We've all seen the pictures and read the stories in the history books
about the kings and queens with their power and privilege
and silks and furs.
But, in this series,
I want to discover the other side of history.
I'm already quite nervous.
Besides, we don't often hear about
how ordinary British people lived their lives.
From the Tudors...
You'll see why it did attract my attention!
Disgusting!
TRAIN WHISTLE
...to the Victorians.
Throw a stone in Victorian London,
you will hit a drunken cabman. There's that many of them.
We are not amused.
From the Georgians...
You take the saw... Oh, my God.
It's horrible just seeing you do that.
...to the people who really fought the Second World War.
James could hear the ping of bullets and the clatter of shrapnel.
One thing's for sure,
these people knew the meaning of the word "tough".
I'll be finding the truth about their daily lives,
what they ate...
How long would that have lasted?
Up to three years.
...how they made a living...
There's even value in a rat when it's dead.
...and those vital necessities of life.
What did you do if you wanted to pee?
Go in the bucket.
The bucket?
This is British history from the bottom up.
You've got to admit,
I am terrifying.
This time, I'm going back 500 years to England
in the reign of Henry VIII.
A time of sex scandals,
executions and codpieces.
Ooh, I say!
The history books are full of his antics.
But what about the people who really made the country tick?
They may not have been well dressed or had any money,
but their lives are full of surprises, love and courage.
During Henry's reign,
living in towns was going out of fashion
and it's not at all hard to see why.
The streets were paved with evil-smelling mud
and, inside, floors became layered with spittle, vomit,
urine and bits of fish.
But even for the Tudors, there was someone you really didn't
want to live next to.
A knacker.
No giggling, please, because a knacker was a very important person
in Tudor society.
He was the bloke who went round collecting dead animals,
then taking them home, skinning them,
chopping them up and making money out of them
in whatever way he could.
Now, there aren't any specific names of actual Tudor knackers
in the records.
We're going to call our one Thomas Grimes.
Here's Tom.
Skinning a carcass to make saddles.
His whole house would have been full of little bits of bleeding animal
and it would have permeated such a stink
that it would have been foul, even by Tudor standards.
Nevertheless, he would have had a way of making a steady income.
Enough for clothes and food and maybe even a long-suffering wife.
# Did you know that, baby, it's true
# You're the one that I've been here waiting for. #
This is how Tom's day would go.
He'd leave home about 6.00am, like most Tudor men,
pick up his cart, head off out of town towards the local farms.
The big moneymakers for Tom were dead or dying cattle and horses.
Hmm...
This one's got potential, poor old thing.
Even in town there could be opportunities.
You'd find dogs, cats, even the occasional horse.
Hang on. What have we got down here?
Look at this.
A rat.
There's even value in a rat when it's dead.
Back at base, Tom would skin carcasses for leather,
boil them to get the fat out for candles,
extract gelatine for glue
and grind up the bones to make fertiliser.
And, after years hacking about with all his flesh,
he became pretty good at it
and wasn't bothered by the smell and sight of blood.
And these skills were about to open new horizons for Tom,
all thanks to his king.
Because Henry was making a lot of enemies
and Tom was just the sort of chap he needed
as an executioner.
Whenever the paranoid monarch, Henry VIII, threw all his toys
out of his cot and demanded the head of some hapless noble,
it could mean a very big payday,
involving one of these.
Although the reality is, wasn't it, john, that most criminals were hung
rather than having their heads chopped off? That's true.
Hanging was for the ordinary people.
It was only people of royal or noble blood who were actually decapitated.
I mean, decapitation was a whole different business.
John White is a historian of crime and punishment
and he's studied Tudor executions.
So, how does Tom, my knacker, come into it?
Well, you see, the axe was often a messy business.
So, in order to perfect the process, you needed to have somebody who,
day by day, was proficient in chopping flesh with an axe
and wasn't bothered by a bit of blood and gore.
I can see that at least when Tom started to be an executioner
he might feel pretty shaky about doing this job,
particularly if it was someone who was high nobility.
