Our nation hasn't just been built by the leading figures of the day
who go down in the history books,
but by a vast army of workers of all ages
dedicated to doing some really horrific jobs.
This time...
Why the royaI succession reIied on women with cricket bats.
How carrying the king's vitaI messages couId be a painfuI business.
Ooh!
And why the very symboI of monarchy meant working with rotten sheIIfish.
Pwhoa! (Coughs)
Welcome to The Worst Royal Jobs in History.
RoyaIty is aII about pomp, spIendour and priviIege.
But behind the scenes, it's taken a Iot of scraping, spitting and poIishing
to keep the institution going -
worst jobs which have aIIowed our kings and queens
to continue at work and at pIay.
In the medievaI world,
the king sat at the top of the orders of chivaIry.
Sports Iike jousting procIaimed their status as war Ieader and perfect gentIeman.
But in order for the king and his barons to show off without kiIIing each other,
scores of men were empIoyed in the thankIess task
of making the uItimate throwaway designer object.
For the ruling classes, charging full tilt at each other
in order to knock each other onto the ground
was just a bit of sport.
The real bad job was reserved for the bloke who made this -
the lance that you used in the tournament.
Mind you, he didn't make just one. He made loads.
Why so many, Toby?
Well, the thing about jousting
is the object is to hit your opponent as hard as possible.
And when you have trained people doing that,
they're going to be hitting each other regularly
and they're going to be hitting with such force
that they're gonna break their lances.
SkiIIed Iance-makers had to make sure their weapons shattered on impact -
vitaI when royaI safety was at stake.
So someone like Henry Vlll
would have dressed up in the armour and done all this?
Yes, Henry Vlll himself was a very, very enthusiastic jouster,
so much so that his courtiers often tried to dissuade him from it.
He was nearly killed in a joust in 1 524.
He was so excited by the event that he charged off without lowering his visor,
and his opponent, who couldn't see very well,
couldn't really see what was going on,
and Henry was struck right above the eye.
And the lance broke and splinters flew into the King's face,
and he was within inches of death.
lt was extraordinary that he wasn't even hurt, actually.
So how many might these guys have had to make?
We do know in 1 403, there's a record of a lance-maker
supplying 1 7 1 lances for a tournament in Spain.
And if you have a large tournament with 60 or 1 00 knights competing,
that's a lot of lances they're going to be going through.
Light, beautifuIIy decorated, superbIy baIanced
and gone in a second.
The Iance-maker's job was so underrated
that the very technoIogy for making them has been Iost.
We've had to get a master carpenter to work out how it was done.
Gerry! Hello, Tony.
Tell me that these things are easy to make.
lf only they were!
l've spent a week now trying to work out the way they made them,
and l think l've got there now, l think l've got there.
l nearly lost a leg, but l think l've got there.
And you were using language l'd hardly ever heard before.
Language l haven't used for a long time.
So tell me how this thing is made.
Well, basically, what we've got, we've got a tree.
First of all, we square it off. And l'm using a side axe.
And if you look at that, you'll find there's one side is flat, one side's curved.
And it's basically for just taking away the timber,
you're making lots of small cuts...along,
and then a couple of long, sweeping cuts.
And as you can see, it's beginning to square up already.
There. Would you like to have a go? Yep.
You've got to remember, this is gonna be done on four sides.
lf you do that for two hours, l'll go round here.
Two hours?! Blimey!
And after two hours, it should look something like this.
Which we then, with the draw knife...
..trim down for another three or four hours.
And once we've got it to this sort of size,
we take the scrapers and finish them off, so that we get a nice round shaft.
One piIe of woodchips Iater, I naiveIy assumed I'd done the most boring part.
Are we finished yet? No, not quite.
What have we got to do? We've still got the handle to do.
Where do we do that? Over on the pole lathe.
That's this thing? That's the machine over there.
If you've ever pumped up a car tyre with a foot pump,
you'II know that just a few minutes is exhausting.
And we're relying on good old leg power here.
Would you like to have a go? l'm left-handed. l'll have to go...
So am l ! Oh, that's alright, then.
l'll come round this side. Alright.
Forget five minutes. Each handIe took a good three hours to make.
We'll make a pole churner of you yet.
l tell you what, it doesn't take long before your leg starts to ache, does it?
That's it, but there, again, you end up with one really big thigh.
You get the idea.
With nothing to occupy your mind except the screaming ache in your Ieg,
this is incredibIy monotonous work.
But you have to keep aIert - as the poIe gets thinner,
there's a danger that it wiII snap, causing terribIe injuries.
But after two days scraping and chipping, there's no thanks,
and about as much job satisfaction as making teapots out of chocoIate.
