Gone Medieval - Excavating An Anglo-Saxon Palace: Ad Gefrin

Episode Date: April 4, 2023

Though today it is just a muddy field, the small hamlet of Yeavering was once a bustling centre of Anglo-Saxon power in the North of England. At its heart was a 7th century palace - known in Latin as Ad Gefrin - which was built by King Edwin in 616 AD, the first king of a united Northumbria.In today’s episode of Gone Medieval, Dr Cat Jarman speaks to Dr Chris Ferguson, the Director of Visitor Experience at the newly opened Ad Gefrin museum and distillery. Located just outside Newcastle, the museum tells the untold story of this remarkable Anglo-Saxon palace and the part it played in Northumbria’s golden age.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. In Northumberland, a brand new museum, the Ad Geffron Anglo-Saxon museum, has just opened, with the aim of sharing the untold story of Northumbria's golden age. The museum focuses on the site known as Ad Geffron, a 7th century palace, which was rebuilt by King Edwin in 616 AD, a king new tribe. from the south of England to rule as the first king of a United Northumbria.

The palace was found at a site called Javering and has been hugely important for understanding early Northern English history. But if that wasn't enough to lure you into their doors, rather uniquely, the museum is actually also the site of a whiskey distillery. I'm with me to explain that link and also tell me all about the background and the site and its contact contact is Dr. Chris Ferguson, whose director or visitor experience at Adgefrid. He's also an archaeologist specialising in early medieval Northumbria, so the absolute perfect person to tell us all about it. So welcome to gone medieval today, Chris. It's nice to be here. Thank you. I'm absolutely delighted to talk to you about this, and I am really gutted because I was invited to your grand opening of your whiskey

distillery and museum for a special tour, and I couldn't make it. But I'm absolutely hoping that you'll invite me back another time. Always welcome. You just have to come straight back. Fantastic. Well, it is happening. Now, I do want to just start by saying, like, this is not just a random job for you, really, as it. You have a very personal connection to this job and to this place. Is that right? Yeah, it is. I mean, both my family's saying up, but Yevring has always been close to my heart. As a small child, it was the site that got me interested in archaeology. I used to walk that field with my grandparents to try and understand what it was. And it's always been there. boo my entire career. I wanted to come back and tell

its story. I went off to study Anglo-Saxon archaeology and suddenly there's yevering at the heart of it because it's one of the most important sites and it's the first one you get taught about when you're looking at Anglo-Saxon settlements. So it's just always been right at the core of what I've wanted to do and where my life seems to have taken me. Fantastic. I had similar things with my Vikings and go to the museum as a child and they're coming back to it. So you've got the personal connection and the knowledge as well. It was there when I did my undergraduate degree.

I went off to a master's, did my PhD in early medieval Northumbia, and at every stage, Yevering was there. And I think to have the place where we can tell that story, to get people interested to understand how significant it is. It's kind of just really exciting. I feel like the luckiest man in the world that I get to do this as a job every day. Brilliant. Well, you're definitely one of the luckiest ones, I'm sure, in terms of being able to really follow those streams. So that's really exciting.

But also, we're going to get back to the whiskey part later on, which is really intriguing. You know, there's a really brilliant connection there and the fact that this is part of your family business, isn't it, as well? Yeah, it is. My family is from the area. I say I walked across those fields with my grandparents, but my family, not archaeologists. My family all worked in Hologen, had a site there. And that's the link to the story as to why we ended up building a museum and a whiskey distillery in the end. Can you first, I mean, you've already mentioned that yearring is a site that we, as archaeologists, certainly familiar with if we're studying this period. But it might not be so familiar to our listeners. What's so special about it? And why is it so important? I think this is the thing that's so fascinating about it. Yefring is the best understood, the most excavated of all the royal palaces of the kingdoms of Anglosax and England