Well, on the basis that decapitation is for people who are noble and royal,
you could be intimidated by the sheer process,
because there you are in front of an enormous crowd
booing and jeering...
They like a good death. Yeah.
It could be a great lord and somebody that, you know,
literally frightens you and you're now going
to have to publicly kill them.
Would you get decent money for this job?
Well, you get paid more than being a knacker because,
as an executioner, there are benefits.
The clothes that the condemned wore,
they would become his.
But it was also the custom
that the condemned would pay, almost like a tip, to do me a good job.
What would the relationship have been like between Tom
and his audience?
Well, they would cheer him if he did a good execution.
They would boo him if he conducted a poor execution.
And would he have been patted on the back in the street?
0h, no, no, no, no, no.
You see, as a knacker, he'd be the lowest of the low.
As an executioner, he'd be even lower than that.
Everybody knows who he was.
He'd be jeered.
He was a social pariah.
So almost the underclass, the untouchables.
Tom's tale is a really miserable one.
Scavenging to earn a living...
A rat.
...being looked down on
and then the only way of making more money
is to become a figure of hate.
Despite all this, we know that many executioners were proud
of the contribution that they made towards Tudor society
and that, by and large,
ordinary people believed that the death penalty
was the bedrock of their system of justice.
But, coming up...
...a punishment even worse than decapitation.
Death by boiling.
And the latest thing to wear in the fields.
I didn't realise that ordinary people had codpieces.
During the reign of Henry VIII, one bad harvest
could spell ruin, even death.
Everyone was constantly famished.
So, imagine that you're an ordinary, poor Tudor person
constantly obsessed by where the next meal is coming from
and suddenly you're given the opportunity of a new life
where, every day, you're faced with a banquet.
I'm talking about a career in the culinary profession.
Not only was it a proper paid job,
but you'd be fed and surrounded
by a bounty of delicious food which often needed testing.
Yes, but be careful what you wish for,
because this tale has a bitter ending.
Richard Roose began working in a kitchen in the early 1500s,
around the time young Henry VIII was getting to know the ropes as king.
Richard was probably too poor to attend school
so, at age seven, when a kitchen boy was wanted at his Lord's manor house,
he jumped at it.
Before sun up on his first day,
he was sent off by his mum to walk several miles
across the fields to his new life.
It was a chance that offered Richard career development and, who knows?
Maybe even the opportunity to meet the rich and famous.
# You can be my flip-flop... #
If he was lucky, little Richard got to stay in the big house
with the other staff with a proper bed and windows with glass in.
But he probably only saw his mum once a week on his day off.
Mark Milton Ville is a Tudor cooking expert.
So, he's just started here. Mm-hm.
What kind of jobs would he have been doing?
Well, if he is a boy of the kitchen, then it's right down the bottom
to start with. There's going to be a lot of sweeping that
and go and get me some wood, chopping wood.
So, he's going to do a lot of really menial stuff, pot washing.
Not very nice, I'm afraid.
Cleaning all those cauldrons. How do you clean them?
Because they didn't have squeegee soap bottles in those days.
No, no squeegee, but they have plenty of soap.
Oh, they do? It's very easy to make, it was made commercially.
And even if you want to just make some yourself in the kitchen,
you take a pan full of fats and bacon fat and pour a little
bit of ash in it.
Richard would have been expected to use the soap to wash his hands
before the day's work began.
To clean his teeth he'd have used candle soot, chalk or salt.
What kind of hours would he have been working?
Probably starting quite early in the morning.
So, they're gonna be down here between five and six getting
everything ready because the main meal of the day is gonna be sent
over to the house by half past 10 or 11.
But there was only two cooked meals a day.
The last one's out by 3.30.
So, after that, it's clear up, set it all down
and, once he gets a bit older, a pot of beer.
It's really quite pleasant, isn't it? Yeah.
# You're the dish of the day, I'm going to dig right in. #
I'm beginning to warm to the idea of being a Tudor cook.
