Meet the Ancestors (1998) s02e06 Episode Script
The Black Hand
When a farmer investigated a strange mound in his field, he didn't realise where it would lead.
The tale reunited an unsuspecting family with the burial ground of their ancestors.
It's mid-June and I'm in Cheshire, on the English-Welsh border.
I'm going to that field, site of an ancient chapel.
The chapel is not in the middle of the village but in open farmland.
Who'd build a chapel this remote? And who'd be buried here? The foundations of what appeared to be a large building had been already exposed by the archaeologists.
Mike Emery, the excavation director, told me what they'd found.
How old is it? The oldest reference to it is in 1233.
But we suspect it goes back to about 1180, 1190.
Who built it? Cistercian monks who founded an abbey here in 1158.
This is a very remote place.
Why did the monks come here to build? Cistercians loved wild places.
Part of their ethic was to make fruitful that which was barren.
There's no evidence the monks were ever buried here.
By 1500, the chapel and its land passed to the Manleys, a wealthy family of French descent.
The Manleys added a tower and chancel.
If they worshipped here, they may have been laid to rest here.
Most of the digging is inside the chapel.
Some burials have turned up in the chancel.
This is where the most important people would have been buried.
Unfortunately, this one is in terrible condition.
We're not going to be able to find out much more.
But there is something else.
This skeleton has had a lucky escape.
I'm amazed because it's so close to the surface.
A couple more inches and the top of it would be destroyed.
It seemed the skull was complete enough for us to rebuild the face.
The entire nasal bone is there.
That's fantastic.
The nose is such a distinctive part of somebody's face.
If that's gone, it's very difficult to reconstruct somebody reliably.
I got a better view of the chapel's surroundings with Jane Braine, our illustrator.
Jane will use clues from the site to reconstruct the original chapel, when it belonged to the Manleys.
From above we could see the plan of the chapel, the foundations of the tower, the nave, and, closest to me, the chancel.
It's going to be nice.
It'll make a nice reconstruction.
In the chancel, in front of where the altar would have been, was the burial of someone very important.
By the time I returned to work, the skeleton was almost completely exposed.
From the size of the bones it looked like a man.
There was one other thing Freya wanted to show me.
We found a couple of pieces of dateable tile.
There's one there, just sticking out of the section.
You can see the decoration on it.
What date is it? That's cheating.
You can't ask me a question like that.
I mean1500s-ish.
The grave can't be older than this tile, so it must be from the 1500s, or a little later.
Hopefully the bones will give us a more precise radio-carbon date.
'It was time to remove the bones.
' Quite a few teeth missing.
Did he lose those before he died? He lost some before he died.
You can some where the bone has healed over.
I think the box is down there.
Have you got him? Yes.
Let's put him that way.
I'm just going to have to lay it in.
'The skull was in great condition.
'But as we excavated the rest of the skeleton, 'it became clear this man had lead an eventful life.
' That's not a normal ankle, is it? No.
That is fused there, I think.
They should be separate, shouldn't they? Yeah.
'But if his left ankle showed signs of some dreadful injury, his left leg was much worse.
' Oh dear.
No mistaking which one's left and right, is there? That's the left one.
It's well and truly broken.
'The bones would soon start to tell their own story.
'I wanted to find out more about the chapel and the Manleys.
'I went to the Cheshire Record Office with retired music teacher Joyce Cook.
'She's passionate about history.
' Mike's excavating, but I understand you've been digging yourself? I've been trying to dig out some information about the Poulton chapel.
'Joyce showed me the proof that the building was a chapel.
'It lay in a 17th-century map.
'But what really fascinates Joyce is people.
' We have a book here called the Cheshire Sheaf, which tells us about the Manley family, who moved to Poulton.
This tells us how, in 1520, a Nicholas Manley made his will and said, "My body to be buried in the chapel of Poulton in the chancel.
"After my death and my wife's, a priest should be found to sing for my soul.
" Nicholas Manley must have been quite wealthy.
Yes, he was quite a prominent person in Poulton.
I determined that I'd find out more about him.
Have you? Well, it took many, many hours of searching, looking through all kinds of old documents.
