On the 11th of October 1982,
one of the most important shipwrecks ever found
emerged from the sea's murky depths.
A global audience of over 60 million people
tuned in to see history being made.
There is the wreck of the Mary Rose.
What an amazing sight.
For over 40 years, the Mary Rose has slowly yielded up its secrets
as the ship and its contents
have been carefully excavated and conserved.
And the BBC has been there every step of the way,
to document this incredible journey.
The history series Timewatch
played a key role in this reporting.
Over the last three decades, Timewatch helped chart
the ever-changing story of Britain's greatest
underwater archaeology project.
Over the years the Mary Rose has delivered countless unique
discoveries, as well as a series of cutting-edge breakthroughs,
which, taken together,
have transformed not just our view of this iconic ship,
but also the Tudor age in which she sailed.
'Even four decades on,
'the Mary Rose is still offering challenges and opportunities
'to historians and archaeologists.
'Each year, new information and insights continue to emerge.'
But that's not all. Over the last 40 years, the Mary Rose project
has itself made history.
It's helped to turn underwater archaeology
into a real, credible science.
And along the way, its produced some groundbreaking scientific advances.
I'll be using 40 years of remarkable BBC archive film
to chart how this amazing underwater time capsule
has captured the nation's imagination.
But also, how this one wreck would redefine archaeology at sea.
For centuries, shipwrecks have fascinated and intrigued us.
But it's only in recent decades that archaeology has allowed
historians to use wrecks to understand the past.
The Mary Rose played a key role in this process.
The team working on her would help
forge the science of underwater archaeology
but also bring back to life this flagship of King Henry VIII.
In her day, the Mary Rose was a formidable ship.
Over 100 feet long,
weighing some 700 tonnes
and heavily armed with 91 guns.
She was also one of the fastest ships in Henry's VIII's fleet
and played a key part in his Navy.
The mention of the Mary Rose might make you think back immediately to
that magical day in 1982, when she rose out of the water,
almost miraculously.
But actually, that wasn't the start of the Mary Rose story.
That was simply a milepost,
and it followed years of hard work by archaeologists and divers.
The tale of how the Mary Rose came to be saved
really started some 20 years before that remarkable day in 1982.
In fact, for nearly 500 years, Henry VIII's favourite warship
had been all but forgotten,
lying hidden somewhere off the south coast of England.
But all that changed in the 1960s,
when one man's personal crusade
led him to the greatest discovery in British maritime history.
His name was Alexander McKee,
and the BBC caught up with him in the late 1970s.
I took a dive when I was 38
and I thought,
"This place hasn't been explored before.
"This is an opportunity that will come once,
"to me only, to one generation only."
"I'm not going to waste my time on just lobsters or
"picking up copper and brass, and stuff like that.
"The most important known wreck in northwest Europe is here.
"Somewhere here.
"And I will spend my time on that, and even if I fail,
"I won't actually have wasted the time
"because it was a well worthwhile objective."
TIMEWATCH PRESENTER: McKee didn't just search the seabed at random.
He is a historian and he conducted a very thorough
programme of research into the wreck.
This led him to a collection of watercolours
made by the Dean brothers before 1840.
The Dean brothers invented and patented helmet diving gear
and used it for salvage.
They stumbled on the position of the Mary Rose by accident
and recovered cannons and other objects which were sold at auction.
The approximate position of the map was marked
on an Admiralty chart, which McKee found in 1966.
This discovery was crucial.
I knew by that time
that even Dean had found virtually nothing of the Mary Rose
showing above the seabed.
He said there was nothing standing up high enough
to which he could even attach a rope.
So, we were looking for an invisible wreck, cos we were a 120 years later.
At the time, many thought McKee and his team were mad,
and that the Mary Rose would never be found.
But McKee had a secret weapon up his sleeve.
During the search, McKee collaborated with
some pioneering American scientists
who were using a new technology called sub-bottom profiling.
This allowed the scientists to use sonar pings
to see what lay hidden beneath the seabed.
On a fateful day in 1967,
the proverbial X appeared on the sonar map.
McKee had his target.
The Mary Rose was the first historic wreck in British waters
to be found using this cutting-edge technology.
And it paved the way for all sorts of other discoveries
around the British coast.
Once McKee had located what he believed was
the wreck of the Mary Rose,
his small team of volunteer divers
began to explore the site
and find out exactly what was down there.
The lead archaeologist on the project was Margaret Rule,
who joined McKee in 1965
and dedicated her life to understanding the Mary Rose.
As a land archaeologist, she had to learn how to dive
to see the wreck for herself.
After sitting in the boat with the team of divers
for some five years, taking notes of what THEY could see on the bottom,
I finally decided I just had to get under and see for myself.
It was just too frustrating for words, to sit there hearing
about mounds and depressions and all this sort of thing, which might mean
a ship buried there in the mud, and never be able to see it for myself.
It was a chance not to be missed.
TIMEWATCH PRESENTER: At that time they were still investigating
a mass of wreckage, rather than something
they could recognise as a ship.
By courtesy of Portsmouth Fire Brigade,
they were using water hoses underwater
to blast away the overburden and anchorage wreckage.
But the sea had helped them.
During the winter, a scouring on the bottom had exposed
some of the frames of the ship's timbers.
Margaret Rule had learnt to dive in time to share the excitement.
Well, the very first time we saw the ship,
we saw eight or nine timbers,
rectangular timbers, just protruding from the seabed,
three or four inches.
