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00:00Our British history is rich with tales of wealth and power and all that political nonsense.
00:10The glamour of our kings and queens, the jewels and furs and charisma.
00:16And all those heads being chopped off.
00:21But what about the real people who made everything happen?
00:24Red Buller!
00:29I'll discover what they ate.
00:31It's a bit stuchy.
00:33The challenges they faced.
00:35Stuff this for a game of soldiers.
00:37And how they built Britain.
00:39That's straight as a die.
00:41I'm going to uncover the extraordinary lives of some of history's ordinary people.
00:49Romans.
00:50It's quite a weight on my head, I have to say.
00:54Edwardians.
00:55Breathe in, madam, breathe in.
00:571950s.
00:58Put the needle on the record.
01:01Ooh, really soft breaks, takes ages to stop it.
01:04And the middle ages.
01:06There's the executive model inside the house.
01:10Whatever.
01:11History from the bottom up.
01:14This 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.
01:33Our story begins after that infamous invasion by William the Conqueror in 1066.
01:44Once the Normans stopped killing people, business boomed, and the population soon trebled to a massive five million.
01:51People crowded into the towns.
01:54Food production rocketed to cope.
01:57But once they'd fed their faces and those of their animals, the people of medieval Britain had to deal with the consequences.
02:04So, what to do with all the poo they produced?
02:10Well, people in the middle ages were renowned for chucking the contents of their chamber pots into the streets below, which were like open sewers.
02:18And there's no doubt that that happened.
02:24Women love my singing.
02:26She'll be putty in my hands.
02:28Get lost, creep!
02:33What she meant was prene garda lo, look out water, which is where we get the word loo from.
02:41But you'll be relieved to know this wasn't how the sum of most human waste was dealt with.
02:48Well, moderately relieved.
02:50For most people, there would be a communal privy out back.
02:54A wooden seat suspended above a cesspit.
02:57Like this 12th century model unearthed in York.
03:01Or there's the executive model, which was actually inside the house.
03:05See, look, there's the little hole.
03:08So you just get in, do what you have to do, and bosh, it goes straight down into the cesspit.
03:15Hurry along, mate, I've been waiting half an hour.
03:18Naturally, it was polite to check first that no one was using the economy version.
03:24But that's not the end of the problem, is it?
03:26Because you can't dig a bottomless hole, and eventually the cesspit's going to overflow.
03:31So, the question is, what do you do with all the stuff in the cesspit?
03:36It's your turn to empty air.
03:39Oh, God.
03:42The solution created a career for a special sort of person.
03:46Someone like Richard Rake here.
03:48The clue is in his name.
03:50What he raked was poo.
03:52He was also known as a gong farmer.
03:56Gong as in going, like, I'm gong the toilet.
04:02This could be him.
04:04Richard's job was to harvest all that poo.
04:07Load it into the back of the cart and take it out of the city where it could be disposed of.
04:13Even by medieval standards, the contents of Richard's barrow were pretty disgusting.
04:20So, he would start work just after dark and finish at the crack of dawn,
04:27which is why he and his colleagues were known as night men,
04:31and their product was rather tweely referred to as night soil.
04:39There was a clear career progression for gong farmers.
04:42Everyone wanted to be the tub man.
04:45He was the bloke who had a little cart with a bucket on it,
04:49and he would transfer the bucket to and from the cesspit.
04:53And below him, there was the rope man,
04:56and his job was to chuck the bucket down into the cesspit.
05:02And at the very bottom, literally, there was the hole man
05:06who went down the hole and excavated all the disgusting stuff.
05:12Oh, what a job.
05:14There was a constant risk of cholera, a lethal bacterial disease,
05:20caused by contact with infected faeces.
05:23It killed around a million people a year worldwide.
05:27Back then, they thought the smelly air itself was dangerous.
05:31So, Richard got danger money and earned a walloping sixpence a day,
05:35a whole week's wages for the average labourer.
