We should be thankful we weren’t born during the dark times of the Middle Ages, where in addition
to poor health care and extremist beliefs for which you could be sentenced, there were jobs so
demeaning, disgusting and brutal that they would make today's jobs look like a walk in the park.
Probably the worst job you can face today as an ordinary person is cleaning public toilets
or being a cashier at McDonald's. Of course in ancient times, there were also simple or
low-risk jobs. But, what about those in which you needed rock solid nerves to pull off?
Today we will talk about the worst jobs of the middle ages, those that will make you see that
your life as an office worker is not as bad as you thought, welcome to Copernicus’s Galaxy.
Groom of the Stool
During the reign of Henry VIII in England, a position was created among the king's courtiers
to assist monarchs in the most intimate and vulnerable moments that any living being can have.
His job was to carry around a stool specially designed
to expel any waste lodged in the kings' intestines... in other words, to defecate.
This way, the monarch could relieve himself at any time and place, in addition to being
personally assisted by his servant to provide him with paper, water or towels. It is even
speculated that on some occasions they were also supposed to help clean the king's backside.
It may be hard to believe, but this job was envied by many and was generally assigned only
to the sons of nobles, since by relating so intimately with the king, trust grew
and secrets were revealed, making him one of the highest ranks among the courtiers,
which ended up granting them privileges such as the right to sleep inside the castle
or to make use of the monarch's old clothes and furniture... in addition to a good pay.
Looking at it from this perspective it might be worth enduring the intestinal
gas and the fetid stench of his majesty's feces,
but there was another job related to excrement that was worse in many ways.
Gong farmers, or better known as night men, were in charge of removing all the human excrement
from the pits in the castles and taking them to a remote place where they were thrown away.
You can imagine how unpleasant the job was, where being covered with feces was the norm.
They were only allowed to work at night, hence the name, because it was frowned upon to see a
person full of excrement, often working in confined spaces that made air circulation
unfavorable, suffocating them... all this added to the low pay per ton of feces collected.
Petardier or sapper
Let’s move from the castle to the battlefield with the work of the
"Petardier", which were something like the well-known Kamikazes, but French.
Its name comes from the device used during sieges by the armies of that country, which consisted of
a small brass or iron cone-shaped explosive filled with gunpowder. The soldiers belonging
to this division had the task of carrying the bomb across the battlefield and placing it at
the gates of the forts where they wanted to enter. They then ignited them and ran for their lives.
Due to the nature of their work, they were covered with a specially resistant armor with which they
intended to protect themselves from the explosion and enemy projectiles... It seems logical,
but in the end it was in vain, because if the enemy projectiles failed to shoot them down,
the shock wave of the detonation reached them, ending their lives in an instant.
On the other hand, the "Sapper" had another type of work during the war.
These people, who were also called Miners, had to dig a tunnel using simple
individual picks to reach the foundations of the enemy wall,
replacing them with a few resistant timbers and destabilizing them by setting fire to the tunnel
and leaving as quickly as possible hoping that the wall would fall under its own weight.
Simple and straightforward, but extremely dangerous due to the
fact that accidents were present in most of these attempts to enter the enemy fortress,
whether it was the tons of wall falling on them or finding the enemy waiting for their arrival.
Leech collector
Since ancient Egyptian times it was believed that a wide variety of diseases
could be cured by performing a somewhat precarious medical procedure called "bloodletting".
This could be implemented using different methods, the most popular being the use of small,
slimy, blood-sucking vermin commonly called leeches.
Of course, the doctors wouldn't stick their hands into the leech-infested puddles themselves,
or in this case, their feet... For that, there was a group of low-income people
who were willing to use their own bodies as bait. They would stick their feet and legs
into those shallow pools of water letting these slimy worms attach themselves to their flesh
and let them drain for 20 minutes before they could capture them for sale.
Needless to say, this was not a good thing for the leech collectors.
They lost significant amounts of blood and contracted infections through the
wounds they received from the vermin and bacteria that lived in those waters.
Rat Catcher
This profession was the precursor of the famous pest exterminators that we know today.
The methods that the ancient "rat catchers" used to perform their work are very similar
to those used today... except for the spells, curses and even torture of these vermin as a
warning to their fellows... illogical methods that could only be conceived by the minds of that time.
The rat hunters were quite respected by the communities given their work to rid
the towns of these dirty, infectious animals that brought deadly diseases such as the
well-known black plague. They walked through the streets of medieval towns carrying animals
trained to hunt these rodents and a large stick from which hung a few dead rats
while shouting "Mort-aux-rats!", which translates to “Death to the rats!”
Among other things, they used poison, rudimentary spring traps and trained animals to do the job,
but unfortunately the risk they ran was quite high, since their chances of being bitten
and contracting an unknown disease for that time were severe.
Sin Eater
This is another job born from the extremist popular beliefs of the time.
It was believed that food, especially bread,
had the incredible capacity to absorb the sins committed by a recently deceased person,
simply by placing the food on his chest for a few minutes... But, was it as easy as throwing
the bread "poisoned" by the deceased's bad deeds in the trash to free his soul?
Unfortunately things were not so simple,
someone had to bear that sin, something like inheriting financial debts today...
This is where the sin-eaters come in, who were in charge of consuming that food,
believing that those evil acts would be borne by him in exchange for remuneration.
The terrible thing about this job was not the execution of it in itself, but what it entailed,
this work was performed mainly by people of the lowest social circle,
poor and destitute, who were mostly seen with the same eyes as the supposed witches
of that time. They were disowned because of the belief that for every sin consumed,
their evil grew, being able to drop a curse on those who looked them directly in the eyes.
Executioner The image that
our subconscious involuntarily creates when we hear the word "Executioner" is that of a
being with a black hood carrying a large axe stained in blood, an evil entity that enjoys
the brutality of executions and of whom we even doubt is human... perhaps a monster.
There is no more accurate truth than the one that says "Everything depends on the
lens through which you look", it’s common for one to give an opinion from his position
without knowing the reality, that stereotypical preconception of what an executioner was,
is mostly wrong. Those who played that role often were forced to do so,
this being because it was not exactly a job that was envied...
On the contrary, the men who dedicated themselves to this work were respected,
repudiated, feared and applauded, all at the same time. While the public executions were
a spectacle where the executioner was an important character in the process,
in the streets he was an undesirable being... Nobody wanted to have him as a neighbor,
much less have contact with him. He was forbidden to go to church and was banned from some places...
If this wasn’t enough, the consequences of his work were also suffered by his family,
where the children were rejected from schools, so they had no choice but to be the successor
of their father with the axe... all this for an above average salary ... Is it worth it?
As time goes by, both better and worse jobs are emerging to cover the new needs of human beings.
Fortunately for us, nowadays most of us are not forced to work in such risky or degrading jobs,
but we can never know what the future holds for us. Whatever our labor destiny may be,
we’ll still be here to tell you about it, at Copernicus’s Galaxy.