Gone Medieval - Life on the Medieval Coast

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

The popular BBC television series Villages by the Sea explores coastal life through the centuries. Its presenter Ben Robinson is an archaeologist with the fantastic job of exploring lost villages and uncovering their secrets, including those that give an insight into medieval life on the coasts of Britain. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis is joined by Ben to talk about some of the series’ - and Britain’s - medieval highlights.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. 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. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Villages by the sea returns to the BBC for a fourth series. It explores coastal life through the centuries and at several points offers us an insight into medieval life on the coasts of Britain. Ben Robinson is an archaeologist with the fantastic job of exploring these villages and uncovering their secrets for us. And Ben's joining us today to talk about some of the medieval highlights from series four. Welcome to Go Medieval, Ben. Hi there, Matt. It's great to be talking to you. It's fantastic to have you here. I've managed to enjoy all of the series, I think, and I think there's lots there for people to look

forward to. Quite a lot of it is post-medieval, I guess, but there are some medieval gems in there that I think are really worth talking about. Yeah, the medieval figures quite heavily across all four series, because it's a very formative period. You know that. So many things were developed, formed, turned into something else during that period. And that's what's fascinating. And it's often hidden, isn't it? In plain sight, we've inherited these places, these structures that belong to those times. But unless you search for it, you're not going to find it.

I do always try and say that everything in the world really is medieval. And I always end every episode by saying it's the greatest millennium in human history so far. You can't argue too much with that, can you? No, it's just facts. We tend to think of the seaside today mostly as a holiday destination. still live there, but for a lot of us, it's where we might go on holiday or for a day out. What was the big lure of the sea to medieval communities, do you think? Yeah, it's funny that, isn't it? We think of seaside places as peripheral, as out of the way,

somewhere where you journey to and you've arrived at your destination. But, of course, these were places that people journeyed to and from. They were the places that connected us to in those days, mostly Europe of course, northwest Europe in particular. And they were the routes both up and down the coast, so places could connect with each other down our own coastline, but also right across the sea. And this was at a time, as we know, when travelled by roads was often quite difficult.

And certainly if you were trying to trade in bulk goods at all, then getting them on a big boat and floating them down a river estuary, down the coastline, or out across the sea, was the way to go. You could reduce your costs, you could ship more quickly, more reliably in many ways. And obviously, as ship technology got better and better throughout the medieval period, these places grew to prominence. But obviously fishing is important as well.

That's always been important, very important to the medieval diet if you could get hold of it. Salt fish, fresh fish, extremely important. But it's amazing how low-key fishing seems to be. in much of the medieval period. It just seems to be an everyday activity that's barely mentioned in documents often. And maybe it's not until the later medieval period and into the 16th, 17th century. When landlords start building harbour infrastructure, the Lord of the Manor might invest in a pier or a breakwater, suddenly you've got a protected little harbour. Suddenly you can protect a little fishing fleet rather than just hauling up a few boats onto a beach or a little cove and it seems to

take off late in the medieval period that sort of industrialisation of fishing but salt production as well so so important again something that we don't think about today no refrigeration of course if you want to transport goods if you want to preserve them salt is the way to go where do you get salt at the sea so salt pans salt houses this was very often an occupation that drew people to the coast. But even surprising how many villages, how many seaside villages, little ports we see today, weren't there in that form in the medieval period.

There were little hamlets, little fishing hamlets, that then grew into something bigger. It sounds like coastal life fits so many of the requirements of medieval life. You've got a food supply, you've got industrial supply, you've got transport links. It kind of seems like almost the obvious place for everybody to have lived in the medieval period. doesn't it? And we're an island nation, of course, so you're never too far from the sea.

