Welcome back to Saint Mary's Field Museum. So, this is a
space where we're able to invite the public in to find
out a little bit more about the work that we're doing here at
the site of Saint Mary's in Stoke Mandeville and in this
film, we're actually gonna bring you up to date with what
we've been doing and we're also gonna go meet some of the
archaeologists who are working on the church itself.
Original evaluation of the church archaeologically was
done in 2018 where they removed a large amount of rubble that
had been created from the 1960s demolition of the church due to
it being unsafe. After that a report was made from which we
could start to figure out on how to go about excavating the
church and so at the start of this year once this lovely
tent was constructed we started excavating the church further.
We start looking at the archaeology through the
different period. So obviously we'll start off with all of the
Victorian stuff and twentieth century stuff and record that
each um piece by piece taking it down through the layers
until we get to a noticeable phase is what we call it then
we get the drone in and do a big drone flight and photograph
the whole church area and that's made into a threeD model
using photography. And then once that's done then we start
figuring out what's next in the sequence. We've got quite a few
burials now in the church where you can see these deep holes.
We've got some interesting graves in the east end of the
chancellor who are probably quite wealthy or high status
individuals. So we thought they might be there and they are
which is good. And at the other end we're doing the same thing.
We've just opened and excavated a sealed brick vault which is
probably nineteenth century or Georgian and recorded the
individual exumed in there. So here I've got a medieval jetton
which is not quite a coin but they would use it for
trading currency at certain merchants. So we think it's
sixteenth century. There's some sort of inscriptions around it.
And it's pretty well preserved for what it is. So usually
they'll be quite degraded but this one's quite well
preserved. So we're now standing in the the south
porch. This would be in the the main entrance into the medieval
church. Now the south porch is actually of interest because
this is AA new discovery. We didn't realize it was here.
There are no photographs or no drawings of the south porch. So
it was uh it was an unexpected uh discovery. The south door is
a it's it's a quite well detailed south door. We've got
this lovely feature here at the jam of the south door. Where
we've got the the chamfer of the stone. The door coming up
here and the rebate at the back where the door set. And we've
got this nice feature here. Um a label style where the uh
which basically turns the chamfer into the square of the
stone. It's a lovely feature here. Very well carved. Dates
to probably about 1320 uh thirteen forty. Uh it's a very
nice very nice detail. Very finely carved. Um it's it's
it's a special stone that one. There were four columns. One,
two, three, four for the archers that separated the nave
from the aisle. And you can see here they're very nicely
detailed. Um they're mid century in date. Very nicely
carved around here but what's interesting about these stones
is there's there's a couple of uh masons marks on here. We've
got AA cross here and these marks are are sometimes
interpreted as the um the mark that Mason makes so that when a
foreman comes at the end of the day, he knows how much stone
the mason has carved and he gets paid per um per stone. You
can also see uh some chisel marks here and this is the the
marks left by the chisel as the mason was working the stone um
taking off all the all these all the surprising to give a
nice flat surface to put the next stone on top. What we also
have around here is a very shallow line running around the
edge of the top of the stone and it provides basically the
template for the mason um to carve the next stones um in
sequence up on the column. So we're now looking at the north
wall of the late eleventh, thirty, twelfth century church.
Uh the nave of the the church here. What's interesting about
the fabric of the north wall is it's make a the flints are are
laid in a herringbone fashion and that is uh um material
that's laid um obliquely together like a herringbone and
that sort of work is quite typical of the late eleven 3012
century anything from about 1080 to about eleven ten. It's
a nice detail of this church. So separating the the nay from
the Chancellor is the chancellor arch. What we can
see is the the wall coming out here that separated the nay
from the chancellor and then the arch would have been there
in the in the middle and uh you've that have been dividing
the name from the Chancellor. We got photographs of the
Chancellor Arch before it was demolished and it's typical
work of the early twelve century. What we can see here
is it's constructed of a very finely um squared and told um
limestone ashler. Uh very nicely detailed. We can see um
good markings of the chisel marks of the mason where they
uh carved the stone and the limestone isn't local to this
area. And what's interesting about that is that the Bishop
Lincoln who seems to have owned the land that the chapel sit
son owned quarries in Lincolnshire. He owned
Limestone Quarries. So it's highly likely that the
Limestone Youth and the Chancellor Arch came from the
Bishop Lincoln's own quarries in Lincolnshire. The chancellor
of the church has seen quite a few alterations over time. What
we have here is the late eleventh early twelfth century
extent of the chancellor and you see it's identified by
yellow sandy mortar and you can see here there's AA straight
joint in the wall and it goes over to a a different fabric
type and that's where the twelfth century finished and it
looks like it's then being extended out possibly in the in
the thirteenth, thirty, fourteenth century and a new
east wall has been put on extending the the length of the
the chancellor. At some point, this later east wall has
collapsed or or it's been replaced and the east wall has
now come back to this point here where where it was and you
can see that uh um how how it abuts uh a straight joint
between the remains of the thirteenth century chancellor
and the new wall here which we believe is about the fifteenth
century. I think it's like the most interesting part of
archaeology is when you can see how people lived and how people
interacted with material culture and buildings with a
site. You normally only excavate a small portion and so
you get a tiny sort of like window into a bigger picture.
Whereas here we've excavated the whole area around this
church and so we've understood how the church fits in the
landscape with um all the other archaes that we've got from you
know medieval buildings outside of the church to Roman
archaeology on the hill and prehistoric stuff it kind of
gives you a picture that you don't normally get.