My most exciting find was this wonderful Cheshire pedigree book.
It was written in 1666.
What's the crest? That's the Manley crest.
A hand, a black hand.
Where's our Sir Nicholas, then? In the middle of our tree we have Nicholas Manley, who was to be married at Poulton Abbey - the same Nicholas.
Can you see his name? And his son, Henry Manley, also of Poulton.
And HIS son, John Manley, and HIS son, Henry Manley.
Is that Henry Manley Son and heirsold Poulton to Richard Grosvenor of Eton.
Henry sold the estate in about 1600, but some of Sir Nicholas Manley's descendants stayed in the area for another 50 years.
I want to know what happened to them? I'd love to know too.
When you do genealogy, that's my hobby, you should work from the known to the unknown and work backwards.
Here I've got to work forwards and see if I can find the descendants of some of the people on this tree.
Can you do it? Well, I'll do my best.
It's a challenge.
They're all hiding around in little villages, no doubt.
I'll see what I can find.
'While Joyce started her search I went to Bradford University to see a bone specialist.
' I take it it's a man? We were pretty confident on the basis of the size.
Yes.
Very robust bones.
A very chunky male.
And tall.
About six foot three.
Six foot three?! Yeah, huge! Certainly for that period.
I realised he was quite tall when we saw the skeleton, but I never realisedsix foot three! Yes.
How old was he? There's some wearing on the teeth.
On the upper jaw, you can see the yellow dentine.
That suggests he may be old.
But if you had a coarse diet, your teeth would wear down faster than normal.
But if we look at the pelvis, there's a joint at the front that we look at for degenerative change.
Usually this is like a ridge and furrow pattern.
As you get older, it changes to this appearance.
What, this more knobbly look? Yes, much, much flatter.
On the basis of these changes, this person is probably around 55-60.
So he is getting on in years.
There are other interesting things.
The first obvious thing we see is in the neck vertebrae.
You've got the second and third, which are totally fused, see? Does that mean he had a stiff neck? It might.
It might be trauma in the neck area.
What, some injury? Yeah, if you get joint disease, like osteoarthritis, you sometimes get underlying trauma, which damages the joint.
So the stresses have changed through the joint and you get this fusion.
Is that the body trying to compensate? That's right.
The one thing we noticed about this skeleton was his left leg.
It looked like he'd had some problems.
What exactly's happened? You were right to notice he's had severe problems.
He's got a fracture.
And it's very long-standing because it's healed nicely.
Very smooth.
But if you turn over the bone, you'll see something else going on.
That odd hole? Yeah.
What is that? I think an infection has got inside the bone.
The pus inside builds up and then pushes its way out through a hole.
There would have been a lot of soft tissue inflammation in this leg as well.
It's all to do with the break? Yes.
On the X-ray you can see that hole.
We've got very little overlap, very little shortening.
We've got no major deformity.
It's not bent.
It's not bent, no.
So it's a good result.
An orthopaedic surgeon would be happy with that.
A modern one? Yes, I think he would.
What's the impression you get of the person? I don't think he would have been too incapacitated with these injuries.
I think it's to do with the fact that he had this fracture treated.
So, pretty healthy person, but suffered a few traumatic incidents in his life.
He seemed a fascinating character.
But what had he looked like? I took his skull to a facial reconstruction expert at Manchester University.
It's a nice big brow, nice big nose.
Is it a wide nose? There's a lot of the nasal bone surviving.
It's not particularly wide.
It is going to be a fairly hefty nose, though.
Not a hook nose, but slightly rounded.
Is that quite a prominent chin? It's fairly prominent, yes.
But he had rather thin lips.
He's got a big nose, a prominent chin, and a bit sunken back here.
That will give him thinner lips.
I shall enjoy this one.
'While Richard started on the face, I went to Somerset to see Jane Braine.
'She'd visited some of the churches and villages around the chapel.
'But the best clue came from the drawing on that map.
' What happens when you put all this together? Well This is what I've arrived at so far.
So, a fairly squat tower.
With these two sets of windows here.
A buttress at the end.