05:39Hmm, quite tempting then.
05:42And Richard would really earn his money
05:45when it came to emptying large communal toilets in the big city.
05:54Somerset House, one of London's most fabulous buildings.
05:58But this glorious Georgian architecture hides quite a mucky past,
06:06one which has only recently reared its disgusting head.
06:14This part of the building is the Courtauld Institute for Art,
06:18and around the corner there,
06:20they're in the process of revamping the art galleries,
06:23which, believe me, are going to be really nice.
06:26I'm meeting project director Dr Stephanie Hall
06:30just by where a fascinating discovery was made.
06:35So this is what the excavation looked like when we had just started.
06:38What we actually thought that we would find was a Tudor wall,
06:42but actually it turns out that it was a cesspit.
06:45A cesspit as in a bog?
06:48A bog, a toilet, a cesspit.
06:51A toilet.
06:52Yeah.
06:55I have to say, it did get a little bit smelly
06:58as the archaeologists were digging down.
07:00Now, it's hundreds of years old,
07:01but it never loses its shine, as it were.
07:07The builders are now busy covering it up behind their brickwork.
07:10The cesspit was part of an inn which stood here in the Middle Ages.
07:15It was lined with large chalk blocks that allowed water
07:19to gradually filter out into the Thames,
07:21leaving the waste trapped inside,
07:24for chaps like Richard to empty.
07:27Toilet seats, two or three in a row,
07:30would have been suspended above the stinking void of the pit.
07:33Our cesspit was full of about a hundred things.
07:36So here you've got a jug, some pottery.
07:39This is a boot spur and a buckle on a belt.
07:42The pottery was brown and the conservators cleaned it up.
07:48So it would have been green like that?
07:49It would have been green like that.
07:50So this would have been a condiment dish.
07:52So if you were eating olives, you'd put pits in one side,
07:55and keep the olives in the other.
07:57So you're sitting there on the loo, having your hors d'oeuvres,
08:01somebody gives you a shout, you stand up,
08:03and your olives go down the car seat.
08:05But there's something else a little more distressing.
08:09So the other thing we found was an entire dog skeleton,
08:14a little dog.
08:17He may have come to have a little dig and a little sniff
08:20and maybe he fell in.
08:22That's the saddest part of this story.
08:23It is very sad.
08:28Emptying this place would have been a big job, quite literally.
08:33But this wasn't the end of it.
08:35Before the night was over,
08:37Richard was supposed to carry his load out of town
08:40and deposit it with a local farmer
08:42who'd used the night soil as fertiliser.
08:46Some unscrupulous night men just fly-tipped the stuff
08:49wherever they could.
08:50But the penalties for that could be really harsh.
08:54There was one young London gong farmer
08:56who was caught pouring effluent down a drain
08:59and they stuck him in one of his own vessels,
09:02filled it with poo right up to his neck
09:06and they left him in Golden Lane for everyone to see
09:09with a big sign round his neck telling them what he'd done.
09:13I imagine Richard yearning to escape his stinking struggle of everyday life.
09:21Unfortunately, that wasn't what happened.
09:26The reason we know about Richard is that in 1326,
09:30unusually for a night man, his death was recorded
09:34because its manner was so bizarre.
09:36One afternoon, Richard was at home and, I don't know,
09:40maybe he was just a bit tired, wasn't quite on his game
09:43and he realised he needed to go to the toilet.
09:47And he sat down and he'd meant to fix that toilet seat.
09:52It had been rotten for some time but he'd never got round to it.
09:55Suddenly, there was a crash and he plunged down, down, down into the cesspit.
10:04And he drowned in his own poo.
10:08It's an odd way to become famous.
10:19In the Middle Ages, it wasn't only chaps who kicked ass.
10:23You've probably heard about the great medieval warrior,
10:28heroine and saint Joan of Arc,
10:30who fought for the French against the English.