Their upper surface was very worn and eroded by gribble,
and by teredo, the shipworm.
But as we cleared away the mud with our hands,
the timbers were sharp and clear, as good as the day the ship sank.
DAN SNOW: It was soon clear this was a hugely important site.
Those involved were determined to try and excavate
and, eventually, recover this iconic warship.
And so, in 1979 an official body,
The Mary Rose Trust,
was created to oversee this epic undertaking.
The once-amateur operation was soon transformed into a huge
professionally led dig, the like of which had never been
seen before or since.
The scale was truly staggering.
Over four years, they made 28,000 dives.
Breakthrough followed breakthrough
and soon they were able to put together
a comprehensive picture of this ship
and the men who sailed on her.
Not only that, but The Mary Rose Project
pushed the boundaries of what was possible
and ushered in a whole new era of underwater archaeology.
As the project expanded,
new people joined the team,
including many professional archaeologists and scientists.
Amongst them would be Christopher Dobbs, who joined in July 1979,
and Alex Hildred, who joined later that year.
Everybody's very cheerful.
Both Alex and Christopher have spent much of their working lives
with the Mary Rose.
It was fantastic to get involved with the Mary Rose.
I'd just come out of university, I'd just studied archaeology.
But, luckily, I was one of the very few archaeologists who could dive.
And so, it meant that I could go straight into
the most important project in the world.
It was exciting, the anticipation every day
of what you were going to find.
It was challenging - getting up at, you know,
sometimes four in the morning, to get the right tides and things.
And this was all done without computers, you know.
The organisation was unbelievable. It was really big.
Before the Mary Rose,
underwater archaeology was a haphazard affair.
But now, for the first time, detailed work was carried out
on the seabed itself, under the watchful eyes of archaeologists.
It required a whole new way of working,
bringing major logistical headaches for the team.
Whereas on a landsite, you brief a volunteer continuously
throughout the day, and you can stand over his shoulder and tell him
what mistakes he's making and where he should be excavating,
on an underwater site,
you have to brief him before he goes into the water
and then rely on him remembering that brief while he's on the seabed
and working completely alone
for the vast majority of his time in the water.
And then, when he comes up, he has to be able to tell you exactly
where he's worked and what he's done, so that you can brief the next diver.
You had a really good training session because we were diving alone,
so you had to be taught how to dive alone.
You had to be taught the layout of the site. So, we were given
a board that you took underwater which had a sketch plan of the site.
You got taught how to use an airlift.
You got a first tour of the site, which, inevitably, was by feel
because the visibility was so bad.
On the seabed, the archaeologists carefully removed
the sediments to expose each new find using airlifts
and improvised tools, like paint brushes.
Once each new object had been revealed,
it was carefully recorded and sketched,
before being brought to the surface.
The common misconceptions are that a wreck is either
virtually complete, with sails furled on the bottom,
waiting for the intrepid diver to go down
and arrest the gold coins from its hull,
or that it's a pile of matchwood and mud,
with no relationship,
nothing meaningful in it at all.
And of course, that's a long way from the truth, really.
Most of the processes and principals involved in land archaeology
can be used underwater.
It may take a little longer, in certain circumstances,
but there's no excuse not to try and achieve the same sort of
measure of accuracy.
There seems to be a lot of land archaeologists who feel
that it's not possible underwater.
Erm, but hopefully, the Mary Rose will do something to
improve its standing in the academic field.
I think many people think the challenges of working underwater
must be because it's cold and dark and you're diving deep down,
and so on. But I think the challenges were
more a matter of time.
You could only spend 58 or 72 minutes,
or occasionally 96 minutes, underwater.
The difficulty was...that there is...there was no guidebook.
We were breaking new grounds the whole time.
We were trying to work as well underwater as we were on land,
with no rules to go by.
The vast majority of the hundreds of volunteer divers
had no formal archaeological training.
Each had to be carefully briefed about how and where
to excavate before being allowed on site.
Back on deck, the professionals were waiting to assess their finds.
Yes, when I uncovered, I thought it might be the lid of something,
cos it was upside down.
I realised... Yeah, it was that way up? It was that way up,
that's right, with all the concretion on the outside.
Well, it's rather nice, cos we had another one a meter east of this,
which had a couple of marks on it.
Yes, well, we found one initial here.
It said something like "GC" on the side there.
But that's the only thing we found so far.
And it was that way up? It was lying that way up, that's right.
And you measured it...you measured it to the centre?
Measured it from the central point, yes.
The initial on that side might show up...
When we've cleaned it up a bit.
It's a pity about that crack.
Yes. Apart from that, it seems to be fairly intact.
A bit warped to eat dinner off, though.
It's nice, that.
Maybe we'll get the rest of the set.
So many finds on the Mary Rose
were unique or absolutely stunning,
that I don't think we had a process
for any individual great find.
They had to be treated the same way.
We needed to record where they came from,
we needed to prepare them for raising and then lift them.
The number of finds that came up from the Mary Rose was astonishing.
On some days, I mean, it was never really,
unless we were weathered off, less than about 50 or so finds,
and sometimes up to a 100. And if we were lifting bricks,
there would be hundreds of objects coming up at once.
And every dive, there was a potential
to find something which was completely,
either unrecognisable or a real shock to you,
you just don't expect it.