But it is surprising that if you say look at parishes and where parish churches are, very often some of these seaside settlements, they weren't individual parishes. They were part of a larger parish that extended inland. And the churches in land as well, which implies that most of the population were actually living inland and only going to the coast for certain activities. That's not true in all cases because even as far back as late 7th, 8th century, you've got ports developing proper trading ports, Yipperswit, Ipswich, Hamwitt, Southampton. One of the places that you visit in this series is beer. And beer is just down the coast right next door to Seton, I think,

and I am emotionally scarred by a visit to Seton at which a Siegel stole estate and kidney pie that I got from the chip shop. I've never quite got over that experience. So beer, you talk about it in the programme. applied stone, a very particular kind of stone for all kinds of projects. Why was the stone at beer so special and so sought after? This goes way back, we're going way back into the midst of time. I always find these geological epochs and eras just mind-blowing. It's a bit like space, really. Someone starts talking about space. It's just too enormous, but between 65 and 140 million

years ago, that area was part of a shallow, warm sea. And this laid down lots of dead sea creatures with the calcareous shells. So you've got sea urchids and all of that kind of stuff. And then what happened in this particular case was that the sea currents sifted this. So you've got a very fine sediment, a very fine sediment in which all the chunky fossils had been sifted out. So bits of sea urchin spine, stuff like that might be in it, but the great chunky ammonites and bellum nights and things like that were not in it. And that got compressed over time as these things do and created this incredible seam of limestone, chalky limestone, which is very fine-grained. Unlike other limestones, it hasn't got these great chunky fossils in it. And it's not bedded, strictly bedded in a sort of

sediments, layers of sediment. So it's what we call a freestone. And that means you can cut it in any direction. You don't have to cut it along the bedding. And it's waterlogged as well. It lies in the seam 20, 30 feet thick. And it's very wet, very damp. So it's very easy to cut in all directions, very malleable when it's first quarried. And then it hardens really well to people say five or six times its strength it gets when it hardens. It's a pretty perfect stone really for fine carving. And that was recognised way back in the Roman period. The Romans used it for various things, coffins, bits of masonry structure, architectural detail, that sort of thing. And into the medieval period, although it had been used pre-conquest, it's after the Norman conquest,

this massive campaign of stone church building and cathedral building, that this particular stone becomes highly prized. And it ends up being used in 20-odd of the 40-odd British cathedrals. It's that good. It ranks alongside things like can stone in France as an excellent building stone. Yeah, and I think you mentioned the programme that it's used in Westminster Abbey and it's even used in the White Tower at the Tower of London. So this is proper high status. As you say, this is the Normans kind of building the Norman conquest into permanence with this perfect coastal stone from far away Devon, the Normans were obviously aware that there was this great depository of stuff. Absolutely. So it's used in Exeter, Winchester, St Paul's, Westminster, Tower of London,

as you said, Windsor Castle. It's used all over, but also in hundreds of parish churches around that area as well. This is a really interesting thing about the use of materials in this country. There was stone building before. Stone building goes right back to prehistory, as we know. And the Anglo-Saxons had the occasional stone church and abbey and that kind of thing. But predominantly they liked building in timber. The Normans come along, create this tradition here of building and rebuilding Anglo-Saxon churches, monasteries, in a huge, much more emphatic style. And that required vast quantities of building material.

And also their castles as well, obviously. There had been timber castles, Motten Bailey castles, which they replaced in stone when they had the ability. And you think about this for a minute, the things that have survived to our present day, obviously the notable castles, obviously the cathedrals,

but also a few townhouses up and down the country, built in stone. There's a couple in Lincoln, remains of some in Norwich. Absolutely incredible. The sort of permanence of what they were trying to achieve and what they did achieve. achieve is extraordinary. And it's confidence, isn't it? It's being in a place that's booming

economically, you're in total control of it, and to say, we're going to rebuild this cathedral. It's not quite just the case of so. Just say it and do it. But they're in such control, and they're able to galvanise and create these massive buildings that survive to the present day. I say sometimes, you know, we fall into this trap of sometimes thinking medieval people were stupid and we're somehow cleverer, but then you look at this understanding that they had of the world around them, how to use it and how to apply it and the technologies that they could bring to effect. And they knew that this stone, we might be able to explain it with science now, but they knew that it could be cut in any direction and that it was perfect for that fine work and then

it hardened perfectly. They knew that as well as we do. Yeah, and to create a structure that relied on these properties or architectural detail that relied on these properties requires a huge understanding of the properties of the stone but also physics maths principles of architecture and maybe not much has been written down and handed to us about how they actually went about doing it but it's there for us to see and the success of it is there for us to see and it is quite extraordinary these are statements in the landscape apart from anything else and a Of course, they're doing this post-conquest the next two or three hundred years. It's a massive building boom.