What about the roof? There's evidence on the site for roofing materials - there are slates and tiles.
The largest quantity of material was an unglazed pinkish tile.
We'll go for that.
It's going to look colourful, isn't it? You'll have this lovely warm stone, pink tiles on the roof and this bit white.
It'll be lovely to paint.
Back to Joyce's.
I just had a phone call and it looks like she's put the pieces of the puzzle together.
Have you managed to find a direct line from our Sir Nicholas, if that's who it is, to the present day? Well, I didn't think I'd be able to say yes, but the answer is yes.
I began to wonder what had happened to all the rich Manleys.
There were so many who were knights and lived in big halls.
I thought it was time to look in Debrett's Peerage and Landed Gentry and books like that.
I was very excited to find some Manleys, not in Cheshire, but living in Staffordshire.
So I roughed out a tree.
It's rather long.
The four Manley brothers are at the top.
Francis, Richard, Roger and John.
Then I realised that Michael Manley, at the bottom, was a direct descendant of this John Manley.
So you're saying this joins on This joins on to this tree.
It's rather annoying that the old trees don't have any dates on.
You're guessing at it all, but he's definitely that John.
Did you ever think you'd be able to do this? No.
No.
No.
'Joyce managed to trace the family tree from Sir Nicholas of Poulton in 1520, 'to his direct descendant today.
'We even knew his name - Michael Roger Manley.
'But the address we had was from 1952, and not very surprisingly he'd moved.
'There's only one thing left.
Call every MR Manley and hope he's one of them.
' WOMAN: 'Hello.
' Hello.
My name's Julian Richards from the BBC.
A slightly odd request.
I'm trying to track down a family called the Manleys, particularly Michael Roger Manley.
I notice in the phone book you're listed under MR Manley 'That's right, but not Michael' It's not Michael Roger? Oh dear.
I'm sorry to bother you.
I'll have to phone everyone and you were the first.
Thank you.
'OK, bye.
' RINGING TONE WOMAN: 'Hello.
' Hello.
Mrs Manley? 'Yes.
' Hello, my name's Julian Richards from the BBC.
This may seem an odd request, but I'm trying to track down some members of a family who lived in Cheshire in the 16th century.
I'm looking for an MR Manley, a Michael Roger Manley.
In the telephone book, you're down under MR Manley.
'That's my husband's initials.
' Is he Michael Roger? 'He is.
' He is! Has he got a sister called Brigitte? 'Yes.
' I might be getting somewhere here.
Was he born in 1938? 'Yes, he was.
' I might have found the people I want.
'What's it for?' I'm working on a progamme 'I couldn't wait to meet them.
'By the time I got there Michael had been rummaging in the attic.
' As a matter of fact I have found something from the attic.
We thought it irrelevant at the time.
Wallpaper? Yes This rather large scroll This was in your attic? Yes.
It's the right family obviously.
We've got the black hand.
John Manley of Poulton Hall.
Nicholas Manley of Poulton.
That's the person whose will we found.
This is brilliant.
This is conclusive proof, isn't it? It can't just be a coincidence this was in the attic.
So it was actually produced Produced in 1658.
But it starts at 1167.
1167?! "Roger lived in the time of King Henry IIand had issue.
" That's a good job! Or that would have been the end of the Manleys.
So there's 500 years of the Manley family history here.
And you didn't know that you had this in the attic? No idea.
Their curiosity aroused, Michael, wife, Sally-Anne, and son, Mark, journeyed from Hampshire to the chapel at Poulton.
They went straight to the graveside.
How do you feel about maybe being somewhere really ancestral to you? Unbelievable.
It's just And you didn't know about this place at all? Absolutely no idea.
Even if it isn't Sir Nicholas Manley, there's a real possibility it's a member of the Manley family.
Many are buried in the chancel.
Can you tell if he's a big man? Yeah, and he's obviously very well-built.
Big muscles, obviously powerful.
We must be related then.
Must be.
He's a Manley, obviously.
Built like a gorilla.
Do you think there are any characteristics in the Manley family, knowing your relatives? Big hands.
Your father had big hands, so have you.
They're just monster things, these.
Let's have a look at your hands.
