'In this programme, we're looking at the worst jobs
in the thousand years up to 1066.'
'Some were hard...
some were messy...
others were just frightening.'
TONY: Oh, Jesus Christ!
'Written history began when the Romans invaded,
and they brought some HORRIBLE jobs with them.'
Now, we know what the Romans gave to us -
all those lovely straight roads,
and measurements like the mile and the calendar.
But it wasn't all one way.
They wanted something from us - gold.
'Gold was very important to the Romans.'
'They used it as a status symbol,
and we had it here in southwest Wales.'
'The Romans sought it out deep underground.'
'But getting it out was one of the worst jobs
in the Roman Empire.'
'The Romans had plenty of rotten jobs,
most of them done by slaves,
but for me, the worst of them all was working in the gold mines.'
'Even Pliny the Elder, who had slaves of his own,
was shocked at the conditions.'
'It was so bad that working in the mines
was used as a means of punishment.'
'The local population in Wales was plundered for healthy people
to dig out the gold.'
Welcome to the worst job of Roman gold-miner.
The gold has come from the centre of the earth.
It's been erupted through volcanoes, etc, millions of years ago,
and due to the movement of the earth and plate tectonics,
it comes out in this higgledy-piggledy manner.
You've GOT TO keep on digging it and it might take you up or down.
- Do you have to chase these things? - You'd have to chase it.
Basically, at any point, it could open up to a bigger vein.
You'd have to keep chasing it until you KNOW you've come to the end.
- How do you get the stuff out? - You use a pick.
Would be pretty difficult to swing a pick in here.
It's a small pick.
Hadn't realised you meant a pick as small as this one.
- How do you use it? - You just chip away.
You can see, you've got a quartz vein there.
You've got to chip away at that
to expose the quartz and to get it out.
Just chip away at the ordinary rock...
- That's right. - and hope that...
quartz comes away. Oh, it is peeling off a bit.
What do you think the conditions would've been like?
Pretty horrible.
In the summer, it would be very hot. Lots of men working here,
and they would have had candles.
They would have had small lamps that they would have used.
And the rest of the mine would have been pitch-black.
So, in the summertime, very warm.
In the the winter, very cold, colder down here than outside.
So, you can imagine, you got the worst of both worlds, really.
TONY: In some ways, it's an easier job than I thought it would be
because...this rock... fractures so easily.
But on the other hand, it gets in your eyes.
Lucky you're wearing glasses. Then up your...
nose...all the time.
It's not actually the nicest job in the world. I should think...
half of them... Oh, I've got a bit of quartz.
Half of them would've been blind
by the time they'd be doing it for a year or so.
'In fact, many of them died before they had the chance to go blind.'
'Because the Romans were impatient, they were always coming up
with more efficient ways of doing things.'
'Getting through lots of rock quickly was a priority.'
'So they came up with fire setting,
a process of smashing rocks on an industrial scale.'
'The cost in lives didn't matter.'
'Workers' lives were cheap.'
PAUL: If you look at this area here,
what you would've done is built up this area
full of timber - branches, logs, etc - and set it alight.
You would've kept that going for three or four days.
- God, it would've been smoky! - Exactly.
You would have had a lot of smoke. It would have been an intense heat.
Also, parts of the rock would have started to
break and shatter at that point.
But after then, a few days, you'd throw water on it,
buckets of water, and that would cause
a bit like a mini explosion.
The whole face there would crack and shatter.
TONY: So, it'd be an incredibly boring job, a very smoky job.
- And then, a very dangerous job. - Exactly.
But it would show you where the seam is going then.
Once it's shattered, you get a pile of rock just like we've got here.
'The problem THEN,
is that you're left with large quantities of rock to carry out.'
'It takes this lot ten truckloads to get one lode of quartz out.'
'Within this much quartz, there's maybe a piece of gold
the size of half a cube of sugar.'
'In Roman times, it all came out by hand.'
'Hundreds of men would've been doing this.'
'Bent double. Carrying big, heavy loads. Day in, day out.'
'And if the weight wasn't bad enough,
there was always the danger of falling rocks.'
TONY: It's fine when the tunnels are wide,
but when you get to about here,
you're carrying this weight and having to duck down, too.
'To make emperors like Nero rich
took the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of Welsh miners,
people who were forced to work in the most horrible,
dark and dangerous conditions.'
