"We've dug some important sites on Time Team, but they don't come much bigger than this, because this is Westminster Abbey." "Westminster Abbey is the setting for coronations and state funerals." "It's packed with the tombs of centuries of monarchs, poets, architects and politicians." "The people responsible for shaping the history of Britain." "The Abbey standing today is largely the ambitious design of King Henry III in the 13th century, although it bears the scars of centuries of renovations." "But there's one crucial piece of his original design that's missing." "Because he built a sacristy, a huge stronghold said to have housed the biggest collection of treasure this side of the Alps." "And amazingly, this important building vanished, and we've got three days to find it." "Henry III began to build Westminster Abbey in 1245." "It was one of the most expensive building projects of the middle ages, and set Westminster on course to be the political centre of London." "Whenever there's talk of a Time Team coming to London, you back off, but you're hereI" "Because of Westminster Abbey, it's the great Benedictine Abbey in the country, one of the biggest." "We're looking for a Sacristy." "Now, am I right in saying that that's the room where they kept all the stuff for the services?" "Yeah, where they keep the chalices and patterns, and where the copes for the clergy to wear are kept." "Where all the paraphernalia for the services are kept, so a really important room." "Warwick, do we have any idea where this sacristy actually is?" "Yes, the sacristy or what they thought was the sacristy was discovered by accident in 1869 when Sir Gilbert Scott was working on this area, and repairing the building, and particularly this north porch, and they lowered the ground level all round this site" "and bumped into walls, and this is the plan they produced." "That's in this area here, look, this L shape in here, from the door to the north porch." "So do we think it's all still here, just under the grass?" "Well, we hope it is still there, but there is a little hitch, in that" "Scott also ordered the construction of a vaulted chamber down here, in this area, then it was demolished again not many years later." "I've suddenly been overcome by gloom, we're not going to find anything, are we?" "No, I think it's extremely unlikely that they dug everything out." "And if we did find the sacristy?" "If we found the Henry III sacristy that would be absolutely fantastic." "You'd be happy?" "You'd be happy?" "I would be very happy, please do it." "Better get on then." "Even if the walls are still there, we're a bit worried they may be nothing to do with the Sacristy." "Because, incredibly, later in the post medieval period, there were houses and workshops built right up against the Abbey on the same footprint as the supposed sacristy." "Where do we think our sacristy is?" "Ours, we think is this L-shaped building, north of the nave where the north transept is." "There is another one of course." "Where?" "Where?" "Down here, that's the more normal place to find it, off the south transept." "Right at the point where you can all troop in with all the vestments and gear, into the east end of the Church." "Right next to the chapter house so that's where you'd expect it." "It's really odd to have a second one and it's very odd to have it in that position there." "and it's very odd to have it in that position there." "If we did find it, how important would that be?" "Oh, I think it would be enormously significant." "Would it be fair to call it a find of national importance if we do?" "Oh, yes, it would be a major find for church archaeology, no doubt about that." "This doesn't look like occasional light showers." "This doesn't look like occasional light showers." "No, it has set in, hasn't it?" "." "The good news is Geophys have found some wall lines." "Starting at the top, the near surface, it's an absolute nightmare." "But as ever there's a problem and it's not just the miserable weather." "All these lines are services..." "Oh, crikeyI" "Electric cables, maybe pipes, telephone cables, but with regards what you want to find if you ignore those, for the moment, go deeper into the ground, deeper into the radar, look at these wall lines starting to show." "Ah right." "Ah right." "These match exactly with what you wanted, Warwick." "There's the cross wall at that point there." "I think we should try and pick up the line of this wall, that one there, if we run a trench down there, it will also pick up the cross wall, it will pick up the raft on which it looks as though" "the whole transept is built, the great stone raft, and it will pick up the edge of this area that looks like the vaulted chamber, so we'll get a whole lot of things from the 13th century onwards, all in one trench." "It's an ambitious shopping list Warwick's given usi" "Especially if we've got to dodge the services." "Copper strip of some sort." "The sacristy we're looking for was said to be built on a grand scale, just like the rest of Henry III's abbey." "And our historian has discovered that his inspiration was partly this man, Edward the Confessor, the last Great Saxon King, who had built an abbey here himself 200 years earlier." "Henry was mad about him, he dressed like Edward the Confessor, has pictures of him in his bed chamber, calls his son Edward." "Would you define the abbey as a shrine to Edward the Confessor?" "." "It is a shrine to Edward the Confessor but it's more than that." "It's a grand political statement