and the early medieval British Isles as a whole. And yet because it's a timber world, it's a world where things are ephemeral, things don't last very long. The remains of the site are all crop marks and timber and things. So there's very little to tangibly see. So the site is a set piece of 1950s, 1960s archaeology, but it's never had its big moment in the sun since then. So it was found only 10 years after Sutton Hill. It's from exactly the same period of time, but it never got its big gallery in the British Museum. It never got its moment when actually it's just as important, if not more so, for our understanding of that period. Yeah, brilliant. And we actually do know quite a lot about it, despite it not having all those really clear physical remains in terms of stone buildings

or anything like that, there is a lot of knowledge and understanding, which I think is quite neat. I'm going to press you a bit more on that in a moment as well. And was this at the time, so it's sort of seventh century it starts. Is that the earliest use of it? So Yevering is built at the foot of the largest of the Iron Age hill forts in the north of England on the Evering Bell. And the palace site really seems to develop from sometime in the mid-sixth century, around the 550s. We're not quite sure when exactly the start is. And it goes through for about a century, a century and a half until it's abandoned at the other end. Tell me about the landscape. Where is it? Is it a little bit inland? Is it near a river? What's the landscape context? So it's at the foot of the Cheviets, the Cheviot Hills, the top end of the Pennine is running right the way up and down Northern England.

and it's also at the edge of a glacial lake basin, millfield basin, and the river Glen that runs past Yevring connects to the River Tille, then onwards to the Tweed. So you're right at a connection point between big navigable rivers, hugely productive agricultural landscapes and upland hills. So it's in a really prominent and dramatic point in the landscape that people can navigate it towards really easily. So it might have been a sight of quite a lot of traffic, I suppose, people moving through it, moving past it. Through, past, it's a place of massive connections to it because Yevering Bell, Cheviot is behind it, which is the highest of all of the hills in this area, so it's got a really significant navigation point above it. Yevering Bell,

the hill fort itself, the stone of the local area survived. The hill fort ramparts were still there and they were slightly pink in colour. The local granite is a pink granite. There's lots of queues that make it a place to navigate to and from and through. And we tend to sometimes forget because we look at our current geography and current towns and cities, but actually we need to go and look at what was important as a transport link. So this is a really key example, isn't it? The landscape of this area, if people don't know where we are, we are in very north of Northumberland, it's on the modern borders between England and Scotland.

Obviously, those kingdoms are much later. The borderlands are much later. What you're dealing with is the heart of a kingdom in an area that's massively agriculturally, with huge expanses around the Tweed. The Tweed is one of the best agricultural landscapes in Britain for producing crops, for producing barley, rye, oats, and for feeding your cattle, which is what everybody's making their money from in this period. So you've got all of that going on, as well as being able to move really quickly by ship. So tell me a little bit about the site then and the excavations, how it was discovered and what did they actually find when it was first dug up?

It is a masterpiece of early archaeology. This is why as archaeologists, people talk about it a lot. So as said, Sutton Hughes discovered just before World War II, 1939, Yeverings discovered just the other side of the war because you've got this massive development in aerial photography and people flying over the landscape photographing it. That's happened by one of the pioneers, Kenneth St. Joseph, who was flying all over the British Isles. He photographed the site, wasn't quite sure what it was,

showed it to a colleague in Cambridge, Brian Hope Taylor. And he looked at it and thought, that looks like it could be a potential Anglo-Saxon site. We'd never really had Anglo-Saxon palace as excavated at this point. No one knew what they were looking for, but he knew from Beads' ecclesiastical history that Yevering was one of the main palace complexes of the kings of Northumbria and that this was a potential site for that.

