Tony Robinson's History of Britain (2020): Season 2, Episode 4 - Tony Robinson's History of Britain - full transcript
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Our British history is rich
with tales of wealth and power
and all that political nonsense,
the glamour of our kings and queens,
the jewels and furs and charisma,
and all those heads
being chopped off.
(BLADES STRIKE)
(SCREAMING)
But what about the real people
who made everything happen?
(GASPING)
(BABY CRIES)
(YELLS)
I'll discover what they ate...
Seems a bit... stodgy.
..the challenges they faced...
Stuff this for a game of soldiers!
..and how they built Britain.
That's straight as a die.
I'm going to uncover
the extraordinary lives
of some of history's ordinary people.
MAN: Hut!
Romans...
It's quite a weight on my head,
I have to say.
(METALLIC CLANG)
(MAN GROANS)
..Edwardians...
Breathe in, madam. Breathe in.
..1950s...
Put the needle on the record.
Ooh. Really soft brakes.
Takes ages to stop it.
..and the Middle Ages...
There's the executive model,
inside the house.
Whatever.
History...
..from the bottom up.
(BIRDSONG)
This time,
I'm going back a thousand years,
to a time of knights in shining
armour, big-personality kings,
a powerful Church and great clothes.
(HORSES WHINNY)
Our story begins
after that infamous invasion
by William the Conqueror in 1066.
Once the Normans stopped
killing people, business boomed,
and the population soon trebled
to a massive 5 million.
People crowded into the towns.
Food production rocketed to cope.
But once they'd fed their faces
and those of their animals,
the people of medieval Britain
had to deal with the consequences.
(HORSE WHINNIES AND SNORTS)
So, what to do
with all the poo they produced?
Well, people in the Middle Ages
were renowned
for chucking the contents of their
chamber-pots into the streets below,
which were like open sewers.
And there's no doubt that
that happened. (BLOWS RASPBERRY)
(STRINGS STRUM)
Women love my singing.
She'll be putty in my hands.
Get lost, creep!
(SPLASH!)
What she meant was "Prenez,
garde a l'eau" - "Look out, water" -
which is where
we get the word 'loo' from.
But you'll be relieved to know
this wasn't how the sum
of most human waste was dealt with.
Well, moderately relieved.
For most people, there would be
a communal privy out back,
a wooden seat
suspended above a cesspit,
like this 12th-century model,
unearthed in York.
Or there's the executive model,
which was actually inside the house.
See? Look. There's the little hole.
So you just get in,
do what you have to do
and - bosh! - it goes straight down
into the cesspit.
Hurry along, mate.
I've been waiting half an hour.
Naturally,
it was polite to check first
that no-one was using
the economy version.
But that's not the end
of the problem, is it,
because
you can't dig a bottomless hole,
and eventually,
the cesspit's going to overflow.
So, the question is, what do you do
with all the stuff in the cesspit?
It's your turn to empty it.
Oh, God.
The solution created a career
for a special sort of person,
someone like Richard Raker.
The clue is in his name.
What he raked was poo.
He was also known as a gong farmer.
'Gong' as in 'going', like,
"I'm going to toilet."
This could be him.
Richard's job
was to harvest all that poo,
load it into the back of a cart
and take it out of the city,
where it could be disposed of.
(OWLS HOOT)
Even by medieval standards,
the contents of Richard's barrow
were pretty disgusting,
so he would start work
just after dark
and finish at the crack of dawn,
which is why he and his colleagues
were known as nightmen
and their product was rather tweely
referred to as nightsoil.
There was a clear career progression
for gong farmers.
Everyone wanted to be the tub man.
He was the bloke who had
a little cart with a bucket on it,
and he would transfer the bucket
to and from the cesspit.
And below him,
there was the rope man,
and his job was to chuck the bucket
down into the cesspit.
And at the very bottom, literally,
there was the hole man,
who went down the hole and excavated
all the disgusting stuff.
(BUBBLING)
Oh, what a job.
(INSECTS BUZZ)
There was a constant risk of cholera,
a lethal bacterial disease, caused
by contact with infected faeces.
It killed around a million people
a year worldwide.
Back then, they thought
the smelly air itself was dangerous,
so Richard got danger money and
earned a walloping sixpence a day.
A whole week's wages
for the average labourer.
Hmm. Quite tempting, then.
And Richard
would really earn his money
when it came to emptying large
communal toilets in the big city.
Somerset House, one of London's
most fabulous buildings.
(RECORD SCRATCHES)
But this glorious
Georgian architecture
hides quite a mucky past,
one which has only recently
reared its disgusting head.
(POWER TOOLS CLATTER)
This part of the building
is The Courtauld Institute for Art,
and round the corner there,
they're in the process
of revamping the art galleries,
which, believe me,
are gonna be really nice.
I'm meeting project director
Dr Stephanie Hall
just by where
a fascinating discovery was made.
So this is what
the excavation looked like
when we had just started.
What we actually thought
that we would find was a Tudor wall.
But, actually, it turns out
that it was a... a cesspit.
A cesspit, as in a bog?
A bog, a toilet, a cesspit.
A toilet.
Yeah.
(INSECTS BUZZ)
I have to say,
it did get a little bit smelly
as the archaeologists were...
were digging down.
Now, it's hundreds of years old,
but it never loses its...
..its shine, as it were.
The builders are now busy covering
it up behind their brickwork.
The cesspit was part of an inn
which stood here in the Middle Ages.
It was lined with large chalk blocks
that allowed water to
gradually filter out into the Thames,
leaving the waste trapped inside,
for chaps like Richard to empty.
Toilet seats, two or three in a row,
would have been suspended
above the stinking void of the pit.
Our cesspit was full
of about a hundred things.
So here, you've got a jug,
some pottery.
This is a boot spur
and a buckle on a belt.
The pottery was brown
and the conservators cleaned it up.
It would have been green like that?
It would have been green like that.
So this would have been
a condiment dish.
So if you were eating olives,
you put pits in one side
and keep the olives in the other.
So you're sitting there on the loo,
having your hors d'oeuvres,
somebody gives you a shout, you stand
up and your olives go down the khazi.
(LAUGHS)
But there's something else
a little more distressing.
So the other thing we found
was a... entire dog skeleton.
A little dog.
He may have come
to have a little dig
and a little sniff
and maybe he fell in.
That's the saddest part
of this story.
It is very sad.
Emptying this place would have been
a big job, quite literally,
but this wasn't the end of it.
Before the night was over,
Richard was supposed
to carry his load out of town
and deposit it with a local farmer,
who'd use the nightsoil
as fertiliser.
Some unscrupulous nightmen
just fly-tipped the stuff
wherever they could,
but the penalties for that
could be really harsh.
There was
one young London gong farmer
who was caught
pouring effluent down a drain,
and they stuck him
in one of his own vessels,
filled it with poo
right up to his neck,
and they left him in Golden Lane
for everyone to see
with a big sign around his neck
telling them what he'd done.
I imagine Richard yearning to escape
his stinking struggle
of everyday life.
Unfortunately,
that wasn't what happened.
The reason we know about Richard
is that in 1326,
unusually for a nightman,
his death was recorded,
because its manner was so bizarre.
One afternoon, Richard was at home,
and, I don't know,
maybe he was just a bit tired,
wasn't quite on his game,
and he realised
he needed to go to the toilet,
and he sat down, and
he'd meant to fix that toilet seat,
it had been rotten for some time,
but he'd never got round to it,
and suddenly, there was a crash
and he plunged down, down, down
into the cesspit
and he drowned...
..in his own poo.
It's an odd way to become famous.
(MAN SCREAMS)
(BUBBLING)
(GROANS)
In the Middle Ages,
it wasn't only chaps who kicked ass.
You've probably heard about
the great medieval warrior,
heroine and saint Joan of Arc,
who fought for the French
against the English,
but what you may not know
is that we Brits had our own Joan,
Joan of Leeds.
Joan of Leeds wasn't actually a
saint, and she didn't live in Leeds.
She lived in the Benedictine priory
of St Clement, in York, in the 1300s.