Yes, when you compare them to mine I'm Sandwiched in there.
Yes.
I'll have to check and see if this chap's got enormous hands.
It's fitting together.
We've the Manley family, of French origin, whose crest is a black hand.
All the modern Manley men seem to have great big hands.
And what's the French word for hand? "Man".
In Richard Neave's studio, the man's face was gradually taking shape.
This is when it ceases to be a skull, if you like, and starts to become recognisably a face.
That's rather nice I quite like that.
There we are.
(Yes.
) So, what started off as what appeared to be an extremely wide, and possibly rather huge nose, is now really perfectly normal and quite modest.
That's nice.
All the evidence suggests that our man was buried in the 16th century, so we gave him a hairstyle of that period.
But just as Richard finished the head, I had a call from the radiocarbon dating laboratory.
Paul Pettitt had dated a small fragment of our man's leg bone.
And, from the tone of his voice, I suspected the results were not what I was hoping for.
The age of the sample is 245 radiocarbon years BP.
We have to turn that into a calendrical age.
So we plot it against our curve here.
This is the result in radiocarbon years and we read if off to get this somewhat confusing age range.
But there are three peaks there.
Yes, I think there's something nasty in the atmosphere.
We can ignore that.
The two of concern to us range from about 1510 AD and 1680 AD.
But this peak is considerably higher than this one here.
This indicates that it's most probable that this individual died somewhere in the middle decades of the 17th century AD.
17th century? 17th, although there's something of a chance that it could have died in the 16th.
So, overall, we should say really that the individual died somewhere between 1510 and 1680 AD.
But if we're going to bet on it, we should really say the 17th century.
'After spending so long investigating long-dead Manleys, 'the opportunity to meet some real live ones was not something that Joyce wanted to miss.
'So when I took the completed head down to Hampshire, she came too.
'What would Michael and his family make of our man?' This is the person from the chapel.
Well! Oh, amazing! It is.
Gosh.
Look at that.
Our old ancestors.
Well, this is the big question, isn't it? Yes.
We know quite a lot about him.
We know he was tall, he was strongly built, and also he lived to quite a ripe old age.
And there are hints that he was very wealthy.
Not just from where he was buried, but that terrible broken leg had had some fairly good medical attention.
It wasn't a problem later in his life.
We're assuming that he is somebody wealthy but we can't be 100% sure that he is one of your ancestors.
I think there's slight resemblance in the nose and possibly the chin.
The noses are very similar.
Do you think so? I think the chin's right.
Do you think the chin? Yes, absolutely.
If we could see the reconstruction against it.
To me, they look remarkably similar.
Turn that way, Michael.
Look at the shape of the nose.
And the chin, I agree with the chin.
And the forehead sloping backwards.
If you stood here and looked at them both.
What do you think? I don't know.
I'm not as convinced as you are.
Aren't you? No.
We shall Maybe that's because I saw the chap's skull.
Maybe.
We had a small fragment of one of his bones radiocarbon dated.
And what it's come out as is quite a wide range.
He could have been buried any time between about 1520 and 1680.
How does that fit in? It would fit in because Sir Nicholas was buried in 1520.
Even if the skeleton was not his, there were other Manleys living around there.
The last I found in the registers was 1639.
So there were still Manleys living in that area well into the 17th century? Yes.
And they were probably still buried in the chapel? Yes, it decayed in the middle of the 17th century.
We know that he's fairly tall and imposing.
But are you happy to accept him as a Manley? He's a pretty good-looking fellow.
I think he'll probably be accepted in the family! There was one more surprise - Jane's reconstruction of the chapel where their ancestors had worshipped and were buried.
Poulton Chapel, lost for centuries under a grassy field, has shared with us some of its secrets.
Not those of the monks who first built it over 800 years ago, but of the Manleys, who restored and enlarged it to their own glory.
Whoever our man was, the search for his identity has led to a 20th-century family rediscovering their lost ancestry.
The bones will be re-buried in a Cistercian monastery.
They are more than just bones.
They were once a person with feelings.
Sir Nicholas wanted a priest to sing for his and his wife's soul.