of power, I mean, look at it." "It's massive." "And it's a very international place." "Henry decided to build this after he'd been to France and there, he'd seen these three separate cathedrals." "One where people got crowned, one where they were buried, one where it was particularly religious, and he decided to wrap all this into one big super-building, which is Westminster Abbey." "So Westminster Abbey's role as a theatre for royal ceremonies would have made a huge sacristy an absolute necessity." "We just need to find it." "Still if we do nothing else the next three days we shall be able to give them an up-to-date map of their services." "Hello, what the devil's that?" "." "We've got lots and lots of images..." "Helen's wading through drawings and plans relating to our site, to try to find out why the Victorians thought it was Henry's sacristy, but they're not proving all that helpful." "This fantastic plan from 1870 is very clear in showing these lovely walls and they're described very nicely as well." "But a lot of them are completely different depths." "If you look at this section drawing, you can see that they're different depths here, but how these are drawn doesn't bear any relationship to how they're described, so we don't quite know how to reconcile the two." "To find out what's really going on, there's no substitute for archaeology." "Ooh-ahI Look at that." "It's good news in the trenches..." "There's something been cut in there." "..because it looks like the Victorians have left some walls for us to look at." "What we've got to do now is hope that we find the other edge of it on this side." "It's 11:45am, day one." "Inside the visitors are teeming in, outside the rain's teeming down and they've just started digging trench one." "Will we find the missing piece of London's greatest abbey?" "We'll know soon." "Westminster Abbey's sumptuous design nearly bankrupted Henry III when he built it in the 13th century." "Most of it is still standing, but there's one important room missing, his great sacristy." "Despite terrible weather on day one, by the afternoon, Phil's found some walls although he's not convinced they're anything to do with the sacristy." "When you look at the stonework, it looks very fresh," "I can't really believe that it is the sacristy." "No, it definitely isn't, not yet." "But then you tell me, it is not part of the much, much later cellar that we know appears on the plan." "If you look at those plans you can see the wall line coming out here." "That's to that point there, and it shows the cellar on this side." "And if you look at the radar, the radar shows the cellar here, there's no doubt about that." "I think that feature there might be stairs going into the cellar." "Do we care about this cellar if it's much later?" "." "Yes, what we've got to do is establish where we are on this plan so if we can prove those are stairs, then we know that we're on the money." "The dig's really beginning to get underway now." "Phil expands the trench to check whether John is right about the position of the cellar." "That's not very old, PhilI" "And once we've located the walls on Scott's plan, we can start to work out whether or not they belong to Henry's sacristy." "Well, I reckon, whether you like it or not..." "Concrete capping?" "..that's as far as you're going to go down for a while." "We're going to need some pretty convincing archaeological evidence, because on paper this building looks nothing like an archetypal sacristy, which should be tucked away securely in the heart of the abbey." "This is the original sacristy which was built even before the one that we're excavating for, but what is it about this place that defines it as a sacristy?" "Well, sacristies have to be very secure because they have all these valuable treasure in, so the door that you have just come through was originally three doors, one beside another, lots of bolts, lots of locks." "Then the walls are very substantial, there's a stone vault on the roof, there are no doors, no windows that lead to the exterior." "So it's a highly-secure space." "You've then got these arches in the wall, so you can set cupboards in, with the chalices and patens, gold and silver and they could have been locked so that's more security." "But virtually everything that you've told me that defines a sacristy is hanging off the walls." "Well, when we dig down we're not going to find any walls so it's going to be difficult for our archaeologists specifically to identify what they've got as a sacristy?" "Well, that's where we we have to try and marry the archaeological evidence with documentary evidence and study it in a general sense, from what we know elsewhere." "It will not turn out to be a building like this with a great vault on itI" "Brilliant(I) If we can't identify Henry's second sacristy, this dig could be a complete wash out." "More sewage pipe." "There's a real prospect of three rainy days in London on one of the most important sites in the country, and all we'll have to show for it is a Victorian cellar filled with centuries of rubble." "One bit of good news though, is that the documents confirm that Henry had definitely planned a second sacristy." "There's a reference in Lethaby's book," "Westminster Abbey And The King's Craftsmen." "This says the King issued a command that the sacristy should be built 120 feet long." "That's huge." "It is, isn't it?" "." "How does that tie up with the stuff we've got on this plan of 1869?" "Let's see, that is 120 there..." "Oh, look, that's