Life was hard for the first 400 years of British history.
But at least when the Romans were gold-mining,
something BEAUTIFUL came out at the end of it.
For the Saxons, who followed them, though,
things were pretty BLEAK.
Look at the materials I'm going to have to be handling
to break into the Saxon building trade.
'The Romans brought a sense of order with them.'
'They were VERY civilised.'
'They built streets with houses and workshops
in neat, straight lines.'
'Then they left.'
'And what did we do?'
'We went back to this.'
'When the Romans left, we went back to living in mud huts
in higgledy-piggledy streets.'
'This was how most of the country lived
until the middle of the Middle Ages.'
Despite all that, the people who lived here after the Romans left,
were part of a very highly-structured society.
At the top were the local kings,
below them were various kinds of noblemen,
all of whom were warriors.
So basically, their job was to fight.
Below them was everybody else doing the ordinary jobs.
'At the bottom of the pile, propping up everyone else,
was the Saxon peasant - the churl.'
'He didn't get paid, he had a few acres of land,
and his job was simply to keep himself and his family alive.'
'He needed to be a jack of all trades.'
'He was a farmer, a builder,
he had to do his own baking,
he was a woodsman,
and he also had civic services to perform.'
Most people, of course, lived off the land,
which meant that they had to work it,
which brings us to a very difficult and backbreaking job.
Would they have had to do very much ploughing?
Ploughing was quite literally a matter of life and death.
If you didn't work the land,
if you didn't plough your fields
and plant your crops you wouldn't have food on the table.
So ploughing was important to everybody, right through society.
TONY: Why did they use oxen and not horses?
LAURA: Cattle are much stronger than horses.
They're beefier. They can wade through the kind of soil
that we're working on here.
Horses were rare in the Anglo-Saxon period.
There were horses, but they tended to be grander animals.
They were the kind of things that higher,
more important people in society would own.
'The word "acre" is an old Saxon word.'
'It was the amount of land one could expect to plough in a day.'
'It wouldn't have looked as sophisticated as this, though.'
'Their ploughs weren't made of metal.'
'That does make a difference.'
'Or so I'd like to think.'
Let's have a look at the plough itself.
- It's fairly rudimentary. - But it does the job.
Now what you've got to do is stand at the back
and get a good grip either side, on the handle here.
- OK. - How do I dig it in?
Just lean a little bit of weight on it as you go along.
Oh, I see. Yeah. How do I make 'em go?
When you want to move forward, you're going to say, "Walk on."
It's Edwin and Oswin.
If you call their names, first, they'll wake up,
then they'll go, "A-ha! Tony's in charge now."
- Edwin and Oswin. - "Edwin...Oswin...Walk on."
You said, "Walk on" and "Steady, boys". And they're just static!
Yes. But it's got to be a COMMANDING tone of voice.
TONY: OK, yeah. What do I do when I come to a corner?
You've just got to try and bring the plough across a little bit.
- OK. - That's for the steering.
OK? I'll be beside you in case you fall over in the mud.
- Can't be that difficult! - Well, give it a try.
CHRIS: Nice commanding tone of voice.
TONY: EDWIN! OSWIN!
WALK ON!
CHRIS: Come on! Walk on! Walk on!
TONY: Come on! CHRIS: Walk on!
TONY: Come on, you...fat boys. - That's it!
TONY: Oh, it's going.
CHRIS: Walk on! TONY: It is very boggy here.
CHRIS: Hold it straight. TONY: Difficult not to get it...
- skidding off to one side. - Walk on!
'What makes this REALLY difficult is the weight
or lack of it.'
'This plough is very light,
so, to dig it in, you need to apply a lot of weight to it
and lean heavily downwards.'
'As a Saxon, I wouldn't have had a team of people helping me out.'
CHRIS: Walk on!
TONY: Oh! (CHRIS LAUGHS)
It's all right. They're learning who's boss.
CHRIS: Yeah, yeah (LAUGHS)
Edwin, get around. Get your bum round this way!
TONY: Come on!
To be quite honest, I think they're a bit fat and spoilt, these two.
TONY: That's better. CHRIS: Walk on!
'This might look like a bit of fun,
but for a Saxon farmer, it wouldn't have been.'
'This was the day job, the job he had to do continually
to ensure food for him and his family.'
CHRIS: What's happened to your commanding tone?
