sunken stone pool.
Whitehall Palace in London was excavated in 1939, but the finds – including the sunken bath and hundreds of associated stove-tile fragments – were inadequately studied at the time, and were recognised as a Turkish bath only when re-examined by David Gaimster, a curator at the British Museum, and Simon Thurley, Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces. Speaking at a recent British Museum conference, Dr Gaimster said the discovery showed Henry VIII was adopting not only `the latest in Continental domestic design and technology’ but also a full Continental
Renaissance lifestyle. `The old-fashioned bathtub used at the beginning of his reign could not offer a greater contrast to the luxury sauna-bath arrangement introduced at Whitehall during the final decade of his life,’ he said. Steam baths, consisting of tiled stoves, baths, and occasionally beds and other furniture, were introduced to Europe in Germany in the later 15th century. In Britain they are known from records from the mid to later 16th century; and the Whitehall bathroom is recorded in an inventory of the palace dated 1543. The finds, however, provide the first archaeological evidence for the technology in Britain.
The tiles and the sunken bath were found associated with a small room in the king’s privy quarters. The wood-fired stove was classically designed with pediment and entablature, and was constructed of English-made green-glazed tiles which were moulded with Henry VIII’s royal arms and those of Edward Prince of Wales.
According to Dr Gaimster, the heraldic imagery suggests that Henry VIII’s modish bathroom may have been designed with a `public propagandist’ purpose in mind, despite being located within the inner sanctum of the royal quarters. The tiles and a reconstruction drawing of the stove are now on display in the new gallery of 15th to 18th Century Europe at the British Museum.
From British Archaeology news, April 1996.