For one last time today, the priest is going to sing for them.
HE SINGS IN LATIN
The tale reunited an unsuspecting family with the burial ground of their ancestors.
It's mid-June and I'm in Cheshire, on the English-Welsh border.
I'm going to that field, site of an ancient chapel.
The chapel is not in the middle of the village but in open farmland.
Who'd build a chapel this remote? And who'd be buried here? The foundations of what appeared to be a large building had been already exposed by the archaeologists.
Mike Emery, the excavation director, told me what they'd found.
How old is it? The oldest reference to it is in 1233.
But we suspect it goes back to about 1180, 1190.
Who built it? Cistercian monks who founded an abbey here in 1158.
This is a very remote place.
Why did the monks come here to build? Cistercians loved wild places.
Part of their ethic was to make fruitful that which was barren.
There's no evidence the monks were ever buried here.
By 1500, the chapel and its land passed to the Manleys, a wealthy family of French descent.
The Manleys added a tower and chancel.
If they worshipped here, they may have been laid to rest here.
Most of the digging is inside the chapel.
Some burials have turned up in the chancel.
This is where the most important people would have been buried.
Unfortunately, this one is in terrible condition.
We're not going to be able to find out much more.
But there is something else.
This skeleton has had a lucky escape.
I'm amazed because it's so close to the surface.
A couple more inches and the top of it would be destroyed.
It seemed the skull was complete enough for us to rebuild the face.
The entire nasal bone is there.
That's fantastic.
The nose is such a distinctive part of somebody's face.
If that's gone, it's very difficult to reconstruct somebody reliably.
I got a better view of the chapel's surroundings with Jane Braine, our illustrator.
Jane will use clues from the site to reconstruct the original chapel, when it belonged to the Manleys.
From above we could see the plan of the chapel, the foundations of the tower, the nave, and, closest to me, the chancel.
It's going to be nice.
It'll make a nice reconstruction.
In the chancel, in front of where the altar would have been, was the burial of someone very important.
By the time I returned to work, the skeleton was almost completely exposed.
From the size of the bones it looked like a man.
There was one other thing Freya wanted to show me.
We found a couple of pieces of dateable tile.
There's one there, just sticking out of the section.
You can see the decoration on it.
What date is it? That's cheating.
You can't ask me a question like that.
I mean1500s-ish.
The grave can't be older than this tile, so it must be from the 1500s, or a little later.
Hopefully the bones will give us a more precise radio-carbon date.
'It was time to remove the bones.
' Quite a few teeth missing.
Did he lose those before he died? He lost some before he died.
You can some where the bone has healed over.
I think the box is down there.
Have you got him? Yes.
Let's put him that way.
I'm just going to have to lay it in.
'The skull was in great condition.
'But as we excavated the rest of the skeleton, 'it became clear this man had lead an eventful life.
' That's not a normal ankle, is it? No.
That is fused there, I think.
They should be separate, shouldn't they? Yeah.
'But if his left ankle showed signs of some dreadful injury, his left leg was much worse.
' Oh dear.
No mistaking which one's left and right, is there? That's the left one.
It's well and truly broken.
'The bones would soon start to tell their own story.
'I wanted to find out more about the chapel and the Manleys.
'I went to the Cheshire Record Office with retired music teacher Joyce Cook.
'She's passionate about history.
' Mike's excavating, but I understand you've been digging yourself? I've been trying to dig out some information about the Poulton chapel.
'Joyce showed me the proof that the building was a chapel.
'It lay in a 17th-century map.
'But what really fascinates Joyce is people.
' We have a book here called the Cheshire Sheaf, which tells us about the Manley family, who moved to Poulton.
This tells us how, in 1520, a Nicholas Manley made his will and said, "My body to be buried in the chapel of Poulton in the chancel.
"After my death and my wife's, a priest should be found to sing for my soul.
" Nicholas Manley must have been quite wealthy.
Yes, he was quite a prominent person in Poulton.
I determined that I'd find out more about him.
Have you? Well, it took many, many hours of searching, looking through all kinds of old documents.
My most exciting find was this wonderful Cheshire pedigree book.