As a nun, Joan was part
of the most powerful organisation
in medieval Europe, the Church.
The countryside of the Middle Ages
was positively cluttered
with religious buildings -
monasteries, priories, convents.
The Church was a fundamental part
of everyone's life.
Many people worked on its land.
Monasteries and convents
delivered a constant vigil of prayer
but also provided
hospitals and social services
and were centres
of science, education and literature.
But being a nun wasn't all fun.
In fact,
Joan was as miserable as hell.
She was a teenager. She was a novice.
And she soon realised that the whole
nun thing really wasn't for her.
(SPIRITUAL SINGING)
(BELL RINGS)
Joan was probably sent to the convent
as a little girl
to be educated by the nuns.
Then in her mid-teens, at some point,
she apparently decided
to forsake worldly things
and become a novice nun.
But was it really her decision?
Or was she pushed?
Joan's family
would originally have come from Leeds
and were reasonably well-off.
I recommend the chateaubriand.
Medium-rare?
Yummy!
Such families
didn't like too many daughters
because they were extremely expensive
to marry off, with lavish dowries.
Oh, dear.
That left one option -
the convent, with
a handsome donation to the abbess.
I've got overheads, you know!
While most people in the Middle Ages
were trying to get OUT of poverty,
nuns were trying to get INTO it.
Joan's priory,
like most at that time,
followed the strict rule
of St Benedict.
That meant she had to take
three vows - obedience to the abbess,
and abbesses could be really strict,
poverty for life, and chastity,
no relations with men.
In fact, men weren't allowed
anywhere near the place.
Whatever.
(SPIRITUAL SINGING)
And that was just for starters.
Joan didn't even get a lie-in.
(BELL RINGS)
Each day would begin at 2am
in the chapel,
with prayers, psalms,
hymns and readings.
The primary role of monasteries
and convents in the Middle Ages
was to pray for the souls of the dead
so they'd eventually
ascend into heaven.
And people donated a lot of money
to be prayed for.
So for Joan,
after a few more hours sleep,
it was up at dawn for more prayers,
followed by a simple breakfast,
then another service at 6am,
then another four lots of prayers,
perhaps interspersed with a bit of
book illuminating and odd jobs,
followed by a simple supper.
Black pudding again?
Yes, every day
for the last two years.
And then prayers,
lights out by seven.
(BLOWING)
For many, it was a genuine calling
to which they were devoted.
All I'm saying is, I don't know
many teenagers who'd plump for it.
To better understand Joan's plight,
I'm meeting
Professor Sarah Rees Jones,
a medieval historian
from the University of York.
It would have been really tough
for a teenage girl
to be a novice, wouldn't it?
I think it could have been
really tedious,
because all that the nuns
were required to do
was to observe the religious offices
throughout the day.
And doing that
day after day after day
with the same
very small group of women -
there were probably fewer
than 20 nuns in this convent -
would have been very tedious,
repetitive and claustrophobic.
It does sound like a pretty dreadful
boarding school type of life.
Yes - we have plenty of evidence
of nuns falling out with each other
and there being sort of factions
and bullying and quarrels,
so there could be a lot
of unhappiness in a convent as well.
How would Joan cope?
Fall into line, fade away
or stand up against the system?
(BLOWS RASPBERRY)
No-one could have predicted
what Joan did next.
Her true story
has only recently come to light,
recorded in the margins
of an ancient document
held at the University of York.
It was the year 1318.
Joan had been complaining
about feeling ill for months.
None of the medicines they gave her
seemed to work.
Eventually, she took to her bed.
She was there for days.
She went off her food,
and, finally, she died.
A funeral was held
and she was buried.
A tragic but all too common end
to a young life.
At least,
that was what everyone THOUGHT.
Then, would you believe it, a few
months later, Joan turned up again,
30 miles away, in Beverley,
shacked up with her secret boyfriend.
Was it a miracle? No.
Actually, some of the sisters
had helped her escape
by going along with the story
about her being ill.
They'd even buried a straw mannequin
in her place.
(ALL SCREAM)
SONG: ♪ Glory-bound
♪ Ah, ah, ah, ah
♪ Glory-bound
♪ Feeling so good today... ♪
On hearing this,
the Archbishop of York
demanded her return to the priory.
And that was all we knew
about Joan's story
until researchers in York discovered
another, very different account.
One of my colleagues working
on the project found another record
about Joan of Leeds,
and this is truly rare,
because it actually gives
her version of the story.
That's fantastic! What's her story?
Somebody called Brother John
says that he's met Joan
and that Joan says that she was
committed to the nunnery under-age -
you had to be 13 to be a nun -
against her will
and that she had never taken vows
and that therefore,
she shouldn't be a nun,
and that was, you know,
her reason for denying her vocation.
And Brother John then
writes to the Archbishop, saying
it would be better
that she were married
than getting up to who knows what
outside the convent.
You like this story, don't you?
Yes.
Joan does come across as
a woman with guts and initiative,
great ingenuity, a great character.
Quite honestly, what amazes me
is that so many nuns
actually stayed in the convents.
Which maybe shows that there
really weren't many options available
for young women at that time
and that when you've got
a really established system,
it takes a reckless act of rebellion
to break away from it,
whether your name's Joan of Arc
or Joan of Leeds.
(KISSING)
I think it's fair to say
that in terms of civil liberties,
things have progressed a bit
since the Middle Ages.
For example, freedom of speech -
it's the cornerstone
of our democracy, isn't it?
We can say what we like.
The Prime Minister
is a scoundrel and a liar.
(PEOPLE YAWN)
You might even say
that we rather take it for granted.
But back in the Middle Ages,
it was entirely different.
There was only one person
who could say what they liked
to the most powerful man
in the country, the king,
and it wasn't the queen.
It was the royal jester.
Diddly-dee! Look at me!
I'm as bonkers as can be!
You see, being king
wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
There was constant pressure,
to win battles,
to keep
all the pushy landowners happy
and to be the life and soul
of the banquet,
all while keeping an eye
on the power-grabbing Church...
Heresy!
..the revolting peasants
and that self-important son of yours
who has his eyes on your hat.
Being a king
was exhausting, stressful
and, frankly, really depressing.
What you needed was someone to
burst the bubble of all that stress,
and that's exactly
what the jester's job was,
to be outrageous,
to do and say the unthinkable.
Your Majesty, Your wondrous Majesty.
If we may beseech you, Your Majesty.
A royal jester could be
a sharp-witted satirist,
poking fun at the great and the good.
Enough oiliness here
to fry a whole pig!
Oh, stop it!
At the other end of the scale,
there were
the end-of-the-pier bawdy jesters,
who were a bit more in-your-face,
but either way,
their ambition was the same,
to make the monarch split his tights.
Our jester was very much
in the second, vulgar category.
His name was Roland le Petour.
(WHIP CRACKS)
(ANIMALS GROAN)
Roland may have had to work his way
right up from the bottom.
(PIG GRUNTS)
Early on in his career as a peasant,
Roland found that he had a talent
for entertaining people,
making them laugh,
or maybe he just thought
that being a peasant
was too much like hard work.
Anyway,
he used to go down the market square
and made a few quid showing off.
But however much he made people
laugh, an amateur fool like Roland
didn't get much in the way
of respect or cash.
When there were no festivals,
he'd travel from town to town
busking for pennies.
Oh, my God.
And if he couldn't afford props,
he'd just have to mime.
(LAUGHS)
(SLIDE WHISTLE PLAYS)
I'm being entertained by Ben Smith,
one of the resident jesters
at Warwick Castle.
(SQUELCH!)
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
Ben, your costume looks a bit like
something a jester would wear
in a movie.
Would Roland actually have worn
this kind of thing?
Absolutely, so from the pied design
of the costume
all the way up to the ears,
the ass's ears and tails
that run behind the costume,
this is a traditional
authentic jester's costume.
An ass's ears because
they make you look stupid?
Yes, of course.
He... he... he was the fool.
What would a jester have had to do?
Some jesters liked to employ
walking on stilts.
Some would like to do
a little bit of a dance and a jig,
juggling or maybe playing the lute
and telling stories,
but the biggest thing was
their charisma.