TONY: I was concentrating on keeping the furrow straight.
I know you'll find that hard to believe. Here we go!
Look at this! Good boys, good boys.
'As well as all the other stuff, this was just one more job.'
CHRIS: OK. 'And I was crap at it.'
I just want you to see this finely-tilled field.
I think my crops are going to work pretty well this year.
Good boys. Good boys.
'But looking after the family's needs
wasn't simply a matter of putting food on the table.'
'The churl also had to provide shelter
and this came from wood.'
'In the Saxon period, 70% of the country was covered by trees.'
'And people really did use wood for lots of stuff,
from firewood to ploughs.'
One of the things we know they used wood for was making their houses.
And to make them, they used this rather spindly-looking stuff,
which would be transformed into a wall looking like this.
This is wattle, isn't it, for wattle and daub?
- That's right. - How do you set it up?
We're gonna weave this into the hurdle on the alternate side
to the rod below it, so if you put the butt of that
in front of the ends there, like that.
- Yeah. - Take it in front of that.
- Looks like it'll snap off. - It should be flexible enough.
Push it down at that end, Tony, and then...
Put your foot on it.
TONY: It really does kink, doesn't it?
GEOFF: That's right. It's green, so it's flexible.
GEOFF: Turn that down there.
GEOFF: And when we get to the end, we have to bring this around.
Now if we just... if we just pull it,
- it'll snap. - Yeah, yeah.
GEOFF: So we have to separate the fibres.
And we do that by... If you want to just...
- Put one hand there. - Yeah.
And I'm going to pull it towards us and we're going to twist as we do it.
TONY: Twist away? GEOFF: Yeah. Twist away, like that.
GEOFF: Eventually, we should see... TONY: Oh, it's turning into rope.
GEOFF: That's right. TONY: Before my very eyes!
GEOFF: It becomes very flexible and that comes round.
And that one might even go behind that upright there
to finish it off.
Oh, brilliant!
Oh, only another 60 and we'll have a wall.
'Building this little bit took ages.'
'And all I was doing was assembling it.'
'I didn't have to gather the right sorts of wood
and strip it all down and split it,
and make sure I had enough of the right length.'
'This might be interesting if you're doing arts and crafts,
but as a JOB, getting 20 or so of these together
for a house or fencing, wasn't my idea of fun.'
'The worst part was still waiting for me, though.'
This is what a finished wall should look like.
But as you can see, it's pretty draughty.
So the next job is to fill in the gaps.
And to do that we need daub.
Hence the term, "wattle and daub".
And daub comes in four parts.
There's water, straw, mud...
and ONE other ingredient.
TONY: Why dung?
If you're using a lot of topsoil to cover a wall,
the trouble with topsoil is if you mix it with water,
and you slap it up on the wall, once it dries,
it can crumble and fall off.
So if you put this stuff in, then it acts like a binding agent
and it REALLY holds the soil together.
Plus you need to put some straw in as well.
TONY: It's going to take a long time to fill our bucket.
- How much are we going to need? - Buckets and buckets of it,
or as much as the horses will actually give us.
Great!
Next thing is we need some water.
- Just to "squadge" it all up. - Yeah.
So I pour that, like so
and you need a lot more water than you'd think.
So that's just the first bucket,
then another one.
And then, you might as well put the binding agent in.
Hooray!
PETER: Then spread it round a bit.
- Like so. - Yeah.
PETER: And then you need your straw.
Well, this stuff's pretty important.
So when the mud cracks a bit in hot weather,
this holds all the pieces.
What we need to do now is just get in it.
- Like so. - And stomp.
PETER: You've got your wellies on but I've got my Saxon boots,
which are designed to leak.
Well, they do!
'So far, so good. Treading in this wasn't too bad, just a bit smelly.'
TONY: Good for the skin. PETER: Wonderful(!)
This is gonna be a good brew.
'Next, though, was the messy bit.'
There's a little bit of a knack to this.
- You get a handful like that. - Yeah.
- Roll into a sort of blob. - Yeah.
You always start at the bottom.
That's best cos each layer supports the layer above.
Plonk it on and then you get your palm...
and you just smooth it in like this.
- So, I get a big dollop. - Like so.
PETER: Roll it into a, sort of, little bit of a ball.
TONY: Oh, it's getting mixed up with my scarf!