10:33But what you may not know is that we Brits had our own Joan.
10:38Joan of Leeds.
10:44Joan of Leeds wasn't actually a saint and she didn't live in Leeds.
10:49She lived in the Benedictine Priory of St Clement in York in the 1300s.
10:58As a nun, Joan was part of the most powerful organisation in medieval Europe, the church.
11:07The countryside of the Middle Ages was positively cluttered with religious buildings.
11:11Monasteries, priories, convents.
11:15The church was a fundamental part of everyone's life.
11:19Many people worked on its land.
11:22Monasteries and convents delivered a constant vigil of prayer,
11:26but also provided hospitals and social services.
11:30And were centres of science, education and literature.
11:33But being a nun wasn't all fun.
11:38In fact, Joan was as miserable as hell.
11:41She was a teenager, she was a novice,
11:44and she soon realised that the whole nun thing really wasn't for her.
11:49Joan was probably sent to the convent as a little girl to be educated by the nuns.
12:01Then in her mid-teens at some point,
12:04she apparently decided to forsake worldly things and become a novice nun.
12:10But was it really her decision? Or was she pushed?
12:13Joan's family would originally have come from Leeds, and were reasonably well off.
12:21I recommend the Chateaubriand.
12:22Medium rare.
12:23Yummy.
12:25Such families didn't like too many daughters,
12:27because they were extremely expensive to marry off with lavish dowries.
12:32That left one option, the convent, with a handsome donation to the abbess.
12:38I've got overheads, you know.
12:40While most people in the Middle Ages were trying to get out of poverty,
12:44nuns were trying to get into it.
12:46Joan's Priory, like most at that time, followed the strict rule of St Benedict.
12:52That meant she had to take three vows.
12:54Obedience to the abbess, and abbesses could be really strict.
12:59Poverty for life, and chastity.
13:02No relations with men.
13:04In fact, men weren't allowed anywhere near the place.
13:07Whatever.
13:09And that was just for starters. Joan didn't even get a line.
13:19Each day would begin at 2am in the chapel, with prayers, psalms, hymns, and readings.
13:26The primary role of monasteries and convents in the Middle Ages was to pray for the souls of the dead,
13:32so they'd eventually ascend into heaven.
13:35And people donated a lot of money to be prayed for.
13:39So for Joan, after a few more hours sleep, it was up at dawn for more prayers,
13:44followed 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.
13:56Jack pudding again?
13:57Jack pudding again?
13:58Jack pudding again?
13:59Yes, every day for the last two years.
14:02And then prayers.
14:03Lights out by seven.
14:04For many, it was a genuine calling to which they were devoted. All I'm saying is I don't know many teenagers who plump for it.
14:14To better understand Joan's plight, I'm meeting Professor Sarah Rees-Jones, a medieval historian from the University of York.
14:22It would have been really tough for a teenage girl to be a novice, wouldn't it?
14:26I think it could have been really tedious because all the nuns were required to do was to observe the religious offices throughout the day.
14:33And 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,
14:41would have been very tedious, repetitive and claustrophobic.
14:45It does sound like a pretty dreadful boarding school type of life.
14:49Yes, we have plenty of evidence of nuns falling out with each other and there being sort of factions and bullying and quarrels.
14:56So there could be a lot of unhappiness in a convent as well.
15:01How would Joan cope? Fall into line? Fade away? Or stand up against the system?
15:09No one could have predicted what Joan did next.
15:12Her true story has only recently come to light, recorded in the margins of an ancient document held at the University of York.
15:22It was the year 1318.
15:24Joan had been complaining about feeling ill for months.
15:28None of the medicines they gave her seemed to work.
15:31Eventually, she took to her bed.
15:34She was there for days.
15:36She went off for food and finally she died.
15:40Her funeral was held and she was buried.
15:44A tragic but all too common end to a young life.
15:52At least that was what everyone thought.
15:54Then, would you believe it, a few months later, Joan turned up again, 30 miles away, in Beverley, shacked up with her secret boyfriend.
16:09Was it a miracle?
16:11No. Actually, some of the sisters had helped her escape by going along with the story about her being ill.
16:17They'd even buried a straw mannequin in her place.
16:26On hearing this, the Archbishop of York demanded her return to the Priory.
16:32And that was all we knew about Joan's story, until researchers in York discovered another very different account.
16:40One of my colleagues working on the project found another record about Joan of Leeds.
16:47And this is truly rare, because it actually gives her version of the story.
16:52That's fantastic. What's her story?
16:54Somebody called Brother John says that he's met Joan.
16:57And that Joan says that she was committed to the nunnery underage.
17:01She had to be 13 to be a nun, against her will.
17:04And that she had never taken vows.
17:06And that, therefore, she shouldn't be a nun.
17:08And that was, you know, her reason for denying her vocation.
17:11And Brother John then writes to the Archbishop saying it would be better that she were married
17:17than getting up to who knows what outside the convent.
17:21You like this story, don't you?
17:22Yes.
17:23Joan does come across as a woman with guts and initiative.
17:27Great ingenuity, a great character.
17:29Quite honestly, what amazes me is that so many nuns actually stayed in the convents.
17:38Which maybe shows that there really weren't many options available for young women at that time.
17:44And that when you've got a really established system,
17:47it takes a reckless act of rebellion to break away from it.
17:52Whether your name is Joan of Arc or Joan of Leeds.
17:55I think it's fair to say that in terms of civil liberties, things have progressed a bit since the Middle Ages.
18:11For example, freedom of speech.
18:14It's the cornerstone of our democracy, isn't it?
18:16We can say what we like.
18:18The Prime Minister's law is a scoundrel of life.
18:21You might even say that we rather take it for granted.
18:25But back in the Middle Ages, it was entirely different.
18:28There was only one person who could say what they liked to the most powerful man in the country, the King.
18:34And it wasn't the Queen.
18:36It was the royal jester.
18:40Diddly-dee, look at me, I'm as bonkers as I can be.
18:43You see, being king wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
18:46There was constant pressure.
18:49To win battles, to keep all the pushy landowners happy, and to be the life and soul of the banquet.
18:55All while keeping an eye on the power-grabbing church.
18:59Heresy!
19:00The revolting peasants, and that self-important son of yours who has his eyes on your hat.
19:06Being a king was exhausting, stressful, and frankly, really depressing.
19:14What you needed was someone to burst the bubble of all that stress.
19:19And that's exactly what the jester's job was.
19:22To be outrageous.
19:24To do and say the unthinkable.
19:26Your majesty, your wondrous majesty.
19:29If we may besiege you, your majesty.
19:31A royal jester could be a sharp-witted satirist, poking fun at the great and the good.
19:36Enough oiliness here to fry a whole pig.
19:39Oh, stop it.
19:42At the other end of the scale, there were the end-of-the-peer bawdy jesters who were a bit more in-your-face.
19:48But either way, their ambition was the same.
19:52To make the monarch split his tights.
19:55Our jester was very much in the second vulgar category.
19:59His name was Roland Lepetois.
20:07Roland may have had to work his way right up from the bottom.
20:14Early on in his career as a peasant, Roland found that he had a talent for entertaining people, making them laugh.
20:21Or maybe he just thought that being a peasant was too much like hard work.
20:25Anyway, he used to go down the market square and made a few quid showing off.
20:31But however much he made people laugh, an amateur fool like Roland didn't get much in the way of respect or cash.
20:39When there were no festivals, he'd travel from town to town busking for pennies.
20:45And if he couldn't afford props, he'd just have to mime.
20:55I'm being entertained by Ben Smith, one of the resident jesters at Warwick Castle.
21:00Ben, your costume looks a bit like something a jester would wear in a movie.
21:08Would Roland actually have worn this kind of thing?
21:10Absolutely. So from the pied design of the costume all the way up to the ears, the asses' ears and tails that run behind the costume,
21:18this is a traditional, authentic jester's costume.
21:21And asses' ears because they make you look stupid?
21:24Yes, of course. He was the fool.
21:26What would a jester have had to do?
21:28Some jesters like to employ walking on stilts.
21:30Some would like to do a little bit of a dance and a jig, juggling or maybe playing the lute and telling stories.
21:36But the biggest thing was their charisma.
21:39So like today, they would be selling themselves on their personality?
21:42Absolutely. And this was very important for the professional jester.
21:45Simply being a regular jester that no one's heard of sounds like hard work.
21:52But how do you break through and make it big?
21:55As ever in showbiz, the secret is to create your own special brand.
22:00At some point, Roland discovered he had a gift. Let's call it a talent.
22:06Something that set him apart from all the other entertainers.
22:09That wasn't me.
22:12Yes, Roland could break wind at will.
22:18Which is why he was known as le petois.
22:21French for farter, but more classy sounding.
22:24Back in the Middle Ages, breaking wind was just as funny as it is today.
22:29Funnier, in fact.
22:31It was a whole genre of its own.
22:37Poor poo.
22:38The breaking of wind by all members and species of society was beautifully captured in medieval sacred texts.
22:47It was part of life.
22:50Perhaps thanks to all those turnips.
22:52Roland's unique skills were recognised with a special job title.
22:58Roland was a flatulist.
23:01The most respected flatulists could even play tunes from their bottoms.
23:10History doesn't recall the precise nature of Roland's act or indeed what tunes he played.
23:15But he must have been very good because very quickly his stock rose and he got a crack at every jester's dream.
23:23A 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.
23:34Henry II's Christmas show.
23:37And he was billed as performing his very own signature act, a whistle, a leap and a fart.
23:47Performing in front of the king was dangerous for a jester.
23:50Like that talent show on TV I can't remember the name of, it could make or break you.
23:56Was the king in a bad mood?
23:58Would Roland's talents be appreciated?
24:01Or would his prowess desert him at the moment of truth?
24:04Roland gave it everything.
24:09And here Roland comes. He's jumped.
24:16He's leapt.
24:19And there it is. He's let one go. Oh, what a talent!
24:25So, how did the king react?
24:29He loved it!
24:31So much so that the king insisted Roland return for a repeat performance the following Christmas, and the one after that, every Christmas in fact.
24:50And by way of gratuity, he let Roland have use of a rather fine house, Hemmingston Manor in Suffolk, complete with 30 acres of land.
24:59Roland was made up.
25:06He got the king to laugh, and gone from zero to hero.
25:12Now he could indulge in the life of a celebrity.
25:15The problem was, tastes change.
25:20When Henry III came to the throne, inexplicably, he regarded Roland as, well, indecent.
25:30Roland's services to the crown were no longer required.
25:35His contract was cancelled.
25:37He was booted out of the manor and onto the street.
25:41Show business tough, isn't it?
25:44You may think that in the Middle Ages, everyone knew their place.
25:54You were born to be a peasant, or a knight, or even a nun.
25:58But things were changing, and for some, career options were starting to open up.
26:03Take young Simon Winchcombe.
26:08This could be him.
26:09I said hello.
26:11He's an apprentice to this gruff-looking chap.
26:14Where have you been, you lazy idle loafer?
26:16An apprenticeship could give someone from a poor family the chance to get ahead in the hip industry of the 1300s.
26:25Simon was learning how to be an armourer.
26:30That's someone who made this stuff.
26:32Armour.
26:35Anyone who was anyone in the Middle Ages had a nice suit.
26:40And the top of the range could set you back as much as a very nice car in today's money.
26:49Young Winchcombe may have been as young as seven when his parents sent him away to live with the master armourer up at the local castle.
26:59That may sound grim, but if you were hard up, then getting someone else to feed your kid was good news.
27:06And getting them an apprenticeship in a swanky profession, that was a result.
27:14But for Simon, it meant getting up before dawn and getting straight to work without even having breakfast.
27:21As 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.
27:31In fact, he'd spend an awful lot of his time just clearing up the debris that his master had hammered and chipped away.
27:38Imagine all that heat and long, long, long hours.
27:42It would be really difficult for a seven-year-old.
27:46Can I go and play now?
27:48I'm hoping to pick up some of the skills that Simon would have learned as a young apprentice.
27:53How hot do you have to get it?
27:56Orange.
27:58Graham Ashford is a professional maker of medieval armour, used for jousting competitions and displays.
28:05This way a bit, towards the forwards, that's it.
28:07From around 1300, chain mail started to be replaced by armour plate, especially to protect legs and arms.
28:14What we're making is a van brace. This is part for the forearm. So you're trying to create like a drain pipe, a cylinder. That's it. We'll get that back in the fire.
28:24Am I right in saying that the arms are one of the hardest pieces of the armour to make?
28:28The shape of the arm and the grieve for the shin are two of the more fluid shapes that resemble the human being.
28:35So if you get them wrong, they're really uncomfortable. It's one of those easy-to-learn, hard-to-master types of skills.
28:42Simon would learn to pump exactly the right amount of air into the forge so it was hot enough just when his boss needed it.
28:50We reckon Simon was about seven when he first started.
28:54Right.
28:55Is it a young manscaper?
28:56Yeah.
28:58The older armourers have all got some sort of tennis elbow or elbow complaints.
29:01I mean, just about everything in these workshops, particularly back then, is designed to either maim or kill you.
29:09Oh, the old smoke's coming up now.
29:10Oh, it's horrid, isn't it?
29:12Simon would have had to endure up to ten years of this without even wearing safety goggles.
29:17Until in his mid-teens, he would have been considered a grown-up, a journeyman armourer.
29:23I can imagine Simon doing this hour after hour.
29:25Now he could literally journey from castle to castle, town to town, with his tools, doing odd jobs, or attach himself to a master armourer.
29:36Oh, it sounds like a budgerigar being tortured.
29:39So that will go on my left arm, right.
29:48Hey!
29:50Yes.
29:51Nothing can harm me.
29:53I see what you mean, though.
29:55If it was just cylindrical, it would chafe both there and there.
29:59But now it fits in really rather snugly.
30:01Simon's job had lots of other dangers, apart from just running the risk of getting tennis elbow.
30:11Throughout most of the 1300s, England was at war with France.
30:15It was called the Hundred Years' War.
30:18A massive scrap affecting the whole of Europe.
30:22Made Brexit look a bit like a tea party.
30:25And Simon may have got caught up in it.
30:31You see, in the heat of battle, a knight's armour could get into a right old state.
30:37As a young armourer, Simon would have been sent off to war and put on standby, ready to bash bits of plate armour back into shape while the battle raged.
30:47A bit like being in a pit lane team replacing wheels in Formula One.
30:54For Simon, it was a steep learning curve, testing the limits of the technology.
31:00He may even have saved lives.
31:02On the other hand, while war could be a little grim...
31:06It was great news for the armourers, and it guaranteed Simon lots of work.
31:12He survived to settle down with a decent income, and married his sweetheart, Johanna.
31:21I've done your favourite, quail with peppercorns.
31:24Oh, I think I'm in love.
31:26Now, they could dream big.
31:28Simon was ambitious.
31:30He didn't just want to repair armour, he wanted to create it.
31:34He saw himself as an artist.
31:36He wanted to head for the top, and be a top designer.
31:39I've come to the worshipful company of armourers and braziers in London.
31:47It's been here for 700 years, surviving the great fire of London and Hitler.
31:53Look at these two, aren't they great, real classical pieces of armour.
31:59You've got breastplates here, a thing for a horse's face.
32:03You've got these marvellous helmets.
32:04Dr Tobias Capwell is a freeman of the company, and a leading authority on English armour.
32:14He's got a finished suit in the style that Simon himself might well have created in the 14th century.
32:21English knights often fought on foot, so their armour had to offer high protection without slowing them down.
32:27These armpits, it's actually very light, isn't it?
32:34Yeah, the armour technology in the 14th century is about developing a complete, hard exoskeleton for the human body.
32:42I love that word, exoskeleton. It's like one of those crunchy insects, isn't it?
32:47You just can't get at the juicy bits.
32:48An armourer has to be an anatomist. They have to know not just the obvious bendy places, but all the subtleties of human movement.
32:58You know, if you stick that gauntlet on, for example, you start to see how subtle that movement actually is.
33:03Oh, yeah, yeah, you can really do all that.
33:06This is light equipment that's very flexible and yet gives you extraordinary protection.
33:10The big difference between what we saw on the stairs and here, though, is that this is made of what?
33:18In the 14th century, they weren't really capable of making really big pieces of iron and steel.
33:24These are all little pieces that are all riveted to a fabric cover.
33:30So, the guy who would have been wearing this, he's bought it off Simon, but this isn't just one guy making this.
33:36There's a load of different skills here, aren't there?
33:37Yes, 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.
33:47So, 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.
33:54Yeah, he's probably not picking up a hammer very much at all.
33:57And he's coordinating the efforts of mercers and tailors and embroiderers and spurriers.
34:02But why was this place, the company of armourers, so important?
34:08Well, it was all about protecting the livelihoods of its members, a little bit like a medieval trade union.
34:14In 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.
34:28They're not allowed to sell to anyone else, and getting political power for themselves is the only way out of it.
34:34With the support of the company, Simon could work for whoever he wanted, without fear of being put in the tower.
34:44His business took off. But life wasn't only a bed of roses, his beloved wife Joanna died, most likely as so many women did in childbirth.
34:54Eventually, Simon remarried to Alice, and having come from nothing, he continued to get richer and richer right up to the day he died.
35:04One of the most interesting things I think about Simon Winchcombe is his death, or at least his will.
35:13He died in the year 1396. Clearly by that time he was absolutely loaded.
35:19The proof is, look, he wanted to be buried in the church of St Mary of Armonsbury, next to the body of Joanna, his first wife.
35:26But in order to do that, God willing, they would have to rebuild the church.
35:33So he hands out bequests to that church, and to loads of other churches, nine or ten of them, and other charities and priories and convents and hospitals and prisons.
35:45And even to the lepers of St Giles, he gives lots of silver, and this one I find very intriguing.
35:52To 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.
36:05So he's handing over the whole business.
36:07And 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.
36:23Well, that speaks volumes about their relationship, doesn't it?
36:26Regardless 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.
36:45Even if they weren't members of the aristocracy.
36:47Tensions over immigration, a global pandemic, trouble with Europe, I am of course talking about the Middle Ages.
37:00Although 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.
37:13No, they were even hotter potatoes, with some uncomfortable consequences for the lives of ordinary people.
37:22Take young Alice Spinner the spinster, for example.
37:26When I say spinster, in medieval times the word meant female spinner rather than unmarried woman.
37:33Surnames were a new thing, and they often denoted your profession, so everyone knew what Alice Spinner did for a living.
37:41Alice was also Irish.
37:45She'd been drawn to England in the 1430s by the lure of the English wool industry, which was booming.
37:53And one of its boom towns was here in Lavenham.
37:59600 years ago, these funny-shaped houses were the power behind England's most lucrative industry.
38:04You see, for sheep, the British climate is paradise.
38:11Every spring, sheep up and down the country were shorn.
38:15The raw wool was cleaned and combed, and then dropped round in batches to spinners like Alice, to be turned into wool and thread.
38:22Essentially, 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 the wool would get more and more taut.
38:34And 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 and round again, and ease it out again.
38:45Mind you, she'd have to do it quicker than I'm doing.
38:48But even for Alice, it took ages. At a push, she could manage 100 yards an hour.
38:54But to make a single dress needs at least 10,000 yards, two weeks hard work.
39:00I hope she didn't get RSI.
39:02She'd have been under constant pressure from the weaver to deliver.
39:06But at least the equipment was portable, so she could get out and meet her mates without stopping work.
39:11Balls 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.
39:25An international trade quickly grew up, flogging thousands of tonnes of wool to weavers and tailors in Belgium, who turned it into gorgeous outfits.
39:35But a couple of things happened to change that happy balance.
39:38The global pandemic of the Black Death wiped out a third of the population.
39:46And war with the French seriously messed up the cross-channel workflow.
39:51So Belgian cloth makers fled to England to be closer to their precious supplies.
39:57And England became the centre in Europe for the entire woolen clothing industry pipeline, from sheep to well-shod gentry.
40:05Oh, isn't it gorgeous!
40:08Alice was now at the heart of a roaring trade.
40:11A trade that was turning England from a backwater into a regional power.
40:16But however much the country needed the labour of immigrants like Alice, not everyone was happy.
40:23Many of the English demanded immigration controls.
40:26By the 1430s, the war with France was going badly.
40:32Resentment was directed at anyone who was French or just a little bit foreign.
40:38Even the Irish.
40:40Which was a bit unfair, as Ireland came under the English crown.
40:43So someone came up with what they considered was a neat idea.
40:50Yes, you've guessed it, a brand new tax.
40:53But not a tax on everyone, just on the immigrants.
40:59Including our Alice.
41:01So how did it work?
41:02This is Leicester University medieval historian, Professor Joanna Storey.
41:07How could they prove who was foreign and who wasn't?
41:10I mean, they didn't have passports, there wasn't a census in those days, was there?
41:14No, they had to ask people's neighbours, essentially.
41:17So it was a system that was put in place where the neighbours reported on who was a foreign-born person.
41:23That'll earn them coming here with their weird ways.
41:27And how much would she have had to pay?
41:29Well, for somebody of Alice's status, it would have been about sixpence,
41:32which is probably round about two days' wages.
41:34And that would have been quite a lot for someone of her status.
41:38Could she have avoided the tax if she stayed here for a long time, or if she got married?
41:43Rich people, or people with money behind them,
41:46could become natural-born English people by paying a sum of money.
41:50But that's very unlikely for someone of Alice's status.
41:54Have we any idea whether the tax acted as a disincentive
41:59and that less skilled foreign people came over here?
42:02It doesn't seem that it did for the 50 or so years after the 1440 tax.
42:08There are 40-odd thousand people reappear in those records.
42:13Can you imagine her eventually earning a decent amount of money?
42:16She appears to be independent,
42:17she appears to be someone who manages herself.
42:21Don't forget that she's a spinner, and that gives us the modern word spinster,
42:25which has connotations of independence and not being married.
42:31After several years of poisonous gossip, the legislation was eventually withdrawn.
42:41As for the war, ultimately the English had to concede defeat and give up on their French territories.
42:47We don't know what eventually happened to Alice.
42:51Let's hope the immigration tax didn't put her off and she stayed put.
42:55Maybe she married the weaver of her dreams.
42:58Maybe she stayed independent and got rich on wool.
43:02All we can be sure of is that while fashions have changed a fair bit since Alice's time,
43:08the way people treat each other, unfortunately, hasn't much.
43:19Coming up, Jack the Ripper the case reopened.
43:22Or over on SBS Viceland, with only a few stages left to reach the finish line,
43:26who will triumph through brutal backdrops,
43:29and which cyclist will conquer Italy's Giro d'Italia.
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