But you have to remember that
a shipwreck is a really unique form of archaeological site.
It is a home, it is a community,
it is a workplace and it's a fighting machine.
So, there are all that gambit of objects
that come with each one of those.
Even seemingly mundane objects,
like parts of the ship's rigging,
caused immense excitement at the time, as they were
so well preserved by the oxygen-free mud of the seabed.
As well as finds that could answer questions about how the ship
was sailed, there was one set of finds that would
transform our understanding of naval warfare.
They were the ship's cannon.
And it was these guns that had made the Mary Rose
such a formidable warship.
But lifting them ready for study was a mammoth task.
Some weighed over 2½ tonnes.
At the time, this was an immense technical challenge,
and the team had to feel their way,
lifting each methodically,
often inch by inch.
Stop.
RADIO COMMUNICATION: 'Swing the jib west.'
Jib west. Roger. Standby.
Jib west? Yeah.
That's that way.
Some of the guns had even become fused with the wooden hull,
as the saltwater had dissolved their iron,
forming solid masses called concretions.
Therefore, pneumatic drills, and even explosives, were carefully
used to detach them before they could be lifted.
In total, 23 almost-complete guns were raised from the wreck,
from ship-battering cannon,
to small anti-personnel devices.
The sheer variety was a revelation
and of those recovered, some were made of bronze,
others of cast or wrought iron.
Before the Mary Rose cannon emerged in the early 1980s,
little was known about the types, sizes
and capabilities of Tudor guns.
Anything that could be learned would radically change
our understanding of war at sea.
What's so exciting is that even after more than 30 years,
new discoveries are being made.
A couple of years ago, some of the team noticed that
the lead cannonballs appeared to be rusting,
which is a bit odd, given that lead doesn't rust.
After imaging the cannonballs using powerful neutron X-rays,
it was found some had square iron cores.
It's possible this innovation was made to reduce the weight
and the cost, but it's also possible that it was designed to
increase range and accuracy, and maybe even to be a primitive
form of armour-piercing round. And that's pretty impressive, given
that technology wasn't thought to have existed for another 200 years.
The recovery of the Mary Rose's guns opened up whole new fields
of research for naval historians.
But it was the discovery of another type of Tudor weapon
that would make history.
It was a weapon of which no other examples had ever been found,
and which would give new insights into medieval warfare.
It was the English longbow.
TIMEWATCH PRESENTER: This chest was one of the most important
discoveries of the 1981 season.
The object protruding from the silt in the centre of the picture
is the tip of a Tudor longbow.
The longbow was the classic weapon of the medieval period.
But almost nothing is known of how longbows of that period
were made, how effective they were,
what range they had,
and still less about how they were used on Tudor ships.
It's fairly surprising that around 200 years after gunpowder
first appeared in Western Europe,
the crew of the Mary Rose
were still using the humble bow and arrow.
Soon after their discovery, it was decided that
so many longbows had been found
that a unique opportunity had presented itself
and new information could be learned.
Experimental archaeology would be used to test the Tudor bows,
and, controversially, they'd be pushed to their limits.
Advisors were brought in from a variety of fields,
including Robert Hardy, the famous actor,
who just happened to be an expert in the longbow.
To test the strength needed to draw the bows,
several were rigged up to a machine that would record
how much draw-weight each could cope with.
I'm going to 26.
When everybody's ready. Yeah.
26.
One, two,
three.
20.8.
TIMEWATCH PRESENTER: The arrows found on the Mary Rose
were more than 30 inches long.
I'm going to 28.
Right.
23.9.
..Kilograms, the draw weight of the bow.
Well, now, this is, I mean, it felt... Yeah, this is discussion.
How did it look? Go on. It felt good to me. John?
It looked good to me. It looked good to me.
Do you have any funnies in the ear?
Not at all.
Going to 30 inches, when everyone's ready.
And...
One, two, three.
30.
24.8. Beautiful.
DAN SNOW: One of the bows would be tested to destruction,
because the team didn't know it had been weakened
by exposure to the elements underwater.
Right.
Going to eight a couple of times. Check.
Cartage. Scotch tape. That's OK.
These are the ones we excavated underwater
and this was the broken end of a box,
so there was biological degradation... Yes.
..within the box at this end.
So, it's not surprising, but it looked so good, didn't it?
Looked so good. Externally.
And, do you know, frankly, there was no alternative.
There was no alternative. How do you learn?
I'm all for experimental archaeology.
When one has the materials,
that work is valid. And I think it's only valid
because we have such a large number, because we can say how representative
these samples are. And the bow which has worked today,
which is a real joy - the first Tudor longbow, I think,
to be drawn for 450 years -
we learnt from that how that moves.
Now we can go back to the mass of the material and see what that means,
what does that represent? Was that standard issue longbow?
The experiments provided some interesting results.
Later, computer models suggested that some of the largest bows
had draw-weights of up to 185 pounds.
That's the equivalent of lifting a fully grown man with one arm.
But archaeology is an ever-shifting discipline.
And so, in 2003, the discovery of
what was thought to be a bowstring
seemed to show that the string itself wouldn't be strong enough
to cope with 185 pounds of weight.
So, an alternate theory has been put forward, that in fact many of the
bows on board were actually designed to be LESS powerful,
so in the heat of battle, any member of the crew
could pick one up and shoot it.
In 2004, Timewatch returned to the story of the bows,
and Alex Hildred explained that new information had
emerged about the arrows used on the Mary Rose.