So he came here in the early 1950s. There was risk as there are of all these things, it was going to be lost to gravel quarrying. And he came here and found that there was bits of Anglo-Saxon building hanging out the edge of the gravel. quarry and from there started 10 years of excavation. And then what did they find then? How did they realize that this was a palace site? Brian Hope Taylor pioneered big open area excavation. So he'd looked in the continent. It was very different style of excavating that was happening in the European

continent to what was happening in the British Isles in that period. And they did big open area excavations looking at the crop marks that had turned up in the aerial photos. And those excavations, what we found was a series of great halls built on top of each other. There were a four or five built in sequence adjacent to a royal residence and a grandstand, which is unique in early medieval Europe, a large enclosure, potentially for cattle, and a whole series of ancillary buildings. And the whole complex is very deliberately aligned and laid out. And it's not just the usual archaeologist saying there's some ritual here. This is an incredibly deliberately planned royal township.

It's all about assembly, bringing people together, all of the things you need to operate the kingdom, the royal court is seen in the layout of the buildings and what could be understood from that. I'd say this was the first palace site to ever be looked at. So there was a lot of looking back at the literature, looking at Beowulf, looking at Beowd, looking understanding how royal halls were used

and actually Yevering proved that a lot of the poetic descriptions in Beowulf actually fit the archaeology. The literature is born out in what we see in the ground. So I love this that you've got the archaeology and the written records at the same time. But in this case, then, when we've got some names and people, can you go and do a little bit more detail about what those records actually say? I mean, who are these people that we're talking about? What do we know about them? So what we've got, and we're very lucky in, is that Bede is two generations after the people we're talking about here. He writes his ecclesiastical history. He's living in Weymouth and Jaro, monasteries in Northumbria

and he's writing about everything that's happened in the periods the hundreds of years that have come before him and he's drawing on all his sources but obviously he knows the Northumbrian story

more than any other because that's where he is and so we know from him that it's likely King Radwell that's in the Sutton Hugh ship burial and that King Edwin who rebuilds at Geffert

when he comes back had been in exile in Radwild's court so King Edwin had seen everything at Suton Hu probably and he's come back to the northeast.

And from that, we know that his wife, Ethelbur, brought Paul Linus with her. So she's sort of prompted the conversions. Paul Linus had been in Augustan's mission, had followed on from that. It's the first conversions to Christiania and Northumbia happened here. We also know Oswald had been in exile in Iona and he's come back and retaking the kingdom. We know about his brother Oswee, who succeeds him. We know about his sister Eber. All of these people, all of this color, come from Bede.

And so suddenly, you're not just looking at archaeological sites. You're looking at the peoples who built them, the peoples who inhabited them, the stories that come from them. And that makes it really special compared to 150 years later or 100 years earlier. That's so exciting. It's really, really quite unique. And how can you be confident that it's definitely this site? I'm just sort of playing devil's advocates here. Well, the description that Bede has for Ad Geffron, the ad is the Latin that Bede has added on. And the Yeffron is the Hill of the Goats.

See, old English word, it's actually an old Celtic word. word that becomes an old English word, Yefran. And that's what then moves on, the linguistics leads to modern Yevering. And all of this was tied together by Brian Hope Taylor when he first noticed the site because he went, well, hang on Yevring, at Geffron, we've got a royal palace. And that's part of also Brian Hope Taylor's sort of masterpiece in this is knitting the story together, looking at the source material from the historical side, looking at the archaeology and bringing it together. And that's interpretation, on the whole, still stands up today. Which is pretty good. I think that's quite exciting. But let's

Talk placing this site within Northumbria and what's going on around it. Because there are some other sites that people might be even more familiar with, places like Lindisfarne and Bamborough that are really quite close, aren't they? What else is happening in Northumbria at the time? Are they contemporary? How does it relate to those sides? What can you tell us about that? The kingdom of Northumbia as a whole comes into being in the time of King Edwin.

It's two earlier kingdoms that people probably have heard less of, Benissia and Deira. So Benissia is the area roughly of, County Durham, Northumberland, the Scottish border. So that northern bit of the British Isles there, and Deira is Yorkshire and the area north of the Humber to the south. And Ad Geffron is one of a number of sites at the heart of the Benissian bit of Northumbria. So it's probably a summer palace.

