The Archbishops’ Palace, Otford

Description: Charles Shee discusses the history and archaeology at the Archbishop's Palace in Otford and what the future plans are.

Transcript: don't realize and this applies even to people who live in Oxford that The History of the Archbishop's palace Otford Charles Shee um the Archbishop Palace Herod one stage occupied a a site even bigger than that of of Hampton Court so I suppose the first question would be why would you want to live in Oxford in the first place well um this is Simonson's map from 1596 Symondson's map 1596 which shows the situation of Oxford which is in for those who don't know is in West Kent on the river Darren we have outfit hair and to the South down below it we have the Holmesdale Valley fertile Valley running across Kent with the pilgrims so-called pilgrims way running along it Oxford is at a gap in the north Downs with the river Darren running north towards the Thames so it's in a good area for River there was a Ford which has probably been here for a long time called otters Ford named after otter some sort of early Anglo-Saxon we we assume um up on the tops of the hills there's lots of wood down below we've got alluvium good for arable and pasture and we know up on the Hills to the east on Oxford Mound there's possibly um an Iron Age Promontory Fort there's certainly a barrow of some sort hidden away in the woods up there and we know that the the Roman remains here as well Progress Roman villa (1927) um this is a picture of an excavation in the early 20th century on progress Villa this is just to the south of um pilgrims Way East in Oxford on on a slope um quite quite a big Villa and of course there are Roman Villas every couple of Miles all the way up to to the Thames Church Field Roman villa um currently being excavated in church field which is actually very near the site of the medieval manner is a Roman villa I know Richards visited it and a number of people I've seen a number of people who are viewing or involved with drop who are the organization busy Excavating um top right hand corner you'll see there's a rather nice hypo course and below it and slightly to the left a tessellated I suppose we could call it a veranda and there are other Roman remains in in Oxford as well um on the slopes to the West on pole Hill when the M25 was going through and Anglo-Saxon inhumation Cemetery was excavated and that showed a lot of remains from the um probably from 7th and 8th Century but Oxford first enters the um the records with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle where there's a mention of the first battle of otfood In 1776. This was um when the mercians were very much in the ascendancy um trying to take over in Kent King offer came down he fought the condition and on that occasion the latter probably won although only temporally because after a brief pause the mercians took over such that in Otford land granted to Archbishop Wulfred um the 9th century king kenoff of Mercy was able to donate quite a big chunk of land to the Archbishop of Canterbury um to remain with the Archbishop in perpetuity this was Wilfred at the time um King kenolf died and the following year his successor King kellgolf gave another parcel of land so this pretty much was the nucleus of the Anglo-Saxon and medieval manner of Oxford land largely to the east of the the river Darren Second Battle of Otford 1016 Edmund Ironside v Canute um there was actually a Second Battle of Oxford this was in 1016 uh we don't know very much about the Anglo-Saxon period but in 1016 um we heard that edmodernside had a battle with Knute um this was by by now Wessex were taking over from Mercer as as Top Dog in in the Southeast and the kings of Kent had effectively ceased by now anyway Edmund Ironside managed to chase off Canute this picture is taken on the slopes of pole Hill the reputed site of the battle but in truth we don't know where either the first or the Second Battle of Oxford was it's not far from here on the slopes of Paul Hill that the Anglo-Saxon Cemetery was was excavated anyway knut as you know subsequently became king foreign so well have a think about the early years not much really to say and in terms of the record before we get to the Doomsday Book 10 1086 at the time oddford was an extensive Manner and the report has to be interpreted with some caution because this isn't just for the village of Oxford but encompasses kemzing Halstead and a number of other Villages and at the time there were eight Mills at least two of which were definitely in Oxford possibly more um the total value was about 82 pounds and the main tenant in Chief was the Archbishop of Canterbury The Priory of of Christchurch so the early Manor House pre-norman The early manor house little is known we assume it would initially be the timber building possibly later a a stone building possibly even incorporating ragstone from the nearby Roman villa we we just don't know we do know it was a settled manner by 1086 and there is there's always talk locally that after the northern Conquest that Archbishop lamb Frank did some improvements here now he way well have done but I have been able to find anything in the records about that and goodness knows he was busy enough producing fantastic buildings elsewhere in Kent interestingly in 1969 there was an excavation in bubbleston Road this this is a later development on the site of the medieval Palace and um an excavation there and a back Garden found a sewer containing some papal bully these are the metal seals that were attached to papal documents and these particular ones there were six found five of which could be dated to this Pope down on the right how uh Urban III this was in the time of um Archbishop Baldwin it would have been at that stage now he had a falling out with the monks and the The Priory at Christchurch he was rather unpopular with them this was quite soon after as you can see from