We've got about 2,300 complete arrows.
At the very end of all of the arrows, there is some
evidence for the binding. And here you can see the green,
which is actually the glue, that's the remnants of the glue.
Now, interestingly, that green colour, we've had the arrows tested,
and the green colour is actually very, very high in copper.
And when the arrow was tested both from the tip to the very...
from the flight, we also picked up, although you can't see it because of
the black staining of the iron, quite a high percentage of copper here.
So, it means copper glue was used for the iron head
as well as for the erm...the flights.
And that is interesting because the French were accusing the English
of poisoning the tips of their arrows and, in fact, copper,
if it goes into a wound, will actually cause huge infection,
and so that might be the reason why.
Whether it was deliberate or whether that's just the glue that was used
is still an unknown.
The bows and arrows of the Mary Rose provided a unique opportunity.
The huge numbers of these rare items meant that some could be tested
without fear of destroying valuable artefacts.
And so, they provided unrivalled information about Tudor warfare.
'Today, the work to preserve and understand them is still ongoing
'and new insights will undoubtedly emerge.'
As the archaeologists worked down through the layers of the ship,
they didn't just find weapons and artefacts.
They were also faced by the bodies of the Mary Rose's crew.
It was one of the most sensitive issues of the entire project.
The archaeologists recovered the remains of 179
of the perhaps 500 men lost that day.
The issue of the bones was a delicate one.
At the time, some argued that this was a war grave.
At the beginning, there was quite a lot of pressure to rebury them,
but where would you rebury them?
How could you mimic those conditions that kept them so well?
So, whilst there were ideas to rebury all of them underground,
or there was some weird ones to put them in between the walls
of Southsea Castle, into sort of certain crypts, those aren't
environmentally monitored. They're not under our care.
You can't keep control of the conditions.
What's more, to remove them from their burial environment
within the ship and to not keep them associated with the clothing perhaps
that was found with them, we think is wrong.
We've dedicated our entire new museum to the men who died.
And to actually separate them and not keep them together, I think,
is morally wrong.
The human remains of the Mary Rose would provide
an extraordinarily rich source of information about Tudor life.
Much of this would be revealed through the infant
science of osteoarchaeology -
the study of human bones.
The first assessment was undertaken by Ann Stirland in the early 1980s,
and some of her initial work focused on determining the age of the crew.
If we take these two long bones,
which are femora,
we can see that they look different.
And they look different because
the articular ends on this bone
are present,
but they're absent on this bone.
This is because in young people
and adolescents, children,
these ends are only fixed, if you like, by cartilage.
And this allows the shaft of the long bone to grow,
which is how we grow taller.
These ends fuse on to the bone
and they do so at certain ages,
which are different for boys and girls,
which is why men are generally taller than women.
And according to the condition of the bones,
whether these are joined and present or absent
or JUST joined, as in this case,
so we can give an age range.
The youngest that I've encountered so far
is an individual aged between 12 and 15 years.
And the oldest is somebody,
at a rough estimate, in their 40s.
Ann Stirland's work also shed light on the injuries
sustained by the crew, perhaps whilst on duty.
So far, we have three fractured legs and three fractured ribs.
We have some very interesting spines.
If we look at these spines here,
we have, if we look at the back of them,
a difference in the shape of the vertebral bodies,
where we have compression in the mid spine,
As we can see, these are nothing like as deep as these.
And if we look on the bodies themselves, we have these
impressions which are called Schmorl's nodes.
It can only happen when a person is very young
and the intervertebral disc ruptures.
And because it can't spread out from between the bones,
it leaves an impression on the body
of the vertebra when it's still in this very young and forming state.
The Americans, interestingly enough, call this "snowmobiler's back"
and I think that probably bobsleigh teams and tobogganers
have the same sort of anomalies these days.
TIMEWATCH PRESENTER: Spinal injuries like that
could have resulted from a fall
from the rigging or from a rash jump over the side of the ship
into a longboat. It's impossible to be sure.
DAN SNOW: In 2004, when Timewatch revisited Ann's research,
further study of the spinal injuries suggested some might have
been caused by a very different activity.
The back of his spine has got these enormous curved...
Sticky-out bits, I think...
Yes, articulations, which are growths. They're much,
much bigger than you normally see them.
But, better still, further up...
..up here, in the spine,
they get even more extreme, these articulations,
even more curved.
And here, this one,
in life, that will have been fused.
He would not have been able to move that back one very much.
And I wonder if he was one of the men
who was involved with the breech loader.
You know, lifting that breech block up and down all the time.
Years of research time also allowed Ann Stirland to compare
the Mary Rose bones with other archaeological finds on dry land.
TIMEWATCH PRESENTER: In order to investigate the health of the crew,
the bones were compared with a group of young men
buried in a medieval cemetery in Norwich.
The men from Norwich had far more pathological changes
of a fairly dramatic nature.
There was leprosy in the group.
There was six cases of venereal syphilis in the group.
There was tuberculosis in the group.
There was evidence of dietary deficiency etc.
On the other hand, the Mary Rose men were fit
and strong and healthy. The bones are extremely robust.
DAN SNOW: Spending over 30 years working with the bones
led Ann Stirland to build up a relationship with these men who had
lost their lives 500 years before.
'Whenever one works on a group of skeletons
'from an archaeological site,
'the most thrilling thing about it is that you're actually
'touching the people.
