BYZANTINE BUCKET | BEOWULF | Time Team News | Episode #11 (Sutton Hoo Special)

Dani Wootton is joined by guests for this very special episode, filmed during Time Team’s historic excavation at Sutton Hoo.

Tony Robinson drops in for a chat, while Dr Sam Newton discusses our Book of the Month, ‘Beowulf’. We share the latest news from the site – the recovery of missing fragments of an ancient vessel.

Meanwhile, we drop in the field school of ULAS in Leicestershire, where students are honing their excavation skills on a huge Roman villa. And we share a teaser of our return to the Medieval Mortar Wreck, with Bournemouth University. This is another episode of Time Team News not to be missed!

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Waterloo to Waterloo: Sponsor Time Team’s Lawrence Shaw and Hanley Manley’s (Bournemouth University) charity bike ride to raise £6,000 for Waterloo Uncovered.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With thanks to:

National Trust
Sutton Hoo
FAS Heritage
British Library
Sam Newton
University of Leicester / ULAS
Philippa Walton
John Thomas
Bournemouth University
Tom Cousins
Poole Museum
Michael Pitts (underwater dive footage)
Pixabay
Wikimedia Commons
Steve Day
Bonne Nuit
Premium Beat

3D models by Andy Woodhead

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Coming up… the latest action live from Time Team’s dig at Sutton Hoo. Dr Sam Newton enters the world of Beowulf, and students investigate a huge Roman villa in Leicestershire [Music] [Music] Welcome to Time Team News, your monthly dose of archaeology stories and discoveries from Britain and across the globe. Well, it’s a very special episode because as you can see we’re at Sutton Hoo in southeast Britain, and we’re going to be filming this episode from the Time Team excavations, bringing you all the latest updates from the site. And we’ve got some very special guests dropping in. We’ve also got a great Book of the Month lined up, and we’ll be bringing you other stories from around the world. So let’s get started! [Music] Some exciting news for us now. The time Team official YouTube channel has been nominated in the Broadcast Digital Awards 2024 for the ‘Best Specialist Channel. category. We’re up against against some strong competition, including CBBC and Sky Sports News good luck to all the nominees. [Music] And the latest news is this… a piece of the famous Bromeswell Bucket has been discovered right here during our excavations at Sutton Hoo. So this is the actual Bromeswell Bucket, it was found in Garden Field in 1986, but I gather from the inscription that we do know that it’s 6th Century because of the letter forms. I mean the thing about it is that the punch work is so delicate and you’ve got this tiny annular punch, picking up details and then you have this almost free form inscribed body work. The rest of that handle is somewhere out there and while while I’m not sure that that the bottom would survive to be found, I’m pretty sure handle should survive. And it would be very identifiable too, yes, you couldn’t miss that. Throughout the dig, we’ve been looking for the source of the big metal spike in the trench. I’m wondering given it seems to be a perfectly circular, very strong metal signal where it’s actually an object. Gradually, centimetre by centimetre, we’re going down. And yesterday, Justin and his team carefully ex… I can’t speak I’m too excited! They excavated the source for it and, wow, bloming wow! They got their rewards, it was great! Oh, I can see a hand! Oh, my word! [Music] What a great find. The question of course is what happens next? And there’ll be more of this to come in the future. So, earlier I promised you some special guests and we’ve got some Time Team royalty here for you. I’m joined by the one and only Sir Tony Robinson. I’m the royalty! So, how long is it since you and I have seen each other? I think it’s probably about 10 years. I remember, I remember your first ever Time Team. I know, so do I actually you were amazing, because I was really nervous I was really thrown in the deepend, wasn’t I, and we had to film a finds scene and you said, ‘don’t worry’, because there were cameras and people watching and you said, ‘don’t worry, just imagine you’re talking to me’, and I thought, well, that’s the problem I talking to Tony! Look at this stuff I’ve got so I’ve just arrived here and this is the work I’ve got to do over the next two days so this describes what I’m sort of thing I’ve got to do conservation chat, look at the Bromeswell Bucket, that is that is the totality of the information I’m going to have to go through for that that interview, boat landing place or what?, that’s another one, felt required, ground-truthing, look ahead to next year. It’s not much to go on. We’ll forget about that and just wander over there and ask some questions! Does it feel like the old Time Team then? Oh very much, yeah, it genuinely is. There is maybe or nine people here, including the gentleman behind the camera, Neil, who I’ve known for years and years and years. But a lot of the the people are new, too, and even older than that if you can stay with me is this yes Professor Mick Aston, the late professor Mick Aston, still looking on us, giving us his blessing. Yes, absolutely. What’s been your favorite bit