Every parish church in the country gets rebuilt in stone, castles, cathedralss, as we've mentioned. Even private dwellings and manor houses rebuilt in stone. This created a massive boom and an energy. And just the whole country must have looked like a building site after the Normans had got hold of it. And also the Normans could deliver a building project in a way that we can't anymore. Yeah, we won't talk about major infrastructure projects and how you do it. But of course, they had total authority, slaves, and not very well paid people to do all the heavy lifting. I wouldn't advocate managing building projects perhaps in the Norman style, as they did back then.

If we leave beer behind then, one of the other places you visit is Hocom, which seems like a fascinating place. But I got really excited because you got to see the geophysics of buildings that had been lost. during the medieval period and hadn't been seen for hundreds of years and you got to spot these things on the geophers. How cool was that? Oh, it's fantastically cool. Geophysics has been around for decades in archaeology, post-war technique and much like a lot of techniques in archaeology, it's borrowed from other disciplines. People who were prospecting for minerals developed all this wonderful remote sensing technology, geophysical survey and we adapt it and borrow it in archaeology and some very clever people

early on. We're doing things like Earth resistance survey, but this is magnetometry. So you're looking at minute changes in the magnetic flux of the earth caused by features that people have created in the past. Dug a ditch, built a wall, you're altering the natural magnetic patterns in the earth, and that can be detected by very sensitive machinery. And it used to be a sort of massive deal and very complicated to do. But now you can trot along with what looks. like a big H frame and literally walk up and down a field and the results could be processed almost instantaneously and you can get almost within seconds of doing the survey there is a picture of what's underneath the ground not necessarily everything but often enough to give you a hint of something

which you just hadn't expected to see or for which there is absolutely no trace on the surface And it's a really good example, I guess, of things like, you know, documentation working together with physical archaeology because we know there was a village there somewhere. And what the documents and the Giofiz can do is come together to narrow it down, narrow it down, narrow it down, and now you found it. Yeah, and this is the thing. You're quite right. Going back, the Doomsday survey talks about Holcomb and settlement there. And it's actually quite a big settlement. There's 70 households. So that puts it in the upper tier of places at the time of Doomsday, top 20%.

So it's a big place, or is it one place? Because what Doomsday doesn't tell you is how these households were distributed over a patch of land. Doomsday is a summary of what occurs in administrative areas of land. It's not a survey of villages. People often get confused about that. Was it one village or was it a series of settlements all with that name in that particular area? And the other piece of documentation is really crucial. So we know it was there since Doomsday.

Quite an important settlement near the coast. And the coast was a bit closer than it is today. Those marshes were effectively the seashore. So it was sitting there. We've got a very good map of 1590 that belongs to the estate there. And it was thrilling to see that because it basically shows a medieval form of settlement, one large settlement, just north of where the hall is now in its grounds. And that's thrilling.

You can see streets, individual building. what looked like manor houses, and that ties in with the documents that you can see at the time. But there's also other bits of settlement scattered around as well. And of course, maps are only a snapshot of time. That's maybe how it looked at the tail end of the 16th century. Maybe it looked like that 100 years earlier. Maybe it didn't. Maybe that map was drawn by someone who was trying to convey something particular.

Maps don't always tell the absolute truth of what's on the ground. it was a good start that there was something there. And then we've got the church which sits on this enigmatic little mound. There's fabric in it dating to the 13th century, probably much older, much restored now. But it's away from where this village is on the map of 1590. And then we've got a mysterious route way. The old Coast Road didn't go where it goes now. It went through what became Holcomb Park.

So you've got all these mysteries. Rumours of fines being made when the grounds are worked, when the lake was dug, all that kind of stuff. But what is actually there? As a kid, I used to visit Holcomb Park and latterly looked at humps and bumps there in the pasture that the deer were walking over and thinking, what lies beneath this parkland? And this was a chance to find out. And we got it. We pinpointed structures, buildings, part of that lost settlement of Holcomb.

Do we know what caused that settlement to become lost? I think we often think of medieval villages that disappear, being perhaps a result of the black death, wiping out a population or something like that. Do we know what happened at Holken? Villages have shifted around, been re-planned, just gradually drifted away from their church or towards a main road for hundreds and hundreds of years. Again, it's a mistake to think that they're static things, and they've always been like this since the dawn of time,

right from the start of the medieval period. No, centre shift, villages diminish, they expand, all that kind of stuff. But in cases like this, very often you get a landowner, starts buying up some of the manners, and here it was the Cook family. It's spelt like Coke, but it's pronounced Cook. That's a Norfolk thing. But they were there in the 17th century and started to buy plots of land. They began to put together an estate.