PETER: Start at the bottom and just...
slap it on.
- Then slide it into the wood. - SLAP it on!
- That's it! - You splashed me with your dollop!
You'll get me back.
There we go.
- Very therapeutic, isn't it? - Ah!
TONY: Your psyche must be pretty messed up
if you find this therapeutic.
TONY: Right! PETER: Or less messed up.
TONY: Into that crack. - Once you get your system going,
it's amazing how fast you can cover a wall.
TONY: I wish you wouldn't keep doing that.
PETER: Do I keep splashing you? TONY: Yeah.
I do apologise!
'At the end, it should've looked like this.'
'Lovely, isn't it?'
'But even after he'd whittled his wattle
and slapped his daub,
the churl's chores had only just started.'
Life in the house was very dull and incredibly repetitive.
For instance, the fire was the focal point
of all the activity in the house.
But it didn't half burn up a lot of fuel. It could take up to four hours
to get enough wood just to keep this one, single fire going,
so it was important to have the children around
because that was a job they could help with.
And then there's THIS - the daily grind.
That's where we get the expression from.
This is the quern stone, where they used to grind corn.
- How did this work, Fiona? - The barley grains
go into the middle of the hole in the quern
and you turn it, rotate it.
The two stones squash the grains together to make flour.
So is there flour beneath these two now?
There is.
TONY: Amazing! How long would you have to do this for?
FIONA: It takes three to four hours
to produce enough flour to make bread for a family of 12.
So after you've done the three or four hours' grinding,
you can relax a bit by kneading the dough.
And when you'd done that, you'd form it into patties,
put it on the fire
and when they were cooked, you'd have enough bread for the family!
But your whole life wasn't just limited
to what happened in the house.
Sometimes, civic duty called.
'The Dark Ages were turbulent times.'
'By 850, England had formed into three warring kingdoms -
Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex.'
'They fought each other and outsiders.'
'On top of his other jobs, the churl had to do national service.'
'All those axes, swords and armour required iron.'
'And that created another terrible job -
the bog iron hunter.'
TONY: What are we after, Gerry?
What we're looking for is a stuff called bog ore.
It's the iron ore that was used certainly in the Saxon period.
'In Saxon times, bogs were the main source
of iron ore for smelting.'
'The wetlands were where the ore had developed
across millions of years.'
'It then just had to be found.'
Who would the guys have been who would have been doing this?
Probably at the very bottom, I think.
I mean, it's a mucky, hard, endless job,
because they would be needing,
when they were doing a lot of iron smelting, 30 or 40 kilos a day.
TONY: We've got wet-weather gear, but they wouldn't have had anything.
It's a thankless task because the iron smelter was dependant
- on getting his iron ore. - It's a bit like a needle
- in a haystack. - It is, it is.
They'd probably know where it is but not EXACTLY where it is.
And because they'll be utilising it year in, year out,
they're ALWAYS looking for new sources.
So they'd be out there all the time looking for it.
TONY: I've found something that's going "clunk" a bit.
GERRY: Let's get that out. TONY: OK.
GERRY: That's the sort of thing we're looking for.
- "Sort of thing"? Is it it? - It is.
It doesn't look like anything special but that is bog ore.
TONY: How much metal do you reckon there is in there?
If you were gonna do a smelt tomorrow,
we'd need another 10 or 15 of these,
cos it only weighs perhaps 2kg or 3kg.
And they're just scattered off around the...bogs.
TONY: A frustrating job, isn't it? GERRY: It is, it is.
'This was a backbreaking and thankless job,
out in all weathers in places like this.'
'Four or five more lumps like the one we've got
and I'd have enough for an axe.'
'In the Dark Ages, very few jobs paid money.'
'Like the churl, most people just worked to live.'
'But there were some specialised jobs.'
'Someone had to work metal - not everyone could do this.'
'But to get metal hot enough to work with,
required material capable of giving off great heat.'
'Charcoal.'
Nowadays, all our charcoal's mass-produced.
It's just something in a big sack that you heave
into the back of the car.
But in Saxon times, it was very different.
Everybody needed charcoal virtually all of the time.
And it all had to be made.
And that was a long, hard and very difficult job.
'Every little town and village
would have had its own charcoal-maker.'
'They set themselves up in the forest,
they cleared the space, and collected wood.'
'Lots of it - three tons or so.'