So, like today, they would be selling
themselves on their personality?
Absolutely, and this was very
important as a professional jester.
Simply being a regular jester
that no-one's heard of
sounds like hard work,
but how do you break through
and make it big?
As ever in showbiz, the secret
is to create your own special brand.
At some point,
Roland discovered he had a gift,
let's call it a talent,
something that set him apart
from all the other entertainers.
(FLATULENT NOISE)
That wasn't me.
Yes, Roland could break wind at will,
which is why he was known
as 'le Petour', French for 'Farter',
but more classy-sounding.
Back in the Middle Ages,
breaking wind was just as funny
as it is today.
Funnier, in fact.
(BREAKS WIND)
(LAUGHS)
It was a whole genre of its own.
(BREAKS WIND)
Oh, poo!
The breaking of wind
by all members and species of society
was beautifully captured
in medieval sacred texts.
It was part of life,
perhaps thanks to all those turnips.
(MONKEY BREAKS WIND AND SCREECHES)
Roland's unique skills were
recognised with a special job title.
Roland was a flatulist.
The most respected flatulists could
even play tunes from their bottoms.
(INSTRUMENT TOOTS)
History doesn't record
the precise nature of Roland's act
or, indeed, what tunes he played,
but he must have been very good,
because very quickly, his stock rose
and he got a crack
at every jester's dream -
a chance to appear
in the medieval version
of the Royal Command Performance,
which could end up
giving him a permanent job
in the royal household,
Henry II's Christmas show,
and he was billed as performing
his very own signature act -
a whistle, a leap and a fart.
Performing in front of the King
was dangerous for a jester.
Like that talent show on TV
I can't remember the name of,
it could make or break you.
Was the King in a bad mood? Would
Roland's talents be appreciated?
Or would his prowess desert him
at the moment of truth?
Roland gave it everything.
(DRUMS BEAT)
(DRUM ROLL)
(WHISTLES)
And here Roland comes.
He's jumped.
(PEOPLE GASP)
He's leapt.
(BREAKS WIND)
And there it is.
He's let one go. Oh, what a talent!
So, how did the King react?
He loved it!
(UP-BEAT MUSIC)
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
So much so that the King insisted
Roland return for a repeat
performance the following Christmas
and the one after that -
every Christmas, in fact.
(BREAKS WIND)
(LAUGHS)
And by way of gratuity, he let Roland
have use of a rather fine house -
Hemingstone Manor, in Suffolk,
complete with 30 acres of land.
Roland was made up.
He'd got the King to laugh
and gone from zero to hero.
Now he could indulge
in the life of a celebrity.
(RECORD SCRATCHES)
The problem was tastes change.
When Henry III came to the throne,
inexplicably, he regarded Roland
as, well, indecent.
Roland's services to the Crown
were no longer required.
His contract was cancelled.
He was booted out of the manor
and onto the street.
Showbiz - it's tough, isn't it?
You may think that in the Middle
Ages, everyone knew their place,
you were born to be a peasant
or a knight or even a nun,
but things were changing,
and for some,
career options
were starting to open up.
Take young Simon Wynchecombe.
This could be him.
I said hello.
He's an apprentice
to this gruff-looking chap.
Where have you been,
you lazy, idle loafer?
An apprenticeship
could give someone from a poor family
the chance to get ahead
in THE hip industry of the 1300s.
Simon was learning
how to be an armourer.
That's someone
who made this stuff - armour.
(SHOUTING)
(METAL RINGS)
Anyone who was anyone
in the Middle Ages had a nice suit,
and the top of the range
could set you back
as much as a very nice car
in today's money.
Young Wynchecombe
may have been as young as seven
when his parents sent him away
to live with the master armourer
up at the local castle.
That may sound grim,
but if you were hard up,
then getting someone else
to feed your kid was good news,
and getting them an apprenticeship
in a swanky profession,
that was a result.
But for Simon,
it meant getting up before dawn
and getting straight to work
without even having breakfast.
As an apprentice, Simon would
start the day by lighting the fire
and getting the coals blazing-hot,
ready for his master to do his work.
In fact, he'd spend an awful lot of
his time just clearing up the debris
that his master
had hammered and chipped away.
Imagine all that heat
and long, long, long hours.
Be really difficult for a 7-year-old.
Can I go and play now?
I'm hoping to pick up
some of the skills
that Simon would have learnt
as a young apprentice.
How hot do you have to get it?
Orange.
(BOTH LAUGH)
Graham Ashford is a professional
maker of medieval armour,
used for jousting competitions
and displays.
Just work that, towards...
towards... that's it.
From around 1300, chain mail started
to be replaced by armour plate,
especially to protect legs and arms.
What we're making is a vambrace.
This is a part for the forearm.
So you're trying to create,
like, a drainpipe, a cylinder.
That's it.
We'll get that back in the fire.
Am I right in saying
that the arms are one of
the hardest pieces
of the armour to make?
The shape of the arm and the greave,
for the shin... Yeah, for your leg.
..are two
of the more fluid shapes...
Yeah.
..that resemble the human being.
So, if you get them wrong,
they're really uncomfortable.
It's one of those easy-to-learn,
hard-to-master types of skills.
Simon would learn to pump exactly the
right amount of air into the forge
so it was hot enough
just when his boss needed it.
We reckon Simon was about seven
when he first started.
Right.
Is it a young man's game?
Yeah.
(BOTH LAUGH)
The older armourers
have all got sort of
some sort of tennis elbow
or elbow complaints.
I mean, just about
everything in these workshops,
particularly back then, is designed
to either maim or kill you.
The old smoke's coming up now. Oh!
Oh, it's horrid, isn't it?
Simon would have had to endure
up to 10 years of this
without even wearing safety goggles
until in his mid-teens, he would
have been considered a grown-up,
a journeyman armourer.
I can imagine Simon doing this
hour after hour.
Now he could literally journey
from castle to castle, town to town
with his tools, doing odd jobs, or
attach himself to a master armourer.
(HISSING)
That's it.
Oh, it sounds like
a budgerigar being tortured.
(SQUAWKS)
So that will go
on my left arm. Right.
Wa-hey! Yes.
Nothing can harm me.
I see what you mean, though.
If it was just cylindrical...
Yeah.
..it would chafe,
both there and there.
Yeah.
But now it fits in really
rather snugly. Sure.
Simon's job
had lots of other dangers,
apart from just running the risk
of getting tennis elbow.
Throughout most of the 1300s,
England was at war with France.
It was called the Hundred Years War.
A massive scrap
affecting the whole of Europe.
Made Brexit
look a bit like a tea party.
And Simon may have
got caught up in it.
You see, in the heat of battle,
a knight's armour
could get into a right old state.
(SCREAMS)
As a young armourer,
Simon would have been sent off to war
and put on stand-by,
ready to bash bits of plate armour
back into shape
while the battle raged.
A bit like being in a pit lane team
replacing wheels in Formula One.
For Simon,
it was a steep learning curve,
testing the limits of the technology.
He may even have saved lives.
On the other hand,
while war could be a little grim,
it was great news for the armourers,
and it guaranteed Simon lots of work.
He survived to settle down
with a decent income
and married his sweetheart, Johanna.
I've done your favourite -
quail with peppercorns.
Oh, I think I'm in love.
Now they could dream big.
Simon was ambitious.
He didn't just want to repair armour.
He wanted to create it.
He saw himself as an artist.
He wanted to head for the top
and be a top designer.
I've come to the Worshipful Company
of Armourers and Brasiers in London.
It's been here for 700 years,
surviving the Great Fire of London
and Hitler.
Look at these two. Aren't they great?
Real classical pieces of armour.
And you've got breastplates here.
Thing for a horse's face.
You've got these marvellous helmets.
Dr Tobias Capwell
is a freeman of the Company
and a leading authority
on English armour.
He's got a finished suit in the style
that Simon himself might well have
created in the 14th century.
English knights often fought on foot,
so their armour had to offer high
protection without slowing them down.
This armpiece, this is
actually very light, isn't it?