And we haven't even got to the food yet.
He's going to be working with so much more fresh meat
than anybody outside in a farm's getting.
It's going to be fresh meat almost every day.
So, it's just going to wow him.
Perhaps it was access to all that rich food,
but Richard grew a little curvy
and must have made a name for himself
because he was soon headhunted to be cook
for the Bishop of Rochester.
This should have been a major opportunity for Richard
but the country was in the middle of a major political crisis
and Richard soon found himself in hot water.
Quite literally.
In 1527, Henry VIII asked the Pope
if he could divorce his queen, Catherine.
She was knocking on a bit, hadn't given him a son,
and besides, Henry had met someone new,
gorgeous Anne Boleyn,
who, as Henry noted, had a nice pair of pretty duckies.
But some people in England failed to support Henry...
...including...
...yes, the Bishop of Rochester.
The bishop's opposition to Henry's divorce was about to have
a devastating impact on his cook.
It all started on February 18th 1531
when the bishop held a banquet
and he wasn't feeling great that evening
so he didn't eat anything.
But his guests scoffed away.
And, by morning,
17 of them were ill and two had died.
Immediately rumours abounded.
Everybody thought it was poison
and the finger was pointed at the cook that night
who was Richard Roose.
They said that he had deliberately attempted to murder the bishop
on the instructions of a vengeful Anne Boleyn.
More likely, it was just a bad case of food poisoning.
But Henry was hopping mad that the name of his sweet Anne
had been dragged through the mud.
So, he sent Richard to the Tower to be tortured until, guess what?
He confessed to it all being his fault.
It sounds like things were pretty grim for Richard
but they were about to get a whole lot grimmer.
Henry passed a law, especially for Richard,
permitting a new form of execution.
Death by boiling.
But it wouldn't be a simple matter
of 12 minutes in the pan and you're done.
A TIMER RINGS
No, it's recorded that Richard was locked in a chain
and pulled up and down with a gibbet at diverse times
till he was dead.
And that took two long hours.
Documents from the time recalled how Henry VIII joked to his courtiers,
"I've cooked the cook.
"Ha-ha-ha!"
It was a world away from what kitchen boy Richard had imagined
all those years ago, when all he had to worry about
was the washing up.
So, a top tip for survival in Henry's England would be...
...don't ruffle the king's ruff.
Which you'd think would be easy,
given that most people lived in the countryside
in simple houses with thatched roofs and walls made of sticks and dung,
minding their own business.
This is what life was like for the vast majority of people
in Tudor England, a world away from the sex scandals
and skulduggery and fabulous costumes that you saw in the course
of King Henry VIII.
Take, for example, a Yorkshire farmer, Richard Jenkinson,
and his wife, whose name isn't recorded,
so let's call her Anne.
This might be the couple out in the field at harvest time.
Richard must be as worn out as his trousers.
Like 90% of the Tudors, Richard's family spent most of their time
in the great outdoors teasing a living from the soil,
and it was long, long hours.
They could start from as early as five o'clock in the morning
and not finish till they lost the fight
which, in the summer months, might be ten o'clock.
In contrast to their king, who pigged out on banquets every day,
there were just two simple meals.
Something to munch in the fields,
perhaps bread and cheese,
and, at the end of the day,
one hot meal to look forward to.
This is the kind of thing that Anne would have prepared for their tea.
This is pottage made out of turnips and beans,
thickened with a few bread crumbs
and maybe just a sprinkle of local herbs.
On special occasions,
they might even eat a chicken.
At night, totally exhausted from the labours of the day,
Richard and Anne would fall asleep on their crude mattress
made of straw with the kids just a few yards from them.
With five or six, it would be a squeeze.
And, if they had any precious animals, like a prize pig,
that could sleep in the room, too.
You couldn't afford to let it slope off.
And pigs are notoriously difficult to house train.
So, as you can imagine, the room would've stunk like crazy.