not even 100 feet long, it's a completely different length." "But even just shy of 100 ft, it's still a very large building." "What this says is that the King commissioned an enormous building, we don't know that it was actually built 120 feet long, do we?" "Well, exactly." "Look, he goes on to say, "A large sacristy was certainly" ""required for the vast treasure which Matthew of Westminster says" ""was unequalled on this side of the Alps."" "So they certainly had a lot of stuff to store." "That could explain the size of the sacristy, but it certainly doesn't explain its puzzling location." "Warwick, this trench has really come on..." "Phil thinks he's found two features shown on the plan, which he reckons are entrances to the Victorian cellar." "So we've moved over here." "And look we've come down onto this layer of concrete." "Wonderful, because I think that is the roof of the vaulted chamber that was built by Sir Gilbert Scott." "We have the accounts telling us about building the vaults and then concreting over the top of them." "OK, so far so good but the crucial question is, is this the medieval wall?" "I mean, it certainly doesn't look like it." "Down here it's got bricks in it." "Yeah, it doesn't look like it yet, but the medieval building was reconstructed as a house and hence we've got post-medieval brickwork on the foundations." "So you think that if we can go down, lower down that wall we should actually find the line of the medieval wall?" "We should hit the medieval wall below that, yeah." "Our search for the sacristy is complicated by so many centuries of usage reflected in the finds." "Bit of Tudor Green which comes in abut 1380, but most is 15th century." "Is it usually that thin?" "Yes, it's beautiful, really finely potted and highly fired, and also a bit of medieval floor tile." "Now that could easily be 14th century." "So it's the only stuff we're getting from the medieval period so far, but I see there's a lot of bone in this tray, isn't there?" "Yeah, some of it's animal bone but we also have human bone." "There's bits of finger bone." "And that's a bit of somebody's big toe." "But this is all in the topsoil?" "Yeah, it's all just redeposited, fractured and broken." "But also what we've got are these..." "They're like little brass studs." "They're the kind of thing you got in the top of 18th-century coffins as decorative stud work." "So the fact that we've got both these and the bones suggests that we've got at least 18th-century burials that have been disturbed." "So there's clearly a lot of history to sift our way through before we can find out what was going on here in the 13th century." "When Henry built his great abbey, his centrepiece was the shrine to his idol, Edward the Confessor, who had been canonised a century before." "So important was this memorial to him that Henry gave instructions for his own tomb to be placed next to it." "This was one of the great shrines of England, to which pilgrims came from far and wide and their aim was to come and to see and to touch and to get spiritual power from the body of Edward the Confessor, who's inside here." "And that's what the steps are for and these niches so you would kneel and pray at the niche." "Contemporary accounts describe this in really splendid terms, they talk about it glistening and gleaming." "I don't want to be rude but it is slightly dull now." "What we see today is the stone shell made of Purbeck marble, which is the frame that held all the decorative detail." "So is it the naughty pilgrims who have been picking off all the glass?" "Well, I'm afraid it is." "Initially pilgrims, but later on, visitors, I think, in later centuries." "But you've got a bit left over there." "We've got a bit left there, and that is a hint of what it looked like." "And you must think that over the whole of this, everything was full of this glistening detail, and so it would have glowed as a great beacon." "Henry was an avid collector of relics, such as a Thorn of Christ's crown, an impression of his feet from the Ascension, as well as a grisly array of saints' bones." "It's no wonder he needed a super-sized sacristy." "And we might just have the first signs of it in the ground." "Somehow or another, there's something running out that way." "This wall lines up with that one in Phil's trench, does it?" "." "Exactly on line." "The abbey was built nearly 800 years ago and I think we've got just about every one of those 800 years represented in this trench." "Very importantly, we've got a couple of finds which could well come from the very early years of the abbey." "What are they, Paul?" "A couple of bits of medieval pottery." "It's Kingston Ware and it's what you would expect to find in London between about 1230 to about 1260, 1270." "This building was supposedly built in 1245, so this brackets it beautifully." "Where did you find those?" "They came from right down there, next to that wall." "This is bang on the money, isn't it?" "." "If you don't think that's exciting..." "Phil, what have you got in your part of the trench?" "We've got part of the original raft on which this beautiful abbey was constructed." "And if these foundations are medieval then you'll see as they come along, they turn round there, it looks like we could have our first medieval wall." "So if we've got a medieval wall, have we got a medieval building?" "And if we've got a medieval building, could it be Henry III's long lost sacristy?" "We'll find out tomorrow." "8.30 in the morning, and it's another normal day here at