the date um 1187 [Music] um quite soon after the martyrdom were backed in 1870 and by then already uh a lot of money was pouring into Canterbury so when he suggested when Baldwin suggested building another church that wasn't popular at all uh the local story is that having got these letters from from the pope saying he had to lift his suspension on the prayer and get a move on with that it just felt the boredom was so annoyed that he did the medieval equivalent of flushing the letters down the loo which is why they were found in a sewer whether that's true or not who knows but but it is a nice story um Baldwin didn't last that much longer he went off he crowned Richard the first and then he went off on the Third Crusade with uh with Richard to to Palestine to the Holy Land and he died of natural causes uh at acre The medieval manor house um moving on in the records 1273 I'll just look and see who that was kill Ward be at the time um he had just taken over from um Boniface of Savoy but was kill Warby had a big survey which showed extensive repairs in 1273 and that was probably following on from attacks down to the archbishop's manners throughout Kent from the baronial soldiers who had been fighting against Henry Henry III in in his battles um anyway we've got records showing a lot of repairs were done at that stage next thing we see is a report in 1284 when a stone church was built to replace the uh the wooden one at that date that would have been in the the decorated style 1348 Edward III now this was during an interregnum During the period when the archbishops when the archbishopric was vacant the properties reverted to the crown and often the Kings would actually keep these vacant for quite a long time because they got an income from them anyway Edward III spent Christmas at Oxford it was during a an interregnum for the archbishops and if you look at the day 1348 that of course was a great plague anyway he escaped from London and he had a jolly old time in Oxford next we find in the in the records that there are reports of this and other manners in Kent being attacked in 1381 that was of course the The Peasants revolt and the Archbishop of the time poor old Simon of Sudbury uh was uh actually murdered by the crowd and following on from that in 1382 the records show that there were extensive repairs done and a new stone hall which would have probably been at that stage in the in the perpendicular Style so what are the medieval manor house consist of well there was a great hall these were a common feature and became in the later medieval period almost a staple of Bishops and Arch Episcopal Archie Episcopal um uh palaces uh there was a chapel the Lord's chamber and the usual outbuildings we'd expect Stables Grange Ox house Sheepfold Etc we know quite a lot about this from manorial records um they're in roles held in the archbishops palace at Lambeth Palace I haven't been to the new library I understand I have been to the old one but I understand that's now moved into a new building whether it's open or not I'm I'm not sure but it is interesting to have a look at the roles there now just to orientate you this is a rather schematic map of model offered in the north up here in the top we've got the pond which is the if you like the epicenter a listed pond and that would have initially been probably on the side of the green which stretches down towards this way towards the South uh Parish church is up in a slightly prominent position as is often the case and as saxo Norman Church in the center of the village and a bit down here to the South we have the remains which I'll be talking quite a lot about later of the Tudor Palace to find the site of the medieval Palace we have to drift further down here to below the stream which was the site of the medieval Palace that zigzag line there are some walls which is which show the southernmost extent of the palace it was if you like a little island sitting down there I'm talking now about the medieval Palace not not the Tudor one so this is roughly what it might have looked like now we don't know exactly because it was built over uh and the latitude appeared the moats were filled in and it has never been properly properly excavated there have been some excavations I'll talk about in the bottom Southeast corner and a few small excavations in front and back Gardens of houses down here which is now where bubbleston road is south of the mode so there was a moat all the way around it was a small island the moat was um the island was extended on at least two occasions with a new mode being dug there was the chapel was almost certainly down here on the the bottom in the Southern left-hand side we're not really too sure about the layout of the rest of the buildings in the medieval one this is really a picture of what it would have looked like in the laser Tudor period the solid black lines which you can see up here in the north and down here in the South are bits of remaining War the northern one actually still running next to a stream which would mean the the original note um this Southeast tar was the focus of a later excavation which I'll talk about by Brian philp I'm going to digress just for a moment Otford Medieval Deer Parks to talk about the Oxford medieval deer parks this is a picture from Clark and stoyle the standard textbook on the standard book on the village uh and it's a bit difficult to see but where these Crossroads are as the center of the village with the church the pound and the manor house there the if we go south coming down this way we come to Seven Oaks if we go straight on up north we go up along possibly an old Roman Road but certainly a straight path leading up to Shoreham and and the Darren Valley the bottom right hand side which is the East we had this extensive area which was the great great park or the old park the earliest one probably from 13th century to the left which is the West we've got