Now, that is such a frustrating sight!
lt must have been part of the status for the nobles
to destroy something that looked so good.
But imagine what it must have been like for the lance-maker -
not only to see this beautiful thing trashed,
but trashed at about 35 miles an hour, in about five seconds flat.
Mind you, that's not all.
After the tournament came the battle, and the jobs just got worse and worse.
For centuries, being a king meant going to war.
There were wars to win the throne, wars to defend it,
wars with foreign powers.
MedievaI kings reaIIy fought, and seven of them died on the battIefieId.
So it was vitaI to the defence of the reaIm
for the king to have the very best armour.
Chain maiI was the business. It was soIid, but fIexibIe.
So the reaI architects of royaI power from Hastings to Agincourt
were the poor souIs who had to knit these coats out of thousands of bits of wire.
It's not hard to imagine the downside of being a Iink-maker.
The fact is, it was incredibly laborious and repetitive work.
lt involved cutting thousands and thousands of rings
and linking them together one by one.
The problem was, it was very dangerous
in the sense that you'd often get lacerations
from the rusty metal which you're playing with.
lnfections can get in, tetanus -
all those lovely things which we don't have to live with today, luckily.
So what do we do when we've finished that?
Well, once we've clipped this off, we've got a little coil,
and next step in the process, we need to go over to a little workplate.
Yep.
So, first wind your wire into a Iong coiI.
l've got a special set of crimping tools here, which have a tiny little hole
set about two mil in, which is just over the width of the wire.
Then cut the coiI into singIe overlapped wire rings.
An overlapped ring.
Heat and soften the rings in a fire untiI cherry red.
A beautiful cherry red, but they will cool quite quickly.
Stage four- hammer out the rings to make a singIe fIat overlapped Iink.
Give it a tap. Two.
Three of those.
And you can see that the ring is now flattened.
Now it becomes much more arduous, because...
And now these fIat overlapped pieces have to be riveted together for strength.
So, what you need to do is place the ring just over that hole.
You know what l'm worried about -
if l miss this little hole with my tool, l could mess up your tool, couldn't l?
Give it a good solid whack.
There you go. Stop. Oh, yep.
Now, you've gone a bit too far there. l've messed it up, haven't l?
Yeah. lt's not gone through and the ring's split apart.
So can we use yours, 'cause l'm... Yeah. Sure.
..terrified l might die of boredom otherwise.
OK.
Little triangular rivet here, and what we're going to do
is force the little rivet into the hole which we've made.
So why was this job so important to the king?
Well, the provision of good-quality armour to the armed forces
was integral to the security of the country
and ultimately the security of the monarchy.
So he would have wanted his men
to have the best-quality stuff he could possibly afford.
So no mail, no king? Pretty much. You got it, yeah.
Which some people might say is quite a good thing.
And we're gonna set it by squeezing it with these pliers
and giving it a good hammer strike on top.
And there you have it - one highly durable, solid steel, mail-riveted ring,
which makes up one of the many on this hauberk just over here.
There are something like 30,000 rings on this, aren't there?
So just another 29,999 and we'll have made a complete mail shirt.
To do that, each ring has to be riveted through its neighbour
to make a strong and suppIe suit -
an incredibIy Iaborious process.
So there was pIenty of work for Iink-makers,
who were apprenticed at age 1 2
and had to settIe for working Iong, boring hours without pay.
lf l'm the king, l want some more mail,
l want to commission you to make it, and l want it tomorrow, can you do it for me?
Uh, very unlikely, unless you've got a work force of maybe 1 00 men or so,
because the king is gonna have the very best mail available
and it's going to be very fine stuff,
much smaller than the rings we're actually using here.
l've got one example here - bronze ring -
which you can see is about a third of the size
of the ones we're gonna be working with.
There are shirts which have in excess of 200,000 rings
and are so dense that you can't even force a needle through it.
But even when they weren't using their costIy chain maiI in battIe,
medievaI monarchs had pIenty of other ways
of keeping themseIves at the top of the tree.
This is King HaroId in the Bayeux Tapestry,
and that's not a mutant duck he's hoIding,
but one of the most expensive status symboIs in history.
A faIcon.
Hunting wasn't just a sport for the monarchy.
It was an essentiaI way of showing who was boss.
WhoIe areas Iike the New Forest were reserved just for the king,
and there were even ruIes about which ranks couId use which sort of hawk.
Imagine trying to keep a Iiving Lamborghini with feathers happy
and you'II see what was at stake for the royaI faIconer.
Jay, we're out in the country with these fantastic birds.
Why was falconry such a bad job?
Well, 'cause they were so fantastic.
l mean, if you were to lose one of these, you were in so much trouble.
These birds are worth a fortune,
worth more than a lot of the other hunting assets of the royal families.