Yeah, this is... the armour
technology in the 14th century
is about developing a complete
hard exoskeleton for the human body.
I love that word 'exoskeleton'.
It's like one of those
crunchy insects, isn't it?
You just can't get at the juicy bits.
An armourer has to be an anatomist.
They have to know
not just the obvious bendy places
but all the subtleties
of human movement.
You know, if you
stick that gauntlet on, for example,
you start to see how subtle
that movement actually is.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
You can really do all that.
This is light equipment
that's very flexible
and yet gives you
extraordinary protection.
The big difference between what we
saw on the stairs and here, though,
is that this is made of what?
In the 14th century,
they weren't really capable
of making really big
pieces of iron and steel.
These are all little pieces that are
all riveted to a fabric cover.
So the guy who would have been
wearing this,
he's bought it off Simon, but this
isn't just one guy making this.
There's a load of different skills
here, aren't there?
Yes - part of the role of a master
armourer, the head of a workshop,
is to be able to bring together
and coordinate all those skills.
So Simon wouldn't just have been
the artist that he wanted to be.
He would have been a manager.
He'd have been a big boss.
Yeah. He's probably not picking
up a hammer very much at all.
And he's coordinating the efforts
of mercers and tailors
and embroiderers and spurriers.
But why was THIS place, the
Company of Armourers, so important?
Well, it was all about protecting
the livelihoods of its members,
a little bit like
a medieval trade union.
In the 14th century, the armourers
were in a very difficult situation,
because the Crown reserves the right
to take armourers
and make them work for however much
money you feel like paying them.
They're not allowed
to sell to anyone else,
and getting political power
for themselves
is the only way out of it.
With the support of the Company,
Simon could work
for whoever he wanted
without fear
of being put in the Tower.
His business took off.
But life wasn't only a bed of roses.
His beloved wife, Johanna, died,
most likely, as so many women did,
in childbirth.
Eventually, Simon remarried,
to Alice,
and having come from nothing,
he continued to get richer and richer
right up to the day he died.
One of the most interesting things,
I think, about Simon Wynchecombe
is his death, or at least his will.
He died in the year 1396.
Clearly, by that time,
he was absolutely loaded.
The proof is, look,
he wanted to be buried
in the church
of St Mary of Almondsbury
next to the body of Johanna,
his first wife,
but in order to do that, God willing,
they would have to
rebuild the church.
So he hands out
bequest to that church
and to loads of other churches,
9 or 10 of them,
and other charities and priories and
convents and hospitals and prisons,
and even to the lepers of St Giles,
he gives lots of silver,
and this one I find very intriguing -
"To Richard Person,"
who is called his servant,
he leaves a gown of blue motley
and six complete suits of armour
and the implements of his craft
as an armourer,
so he's handing over
the whole business,
and then,
a slightly waspish note at the end.
To his current wife, Alice,
he gives such share of his gifts
as of right and by the custom
of the City of London, and no more.
Well, that speaks volumes
about their relationship, doesn't it?
Regardless of what really went on
between him and his wife Alice,
what this really shows is that it was
possible for a select few people,
if they had
the right marketing skills,
to succeed big-time
in medieval England,
even if they weren't
members of the aristocracy.
Tensions over immigration, a
global pandemic, trouble with Europe.
I am, of course,
talking about the Middle Ages.
(CHICKENS CLUCK)
Although most of the population
lived out in the sticks,
had no newspapers
and their internet was rubbish,
issues of disease,
Europe and immigration
were every bit
the hot potatoes they are today.
No, they were even hotter potatoes...
(SCREAMING)
..with some
uncomfortable consequences
for the lives of ordinary people.
Take young Alice Spinner,
the spinster, for example.
When I say 'spinster',
in medieval times,
the word meant 'female spinner'
rather than 'unmarried woman'.
Surnames were a new thing, and
they often denoted your profession.
So everyone knew
what Alice Spinner did for a living.
Alice was also Irish.
She'd been drawn to England
in the 1430s
by the lure
of the English wool industry,
which was booming.
(DOG BARKS)
And one of its boom towns
was here, in Lavenham.
600 years ago,
these funny-shaped houses
were the power behind
England's most lucrative industry.
You see, for sheep,
the British climate is paradise.
(THUNDER CRASHES)
(SHEEP BLEAT)
Every spring, sheep up and down
the country were shorn.
The raw wool was cleaned and combed
and then dropped round in batches
to spinners like Alice
to be turned into woollen thread.
Essentially, what she did was this.
She'd have this spindle here,
which she would spin
round and round and round and round
and round and round and round
and the wool would get
more and more taut,
and eventually,
she'd just tease it out
with her thumb and forefinger
like that a bit
and then she'd spin it
round and round and round again
and ease it out again.
Mind you, she'd have to do it
quicker than I'm doing.
But even for Alice, it took ages.
At a push,
she could manage 100 yards an hour,
but to make a single dress
needs at least 10,000 yards -
two weeks' hard work.
I hope she didn't get RSI.
She'd have been under constant
pressure from the weaver to deliver,
but at least
the equipment was portable,
so she could get out and meet
her mates without stopping work.
Balls of the wool that Alice had spun
would then be collected
and go first to be dyed,
then to the weaver
to be turned into cloth,
which tailors could cut and sew
to make clothes.
An international trade
quickly grew up
flogging thousands of tonnes of wool
to weavers and tailors in Belgium,
who turned it into gorgeous outfits.
But a couple of things happened
to change that happy balance.
The global pandemic
of the Black Death
wiped out a third of the population,
and war with the French
seriously messed up
the cross-Channel workflow.
So Belgian cloth makers
fled to England
to be closer
to their precious supplies.
(SHEEP BLEAT)
And England
became THE centre in Europe
for the entire
wool and clothing industry pipeline,
from sheep to well-shod gentry.
Oh, isn't it gorgeous?
Alice was now at the heart
of a roaring trade,
a trade that was turning England from
a backwater into a regional power.
But however much the country needed
the labour of immigrants like Alice,
not everyone was happy.
Many of the English
demanded immigration controls.
By the 1430s,
the war with France was going badly.
Resentment was directed
at anyone who was French
or just a little bit foreign,
even the Irish,
which was a bit unfair, as Ireland
came under the English Crown.
So someone came up with
what they considered was a neat idea.
Yes, you've guessed it,
a brand-new tax.
But not a tax on everyone,
just on the immigrants.
Including our Alice.
So how did it work?
This is Leicester University medieval
historian Professor Joanna Story.
How could they prove
who was foreign and who wasn't?
I mean, they didn't have passports.
There wasn't a census
in those days, was there?
No, they had to ask
people's neighbours, essentially,
so it was a...
a system that was put in place
where the neighbours reported on
who was a foreign-born person.
That'll learn 'em,
coming here with they weird ways.
And how much
would she have had to pay?
Well, for somebody
of Alice's status,
it would have been about sixpence,
which is probably
round about two days' wages.
And that would have been quite a lot
for someone of her status.
Could she have avoided the tax
if she stayed here for a long time
or if she got married?
Rich people,
or people with money behind them,
could become natural-born English
people by paying a sum of money,
but that's very unlikely
for someone of Alice's status.
Have we any idea whether the...
the tax acted as a disincentive
and that less skilled foreign people
came over here?
It doesn't seem that it did.
For the 50 or so years
after the 1440 tax,
there are 40-odd thousand people
reappear in those records.
Can you imagine her eventually
earning a decent amount of money?
She's... appears to be independent.
She appears to be
someone who manages herself.
Don't forget that she's a spinner,
and that gives us
the modern word 'spinster',
which has connotations of
independence and not being married.
After several years
of poisonous gossip,
the legislation
was eventually withdrawn.
As for the war, ultimately,
the English had to concede defeat
and give up
on their French territories.
We don't know
what eventually happened to Alice.
Let's hope the immigration tax didn't
put her off and she stayed put.
Maybe she married
the weaver of her dreams.
Maybe she stayed independent
and got rich on wool.
(SHEEP BLEAT)
All we can be sure of
is that while fashions
have changed a fair bit
since Alice's time,
the way people treat each other,
unfortunately, hasn't much.