It was written in 1666.
What's the crest? That's the Manley crest.
A hand, a black hand.
Where's our Sir Nicholas, then? In the middle of our tree we have Nicholas Manley, who was to be married at Poulton Abbey - the same Nicholas.
Can you see his name? And his son, Henry Manley, also of Poulton.
And HIS son, John Manley, and HIS son, Henry Manley.
Is that Henry Manley Son and heirsold Poulton to Richard Grosvenor of Eton.
Henry sold the estate in about 1600, but some of Sir Nicholas Manley's descendants stayed in the area for another 50 years.
I want to know what happened to them? I'd love to know too.
When you do genealogy, that's my hobby, you should work from the known to the unknown and work backwards.
Here I've got to work forwards and see if I can find the descendants of some of the people on this tree.
Can you do it? Well, I'll do my best.
It's a challenge.
They're all hiding around in little villages, no doubt.
I'll see what I can find.
'While Joyce started her search I went to Bradford University to see a bone specialist.
' I take it it's a man? We were pretty confident on the basis of the size.
Yes.
Very robust bones.
A very chunky male.
And tall.
About six foot three.
Six foot three?! Yeah, huge! Certainly for that period.
I realised he was quite tall when we saw the skeleton, but I never realisedsix foot three! Yes.
How old was he? There's some wearing on the teeth.
On the upper jaw, you can see the yellow dentine.
That suggests he may be old.
But if you had a coarse diet, your teeth would wear down faster than normal.
But if we look at the pelvis, there's a joint at the front that we look at for degenerative change.
Usually this is like a ridge and furrow pattern.
As you get older, it changes to this appearance.
What, this more knobbly look? Yes, much, much flatter.
On the basis of these changes, this person is probably around 55-60.
So he is getting on in years.
There are other interesting things.
The first obvious thing we see is in the neck vertebrae.
You've got the second and third, which are totally fused, see? Does that mean he had a stiff neck? It might.
It might be trauma in the neck area.
What, some injury? Yeah, if you get joint disease, like osteoarthritis, you sometimes get underlying trauma, which damages the joint.
So the stresses have changed through the joint and you get this fusion.
Is that the body trying to compensate? That's right.
The one thing we noticed about this skeleton was his left leg.
It looked like he'd had some problems.
What exactly's happened? You were right to notice he's had severe problems.
He's got a fracture.
And it's very long-standing because it's healed nicely.
Very smooth.
But if you turn over the bone, you'll see something else going on.
That odd hole? Yeah.
What is that? I think an infection has got inside the bone.
The pus inside builds up and then pushes its way out through a hole.
There would have been a lot of soft tissue inflammation in this leg as well.
It's all to do with the break? Yes.
On the X-ray you can see that hole.
We've got very little overlap, very little shortening.
We've got no major deformity.
It's not bent.
It's not bent, no.
So it's a good result.
An orthopaedic surgeon would be happy with that.
A modern one? Yes, I think he would.
What's the impression you get of the person? I don't think he would have been too incapacitated with these injuries.
I think it's to do with the fact that he had this fracture treated.
So, pretty healthy person, but suffered a few traumatic incidents in his life.
He seemed a fascinating character.
But what had he looked like? I took his skull to a facial reconstruction expert at Manchester University.
It's a nice big brow, nice big nose.
Is it a wide nose? There's a lot of the nasal bone surviving.
It's not particularly wide.
It is going to be a fairly hefty nose, though.
Not a hook nose, but slightly rounded.
Is that quite a prominent chin? It's fairly prominent, yes.
But he had rather thin lips.
He's got a big nose, a prominent chin, and a bit sunken back here.
That will give him thinner lips.
I shall enjoy this one.
'While Richard started on the face, I went to Somerset to see Jane Braine.
'She'd visited some of the churches and villages around the chapel.
'But the best clue came from the drawing on that map.
' What happens when you put all this together? Well This is what I've arrived at so far.
So, a fairly squat tower.
With these two sets of windows here.
A buttress at the end.
What about the roof? There's evidence on the site for roofing materials - there are slates and tiles.
The largest quantity of material was an unglazed pinkish tile.