So, for example, Phillip the Bold's son was captured
during one of the Crusades.
His ransom was 200,000 golden ducats,
but that was declined for just 1 2 gyrfalcons instead.
So they're so valuable
that should you lose one of these, you were in real, real trouble.
This part of the job doesn't seem great.
No, you, as the cadgeman,
had to carry these royal falcons into the field for the royalty.
The cadgeman. A cadger. The cadger.
lt's where you get the phrase 'cadge a lift' from.
You had to carry these through all terrain, crossing rivers in the worst...
..areas of the country, and possibly quite bad climatic conditions.
And would there normally have been about this number of birds
on one of these frames?
Well, you're looking at four on this particular cadge,
but you could have been carrying 1 2, even more than that,
and each bird weighing between
1 .5 to 2 pounds in weight.
Of course, it's gonna weigh the old codger down.
So if l lose one of these, l'm in big trouble.
l have to carry this cage around with me all the time. What else?
Well, you would have to make sure that you recovered the hawks,
crossing icy streams, risking life and limb to recover the bird,
should it chase and kill something.
Should you not be able to recover the trained hawk,
of course, that hawk, or one like it,
once finally recovered, would remove six ounces of flesh from your breast.
Oh, great.
The punishment of having a hamburger-sized piece of your body
eaten by the bird
wouId aIone make this a worst job.
But the terror started early, at the age of seven.
Their first job was to tame down a wildly trapped hawk.
So they not only had this huge bird on their hand,
but they had a very angry bird with them as well.
What are we gonna do now?.
Well, we're gonna give this guy his daily exercise.
A falconer had to exercise his hawks every day
as well as the normal management of feeding, cleaning, look after them.
The hawk was a priority. That came first above everything else.
You can feel a nice bit of breeze there.
His wings come out. And we'll let him off.
Exercising a faIcon requires a bit more skiII than waIking a dog.
You have to swing a baited Iure just out of reach
of a bird fIying at 30 or 40 miIes an hour.
Wow!
But the rigorous job spec aIso invoIved personaI quaIities.
ln the late 1 3th century, Aliard wrote
that a falconer had to be sober, patient, chaste, sweet-smelling
and avoiding preoccupations.
Chaste, as in not sleeping with people?
Very much so.
Because sleeping with the local prostitute could lead to disease,
which could be passed on to the falcons themselves.
Thus encouraged to think I was perfectIy cut out for the job,
it's my turn to put the birds through their paces.
I mean, how hard couId it be to swing my bit of meat on the end of a string?
lf at any time you're not sure...
Oh! She... (Laughs)
That was very, very scary. You are so clever.
TONY: Oh! Does that count?
She caught it. She caught it. ln one.
You're swinging the wrong way. lt ought to be forward at the bottom.
Oh, forward at the bottom - that's what l've done wrong?
Whoa! l tried to put it behind my back to readjust it.
She just followed it behind my back and went down and got it.
You are some smart bird.
A faIcon hunt was a great sociaI occasion.
But aII the training was for nothing if you couIdn't keep up with the royaIs
as they hunted rabbit and wiId fowI.
Remember, the royal party are mounted on horseback.
These guys are being followed by you on foot.
So you've got to be up the hills and over the dales,
through the bramble bushes, through the briars,
across streams, at risk of drowning -
anything to recover your hawk and the quarry that it's taken.
So, Blade...
He's going for something. He's seen something.
There.
Yep.
Oh, my God.
This proves that falconers were brave and resolute
and hunted their quarry until they were able to get it.
These waders are leaking, Jay.
lt's freezing in here.
l'm glad l'm not just in tights and a jerkin and bare feet.
Come on.
That's it.
Ooh!
Think l'm gonna let it have it.
The court has aIways been vitaI to the smooth running of the monarchy.
By the 16th century, it was a vast community
of unseen workers of aII ranks,
catering for every whim of the autocratic Tudors.
The present Queen has downsized her staff to 645 people, poor thing.
But in Tudor times, the monarch had over 1 ,000 courtiers
and over 1 ,000 servants,
and each one knew their place in the pecking order,
even if it was quite a lowly one,
like the whipping boy,
who was an aristocratic friend of the royal prince,
and it was his job to receive punishment
every time the heir to the throne did something wrong.
And if you think that's unfair, just look at the demands
that were made on some of the rest of the staff.
Alright, you can stop now.
The court was a pIace of intrigue.
One group of IuckIess servants had the job of risking their Iives
to protect the monarch from pIotting courtiers.
A royaI meaI had anything up to 25 dishes.
Any one of them couId contain something deadIy.
And what better way to climb the slippery pole
than to poison the food of the person that you're eating with?
Hence the job of royal food taster,
which is enough to put you off your food for life isn't it, Cassie?