Westminster Abbey." "There'll be four services in here today, between 3,000 and 4,000 tourists looking at the 3,000 plaques and monuments and burials to the great and the good which are inside there." "Although actually, it's not quite a normal day, because in addition to all that, we've got the Time Team digging a great big hole right there." "We're here because of the work of Victorian architect, Sir George Gilbert Scott." "During his renovations here, he discovered the remains of a massive L-shaped building." "We're trying to confirm that it was Henry III's 13th century sacristy." "We do appear definitely to have medieval walls." "We've got this wall here that's actually sitting on top of the main raft of the Abbey." "You can see there it's built out of chalk, and we've got a similar wall of similar construction with chalk in it, running through there." "And that does tie up with what's on Scott's drawing." "We've even got the curve behind Matt, which is of the stairway, which is shown on Scott's drawing." "But the crucial thing is that now that we're beginning to look at all these things, we realise they're more than one date." "They're multiphase, not like the drawing says." "Scott clearly misinterpreted the date of some of the features he found." "So we're putting in more trenches to check out exactly which walls are medieval." "Much of what we've uncovered so far relates to post-medieval buildings which were built on top of the sacristy." "And in trench two," "Faye's getting a little taste of life in those later houses." "Oh, that's lovely..." "It's border ware, it's the bog standard pottery in London from about the mid-16th getting towards the 18th century, and it's a frying pan handle, it's a skillet." "LovelyI" "That's pretty cool." "So it's ties in about when the houses must have been here." "It's in pretty good nick, you can even see where it's been used." "See where it's all blackened underneath?" "that's the side that would have gone on the fire." "Someone had their fried eggs for breakfast out of that maybe..." "Bacon, sausages, the works." "Oh, yeahI Works for me." "It looks like we've got a lot of later stuff to get through before we reach the medieval levels." "The Great Sacristy that we're hoping to find is an example of the Abbey's extraordinary design, which Henry never lived to see completed." "This was going to be one of Henry III chapels." "It's 50 ft above the floor of the Abbey, but it was never finished because these high chapels went out of fashion." "But I've come up here to show you how much this part of Westminster is at the epicentre of English royal power." "Over across there is the Houses of Parliament and underneath that was the old Palace of Westminster, which was Henry's favourite palace, he actually lived there." "And in those days, there was no road there, just a wall." "So he'd come out of his palace through a little gate in the wall, straight to here." "It was like having a very large office at the bottom of your garden." "Living in the palace also meant that Henry could keep an eye on his builders." "And in Phil's trench, we're getting an idea of the logistics of constructing his great Abbey." "We can now see that this wall here, which we have always been calling medieval and which we still think is medieval, is actually built on the raft, and actually butts up against the basal course of the main abbey, so is of a later date." "We still think it's medieval, but later medieval than the construction of the Abbey itself." "But what is new and very interesting is that you can see that this is actually part of a wall, and you can see there's an edge running across there, and that face is actually visible continuing in here." "Do you see there's this little raised step of mortar?" "." "And that implies that there was once a wall coming across here, blocking off between these two buttresses, apart from the main wall that we know was running from East to West." "Is this what you'd expect, Warwick, or is this all new stuff?" "This is entirely new, we had no idea that there was going to be a wall running between the buttresses here." "So that suggests that the foundation for the North Transept in the 13th century, when that's put in, they're already thinking of this corridor, this room going off." "And in fact, that block there that looks like the base of a doorway, is part of a doorway that was built into the wall at that stage, to go off in that direction." "It certainly looks like that, because when you're building some like this you put the raft in, you build the great mass of the transept, and you might leave connections ready for when you're going to add these other lower appendages." "And then when the scaffold comes down, you then add these lower level chambers." "If there was a doorway in Phil's trench, there must have been another one out of the North Transept." "But there's no sign of it on the exterior today, thanks to centuries of refacing." "Nor can you see where Henry's build came to an end at his death in 1272, halfway down the old Norman Nave, which was still standing." "But on the inside, you can see where work resumes to complete his design a century later." "There's the junction..." "There's the junction..." "Oh, yes." "You see to the left?" "." "Henry III." "Rich, rich surface decoration and all the Purbeck marble shafting and going to the extension, as it were, not much." "It's quite plain, just look at the contrast there." "Yes, that diapering is absolutely incredible." "I mean, just the cost of