Medieval Worst Jobs

[Blackleaf]

Extracts from a book written by Tony Robinson - aka Baldrick from BBC comedy series Blackadder - about "Worst Jobs" from the Medieval era. Some were disgusting, some dangerous and others just downright boring.


_________________

Worst jobs in Medieval England


If you are living in the Middle Ages, you are experiencing the period between AD 1000 and 1500. This is a time of castle building and cathedral construction, honour, chivalry and the development of the law. However there are also horrible wars and such significant hiccups as outbreaks of the Black Death and rebellions.

While noblemen and their ladies flounce around in sumptuous clothes and are entertained at court and tournament, an army of unlucky souls toils away in some spectacularly hideous employment. In this time of thanes and barons, the lowly peasant is in for a rough time. The worst jobs in the Middle Ages are pretty grim.
Top

The 13th century is boom time for the wool trade. With three sheep to every man, woman and child, wool is our biggest export. But nobody likes stiff and itchy cloth that falls to pieces, so we have several openings for fullers.
As a fuller, you are expected to walk up and down all day in huge vats of stinking stale urine. The ammonia produced by the rotten wee may make your eyes water, but it creates the softest cloth by drawing out the grease (lanolin) from the wool. If you can dance up to your knees in urine for around two hours per length of cloth, you'll succeed in closing the fibres of the wool and interlocking them to produce cloth that is kind to the skin. You will be doing your part, along with the weavers, dyers and merchants, in making it a world-beating export.
You may stink and regularly have to fight back the urge to throw up, but you are guaranteed very clean toenails.
Top

Want to be a cool knight in shining armour? Wearing all that bling makes you a guaranteed princess magnet. Here's an opportunity to get started in the career of a lifetime (which may be short if combat is encountered).
Welcome to the world of the arming squire. You will serve a five-year apprenticeship between the ages of 13 and 18. When qualified, you must be willing to run, unprotected, into combat to replace broken armour on your knight. After the battle, all the mud- and blood-coated and excreta-filled armour is stripped off and your boss – if he has survived – goes off to party. Meanwhile you are expected to flush out the suit and scour it with sand, vinegar and urine so that it's nice and shiny for the next day's action. Promotion is available for promising candidates.
Top

Top medical practitioners with amazingly high success rates (some even into double figures) require your help. Some people say this job sucks, but you know it makes sound medicinal sense.
A good fat leech – the king of worms – can suck the badness out of anybody, so all we need are people to go and get them. Openings currently exist in the Lake District for Scottish women with nice legs. Stamping barefoot among the reed beds, you will be expected to catch, via parasitic attachment, as many leeches as possible and transfer them from your scarred calves to jars. The containers of leeches are then transported to the leeches – that is, the doctors, for the worms are named after them.
Top

Stylist and amputator required by trendy medieval boutique. You must be advanced in the tonsured monk, ringletted maiden and knight's mullet styles, but also able to turn your hand to the odd bit of surgery as this is where the big money is.
A complete set of tools will be provided for administering anal medication and rectal feeding. The successful applicant will also receive a lovely set of knives, including the curved muscle carver, for amputation. Experience in urine tasting, to determine the type of sickness, and in blood-letting is also an advantage. The knack of small talk while working – such as 'Where are you going on holiday this year?' – is not necessary as training will be given.
_____________________________________________________

This post – part of a medieval positive discrimination campaign – carries with it a high risk of the occupier being branded a witch with subsequent Catch-22 punishments such as water ducking, leading to torture and death. But the big pay-off is that, while you are practising, you get to make other people take some truly awful cures.
You are required to be both feared and respected by the community. Diverse roles are combined within this post, including midwife, agony aunt and general practitioner. You must personally provide a plethora of paraphernalia to conduct your work. A fair understanding of old wives' tales and herbal remedies would be advantageous, as would a well-grounded appreciation of horrible concoctions and hideous dishes. Experience in making snot-flavoured worm stew would be a plus.
Top