Absolutely.
But surely it must have been a pretty easy job.
l mean, once there was poison in your food,
well, you'd eat it and know straightaway, wouldn't you?
Not necessarily. How come?
Because it's remarkably easy
to hide something that's deadly dangerous in food
and it would not be obvious to you until you had already eaten it.
What's this stuff? This stuff's called frumenty.
Which is what? A sort of thick grain.
Like a sort of porridge or something?
A very thick porridge, yeah. Alright. So how am l gonna poison this?
Ah. Well, you could do that easily with a solid poison like arsenic or mercury.
Well, have we got any arsenic?
We do indeed.
This is arsenic.
lt's not real arsenic, is it? No, it's not. lt's plaster of Paris.
So, what are we gonna do with it?
We are going to mix it with the frumenty, but because it's so solid and white,
it will be quite obvious,
so, first, we'll mix it up with a bit of water.
Were the royals really under threat of being poisoned, or was it just paranoia?
There was a great deal of paranoia,
but there were actual plots to poison the royals, yes.
Like what?
Well, in the 1 590s, there was a plot allegedly by the King of Spain
to poison Queen Elizabeth.
The Spanish government managed to find three Portuguese men
who would agree to poison the Queen.
One of these three was her own physician, Dr Rodrigo Lopez,
who'd been living in London for decades.
But the plot was betrayed, the three were tortured and confessed,
and, of course, as traitors, condemned to death and executed horribly -
hanged, drawn and quartered.
Now, if l was a really subtle food taster,
how am l gonna be able to tell that there's poison there?
The first thing you're going to notice is a very strange grittiness,
but it's not going to be so strange that you're going to feel, ''l shouldn't eat this.''
You'll swallow it.
And what's it gonna do to me? Oh, that's appalling.
The first thing you're going to feel is a sort of burning,
not necessarily strong, but something going on in the mouth.
lf you've got an empty stomach,
within an hour, you're going to start vomiting uncontrollably.
You're going to have extreme pains in the stomach area.
lt feels like rats gnawing on your insides.
And then after about an hour, perhaps two,
you're going to start suffering from purging,
which is a polite way of saying...
That's enough.
So EIizabeth I was paranoid.
She saw poison everywhere.
Every dish was tested before she ate.
Even her gIoves and handkerchiefs were checked,
in case they'd been impregnated with something nasty.
And it was her disposabIe servants who were put in the front Iine.
The royal food taster comes into the room.
ls there any ceremony? There is, yes.
The ladies-in-waiting would come and begin the ceremony by laying the table.
And then the men would bring each dish from the kitchen and lay it on the table,
and the ladies-in-waiting would supervise.
Each person who'd brought a dish was then required to eat one bite
from the dish that he had carried,
and when this ceremony was complete -
and there might be as many as 20 or 25 dishes -
then it was safe for the monarch to eat from these dishes.
Remember, this is a time of invasion, potential invasion, by the Spanish.
The monarch embodied all that was England
and thus had to be kept completely safe.
You had to have food tasters.
So being a royal food taster wasn't bad because you were actually gonna die.
lt's just that you were terrified you were gonna die?
Yeah, that's about it.
Well, this fig is still pretty good.
Potentially dangerous. Ah!
EIizabeth's court didn't have a permanent address.
To ensure the IoyaIty of her subjects and to save on housekeeping,
the Queen went waIkabout,
and the whoIe court went with her.
In the summer of 1 578, they pIonked themseIves on 25 different househoIds,
saving the equivaIent of £10,000 per day.
It may have been a good deaI for the Queen,
but for the men and women of the court,
it was Iike moving house every day,
and the biggest Ioad was IiteraIIy on the shouIders of the groom of the chamber.
And l don't just mean one or two carts.
We're talking 200 or 300.
And everything in them had to be off-loaded
and got into the staying house on time and...
Gorblimey!
..in order... (Pants)
..ready for the Queen's arrival.
So if you were the groom of the chamber,
you had to be something like a cross between...
..Paul Burrell and Arnold Schwarzenegger,
which isn't a very attractive image, really, is it?
Summer tours, or progresses, wouId Iast 8 to 1 2 weeks,
and each stay needed days of preparation.
When Queen Elizabeth ll goes off on a royal tour, it's all pretty relaxed.
She just has... Oh!
..the odd bit of red carpet
and the occasional five-star hotel and a private jet or two.
But Queen Elizabeth l was much more demanding.
The groom of the chamber
had to take out of her palace all of the Queen's necessary possessions.
That meant not only the furniture and the carpets,
but the pictures and the wall hangings and her jewellery, her legal documents.
And the Queen was renowned for having quite a temper on her,
so if you wanted to avoid her wrath, you had to have...
