This year marks three decades since Time Team first appeared on our screens and, following the show’s relaunch online in 2021 (see CA 375), new episodes continue to appear on its official YouTube channel. Among the most recent releases is a dig that CA visited last summer, which focused on Modbury, a small market town nestled in Devon countryside 12 miles from Plymouth. The investigation was carried out in classic Time Team tradition, opening test-pits in back gardens across Modbury, as well as in the churchyard, pub courtyards, and the grounds of the local primary school. As well as the obliging residents, who nobly sacrificed (1m by 1m portions of) their lawns to the cause, the Team’s efforts were aided by an army of local volunteers, including schoolchildren and the town’s Scout Group.
Today, Modbury’s winding streets have a pretty village feel, peppered with pubs, boutique shops, cafes, and galleries, as well as elegant examples of Georgian and early Victorian architecture, but its history stretches back rather further into the past. Our first known mention of the settlement is found in the Domesday Book, and its name (deriving from the Old English for ‘meeting place’) points to Anglo-Saxon origins. Elements of its old street-plan survive, but widespread damage inflicted during the English Civil War, followed by a dramatic revival of the town’s fortunes that prompted extensive rebuilding during the Georgian period, has swept away most of its medieval buildings.
A highly visible exception to this pattern, however, is St George’s Church. Much of its fabric today dates to the 14th century, but the church was founded much earlier in the medieval period, and once stood alongside another ecclesiastical building. In the 12th century, the site was also home to Modbury Priory, a Benedictine community founded to administer lands owned by, and to send revenues back to, its mother house in Normandy. ‘Alien priories’ – those that operated under the control of a religious house in another country (usually, France) – were not uncommon in medieval England, but they became increasingly controversial during the periodic cross-Channel conflicts of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453), and in 1414 Henry V dissolved most of them once and for all. The monks of Modbury managed to escape this royal ire, and their home endured for almost three more decades, making it one of the longest-surviving Norman alien priories in England. But in 1441 their luck ran out, when Henry VI disbanded the community so that he could give its lands and possessions to his newly founded Eton College.
Feats of engineering