about this site so far then? Sounds ridiculous being here and being allowed to dig. To me, this site is more significant than Stonehenge. It’s more significant because one of the problems with Stonehenge is you don’t find that much stuff to go with it. I know microbiologists would say, ‘oh there’s loads of stuff’. Well, yeah, tiny tiny stuff, but you get good stuff quite frankly here, and it just, it shimmers with life and curiosit this place and so the the privilege of being allowed to excavate in the field next to where the boat burial was found. We’ve got the 1939 dig, we’ve got the one in the 60s, the one in the ’90s, the one 2000s – all of them incredibly carefully managed, and and very limited most of them in their aspirations, and now we’re allowed to come here, too, and I just I find that… it’s something else, isn’t it? Yeah, it really is. It’s been really lovely catching up with you, thank you. Could you give us a plug for Time Team News? Yeah, you are watching Time Team News! Does that work? Perfect, thank you very much, thanks Tony. I’ve got to go now as well! [Music] It’s that time of year when students around Britain are out in the field, honing their excavation skills students from the University of Leicester led by staff including Time Team’s Dr Philippa Walton have been out excavating a Roman villa in Leicestershire, so let’s see what they’ve been up to. [Music] This is it then folks. Okay, exciting! Have you got a villa? Hope so. I hope so. Well there you are oh wow right so that’s the magnetic date of the whole field it’s busy and yeah it’s not just a villa you’ve got a whole complex of things. Yeah, there’s just so much more than was on the aerial photographs, that’s really giving you an idea of what the whole archaological landscape looks like rather than just the villa on its own, and a few potential prehistoric features too [Music] and the main target in this trench was one to look at an area of what we call high resistance… Well, we’re here because we’ve got a newly discovered Roman villa and this is giving us an opportunity to have a student training excavation to learn more about the site and to teach the students how to excavate. Hi, I’m Chris I am studying archology at the University of Leicester and I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on and properly doing archology in the soil itself. So, we’re finding lots of uh mostly tesserae, little floor pieces, we found lots of those and quite a bit of pottery and bone especially down this section here. Hi, I’m Isabel, I’m studying Archaeology and Ancient History BA at the University of Leicester, and I’m really enjoying our excavation. I’m enjoying using the mattock to get through gravel quite quickly and I’ve been really enjoying doing the cleaning of the finds and seeing what we’ve got on site. Well, so far in the two trenches immediately behind me we found the remains of a large winged Roman villa about 70-metre long, so really quite substantial country house. Leicestershire in most of the Roman period is part of the rural landscape of Britain, and what we see during the Roman period’s the development of wealthy rural estates, with these big Roman villas at their heart, but up until recently we’ve not really known much about them. We’ve got on this side here, the northern side, some remaining wall that’s still in situ, and then just this side here we’ve gotten to the bottom of what used to be where the wall was before it was robbed out, and then back-filled. So over here, we opened up what we thought would have been a well. But upon further excavation, we reached sand at the bottom so it’s not a well because water would have went right through it. No dating material has actually come out of whatever this pit is supposed to be, but we do see right over here we have some recycled Roman tile that has been used in the construction of the well, or the pit ,whatever it might be! It’s great to see the field school in action and we’ll be following more on that excavation in the future. So now, it’s time for Book of the Month and we’ve got a very special one lined up for you this time. It’s Beowulf! Now, this isn’t a new book, it’s a thousand year old book, although it was originally being spoken a long time before that, and given that we’re at Sutton Hoo, we’re sat on Mound One of what was perhaps King Raedwald’s final resting place, we thought it’d be quite appropriate to discuss Beowulf. I’m joined by Dr Sam Newton, who’s an expert on Anglo-Saxons and on Beowulf. Can you give us a bit of a synopsis about what this story is about? If you boil down the story of Beowulf, it’s about a great hero called Beowulf, who’s something of a Superman but mortal, who fights three terrible monsters. Really scary monsters. First of all, he fights Grendel, who is the precedent for all the nasty monsters right down to modern film: Alien, Predator, they all take something from Grendel, and then after he defeats Grendel in a great wrestling exorcism. He then defeats Grendel’s mother, who’s almost as terrifying and then achieves great things in his early life. And then the narrative fast forwards and it’s the only end that can match for a great hero like them, it’s a dragon. These are the wondertale aspects of the poem, and it’s the first dragon of English literature, he’s