all that chiselling must have been incredible." "Well, it's not only the chiselling." "You've got to paint it then and guild it." "So where does that take us to on the plan?" "Well, the Henry III work got as far as there." "So they built that buttress?" "So they built that buttress?" "Yes." "So they built that buttress?" "Yes." "OK, so are they in blank space around here then?" "No, there's still a nave here, it's the Norman nave, and they're gradually replacing each bay of that as they go along." "But that's slightly narrower than the building we've got at the moment." "So our L-Shaped structure straddled the join between Henry's rebuild and the old Norman nave." "And it would have led into both ends of Henry's fabulous, newly built part of the Abbey." "We've found medieval walls in all of our trenches, but we're lacking hard evidence of a sacristy." "This is the place to view it from, isn't it?" "." "Yeah, you can actually see the wall of the sacristy from up here, can't you?" "Yeah, we've got a line of it in one trench over here, and in Faye's trench you've got the other bit." "But I really do wonder if it's a sacristy this time." "What?" "." "We've been digging for one and a half days..." "I know." "We know it's there from the documents." "We know it's there from the documents, but this actual position is the result of the Victorians interpreting these foundations as the lost sacristy." "What worries me is that this is effectively either half a cloister, or just a stone corridor." "But is it going out to something that we don't know about, that's never been found?" "I can't believe that we're on a site of international importance, looking for Henry III's sacristy, and we might just have some manky old corridor." "I can't help that, Tone, that's the reality of it." "I can't help that, Tone, that's the reality of it." "Oh, come on." "If Mick's right, we haven't found the sacristy yet, but it might be at the end of the corridors on the other side of the path." "In which case, it should show up on the geophys." "But whatever our building is, we're getting below the foundation levels." "There's been quite a few bits of disarticulated bone here, there's been bits of skull, bits of foot bone..." "And now we're getting hints of the earlier history of the Abbey." "It suggests that whenever these things were put in, whatever date these are, they've cut through earlier burials." "Which may, like I say, on the basis of that and the level we're at, be associated with that original Confessor's building." "This is potentially important archaeology, because precious little survives of the abbey Edward built before Henry, depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry." "And as if that wasn't enough," "Mick suspects there might be some even earlier burials on the site." "There were two burials about here, on the 19th century plan, but there's no sign of them." "They either got rid of them, which they said they didn't, or they're further down." "My bet is that they probably are much further down." "Let's be honest, if they took them away, we'd expect to see the cuts from the backfilled graves." "I think they must be further on down." "And the other thing about them is that they're on a different alignment to the present Abbey and all these walls." "Of course, the possibility is that they're aligned on a much earlier church, which would have to be a Saxon church, because it would be earlier than Edward the Confessor's." "If we find more burials of that date, that would be absolutely fantastic." "These burials might represent the first solid archaeological evidence that there was a church here before Edward the Confessor's, because early Saxon churches were often built on a slightly different East-West alignment." "But exciting as all this is, it's not helping us with our search for the sacristy, which is beginning to feel a little desperate." "This is a hand-written note in a book, but it's been written by" "Mr Westlake, who was writing a book himself in the early part of the 20th Century." "And he's written down..." ""Sacrist's account of 1535, for pitch rosin and canvas for mending of a pipe in St Margaret's churchyard" ""carrying to the sextery, 3d."" "Sextery, I've checked up, and it's an alternative spelling, if you like, for the word 'sacristy'." "Now St Margaret's, I'd have thought, this shows St Margaret's on the north side." "So surely if the pipe is being mended in the churchyard, it must have been running across to a sacristy somewhere around here." "But why couldn't it have just gone to the north side of the Abbey on that side of the transept?" "Oh, I hadn't thought of that, to be honest..." "Oh well, back to the drawing boardI" "It's so frustrating." "The documents only tell us that the sacristy was somewhere on the North side." "Mick, look, I've got the geophys from the grass over there." "'Let's hope the new geophys can help locate it.'" "Its rubbish, isn't it?" "." "Its rubbish, isn't it?" "." "What do you mean, it's rubbish?" "Well, this is the demolition rubble from the houses that stood here until the 19th century..." "Oh, you mean it's literally rubbish?" "Oh, you mean it's literally rubbish?" "Exactly." "There's no walls or structures that we can see within that." "So as far as you're concerned, the sacristy probably isn't there?" "There's nothing that we can see that indicates that." "Well, look, in Faye's trench..." "Medieval, right?" "." "Which tallies with that over there in Phil's trench..." "That bit there." "This is join the