The WORST Jobs in Medieval England

You wake up in the dark, and the first thing you notice is the smell. This is London around the year 1340, a city with no sewers, no rubbish collection, and tens of thousands of people packed inside its walls. Today, you need work, and the only jobs left are the ones nobody else wants. In this video, you try five of the worst jobs in medieval England from dawn to midnight. You plough frozen fields as a serf who cannot leave his lord, scrape filth from the streets as a raker, stamp wool in cold troughs as a fuller, and work the stinking pits of a tannery outside the town walls. Then night falls, and you meet the gong farmer, the person who climbed down into the city's cesspits by hand. And you discover why the worst job of all may have been one of the best paid. CHAPTERS 0:00 Waking up in London 0:51 The ploughman 2:19 The raker 3:57 The fuller 5:15 The tanner 6:36 The gong farmer 8:21 Your own city Sources: Ælfric's Colloquy (around AD 1000), the London Assize of Nuisance, the London coroners' rolls (the death of Richard the Raker, 1326), the royal order of Edward III on filth in the streets and the Thames (1357), and the London record of the Newgate prison cesspit cleaning (1281). If you enjoyed spending a day in medieval London, leave a like and subscribe for more trips into the past. Now tell me in the comments: which of these five jobs would you have picked? #MedievalHistory #MedievalEngland #History #IfYouLivedThen #WorstJobs