They're here three months out of the year. It's only 10 miles from Bambra on the coast. And Bambra overlooks the Holy Island of Lindisfarm. Other sites people will have heard about Weymouth and Jarrow, monasteries that are further down the coast, the mouths of the Tyne and the River Weir, and further south to Whitby, Hartlepool, York. Yevering is one of what we think or are known of for Anglo-Saxon palaces. So Yevering, Bamber, York and Catterick are all mentioned by Bede as places that the Royal Court is going to.

So we think they're moving around. Early kingship is that fantastic, complicated word, peripatetic. It moves, the court moves, it consumes enormous quantities of food and supplies. And so it can't stay in one place too long because otherwise it's like a plague of locust and everybody's been eating at our house and home. So it moves from Yevering to Bamber to York to Catterick, both the consumption of supplies, but also to dispense justice, do all the things that the royal court needs to do to operate the kingdom. So this is one of four sites we know of that do that. Why were medieval priests so worried that women were going to seduce men with fish that they'd kept in their pants?

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As promised, there will be sex. Anne has said that Henry is not skillful in copulating with a woman and has neither vigour nor potency. Anne Scandal. Everybody just descends onto this crime scene and it's being pulled apart by members of the public sort of as quickly as they can excavate the bodies and moments which shaped society.

Pointy boobs then became a thing and was still a thing into the 1950s. What more could you possibly want? Listen to betwixt the sheets today wherever it is that you get your podcasts. A podcast by History Hit. You talked a little bit about, there's a link to Christianity and things there.

Is religion important here? here? Is it a religious site as well? Or how does that fit in? Yeah, it is actually. It's a really interesting site from a religious perspective. So at the start of this, we have evidence for possibly one of the only pagan temples to have been discovered in the British Isles. So there's a timber structure that's surrounded by some burials, but it's got a palisaded wall, which has been interpreted by a number of academics, as a possible pagan temple. That sends supplanted, and we again, we get told in Bede that the temples are destroyed. and Christian churches are set up.

This is where Paulinus, who has been as part of the missions into Kent, has come up with Green Ethelbur, who's married King Edwin. She is a Kentish princess, daughter of Frankish princess. So they are bringing continental traditions, Roman traditions of Christianity with them.

So Paulinus arrives at Yevring. We have this place of assembly. We have a grandstand. It's amphitheater where you can get 350 people in. They assemble the people. They have this debate in court. and B. tells us that Paulinus spends 36 days baptising and catechising people in the River Glen. And this is the sights of the first conversions to Christianity in the Anglo-Saxon period in Northumbia.

But Edwin is defeated by the pagan King of Mercia, Pender and Cadwallon of Wales. He's killed. Ethelbyr and Paulinus flee. Oswald's older brother comes back and takes the throne and he's pagan and the whole place reverts to pagan tradition. and Christianity only returns with Oswald and a more Irish tradition from Iona, which many people have heard about, that sort of more Western Celtic tradition of Christianity, which is what leads to the foundations of the coastal monasteries like Linda Sfar and Jaro and Weymouth. Fantastic. I mean, that's really quite amazing, both that we have that story and the sight of it as well, which I think is very exciting. So any artifacts or objects linked to any of this?

So one of the things that happens in practice that was discovered around the site at Yevring is this tradition of burying cattle skulls. So obviously cattle is your wealth in this period. And they're burying a lot of cattle skulls at the thresholds of buildings. So a lot of the buildings have those at the threshold. We know that they're doing that practice, but we don't know quite why. With the potential pagan temple, we have no artifacts that go with that that would say, right, okay, this is figures of Woden or Thor. We don't have a direct connection to any of the Germanic gods, but what we do know is that they are worshipping those gods. That is a practice that's there and that perhaps this is a structure that has emerged right at that last point before conversion