dots, isn't it?" "." "Over there we've got this..." "Tracey's trench there, yeah." "And this little trench by the digger..." "And this little trench by the digger..." "Where Raksha was, yeah." "LookI Bish, bash, bosh, bash." "Job done - there's your sacristy." "All that proves is that we've got medieval walls in those places." "It doesn't demonstrate it's a sacristy." "This looks to me much more like a corridor or a cloister." "All rightI But you tell me what piece of church architecture exists that's this funny little corridor, which comes off at right angles outside of an abbey, and disappears back in there again?" "Well, a covered walkway is what it looks like, I know that's not..." "What's its function?" "What's its function?" "I don't know, but that doesn't mean..." "It's not an old National Health hospital going from ward G to ward F." "It doesn't mean it's a sacristy just because we don't know what it is." "The sacristy could still be somewhere else in the area." "It might, for example, be over there by the North door of the north transept." "All right, I'll buy that as long as you put your thinking cap on tonight and work out if it's not a sacristy, what this could be." "All right?" "." "I shall have a glass of wine, that helps me think a lot better." "Our search for Henry's sacristy may be falling apart, but just before the end of the day," "Dave finds some definitive evidence of Edward the Confessor's earlier abbey." "Let's see what you've got there." "These are 11th century hand-incised floor tiles with glaze on, and this is very heavily worn." "This is an absolutely wonderful find." "So, extremely rare, this tile?" "So, extremely rare, this tile?" "So rare, they're only known at Westminster Abbey and we only recognised them within the last five years." "Absolutely wonderful." "Find us some more, pleaseI" "Absolutely wonderful." "Find us some more, pleaseI OK, I'll try." "This is more than we could have hoped for, because finds from Edward the Confessor's great abbey are like gold dust." "If that isn't exciting enough, if Mick's to be believed, then down here we may well have burials from something even earlier, the very first Saxon church which gave its name to West Minster." "Beginning of Day 3 here at Westminster Abbey, and completely by surprise we seem to be uncovering the story of three churches on this site." "We came here to find the lost sacristy of this man" " Henry III who built this marvellous abbey that's here today, but late yesterday afternoon we unearthed a tile from the abbey belonging to this man" " Henry's inspiration, Edward the Confessor." "200 years previously." "And not only that, but we think we may have a row of burials from the very first church on this site, way back in Saxon times and, if we have, then we're sailing into completely uncharted archaeological waters." "The theory rests on the orientation of these chalk-lined burials, which were discovered by Sir Gilbert Scott in the 1870s." "Phil needs to find them to see if they are aligned to the earliest" "Saxon Westminster Abbey." "Ian?" "Just like being on the downs, innit?" "." "But there's still the little matter of whether the L-shaped building we're excavating is Henry III's long-lost sacristy." "No cow pats eitherI (LAUGHS)" "Although we're sure the walls were all originally built by Henry," "Mick's convinced himself that they're just corridors and nothing to do with our sacristy." "But Warwick's got a new idea." "He's been searching for evidence of a doorway from our building into the North Transept." "Although there's no sign of it on the outside, he thinks he's found it on the inside." "So, where's this doorway then, Warwick?" "All I can see is monuments and filing cabinets." "Yes, we've got quite a few of both." "But there in the middle of this bay in the central arch, you can see the arch is different from those either side." "The arch stands up taller, it breaks through the window sill." "Now, that moulding there is all original Henry III work." "But it is very tall and narrow, isn't it?" "." "It's not a normal doorway into a room." "Yes, well now that's what's particularly interesting because it is so tall and narrow it immediately says one thing." "It is a processional entrance where you could walk through carrying a processional cross which of course stands high above your head." "But if it's to carry a cross, that suggests it's a passage behind it and not a sacristy, doesn't it?" "." "Well, yes and no." "Both answers are correct." "It is clearly processional, but processions can start in sacristies." "And so I think what we're looking at here, potentially this long passage is really a robing area and an assembly for a procession, rather than a sacristy in the sense or a treasury where you keep all the valuables." "I think we're understanding it." "At last we've got a theory to satisfy Mick." "I am now convinced about this." "I am now convinced about this." "Jolly goodI Glad to hear it." "And in the trenches, Phil's making progress, too." "So, does that look like as though it's in situ, Phil?" "It's definitely articulated." "Yeah, that's a pair of legs in there and there's a foot bone." "So there's the ankle in there..." "But it's not the early Saxon chalk-lined burial Phil's looking for." "For the last two days, there's been one big question that's been bugging us - why is our sacristy such an odd shape?" "Basically it's just two corridors in an L-shape." "Well, we think we've got the answer, but it isn't until you get in here that you understand the