The Worst Jobs in History - The Dark Age - Part 1

[itissomeoneelse]

just think how easy life will be in 1000 years, they will look at us making copies and and having to carry around heavy cell phones as hard stuff

[deanmullen10]

Compared to the middle ages, we live in luxury. I guess watching these documentaries can be a good thing because they make you appreciate this world now and gets you closer to realizing how great it is.

[mat31new]

this makes sense. people got blind from dust that gets in the eyes when mining, after they would become blind they would be put in the hamster wheel on cranes.

[Time71Team]

Tony Robinson is a legend, really has a talent for making history come alive.

[leenut91]

This was my first intro to tony Robinson, baldrick came later lol

[Viljarism]

Very fitting that Baldrick presents the worst jobs in history.

[Jimbo5able]

Yeah. but apart from all of that, what did the Romans ever do for us?

[ndgh209]

We can thank the Romans for modern day stuff.

[badpanda84]

Dosent see too bad -- ( or at least by ancient standards)

[ZamfirChannel]

I'll bet when Robinson was taping the show, he had many a cunning plan!

[teakbridge101]

Check out Laura's teeth! Yikes!

[PaladinDanielle]

Hey my job isn't in this show

xD lol

[MsPandaNut]

Isn't that pony adorable? I would have killed for one when I was a little girl.

[kimokamal5]

@satv365 What a lazy bastard! hahahaha

[LambadLambadLambda]

Actually, horses could get more work done. Someone wrote a treatsie on it in the Middle ages, but Oxen were cheaper.

[LadyDeirdre]

@LambadLambadLambda That was only true after the invention of the rigid horse collar. At the time Tony's talking about, the ox was a superior draft animal and much less expensive.

[AllThingsGeek1]

The small horse was so CUTE :3

[slyrader1]

was osha present

[GRANBESTIA]

wow that sounds just like what the spanish did to us here in america. Many incas, aztecs, caribes, tahinos, mapuches, guaranys, and GOD KNOWS HOW MANY MORE, died by thousands only in the mines.

[carinter15]

CHECK THE COMMENTS NO DISRESPECT

[teufelstaub]

"Do you even know what irony is,Baldrick?Yes,my Lord Blackadder,it's a metal,like goldy and bronzy."

[chandrakanthgreddy]

Romans ruling bastards should've been crucified for killing so many people.

[DrD0000M]

@chandrakanthgreddy And then the British after them.

[nathanplayer13]

thanks man for these vids but do they have to be so LONG???

[AnnoyingJavier]

@nathanplayer13 Cause Mrs. Tice wants to torture us dude.

[xraidedlok]

@nathanplayer13 the show is an hour long.. if you dont want to learn dont watch

[VelikyUstyug1]

I prefer the 'higgledy-piggledy' thatched street plans of the Anglo-Saxons to the right angle universal angst manias of the Romans.

[PollyJuice]

@VelikyUstyug1

Right angle universal angst maniacal roads do have an advantage over higgledy-piggledy streets when ir comes to driving ambulances and fire engines, though. Not that they had such things back then, but I'm making a general comparison of two different street planning tactics, as they would work today.

[VelikyUstyug1]

@PollyJuice Very Correct, Polly... but in between emergencies and other such transient exigiencies they rot the soul with predictable colorlessness and straight-line thinking.

[Sarahguli]

Wow

[longfootbuddy]

you can tell that woman's a peasant as soon as you see her

[haydenarias]

So the Dark Age preceded the Middle Ages?

[tribetng]

@haydenarias Yes, it basically goes like this first the Roman age then the Dark / Anglo-Saxon age then the Middle / Medieval age.

Then you get into the Modern age which divides up into the Tudor era, the Stuart era, the Georgian era, the Victorian era, the 20th century and the 21st century which is now.

[shgibby61981]

Its interesting to see how our ( Anglo Saxon, Germanic, Welsh) people lived their lives. I'm glad I wasn't born back then in such conditions. Modern people complain alot and they have it 1000's of times better than these people did.

