Time team Hastings dig

[Mark G]

As no one else has raised it...

What thoughts on Time Team's analysis of the Hastings sites?

No archaeology at the abbey field (no surprise there, does anyone still think that the Abbey field was the battle field?)

nothing at Caldbec hill either.

So little archaeology, in fact, that they hardly bothered with the dig, and spent a bit of time showing the Crowhurst suggestion instead.

And interestingly, when they did their big idea - laser light scanning of the entire area to get a 3D model, which they could digitally strip off the features to leave just the landscape - and fill in the low marshes from the period - an interesting third option emerged.

the survey shows Caldbec as too big to defend with the men present, William had to come through Battle
- but the 'old' field below the abbey was mostly marshland, so again, he couldn't have come up that way.

but there was a narrow gap from the Hastings peninsular up Battle hill - exactly the sort of hill a shieldwall would want to defend. covering the neck.

i.e. the battle was at Battle, but the field was 90 degrees rotated - and basically, the attacks followed the line of the modern road, with the fighting roughly at the roundabout in town.

Which also offers the suggestion that Harold did get it roughly on the spot of the abbey.

they stripped all the trees off before picking their site - Caldbec was quite forested, I understood, so they may have done it a disservice as an option by removing the anchoring wings that offered - but they did fail to find anything under the turf there, so that is not surprising.

it was just a shame they didn't make any attempt to reference the little hillock from their scan.

[Erpingham]

I thought it was an interesting suggestion, though typically they didn't really follow through, as you said.  An attack up the shoulder of the hill would allow the Abbey to be in approximately in the right location and it does solve one of the problems of the site - why launch your main attack up a steep hill when you could turn the position on a shallower slope?  And it does allow the Abbey to be in approximately the right place, as you say.

[aligern]

It is unusual for battlefield archaeology to turn up much of an Ancient or medieval battle.  If  the ground is hard not much will penetrate it and the winner will very likely salvage and recycle  weapons armour, all metal objects and frankly most cloth and metal as manufactured stuff is very expensive.
Given that 4000 or so casualties occurred at Hastings there should have been some large grave pits and it would have been helpful to have had some expert opinion on the likely survival of buried bone in the local soils.
It was also disappointing that the width of of the causeway position was not given. If, as seems likely, Harald had 7000 men then  we should be looking for a position that gives a safe deployment across about half a mile. beyond that there has to be an area for the Norman cavalry to manoeuvre and I am not sure that the programme really showed us that.  There was much more marsh in Eleventh century England than there is now, but I would think that they needed a bit more evidence that the fields below Battle Abbey were marshy in October 1066. Many areas are marshy in the winter but dry out n the summer. Was it a wet summer? If not then the alleged marsh might well have been dry and perfectly OK for William. let us remember that cavalry deployment takes a lot of space.

The man with the Crowhurst theory seemed a true British eccentric, with his two bucket reinforcements, the presenters were incredulous as he tried to claim these sorry rings of iron  as part of a Norman helmet.
So an entertaining but lightweight programme  which advanced a theory and then did not sufficiently test it and in true Tony Robinson style moved in cavalier fashion from theory three being a possibility to it being virtually certain fact.

Roy

[Erpingham]

The man with the Crowhurst theory seemed a true British eccentric, with his two bucket reinforcements, the presenters were incredulous as he tried to claim these sorry rings of iron  as part of a Norman helmet.

Having since had a look at his website, I think we should draw a veil across this one and move on.

So an entertaining but lightweight programme  which advanced a theory and then did not sufficiently test it and in true Tony Robinson style moved in cavalier fashion from theory three being a possibility to it being virtually certain fact.

Roy

A good summary.  It was typical of the "quest" type documentary that the big reveal has to come at the end but it left you with the annoying feeling that this could have been edited to allow a longer final segment allowing more consideration of the implications and possibly a new research agenda (e.g. looking for the hillock, locating malfosse, a bit of coring in the valley bottoms to test their nature before modification).  From trying from memory to match the lidar image with map & satelite images, I think that to hold the suggested position the English would push their flanks back round the hill.  But it would have been nice to see an attempt to work this out rather than leave it hanging.