In this age of building castles and cathedrals, there are plenty of vacancies in the stone business. For the less artistic, there is plenty of work at the quarry. This involves dangerous wedge and lever work to remove blocks directly from the rock and the more precise, measured cutting by delving with splitting wedges. If you chose to become a stone carver, you might be able to create gargoyles in the images of your bosses.
General hard labour is always available in the transport section, while those with innate skills can gain training and promotion to become a mason. But that's more likely if you are a member of the middle class and have a talent for funny handshakes.
Even masons are occasionally required to work in dangerous conditions on unsafe scaffolding at a great height – in 1178, master mason William of Sens fell off the scaffolding of Canterbury Cathedral and was paralysed. However, the rewards are top rates of pay and the benefits of enjoying the community that gathers in support around your building project, not to mention shouting abuse from the scaffolding.
Top

Do you like to live on the edge? How about creating and handling an extremely nasty chemical agent to make a vital component of mortar?
Running a lime kiln requires you to supervise the heating of chalk – or, near the coast, oyster shells – until they start producing incredibly toxic carbon monoxide. This can easily make you drowsy or even paralyse you before you suffocate. Don't worry, though – you only have to sit with the kiln for 48 hours at a time.
If you really like a risky challenge, the next process could be for you. The hard cake of quicklime (calcium oxide) is taken from the kiln and added to water. It immediately reacts, producing intense heat and a shower of caustic, agony-inducing specks of slaked lime (calcium hydroxide). These crumbly grains are then crushed into lime powder, which will be added to sand to make mortar. You obviously don't need safety goggles because they haven't been invented yet.
Top

With so much work in the building trade, you know that this is the career for you. A vacancy has arrived following the tragic collapse of the crane at your local cathedral. Now a new one has been made, taking all the design faults of the original into account.
To operate this latest technological marvel, you'll be expected to walk the treadmill to provide the power for lifting blocks of stone weighing up to two tons. Preference will be given to the blind – they have proved great treadmill walkers in the past due to their lack of fear of heights.
__________________________________________________________


Medieval jobs • Page 3

This position is available for those artistic types who like living life at the sharp end. You will spend an age lovingly crafting a beautifully balanced weapon and then carefully painting and decorating it with intricate designs. Then a posh knight will smash it into thousands of pieces in moment.
Using an ash bow-lathe, you can create a lance handle in about half a day. Then the careful construction of the shaft can begin. By the precision placing of laminates, you will create the ultimate lance – one that can prise the opposition from their horse, but will also shatter on impact so as not to endanger the life of the knight. If you get the construction wrong and harm one of the medieval big cheeses, you can expect to pay with your life.
Large batch orders for lances are expected for international tournaments. Prissy types and those precious about their work need not apply.
For more about the lance, see Weapons that made Britain.
Top

Are you a veritable lord of the rings with a strong inclination towards monotonous repetitive tasks? If so, this could be the ideal job for you.
Become hypnotised as you endlessly wrap heavy wire around a handy pole. Get sore and swollen fingers as you carefully snip the resultant 'spring' into tiny rings with overlapping ends. Try not to set yourself alight as you singe your pinkies heating the rings until they are orange hot. A careful tap-tapping over a miniscule anvil ensures the ring ends are uniformly flat. Then a neat sharp hammer-and-punch action creates tiny holes into which you can then insert an incy-wincy rivet to close the ring.
Then the real fun begins as you start to knit the rings together. Just complete the task 30,000 times and you will have a fine chain-mail (or maille) shirt fit for a king. Work from home.
Top

channel4.com/history

 

[Blackleaf]

VICTORIAN WORST JOBS - It was a time when Britain became the first mechanised and urban country in the world, leading the world in the creation of new, advanced steam machinery. Our navy dominated the world and we ruled a large Empire. We were the 19th Century's Japan and United States rolled into one.

But all these technological advances meant a lot of dangerous jobs - children worked as "scavengers" in the cotton spinning mills (sweeping up underneath the moving machinery) and children even worked down Britain's coal mines. These would never happen today with.

Victoria comes to the throne at the tender age of 18 in 1837 and reigns supreme for a staggering 64 years until her death in 1901. Not only is she queen of England, she is also the empress of India and head of the rest of the enormous British empire.

Her reign sees Britain at the height of its power and the globe's dominant and most technologically advanced.

It also sees the Industrial Revolution accelerate its pace and the transfer of people from the countryside into the cities, where most live in rotten slums and have equally rotten jobs. Not, of course, that life in the countryside is any better for those left behind, especially for those looking for anything other than really bad career choices.

