Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
This is a very important (quasi) royal site it began in the middle ages about 1200 A.D.
we hope to first of all prove the existence of some of the Tudor buildings and find out
more about them
but equally importantly go back for 300 years before the Tudors right back to the beginning
of the site and yes we have found evidence of the first memorial buildings were brought
here 1200 A.D..
Yes we've been interested for some years in finding out about Woking palace
we knew for a long time it was an important site in the medieval period and went on to
be used by royalty particularly Henry the 7th and Henry the 8th during the 15th and
16th centuries
but as you see behind you it has been totally demolished so there was plenty to find out
about 4 centuries of history under the ground and were delighted that we were able to organise
this excavation in conjunction with Surrey Archaeological Society and Woking Borough
Council to find out more about the site.
We've found a lot of information about the walls and other elements underneath the ground
and we can see that there were more extensive elements to the palace than we previously
knew and we are beginning to get an idea how royalty in particular Henry the 7th and Henry
the 8th adapted the palace to suit there greater needs than were required in the medieval period
so were learning an awful lot
we've got some really interesting finds but really with this kind of work its afterwards
when you piece together the finds the evidence of the records what we can see in the ground
and what we knew already to make a much more coherent story of what to say as time goes
on.
Well it's a very large site, it's about 8 acres we have run 4 weeks of geophysics on
it first of all to fill up our thoughts on where to put the trenches because it's a scheduled
ancient monument
we have to get English heritage consent not just in general but in detail and because
it's a scheduled ancient monument were not allowed to use a digger to come in and dig
deeply so we had a digger come in and just take off this very rough surface so physically
for the diggers its been quite hard because its all been dug by hand.
New to me was the chance to discover these tiles that were specific to this site that
came from Spain a few have been found but it was really nice that the volunteers got
a chance to dig them up on this site so that's was particularly nice.
And the main thing was to have public engagement and I think we've been able to achieve that
having about 120 people who've never dug before being involved through out the course of the
3 weeks well it's a testament to the interest levels in Woking.
We've been running a lecture series, I've been running a lecture series at Woking palace
ever since I became the chairman of the fens there will be a quite extensive lecture series
starting this November organised by Surrey History Centre and hopefully we will raise
public awareness sufficiently that we will attract more money for years two and three.
The lecture series is focused around the idea of Royals and Revolution because between I
suppose the earliar part of the 16th century and the middle of the 17th century there were
enormous changes in England the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry the 8th released
vast amounts of land into the market and there was a transformation how the land was used
and how the economy developed so that was one kind of revolution and at the other end
we have the revolution of the civil war when the king himself was overturned and we had
for a brief while at least a republic in England so there were a lot of fascinating elements
in history during that period and this site itself covers that era and those developments
to a large extent.