'You're not looking at bits of pot.
'You're actually looking
'and touching the people, and that's what engages me.'
The bones of the crew have helped us build a fuller
picture of the hard lives the ordinary sailors must have faced.
But there were other bones found in the excavations
that would play a crucial role in the development of
a new archaeological science -
ancient DNA.
In the 1980s, DNA sampling was in its infancy,
and there was a concern that you wouldn't be able to get
usable DNA off ancient skeletons like this,
because they'd been handled by archaeologists and contaminated.
But then, tests were done on pig bones that were
found on the Mary Rose,
and it was discovered that you could get DNA,
even if they had been contaminated by archaeologists.
It was a breakthrough moment.
It was the first time this procedure had been used successfully.
It paved the way for DNA to be used
in all future archaeological excavations.
The work on the Mary Rose bones is ongoing.
And recently, isotope analysis of tooth enamel,
which shows where someone lived as a child,
has revealed some intriguing information
about where these men might have come from.
Many of the crew appear to have been Englishmen from the West Country.
But some were born as far away as southern Europe, perhaps even Spain,
and that's led some historians to speculate that one of the reasons
for the loss of the Mary Rose could have been
a miscommunication between the captain
and foreign-speaking members of his crew.
Every aspect of the Mary Rose Project
had its own dedicated specialists.
From the divers and archaeologists at sea,
to pathologists, historians and the scientists tasked with
conserving the countless delicate objects.
In fact, before the dives even began, a lab had been created
back on shore to help process each individual find.
And soon, thousands were flooding into the stores.
The scientists were breaking new ground all the time.
TIMEWATCH PRESENTER: Wooden objects that are in water for a long time
absorb moisture in varying degrees.
It depends on the type of wood.
The water becomes crucial to their structural strength.
And to conserve them, it must be removed in a controlled way
and replaced with an inert substance.
The usual approach is to submerge fragments of wood
or leather in an oily chemical called polyethylene glycol,
as preparation for freeze-drying.
This was a powder scoop.
The copper blade was found with it.
Different types and weights of wood
require different periods in a PEG solution.
This carved panel was very worm-eaten, as well as waterlogged.
The chemical displaces most of the water in the molecular
structure of the objects
and then they can be frozen, which stabilises them completely.
On one particular day, the Mary Rose deep-freeze contained
a leather bucket...
..a tray of leather fragments...
..a wooden bowl...
..and one of a pair of leather thigh boots,
all awaiting the final stages of conservation,
when they will be placed in the freeze-drying unit.
Under a vacuum, in a very low temperature,
all the residual moisture can then be vaporised
and removed from within the structure of the materials.
This minute sundial,
the Tudor equivalent of a wrist watch,
shows how successful the treatment can be.
When the Mary Rose Trust was set up in 1979,
it was really done extremely well,
because what they started to do first
was to set up the conservation labs.
There was no point in us going out diving and raising lots of objects
until the labs were ready.
So, these were built first and then when the dive season started,
it meant there were laboratories for the first aid for the finds,
and then the eventual treatment were all ready and waiting.
There was even a team of specialist draughtsmen
brought into record the finds in meticulous detail,
as the eye could capture things no camera could.
Especially on the Mary Rose, you never know what you're going to find,
you get such a variety of work.
It's nice to get such decorated objects here as you do get.
And things that people have never seen before.
I'm very interested by all the different shoes,
because not very much is known about Tudor shoes.
There's never been such a wide selection of them around before.
Shoe specialists like to see the different parts that make up
the shoe, so they know exactly how they were made.
These are three different rulers
that have recently been found on the Mary Rose.
And, again, the markings and the numbers
on the ruler show up better in the drawing.
Those are quite interesting numbers.
The ten's back to front and there's a line through the nought.
The seven's on its side.
And the six is rather strange.
It's quite interesting to emphasise these kind of details.
Some of the most delicate and surprising objects found
in the sediments were pieces of clothing.
The work to conserve and understand these fabrics
wasn't just done by professional archaeologists,
but by volunteers with years of practical experience.
It's the silk that really has amazed me.
It's so fine.
And this particular piece is finer than the rest of it.
It's almost like a silk tissue.
I'm hoping that this will really make a good hat.
This is very similar to the one that would have been worn by Henry VIII.
This is a beautiful velour.
It's...as you can see, this particular piece here,
I just cleaned it slightly to see what it was like.
This jerkin, again... Now, this is the only thing
so far that has got a definite colour in it.
It's been identified as madder dye.
A lot of this is the actual dirt from the owner.
And it's almost a greasy substance, where it's been worn such a long
time without being cleaned.
This is our... one of our prize pieces.
It is a hand-knitted stocking,
part of a hand-knitted stocking,
possibly one that would have only come to the ankle,
just over the foot.
It's a wonderful feeling to think that no-one's ever touched this
and it's so old.
And you're touching it for the first time for over 400 years.
It really gives you... It does, it gives me a great feeling.
One of the reasons some of the clothes survived
was because they were preserved within sealed wooden chests.
I think the chests we found, and we found over 50 of them,
are really important because they give us insights
into the lives of individual people.
You know, one of them might have nice shoes,
or might be learned and have books.
We found the book covers.
They might be well-off and would have pewter items.
But they then also might have aspects of
their profession in those chests.
One chest uncovered in 1980 revealed the identity of one
of the most important men on board.