'They then built it up into a sort of igloo shape,
carefully placing the wood so it didn't collapse.'
'This, basically, ended up as a sort of giant oven
to slowly bake the wood.'
'They lit a fire inside,
which would've taken about five hours or so to catch.'
Right, well, it looks like it's the moment of truth.
'They had to be careful to make sure it just smouldered
and didn't really burn, as such.'
'If it burnt too strongly, then the whole lot would have gone up,
maybe also bits of the forest too.'
'But what made this a REALLY horrible job
was the process once it was lit.'
'What you had to do was just sit and watch it
for up to 100 hours solid.'
You sit for many an hour watching a charcoal kiln,
day and night, and the tendency is to get a little bored
and to nod off.
And it is VERY frightening to wake up
and find a big hole in your kiln
with flames leaping 12, 15 feet in the sky.
'So the charcoal burners developed a one-legged stool,
so that if they DID nod off, they LITERALLY
nodded off the stool.'
'It kept them awake.'
'Right, let's leave them to it, then.'
'We'll pop back in a few days or so.'
There's one other skilled craftsman
who deserves a mention on ANY list of The Worst Jobs In History.
A man who risked his LIMBS for his work.
A man who lived CONSTANTLY in fear,
ALWAYS afraid of being denounced for cheating.
For my next worst job,
welcome to the world of the coin-stamper.
'The Saxons produced the first penny in 765.'
'At that time, every local area had to have its own mint.'
'Each one had five or six people like this
cutting and hammering away and making coins.'
'It was really like early piecework.'
'But these guys didn't get paid, they got bed and board.
Yet they were surrounded by all this money, all the time,
and NONE of it was theirs.'
'Coins had to be shaped.'
'You might think that the poor old stamper
would be tempted to snip off the odd bit of silver.'
'If he was caught, the punishments were severe.'
'Shaving a bit off the coins were seen as defacing the king's head,
a very serious offence.'
'The penalty was castration.'
'And if a whole coin went missing, then this guy's boss
had his hand cut off and nailed to the door as a deterrent.'
'So the pressure was really applied hard.'
'Long, cold days in the mint
and NO chance of a mistake.'
'Back out in the woods, Dave has been awake
for 48 hours solid.'
'But it's not over yet.'
'For the charcoal-burner, TIME is the enemy.'
'There's still a danger that the whole lot goes up in smoke.'
'And after another 24 hours, this is it,
the big moment.'
'After a week of hard work and sitting around staying awake,
the Saxon charcoal-makers were left with this much charcoal.'
'And because charcoal was in so much demand in Saxon times,
they just had to clear this lot away
and start the whole process all over again.'
'The monastery was a key part of Saxon life.'
'Monks led a life of serenity, of reflection and prayer.'
'A bit of singing and a lot of bowing.'
'Compared with the drudgery of outdoor life,
this looks pretty cushy.'
Hang on, that is just the telly.
It may have looked like that in medieval times,
or at least in our rather romantic vision of medieval times,
with lots of cloisters and plainsong
and people praying and meditating very quietly.
But in Saxon times, it was much harder,
it was a REALLY tough job.
'To start with, the monks would have lived in huts like these.'
'And they too would have had to build them themselves.'
'They had to make their own bread
and they also had to do their own ploughing.'
'In fact, the worst part of being a monk
was that they had to do everything that everyone else had to do
AND they had the day job.'
Well this is a far cry from the medieval cloister, isn't it?
- Indeed it is, yes. - Is this it?
This is exactly it - a Dark Age monk cell.
- What you see is what you get. - No furniture?
No furniture, a bit of blanket, perhaps, for a bed on top of straw,
a few eating irons, you know, erm...
a drinking vessel, a plate, a knife to...to cut your bread.
And that was it. And...
a very, very strict prayer regime.
And all the other work they had to do, as well.
- How many times did they pray? - About eight times in 24 hours.
And this isn't hands together, eyes closed.
- This is down to the church? - Yes.
They were stipulated exactly at...
at regular hours throughout the day.
- At what times? - Starting just after midnight...
Bear in mind, of course, they didn't go to bed as late as we do.
Just after midnight, then at 3:30 in the morning, then at six o'clock.
Six in the morning was called "the first hour"...
of daylight when they'd have their prayers,
then they'd go off to work.
And then straight after that, you'd have nine o'clock,
then mid-day and then about 5:30 in the afternoon.
