Miss Mick, such a great teacher. Love his work on monastic sites.

I could listen to these all day.

I Love these out takes and conversations, I could listen to this for hours, and learn so much from them.

Wow I am loving hearing Mick illuminate the history for us. What a great capture of a gifted educator. Thank you Mick for all your hard work, we miss ya mate ♥

Great conversation. Thanks for sharing. And... I want to know more about barns!!

0:54 "Tudor Yuppies" This is why we miss Mick. Brilliant.

Thanks a lot for that sharing

This summarizes perfectly why I have a playlist called Spiritual Utilities. There’s always been a social function to our more Mytho-Poetic belief systems, which benefits by social cohesion across every culture.

"Tudor yuppies basically" hahahaha

A master class indeed. Professor Aston added greatly to my knowledge of English history. Miss him incredibly and mourn that I never met him.

By the mid to late medeval period, most churches and monasteries also exercised a lot of political power. Having the local monks and/or bishop on your side could literally save your life, and led to additional income generation - think: networking.

i often wonder through how many of those striped jumpers the Professor went in the 16 years that he was on the time team?

Aristocrats also wanted clergy on-site to educate their children. Read: "How the Irish Saved Civilization" by Thomas Cahill

If the church ended up owning 25% of the agricultural land, and most of that was through the monastic orders, there must have been a massive displacement of the peasantry when the monasteries switched from being landlords to directly cultivating the land by means of celibate lay brothers living in barracks. That would have been like collectivisation in Russia. The other thing that cleared the land would have been the change from cultivation to sheep farming, which Mick Aston implies was not done only by the monks. So the "lowland clearances" may have been as traumatic as the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries. Nobody wrote about them, because only the monks were writing chronicles in the middle ages. There must have been a lot of popular resentment, which could have contributed to movements like Lollardy and the Peasants' Revolt. Although the monks were providing public services such as education and hospital care, that may have been outweighed in people's minds by the massive economic impact of their landholdings. Their acquisitions were sometimes underhand: not all of the charters that granted them lands were genuine. They had a whole branch of philosophy called casuistry to justify dishonest actions that benefited the church. So the dissolution of the monasteries (and schools and hospitals) was not solely due to the greed of Henry VIII and his rich friends.

When I watch this, I'm reminded of the circumstances at the time: Time Team trying to "modernize", adding behind the scene interviews, desperately trying to crank up its viewer count. Meanwhile, Mick wanted the show to remain as it was: education & integrity first. Not long after this, they were going to remove people from the show behind his back, adding new people without consulting him and watching these interviews brings a bit a double feeling to me, especially since his death shortly after he left the show in anger.

Wonderful

Music was also provided by choirs with boy students providing the upper voices. We forget how much the western church were involved with education. Some of these kids would have entered the monastery, some not.

I'd like to see a Time Team in Ireland.

Interesting stuff!

Fascinating conversation the centuries change but the people stay and have the same aims.....be it a peasant or landlord.

You can't dig down a foot in England and not dig up a professor.

Who's the guy in the hat?

Great talk, but the benefices were not for "saving their souls in Hell", but in Purgatory.

I think it's too bad to have someone who isn't Catholic (or even a believing Christian) giving such a garbled and deficient idea of Catholic Christian beliefs. I greatly like Mick as an archaeologist, but I'll stick to Catholic literature to explain Catholic spirituality.