the newer slightly newer little Park still medieval and up in the north a rather enigmatic one called the new park which had certainly been disparked by Tudor period difficult to know quite what to make of that there are some big banks that look very like the the walls around the the banks around Deer Parks but we don't really know very much about that Hunting uh the reason I'm mentioning it is that there's very little in the records uh in the minorial roles about dares and hunting that does give the name of some of the Parkers we don't know the names Act of several of The Parkers uh but very little about the hunting and um and very little about deer and venison surprisingly there were two main sort of hunting the bow and stable stable with the men on horses who chased the deer the bow with these men on the left hand side in the left-hand picture hiding up in the trees who would then shoot the deer when they were paroled down into a narrow space the less common but more High status hunting was of course the par our fourth station where a stag would be selected for the hand and with a lot of magnificence the Lords and their dogs and men would chase this one stag who would be ritually killed Woodland but I'm mentioning this to show that actually because the the role show there was actually quite a lot of wood being coppersed or at least taken from this area both coppersed wood and large wood for for more structural purposes um outside the Deer Park the woods would have been coppers and just built used as a crop cut back every five to seven years within a deer park as for instance on the left they would be pollarded cut off at a higher level so the deal wouldn't be able to eat the the fresh shoots now it's probably a mistake to call them deer Parks a lot of modern a lot of historians now are tending to refer to these as as Parks rather than deer parks and looking through the records uh there are examples in this these particular parks of land being let out of pasture what's known as adjustment as as well as Pastor for the domain itself Panache pigs rooting through the woods to eat the acorns and the beach Mast there's even tile making fish ponds even crops being grown which must presumably have been in compartments we know some deer Parks did have sub-compartments within them um so the deer wouldn't wouldn't eat them later in the period rabbit Warrens wildfowl falconry so the message really is that these Parks were used for deer they were high status but they were probably used for an awful lot of other things simultaneously all right to return to the Tudor Palace which we know rather more about than we we do of the um the Earth the older Palace okay this is the Archbishop who built them Archbishop Warham (Holbein) warm he was um this picture incidentally uh is a copy of one the original is in the Louvre and the copy is hanging in in Lambeth Palace um Warren was appointed Archbishop at quite an old age he was a wickerist who had earlier been Bishop of London um he was Lord Chancellor between 1504 and 1515 initially working for Henry VII and later for Henry VII and he built the Tudor Palace which was an absolutely magnificent one I will show you on the let me see on the next picture how now this is a picture of the uh a sketch of the both the Tudor Palace probably was like in the lower section here you'll recognize this I've already shown you this separately this was the site of the medieval manor um Warren had most of this knocked down he kept the chapel and he kept the Great Hall uh he built this big Square Tower in the bottom right hand corner and he built a new range of buildings along here um I gather the pointer doesn't always show up but where the solid line is in the middle of a picture um he built a new Range oh I should like on the island with with an entrance in addition he added a really big outer core ill in a courtyard really here so the main entrance would have been right up on the top through the Gatehouse a three-story gate house uh on either side there's a Northwest tar and a Northeast Tower running down on the west there was a gallery and another one on the Eastern Gallery rather akin to the sort of architecture coming in round about that time if you think of the Oxbridge colleges or the Inns of Court big Courtyards with with lodges around the edge the moat was certainly kept uh initially with the main entrance down um uh in in the North yeah so the question arises why why did Why did Warham build here? Warren decide to build hair out of all the Palaces that he owned which is probably about a dozen or so or more he had a lot of banners well it was near London um he did have Knoll as well which belonged to the archbishops by that stage and it's felt that he probably used no more as a retreat it's a bit higher and drier but Oxford was his Grand Palace for for entertainment in his personal life he was quite abstemious but as a previous Lord Chancellor and as an Archbishop it wasn't cumbered on him to entertain lavishly and he did have some rivalry with Cardinal Woolsey there are so there is some rather jokey correspondence between the two of them as as Woolsey was was building Hampton Court but I'm indebted to an article by Orden Gregory and I've given the reference to this at the end of The Talk about that Warren may have seen himself in some ways being very similar to Thomas Beckett he was a great fan of Beckett he kept um he kept mementos of him uh Gregory suggests that because of the associations between Oxford and Beckett that this is one of the reasons that he kept the church and the the the the stone hall and the other thing was that the thought of martyrdom by this stage late in his career shortly before he died Warren was increasingly falling out with Henry VII and it's likely that if Warren hadn't died he could well have be martyred or executed by the king and in fact he ended up being buried quite close to uh to Thomas Beckett