TIMEWATCH PRESENTER: The box contained medicinal materials,
like these peppercorns in their wooden jar.
It was the complete kit of a barber surgeon,
specialising in naval medicine.
Packed with mixing bowls, bleeding bowls,
a chafing dish, ceramic pots
and even jars half-full of ointment,
in which the man's finger marks can still be seen.
Nothing like this has ever been found before.
DAN SNOW: After years of research and study,
Timewatch revisited the barber surgeon's chest
to reveal what secrets it had given up,
and what it could tell us about this crucial member
of the ship's company.
The ordinary soldiers and sailors on the Mary Rose,
who were people in the prime of life
and were the strongest and fittest
soldiers and sailors in the nation, by and large,
erm...they would not, in day-to-day life,
have the services of a barber surgeon.
So, it was seen as a reassurance to the crew
that they had a surgeon on board to tend to their wounds
and their general health.
The barber surgeon's role varied hugely,
from amputations and the extraction of bullets
and arrows in warfare,
to the more obscure,
like the letting of blood,
a common practice in the 16th century
for over-energetic young men.
He was even responsible
for the pulling of teeth.
HE GROANS AND SCREAMS
Some of the instruments in the surgeon's chest
were quite horrendous.
Erm...included amongst these were an array of syringes.
There was a urethral syringe for the administration of mercury
for the French pox.
We always called our nasty diseases after our enemies.
It took a bit of detective work to make sense
of some of the items in the barber surgeon's kit.
An innocuous-looking bench turned out to be used to set broken limbs.
And although the metal had all corroded away,
enough of the handles were left of the surgeon's grisly
array of tools to give you a real sense of what he got up to.
There were bone saws,
cautering irons and needles.
And as for those three large urethral syringes,
they don't bear thinking about.
The items found in the chests gave the archaeologists
a glimpse into the lives of specific individuals.
But the wealth of the finds, when looked at together,
revealed much more about life on board,
as Collections Manager Andy Elkerton explained for Timewatch.
The ship would have been quite crowded.
You're talking about a crew of over 415 men.
If you put the officers retinue on top of that,
you're probably approximating 500.
Life on board would have been pretty grim.
The ship would have been dark, gloomy,
pretty airless, for the most part.
We're not talking about a society where showers and baths
are the norm, and we're certainly not talking
about a vessel where facilities for having a wash are the norm.
Within the dark, cramped hull,
the crew worked and played.
CREW CHAT AND SING
We've got a lot of evidence for what the crew did in their spare time.
We found a lot of dice on board.
The Tudors were inveterate gamblers.
On top of a barrel, we've got a game, Nine Men's Morris.
We also found a backgammon set -
beautiful work of art it is, too.
And for those who could afford it,
the coins to gamble with.
Recent analysis of the gold coins by the Royal Mint
shows that of the 28 coins,
five - and, interestingly, it's the five newest coins,
minted just before the Mary Rose sank -
show signs of debasement.
And that means the level of gold in those coins
has been significantly reduced.
Henry VIII had taken England to the brink of bankruptcy,
so debasing his currency was one of the only ways he had
of paying his debts.
It's fascinating to hear an echo of that story
here in the coins at the Mary Rose.
Gold coins are almost synonymous with the idea of a shipwreck.
But one thing no-one expected to find on board
was a pile of simple bricks.
I remember when I found the first brick on the Mary Rose
and my colleagues thought I was being silly, that this
wasn't of interest. They thought it must be a modern brick.
But the advantage of doing things archaeologically
is, because of the layer you find it in, I knew this was a Tudor brick.
So, I insisted that they took it seriously.
And then, later, we found another 4,000 pieces of brick.
In fact, what Christopher Dobbs had found
was the remains of the ship's kitchens.
And this seemingly useless jumble of bricks
would transform our understanding of Tudor cooking.
If you look at the historical records for the Mary Rose,
it has these obscure references to "a cauldron in furnace",
set in lime and brick.
And nobody really knew what that was.
But what we actually found underwater
was that it was exactly that.
TIMEWATCH PRESENTER: From the location of the bricks
and brass cauldrons found deep in the hold of the ship,
the archaeologists have been able
to construct a picture of what the Mary Rose's galley might have
looked like and, from this,
work out how they would have cooked.
What looks at first sight
like a fairly crude cooking arrangement -
it's basically just a cauldron set above a brick oven -
can actually be used to cook in a variety of different ways.
You could cook just a basic broth,
perhaps for the crew,
but in that you could cook different things.
They could have bags, like muslin bags,
that would hold enough meat and peas
for one whole mess of people -
that is 8, 10 or 12 people.
And then, in front of the oven,
using the radiant heat from the fire,
we could cook on normal pottery or
iron cooking pots, that we actually found. And it's actually shown
that this was really a very sophisticated cooker,
like a modern-day Aga but with a great big cauldron,
and it wasn't just a crude cooking range.
It seems pretty remarkable that from an unpromising pile of bricks
historians were able to unlock such a wealth of information
about Tudor kitchens and cooking.
This replica brick oven shows how those breakthroughs were made,
by building working examples to test out historical theories.
It must have been a terrifying jigsaw puzzle with no plans,
no existing examples.
They just had to sound it out as they went along.
A big case of trial and error.
As the discovery of the bricks proved,
even the most unlikely objects
and most mundane finds could be crucial.