Top

Are you that special person we are looking for? Is your idea of a great day at work one that involves you standing all day in a barn full of rotting flesh, dog poo and chicken dung? Then tanning – the conversion of cattle and sheep hides into leather – is just the career for you.
You'll be getting your hands dirty from your very first moment at work, de-fleshing and de-hairing cow hides from dawn to dusk. The unique smell of rotting animal tissue will soon become a comforting backdrop to your working day, enlivened at times by the fascinating aroma of old, warmed-up dog and chicken faeces, which will be stored in a foetid pool to de-lime the hides. If you're really lucky, the foul pool won't be changed for months just to get that lovely bacteria-infused mixture going.
Strangely, the rest of the population doesn't seem to have the same affection for this environment, so you'll be forced to work some distance from them. In 1882, the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen writes a play – An Enemy of the People – in which a tannery has contaminated a local (and lucrative) spa. But the doctor who exposes this crime is vilified by the rest of the community!
Top

Would you like to work in the high-tech world of steam? Well, more accurately, in the fire box of the high-tech world of steam. A man of small proportions and some pot-holing experience is currently being sought by the Great Western Railway to crawl into the bowels of its great steam locomotives to clean them.
A penchant for carrots is advantageous if you are to stand a chance of seeing a thing in the pitch dark. Once you have raked out the ashes and left the fire bars gleaming, you can wriggle your way back out and enjoy a good stretch in the inspection pits raking out the ash pans. This will make you really appreciate your time in the fire box.
Top

The term 'navvy' originated with the 'inland navigators' who constructed Britain's canals. It's now used for the men – a quarter of a million them – who are needed to build the thousands of miles of railway track that are set to span Britain: digging the cuttings, laying the lines and packing the ballast. The job might particularly suit Irish immigrants escaping the horrors of the potato famine.
You will have the muscles of Hercules after pushing 200 wheelbarrow loads of soil up unbelievably steep-sided banks every day or shovelling 20 tonnes of stone scalpings. When the artist Ford Madox Brown includes a navvy in his painting Work (1859-63), he writes: 'Here is presented the young navvy in the pride of manly health and beauty; the strong fully developed navvy who does his work and loves his beer ...'
No accommodation is offered with the position, however. You will probably live in a squalid communal dwelling with all the other workers, their families and, of course, their cholera, dysentery and typhus.
Top

With agricultural wages down by a third in the last 10 years, times are hard. Why don't you help out your mum and dad and earn a few extra pennies a week scaring birds from the fields? Work starts with the dawn chorus and ends with the setting sun.
We also have work for your brothers and sisters sowing seeds and gathering stones. Realistically, you won't stand a chance of escaping poverty, but you may make enough money to put a little more bread and cheese on the table.
_______________________________________________________

Join the world of pest control and tell the cats to move aside – you'll be doing the rat catching in your street from now on.
If the idea of despatching the poor little rodents with your own hands offends your sensitive soul, don't worry – you can keep them alive. Just bag up the little bundles of fur and take them around to your local pub. There you'll be handsomely rewarded for your trouble. The slathering dogs in the rat pit will do the dirty work for you to the delight of the drunken crowd.
It's not all 'nature red in tooth and claw', though. Jimmy Shaw, who manages one of the largest sporting public houses in London, collects and breeds unusually coloured rats as pets. And there is a career structure of a sort: Jack Black becomes the 'royal rat catcher' in mid-century.
Top

Small boys between the ages of 5 and 10 are sought to clamber up chimneys to clean out deposits of soot. Some of the chimneys are extremely narrow, perhaps only 18 centimetres (7 inches) square, and you may be reluctant at first to wriggle into them. However, plenty of encouragement is provided – by a lighted straw held beneath your feet or by pins stuck into you. You may suffer some cuts, grazes and bruises at first, but months of suffering will toughen up your skin to a leather-like quality.
Sweeps have other things to look forward to – twisted spines and kneecaps, deformed ankles, eye inflammations and respiratory illnesses. The first known industrial disease – 'chimney sweep's cancer' – appears in the testicles from the constant irritation of the soot on naked skin. Many sweeps are maimed or killed after falling or being badly burned, while others suffocate when they became trapped in the curves of the chimneys.
Although you will officially be apprenticed as a chimney sweep, there really is no work of any value to be had at the end of your years of training – despite your poor diet, you will have grown too large to be of any use.
Top