in in Canterbury Cathedral so those are some of the reasons why he may have decided to build that of course it was quite near London the archbishops tended to travel from London to Canterbury on a more southerly approach so they would leave Lambeth then go via Croydon most of the Palaces were about a 15-mile gap between then from Croydon to oddford then route to Maidstone chairing in Canterbury uh ruseum's actually quite near Oxford and that didn't last very long I think mid 14th century I think it was archbishop's Simon Islip had it demolished or partially demolished there is a bit a bit of a building still left there foreign I'm grateful to Rod Shelton who lives in Oxford for making this model of the um The Tudor palace (model Rod Shelton) the Tudor Palace it gives some idea it may not be entirely accurate but pretty accurate I think um so if we start down on the bottom we've got the Great Gate House with three stories and crenellations we've got a northern range running across an East and Westerly Direction on the right hand side we have the Northwest tar uh a lot of which still stands we still have the right hand or Western gate house but the Eastern Gate House the northeastern tower on the left and both Rangers have now gone most of what we have on the island which is at the top of the picture to the South uh has pretty much all has disappeared apart from some walls um you came through the main gauge yard there was quite a big Courtyard in front of it and then you would cross that and go through another big gauge yard through the north the new North range and then into the residential area the houses and lodges on the western side overlooked a privy Garden and on the Eastern side overlooked um farms and Stables sorry are people getting an echo I can I can hear an echo coming through for um the more functional buildings this was often the case obviously because the prevailing winds are Westerly so you would want the the nice fresh winds to come over the garden and blow blow across and blow away the the smells from the the yard and this is an impression by Rob Sheriff about the front of their palace might have looked like really quite a dramatic structure and this is a view from from the north as it looks at the moment this is a slightly different um representation in the lower part uh a sketch by Pat Patrick Phillips and we see here up on the top on the right the existing Northwestern Tire over on the left we've got the Western half of the gate house which obviously has been severely truncated it used to be a three-story building as we can see below and in between there was um a range and a Cloister but that's been replaced in the early 20th century with some cottages um from Rod's model this is an example of what it may have looked like uh looking at the Western Range so there were series of residential lodges with Windows looking out over the privy Garden which was in quite a formal style and was said to contain little Pavilions of pleasure you could make of that what you will so some of the notable visitors during this early period included Cardinal competio the papal Leggett um Hans Holbein and Erasmus Erasmus and Warren were actually quite friendly and they they met and there was extensive correspondence between them The Field of the Cloth of Gold 1520 uh possibly one of the best um known and most lavish of the visits was that of the the field of the cloth of gold of Henry VII and Catherine of Aragon in 1520 when they went on a grand procession across Kent and then across the channel down to meet in northern France at the field of a cloth of gold um or one there was a wonderful spread apparently it Oxford where they spent a a day or two um the field with a cloth of gold was a really extravagant display if you're driving down south from Calais there's a rather unprepossessing looking field on the right which is labeled as La core dudrador I've never actually been to look at it but I gather there's not not a lot to see there and it didn't do a lot of good because within a few years Henry was fighting the French anyway despite the treaties they signed Thomas Cranmer Archbishop 1533 anyway Warren died before he could be executed and he was succeeded by Kramer in 1533 um of course he was executed later and uh under Mary the first it's often said that he written he wrote the book of common prayer at Oxford he probably didn't but he he did reside there on periods it said that he enjoyed hunting he wasn't that well off and there are letters of him writing to friends asking him to send him dear for hunting but he liked walking and reading and it's recorded in in the privy Garden 1537 Henry VIII gets Palace 1537 dissolution of the monasteries and Henry VII gets not just this but numerous palaces he got null Maidstone and other adavas um it surprises to me how much give the number of palaces he had about 50 plus altogether um that he was able to keep an eye on them all but it certainly recorded that he um he bought little Parcels of land around Oxford he had deer imported he did spend money on Oxford um it fell into uh rotten disuse not long afterwards and so he sometimes gets the blame but actually he did spend money on it the problem is that the the extant bills don't distinguish between how much he spent on null Oxford and other palaces but but he did spend Post Henry (died 1547) anyway Henry died in 1547 and the palace then passed on to to Edward VI he briefly handed it over to Lord Dudley who was official who was really the sort of head of government at the time um but after Edward VI died um they passed over to Queen Mary she briefly gave it to Cardinal poll it moved back to the crown then with Queen Elizabeth during the Elizabethan Reign the sydneys of penshurst became the formal stewards of the manor so they knew that area well and there's a long and very tedious correspondence between the sydneys and Queen Elizabeth or at least their their