to Christianity that suddenly there's this feeling to build a building to do something with your pagan traditions in response to Christianity somewhere else. It's an interesting point, isn't it, where people are dealing with a lot of things and a lot of changes in society and beliefs and it's absolutely intriguing. It's constant flux. The thing with Yevering as well, like we said before, it's a place of transport connection movement. What you then also have is because you've got these widely connected individuals in the Royal Court, you've got people coming from vast distances to Yevering. So somewhere which now might seem like slightly isolated, upland hills, in Northumberland, beautiful, quiet, idyllic place to go. In 600s, is actually at the crossroads on the center

of cultural exchange and meeting and creativity. And that's what lives. leads you on to Linderfarn and the cultural outputs of the Golden Age in Northumbia. It's such an important point. And what about burials? Are there any burials there at all? If you've got all of this, do you have cemeteries as well? We do have cemeteries on the site, but they're not particularly furnished burial. There's one particular burial that was found at the site, which is really exciting.

So the site, as I said, was deliberately aligned. So in a line, you have the Great Hall, the place of assembly, where everybody comes together. And then immediately to the west of that, you have an enclosed fence area and then you have the royal residence. So the royal bed chamber, a more intimate space to be invited into. And then to the west of that, you have this completely unique grandstand, this place where everybody comes together. Between the residents and the grandstand, what Brian Holt Taylor found was the burial of a male skeleton with a staff. And that staff had at the top, it was a whole series of brass rings on a wooden pole and a small, animal shape, potentially a goat at the top. And this is again where the historical sources and

the archaeology align beautifully. In Bede, we are told that King Edwin is always preceded by his standard bearer. And what Hope Taylor interpreted this as is, well, here we have right at the center of the site, the standard buried with the standard bearer. Amazing. Yeah, you have this incredible connection of the sources, the finds, the story and something that shows you the high status and deliberate laying out of a royal palace. That's incredible. It's so exciting. But you said it lasted for a little bit over 100 years or so. Do we know what happened to it at the end?

How did the site fall into disuse? Do we know that? In the historical sources, we know that King Edwin and King Oswald are both defeated by Pender of Mercia, and they're both killed. Your life expectancy is an early medieval king. It's short. and Oswey, who is Oswald's brother, defeats Pender. And he then goes on to be Brett Welder,

Ovald, Ovald, Ovald King, of the Anglo-Saxon Caneons. And Hope Taylor tied those periods of battle and defeat with the Mercians, with the Welsh, two periods of burning that he saw across the site. So what the archaeological evidence shows us are two to three distinct episodes of burning and destruction. The site is burnt down, the site is clear, the site is rebuilt.

Its last phase, the end of the site, is one of the archaeological questions that needs to be fully resolved. We know that the site ends, sometime in the reign of Oswe we think, and that it goes a couple of miles north to a place called Mailman, Modern Millfield, which is another Anglo-Saxon-Palestite that's been noted by aerial photography, but has never been excavated. So the end date of the site is something to still be understood, really. Fantastic. There's so much potential of rights I'm coming up. Brilliant. But let's go on to the museum now and I wanted to quiz you a little bit about this, because you've made it quite clear that this isn't a sort of site where you have lots of words, lots of things that people can go and see in the field, but we have this remarkable big story. How then do you go about trying to tell this story and try to engage people and get them interested in it?

Obviously, when you're telling it, it is fantastic, but to get people in and do it sort of more visually. How did you go about that challenge? When you go to modern Yevry, you go to the palace site, it's a field, a beautiful field, surrounded by beautiful hills. It's very difficult to picture a Royal Court, a Great Hall, any of those structures there. And it's very difficult to do anything on that site interpretation-wise that doesn't then spoil the experience, spoil the sense of place or affect the archaeology. So we built the museum three miles away in Woolle with a view that we would firstly immerse, you create the sense of the people of the court, of those characters who were there, so everybody from Edwin to Ethelbert to Bolinus to Oswald, could see and feel and hear their stories and experience what a great hall may have been like