Then the late prayers before they went to bed.
- Went to bed about eight o'clock. - What happened if you gave
- it a miss and slept in? - That was just a definite no-no!
Punishments were quite severe.
Even being late for a service would have meant severe punishment.
- What punishments? - Various types of punishments.
For lesser faults, you would have to prostrate yourself
in front of the brethren. This was called, "making the venia".
What do you mean by "prostrate yourself"?
Would you like to demonstrate? (LAUGHS)
There's some straw there. What you do is lie yourself down
- with your arms outstretched? - Like...
No. On your front, on your top. That's right.
Arms outstretched... And that's where you'd be,
and the abbots and others would be around you
and you would stay there until the abbots thought
- that you'd had enough. - Roughly how long?
Could be as long as that particular gathering was in session.
So you could be talking up to hours, perhaps.
I don't think my sin was particularly grave.
What other punishments were there?
For the GRAVEST of offences,
you could be thrown out of the monastery.
Doesn't sound too bad a punishment to me!
It might have been a good thing if you were
that sort of person that you didn't want to do it anyway.
But if you were that sort of person, how would you fare in Saxon life?
You wouldn't really get on anywhere, would you?
'This is St Cuthbert.'
'Famous monks like him weren't in trouble that often,
but their lives were still very hard
and some of it was accepted as a big part of the job.'
One of the worst parts of the job of being a monk
has got to be atonement.
This was the process whereby you SUFFERED as a monk
in order to try and prevent other people in your community
from going to hell.
There were lots of different forms of suffering.
One of the things that Cuthbert did
was that he used to wade out into the sea,
sometimes in the middle of winter,
and (PANTS) in the freezing cold.
And... OUCH!
He'd pray for up to seven or eight hours at a time.
He did it in secret but...
people saw him and he became...
very famous for it.
I don't know if it stopped anybody going to hell or not,
but what we do know, is that within 300 years,
the entire country was Christian.
I tell you what, that was REALLY cold.
'The WORST job of being a monk, though, was the writing.'
'Great writers like the Venerable Bede
give us a lot of our history of the period.'
'But most monks didn't really WRITE
as much as just copy texts,
which was far more boring.'
'The danger of making mistakes was always there.'
'Remember all those punishments?'
'And they worked in cold conditions.'
'Because they didn't have much light,
they usually worked by open doors or windows.'
'Remember, they didn't have glass so they were always cold.'
'One Benedictine monk wrote,
"Writing tires the eyes, wearies the back,
and sends cramps through the arms and legs."'
'But the worst part - that was the danger.'
'Because of the valuable books,
monasteries were a prime target for raiders.'
'And not just any old raider.'
'The biggest danger facing many people in Saxon times
was the Vikings.'
'The Vikings began raiding Britain in the 790s.'
'Although they started out as raiders,
once here, they began to settle down.'
(ROAR OF BATTLE)
'Eventually, they created their own kingdom - the Danelaw -
stretching from East Anglia,
up to Yorkshire and beyond.'
The thing about the Vikings is we have a generalised view of them.
They were these great, hairy men who sailed across the sea
in order to hack us to pieces, rape our women,
and set fire to our churches.
But there was MUCH more to them than that.
Welcome to the worst job of the Viking warrior.
'Now, when I think of Viking boats,
I think of pretty large ships
with a dozen or so people rowing
and the rest hanging around, being carried to battle.'
'It's fine when the wind's up and you can raise the sail,
it fairly clips along.'
'But I didn't think it would be like this.'
'Just room for about 16 of us, and we're all rowing.'
What would life have been like on the boat?
It would have been pretty cramped and uncomfortable.
As you can see, we're pretty tight in here, even as it is.
And it's a lovely day.
If we were going across the North Sea or the Atlantic on a rough day,
we'd have water spraying all over us.
And of course, we wouldn't just be rowing in the afternoon.
We'd have the problem of... we'd be here all night,
so you've got to sleep in this space.
We'd all be huddled between the sea chests, no privacy.
So it'd be cold, wet, probably extremely smelly.
And remember, no toilet facilities.
You've just got the side of the boat.
TONY: Were there women Viking sailors?
There's at least one reference to a Viking army
coming across from the Continent to England,
bringing the women with them.