But, more important, if you spent a lot of time in the proximity
of farm animals, you ran the risk of contracting killer diseases.
It's no wonder that the average life expectancy was just 35 years.
There was no NHS and Tudor medicine was rubbish.
Problem with gout? Apply worms, pig's marrow and herbs boiled
with a red-haired dog.
Bit deaf? Stick a hare's gall bladder
and some fox grease in your ear.
With a fire in the middle of the room and no chimney,
the place would have been full of smoke.
So, the children might well have had respiratory infections
but people and animals would be snug together
and hopefully the thatch wouldn't catch fire.
If they were lucky, the next day would be a Sunday
and their only day off.
But there was no let up for Anne because she'd also
have to make everybody's clothes...
...starting with a bit of fleece straight off a sheep's back.
Marion Knights, a Tudor technology expert, knows Anne's secret.
How do we get it from that into some kind of yarn
that we can make something out of?
Well, that's where this comes in.
Ah! The spindle.
This is the drop spindle.
How does it work?
Well, basically, you just spin it.
So, this twiddles round and I can feel when there's enough twist
because it nips my finger up here.
Then you can start pulling this out a bit more.
It is very slow. It is very labour intensive and slow, yes.
How often would people have been doing this?
Erm, every time she'd got an empty pair of hands
she would have got the spindle out.
You know, waiting for the pot to boil,
waiting for the baby to wake up,
standing at the well, waiting her turn.
This was the only way she could clothe her family.
Anne would also have done her own weaving.
So, what sort of outfit would she have made
for her husband, Richard?
I'm meeting clothing expert Ninya Mikhaila.
The thing that sticks out for me more than anything else
is how robust all this is.
I would have thought that he would have been in rags.
Well, no, I don't suppose he'd last very long in the field in rags.
It is very robust. He's got a warm, woollen layer on the top.
And, in fact, the whole thing is lined in another layer of wool. Oh!
Yeah, you'd be all right in the fields in this. Yeah.
And what's all this under here?
Well, yeah, it's a bit startling, isn't it? It's got red.
I wasn't expecting that!
There was a very strong belief in this period that red
was the colour that kept you healthy
and it was a good colour to wear near to your skin.
And then you've got this shirt underneath, look. Yes.
So, everyone, man, woman and child always has a linen layer next
to their skin. And that's the bit you can wash, which none
of these could be washed in water.
Big question.
Vest and pants? No pants, I'm afraid.
Most men used their shirt,
which was long and split at the sides.
So, you could tuck the front this way, and the back that way,
and that was basically your pants. You'd be nice and warm. Yeah.
What about the women?
Women? Absolutely no pants.
Long skirts? Don't need them.
All the time that we've been talking,
there's been one item of clothing that's been catching my eye here.
Excuse me about this.
You'll see why it did attract my attention.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Are you sure?
I didn't realise that ordinary people had codpieces. Yeah.
By this day, it was just completely standard wear on men's hose.
So that they were taking in the fashion of the richer people
and incorporating it into their own? Exactly.
I mean, it does seem like a weird fashion, but in the 15th century
the codpiece didn't exist. Yeah.
It starts as just a simple flap that's used to cover the fly.
Yeah. And then human, maybe male, nature comes in and it becomes a bit
more exaggerated and a bit more padded and embellished
until it is, by this stage, just standard,
almost like the one the king's wearing.
But King Henry's influence on Richard and Anne
was about to extend even beyond codpieces.
It was the summer of 1513, just four years into the reign
of young King Henry.
One morning, Richard got up as usuaL
went down to the river to fetch a bucket of water,
probably had a quick pee in the hedge on the way,
when suddenly he was stopped by one of his landowner's servants
who gave him a message, or more likely an order.
The lives of Richard and his family were about to be turned upside down
by the activities of his firebrand king, Henry VIII.
Richard was being called up for military service.
Coming UP---
Richard is sent to fight for Henry VIII,
with nothing more than a hedge trimmer,
and can this brave seaman
stop the Mary Rose from sinking?