respective agents about trying to buy the buy the property in Oxford probably because penshurst during the winter could be a bit inaccessible through through the Wild and mud Lanes but anyway the sydneys did finally buy buy it in 1601 probably because Queen Elizabeth had debts to pay off from her Wars in in Ireland he didn't keep it for very long he had ten daughter ten children six of whom were daughters he undoubtedly had Diaries to pay for and 17 years later he sold on the manor to somebody locally called Sir Thomas Smith thought that one of the reasons the northern range is survived is that the sydneys may have used that as their estate house or office at the time following the sale of the manor by then the deer Parks have been disparked the northern one sometime before uh little Park was sold off earlier and finally the Great Park and this was subsequently divided into three Farms which lasted right down until fairly recently so that effectively was the end of the manner going back to the building itself we Manor surveys what we know about it comes from some surveys the first of these was 1541 nobody actually knows where this survey is it's been much quoted and it's said to be in private hands but nobody knows whose private hands anyway this is this this one of 1541 has a very good description of the layout of the palace pretty much as we've seen it in in Rod's model uh 1548 there was another survey under Edward VI and this mentions much Decay uh said to be decay in Fault of lead which suggests that somebody been stripping lead off for roofs and um letting the water in Elizabeth the first hung on to it she hardly ever visited and she didn't want to sell it but she didn't really use it much 1573 there was a survey and I'm just looking at my notes it said there were rotten Timbers broken glass missing door locks and keys and it was going to cost masses to try and restore it why the sydneys wanted to buy it I'm not sure but anyway they did we then move on to the earliest picture 18 C view of the palace from the SW (I Bayly) I've been able to find of the palace this is a view in the 1700s and as you can see already it is pretty derelict on the left we've got the uh the tower uh de-roofed at this stage Parish Church in the distance on the right hand side we've got the the western part of the Gatehouse which has now been taken down in size and the area in between was obviously being used as as agricultural buildings on the side I think we need to think how do palaces disappear you would think having had this massive Place rivaling Hampton Court there'd be a bit more to see well it's not that unprecedented after all you can think about non-such this was Henry's fantastic Renaissance Palace in Surrey which was built in 1538 in in the Renaissance style that passed down through the crown to Charles eventually to Charles II he handed it over to one of his Mistresses uh Barbara Countess castlemaine who had massive back gambling debts and she sold it off she had the whole place demolished and there's now nothing to see above ground at non-such at all and um in the Bishops palaces themselves there's an interesting thing which I only found out recently I was reading Tim Tatton Brown's book on Lambeth Palace he's a well-known architectural historian and he mentions that during the Commonwealth period in the mid 17th century pretty much all the Episcopal and Archie Episcopal great Halls of which they were quite a number in England were de-roofed and that's why actually very few of the medieval great Halls survived to this day so that's just an aside that buildings can disappear Tithe map 1840s we move on to the 1840s this is the tithe map from about 1844 and I'm showing this really to um to show what little remained at that stage and also the water supply so to orientate you top left hand corner we have the village Pond we've got the church to the right um we've got some remains here um halfway down on the left hand side but we can see that most of the castle has gone most of the palace is gone there is a bit running in a southerly direction and it's felt that these may have been farm buildings rather than the original Eastern range of the castle and down here in this field at the bottom Mark 5 10 that was being used for pasture at the time and is roughly in the area of where the medieval Island was but you'll see by 1840 the only bit of the island that remains is the the little stream running along to the north of it um if we but I come up to the top stream um I mentioned actually I didn't mention but Oxford is on where the chalk the permeable chalk from the Downs meets the impermeable gold clay and so we have spring lines on that side there's a spring up here in the top of the picture which fills some ponds and leads down and from this it now runs down through Castle Farm in a southerly direction and from that Spurs were taken off to run across to provide this great big Courtyard and the northern range and in fact south of the northern range there's a little stream which you'll see in some later photographs which which still runs across there and indeed there's a culvert running underneath and coming out from the guard room tar which is buried and then comes out and reappears to join up with another stream this lower one I'm mentioning because it's again another spring which originates in the area of Beckett's well which I'll show you in a moment it runs across here uh in a Westerly Direction it's currently buried underground as it was on 1840 and then reappears and this would have been the original Northern mode and this would have been the source of water for the whole mode which surrounded the um the medieval Palace Beckett's well probably has nothing to Becket's well do with Beckett the legend is that he stamped the ground with his staff and a spring appeared but there's probably always been a spring there and that's pretty much adjacent to the Roman site