..great big muscles and...patience...
..and a phenomenally good memory.
Simon Bowyer, who organised the tour in 1 578, had aII those quaIities.
At the Mutus Estate, he spent two days setting up with his team,
onIy for the Queen to change her mind after staying for dinner
and set off for another Iocation.
Add to this indecisiveness EIizabeth's bouts of toothache
and the groom of the chamber had the boss from heII.
She wasn't much of a guest either.
So not everyone was that happy about having to lay out the old red carpet.
ln fact, there was an estate called Gotem Place,
where they were so worried about the possible expense and hassle
of having a royal progress
that they decided they'd try and put the Queen off
by all collectively feigning a kind of madness.
So the royal progress turns up
and all the aristocrats and servants there suddenly go, ''Waaa!''
And the progress all run away absolutely terrified.
Although l suspect that the groom of the chamber
had a bit of a smile on his face when he left.
The groom may have ended up with a strained back and frayed nerves,
but at Ieast he had a roof over his head.
Not aII royaI empIoyees were as Iucky.
With the court moving around so much,
communication became vital to the institution of the monarchy.
Hence the job of royal messenger.
Da-dum!
The royal messenger was important not just simply in order to tell people
where the king and queen were at any particular moment in time,
but also to let them know about royal births and deaths and marriages
and much darker things, like intrigues and stabbings and assassinations.
Anything you wanted to know, the royal messenger would let you know it.
Come on. (Clicks tongue) Come on.
Henry VIII started a system of messengers
that rode between staging posts.
In time, it became the royaI postaI service,
which is why the monarch's head is stiII on stamps.
But for early messengers, every journey was tough and fraught with danger.
When EIizabeth I died, it was royaI messenger Sir Robert Carey
who rode to ScotIand to teII James, the heir to the throne, he was now king.
Riding in aII weathers, he aIso had to avoid potentiaI assassination
from those who wanted to deIay news of the Queen's death.
''The marshall met me coming and bade me begone,
''for he had learnt for certain they would betray me.''
( HORSE NElGHS )
Wind, rain, 200 miIes and peopIe waiting to kiII me.
I can't wait.
But Sir Robert had to press on, because for the royaI famiIy, succession is vitaI.
The whoIe institution is based on births, deaths and conceptions.
Was the queen going to have a baby? Was it the king's?
The evidence was gonna be right here among the royal sheets.
And one of the people who would have known most about it was a worst jobber -
not an aristocrat, but the person round the back
mopping up after all this messy business.
The royal washerwoman.
But being a royaI washerwoman was tough, messy
and aIso surprisingIy dangerous.
You can see why so very many women died drowning, can't you, if...
Died drowning?
Yeah, huge cause of death amongst Elizabethan women.
Falling in wells, slipping in ponds, all that sort of thing.
Whilst you're busy, bucket after bucket after bucket,
and you get tireder and tireder.
Especially sort of near dinnertime when everybody was tired.
When you look at the coroners' reports,
there's a sort of blip, you know, just before dinner.
It's difficuIt to imagine just how tough the women had to be.
AII the water had to be Iugged from the moat before the washing couId begin.
Whoa, whoa. Don't spill it now. Ooh!
Lovely. That's great. Right.
There was no soap powder,
just water repeatedIy strained through woodash to make Iye.
lt contains the chemical, the alkali, which is what dissolves the grease.
So presumably it's not too good on your hands?
lt's terrible on your hands. Water?
Yes.
So it's gonna pick up all the chemicals out of the ash,
and then the hay and the gravel will strain it, act as a filter,
So, what comes out the bottom should be quite clean-looking.
Shouldn't look ashy at all. Oh, it's coming out now, isn't it?
Yeah, it is. lt's starting to flow through. lt's a little bit muddy.
Dirty sheets next. ln the big bucking basket. That's it.
The smeIIy sheets were then put into a bucking basket - the very first top Ioader.
Well, they're usually married women, actually, which is quite interesting,
'cause it's about the only job of any decent sort of remuneration
that married women could do.
Do we know anything about any of them?
We've got a few names of people who were royal laundresses.
Anne Twist, for example.
She was Queen Elizabeth's laundress for, oh, 1 6, 1 7 years.
And there was an Anne Harris as well, in King Henry Vlll's reign,
who held the post for some time.
They were quite poorly paid, but they had to be respectable women.
You wouldn't want just anybody touching all your linens
and your personal stuff, would you?
So presumably the washerwomen
would have known more about the sex lives of the monarchy than anybody else?
Yeah, l think they probably would, actually.
Pretty darn intimate things, sheets, aren't they? You can't get away with anything.
ln fact, there's even proof of that.