(GURGLING)
---
Our British history is rich
with tales of wealth and power
and all that political nonsense,
the glamour of our kings and queens,
the jewels and furs and charisma,
and all those heads
being chopped off.
(BLADES STRIKE)
(SCREAMING)
But what about the real people
who made everything happen?
(GASPING)
(BABY CRIES)
(YELLS)
I'll discover what they ate...
Seems a bit... stodgy.
..the challenges they faced...
Stuff this for a game of soldiers!
..and how they built Britain.
That's straight as a die.
I'm going to uncover
the extraordinary lives
of some of history's ordinary people.
MAN: Hut!
Romans...
It's quite a weight on my head,
I have to say.
(METALLIC CLANG)
(MAN GROANS)
..Edwardians...
Breathe in, madam. Breathe in.
..1950s...
Put the needle on the record.
Ooh. Really soft brakes.
Takes ages to stop it.
..and the Middle Ages...
There's the executive model,
inside the house.
Whatever.
History...
..from the bottom up.
(BIRDSONG)
This time,
I'm going back a thousand years,
to a time of knights in shining
armour, big-personality kings,
a powerful Church and great clothes.
(HORSES WHINNY)
Our story begins
after that infamous invasion
by William the Conqueror in 1066.
Once the Normans stopped
killing people, business boomed,
and the population soon trebled
to a massive 5 million.
People crowded into the towns.
Food production rocketed to cope.
But once they'd fed their faces
and those of their animals,
the people of medieval Britain
had to deal with the consequences.
(HORSE WHINNIES AND SNORTS)
So, what to do
with all the poo they produced?
Well, people in the Middle Ages
were renowned
for chucking the contents of their
chamber-pots into the streets below,
which were like open sewers.
And there's no doubt that
that happened. (BLOWS RASPBERRY)
(STRINGS STRUM)
Women love my singing.
She'll be putty in my hands.
Get lost, creep!
(SPLASH!)
What she meant was "Prenez,
garde a l'eau" - "Look out, water" -
which is where
we get the word 'loo' from.
But you'll be relieved to know
this wasn't how the sum
of most human waste was dealt with.
Well, moderately relieved.
For most people, there would be
a communal privy out back,
a wooden seat
suspended above a cesspit,
like this 12th-century model,
unearthed in York.
Or there's the executive model,
which was actually inside the house.
See? Look. There's the little hole.
So you just get in,
do what you have to do
and - bosh! - it goes straight down
into the cesspit.
Hurry along, mate.
I've been waiting half an hour.
Naturally,
it was polite to check first
that no-one was using
the economy version.
But that's not the end
of the problem, is it,
because
you can't dig a bottomless hole,
and eventually,
the cesspit's going to overflow.
So, the question is, what do you do
with all the stuff in the cesspit?
It's your turn to empty it.
Oh, God.
The solution created a career
for a special sort of person,
someone like Richard Raker.
The clue is in his name.
What he raked was poo.
He was also known as a gong farmer.
'Gong' as in 'going', like,
"I'm going to toilet."
This could be him.
Richard's job
was to harvest all that poo,
load it into the back of a cart
and take it out of the city,
where it could be disposed of.
(OWLS HOOT)
Even by medieval standards,
the contents of Richard's barrow
were pretty disgusting,
so he would start work
just after dark
and finish at the crack of dawn,
which is why he and his colleagues
were known as nightmen
and their product was rather tweely
referred to as nightsoil.
There was a clear career progression
for gong farmers.
Everyone wanted to be the tub man.
He was the bloke who had
a little cart with a bucket on it,
and he would transfer the bucket
to and from the cesspit.
And below him,
there was the rope man,
and his job was to chuck the bucket
down into the cesspit.
And at the very bottom, literally,
there was the hole man,
who went down the hole and excavated
all the disgusting stuff.
(BUBBLING)
Oh, what a job.
(INSECTS BUZZ)
There was a constant risk of cholera,
a lethal bacterial disease, caused
by contact with infected faeces.
It killed around a million people
a year worldwide.
Back then, they thought
the smelly air itself was dangerous,
so Richard got danger money and
earned a walloping sixpence a day.
A whole week's wages
for the average labourer.
Hmm. Quite tempting, then.
And Richard
would really earn his money
when it came to emptying large
communal toilets in the big city.
Somerset House, one of London's
most fabulous buildings.
(RECORD SCRATCHES)
But this glorious
Georgian architecture
hides quite a mucky past,
one which has only recently
reared its disgusting head.
(POWER TOOLS CLATTER)
This part of the building
is The Courtauld Institute for Art,
and round the corner there,
they're in the process
of revamping the art galleries,
which, believe me,
are gonna be really nice.
I'm meeting project director
Dr Stephanie Hall
just by where
a fascinating discovery was made.
So this is what
the excavation looked like
when we had just started.
What we actually thought
that we would find was a Tudor wall.
But, actually, it turns out
that it was a... a cesspit.
A cesspit, as in a bog?
A bog, a toilet, a cesspit.
A toilet.
Yeah.
(INSECTS BUZZ)
I have to say,
it did get a little bit smelly
as the archaeologists were...
were digging down.
Now, it's hundreds of years old,
but it never loses its...
..its shine, as it were.
The builders are now busy covering
it up behind their brickwork.
The cesspit was part of an inn
which stood here in the Middle Ages.
It was lined with large chalk blocks
that allowed water to
gradually filter out into the Thames,
leaving the waste trapped inside,
for chaps like Richard to empty.
Toilet seats, two or three in a row,
would have been suspended
above the stinking void of the pit.
Our cesspit was full
of about a hundred things.
So here, you've got a jug,
some pottery.
This is a boot spur
and a buckle on a belt.
The pottery was brown
and the conservators cleaned it up.
It would have been green like that?
It would have been green like that.
So this would have been
a condiment dish.
So if you were eating olives,
you put pits in one side
and keep the olives in the other.
So you're sitting there on the loo,
having your hors d'oeuvres,
somebody gives you a shout, you stand
up and your olives go down the khazi.
(LAUGHS)
But there's something else
a little more distressing.
So the other thing we found
was a... entire dog skeleton.
A little dog.
He may have come
to have a little dig
and a little sniff
and maybe he fell in.
That's the saddest part
of this story.
It is very sad.
Emptying this place would have been
a big job, quite literally,
but this wasn't the end of it.
Before the night was over,
Richard was supposed
to carry his load out of town
and deposit it with a local farmer,
who'd use the nightsoil
as fertiliser.
Some unscrupulous nightmen
just fly-tipped the stuff
wherever they could,
but the penalties for that
could be really harsh.
There was
one young London gong farmer
who was caught
pouring effluent down a drain,
and they stuck him
in one of his own vessels,
filled it with poo
right up to his neck,
and they left him in Golden Lane
for everyone to see
with a big sign around his neck
telling them what he'd done.
I imagine Richard yearning to escape
his stinking struggle
of everyday life.
Unfortunately,
that wasn't what happened.
The reason we know about Richard
is that in 1326,
unusually for a nightman,
his death was recorded,
because its manner was so bizarre.
One afternoon, Richard was at home,
and, I don't know,
maybe he was just a bit tired,
wasn't quite on his game,
and he realised
he needed to go to the toilet,
and he sat down, and
he'd meant to fix that toilet seat,
it had been rotten for some time,
but he'd never got round to it,
and suddenly, there was a crash
and he plunged down, down, down
into the cesspit
and he drowned...
..in his own poo.
It's an odd way to become famous.
(MAN SCREAMS)
(BUBBLING)
(GROANS)
In the Middle Ages,
it wasn't only chaps who kicked ass.
You've probably heard about
the great medieval warrior,
heroine and saint Joan of Arc,
who fought for the French
against the English,
but what you may not know
is that we Brits had our own Joan,
Joan of Leeds.
Joan of Leeds wasn't actually a
saint, and she didn't live in Leeds.
She lived in the Benedictine priory
of St Clement, in York, in the 1300s.
As a nun, Joan was part
of the most powerful organisation
in medieval Europe, the Church.