But for the longer voyages, when they went out to settle
in the North Atlantic, the Faeroes and Iceland and so on,
they took their families with them.
The women would have been on the boat
and they'd have done their share of the rowing as well.
PULL!
PULL! SLOW AND DEEP! PULL!
Pull!
Pull! Keep it together! Pull!
- Given how tough this is... - Pull!
it's impossible to imagine how you'd do it for two or three days,
in a squall, with very little to eat,
no toilet facilities...
Huh... huh...
And I know I'm the crappiest rower in the world but...
if this isn't the worst job, I don't know what is.
So we've been rowing and bailing out for two days and two nights.
Finally, land ahoy.
And we want to get over here.
So we've got two alternatives.
We can either sail ALL the way round this headland about 20 miles
till we come to here.
Or we can carry the boat over this hill!
'This process was called portage.'
'It was a common Viking practice.'
'The two key aspects were speed - how quickly can this be done?
- and caring for the boat.'
'Viking ships were made from single planks,
split radially from very long trees.'
'Building them was tricky and time-consuming.'
'So repairs away from home were not a good idea.'
'But more importantly, the ship was also a spiritual symbol.'
'Important Vikings were BURIED in their boats.'
'Ensuring that the boats were well looked after was very important.'
Gareth! Even with this number of people,
I find it hard to believe
that you could shift a boat as heavy as...
this one is...by hand across a hill. How do you do it?
It's not easy. We're going to shift it along these wooden runners.
- These things here? - So we slide it along the runners
and it's going to be half lifted, half pushed,
and we've got the rope there to drag it as well.
And we slide it along the runners, someone comes behind,
picking up the runners once it's over them,
moving them to the front, and we keep moving, keep moving.
Why wouldn't the boat just snag on these things?
Well, this is where it gets really unpleasant
because to stop it snagging, the runners have got to be greased.
TONY: With? - There's various things
we can use for that. Erm... Lard is one,
butter is another, rancid after a couple of weeks on board ship.
But what we're going to be using is fish.
- These things? - Yes, that's right.
It's pretty absurd. A line of fish with a boat sliding down them?
We're not going to use WHOLE fish. There's lots of grease in there.
But what we have to do before we can use them is mash them up.
TONY: Gets stinkier as you go, doesn't it?
I ain't half glad I've got a cold!
Right, what we do we do with these little sweethearts now?
Basically, pick them up and smear them on the logs.
'The thing about these fish is that after four days in a box,
they were REALLY smelly.'
'You can't imagine how much they stank. That was the worst part.'
'At this stage, moving the boat looked like the EASY bit.'
We've got it lifted already.
Basically, what we need to do is, sort of, half lift and half push.
So get your weight underneath as far as you can,
so you're taking some of the weight off the keel.
That way, there's less weight to actually push forward.
What's Viking for "one, two, three, go"?
- One, two, three, go. - All right. One, two, three, go!
Right. Oh! Uhh!
Push! Go!
Towards me, towards me, Derek. Towards me.
GARETH: Keep it towards me. Push!
Put your backside to it. PUSH!
COME ON! PUSH!
- Aaah! GARETH: Push!
PUSH! Here we go! PUSH!
TONY: We need some more runners! GARETH: Push! Push!
PUSH!
A whole shoal of fish was sacrificed for this.
- Aaah! GARETH: Come on! Push!
Push! Push!
I tell you, that fish grease really does work.
but...I have to say...
that does have to be one of the worst jobs.
'But it wasn't the very worst.'
'For me, the worst job of all in the Dark Ages
was still to come.'
I don't want to do this. I really don't want to do this.
I still like to have a go at the worst job of each era myself.
So, what's the worst job that the first thousand years
of British History can throw at me?
'Building a Saxon house wasn't the most pleasant of tasks.'
'Being a Viking warrior wasn't all plain sailing.'
PULL!
'And the life of a monk wasn't a bed of rosaries.'
But there was one job which I reckon was worse than any of those.
It was a job where you risked your life
for the most basic of foods,
where your workplace required a really good head for heights,
and where your technical equipment, and health and safety,
were a bucket and a rope.
But I've committed myself to doing it,
even in this pouring rain.
So welcome to the world of the guillemot egg collector.
'In the Dark Ages, guillemot eggs were much sought after.'
'They were good to eat and bigger than most.'
'Farming was tough and unpredictable.'
'Collecting eggs was seen as essential.'