The sort of, like, foreign ambassadors at Elizabeth's court,
when she was sort of beginning to get on and a bit long in the tooth,
and they were contemplating the French marriage with the Duke of Anjou,
they actually paid washerwomen for inside information
as to whether she was still menstruating or not.
Oh. What do we do with this? Can we lift it up on there?
Yep. OK.
Oh, flippin' heck.
And now?.
Uh, now we pour the lye that we made through the linen.
And... Sort of like a liquid soap. lt'll move through and...
You'd have had to have been quite tough, wouldn't you,
to have been a washerwoman.
Oh, you had to have muscles. There's no doubt about it.
lt's nothing sissy about this job.
Now what?
Right, well, we just let that trickle through slowly.
And we don't want to hurry it particularly.
lt's gonna be dissolving any grease that's in there.
Yeah.
And then we're gonna beat the living daylights out of it.
(Both laugh)
These are caIIed battIe doors, not bats.
But this feeIs very much Iike a strenuous version of cricket.
If you weren't so knackered after the water-carrying and buck-Ioading,
it wouId be a way of venting your frustration at the job.
Hang on a sec. Let's give it a dunk. Water.
Oh, God, look at that. Five minutes.
They must have been really cracked and bleeding, their hands.
l think they must have been cracked and bleeding most of the time.
Right, do you wanna wring this one out? Yep.
lf you grab one end and l'll grab the other.
Yep.
The sign of every birth, death and marriage is gonna be in here, isn't it?
Yeah.
Shall we hang this out?
Yeah, l think that's a good idea.
For drying, they used privets rather than pegs and washing Iines,
but if the wind got up and bIew the sheets into the mud,
the washerwoman wouId have to start aII over again.
( HORSE NElGHS )
''l got a great fall by the way, and my horse, with one of his heels,
''gave me a blow on the head that made me shed much blood.''
We hadn't meant to re-create every bit of Robert Carey's journey.
But then...
Pomp and ceremony have aIways been a way of estabIishing royaI status.
But before the days of ampIified music and RAF fIy-pasts,
there was no more spectacuIar way of ceIebrating a victory or coronation
than a royaI firework dispIay.
Thanks to Handel's 'Music for the Royal Fireworks',
it's George ll's magnificent firework displays that are so well remembered.
But behind all the oohs and the ahhs and the big bangs
lies another worst job that involves blood and burns and physical injury.
Welcome to the highly explosive career of the fireworker.
Making and firing fireworks was a very primitive business.
There was onIy one coIour, no safety awareness,
and it invoIved pIaying around with Iarge quantities of gunpowder
in smaII pieces of paper.
lf l was a really daft fireworker... Yeah.
..what kind of things might l have done to cause an explosion?
Well, you could - and l've got to illustrate this -
you could be doing this in front of your fireworks.
People really smoked while they were making them?
They smoked. Sparks came out.
Accident report actually shows that people were smoking making fireworks.
Right, Darryl, as soon as l've got this pipe in my mouth,
show me what l might have done, alright?
Ha-hey!
That was so hot.
l can tell you, we were, what, 1 0 metres away,
and you really felt it, didn't you?
Wow, and lots of little bits of stuff in my eyes as well.
l wish l hadn't done that.
(All laugh)
Presumably there must have been more to their fireworks
than just a long line of gunpowder.
Oh, of course, yes.
Rockets are basically flying fountains.
Um, of course, you would have had problems with rockets
because they used to fire them horizontally.
Rockets coming out horizontally? Yeah.
Well, that was bad for the audience,
because they weren't necessarily lined up like that.
They would have been sometimes around,
and therefore, the audience got the rocket,
but then, of course, so did the people firing.
They would have got a lot of other problems as well.
There were lots of explosions.
People would get them through their clothes
because they weren't wearing appropriate clothing.
John, this looks like the kind of bomb that the Roadrunner has.
lndeed.
ln the times that we're talking about, the 1 8th century, they were called balloons.
Balloons.
l can see we're gonna do something dangerous with it, whatever you call it.
lt's a dangerous firework.
Don't look down the mortar, 'cause one of these days, it's gonna have a shell in it.
Were there many injuries from these things?
Oh, there were loads of injuries, yes.
You can imagine, if one of these actually explodes within a metal mortar like that,
you've got shrapnel flying about.
Do we know very much about the people who were hurt?
We don't know anything about them.
They were killed and the whole thing was hushed up.
Really? Yeah.
ln fact, in one display, four people were killed.
They just carried on the display.
Where were these things fired from?
A lot of displays in the 1 8th century would have used water as a backdrop,
and, actually, barges would have contained all these mortars.
And there'd have been a bloke on there lighting them?
There would have been more than one blokes on there lighting them.
lf one of them actually went, you've got big trouble,
because the whole of the barge goes and the men end up in the water.