logic of it." "Most of us think of an abbey like this." "It's beautifully decorated, highly painted, we hardly even notice areas like that one or..." "..this little room over here." "But that is where the real work of an abbey gets done and that's the logic of our sacristy." "It's a place where things are stored, where things are sorted out and where people get changed out of the public eye until they process back into the formal part of the abbey dressed in their full glory." "Mick, are you happy now?" "Oh, ecstatic, ecstaticI I really feel we've sorted it out." "But, Helen, how does all this tie in with the documents you've been looking at?" "." "It ties in brilliantly helping us understand some really tricky passages in the documents." "To begin with the galilee of the sacristy." "What does galilee mean?" "Everybody says "what does this mean?" "It's so annoying." But when you realise what this place is - a place to prepare for processions, and it's a place to put your kit on - it becomes very obvious." "Now, I do a few processions every year as a member of church choir and they're awful." "If you've only got a tiny little space, you can't organise yourself in a great long line and you don't know what you're doing." "If you've got this lovely space which you could call a galilee, you can line up and you can check that you're all in the right order, without all that huffling and shuffling and worry." "It also sorts out the L-shape because you can take a procession through into the North Transept, appearing as if by magic through that lovely door." "You can also take a procession into the nave, appearing as if by magic." "It's absolutely ideal." "Helen's talking about a galilee." "I thought we were looking for a sacristy." "There are two functions to a sacristy." "One is to keep the holy vessels - gold and silver chalices, patterns, that sort of thing - and the best place for that here is that one on the other side, St Faith's Chapel." "The other function is to keep the robes in - the vestements, the copes and so on that the clergy wear." "So, we're talking about two sacristies with two different functions?" "Yeah, most places would have had all this going on in one room." "Here they've got the luxury of keeping the clothes separate in a less secure building but is ideal to get to everywhere." "So our sacristy was like the wings of a theatre and what a theatre." "MUSIC: "Zadok the Priest" by Handel" "Because Henry was setting the scene for the most important ceremonies in the kingdom - royal weddings, funerals and coronations." "And this sort of pageantry needs a lot of room for preparation." "Well, that's pretty spectacular." "What's that?" "." "It's a cope and it would be worn by the priests and it dates back to about 1660 and it may have been used for the coronation of King Charles II." "It's beautiful." "It's in good nick." "Wonderful, yes." "What else have you got?" "." "Stunning." "Another cope here dating back also to Charles II, 1685." "And it may have been used for his funeral and these are still used to this day." "You can see why it requires such a lot of space, can't you?" "This cupboard goes back maybe five foot here, you pull that out and then if you need to change as well, then that's additional space and if you've got 20, 50 people all changing in the same place, it really could be quite difficulti" "A bit chaotic, yes." "Actually, I've just noticed over here, all the work that maybe 10 or 20 monks used to do in the medieval period is nowadays reduced to an ironing board, a little rack and plenty of starch." "(PHIL) Now that's another bone." "Oh, that's a jaw." "Outside, Phil's got his work cut out..." "Hello, there's another set of teeth." "Hello, there's another set of teeth." "Here's the top set and here's the bottom set." "..because he's uncovering multiple burials." "Burials on top of burials." "That's another one, look." "We need to find some Anglo Saxon potteryI" "Well, yeah, doesn't matter what..." "Warwick was excited to see Saxon tiles last night, dating to the abbey that Edward the Confessor built before Henry." "So this must be one of the oldest surviving rooms in the abbey, is it?" "." "It is." "This is a wonderful space it's known as the Pyx Chamber, and it is a complete 11th century room." "You won't go in anywhere older in London." "It was a treasury." "Now, these tiles which we've dug up are specimens similar to some we have here in the floor." "Now, look down here." "You can see we have a number of them in the floor which have scratched designs on and that, as you can see, is a sort of criss-cross design and this is the corner of one of those tiles." "It's just brilliant because that fits absolutely perfectly." "YesI" "So this is something commissioned by Edward the Confessor himself?" "Yes." "When we focus on Henry III, we forget that there was this massive, glorious building already here that Edward the Confessor builti" "Yes, there was." "Edward the Confessor didn't build the first monastery here." "He was rebuilding something that was here earlier." "So the sanctity of this site had been established hundreds of years before the Confessor." "And it's the original abbey that we're putting our resources into because nobody has ever found any archaeological evidence for it." "Raksha?" "Yeah." "You know we were looking for these chalk-lined burials." "You know we were looking for these chalk-lined burials." "Yeah." "I think I might have one." "Also, what do you remember about the alignment?" "." "Yeah." "It was on the