and then show a whole series of artefacts that allow you to delve deep then into the archaeology. But for first, encounters with it, to just kind of feel what the 7th century looks like. One of the challenges with it is it's not Yorvik or something like that. So it's not a trading place. It's not a creative place. It's a high status site. it's a royal court. So you've also going to go through all of the challenges for people of what that looks like. It's not people's first perceptions of like films and TV have of like wearing fur skins and it's all a bit dark and broodied. So it's big, it's huge and it's colorful and it's covered in tapestries, embroideries and hangings and high status furniture. You've got to

get that across. That was the challenge that we had. Yeah, because it is, especially in that period where people don't really know that much about it at all. And we don't have these sites we can go to. You might have some early Saxon churches maybe, but it's not that colour, that experience, absolutely something you really don't get. And I suppose some of these events and feasts and things would have been such a big part of going there where they would have really laid on everything. So is that the sort of thing that you're trying to get people to get the sense of? Yeah, it is. Absolutely. In that sense that the court moves around from place to place. So when the court is in residence, which it is in our museum, the walls are hung with tapestries,

the tables are set with cups because you're invited to join the feast. You're invited to come into the space. And we've recreated the great hall of King Edward. So we have the right width, but we've created the length by the miracle of modern technology. So we have created the full extent of the hall that's populated by the characters at the time. And they come forward and they tell you their story. And they're all interconnected by our bard. And she is a woman. She plays the liar. She tells you the stories. Because one of the main things we're keen on telling is the story of women, the story of the unsung, the stories of the others. It's not just kings and battles. This is a royal court that only functions because of the powerful women who are in that space.

And tell me about some of the objects and artifacts that you've got on display. What can people see? Obviously, we have the material from the excavations of Brian Hope Taylor. and more recent excavations in the last few years by Durham University. But we've also assembled material on loan from the British Museum, Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust, the Society of Antigrees of Newcastle. So you'll see things like the Castle Even Clairbeker, which is from County Durham, part of early medieval Northumbia. It's an amazing intact claw beaker that was made somewhere around 500 to 550 in the Rhineland,

exported to Northumbria and buried in a high-status burial. It hasn't been on display in the northeast for 40 plus years. Ares, alongside other things, Northumbia materials that were in the British Museum collections, as well as high-status material from across country, hence Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Bidford Shield, which is a masterpiece of Shield technology, second only to the Great Shield from the Sutton New Ship Burial, to give you a sense of the things that would have been used in a Royal Court. Fantastic. And it's great to bring, as you say, these things that were from Northumbria originally and actually bring them back into their local context. It's always just a really,

really nice thing to see. We are in an area where a lot of people can't get down to London to see these things. And so it's bringing the material to a place where people can see that and experience the story, see the artefacts in the region they were from and then go out into the landscape to see where they would have been 1400 years ago. That local connection is good and it's really important. These are the same people who have lived in the experience the same land as these people did just a bit more than a thousand years earlier, which is a really nice thing to do. Now, the thing we haven't touched on yet, which we do have to get to right at the end, is the whiskey element to all of this. So explain a little bit about the link between the whiskey distillery and the museum.

What's the connection? Why are they in the same place? Well, they're in the same place. Partly, it's a new model of cultural attraction so that we can make it financially sustainable. But also, when you buy a bottle of our spirits, the story of Anglosax and Northumbia is there with you on the bottle. So we're getting a whole different group of people to understand and support our story of the Anglo-Saxon period. And then it gives you different things to come and experience on the site. So you get to go around an amazing museum and Great Hall experience and then go on a whiskey distillery to it.

And so at the end, there's breadth of things for everybody to enjoy on a day out. I love that. But just to sort of said there were just for our listeners, the whiskey isn't Anglo-Saxon. The Anglo-Saxons weren't drinking whiskey, were they? They weren't making whiskey. No, whiskey comes later. In the Great Hall, in the 7th century, they're drinking beer and mead.