And by the beginning of the 18th century, they wanted, as was fashionable at the time, parkland around the great hall that they built there. And as was fashionable at the time, whereas it was tolerated in the past to have the humble dwellings of your village neighbours in your line of sight from the great house. And the manner was amongst the villagers very often. At the time you get to the 18th century, no, they don't want that. They want vistas that are perfect. and where all the views have been planned and sorted out,

everything is perfectly sculpted in the landscape. So a few sort of humble hovels and dilapidated farmsteads and so forth, not really what they want. So they go through a process of removing ancient villages. And this happens all over the country. And some landlords would replan those villages in a new model estate village style. Some wouldn't. Some would just say, that's it, you're out of here.

and it's extraordinary. What happened at Holcomb is pretty typical of what was happening all over the country at that period. An old village is swept away. Actually, they wanted to expand the ornamental lake in the landscape. This had been a little inlet, and they expanded it to an ornamental lake, and they dug away some of the village doing that.

But they replanned actually two new villages in the area. One, an old village called Stath is now the present Holcomb, and then there was new Holcomb that was planned at the south end of the hall grounds on the London approach road. It's always a complicated story villages. It's never straightforward. The present village of Holcomb that people go to today is one of several villages of Holcomb that there's been through time and all this needs unpicking. The other thing it brings home is these parklands are treasure troves of history and archaeology. If you create a parkland in the 16th, 17th, 18th century, you're fossilising a landscape in many ways.

It's not being plowed. It's not being built on. It's a great reserve that protects everything beneath the ground. It's got natural environment qualities as well, which are pretty unique. But there's hundreds of these all over the country that have really seldom been thoroughly explored. because as archaeologists we like to stumble across finds, you know, during development and all that kind of stuff, doesn't happen in parkland. And it's only with things like geophysical survey that you can start to get an impression of what lies beneath. Yeah, and I guess that's the power of the archaeology.

I know fairly recently Charles Spencer has been having a fair bit of archaeological work done at Orthoff Estate in the same situation. You know, it's land that hasn't been disturbed for hundreds of years. and it has taken a snapshot of all of these former lives that it had before the park was there. And as you say, they're almost perfectly preserved. I guess the medieval equivalent of the mosquito in the amber. You know, it's there as a snapshot in time perfectly preserved. And if you know how to go and find it, which people like you do know how to go and find it, it can tell us so much of the story of that land before what we see today is there.

Yeah. And just thrilling. We had Alan Archaeology, Rob came along with his geophysical equipment. You don't know what to expect. We're going to film it regardless because it's just fascinating to explore. We really didn't know that we would get such good and clear results. And sure enough, it's there. And there's more to be explored.

There's more to discover, I just know it. There's a bigger tale there. This whole thing about village history, I wrote a book recently. It's called England's Villages, an extraordinary journey through time. And I hadn't really thought about it in those. terms, but we're banding around titles. But every village has gone through an extraordinary journey. They all have tales to tell. We shouldn't take it for granted that it's a simple story. Someone creates a village and it goes on to thrive all these years later. And as we've discussed,

they shift, they move around, they're dynamic. They might get snuffed out by plague, by clearances, by landlords, but only to reappear in a different form. And it's absolutely fascinating. Village history is our history because that's how most people lived through much of the medieval period. The village and Hamlet, the farmstead, that was the standard unit of settlement. Towns were few and far between and they were more like the small towns that we have today, most of them. Village history is our history. The last episode that I really wanted to focus on and talk about is the one at Grey Abbey, which looked like a great place to explore medieval fishing, which we mentioned a little bit earlier,

quite often doesn't leave a story behind in the landscape and in the archaeology for us. So how are you able to spot, first off, I guess, where the coastline used to be at Grey Abbey, because it looks very different now to how it did in medieval times. How are you able to spot that in the landscape, you know, where the sea used to come to? Strangford Lock is absolutely extraordinary. It's an area of outstanding natural beauty. It's a massively striking place. And one of the things is when the tide goes out and extremely low tides, you just end up with this huge expanse of mud and sand.