During the reign of Henry VII,
an Englishman could be called up at any time
to serve his king in battle
and, in 1513, that's exactly what happened to a Yorkshire farmer
called Richard Jenkins.
The young Henry VIII looked like this and he dreamt
of being a great warrior king
and ruling both Scotland and France.
So, aged 22, he took his toughest troops and invaded France.
James IV of Scotland couldn't believe his luck.
With Henry gone, England could be his.
So, it fell to Henry's queen, Catherine,
to recruit an army for him.
25,000 soldiers...
...including Richard.
Poor farmers like him had to provide their own weapons.
Luckily, Richard had just the thing.
Because, in Tudor times, there were sheep everywhere.
Hello!
THE SHEEP BAAS
Bear with me here.
You see, in order to stop them wandering all over the fields
and eating the turnips,
these things began to appear throughout the Tudor landscape.
Hedgerows.
And, to trim those, you needed one of these things,
a billhook, which was a simple slashing, scything tool,
which you just made the hedges tidy with.
With a few modifications, Richard's hedge trimmer...
...was fashioned into a lethal weapon.
His local blacksmith simply tweaked the billhook design
with a series of nasty twists and turns.
Now, Richard was ready...
...to take on the Scots.
To find out how, I'm visiting the Royal Armouries in Leeds
and meeting curator Andy Dean.
Richard wouldn't have been able to escape
from going into the army, would he?
No. I mean, it's part of that feudal system.
So, they knew that if the call came,
there was no getting out of it
and possibly your wives and your children would come
along with you. Oh, really? Why would they do that?
Well, it's part of the baggage train.
And women had a vital role before the battle and after the battle.
I mean, obviously picking up the bits.
But, of course, you're more likely to fight if you feel comfortable.
You have your loved ones around you.
And, of course, you don't sort of just go somewhere, fight
and come home again. You might be away for 40 days.
And so, having family around you, then maybe there's a greater reason
for the ordinary man to fight harder. Yeah.
To get to the battle,
Richard, Anne and the kids had to walk about 150 miles,
sleeping in the fields each night.
They couldn't carry much food
so the army often looted from villages along the way.
Of course, going to war would have been terrible,
but it would have been a bit of an adventure too.
Remember, Richard had probably only ever been about ten miles from his home before.
And suddenly off he goes.
And he can bring his wife and kids.
It would have been like some sort of weird summer holiday,
except he might have got killed.
Richard would have to summon up the courage to confront
one of these guys.
So noisy and heavy!
I'd have wet myself.
What am I going to do against this guy?!
I don't think this is going to be much use.
He's almost impervious.
But, if you came across this guy,
actually you and your mates have got the perfect weapon.
You can see where the gaps are.
Where would you thrust this spike? Bang! Exactly.
So, it's gone through his eye socket, into his brain.
Now, it's called a billhook for a reason.
What would you do with the hook here?
No idea. All right.
Well, I would wrap this around the back of his neck.
Haul him to the ground.
Richard would need nerves of steel,
but he did also have some protection.
This would be the most basic jack of plates.
The plates inside the linen garment could be made out of horn or...
This is really heavy, actually. Well, it needs to be heavy, but not so heavy
it limits you and it's protecting, obviously, your engine,
heart, lungs.
So, your engine is protected, but your computer's not.
So we need something for the top end of you, as well.
And, again... Let's have a computer cover. Yeah.
And there will be an armoury and there'll be 50, 100 of these.
And you would get one of these and you'd pad it to make it your own.
On it goes.
You've got your billhook, you've got your jack of plates.
And now we have 20 other blokes all lined up who are motivated.
You've suddenly become a very important part of the army.
You've got to admit, I am terrifying.
When they finally arrived to fight the Battle of Flodden,
the English army face stiff odds,
attacking uphill against greater numbers.
And the Scots had bigger cannons.
A CANNON BOOMS
If the Scots won and captured a chunk of England,
it could have been the end of Henry VIII.