The countryside of the Middle Ages
was positively cluttered
with religious buildings -
monasteries, priories, convents.
The Church was a fundamental part
of everyone's life.
Many people worked on its land.
Monasteries and convents
delivered a constant vigil of prayer
but also provided
hospitals and social services
and were centres
of science, education and literature.
But being a nun wasn't all fun.
In fact,
Joan was as miserable as hell.
She was a teenager. She was a novice.
And she soon realised that the whole
nun thing really wasn't for her.
(SPIRITUAL SINGING)
(BELL RINGS)
Joan was probably sent to the convent
as a little girl
to be educated by the nuns.
Then in her mid-teens, at some point,
she apparently decided
to forsake worldly things
and become a novice nun.
But was it really her decision?
Or was she pushed?
Joan's family
would originally have come from Leeds
and were reasonably well-off.
I recommend the chateaubriand.
Medium-rare?
Yummy!
Such families
didn't like too many daughters
because they were extremely expensive
to marry off, with lavish dowries.
Oh, dear.
That left one option -
the convent, with
a handsome donation to the abbess.
I've got overheads, you know!
While most people in the Middle Ages
were trying to get OUT of poverty,
nuns were trying to get INTO it.
Joan's priory,
like most at that time,
followed the strict rule
of St Benedict.
That meant she had to take
three vows - obedience to the abbess,
and abbesses could be really strict,
poverty for life, and chastity,
no relations with men.
In fact, men weren't allowed
anywhere near the place.
Whatever.
(SPIRITUAL SINGING)
And that was just for starters.
Joan didn't even get a lie-in.
(BELL RINGS)
Each day would begin at 2am
in the chapel,
with prayers, psalms,
hymns and readings.
The primary role of monasteries
and convents in the Middle Ages
was to pray for the souls of the dead
so they'd eventually
ascend into heaven.
And people donated a lot of money
to be prayed for.
So for Joan,
after a few more hours sleep,
it was up at dawn for more prayers,
followed by a simple breakfast,
then another service at 6am,
then another four lots of prayers,
perhaps interspersed with a bit of
book illuminating and odd jobs,
followed by a simple supper.
Black pudding again?
Yes, every day
for the last two years.
And then prayers,
lights out by seven.
(BLOWING)
For many, it was a genuine calling
to which they were devoted.
All I'm saying is, I don't know
many teenagers who'd plump for it.
To better understand Joan's plight,
I'm meeting
Professor Sarah Rees Jones,
a medieval historian
from the University of York.
It would have been really tough
for a teenage girl
to be a novice, wouldn't it?
I think it could have been
really tedious,
because all that the nuns
were required to do
was to observe the religious offices
throughout the day.
And doing that
day after day after day
with the same
very small group of women -
there were probably fewer
than 20 nuns in this convent -
would have been very tedious,
repetitive and claustrophobic.
It does sound like a pretty dreadful
boarding school type of life.
Yes - we have plenty of evidence
of nuns falling out with each other
and there being sort of factions
and bullying and quarrels,
so there could be a lot
of unhappiness in a convent as well.
How would Joan cope?
Fall into line, fade away
or stand up against the system?
(BLOWS RASPBERRY)
No-one could have predicted
what Joan did next.
Her true story
has only recently come to light,
recorded in the margins
of an ancient document
held at the University of York.
It was the year 1318.
Joan had been complaining
about feeling ill for months.
None of the medicines they gave her
seemed to work.
Eventually, she took to her bed.
She was there for days.
She went off her food,
and, finally, she died.
A funeral was held
and she was buried.
A tragic but all too common end
to a young life.
At least,
that was what everyone THOUGHT.
Then, would you believe it, a few
months later, Joan turned up again,
30 miles away, in Beverley,
shacked up with her secret boyfriend.
Was it a miracle? No.
Actually, some of the sisters
had helped her escape
by going along with the story
about her being ill.
They'd even buried a straw mannequin
in her place.
(ALL SCREAM)
SONG: ♪ Glory-bound
♪ Ah, ah, ah, ah
♪ Glory-bound
♪ Feeling so good today... ♪
On hearing this,
the Archbishop of York
demanded her return to the priory.
And that was all we knew
about Joan's story
until researchers in York discovered
another, very different account.
One of my colleagues working
on the project found another record
about Joan of Leeds,
and this is truly rare,
because it actually gives
her version of the story.
That's fantastic! What's her story?
Somebody called Brother John
says that he's met Joan
and that Joan says that she was
committed to the nunnery under-age -
you had to be 13 to be a nun -
against her will
and that she had never taken vows
and that therefore,
she shouldn't be a nun,
and that was, you know,
her reason for denying her vocation.
And Brother John then
writes to the Archbishop, saying
it would be better
that she were married
than getting up to who knows what
outside the convent.
You like this story, don't you?
Yes.
Joan does come across as
a woman with guts and initiative,
great ingenuity, a great character.
Quite honestly, what amazes me
is that so many nuns
actually stayed in the convents.
Which maybe shows that there
really weren't many options available
for young women at that time
and that when you've got
a really established system,
it takes a reckless act of rebellion
to break away from it,
whether your name's Joan of Arc
or Joan of Leeds.
(KISSING)
I think it's fair to say
that in terms of civil liberties,
things have progressed a bit
since the Middle Ages.
For example, freedom of speech -
it's the cornerstone
of our democracy, isn't it?
We can say what we like.
The Prime Minister
is a scoundrel and a liar.
(PEOPLE YAWN)
You might even say
that we rather take it for granted.
But back in the Middle Ages,
it was entirely different.
There was only one person
who could say what they liked
to the most powerful man
in the country, the king,
and it wasn't the queen.
It was the royal jester.
Diddly-dee! Look at me!
I'm as bonkers as can be!
You see, being king
wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
There was constant pressure,
to win battles,
to keep
all the pushy landowners happy
and to be the life and soul
of the banquet,
all while keeping an eye
on the power-grabbing Church...
Heresy!
..the revolting peasants
and that self-important son of yours
who has his eyes on your hat.
Being a king
was exhausting, stressful
and, frankly, really depressing.
What you needed was someone to
burst the bubble of all that stress,
and that's exactly
what the jester's job was,
to be outrageous,
to do and say the unthinkable.
Your Majesty, Your wondrous Majesty.
If we may beseech you, Your Majesty.
A royal jester could be
a sharp-witted satirist,
poking fun at the great and the good.
Enough oiliness here
to fry a whole pig!
Oh, stop it!
At the other end of the scale,
there were
the end-of-the-pier bawdy jesters,
who were a bit more in-your-face,
but either way,
their ambition was the same,
to make the monarch split his tights.
Our jester was very much
in the second, vulgar category.
His name was Roland le Petour.
(WHIP CRACKS)
(ANIMALS GROAN)
Roland may have had to work his way
right up from the bottom.
(PIG GRUNTS)
Early on in his career as a peasant,
Roland found that he had a talent
for entertaining people,
making them laugh,
or maybe he just thought
that being a peasant
was too much like hard work.
Anyway,
he used to go down the market square
and made a few quid showing off.
But however much he made people
laugh, an amateur fool like Roland
didn't get much in the way
of respect or cash.
When there were no festivals,
he'd travel from town to town
busking for pennies.
Oh, my God.
And if he couldn't afford props,
he'd just have to mime.
(LAUGHS)
(SLIDE WHISTLE PLAYS)
I'm being entertained by Ben Smith,
one of the resident jesters
at Warwick Castle.
(SQUELCH!)
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
Ben, your costume looks a bit like
something a jester would wear
in a movie.
Would Roland actually have worn
this kind of thing?
Absolutely, so from the pied design
of the costume
all the way up to the ears,
the ass's ears and tails
that run behind the costume,
this is a traditional
authentic jester's costume.
An ass's ears because
they make you look stupid?
Yes, of course.
He... he... he was the fool.
What would a jester have had to do?
Some jesters liked to employ
walking on stilts.
Some would like to do
a little bit of a dance and a jig,
juggling or maybe playing the lute
and telling stories,
but the biggest thing was
their charisma.