As the archaeologists continued to work down through
the layers of mud and silt,
they knew there could be clues
all around them that were being missed.
Invisible to the naked eye were countless tiny fragments
of evidence that would only emerge later, back in the lab.
So, to unlock the secrets hidden in the mud,
a painstaking operation was begun.
TIMEWATCH PRESENTER: These racks in the basement
of the Mary Rose Trust building hold
the thousands of environmental samples taken during the dig.
Ian Oxley and his various volunteer assistants
are attempting to assess the range of this material.
No underwater site has ever been so thoroughly sampled.
Through the microscope, Ian can see a fragment of some textile...
..a seed...
..and the corpses of two Tudor fleas,
which confirm the need for all the flea combs found on board.
The raw materials of one of these samples looks like this.
After much patient sorting and sieving,
one four-litre container can yield
a variety of materials,
including samples of textile,
perhaps from a garment or a stocking,
profuse quantities of plant remains of various sorts,
and many other curious items.
Frank Green deals with the plant materials.
This work on the Mary Rose is really starting from scratch.
And compared with normal, land-based archaeology,
it is a completely different world.
We have materials that are surviving here
which we've never seen perhaps previously.
These are, in fact, actually pods of broom, or cytisus,
and these come from several locations on the wreck.
It may well just simply have been to pack round objects.
It may be that some of the stems were used
for actually scrubbing down the decks.
This, in fact, is a sample of peppercorns, black pepper.
These have been found in several locations on the wreck.
These particular ones come from a container
in the barber surgeon's chest,
and are really very well preserved.
Pepper was used for a variety of purposes.
Medicinal, herbal and, of course, it was used as a food flavouring.
And it may well be that the average seaman even
had a small quantity of pepper to flavour his rather boring food.
Many of the plant remains actually still contain
something of their original smell.
It does appear that the essential
oils contained in pepper and other plant materials has survived.
And so, in fact, actually it's quite remarkable that you can pick up
material that even has a scent about it,
of the period we're dealing with.
The environmental sampling on the Mary Rose was a first
for British underwater archaeology.
That hard work and dedication by the scientists
shed new light on a whole weird and wonderful range of subjects.
From what fleas were on board the ship
to what crops were grown in Tudor England.
But it was a colossal task.
In fact, so many samples were taken
and stored carefully in plastic ice-cream tubs,
that the team couldn't hope to analyse them all.
But that's the dilemma on a site like the Mary Rose.
There's just too much to be saved.
And so the archaeologists face difficult decisions
about where to focus the limited time and money.
In the four years of excavations,
over 19,000 individual objects were recovered.
Each had to be meticulously preserved and catalogued,
and that took decades.
While they were waiting, archaeologists and historians
could look at the finds as a whole unified collection,
not just in isolation.
By joining the dots between often random objects,
new insights emerged about one subject that's come to define
Henry VIII's reign - religion.
TIMEWATCH PRESENTER: This is a tankard with an inscription on it,
beside the bones of a small pet dog.
The inscription begins, "Sit deus nobis."
On deck, the remainder of the Latin tag was revealed.
"Sit deus nobiscum, quid contra nos."
Which is a quote from Romans 8, and it means,
"If God is with us, who can be against us?"
And we've got quite a few of these illustrations of religion
and people's beliefs on board the wreck.
So, we've got that on the tankard.
But then we've also got book covers.
Again, quite amazing to find something like book covers
on a shipwreck, and they're all drawn here.
But some of them actually have, erm...sayings, again, like this,
"Verbum domini, manet in Aeternum,"
"The word of the Lord lasts forever."
This was a time of intense religious turmoil.
Henry VIII had broken with Rome over his divorce of Catherine of Aragon.
Catholicism was being suppressed.
And yet, on the Mary Rose
it seems to be Catholic faith
that was very much in evidence.
Eight complete sets of rosary beads were found,
some perfectly preserved.
It's fascinating to get this sort of insight into
the religious upheaval at the time, because in 1547
the whole practice of using rosaries was frowned upon in an injunction,
and if lay people were caught using them,
they had to be warned by the clergy.
So, to get glimpses into this very, very great upheaval
in religion in Europe at one time is quite stunning.
When the archaeologists set out to excavate the ship in 1979,
I bet few of them dreamt that over 30 years later we'd still be
learning new information from the artefacts
they were digging out of the mud. And that's one of the key reasons
why the Mary Rose has been so important.
The research has continued uninterrupted for decades.
And when all those individual finds are looked at together,
new information and new links emerge.
In 1982,
after nearly four years of intensive digging,
and with tens of thousands of objects safely on shore,
there was just one artefact left to recover -
the ship itself.
Raising the Mary Rose was an epic task,
unlike anything attempted in Britain before or since.
The team would have to put their faith in new technologies,
some of which were untested at the time.
The preparation took months
and everything was planned with military precision,
quite literally,
as the Royal Engineers played a key role in the salvage operation.
A giant steel frame had been built to support the hull during the lift,
and the first stage was to tow and manoeuvre this into position.
Once the frame was securely on the seabed, then the archaeologists
tunnelled underneath the hull and drilled holes in the ship's
structure for support wires to be attached to the huge steel frame.
The final stage before the actual lift, was to manoeuvre
a giant steel cradle into position above the hull and the steel frame
it was now attached to.
All this was done underwater and almost blind.
To help guide the Mary Rose into this cradle,
a pioneering acoustic rangefinder was used for the first time.