Richard watched in awe as he waited for his turn.
On one side, you've got the Scots with their long pikes,
which were brilliant against knights in armour on horseback,
but weren't nearly as good when it came to close fighting.
And they were up against Richard and the other Tudor farmer soldiers
armed with equipment better suited to hand-to-hand combat,
billhooks, which were stabbing and scything weapons.
Richard and his comrades began to push the Scots back.
Finally, in one last desperate move,
the Scottish King charged down right into the heart of the English ranks.
But the infantry held firm.
They pulled him off his horse and slaughtered him.
King James IV of Scotland,
killed by common farmers with billhooks.
The English army had won a famous victory
and Richard could now return home.
With his adapted hedge trimmer, our simple farmer
had helped save Henry VIII from a humiliating defeat,
one that could have ended his entire reign.
Phew!
And with all that blood, sweat and toil,
the Tudors needed to let their hair down.
And "fun", for our Tudor ancestors,
was pretty much the same as it is today for us.
Festivals...
Is this the way to Glastonbury?
...football..
On me head, son!
...and, most important of all,
a glass of ale down the pub.
And if you lived in Leatherhead, Surrey,
this could have been your local.
500 years ago, presiding over everything from the brewing
of the beer through to the ladling it out to the guests,
was a woman.
Elynor Rummyn.
Can I have a pint, please?
This is Elynor, still welcoming customers to the pub.
And The Running Horse is a modern twist on the pub's original name,
Rummyn's House.
Elynor's life was tough.
She'd be up at dawn seven clays a week
fetching water from the river
and cleaning up from the night before.
She had a kitchen over here somewhere,
set away from the pub,
and in here she would have made bread and cooked all the meals
for the family.
And, round here, you would have had pigs and chickens,
and there would have been lots of herbs growing so that she could
produce the meat and the medicine for her family.
But the most important part of her workplace was here.
This would have been where she did the brewing.
Elynor's ale was old school even then.
After the barley was malted, she'd have added her own
signature mix of herbs like thyme,
rosemary, nettle, yarrow and mugwort.
It would have been a murky brown brew and tasted sour and smoky.
And it would go off pretty quickly
because Elynor didn't use hops,
which are important for preserving been
She produced about ten gallons a week for her family
and all the rest was put on sale because, in those clays,
everybody drank ale, even children,
partly because it was thought to be more nutritious than water,
certainly didn't give you the gyp like water did,
and it made you feel good.
We know all about Elynor from a bloke who stopped off
at the pub one night for a drink.
And he happened to be Henry VIII's poet laureate.
A bloke by the name of John Skelton.
And he wrote this poem about Elynor.
From our point of view, it's brilliant
because it describes an ordinary person in great detail.
You may think he wrote it because he was besotted by her beauty
but, in fact,
what he says was, "Her face all boozy,
"comely crinkled, wonderfully wrinkled...
"..like a roast pig's ear
"bristling with hair."
That's charming, isn't it?
Skelton goes on insulting Elynor for about 600 lines.
But it wasn't just her looks that he was slagging off.
This was full-scale character assassination.
According to Skelton, she was a sexual deviant.
She was a dodgy businesswoman.
She cut her ale with all sorts of disgusting stuff.
Look at this.
"And sometimes she blends the dung of her hens."
I can't imagine Skelton came back for a second pint.
Can you?
So, what's the truth about Elynor?
Jaega Wise, 2018 Brewer Of The Year,
has studied the ancient craft of ale-making
all the way back to Tudor times.
Why does the poem slag her off so much?
It's implied quite heavily that she's doing things like
watering down the ale or cheating customers.
Do you think she really did cheat the customers?
Yeah.
She was fined two pennies for serving false measures
and she was lucky that she was fined.
One of the other punishments would have been a thorough ducking
in the local pond.
Like a witch? Yeah, like a witch.
That's one of the things that strikes me about the poem.
She does come across as a bit witchy, doesn't she?
There is said to be a relationship between witches and ale wives.