that's been being excavated at the moment so I think it's probably been there a long time an excavation by Oxford archaeologists in the 1950 showed that the construction was probably um probably 14th century and later on in 1440 there's an account in the medieval records of extensive work and repairs being done to uh what was called the the fountain I think it was really only called Beckett's well a bit later although they were the associations with Beckett this is what it looked like in in the 1950s it was empty and drained for the archaeological work and this is a bit like it looks at the moment much more overgrown they're not strictly comparable because the first picture the one on the left is looking in a Westerly Direction the one on the right is looking in an easterly Direction these concrete pipes are later editions the excavation showed that on the wall facing East there were two nice little arched inlets for the Springs at the bottom what is sad to note is if we look at this which is the Northern wall it was quite intact in the 1950s and if we look at it now uh it certainly appears to have lost some of its top so moving on to the late 19th century uh this is a view of the palace in 1885 heavily covered in Ivy ruinous uh Parish Church in the background you're probably used to the view now of the tar with the range in between actually you can see there some of the windows were open this would have been a Cloister with open rather nice Tudor Windows which would have been open there and the Western half and um this was the area that was probably inhabited by the sydneys as a farmhouse if you want to see who was resident in the late 19th century I think I've got a picture there of a resident or at least one of the residents which you can see down there and at that stage the gate house was being used as a barn Gatehouse as a barn there's a rather nice fine Tudor window which is still there uh straw covering it's subsequently been tiled this was a Victorian picture some hens pecking away in the foreground and that was the main entrant oh sorry that was the main entrance there this was a later entrance the the one to the right of the the arch Tudor looking doorway this flight of stairs was added probably in the Victorian period and led up to an attic which was built in the in the gate house and this funny little extension on the left of the picture have subsequently gone as well um this is an early photograph of Castle Farm which lies to the east was probably the Farmhouse or the Grange for for the medieval manner there is some tutor work buried in here and some evidence of Warren may have had a part in in building this but a lot of the additions you see there are actually later so we move on to the more recent history 1933 Freehold bought by William Collier 1933 you could see a rather forlorn looking tar surrounded by not very much sort of empty Fields but a sign has gone up here about houses for sale what happened was that in 1933 the Freehold was bought from the farmer by a local Builder called William Collier the background to this is not just because there were developments going on around and outside London at the time but there was a rumor that the London's airport at Croydon would be re-situated to uh north of the Darren Valley near lullingston and so clever people thought oh well if that's true there's going to be a big demand for property people want to live within commuting distance and it's a good time to build houses so William Collier bought the land but there was then an uproar amongst the locals who grown rather fond of their palatial um their ruinous Palace probably rather than palatial ruins and there were protest meetings the bishop of Rochester got involved and Collier had threatened that if they didn't buy the ruined area and the immediate land that he would flood in and surround the whole the whole thing with with houses so in 1935 uh Seven Oaks that it was the RDC the rural district council at that stage decided to buy the ruins and some of the land around that and it went into their ownership Collier retained ownership of the rest of the land and in 1936 he built first three houses on bubbleston Road and no excavation obviously at the time and then the war came along and things quietened down and we had a bit of stasis for a while um until 1974 this was the excavation by 1974 excavation by Brian Philp and team Brian philp and his Rescue Team the builders and I'm afraid I can't remember who owned it at the time but were about to start building more houses on babelson road now I've shown you this map before this is the schematic map of the village if we come down here to the bottom you could see bubbleston Road that is the site of the filled in southern moat which was around the medieval Palace and just north of bubbleston Road this dark red line here are the ragstone remains of the the southern walls of the palace up here is the northern bit of the moat and along there there are actually if you look carefully there are some Stone remains of of the northern though to be seen 1974 Brian phillp excavated this area which is um um was going to be built on but actually due to public pressure was subsequently purchased by Seven Oaks um District Council would have been by that stage and the excavation here showed a big Square tar almost certainly a warrant's construction there were four sluice guard robes beneath the tar one could see the remains of an earlier uh medieval probable tar that had been there but certainly made medieval buildings under that with in fact remains of an earlier guard room a number of water channels excavations showed that the the motor routers had been filled in on at least two separate occasions the main mode was probably filled in um in The Tudor period but we don't know exactly when not not during Warren's time we think um excavations showed a lot of uh masses of of medieval Pottery some early probably 12th