Professor Rob Collins

It's the transformation of those into what look like feasting halls or mead halls, or what you might call an Anglo-Saxon hall.

But it's not Anglo-Saxon.

There's a continuous stratigraphic sequence there of one granary collapsing and like just the subfloor being left as an open ruin and for rubbish dumping while the granary to its south was repurposed as a social space, as a hall of some sort.

But when the roof collapses on that, they then build a new hall over the other granary.

But it's timber framed and it's built on the footprint of the former granary.

So it's a big building.

When that life, that building's life comes to an end, they build another hall, but they build it slightly offset.

And this one, instead of being timber framed, it's more post-built and looks more like the halls we'd see at Yevring, for example, that royal settlement, not too far north, in fact.

So we can see this as a continuous archaeological sequence.

It's an architectural form which we identify and recognize.

We often associate it with the Anglo-Saxons in the Middle Ages.

But it is an architectural form that is seen elsewhere in Roman Britain.

And that sense of a hall is not an alien concept to the Romans.

The emperors have imperial halls, residence halls, where the court will meet.

It's just a lower down the hierarchy, lower down the social ladder, but it's still a hall.

And so we get hall type villas in the Midlands of England.

The architecture can look very similar.

So it's not this foreign, exotic, newly emerging architectural form.

It's something that's within that broader cultural knowledge, but they're not building in stone.

They're building in timber.