[aligern]

Fully agreed Anthony,  there was much more that could have been done using the estimated army sizes and compositions and the available deployment areas. If Harold's position is too strong then William would have had to dismount his knights, keeping a mounted reserve, and then advance on foot to take on the English battle-line. But William keeps large contingents of men mounted and has space to withdraw units and set other units to attack the charging Saxons. That takes a lot of space, probably a mile or so to allow spaces to wheel and gaps for archers and infantry to move through. I am estimating 3000 knights with a yard and a half per horse and say 30 yard gaps between units. That's not to say that the English are deployed on a mile frontage, but that William needs that space to  operate in. I just did not see that area of flattish land available on the programme's map of the terrain except in the fields that front the current English Heritage site.
It really seemed as if the march and deployment of William's army was irrelevant to the Time Team producers.
They could have done a better job by getting Phil Sabin involved rather than the enthusiast authors that were wheeled on as talking heads. Prof Sabin has a developed methodology for working from best guess figures, probable historical deployments and likely terrain to a likely positioning of armies and affirmation of numbers.
Roy

[Mark G]

well they did only have three days to do it in.... even f the dig itself was almost completely ignored

[aligern]

But do they really have three days only?  Too short to do some core samples on the marshy areas?
No time to set some metal detectorists loose on the area where  20,000 arrows should have fallen? They might only have three days of digging, allowed, but they could take a bit longer over the talking heads. For example,  someone who could really talk about the feasibility of deployment on their new theory.  How about an historian summarising what the evidence from the Tapestry and the most pertinent chronicles says they should fit the battle site too. Perhaps someone who could talk about the likelihood of their being any trace of any battle that long ago.

Also, a few less re enactors and atmosphere shots please.
Although the one who described what items he actually lost on a re enactment field was some use.
Roy

[Mark G]

actually, I don't remember him saying he only had three days to do it this time.

and as they spent so little time on the dig itself, and basically seemed to rely entirely upon metal detection to determine whether they would go deeper, I wonder whether they already expected to find nothing in the ground, and were always planning on a bit of digital wiz bang for the ending.

but as you say, barely a beginning of something. 

[Dave Gee]

English Heritage are dismissive of TT's conclusions.

Bexhill Observer

[Sharur]

Since Channel 4 pulled the funding plug on Time Team, they're no longer making series' of programmes the way the used to, just one-off "specials" like the Hastings one. So they're not doing the old-style three-day digs any longer.

I found the Hastings programme was over-long and poorly constructed in general, skimming over everything in far too little detail. The site investigations seemed to have been done either hastily or with little forethought as to how best to film things (possibly too small a filming unit), so there was no strong impression as to what was done and what was found (presumably very little).

It also seemed the whole was generally ill-prepared. Making their new suggestion for the battlefield's site only in the closing minutes of the programme was a big mistake, as surely the ground-based investigation should have started there, if anywhere.

Can't help feeling the programme should have been done in their old-style, with a full team available to check the records and landscape, and some proper geophysical analysis ahead of the digging. In three days of that, I dare say they'd have found out more, and created a better story along the way.

[Patrick Waterson]

I think Time Team need to become aware that the SoA exists and could if asked considerably improve the quality of their programmes - that way they could have a conscious reason for avoiding us! 

[Erpingham]

Personal suspicion is they were going to do the lidar thing from the beginning.  A bit of Googling showed the hastings area had been lidar mapped the year before, which may have given them the idea (or even provided data which they then "refined" with their own survey.

Roy has already said that preservation of weapon parts on battlefields varies a lot.  I think there are a couple of arrows from the traditional sites of Agincourt and Crecy (though Crecy has produced a number of later cannonballs).  Hastings field is problematic for several reasons - the hill top was flattened and the spoil dumped down the valley side in the Middle Ages.  It had a field system imposed (you hear reference to digging under a field boundary in the programme) and the bottom of the valley was given over to fishponds.  Finding the 1066 layer, if it still exists, would be difficult.  And any general churned up finds risk destruction because they discarded the top 18 inches or so as contaminated.

Incidentally, the Battle of masterby programme mentioned elsewhere on the forum has done a much more sustained and more successful piece of battlefield archaeology.  Flawed programme but better archaeology than the time team one (sorry Sir Tone).

[Mick Hession]

Well at least they consulted a wargamer: Thom Richardson, the Royal Armoury gent who pointed out that the Norman "helmet" was actually a bucket   

Cheers
Mick   

[yesthatphil]

The other thing that circles in my mind is the story of Edith Swan-neck being brought along to identify Harold's body (Waltham Chronicle?) because allegedly, after the battle he could not be found.  I've no idea how we take the tale these days ... evidence? embellishment? romantic tosh?   But it seems to suggest that the battlefield was a jumble and that it was far from easy to tell who was who or where to look.   If it was clear where the Anglo-Saxon position was ... where Harold fell ... the key point etc.  then presumably it would have been easy enough to locate him.

If the story, made up or not, was plausible at the time, it might mean that even for contemporaries it was not clear what the original positioning and orientation was ...

Phil
(watched on 'catch up' but found it a bit boring: lots of of site snippets, but not much archaeology and even less insight: still it got military history onto the drivel-box, so gets a tick for that ...) ...

[Mark G]

odd that English heritage reportedly pan it in a local paper (Bexhill observer) and praise it on the show itself, or at least are reported as doing so by Tony during the show ending.

if the paper's video link would actually open this morning, I would be interested to see the detail of the criticism, but there is sod-all in the text.