And dedicated volunteers and archaeological researchers undertook this campaign, especially big one from 1995 onwards, to try and map the extraordinary archaeology, which had mushroomed up on occasion. They tried to do it systematically and achieved it with enormous success. hundreds of new archaeological sites were found. And they realised that the lock had been used as a resource way back into Mesolithic times when it was a bit drier, but there were shell middens and all that kind of stuff around the former shoreline. A Neolithic boat, a wooden boat, the remains of that were found out there. Fish traps dating back to the 7th, 8th century, I think were also found wooden ones.

But for me, some of the most extraordinary structures I've ever seen. It's just the enormity of them. You can't miss them. You asked me how I saw them. We've got this big archaeological survey. And Tom, who was very involved in that, led me out there. But you don't have to go too far before you see what look like massive dry stone walls or the remains or the foundations of them running off in all directions.

and from above or even on the ground, if you walk along them, you can see that they're different shapes. They're crescents. They look like giant tick marks that you get for a good piece of homework. Not that I ever got many of those, but I vaguely recognise a tick when I see it. V shapes. And they run for hundreds and hundreds of metres. These are massive.

And if you can imagine a wall construction where you've got the core of the wall, rubble but then faced exterior of the wall that's what these were these were like field walls or garden walls and they probably three or four feet high and the whole idea

was that as the tide went out the fish would get caught behind these walls they'd get funneled to the V point shape there and as the water went away they'd just be left there flapping in the mud and sand and you could just go along and pick up as many as you wanted

Of course, that happened twice a day. These were engines of fish production, really. Just extraordinary. Machines for catching fish is the way that Tom described them. And the scale is unbelievable. And even more unbelievable, when you realise they were created in the 12th and 13th century on that scale. Just mind-blowing.

Yes, again, so it was 700 and 800 years ago, you know, people were developing this effectively industrial. fish farming techniques and ways to make their lives easier as well, I guess. Do you want to spend hours and hours out on a boat fishing? Or do you just want the tide to leave you something you can wonder out and collect a couple of times a day? I mean, it's an incredible way to harness what is right on your doorstep, I guess. Yeah, and like I said, a long tradition of harnessing what the lock had to offer, that wonderful, extraordinary tidal lock what it had to offer.

but they're doing it on such a grand scale at that period. One thought is one of the markets was feeding marching armies. A lot of armies marching about massive campaigns throughout the medieval period. They needed feeding and saltfish was an important part of the diet. If you could supply, in any case, growing towns needed a huge market for this as well. So they'd spotted an opportunity there. Nature had created this wonderful resource. you just had to tap into it

and boy did they invest in that. Honestly I've never seen anything so widespread so extraordinary and you think of the effort. Small wooden fish traps are one thing as a lot of effort goes into building those, cutting the timber, designing it all but here

taking the stone out there constructing it just amazing so it was definitely worth it and definitely highly successful. It's great to see again see that on screen and be able to appreciate how that sits in the landscape and how it would have worked. I mean, the place is called Grey Abbey because there's a grey abbey there that you go and visit and explore a little bit too. So how important were the arrival of the Cistercian monks there

as kind of managers of the land and perhaps even driving some of this industrial scale fishing with their ability to organise things? Definitely driving it. They would pick up on ideas and things done by tradition over hundreds of years. The Cistercian's just incredible movement that was, not only in religious terms and the way it spread, but 80-odd Cistercian abbeys in England, definitely, I'd say the most successful order. And all was very industrious. Wherever they went, they had the idea of making the most of the land that they'd got. They were huge improvers, agricultural improvers. They would divert rivers. They would drain land. Rivo Abbey, splendid monastic site there. That's the poster child for ruined monasteries, isn't it?

it was all about sheep farming, but also lead and iron as well that they'd got. Just an incredibly industrious order. They knew how to look after themselves, and they knew how to tap into markets as well. And monastic communities, very often we think about quiet contemplation and prayer, and all of that went on. But they were big estates as well that they were managing. So they had to have a lot of know-how. They had to be able to support themselves and create a surplus.

for the building campaigns and everything else they wanted to do. And they were made up of really quite clever people. If you think of people that went into monastic orders, educated, skills, knowledge, it was all there. Yeah, at Grey Abbey, they were the catalyst for all this. They built those big fish traps. They also had great inland estates that they worked. They farmed very successfully. And they built a spectacular monastic complex there.