So, like today, they would be selling
themselves on their personality?
Absolutely, and this was very
important as a professional jester.
Simply being a regular jester
that no-one's heard of
sounds like hard work,
but how do you break through
and make it big?
As ever in showbiz, the secret
is to create your own special brand.
At some point,
Roland discovered he had a gift,
let's call it a talent,
something that set him apart
from all the other entertainers.
(FLATULENT NOISE)
That wasn't me.
Yes, Roland could break wind at will,
which is why he was known
as 'le Petour', French for 'Farter',
but more classy-sounding.
Back in the Middle Ages,
breaking wind was just as funny
as it is today.
Funnier, in fact.
(BREAKS WIND)
(LAUGHS)
It was a whole genre of its own.
(BREAKS WIND)
Oh, poo!
The breaking of wind
by all members and species of society
was beautifully captured
in medieval sacred texts.
It was part of life,
perhaps thanks to all those turnips.
(MONKEY BREAKS WIND AND SCREECHES)
Roland's unique skills were
recognised with a special job title.
Roland was a flatulist.
The most respected flatulists could
even play tunes from their bottoms.
(INSTRUMENT TOOTS)
History doesn't record
the precise nature of Roland's act
or, indeed, what tunes he played,
but he must have been very good,
because very quickly, his stock rose
and he got a crack
at every jester's dream -
a chance to appear
in the medieval version
of the Royal Command Performance,
which could end up
giving him a permanent job
in the royal household,
Henry II's Christmas show,
and he was billed as performing
his very own signature act -
a whistle, a leap and a fart.
Performing in front of the King
was dangerous for a jester.
Like that talent show on TV
I can't remember the name of,
it could make or break you.
Was the King in a bad mood? Would
Roland's talents be appreciated?
Or would his prowess desert him
at the moment of truth?
Roland gave it everything.
(DRUMS BEAT)
(DRUM ROLL)
(WHISTLES)
And here Roland comes.
He's jumped.
(PEOPLE GASP)
He's leapt.
(BREAKS WIND)
And there it is.
He's let one go. Oh, what a talent!
So, how did the King react?
He loved it!
(UP-BEAT MUSIC)
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
So much so that the King insisted
Roland return for a repeat
performance the following Christmas
and the one after that -
every Christmas, in fact.
(BREAKS WIND)
(LAUGHS)
And by way of gratuity, he let Roland
have use of a rather fine house -
Hemingstone Manor, in Suffolk,
complete with 30 acres of land.
Roland was made up.
He'd got the King to laugh
and gone from zero to hero.
Now he could indulge
in the life of a celebrity.
(RECORD SCRATCHES)
The problem was tastes change.
When Henry III came to the throne,
inexplicably, he regarded Roland
as, well, indecent.
Roland's services to the Crown
were no longer required.
His contract was cancelled.
He was booted out of the manor
and onto the street.
Showbiz - it's tough, isn't it?
You may think that in the Middle
Ages, everyone knew their place,
you were born to be a peasant
or a knight or even a nun,
but things were changing,
and for some,
career options
were starting to open up.
Take young Simon Wynchecombe.
This could be him.
I said hello.
He's an apprentice
to this gruff-looking chap.
Where have you been,
you lazy, idle loafer?
An apprenticeship
could give someone from a poor family
the chance to get ahead
in THE hip industry of the 1300s.
Simon was learning
how to be an armourer.
That's someone
who made this stuff - armour.
(SHOUTING)
(METAL RINGS)
Anyone who was anyone
in the Middle Ages had a nice suit,
and the top of the range
could set you back
as much as a very nice car
in today's money.
Young Wynchecombe
may have been as young as seven
when his parents sent him away
to live with the master armourer
up at the local castle.
That may sound grim,
but if you were hard up,
then getting someone else
to feed your kid was good news,
and getting them an apprenticeship
in a swanky profession,
that was a result.
But for Simon,
it meant getting up before dawn
and getting straight to work
without even having breakfast.
As an apprentice, Simon would
start the day by lighting the fire
and getting the coals blazing-hot,
ready for his master to do his work.
In fact, he'd spend an awful lot of
his time just clearing up the debris
that his master
had hammered and chipped away.
Imagine all that heat
and long, long, long hours.
Be really difficult for a 7-year-old.
Can I go and play now?
I'm hoping to pick up
some of the skills
that Simon would have learnt
as a young apprentice.
How hot do you have to get it?
Orange.
(BOTH LAUGH)
Graham Ashford is a professional
maker of medieval armour,
used for jousting competitions
and displays.
Just work that, towards...
towards... that's it.
From around 1300, chain mail started
to be replaced by armour plate,
especially to protect legs and arms.
What we're making is a vambrace.
This is a part for the forearm.
So you're trying to create,
like, a drainpipe, a cylinder.
That's it.
We'll get that back in the fire.
Am I right in saying
that the arms are one of
the hardest pieces
of the armour to make?
The shape of the arm and the greave,
for the shin... Yeah, for your leg.
..are two
of the more fluid shapes...
Yeah.
..that resemble the human being.
So, if you get them wrong,
they're really uncomfortable.
It's one of those easy-to-learn,
hard-to-master types of skills.
Simon would learn to pump exactly the
right amount of air into the forge
so it was hot enough
just when his boss needed it.
We reckon Simon was about seven
when he first started.
Right.
Is it a young man's game?
Yeah.
(BOTH LAUGH)
The older armourers
have all got sort of
some sort of tennis elbow
or elbow complaints.
I mean, just about
everything in these workshops,
particularly back then, is designed
to either maim or kill you.
The old smoke's coming up now. Oh!
Oh, it's horrid, isn't it?
Simon would have had to endure
up to 10 years of this
without even wearing safety goggles
until in his mid-teens, he would
have been considered a grown-up,
a journeyman armourer.
I can imagine Simon doing this
hour after hour.
Now he could literally journey
from castle to castle, town to town
with his tools, doing odd jobs, or
attach himself to a master armourer.
(HISSING)
That's it.
Oh, it sounds like
a budgerigar being tortured.
(SQUAWKS)
So that will go
on my left arm. Right.
Wa-hey! Yes.
Nothing can harm me.
I see what you mean, though.
If it was just cylindrical...
Yeah.
..it would chafe,
both there and there.
Yeah.
But now it fits in really
rather snugly. Sure.
Simon's job
had lots of other dangers,
apart from just running the risk
of getting tennis elbow.
Throughout most of the 1300s,
England was at war with France.
It was called the Hundred Years War.
A massive scrap
affecting the whole of Europe.
Made Brexit
look a bit like a tea party.
And Simon may have
got caught up in it.
You see, in the heat of battle,
a knight's armour
could get into a right old state.
(SCREAMS)
As a young armourer,
Simon would have been sent off to war
and put on stand-by,
ready to bash bits of plate armour
back into shape
while the battle raged.
A bit like being in a pit lane team
replacing wheels in Formula One.
For Simon,
it was a steep learning curve,
testing the limits of the technology.
He may even have saved lives.
On the other hand,
while war could be a little grim,
it was great news for the armourers,
and it guaranteed Simon lots of work.
He survived to settle down
with a decent income
and married his sweetheart, Johanna.
I've done your favourite -
quail with peppercorns.
Oh, I think I'm in love.
Now they could dream big.
Simon was ambitious.
He didn't just want to repair armour.
He wanted to create it.
He saw himself as an artist.
He wanted to head for the top
and be a top designer.
I've come to the Worshipful Company
of Armourers and Brasiers in London.
It's been here for 700 years,
surviving the Great Fire of London
and Hitler.
Look at these two. Aren't they great?
Real classical pieces of armour.
And you've got breastplates here.
Thing for a horse's face.
You've got these marvellous helmets.
Dr Tobias Capwell
is a freeman of the Company
and a leading authority
on English armour.
He's got a finished suit in the style
that Simon himself might well have
created in the 14th century.
English knights often fought on foot,
so their armour had to offer high
protection without slowing them down.
This armpiece, this is
actually very light, isn't it?
Yeah, this is... the armour
technology in the 14th century
is about developing a complete
hard exoskeleton for the human body.