century Shelly Ware and some later Sandy wear animal bones including pigs cattle and some deer and anyway this area was subsequently protected and has now the buildings on bubbleson road run along in that gray area and this bit of land now has been covered over um and is if you like green belt and is also owned by the um Palace trust who now own the palace field and the palace there NW Tower 1960s and 2010 so this shows what it looked like in the 1960s still rather forlorn looking tar I forgot to mention that there was a fire in the early 20th century and the straw roof uh burned on on the barn the Gatehouse and the barn The Stables how and three Carmen's Cottages were built which are now private residences and a tiled roof was put on uh it's now rather more overgrown here's one of the little streams that runs from the East starting way over there in a spring running around Going Underground a bit and then feeding through and going down to join the moat another one coming in somewhere just off the picture here which is from the guard robe which isn't that that tar on the right hand side of of a Northwest time um around about 2014 bits of the tar started falling off it was becoming quite dangerous there was no proper roof and the masonry was in a poor State and so Seven Oaks District Council who who owned the site who who own the site did some Tower repairs to show you some of the pictures of the repairs going on in the tire down to a very good very high standard and we're now left with the present remains a very respectable looking roofed Tower oh just a passing note there if you look carefully you'll see um it's built with classical English Bond sort of long and short bricks but in between we've got what's called diapering this decorative burnt brick work cause bricks bird bricks end on causing a nice pattern this just shows that it was meant to be brick this tile was not going to be plastered over it was meant for show this is a view inside the tower as you can see the floors have fallen in there are plans to replace these at some stage very ambitious plans this is a view inside the guard row I found whenever going to castles that um Inside garderobe tower children can never resist looking into the guard robe and in fact neither can adults and many a photographs has been taken I think of people seated clothes that I hasten to add within these areas foreign The cowshed becomes three farmworkers' cottages workers Cottages this is a picture taken from a drone it should be familiar to you now the Northwest tar The Cottages in between you can just see along their remains of some nice looking Tudor with Windows which were later bricked up and we've got our the bottom bit remaining from the from the Gatehouse which has been used variably it was a stables and during the war second world war was used as a mortuary and after the war was used for Scouts and then for Girl Guides um and now belongs to the the archbishop's trust another view from the Drone you can see the nice new roof and the big Courtyard this would have been the great inner Courtyard on the left-hand sideboard the outer Courtyard through which you're approached you will cross that and then go off to your right hand side to enter the medieval manner there's a dis a modern Bungalow where the Eastern range would have run and in the distance you could see Castle farmhouse this is a view of some of the stone ragstone remains in bubbleston Road there's actually quite a lot of rag Stones scattered around Oxford you see it in some of the walls you see it in the High Street as a damp course along some of the Cottages some of it moved over to null to help build a Folly there uh it's really just amazing how the building Stone gets reused and they originally probably did come from the Roman villa in church field the one that's been excavated at the moment it was in this area that those papal seals were founded in the sewer I might just quickly mention this this was also found lot of the sewer but during one of the excavations it's some Roman plaster painted plaster I forgot to mention it with Brian Phillips excavation they did find a little bit of Roman infill in fact on top of the medieval which is a a nice example of reverse reverse stratigraphy so what could this be well we don't know for certain but it is just possible this may be a portion of a Cairo symbol an early Christian symbol for for Christ there is a very good intact one which was found at lullington Roman villa and that is now visible and on this prominent display in in the British museum well what to do with the tar various option appraisals came up in 2017 the archbishop's palace conservation trust apct was formed and they came up with a plan to renovate it and open it as a museum and interpretation center for the Darren Valley and so in 2019 uh a 99-year lease was signed from Seven Oaks District Council giving ownership for that period to the apct um the plan is that the flaws will be reinstated and a ground floor level there would be an entrance maybe a glass Atrium with depending on planning permission a little Museum and Shop then on the first floor a Tudor room a museum and on the second floor this could be used to house archives archaeological remains for research exhibitions meeting spaces Etc and the Gatehouse could be similarly used uh just prior to covid there was a little Heritage Center Museum in the Parish Office the parish council offices and um that closed down for all the complicated reasons but you can see Rod's model there on the left and various other artifacts Tudor Roman and so on and the contents of those have now moved from the Oxford Heritage Center to become the Oxford Heritage collection under the Aegis of the archbishop's palace conservation Trust so we'll have the Heritage collection in addition the conservation and building project will be organized by the apct ultimately to become an interpretation Center