The church now in its sort of wooded setting is absolutely beautiful, spectacular set of well-preserved ruins there. And actually, certainly one of the first fully Gothic structures in Northern Ireland, where they go from the old Romanesque, the end of the 12th century. This is one of the first places where they go into pointy arches and the new style of architecture. So they're innovating, they're industrious, yeah, they're the catalyst for growth in so many areas. and they'd picked up on, again, clean running water, that's a big thing for monastic communities. There's a little stream there that runs down towards the lock. There was a little inlet like a mini estuary,

traces of which you can see on early maps, and you can see exactly why they placed their monastery, their abbey, where they placed it. They had all the best of the sea and the lock, all the best of the land, and clean running freshwater as well. Yeah. Hopefully my oldest daughters enjoyed this episode,

She always says monastic is her favorite word, so the more often we say monastic, the happier my daughter is. And I guess then the Cistercians, by organizing it and kind of industrializing it, become drivers for growth and expansion for somewhere like Grey Abbey, because you've then got produce that presumably you can send out to sell on, and that draws in more money and wealth, and maybe that's part of the reason why places like this endure and thrive so well. Yeah, absolutely.

Up and down, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, can see the same story. They come to a place and develop that place very often, serving as a catalyst for its growth. So somewhere that might have been quite out of the way, perhaps just a hamlet, they would create a market. There would need to be people that sort of serviced the various needs of the monastic community there. Perhaps they would get a charter for a market. Perhaps they would get the rights to have a little port or something like that. And that would just set a place off on a path to development over time. And so many of our villages and small towns we owe to some monastic, there we go again, monastic institution coming, a priory and abbey, whatever it is.

And really interesting to think about the vacuum that was left when those institutions were dissolved by Henry VIII. And when they were swept from the landscape, something had to come in and fill that vacuum. Yeah, absolutely. I was going to say the same thing, that, you know, having become these real hearts and cores of communities that thrived around them because they were there, if you suddenly pull that out, it's sort of uprooting the very roots of the village and the community around it, and that you say it must have left a real vacuum that people must have looked around and thought, well, what do we do now? And something had to be. be done to kind of fill those gaps in. Yeah and sometimes a landlord was a new lord of the manor,

someone who'd inherited or been given those monastic estates and the monastic complex itself, would just use it as a quarry, a building quarry and that happened a bit at Grey Abbey. But then eventually the place was replaned. Almost in a medieval style, this is absolutely fascinating that you see in Northern Ireland and in Scotland and in some parts of England as well, where an 18th and 19th century landlord would come along and plan a settlement, a wide main market street, burghage plots, as we'd call them in the medieval period. But they're doing it several hundred years

after the Normans did exactly the same thing. It's absolutely fascinating. And how important do you find in your tours around the villages by the sea? How important is archaeology in helping us to discover and understand the medieval past of these coastal places? Quite a lot of what you see is obviously above ground. but you're also picking out parts of the landscape and elements of building materials and things like that. How important was archaeology to being able to understand some of these places?

I think it's immensely important because the documents are only ever partial representations. Say Doomsday, this great survey or series of surveys, and we put a lot of faith in it, and if Doomsday says there was a church there, there was a church there. But if it's silent on the matter, it doesn't mean that there wasn't a church there. and very often you find that there is evidence for an earlier church, there is evidence for all sorts of things that Doomsday just skips over because it wasn't important for that particular purpose at that particular time to mention it. You always go with a sort of critical eye.

This is what the document says, and it says there was a village there, but was it one village or was it a series of Hamlets all under the same administration, doesn't say anything about how it was configured or construct, or shaped, all of that you get from the ground. All of that you get from, in a very simple terms, just using your own eyes. We've talked about parkland and how interesting that is. Countless examples, if you go into your nearest National Trust property, other properties are available, of course, but English heritage and your private owner ones as well, but you go into any great country house, spend some time walking around the park

noticing the ridge and furrow that will undoubtedly be there most parts of England and that will be evidence of the medieval open fields that existed before that park was laid out and those ripples those characteristic corrugated ripples will be seen in the grass

and then if you look a bit closer you will see hollows linear hollows that were the former roads and streets of a place that was there before the park lane. You can literally trip over this stuff. You don't need sort of special techniques or anything to investigate it. You've just got to go with your curiosity in your eyes and just think, why is that there? What's that little ripper? What's that hump and bump? Why does the road veer off and do this while that hollow carries on? It's just that sort of thing,