Where some people see an overcrowded city brimming with rubbish, we see a sprawling metropolis with money-making opportunities in every nook and cranny.
Why not join us collecting domestic rubbish and see if you can find any accidentally discarded valuables or old shoes? Alternatively, drop down into the sewers and discover an Aladdin's cave of coins and jewellery, hiding among the stools and urine.
If you've not got the stomach for this and you really are down on your luck, why not try mudlarking? Wade into the mud alongside the Thames at low tide and pick up bits of coal, rope, bones or copper nails to sell. 'It was very cold in winter to stand in the mud without shoes,' a child mudlark told the journalist Henry Mayhew. You won't get rich – the same boy said that he would 'starve until the next low tide' unless he found something – but it may keep you out of the workhouse a little while longer.
Top

This is not so much a job advert as a list of the work that you may be required to do if you wish to stay in the workhouse and receive free board and lodging:

• breaking stones to be sold for road making
• oakum picking – teasing out the fibres from old hemp ropes to be sold to the navy to seal the linings of wooden ships
• corn grinding using huge mill stones to make flour
• crushing gypsum to be used in plaster manufacture
• chopping wood.

The good news is that you won't have to work on Sundays, Good Friday or Christmas Day, and you can give three hours' notice and be gone. The bad news is that you've got nowhere to go.
____________________________________________________

Imagine those unfortunate upper-crust folk who have to spend their days gallivanting across the country hunting and shooting. When they get back to the manor, the last thing they want to do is clean their dirty boots. Well, you could be their saviour.
A young boy is needed to be the boot boy at a big country house. Your job will involve gathering up the discarded garb of the hunters in the evening and then spending the night scrubbing and cleaning their boots until you can see your face in them. The nobs then go and trash them the next day. Of course, when the lords have left the manor, you can't just put your feet up. You'll have a mass of shoes for evening and court wear that need to be sparkling by the time they get back.
If you don't mind the smell of feet, hardly any sleep and posh folk looking at you like you're something they picked up on their shoes, then apply straight away.
Top

Along with the Industrial Revolution comes a scale of engineering that, in terms of anything that has gone before, really pushes the envelope. The construction of grand and gigantic works is underway and you can be a part of it.
If you have a head for heights, an understanding of the new vision in civil engineering and a huge spanner, get yourself down to the West Country where Isambard Kingdom Brunel is constructing the stupendous Clifton Suspension Bridge. By connecting twin towers with a series of cables, which will be embedded in the rock on either side, a marvellous bridge is to be suspended over the Avon Gorge.
You'll need to be surefooted as the bridge deck is susceptible to gusts of wind, and at 245 feet (75 metres) above the River Avon, you don't want to fall. You may not be as lucky as Sarah Ann Henley will be. In 1885, following an argument with her lover, she will throw herself off the bridge. However, her crinolines will act as a parachute, and landing on mud, she will survive the fall.
Now a total span of 702ft (214m) needs to be laid and bolted together by hand. If you fancy building the towers, or piers, you'll get to climb an extra 85ft (26m). Of course, if you love heights, this could be one of the best jobs, but no safety lines will be used, so hang on tight.
Top

Join the hundreds of buffer lasses who work in the sweatshops of Sheffield. The cutlery industry is thriving there, but all that steel needs to be sharpened and polished so that you can see your face in it.
The lucky devils with the knack will be on the sharpening machines, spinning grindstones that put edges on the knives, but in your job, you'll get to handle the full array of cutlery types. From teaspoons and steak knives to dessertspoons and pastry forks, you will wear your fingers to the bone during all daylight hours as you sit at a small bench and endlessly polish.
A buffing wheel, regularly loaded with a waxy polishing paste, will be your master. Press the metal too hard and you'll burn your black-stained fingers, but get it just right and the warm steel will come to life as if it were shining silver.

 

[Vereya]

I don't know about jobs, but I sure am glad that I live in this century when I am doing some housework. When I try to imagine a lige without vacuum-cleaners, washing-machines, microwave ovens, refrigerators, blenders, hot water, sewerage system, gas or electric stoves, central heating, all sorts of chemicals and appliances to keep your home tidy, I get the shivers. Just imagine baking your own bread everyday, and washing carpets with your hands.