In the 14th century Shropshire was one of the wildest counties in England. Poverty, famine and war with the Welsh were constant threats. A key to stability lay with local landowners, some of whom prospered in the face of adversity, some of whom didn’t.
This is the home of one powerful medieval family who lost the battle to survive. In last Sunday’s Time Team we came here to find out why.
Hello, and welcome to Time Team extra. I’m Robin Bush and each week I’ll be here to put Time Team’s current programmes into some form of historical perspective.
In this weeks programme, Time Team visited a medieval manor house at Aston Eyre in Shropshire, where the archaeologists tried to work out when the many different phases of the buildings had been put up. Historian Paul Stamper, had the job of relating the changes to the buildings with the various owners of Aston Eyre through the Middle Ages.
To digest our finds and help us put them in a broader context is Professor Ronald Hutton from the University of Bristol.
But let’s begin with the first challenge of last Sunday’s Time Team, which was to work out how to do archaeology on buildings that’s are still above ground floor level.
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