Dan Snow's History Hit - Digging Medieval Battlefields

Episode Date: September 2, 2021

How different is battlefield archaeology compared to other disciplines? Do local legends ever help track down evidence in a field? And why are potato fields in particular sometimes problematic for archaeologists? In this episode of History Hit's Gone Medieval podcast Sam Wilson, a specialist in battlefield and conflict archaeology, joins Matt Lewis to talk through his specialist work and explain more about some of his incredible discoveries.

Welcome, everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. This episode of History Hit is one of our sibling podcasts. It's called Gone Medieval. It's doing gangbusters. If you love medieval history, this is the place you need to be, folks. This episode is a particularly brilliant one, I think, so I've lifted it and put it on my feed. It features Sam Wilson, a specialist in battlefield and conflict archaeology, joining the very brilliant host of this podcast, Matt Lewis, to talk about battlefield archaeology. Now, you may know that no trace of the battlefield of Hastings, 1066 Battle of Hastings, no trace of that battle has ever been found, which has led some lunatics to suggest the battle took place elsewhere. Well, in this episode, you're going to

hear about some of the challenges, some of the realities of battlefield archaeology, why there is no trace of several other medieval battles, in fact, as well. But also, he deals with whether local legends, oral history, tradition helps him to track down battlefields. It is a great episode. Sam is responsible for some truly remarkable discoveries. It is exciting stuff. Love a bit of medieval history. And of course, love Gone Medieval with Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman, the two hosts of that brilliant hit new podcast. If you want to listen to more medieval podcasts,

we've got loads of them available on History Hit TV. Just become a subscriber. You go to historyhit.tv. You become a subscriber over there. Just subscribe away. You get 30 days free if you subscribe now. And you get all these other podcasts you get thousands of hours of podcasts basically it's bonkers but you also get hundreds

of hours of tv documentaries as well brilliant documentary if i don't say so myself increasing number of them do not feature me so i am allowed to say that and you can see what we got cooking over there the world's best history channel at the moment. Nominated, I like to remind you, for best specialist channel in the UK by an industry awards that is coming up soon. We'll let you know if we win, of course, unless we lose, in which case I'll probably just let it go quiet. But you can find out for yourself at historyhit.tv. Subscribe over there now. But in the meantime, here is an episode of Gone Medieval talking about battlefield archaeology. Enjoy. Welcome to Sam and thank you very much for joining us. Hi Matt, thanks so much for having me on. 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 churned around by ploughing 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 on 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 vines 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 crops, 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. So when you get to a battlefield, 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. we're dealing with the Battle of Bosworth, 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, 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 road 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. Yeah. 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

you know 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, 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 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 fishermen, I suppose, isn't's very difficult to verify the validity of anything, unfortunately.

It's a bit like fishermen, 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, wouldn't 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 yeah so when I wrote this question I didn't realize 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. 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 with one 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 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. 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 Bosworth, 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. I'm involved with a project at Stow-on-the-Wold with the Battlefields Trust, and 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. But 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 as 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. 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 and 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, you know, 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. was actually quite good and we found quite a lot from the battle so now someone's trying to build next door we'll 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 soldiers' 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. 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 status 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. 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 the 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. 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. Toughton 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 a 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? know 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 you know surveys and things but principally we're looking at the non-ferrous objects which are a lot easier to find with a metal detector. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We've got an episode of Gone Medieval here on the pod today.

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a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. 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 you know leather belts lots of English armor 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, armour 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. Someone will ultimately pick it up and it's very difficult to lose it, 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.

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. You know, 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 of the ground and fire them back. Exactly. Although on the sort of flip side of that, I suppose, just thinking about it, von Weasel's account of the Battle of Barnet, I think it's von Weasel,

he talks about, it's a few days after the 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. 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 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 concentrated 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 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 Toughton 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 humanises it. Of course, we had that more recently with Richard III, you know, and the trauma on his body. So 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 Towton 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 Towton burials, actually, that one of the bodies had a severe wound to the side of his face that had healed sometime 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, humanises 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 battlefield.

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. Yeah, 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 Humber, 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 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 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 Weizel 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. So we were expecting, particularly because there were a number of cannonibals been 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 fought. 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 field work, which at the very least indicates where certain evidence was or certain evidence wasn't. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid

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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 we 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 this sort of 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. You know, 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. 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. 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 sore today. And I do have to shout out, it wasn't just me who was doing the project. It was very much a combined effort. It was led by Dr 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 field work aspect of it. Yeah 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 and it's you know it that's not time sensitive and things like that. And it's 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.

But 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. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, everyone. That was an episode of Gone Medieval. It's History Hits New Medieval podcast by the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. They've got a big canvas. They got the Romans leaving until, I don't know, I guess the Tudors, when they hand over to Professor Susie Lipscomb, I'm not sure it's the Tudors. We're

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