Well, l'm glad we're on dry land.
What do l do, just lower it in? Just lower it in.
But keep your head away. And try and keep your hands as far away as possible.
Yep.
This was a job no-one wanted to do.
So the royaI fireworkers were voIunteered from the Iowest ranks of the miIitary.
And with burns to the skin, perforated eardrums and deaths,
they didn't just put the one in and go home.
Whay!
The most dangerous part was reIoading.
Oh, that was amazing, wasn't it?
The worst thing is that there are probably burning embers in the bottom there.
So l've got to put a whole load of this stuff in?
You've got to put another load of gunpowder
and you've got to put the shell back in.
And they really did that? And they really did that.
With the embers in? With the embers in.
Even George II's firework dispIays didn't go without a hitch.
The King had forked out £8,000 - about a miIIion today.
But with a crowd of 1 2,000 peopIe waiting,
the decorated frame hoIding the fireworks caught fire.
The designer wasn't happy,
and the hapIess fireworker ended up with a sword at his throat.
By the 1900s, the poIiticaI power of the royaIs had eroded,
but show was as important to them as ever.
They were stiII the peopIe to know,
sharing their Iavish IifestyIe with their favoured movers and shakers.
An invite to one of Edward VII's shooting parties at Sandringham
was the uItimate sociaI accoIade,
and every guest wanted to Iook their very best.
Which brings me to my next worst job,
which is very much at the bottom of the pecking order - literally below stairs.
lt's the bootboy.
Edward Ioved shooting, and he worked his guests hard.
They'd spend Iong days bIasting away at wiIdIife...
( GUNSHOT )
..before returning Iate for a Iavish dinner, port, cigars and bed.
As the snores broke out over Sandringham,
the royaI bootboy's day was onIy just beginning.
And it was up to the poor old bootboy
to creep around the corridors last thing at night,
collecting up everyone's boots and shoes and then polishing them
so they'd be bright and shiny for the hunt the next morning.
And given that King Edward insisted
that the entire hunting party should be up at the crack of dawn,
and everyone had to set their alarms really early,
the poor old bootboys hardly got any sleep at all.
So Edward Vll's upstairs. He's brought his full hunting party with him.
How much work is that gonna be for me, the bootboy?
A horrific amount of work.
When the hunting was going on, chaps like you really did have a rough life.
Right, l've got the shoelaces out. What next?
You've got to learn how to make your own blacking.
lf you come round here, l'm going to read you Mrs Beeton's recipe for blacking.
Are you ready? Yep.
''Take four ounces of ivory black.'' God, that looks good stuff.
''Then an ounce of olive oil.''
How many of these am l putting in?
The grim side of this job wasn't just terribIe tiredness,
but aIso mixing up some pretty fouI and caustic ingredients which couId be deadIy.
We've got an ounce of sulphuric acid. This one, you be very careful of.
l'd better do this for you.
Hold your nose. Yep.
Aw! We're gonna die!
(Coughs)
Rotten eggs? You bet.
(Laughs)
Whoa! How much did they get paid?
About $8 a year, which wasn't very much, but, then, they did get their keep.
So most of that $8 their mother would expect them to bring back home to them
on their monthly day off.
Always be good to your mum.
In times of earlier monarchs,
working for the king or queen couId bring you riches.
But by the 20th century,
back-breaking royaI domestic service wasn't even weII paid.
By Edward Vll's time,
most young men at that time didn't want to go into domestic service.
They wanted to go into something much more glamorous and manly like the army
and march out to the colonies in their red coats.
So domestic service was beginning to be really looked down on.
So when you did get your very rare days off,
you'd go out there and people would jeer at you, rather, for coming from a house,
rather than coming from some job in the new industries that were growing up.
Pretty scant reward for doing all this work.
But nevertheless, it doesn't half get the boots polished up.
l'm rather proud of that. Even if they do stink, of sugar.
(Both laugh)
And it didn't stop at hunting boots.
There were aII the party shoes to shine as weII.
And by the time those were done, the hunters' boots were back again.
( HORSE NElGHS )
But at Ieast one of my jobs had an end to it.
What, with all the falls and the ambushes,
not to mention losing my lovely hat
and having to ride about 200 miles just to deliver a simple message,
that job is frightening, dangerous, not to say very, very tedious.
But my very worst royal job is also extremely disgusting.
Oh, and now, of course, l've got to ride all the way back again.
Come on, Poppy. Off we go.
l've been looking at the worst jobs
that supported the monarchy down the centuries.
But which one was the very worst job?
Moving house for EIizabeth I was back-breaking but pretty weII paid.
Fireworking was fun,
so Iong as you remembered to keep your head out of the way.