We'll go for that.
It's going to look colourful, isn't it? You'll have this lovely warm stone, pink tiles on the roof and this bit white.
It'll be lovely to paint.
Back to Joyce's.
I just had a phone call and it looks like she's put the pieces of the puzzle together.
Have you managed to find a direct line from our Sir Nicholas, if that's who it is, to the present day? Well, I didn't think I'd be able to say yes, but the answer is yes.
I began to wonder what had happened to all the rich Manleys.
There were so many who were knights and lived in big halls.
I thought it was time to look in Debrett's Peerage and Landed Gentry and books like that.
I was very excited to find some Manleys, not in Cheshire, but living in Staffordshire.
So I roughed out a tree.
It's rather long.
The four Manley brothers are at the top.
Francis, Richard, Roger and John.
Then I realised that Michael Manley, at the bottom, was a direct descendant of this John Manley.
So you're saying this joins on This joins on to this tree.
It's rather annoying that the old trees don't have any dates on.
You're guessing at it all, but he's definitely that John.
Did you ever think you'd be able to do this? No.
No.
No.
'Joyce managed to trace the family tree from Sir Nicholas of Poulton in 1520, 'to his direct descendant today.
'We even knew his name - Michael Roger Manley.
'But the address we had was from 1952, and not very surprisingly he'd moved.
'There's only one thing left.
Call every MR Manley and hope he's one of them.
' WOMAN: 'Hello.
' Hello.
My name's Julian Richards from the BBC.
A slightly odd request.
I'm trying to track down a family called the Manleys, particularly Michael Roger Manley.
I notice in the phone book you're listed under MR Manley 'That's right, but not Michael' It's not Michael Roger? Oh dear.
I'm sorry to bother you.
I'll have to phone everyone and you were the first.
Thank you.
'OK, bye.
' RINGING TONE WOMAN: 'Hello.
' Hello.
Mrs Manley? 'Yes.
' Hello, my name's Julian Richards from the BBC.
This may seem an odd request, but I'm trying to track down some members of a family who lived in Cheshire in the 16th century.
I'm looking for an MR Manley, a Michael Roger Manley.
In the telephone book, you're down under MR Manley.
'That's my husband's initials.
' Is he Michael Roger? 'He is.
' He is! Has he got a sister called Brigitte? 'Yes.
' I might be getting somewhere here.
Was he born in 1938? 'Yes, he was.
' I might have found the people I want.
'What's it for?' I'm working on a progamme 'I couldn't wait to meet them.
'By the time I got there Michael had been rummaging in the attic.
' As a matter of fact I have found something from the attic.
We thought it irrelevant at the time.
Wallpaper? Yes This rather large scroll This was in your attic? Yes.
It's the right family obviously.
We've got the black hand.
John Manley of Poulton Hall.
Nicholas Manley of Poulton.
That's the person whose will we found.
This is brilliant.
This is conclusive proof, isn't it? It can't just be a coincidence this was in the attic.
So it was actually produced Produced in 1658.
But it starts at 1167.
1167?! "Roger lived in the time of King Henry IIand had issue.
" That's a good job! Or that would have been the end of the Manleys.
So there's 500 years of the Manley family history here.
And you didn't know that you had this in the attic? No idea.
Their curiosity aroused, Michael, wife, Sally-Anne, and son, Mark, journeyed from Hampshire to the chapel at Poulton.
They went straight to the graveside.
How do you feel about maybe being somewhere really ancestral to you? Unbelievable.
It's just And you didn't know about this place at all? Absolutely no idea.
Even if it isn't Sir Nicholas Manley, there's a real possibility it's a member of the Manley family.
Many are buried in the chancel.
Can you tell if he's a big man? Yeah, and he's obviously very well-built.
Big muscles, obviously powerful.
We must be related then.
Must be.
He's a Manley, obviously.
Built like a gorilla.
Do you think there are any characteristics in the Manley family, knowing your relatives? Big hands.
Your father had big hands, so have you.
They're just monster things, these.
Let's have a look at your hands.
Yes, when you compare them to mine I'm Sandwiched in there.