But the connections for us with it is we're exploring using heritage strains of grain, heritage barlies in our whiskey making, and also all of our barley that goes into the whiskey is from within 20 miles. So it's grown on fields where they were grown barley 1400 years ago. And we'll also possibly be making a rye whiskey again, because rye is massively grown in that period. So we're always connecting the stories back together. But no, they weren't drinking whiskey in the 7th century. century sadly. As far as we know, yeah, totally. But I do think this is a really important

point, actually, and it's a really nice to see that. And I think we're starting to see the same sort of thing happening elsewhere as well, trying to work at how to make history and artefacts archaeology sites sustainable, because funding is a huge issue. And we've got these wonderful sites. You know, this story hasn't been told before. So I know in your sort of press material is that the untold story, but it's true because it is there, but there's no funding to do that and the sort of things that you're talking about with the virtual experience is not cheap. That needs to be funded, first of all, and then it's been sustainable for the future as well. So I'm really delighted to see that. I mean, is this something that you know of lots of

other examples about as well, or are you quite unique in doing this? I think we are unique in tying a distillery together with this sort of museum experience. I think it's something that will be explored by people a lot more in the future because that sustainability model financially, we're very conscious of our environmental sustainability as well. Do a lot of heat recapture because we have to care about the world we live in and you have to do these things properly and that's the guiding ethos that we've had behind all of this is if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right. These stories are worth telling properly and doing so in a way that it's there for

the long term for people because the worst thing that happens with all this is there's all of that sort of initial funding. You get a museum open and then there's no money to make it work. funding is increasingly harder to come by, so to do something that's self-sustaining, and people can opt into supporting through buying the products that then go into charitable thoughts that we fund on into other activities. It's just a different model that we think and we hope will work. Come back and ask me in 10 years' time and we'll check, but it should work.

It seems to me like this may act as a bit of a catalyst for increasing and engagement with the history of the site and the period, but also in terms of. of the academic research and just getting people to sort of as a reminder almost that what's there and what we haven't got yet. Do you think that's going to happen as well? Is this going to help, do you think? I really hope so. I mean, this is the thing that we want from there. It's a catalyst to bring people into the area. It's catalyst for people to look at it, to understand the amazing archaeology we have in North North North London. It's an incredibly rich archaeological landscape. And despite being so well excavated and understood in one sense, so not understood and so much more work to be done.

So academically, archaeologically, there's immense amount of research that hopefully we can act as a catalyst, as you say, to get going, but also just to get the wider public interested and to get education programs and things going around this site and to act as the place where you can experience the Royal Court in life. There's a counterpoint to Sutton Hill where you can experience it effectively in death and you can see the wonderful objects there and in British Museum, we're sort of the living response to that. Fantastic. Absolutely love that. If people then want to come and visit you, how do they find out more?

Where does they go? Have you got things that can look at online and to plan their visits? Yeah. If you want to plan your visit and come see everything. You go to our website, which is ad geoffron.com. A-D-G-E-F-R-I-N. On there, all our tickets, all your plan your visits and everything. We're also on all your favourite social media channels. So you can get in touch with this that way as well. Fantastic. Well, I do hope that people will take this opportunity.

to do something which is not just sounding like an absolutely great experience, but actually doing something really good, both of the history for heritage and for the community as well. So well done, and congratulations on the opening. Thank you. I look forward to welcoming you when you can come up. Soon, soon. Right, booking my train ticket. Brilliant. Chris, thank you so, so much for coming and sharing your expertise with us today.

Thanks, Kat. So that brings us to the end of this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter. just look in the episode notes for how to get more medieval info straight in your inbox every Monday. Do join us for the next episode with my co-host Matt Lewis and then I'll be back again in a week's time. In the meantime, do leave us a review or a rating wherever you found this podcast, including on Apple or Amazon or Spotify, wherever it was, because it really helps other people find us.

Thank you so much for listening and I hope you join me again soon.