The Worst Jobs in History - The Middle Ages - Part 1

Think your Job sucks? You aint seen nothing yet! Creative Planet, Creative Thinking

The Middle Ages is what we call the 500 year period that ended just before 1500.

It was the time when the great cathedrals and castles of England were built.

The time of the crusades, of bishops and barons.

When Magna Carta was signed,

and when Robin Hood and his merry men

terrorised Sherwood.

The country prospered under the wool trade and suffered the ravages of the Black Death.

But above all it was the age of Chivalry. Think saintly nobles, jousting champions, and pure maidens.

Think battles and bravery, think deeds of daring do... think again.

Oops

We do tend to have a rather romantic attitude towards the age of chivalry.

With knights in shining armour fighting for fair damsels in a misty haze.

But actually that's got far more to do with the sentimental nature of the Victorians than with reality.

So what were knights really like? What did they do? Who looked after them?

Well that brings me to my first worst job.

Because you didn't start off being a knight, you started off on the very lowest rung of the ladder,

being an arming squire.

The arming squire was actually a combination of a valet and a washer woman.

To plumb the depths of the knightly hierarchy,

I have come to Arundel Castle in West Sussex.

Cool, look at the state of you.

You're supposed to be a knight in shining armour.

He looks as though he has been hit by a load of cowpats

Did you really look like that at the end of a battle?

Probably even worse than that to be honest.

Umm, this as you see is everyday work for myself.

It's pretty grimy, it's wet, it's slimy.

I've been in here for probably 8 hours.

Umm, I haven't had a toilet break so things are pretty hot

and sweaty, and smelly in here as well.

Gavin you're his arming squire, when he comes back after 8 hours on the field,

what's the worst part of the job here?

Basically taking him out of the armour.

He might have fallen into blood,

he's going to fall into where horses have been cut down.

So how do we get it off?

Well, we start with the helm,

just to give him a little bit of air now.

So what would you be doing while he was battling away at the enemy for 8 hours?

Well if he hadn't called me to be at his side on the field of battle as well

I would be at the back of the lines,

maybe with another piece of armour,

if something was broken, if it got caught.

I could be there just to run in and help him out.

Would you be trained much before you could do all this?

Oh, very much. I mean I started off as a page, then I would become a squire,

and at some point maybe in my late teens, early twenties,

at that point, if I was brave enough and if I had wanted it enough

then I would be knighted.

So Gavin, have you got the chance to end up like Paul, a proper full pledged knight?

That's right, yeah, as I have been in his service for many years

So I would be trained up in the ways of the knight, the ways of chivalry.

He needs to carve my meat as well.
Yeah

I beg your pardon?

Has to carve my meat,

he has to learn how to carve that in a proper fashionable manner.

Basically you're like a Formula 1 pit team, aren't you?

Pretty much so.

A good team would be like a Formula 1 team,

you could get in and out of it relatively quickly.

The problem of course, is what

you're going to do once you're out of it,

and some poor person has to clean your things,

and that's likely to be my squire or

any other attendants that I got within the camp.

There are 24 pieces of armour in a full suit, weighing up to 27kg.

Supported by a leather harness,

and worn over a hot and sweaty padded jacket.

Oh, dear oh dear. If you had been scared during the course of the battle,

I wouldn't wanted to have been down here.

And of course most of it is running down, literally my legs.

Yes alright. That's a step too far for me.

In order to clean up the dirty armour,

the arming squire would have used vinegar and sand, like this stuff here.

Occasionally they used to include a bit of urine into the mix to give added zest.

As you can see it's pretty effective although its horrible stuff,

it would remove your fingerprints pretty quickly.

But this is just the tedium of the camp.

What would the actual battle have been like?

Before you got the clean out the armour,

you had to get to the battlefield.

And that could be a nightmare.

Take the most famous conflict of the middle ages,
the battle of Ashencore.

Our squire would have marched 260 miles through France in 17 days,

living outdoors in almost continuous heavy rain.

Food and clean drinking water were scarce.

Dysentery killed far more soldiers on the way to Ashencore

than died on the battlefield.

The English were hopelessly out numbered.

But the heavy rains created a quagmire for the French cavalry in their heavy armour.

They became sitting ducks,

for the English armies mightiest weapon - the long bow.

In the end it was the archers that did it, they won the battle.

Their arrows might not have been able to pierce a suit of armour,

but they could kill the horses.

And they did, they decimated them.

Now you might think that being an archer was one of the

better medieval jobs, but in many ways it wasn't.

If you got captured, you got your fingers sliced off.

And at the end of the battle, it really did become one of the worst jobs in history.

There were no doctors on the battlefield,

no St Johns ambulance running around with stretchers.

So the archers used to wonder among the carnage and

when they found someone who was seriously injured,

they put them out of their misery.

In the year 1348 the Black Death swept into England from Europe.

It decimated the population, and killed round about 2 million

men, women and children in a couple of years.

Understandably, people began to get more and more frightened of falling ill.

Of-course we know that they were fighting a losing battle

against over-crowding, and poor sanitation.

Remember in those days, household waste and

excrement were just chucked out of the windows into the streets

in the towns and in the cities.

But most people had no idea that

that was the cause of their problems,

and instead, in their panic,

they began to rely on a whole host of bizarre remedies.

And for us, that means lots more worst jobs.

Medical theories were sophisticated

but as we now know, hopelessly misguided.

Success rates were terribly low

even before the plague.

So any career in medieval medicine was bound to be frustrating.

Oh and messy, very messy.

How about a few of these

if you don't fancy walking around with a bottle of aspirin.

Leeches. In the medieval period

these were a staple, medical treatment.

The idea was that as they suck the blood out of you,

they would suck the badness out as well.

In fact they were so popular that it brings me on to my

next disgusting job- leech collector.

By the 20th century, leeches were almost declared extinct.

So I am heading for one of the few spots left,
for a leech safari.

Romney Marsh is in Kent, with ranger Owen

Oh nice smell.

I'm practically up to the top of my waders in one step.

What sort of people would have been leech gatherers?

They would have been professionals,

but they would have also been people like thatchers

who would have had leeches stuck to them

as they were collecting, all these reeds and sages

And they would have passed them on to dealers.

Could have made a lot of money

out of these reeds if you were a thatcher couldn't you.

Yeah

Still have a nice bit of pin money from the leeches on your feet.

Apparently if we jiggle around a lot

then the leeches will think that we're cows or sheep or something

that have come down to the waters edge to have a drink

and they will come up from the bottom and attach themselves onto us.

Mind you they wouldn't have had waders in the middle ages.

No they wouldn't no, they would have had

Scottish women in the Northern England Lake district

and Yorshire, they would have gone to some of these

good leech areas, and they would have gone in barefoot

into these marshy areas looking for leeches.

What are leeches?

They are worms with character.

They really are worms?

Yeah they are