Once safely in position, a giant crane then lifted the whole
thing slowly towards the surface.
If anything wasn't exactly in place, the ship could be torn apart
before a global television audience.
Hello and welcome to Southsea Castle for what promises to
be the most remarkable archaeological
event that we in this country are ever likely to see.
During the last few days before the lifting, the world's attention
started to be turned on us.
There was press everywhere,
and, particularly, I remember
waking up on the morning before the lift
and we came out of our bunks on the salvage vessel,
and around us there was this complete ring of yachts,
who were just coming to get a place, to see the greatest
show on earth that was going to unfold over the next few days.
And I think that's when we realised that there really was
an enormous amount of public and press interest in the project.
We lived and breathed to raise the Mary Rose.
I wouldn't think that any member of that full-time team
would for a second have thought that we wouldn't have raised
the Mary Rose. And actually, that's quite interesting.
But the most amazing camaraderie. You can meet somebody after 20 years
and it's like... You know them better than
you know your family, really.
I think it's being... I mean, I've never been to war
and I'm very lucky I haven't, but it's the sort of camaraderie
I think you might feel when you're in a very intense situation
with a close group of people.
Brilliant!
With everything in place,
the crane began to carefully lift the hull from the water.
There is the wreck of the Mary Rose - it has come to the surface.
There is the first sight of this
flagship of Henry VIII.
It's the first time we have seen this in 437 years.
That moment when the Mary Rose broke through the water
was the culmination of ten years of hard work by archaeologists.
The lift was anything but straightforward.
There were delays for technical and engineering reasons,
strong tides and good old, unpredictable British weather.
While it was happening, the archaeologists were forced to
sit back and rely totally on the salvage experts and crane operators,
watching as a lifetime's work literally hung in the balance.
I was very young at the time of the lifting.
One of my earliest memories is watching the Mary Rose
slowly get lifted out of the water with a room full of grown-ups.
The excitement in the room was palpable and there was a moment
when...the boat shifted, I think one of the strops snapped
and it settled slightly. And everyone was completely terrified.
You know, I really remember that moment
when we had a problem lifting, because I was being interviewed
and then this enormous crash happened,
but it was quite tense.
But, luckily, there was no damage to the hull
and we were able, after a while, to carry on with the salvage.
The team could finally celebrate years of tireless work.
And in a last symbolic act, the Mary Rose was towed
back into Portsmouth Naval Dockyard.
Henry VIII's favourite warship had returned to almost the exact spot
where she had been built some 470 years before.
But the story of the hull was just beginning.
Sitting in a dry dock,
she was exposed to the air,
and in real danger of being destroyed.
So, almost immediately,
a long and complex operation to preserve the Mary Rose began.
In the shelter of a huge tent,
the archaeologists could also begin to record her in minute detail.
At last, we've just started our survey work of the ship.
Nobody knows anything about how these ships were built.
There are no plans, no drawings, no models.
She had a very long active service,
and in 1536 she was rebuilt.
Whether or not this was complete, or was only partial,
we hope the answers will come out of this very detailed survey work.
In 1986,
Timewatch was there to witness the exciting moment
when the first of the Mary Rose's deck planks was reinstated.
The cabins, the superstructures, are all to be replaced.
So, the first piece of timber is just about to be refitted.
It's a good fit.
It's good. That's beautiful. Right, we're there, at this end.
It's nice and snug. First class.
That's excellent.
The preservation took rather longer than predicted.
In 2004, Timewatch returned to see how the work
had progressed in 20 years.
Right underneath the Mary Rose, under the starboard side of the stern
and towering above us, is the bulk of the Mary Rose.
And from this area, we can get an impression of the ship's lines,
the very fine lines of the ship.
But also, underneath the ship, here, we can get some of the
impression of the repairs that were done during the life of the ship.
So, up here we've got one repair piece, there.
It's actually a patch that's been let into the timbers of the ship,
at some time during the ship's life.
We've leant an enormous amount about the hull since it was raised,
partly because so little was known beforehand.
There were no ship's plans of the Mary Rose. It predates that period,
which is why it's so important.
But one of the programmes that we HAVE done is a programme of
dendrochronology, which is tree-ring dating,
and this has been fantastic,
because it's confirmed some of our theories about which
timbers date to the original build,
and which timbers date to a rebuild,
or a refit, or a repair period.
And that's been very important for just seeing the life of a ship.
You know, she was in service for 34 years.
It's hard to grasp just how big the remains of the Mary Rose are
until you see them up close.
And today, the ship is finally nearing the end
of her long journey to full preservation.
The timbers are now being carefully air-dried,
after being sprayed with water and wax
for over 30 years.
In 2012, a new museum was built around the hull,
costing some £27 million.
It was only possible after the decades of painstaking work
to uncover the story of the Mary Rose.
The story of the Mary Rose has been teased out over
the course of my lifetime, and it's not over yet.
The research continues and every new development
fills in gaps, presenting us with an ever-clearer picture
of this iconic ship and the crew who sailed on her.
So much has been learned during the 40 or so years
of the Mary Rose story,
from how to manage and undertake a vast underwater dig,
to the use of pioneering conservation techniques.
It really did revolutionise underwater archaeology.
But perhaps what makes the Mary Rose so special
are the finds, both big and small.
Each of them has opened a window into a lost Tudor world
that, without the Mary Rose,
historians would just have to guess at.