[imperatorcaesar100]

@shgibby61981 I agree People complain, and are totally spoiled they do not realize that everyjob 1,500 years ago was completed by hand, human or animal power. they complain when they should know how jobs were done back done. no wonder the western world has so many lazy people, and health problems which could be aleviated by doing some work.

[shewolf51]

@shgibby61981 No kidding, especially when it comes to medicine. A lot of people alive today would have most certainly died if they had lived back then, myself included.

[DrPlaybox360]

oh, the romans gave us the year? the year measurement i mean.

[coldarc]

they didn´t need the slow heating and rapid cooling fracture technique. they had gunpower. they chould blow their way trough rock. it was invented by alchemy

at the time of the knight templar vikings, iven the chinese had it. it was first later that

they chould deploy the gunpowder into warfare trough cannons and guns.

it wasn´t thet they didn´t know how to make it.

[PollyJuice]

I admire Tony Robinson for his dedication - he COULD just stand there and talk about it and explain how thigns were done, but no, he SHOWS you what it was like, and that makes it so much more interesting to watch, and much easier to understand and learn.

[sewagedweller]

Mr. Tony is my hero now , i love dedicated historians

[anchicam]

tnx for uploading every episode!!!!

[XOnoonooXO]

does any one else stop playing at 4.25 ???

[Bidmartinlo]

Life for gold? Not worth it, if you ask me.

[baraxor]

What's the worst job in the Dark Ages?

Being Baldrick!

[GhostWritersDragon]

I Welsh related to Hindi at all? The Welsh accent is very much like that!

[wwmadi]

@GhostWritersDragon

Welsh is a distant relative to Hindi, as is English. They're all Indo-European languages.

example:

English: two

Welsh: dau

Hindi: do

[Freakgrl04]

haha...that horse is like, "Hey man! Put my shit down!"

[Dafidd]

strange, would have thought that a cave would have been cooler in summer and warmer in winter...oh well

[vtecivicsib18]

ya your dead fucking wrong

[tonydason]

you are my hero

[dodico20]

If this show is anything like the show dirty jobs I'm gonna love it!

[Deathfromabove5]

Nope

[tonydason]

poor gold miners

[mat31new]

@tonydason hah, interesting, those who were mining the most expensive metal (gold) were poor.

[tonydason]

good

[tsilll]

well he's Baldick, isn't he, he's used to it.

[havocgate]

Most people in Rome lived in mud huts, too. Rome had impressive cities and towns, but at the end of the day most Romans were dirt poor subsistence farmers, just like medieval Europeans.

[GaijinGDB]

C'mon, being Baldrick must have been the worst job ever!

[iggymanoneoone]

Ergonocide and Agronocide is the causes why thousand of death of workers through Mining and Agriculture.

[26blanco]

very good video. learning is easy with documentaries.

[meowmeowkitty3]

it's baldrick, I didn't recognize him ;)

[mmedefarge]

LOL. Hopefully, the people of that time. I think that the Brits probably caught on to the stone & mortar thing by the time they started building castles.

[MagnusBruce]

You'd be amazed what people can do without mortar. Dry Stone walls can stand for hundreds of years in the harshest conditions and this is done using stones and nothing else.

[mmedefarge]

Yeah, like the Egyptians & Greeks except that it is extremely slow process usually only for royalty & the very wealthy Mortar allowed the Romans to build aqueducts, sophisticated houses with hot/cold running water & baths on a large scale, bringing those innovations to a much larger population,

[MagnusBruce]

Dry Stone walls aren't necessarily for the wealthy. Up in The Lakes pretty much every wall is dry stone (and there are lots in the fells!) and many houses too.

Most of these walls were constructed in an unemployment scheme whereby the government paid for the unemployed to be taken up the the Lakes and build walls for bed and board.