really. And then you can really start to understand a place and how it's developed over time, just from what you can see using a bit of imagination to think how things might have been. And I think therefore you get more out of a visit. You're seeing something additional. You're not just enjoying a cup of coffee and your cake and your ice cream or whatever it is, or your fish and chips. There's all those treats. But if you go to these places, seaside places, and have a look and just notice something

and start to ask questions about it, I think you appreciate that experience and visit all the. more. And if you understand what these places have been through over time, that extraordinary journey over time, again, you'll appreciate that place even more. That's what I hope anyway. There seems to be innumerable advantages to living by the coast in the medieval period. As we said at the beginning, why wasn't everybody living at the coast? Across the four series that you've done now, have you come across any drawbacks to living at the coast? Yeah, absolutely. The first thing is, it's great for trade.

and contact with our friends and neighbours across the sea when they're friends and neighbours. When they're not, you're the first line of either defence or you're in trouble because they're going to raid their coastal communities first. And obviously throughout history, those coastal communities have been very vulnerable to raids and attacks, people being carted off into slavery by foreign powers and all that kind of stuff. So coastal communities have suffered in that way. making a living from the sea is dangerous. It's still dangerous today, but in medieval times, you didn't have sat nerves, obviously, couldn't predict the weather, so simple fishing expeditions could turn out very bad, very quickly, quite lethal pursuits to be involved with. Trade,

cargoes of materials, same thing. You get it wrong, the weather goes wrong, you get the tides wrong, you hit a sandbank, whatever, that's it, you're in trouble. It wasn't all fun and games. It wasn't all the sort of delightful paradise that we like to think of some of these places as now. The other thing is that medieval people achieved an awful lot, constructed an awful lot of fantastic buildings, engineering prowess was there. But obviously they had very few mechanical aids and assistants. For example, if your harbour starts silting up and we've been to a number of places that were called by the sea, Cly next the sea, it's a mile and a half from the sea now. but it was closer to the sea, but the harbour silted up. There was a great haven there,

Blakeney Haven, really notable harbour on the east coast trading with north-west Europe. But over time, silted up and land reclamation didn't help, and it just snuffed it out as a port. There was a really significant port in late medieval times, could no longer function as a port, almost overnight. There's not much they could do about that. And something similar happened at Orford, where the Orford nest, the Great Shingle Spit, another one of our programmes, just developed along the coastline perfectly naturally. It's nothing they could do about it. And what was the mouth of a harbour turned into a five-mile route to the sea? So all of a sudden, your attractiveness as a trading port, as a fishing port, we're now five miles from open water. That's not such a great position to be in. And they had limited ability to adapt, modify nature. to overcome those things. They tried. We did a program on Walberswick and Dunwich and the rivalry there. The growth of the shingles spit there that cut off the mouth of the harbour at Dunnich and then the sea broke through at Walberswick, enabling that to be the poor. That was a source of battles and disputes. They fought each other over the rights to tolls and who got the shipping because it was a matter of life and death, but they couldn't actually control what nature was doing.

And then there's coastal erosion as much as silting up and so forth. There's coastal erosion again, which you could do very little about. So at Dunnage, famously, an entire medieval town, a fantastically important port going right back to Doomsday and before, is now a tiny village throughout the medieval period, a series of storms, high tides swept away all its churches, its monastic institutions of which it had several, all the infrastructure of the town. You could now just see a fragment of where the far end of the town wall used to be, and it's just now a tiny village. And up in Yorkshire, their Holdeness region, dozens of villages lost to coastal erosion. Those soft muds and silts just eroded away by the sea.

Yeah, it wasn't all roses living by the sea. It has hazards. The rewards were very rich if you got it right, but if you were unlucky, if nature did something, that's it. There's very limited ways to recover. But resilience and recovery, that is a feature of these coastal places. They reinvent themselves. They turn into something slightly different, but still with that tradition, often going right back to medieval times.

Thank you very, very much for joining us, Ben. It's been fantastic to talk to you. That's a real pleasure. Thanks very much. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please do join us next time for more from the greatest millennium. human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts from and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to podcasts as it really does

help new listeners to find the show. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.