Museum and running parallel to this will be a community outreach educational program I've just mentioned here briefly some of the local National people who have contributed towards this so in conclusion Conclusion um we've had an Anglo-Saxon manner we've had emoted medieval manner we've then had an Archie Episcopal Grand Palace which then became a Roman Royal Palace we've had a then deteriorating bit but becoming a farm then a ruin then a protected side and now possibly a museum so I think it's a good example of cyclical change and use of buildings and land in the landscape and how the landscape can change over time and we're about to enter yet and yet another phase so we'll see how that goes References um so that's all I was going to say Richard I've got a few references but um we probably don't need to leave them up because I understand that later the talk will go up on YouTube where people will be able to have a look at those it's just a selection there's a lot more one could have put on that yeah thank you thank you very much Charles that was fascinating and I didn't realize there's so many phases to the Palace you know the the early manner the medieval manner the Tudor Palace and the sheer scale of that Tudor Palace I think it is staggering it's it's it's quite difficult to comprehend really it is it was absolutely massive and um a bit like Hampton Court is now and of course with the part with the parks and the outlying buildings it would have been been even more dramatic but as I mentioned them big buildings can disappear it's quite extraordinary yeah I'm going to look into this this concept of de-roofing yes the the Puritans love destroying things still I mustn't be too anti-purism yeah right we got uh a couple of questions I think uh okay firstly Nicholas asks uh are any of the drains negotiable um when you say negotiable you mean would people be able to look after them with a traversable that sort of thing are they still in existence or can you can you yes the the southern one runs from Beckett's well there's a stream which then runs through Castle Farm uh it then goes through a through a conduit underground which has actually been drawn I don't know there are some good drawings in fact on the Archbishop Palace conservation trust the apct there there is a a section called archives and there's some nice drawings and plans on that including some quite sophisticated drawings of that conduit which leads all the way from the farm it then goes Underground Across where a bit of scrub land where the Southeastern Tower was it then runs and you could see it coming out it then runs to the uh north of bubbleston Road and if you walk along that road and peer over you can actually see the remains of of the the northern mode and then curves round and runs in a southerly direction it then gets submerged again and runs under houses turns right and disappears into the field across the other side of the Seven Oaks Road and then leads into um into the Darren the darrenth river um the more Northerly Springs you can see if you walk on the path leading from the church to the station if you go from Oxford from a public path heading from the church to the station on the left you can see some ponds and um dips under the path and then reappears in Castle Farm that's private property so please don't go and wander around in there uh runs down through a series of ponds which we're almost certainly used for fish ponds in in The Tudor period they are described on on the plans and then those run down and they dip underground to to join the um the northern part of the of of the manner and with side Spurs as I mentioned um yes if if you had I must show my my medical background I'd call it a sigmoidoscope I'd had more plumbers would call it but I know plumbers have them now really wonderful fiber optic machines which can go a long way um don't go do this without pushing from English Heritage but I think you could probably go quite a long way you could there is one that comes out um to the west of the Guard robe I suspect if you pushed your fiber optic scope you would probably find Rubble under it but but who knows we are planning to do a rather more sophisticated geophysical survey there have been some done in the past but a finer scale geophysical survey providing full permission as granted of course it's non-invasive doing um uh the survey in the in the great Courtyard which which might show some of these channels running Underground yeah that was actually going to be my question Charles have you got any plans for geophysical surveys in in the in the courtyard yes and we're actually hoping possibly um with the help of of Anne Sasson and um the Darren Valley partnership to do some geophysics once the weather's improved a bit in the spring obviously um it's not very suitable to do it at the moment but we're hoping yeah yeah and uh final question for Graham has any evidence of pre-conquest that's Roman and Norman uh been found during the excavations in the past there's the old there's the old Flint um on the Palace site there's nothing to suggest uh there's nothing to suggest any previous um Neolithic or other um the residents or working in the the immediate area of of the medieval Palace that that I'm aware of I need to go back and look at Brian Phillips report to the excavations as to whether incidentally the odd flints and so on may have been found they did find a rather nice um early Norman Romanesque Capital which was in buried in one of the trenches so it suggests that there was an earlier Norman building which at some point was destroyed and used to to fill in as prior to the later mid medieval buildings but I I'm not sure about earlier stuff not on that side anyway there are um scattered around Oxford you will find earlier things as we've mentioned the Roman and there have been some fines of Iron Age coins and and so on but not immediately in the area of the palace okay