Whoa! Blimey!
And even royaI faIconers had a famiIy firm to support them
when they were oId codgers.
Oh, does that count?
No, for me, the very worst job of all
is an incredibly disgusting and very ancient one,
and one that underlies the very symbol of royalty itself -
the purple-maker.
Purple has been the colour of royalty since Roman emperors
because it's so difficult and expensive to make.
l am a purple-maker's assistant, and this is a worst job that disappeared
during the siege of Constantinople,
when all the purple-makers were wiped out.
So we reckon that this is the first time in over 500 years
that this particular process has been demonstrated, don't we, John?
Yep, that's quite true. Yes.
One of the shortcomings of television is that you can't smell the incredible niff
that's coming off this rather disgusting mess.
Why are we killing all these innocent shellfish?
Well, this, Tony, is the basis of the whole of the imperial purple industry.
This was the dye...the most prestigious dye in the world, in fact.
The Romans, of course, made it an imperial monopoly,
and this went on right into the Middle Ages, in actual fact.
So how do you make it out of these things?
Yes, well, basically, we have the mollusc. This is the murex trunculus.
And what we have to do is to make an incision
into what, in fact, is the hypobranchial gland.
And when we've done that, the dye, or the precursor, comes out
and the air, in fact, oxidises it to the purple pigment.
But, of course, the old dyers had to do this on a vast scale,
and this involved, in fact...
Oh!
l really didn't know you were gonna do that!
Don't hit it too hard, otherwise you'll get all the entrails over the floor.
Don't tell me! lt was you who whacked it.
So that's the technique. So we'll have to work through these.
l've kept these on one side. l've done those for you previously.
l don't want to hit it that hard.
That's the idea.
Smashing a few stinking sheIIfish is stomach-turning enough,
but the purpIe-makers had to smash at Ieast 1,000
to dye just one cIoak.
I can understand why onIy royaIty couId afford it.
Phwoa! (Coughs)
And put them into the pot.
God! Doesn't it affect you?
Well, no, perhaps l'm used to it.
There we are. There's more over there. Those we did earlier, of course.
So now these will be put into water, and then eventually, to get the actual dye,
it takes about 1 0 days fermentation.
Come on.
ln here, like this? That's it.
This is in order to extract the dye, or the pigment, from the macerated molluscs.
How much water do you want? That's about right. Yep.
Then the dye will...
Now stand for an hour or two to coIIect pigment in Iiquid,
add woodash for its aIkaIi,
and Ieave the putrefying sheIIfish to rot and stink for 10 whoIe days.
Because you want it to ferment.
So that's what we've got here. Yeah.
Now, you notice we have a lid on it. Why's that?
Well, basically, we want to keep it in the dark.
Otherwise what happens is, the light, in fact,
can break the dye down to... what we call debrominate it.
ln other words, we take the redness out and we end up with a blue.
So we can end up with this colour, as opposed to that one.
How do we know when this is ready?
This would be tested, in fact, either by the feel, which feels slippery,
or by the taste.
And this is shellfish that have been fermenting for 1 0 days.
Exactly, yep.
(Retches)
l thought it was bad out there.
(Retches)
lt's powerful stuff. That is really disgusting.
What happens when you feel it?
lf it feels slippery, this gives an idea of the degree of alkalinity.
lf it was acid, it would be rougher. That's the technique.
And then they really tasted it? And the other way is to taste it, in fact.
(Spits)
l don't know... lt's rather powerful.
l don't know what it tasted like.
lt's just the thought, really.
Just so disgusting.
OnIy having done the fermented moIIusc taste test
is it now time to put the cIoth in the vat, Iid firmIy back on.
So we should leave it, really, for half an hour or so, to pick up the dye.
Leave it till l'm dead if you like. Mmm.
Oh, that was an adventure.
Blimey.
And after haIf an hour, it's time to expose the cIoth to the air
and see if it's worked.
Oh, look!
Wow!
That's really changing fast, isn't it?
So when it comes out of the vat, it takes usually a couple of minutes.
lt goes a greeny colour and then slowly turns the purple colour, as you can see.
Look at that now. lsn't that fantastic?
We've really proved the process works.
So the lives of all these poor little foul-smelling shellfish
weren't sacrificed in vain.
And if it hadn't been for all the stirring and the bubbling
and the feeling and the tasting,
then our royals would never have been swathed in all this kind of stuff.
They'd have been dressed in fuchsia pink or lime green.
Join me next time, when l'll be down the bottom of the careers barrel again,
scraping up some more worst jobs.
Next time, I'm on my knees down a mine as a chiId hurrier,
up in the air finding out what it took to make BruneI's reputation,
and on my back, keeping the whoIe industriaI revoIution moving.