It's true that ale wives would have used a big cauldron,
may well have had a cat for pest control,
and they did put a broom outside the pub to show the beer was ready.
But why would anyone want to demonise women like Elynor?
What begins to happen is the brewing industry begins to become
professional and, when that happens,
the ale wives are a considerable threat.
So, what do you do when you're under threat?
You spread rumours about them. You spread lies about them.
You want to make their product sell less than your product.
What about Mr Rummyn?
We don't hear much about him.
I imagine him as some drunken old sot
sitting in the corner while his wife coins it all in.
Yes.
And there is a reason why ale wives are called ale "wives"
and not ale "women".
It's because most of them were probably married
and Elynor would have had a certain amount of financial freedom
but it all belonged to their husbands.
So, Elynor did all that hard work, didn't directly receive
any financial reward and risked a ducking in the local pond.
I wish I could have been standing here 500 years ago,
watching the real Elynor presiding over her little boozy kingdom.
But, as for this poem, I feel split down the middle
about it because, on one hand, it's funny. It's bawdy.
It brings to life a working woman in the Tudor period.
But, on the other hand,
it takes the mick out of her.
It slags her off.
And that kind of writing about working women at that time
helped drive a nail in the coffin of their lives,
and it meant that they were cut off from their work
and all the opportunities that go with it for centuries to come.
Coming UP---
Come on! Open the door!
The tough life and tragic end of a seaman who lived on board
the pride of Henry VIII's Navy...
...the Mary Rose.
Oh, wow.
Over the course of his reign,
Henry VIII managed to annoy the Pope,
the French, the Scots
and, it seems, most people in Europe.
# How did it happen?
They'd had quite enough of Henry...
# It's just another oops on me. #
...and now the threat of invasion hung in the air.
The new situation demanded that England have a ready
and well-equipped Navy, which meant that suddenly a lot of ordinary
people had exciting new job possibilities
and the chance of long-haul travel.
7,000 new seamen were taken on as Henry expanded the Royal Navy
from five to 40 warships.
So, what kind of life could a novice sailor
expect in the swashbuckling early clays of the Navy?
Well, for once, we can answer that question in incredible detail,
thanks to a remarkable Tudor time capsule
that emerged from the drink nearly 40 years ago.
In 1982...
It's a wonderful structure and a wonderful sight.
...salvagers recovered Henry's flagship,
Mary Rose, which had sunk back in 1545.
On board were 19,000 artefacts
and the jumbled bones of 179 sailors.
And, in one corner of a lower deck,
archaeologists found one complete skeleton.
An ordinary seaman we'll calljohn,
a man who went down with his ship.
So, this is our man! This is John.
This is john.
Alex Hildred is a curator at the Mary Rose Trust
and first dived the wreck back in 1979.
He doesn't seem hugely tall.
He isn't, actually.
He's about our height, more or less.
About five foot four-ish, maybe five foot five.
I'm five foot four and a half, so... Yeah, perfect.
...almost identical. Almost identical.
What about age?
Age. You can see that the sutures have all closed.
So he's probably between 20 and 30.
A perfect age for somebody who's a hardworking individual.
John, who would have looked something like this,
was one of a crew of over 400.
I can't wait to see his home,
the ship where his body was found.
Are you ready? Yeah.
You know I've never seen this before? No! Really?
Truly.
Come on! Open the door!
Go on, have a look.
0h!
Oh, wow.
I've so always wanted to see this.
To me, this is like the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Half the ship rotted away,
but the remaining half's in good nick.
It's as though the Mary Rose was cut down the middle, lengthways,
to give us a sneaky look inside John's home.
Where was he actually found?
He was found just over there.
So, this is the hold of the ship.
And there were four people in there
and five barrels about this high with tar or pitch in them.
So it looks as though he was working?
It looks as though he was working.
John had about the most important job on the ship,
to stop it sinking by keeping it waterproof.
What's known as "caulking".