I love that word 'exoskeleton'.
It's like one of those
crunchy insects, isn't it?
You just can't get at the juicy bits.
An armourer has to be an anatomist.
They have to know
not just the obvious bendy places
but all the subtleties
of human movement.
You know, if you
stick that gauntlet on, for example,
you start to see how subtle
that movement actually is.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
You can really do all that.
This is light equipment
that's very flexible
and yet gives you
extraordinary protection.
The big difference between what we
saw on the stairs and here, though,
is that this is made of what?
In the 14th century,
they weren't really capable
of making really big
pieces of iron and steel.
These are all little pieces that are
all riveted to a fabric cover.
So the guy who would have been
wearing this,
he's bought it off Simon, but this
isn't just one guy making this.
There's a load of different skills
here, aren't there?
Yes - part of the role of a master
armourer, the head of a workshop,
is to be able to bring together
and coordinate all those skills.
So Simon wouldn't just have been
the artist that he wanted to be.
He would have been a manager.
He'd have been a big boss.
Yeah. He's probably not picking
up a hammer very much at all.
And he's coordinating the efforts
of mercers and tailors
and embroiderers and spurriers.
But why was THIS place, the
Company of Armourers, so important?
Well, it was all about protecting
the livelihoods of its members,
a little bit like
a medieval trade union.
In the 14th century, the armourers
were in a very difficult situation,
because the Crown reserves the right
to take armourers
and make them work for however much
money you feel like paying them.
They're not allowed
to sell to anyone else,
and getting political power
for themselves
is the only way out of it.
With the support of the Company,
Simon could work
for whoever he wanted
without fear
of being put in the Tower.
His business took off.
But life wasn't only a bed of roses.
His beloved wife, Johanna, died,
most likely, as so many women did,
in childbirth.
Eventually, Simon remarried,
to Alice,
and having come from nothing,
he continued to get richer and richer
right up to the day he died.
One of the most interesting things,
I think, about Simon Wynchecombe
is his death, or at least his will.
He died in the year 1396.
Clearly, by that time,
he was absolutely loaded.
The proof is, look,
he wanted to be buried
in the church
of St Mary of Almondsbury
next to the body of Johanna,
his first wife,
but in order to do that, God willing,
they would have to
rebuild the church.
So he hands out
bequest to that church
and to loads of other churches,
9 or 10 of them,
and other charities and priories and
convents and hospitals and prisons,
and even to the lepers of St Giles,
he gives lots of silver,
and this one I find very intriguing -
"To Richard Person,"
who is called his servant,
he leaves a gown of blue motley
and six complete suits of armour
and the implements of his craft
as an armourer,
so he's handing over
the whole business,
and then,
a slightly waspish note at the end.
To his current wife, Alice,
he gives such share of his gifts
as of right and by the custom
of the City of London, and no more.
Well, that speaks volumes
about their relationship, doesn't it?
Regardless of what really went on
between him and his wife Alice,
what this really shows is that it was
possible for a select few people,
if they had
the right marketing skills,
to succeed big-time
in medieval England,
even if they weren't
members of the aristocracy.
Tensions over immigration, a
global pandemic, trouble with Europe.
I am, of course,
talking about the Middle Ages.
(CHICKENS CLUCK)
Although most of the population
lived out in the sticks,
had no newspapers
and their internet was rubbish,
issues of disease,
Europe and immigration
were every bit
the hot potatoes they are today.
No, they were even hotter potatoes...
(SCREAMING)
..with some
uncomfortable consequences
for the lives of ordinary people.
Take young Alice Spinner,
the spinster, for example.
When I say 'spinster',
in medieval times,
the word meant 'female spinner'
rather than 'unmarried woman'.
Surnames were a new thing, and
they often denoted your profession.
So everyone knew
what Alice Spinner did for a living.
Alice was also Irish.
She'd been drawn to England
in the 1430s
by the lure
of the English wool industry,
which was booming.
(DOG BARKS)
And one of its boom towns
was here, in Lavenham.
600 years ago,
these funny-shaped houses
were the power behind
England's most lucrative industry.
You see, for sheep,
the British climate is paradise.
(THUNDER CRASHES)
(SHEEP BLEAT)
Every spring, sheep up and down
the country were shorn.
The raw wool was cleaned and combed
and then dropped round in batches
to spinners like Alice
to be turned into woollen thread.
Essentially, what she did was this.
She'd have this spindle here,
which she would spin
round and round and round and round
and round and round and round
and the wool would get
more and more taut,
and eventually,
she'd just tease it out
with her thumb and forefinger
like that a bit
and then she'd spin it
round and round and round again
and ease it out again.
Mind you, she'd have to do it
quicker than I'm doing.
But even for Alice, it took ages.
At a push,
she could manage 100 yards an hour,
but to make a single dress
needs at least 10,000 yards -
two weeks' hard work.
I hope she didn't get RSI.
She'd have been under constant
pressure from the weaver to deliver,
but at least
the equipment was portable,
so she could get out and meet
her mates without stopping work.
Balls of the wool that Alice had spun
would then be collected
and go first to be dyed,
then to the weaver
to be turned into cloth,
which tailors could cut and sew
to make clothes.
An international trade
quickly grew up
flogging thousands of tonnes of wool
to weavers and tailors in Belgium,
who turned it into gorgeous outfits.
But a couple of things happened
to change that happy balance.
The global pandemic
of the Black Death
wiped out a third of the population,
and war with the French
seriously messed up
the cross-Channel workflow.
So Belgian cloth makers
fled to England
to be closer
to their precious supplies.
(SHEEP BLEAT)
And England
became THE centre in Europe
for the entire
wool and clothing industry pipeline,
from sheep to well-shod gentry.
Oh, isn't it gorgeous?
Alice was now at the heart
of a roaring trade,
a trade that was turning England from
a backwater into a regional power.
But however much the country needed
the labour of immigrants like Alice,
not everyone was happy.
Many of the English
demanded immigration controls.
By the 1430s,
the war with France was going badly.
Resentment was directed
at anyone who was French
or just a little bit foreign,
even the Irish,
which was a bit unfair, as Ireland
came under the English Crown.
So someone came up with
what they considered was a neat idea.
Yes, you've guessed it,
a brand-new tax.
But not a tax on everyone,
just on the immigrants.
Including our Alice.
So how did it work?
This is Leicester University medieval
historian Professor Joanna Story.
How could they prove
who was foreign and who wasn't?
I mean, they didn't have passports.
There wasn't a census
in those days, was there?
No, they had to ask
people's neighbours, essentially,
so it was a...
a system that was put in place
where the neighbours reported on
who was a foreign-born person.
That'll learn 'em,
coming here with they weird ways.
And how much
would she have had to pay?
Well, for somebody
of Alice's status,
it would have been about sixpence,
which is probably
round about two days' wages.
And that would have been quite a lot
for someone of her status.
Could she have avoided the tax
if she stayed here for a long time
or if she got married?
Rich people,
or people with money behind them,
could become natural-born English
people by paying a sum of money,
but that's very unlikely
for someone of Alice's status.
Have we any idea whether the...
the tax acted as a disincentive
and that less skilled foreign people
came over here?
It doesn't seem that it did.
For the 50 or so years
after the 1440 tax,
there are 40-odd thousand people
reappear in those records.
Can you imagine her eventually
earning a decent amount of money?
She's... appears to be independent.
She appears to be
someone who manages herself.
Don't forget that she's a spinner,
and that gives us
the modern word 'spinster',
which has connotations of
independence and not being married.
After several years
of poisonous gossip,
the legislation
was eventually withdrawn.
As for the war, ultimately,
the English had to concede defeat
and give up
on their French territories.
We don't know
what eventually happened to Alice.
Let's hope the immigration tax didn't
put her off and she stayed put.
Maybe she married
the weaver of her dreams.
Maybe she stayed independent
and got rich on wool.
(SHEEP BLEAT)
All we can be sure of
is that while fashions
have changed a fair bit
since Alice's time,
the way people treat each other,
unfortunately, hasn't much.
(GURGLING)