'Many people believed that chickens were sacred,
so you couldn't actually eat their eggs.'
'That meant you had to look elsewhere.'
'Like here.'
'Getting to the eggs was difficult.'
'People went over the edge on a rope
with a bucket to collect them. They went out in all weathers
and were attacked by birds trying to protect their eggs.'
'In Victorian times, the people who did this were known as "climmers".'
'It was a nasty job.'
'But I geared up in Saxon clothes and had a go.'
- Does this look authentic to you? - Well, it's not too bad.
How do we know people were actually doing this?
Well, there's an account from... the 10th century
of a trader who visited King Alfred.
And he described some of the people
that were harvesting various products
and eggs, from what he described as "egg mountains".
Egg mountains?
Well, that we take to be the sea cliffs and the sea colonies.
Why would they collect guillemot eggs in the first place?
Guillemots' eggs would have been a rich form of protein
at a time when other forms of food would have been scarce.
And the cliffs would have been laden with THOUSANDS of them.
They would have needed to keep the eggs and, without refrigeration,
they had to have fresh eggs at least every two or three days.
- They were doing this for money? - No.
This would have been the food they needed.
The biggest battle they faced was to put food on the table.
And sometimes, in a bleak landscape like this,
- food could be very scarce. - So the guillemots were nesting
- in the sheer cliffs? - Yes, they tend to nest on ledges
and they get pretty aggressive when you try and take their eggs.
TONY: Great, great. GARY: Watch out for that.
TONY: How did the collectors get down?
They would have needed to use a handmade rope.
There are lots of materials they could have used,
but what was very popular was seal skin like this.
And this would have been cut and braided...
together to actually make a rope.
They could have also, of course, used something like this.
And just hang on to it and...
- and go down. - Well, pretty well.
They would have needed to take a bucket to collect the eggs in.
- So you're one-handed? - Well, yes.
If you think, I'm doing it like this, you've got to be mad.
Fortunately... Ah!
I'm going to be able to do it the proper, 21st-century way.
'Getting kitted up with modern safety gear,
didn't REALLY make me feel any better about doing this.'
'I'd chosen this as the worst job in the Saxon period for me.'
'But even on a cliff, with very few birds of any description,
I was still DESPERATELY unhappy when it came to actually doing it.'
- We need you to come down here. TONY: Yeah.
To these ledges. We're going to hook you to the safety system.
- This is Rick, your safety man. TONY: Yeah.
All right?
I've never abseiled in my life before.
- Oh, just this looking down, mate. - Don't look down.
Sort of concentrate on the rope.
TONY: Oooh! - That's OK. Keep looking at me.
Ooaah! I don't want do this, I really don't want do this.
'At this stage, I was really glad I wasn't being ATTACKED
like the Saxon egg collectors would have been,
and that someone was passing the bucket down to me.'
'Someone else had planted eggs for me to find.'
'Even so, I wasn't that confident.'
Oh, I looked down, I looked down, I looked down. It was horrible.
Oh! I see an egg, I see an egg, I see an egg.
I don't know how the hell I'll get it but I can see...
Oh, my shoe's come off!
Oh!
There's an egg over here. There's an egg just over here.
It's horrible leaning back. I don't know how I'm going to...
get it in the bucket without breaking the things in my hand.
God knows how they laid the things here.
The trouble is, when you're this frightened,
all your muscles go shaky, and it's hard to handle it.
Uhh...hah...hah.
I'd quite like to...er... be...er...to come up now. Really.
Can I come up?
'So, I had modern safety gear on,
a warm hat, a whole team of people helping me,
planted eggs, and I wasn't being attacked.'
Thanks ever so much.
'But this was still, for me, the worst job of the Dark Ages.'
Here's your...eggs. I got two of them.
The worst thing...
was when my shoes fell off and I looked down
and they were just spiralling
down...towards the sea... hundreds of feet below.
Then, when I came away from the rock, and kept coming forward,
my feet were just chafing against...against the rock.
I don't think I'm a very good egg collector.
Next time, we're going to be looking
at some of the worst jobs of the Middle Ages.
Surely, they can't be worse than this!
Can they?
'Among the worst jobs in the Middle Ages,
I'll be acting as a human hamster building cathedrals,
trying a bizarre cure for sore throats,
and up to my knees in urine,
stale, human urine.