Yes.
I'll have to check and see if this chap's got enormous hands.
It's fitting together.
We've the Manley family, of French origin, whose crest is a black hand.
All the modern Manley men seem to have great big hands.
And what's the French word for hand? "Man".
In Richard Neave's studio, the man's face was gradually taking shape.
This is when it ceases to be a skull, if you like, and starts to become recognisably a face.
That's rather nice I quite like that.
There we are.
(Yes.
) So, what started off as what appeared to be an extremely wide, and possibly rather huge nose, is now really perfectly normal and quite modest.
That's nice.
All the evidence suggests that our man was buried in the 16th century, so we gave him a hairstyle of that period.
But just as Richard finished the head, I had a call from the radiocarbon dating laboratory.
Paul Pettitt had dated a small fragment of our man's leg bone.
And, from the tone of his voice, I suspected the results were not what I was hoping for.
The age of the sample is 245 radiocarbon years BP.
We have to turn that into a calendrical age.
So we plot it against our curve here.
This is the result in radiocarbon years and we read if off to get this somewhat confusing age range.
But there are three peaks there.
Yes, I think there's something nasty in the atmosphere.
We can ignore that.
The two of concern to us range from about 1510 AD and 1680 AD.
But this peak is considerably higher than this one here.
This indicates that it's most probable that this individual died somewhere in the middle decades of the 17th century AD.
17th century? 17th, although there's something of a chance that it could have died in the 16th.
So, overall, we should say really that the individual died somewhere between 1510 and 1680 AD.
But if we're going to bet on it, we should really say the 17th century.
'After spending so long investigating long-dead Manleys, 'the opportunity to meet some real live ones was not something that Joyce wanted to miss.
'So when I took the completed head down to Hampshire, she came too.
'What would Michael and his family make of our man?' This is the person from the chapel.
Well! Oh, amazing! It is.
Gosh.
Look at that.
Our old ancestors.
Well, this is the big question, isn't it? Yes.
We know quite a lot about him.
We know he was tall, he was strongly built, and also he lived to quite a ripe old age.
And there are hints that he was very wealthy.
Not just from where he was buried, but that terrible broken leg had had some fairly good medical attention.
It wasn't a problem later in his life.
We're assuming that he is somebody wealthy but we can't be 100% sure that he is one of your ancestors.
I think there's slight resemblance in the nose and possibly the chin.
The noses are very similar.
Do you think so? I think the chin's right.
Do you think the chin? Yes, absolutely.
If we could see the reconstruction against it.
To me, they look remarkably similar.
Turn that way, Michael.
Look at the shape of the nose.
And the chin, I agree with the chin.
And the forehead sloping backwards.
If you stood here and looked at them both.
What do you think? I don't know.
I'm not as convinced as you are.
Aren't you? No.
We shall Maybe that's because I saw the chap's skull.
Maybe.
We had a small fragment of one of his bones radiocarbon dated.
And what it's come out as is quite a wide range.
He could have been buried any time between about 1520 and 1680.
How does that fit in? It would fit in because Sir Nicholas was buried in 1520.
Even if the skeleton was not his, there were other Manleys living around there.
The last I found in the registers was 1639.
So there were still Manleys living in that area well into the 17th century? Yes.
And they were probably still buried in the chapel? Yes, it decayed in the middle of the 17th century.
We know that he's fairly tall and imposing.
But are you happy to accept him as a Manley? He's a pretty good-looking fellow.
I think he'll probably be accepted in the family! There was one more surprise - Jane's reconstruction of the chapel where their ancestors had worshipped and were buried.
Poulton Chapel, lost for centuries under a grassy field, has shared with us some of its secrets.
Not those of the monks who first built it over 800 years ago, but of the Manleys, who restored and enlarged it to their own glory.
Whoever our man was, the search for his identity has led to a 20th-century family rediscovering their lost ancestry.
The bones will be re-buried in a Cistercian monastery.
They are more than just bones.
They were once a person with feelings.
Sir Nicholas wanted a priest to sing for his and his wife's soul.
For one last time today, the priest is going to sing for them.
HE SINGS IN LATIN