Gilded brooches under a Wiltshire housing site: Chronicle digs into Anglo-Saxon Britain
All three new documentaries went into the ground, from a pagan cemetery at Winterbourne Gunner to Tintagel and Hadrian's Wall, while a Tudor film with Tracy Borman kept its pull.
Chronicle - Medieval History DocumentariesStory of Why this story? The channel's weekly summary: what went up this week, what is drawing views now, and where the channel stands among similar channels.
Archeologists Discover A 1,400-Year-Old Anglo-Saxon Cemetery
Construction stopped in Winterbourne Gunner, a village in Wiltshire, and what lay under the planned houses turned out to be a 1,400-year-old Anglo-Saxon cemetery. That find anchors one of Chronicle's three new documentaries: pagan burials with gilded brooches, amber beads and weapons, laid out, the description says, around a Bronze Age sacred site some 3,500 years old.
The rest of the week stayed underground too. A three-hour compilation tours Black Death mass graves at Thornton Abbey, the lost monastery at Lindisfarne and what is billed as Western Europe's oldest salt factory, and it has been the most watched of the new uploads. The youngest film, posted Sunday, takes on the old idea of a post-Roman "dark age," looking again at Roman York, Hadrian's Wall and Tintagel, the Cornish headland long tied to the legend of King Arthur. In its first hours it moved faster than anything else on the channel.
Behind them, a 23-day-old portrait of Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's son who rose to run Henry VIII's government, is close to 200,000 views. Historian Tracy Borman, who wrote a well-known biography of Cromwell, leads it.
Overall the channel ran at about half its usual daily pace and added around a thousand subscribers. Among documentary channels of similar size, the bigger weeks belonged to Channel 4 Documentaries and Banijay History, with Odyssey, Chronicle's ancient-history sibling, running a little above its own norm.
Published on Trari
Read next
What viewers say
The comments under "3 Hours Of The Greatest Archeological Discoveries That Rewrote British History"
Fascinating!
@joaniem3817See it on YouTube
Public comments from the video's page on YouTube
Is this your channel?
Share the story with your audience: in a community post, in your channel's description or on your socials. The text and the badge are ready.
You may use the picture, the badge, and link it to this story.
The videos drawing views on Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries right now
- Subscribers
- 896,000 ▲ 1,000 this week
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 759,139
- Videos published this week
- 3
- Video published
- October 2, 2026
- Video views so far
- 9,213
- Views on its first day
- 6,841
The numbers
Here is how Chronicle's week looks in figures.
💡 Test your knowledge
The Viking raid on Lindisfarne, often taken as the start of the Viking Age in Britain, happened in which year?
Norse raiders attacked the monastery on Lindisfarne in 793, an event recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