absolutely great. Perfect description of him, beautifully retold by Tolkien. So, that’s your basic three-fold hero monster killing story. But interwoven into the gaps between that are the heroic legends of the Old English homelands and their neighbours, the Danes, bit further away the Swedes. In other words, from that perspective, Beowulf is a history onto the prehistory of the English. It’s really one of the great epics of world literature, where the three hero monster combat scenes become three moments in an idealised mortal life, you know, youthful achievement, having not had a good start, goes on to mature, and then as an old man he still goes out fighting, and never, never shows fear. Brave to the last. It was first, well it was written down wasn’t it about a thousand years ago, but it’s older than that. That’s it that it was composed as we have it in the 8th Century in writing, but drawing on much much earlier poetic traditions, which reach right back to the sixth, even into the fifth century, and our poet clearly was he loved that old poetry, the inherited traditional elative poetry from the oral tradition and yet he knew how to write, and so you’ve got this wonderful alchemy of the two media through driving together. So, for me, what’s really interesting about Beowulf is how it relates archeologically, because the 1939 excavations here at Mound One it kind of is quite similar to some passages in Beowulf, isn’t it? Yes, the opening movement culminates with a magnificent account of a royal ship funeral, which in so many ways brings to life the barebones of the archaeology here, and the events entailed by the archaeology, and it makes the whole magic of ship funeral make sense. The idea of crossing the boundary between worlds, which is one of those powerful and simple metaphors that everybody would understand. So the the passage in Beowulf that’s really kind of ties it all together is that bit where they describe the funeral isn’t it? Yes, that’s right it’s so touching, it’s so moving, it reads like an authentic account of a real ship funeral. So tell us about that. Well, they they have the right from the start, [speaks Old English] ‘there at HUD stood ringed stevena’ the Bing Bow of the Noble’s ferry was ready to take him across the boundy between worlds’. It reads a bit like the Gray Havens at the culmination of the Epic of Lord of the Rings, and the laying in of the treasure, fortune fetch from far and wide, is exactly what we have here. East Mediterranean connections, Celtic world connections, and not above all the beautiful golden garnet treasure, where the garet comes from it appears from India. So, in way that that some passages, from this passage from Beowulf, could almost be describing what happened here? Yeah, well it certainly describes the ideal behind what happened here, and as if what happened here, in the poetry composed the eulogy for Raedwald, and composed about this event would have been available to the poet to retell his story and apply it to the legendary founder of the king, as I said, kind of mythic precedent. In a sentence, why should people read Beowulf? The first epic of English literature, is the roots of national identity for all the English speaking peoples. ‘There at H the [Music] stooding easy andus AES [Music] far’. Now, here’s Lawrence to tell us about a fundraiser that he’s involved with. Thanks Dani, so I’ve got some really exciting news. At start of September this year, myself and Harry Manley from Bournemouth University are going to be undertaking a 250 M bike ride as part of the cycle from Waterloo Station in London, to the site of the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium. And this is all in aid of Charity. So the Waterloo Uncovered charity, which uses archaeology to train and rehabilitate ex-service personnel. We’re going to be cycling for three days, we’re going to be recording our adventure for you all to enjoy afterwards, but also we’re going to be raising money for a really important charity. So, if you’d like to get behind us we’re hoping to raise £6,000 you can find details below. You might remember a while ago that Derek and Lawrence joined a team from Bournemouth University to investigate a medieval shipwreck, laden with Purbeck stone. Well, they’ve rejoined the crew again for a special dive to bring back 700 year-old stone slabs to the [Music] surface. I kind of love that barge it looks like it shouldn’t float. After a short journey through Poole Harbor, we’ve reached the wreck site. Looks like Tom’s on the move. Here he [Music] goes. Imminently, it’s coming up well imminently yeah imminently-ish! How’s it looking down there? As he said he doesn’t talk a lot, Tom, does he? There it is, you can you can see it! And we’ll be sharing that full story with you very soon. Well, that’s all for this month. Thanks for watching and please do remember to subscribe and press the notification bell to receive all the latest updates, but it’s been a real privilege to be able to be here and to excavate at Sutton Hoo, and we’ll be bringing you the full results in a Time Team Special next year. Well, that’s all from me for now and I look forward to seeing you next time. [Music] Join Time Team on Patreon to access exclusive 3D models, masterclasses and behind the scenes insights.