skew." "That's right." "One should never go anywhere without a compass." "Yeah, they are a bit on the skew, aren't they?" "Yeah, they are a bit on the skew, aren't they?" "They are." "That's due east that way." "Watch this spaceI" "Watch this spaceI I know." "'It's a tall order to find out if 'this burial really was aligned with the earliest abbey at Westminster.'" "I believe..." "Oh, you have got some bones down here." "And Tracey has spotted something the might have been part of its fabric in the Victorian stairwell." "That one there, the long one, see the difference on the carving on that?" "." "This looks very much like Roman rustic stone carving." "Oh, that's carving, is it?" "." "Well, yes." "All these medieval and post-medieval stones here, they've got dressing on them?" "You can see the stripes where it's carved into the surface here, they're dressing the stone for use." "This one is completely different." "Here you've got this surround coming round here, but that's carved." "The decoration, the pattern is in relief, so it stands out." "Right." "Yeah, I can see that." "But there isn't really a major Roman site right near the abbey, is there?" "Not right near, no." "The theory is that it could have come from the earliest phase of abbey building and then it's just been incorporated much later on." "That's fab thing to find, though." "That's fab thing to find, though." "It's really niceI" "Everybody involved in the abbey is on tenterhooks to find out what else we can discover about this historic site in the final hours of the dig." "Jackie's already identified several burials, including an eight-year-old child." "Their alignment and level suggests that they're probably from the time of Edward the Confessor." "But what we really want is to pin down a date for the chalk-lined burial." "This has definitely disturbed by the Victorians." "Has it?" "." "Has it?" "." "Yeah, this is all Victorian backfill here." "And this means that any finds from the grave might be misleading." "Usually finds are vital clues for us, and this dig has produced vast quantities, which the students of Westminster School are helping us process." "That's somebody's leg bone." "What we need is something datable from the very bottom of the grave." "That looks more like a bit of tile or brick to me." "That's not pottery." "But you can't give us a date on it?" "." "It's tile or brick, mate." "It's not my job, I'm afraidI" "Sorry." "The good news is that now we can see the chalk-lined grave, it's clearly on a different alignment to the later burials." "So this ought to be associated with an early Saxon church?" "Exactly." "Exactly." "That would be incredible." "It would be fantastic." "And in order to be able to work out the date of the building to which this grave relates, what we need to do is to take a small sample of bone from the leg and have that radiocarbon dated." "What about pottery dating, Paul?" "One really interesting bit we have got is this." "Now, this is from much higher up but it's a piece of Saxon pottery - it's late Saxon Shelly ware." "Late 9th to early 11th century." "So pre-Edward the Confessor." "Warwick, does it make sense that that piece of pot is pre-Edward the Confessor?" "." "Oh, yes." "That is wonderful." "The fact that we've now got Saxon pottery of the period probably of Dunstan who founded the Church before Edward the Confessor and now if we've got a grave that could easily be of that period also we're beginning to get new horizons in the archaeology of Westminster." "Has anyone found anything associated with the Dunstan on this site?" "No." "We do not know anything about Dunstan's church or quite where it was or anything structural to do with it." "We haven't anything and this and the grave could be the first solid indications that we've got." "St Dunstan founded a Benedictine abbey on what was then Thorney Island in the 10th Century." "But there are stories of an even earlier church." "At the end of the day, after six solid hours' solid digging," "Phil finds more evidence that the grave pre-dates Henry III's sacristy." "I reckon I've cracked it." "I reckon this wall cuts this grave." "In other words, the grave is earlier." "Now, that is just what we want really." "Splendid." "I'm absolutely sure about it now." "Good." "But the final piece of the jigsaw will be the radiocarbon date." "If I put you on the rack, what date would you say that burial was?" "Ooh, you don't want much, do you?" "Around 950." "Ooh." "Ooh." "Not good enough, Mick?" "Too late, that's too late." "It should be earlier than that," "I think it would be nice if it was about 800." "So we're 99.9% sure that this burial is Anglo Saxon which is a first for Westminster Abbey." "But it all depends on that one little bit of bone." "I wonder what date it will be?" "We've had quite a journey here at Westminster Abbey." "We came here to find Henry III's lost sacristy and in so doing we've discovered it had a totally unique role." "It was the backstage area for the spectacular royal processions that were at the very heart of Henry's groundbreaking design." "But the totally-unexpected find was the first evidence of an early Saxon church, which we now think was built on a different orientation because the carbon date suggests our burial dates from the early-11th century, earlier than Edward the Confessor." "And this was a critical period when King Canute built the very first royal palace next to Dunstan's Abbey and the stage was set for greatness." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd"