Settle in for two quiet hours with nine of the hardest, dirtiest and strangest jobs of the past, told slowly and gently so you can drift off along the way.
We follow the gong farmers who emptied the city’s cesspits by lantern light, the women who waded into cold ponds to gather leeches, the toshers who searched London’s sewers at low tide, the rat catchers, the chimney sweeps and their climbing boys, the tanners in their bark pits, the fullers walking cloth in the mill, the Groom of the Stool at the Tudor court, and the saltpetre men who dug up dovecote floors for the king’s gunpowder.
Every figure, wage, date and law in the narration comes from a source we read, including Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, the diary of Samuel Pepys, the Leather Act of 1604 and the saltpetre ordinance of 1646. The full list of sources is in the pinned comment.
Key sources
The Leather Act of 1604, 1 James I c. 22: https://vlex.co.uk/vid/leather-act-1603-861276231
An Ordinance enabling Saltpeter-men to make Gun-Powder, 7 February 1646: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/pp828-830
Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: https://archive.org/details/mayhewslondonbei00mayhuoft
The diary of Samuel Pepys, October to December 1660: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4124
Chapters
0:00:00 The Night Soil Collector
0:13:36 The Leech Collector
0:27:24 The Tosher
0:41:00 The Rat Catcher
0:54:08 The Chimney Sweep and the Climbing Boys
1:07:34 The Tanner
1:20:39 The Fuller
1:33:58 The Groom of the Stool
1:47:41 The Saltpetre Man
About this channel: the narration uses a synthetic voice, and the paintings are generated in the style of seventeenth-century Dutch art. The research, scripts and fact-checking are done for each episode.
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