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Archaeologist Robin Holley with Tudor tiles in the rediscovered foundations of Wolf Hall.

Historic Wolf Hall, home to the Seymour family and star of Hilary Mantel's famous trilogy on Henry VIII th, has finally been definitively located after new discoveries around the much smaller ramshackle house that remains today.

Despite it's fame, nobody really knew where the enormous Tudor pile actually was, or what it looked like, due to its very short but very influential existance in the middle of the tumultuous 16th century.

Built with a million pound loan (£2,400) from King Henry in 1531, brokered by Thomas Cromwell, the huge house was rapidly brick built in time for the King's pivotal visit with the court and troublesome wife Anne Boleyn in 1535, at which point Sir John Seymour's daughter Jane caught his eye, within a year Anne was dead and Jane, and the rest of the Seymour clan were in.

They benefitted massively from Royal patronage and the dissolution of the monastries, but it all went wrong when Henry died and the brothers fell out and were later executed in a spectacular fall from power only 21 years after the house was built.

Historian Graham Bathe and his team have now uncovered part of the outline of the original building, as well as the extensive Tudor brick sewer system that proves the huge scale of the 16th century mansion.