At sea, his mission was to constantly check
that the timbers were watertight
and to repair them with tar and pitch before the ship sank.
Every day he would have worked a relentless shift pattern
of four hours on, four hours off,
signalled by the tolling of the ship's bell.
A BELL RINGS
John may have been a local lad who learned his craft
from about 14 years of age as an apprentice at Portsmouth dockyard.
Then around 18,
he'd have had his big chance of a life of adventure at sea.
Imagine his first day.
He must have been completely awestruck.
Do you have any idea where John might have slept?
Likely he would have just slept anywhere that he could have done.
Maybe on the storage deck above or on the main deck by the guns.
That's the sort of thing we hear, of people just crunching themselves up
beside the guns and falling asleep as much as they can.
I bet everybody would assume that he would have slept in a hammock.
Hammocks weren't around yet.
So, no, no hammocks.
And, for an ordinary seaman like john,
there were certainly no cabins or bunks either.
All right. We've got him up in the morning.
What about his ablutions?
Well, the only evidence we have for that are two channels,
if you like, both up on the upper deck in the stern,
which basically they were like urinals
and they went out through the side of the ship with little protruding,
basically, beams which had a hole in the centre
so everything would go out the side.
Have we got any evidence of the kinds of things
that he might have done in order to make his spare time bearable?
Actually, really close to where he was found, just on the deck above,
we have evidence of two gaming boards.
Musical instruments. In fact, we had a fiddle that was found
just by the main mast.
So, we've got a fiddle and a tabor drum and pipes.
I love the idea that you've got a ship's band.
You look at something like this and all you see
in your mind's eye is the serious nature of running a ship.
But they were grooving away as well.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Also near John's skeleton they found one of these.
I know what that is. That reminds me of primary school.
Yeah. Those are one of our most common objects.
Both the anti-nit combs part, which are very, very fine,
and then the one for normal grooming.
He would have had nits, wouldn't he?
Probably.
And you do hear of people throwing themselves
in the sea to get rid of the nits.
But John might have got comfort from a special friend.
A small skeleton was found in the doorway where John
would have picked up his tools.
Interestingly, in the opening of it, because it was a sliding door,
so almost jammed in the crack was a small dog.
I know! We called him Hatch because he wasn't too far away
from the hatches. But he was so far away that he couldn't get out.
He couldn't get out. No, I know.
And he, actually, is our most complete skeleton.
I don't want to get too weepy about this,
but John would have seen him every day, wouldn't he?
He would have and he was only 18 months old, the dog.
Just a baby, really.
Let's move on before I... Cry.
...show myself up.
This may be one of the great archaeological treasures
of the world but it's also the place where young John lived
and worked every day, along with 500 of his mates,
in very dark, cramped conditions.
Imagine, though, how proud he must have felt
about being a crew member of the Mary Rose.
But, in July 1545,
the French attacked the English fleet at Portsmouth.
Henry watched as the Mary Rose went out to engage the enemy.
All the cannons to starboard fired a volley together but,
as she turned,
her gun ports fatally dipped beneath the waterline
and water rushed in.
John's whole world would literally have been turned upside down.
There would have been things flying across the room, up, down,
backwards, forwards, smacking him in the face.
Then a final gush of freezing cold water.
And then that was it.
No escape.
The Mary Rose sank like a stone.
Only 30 of over 400 crew members escaped.
John perished where he worked.
I like to think that John would be pleased to know
that the English Navy finally managed to repulse the French
and also that he might be a bit tickled if he knew that,
500 years after he died,
his life would become immortalised.
The Mary Rose had been Henry's pride and joy for 34 years.
Its end foreshadowed his own.
He died two years later.
And, thanks to his reign,
the lives of ordinary people would never be the same again.
In the next episode...
Right. Let's go.
...I'll be meeting some Victorian Britons.
The female miners who hauled coal...
But it wasn't the backbreaking conditions that shocked everyone.
It was, believe it or not,
the nudity.
...and new experiences that changed their world.
It's the invention of modern shopping.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media