[mmedefarge]

Than why did people in the Dark Ages start slogging around with mud & dung to build housing? Maybe now days, with machines to cut stone precisely as well as to lift it, dry stone walls are affordable but for the peasant back in the Dark Ages, that would not have been possible.  You can take a few hundred years to build a pyramid or a cathedral but most folks needed housing a bit sooner & a lot cheaper. Mortar would have allowed them to do that & using smaller more irregular stones.

[MagnusBruce]

I'm not saying that they useddry stone walls back then, they're a more recent development, I was just saying that they're remarkable for the fact that they do no use mortar.

But no machines are used at all - the stones are lifted by hand and cut using hand tools (if at all)

It takes alot longer than mud and dung, but lasts far longer too, which is particularly useful if you have several miles of walls running up and down mountains to keep sheep in.

[mmedefarge]

Here we call them "New England walls", low stone walls fashioned by piling small stones one atop the other. But you couldn't build a house that way unless you had stone cut to fit. Are you cutting stone without using power tools, using only hammer & chisel? That would have taken a peasant in the Dark Ages forever to build a house, trying to hand cut stone with hammer & chisel.

[MagnusBruce]

For the most part the stones aren't shaped, they're just taken from the land, given a bit of a wash to get rid of soil and then fit into the rest of the wall.

They are actually very solid, the test to see if a dry stone wall is good is that you should be able to walk along the top of it, before the final asthetic stones are placed on the top. There should be videos on here somewhere which explain how they're made tbh.

[mmedefarge]

How high are the walls; could you build a house that way?

[MagnusBruce]

Typically a wall surrounding a field would be about 4-5 foot tall and no more than a foot wide.

You'd need something much wider to make a two storey house though.

It can be done though - I have been to disused slate quarries where the walls of dry stone buildings still stand, although these are only one floor buildings.

[mmedefarge]

Then the question still remains, why didn't the people of the Dark Ages not do this? I don't think that they were stupid; they must have had a valid reason for building houses out of wattle & daub, especially in a climate as wet as the climate in the British Isles.

[MagnusBruce]

They didn't do this as far as I'm aware...as you said before, it's a time consuming process which requires skill.

Plus there are often gaps between the stones which let some wind and rain through, so you'd have to put daub on anyway to 'waterproof' it.

Also I'm not sure if the technique really existed then, I've no idea when it was first developed but the oldest ones which I'm aware of are not much more than a couple of hundred years old. Does that answer your question?

[mmedefarge]

Yes but I still stand by my statement that the people of the Dark Ages would have had far better housing if they only could have retained the Roman recipe for mortar. The prolific building of castles among the gentry didn't start either until mortar was rediscovered. Had the technique which you've described been practical, there would have been many more houses & castles built that way. But thanks for the info, it was an interesting tutorial. :-)

[MagnusBruce]

I think part of the reason why we stopped using mortar was that we wanted to disassociate ourselves from the Romans after they left. Although there is evidence to suggest that we actually tried to repair some bathhouses after the Romans left, so presumably this view was not held everywhere.

And no problem, I'm not expert on it, but it something I know a bit about ;)

[mmedefarge]

Christians all over the former empire of Rome decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater by not only rejecting the pagan Roman religions but also rejecting the health, sanitation, building technology, education & administrative tools of the Romans as well.

[MagnusBruce]

Indeed, although I can think of one exception - Galen.

He was a Greek doctor working in Rome who improved knowledge of anatomy through dissection. His work, howeverm was largely related to the Four Humours, the Church accepted his ideas because of his belief in one god (rather than many as in the Roman system). Unfortunately the theory of the Four Humours is a load of rubbish and did more harm than good.

It wasn't progress but it was a continuation of Roman ideas.

[mmedefarge]

And to think that "humours" nonsense lasted until the 19th century. I think of all those poor anemic people being bled to drain those "humours". The Church also stopped any further useful knowledge of the human body by banning dissection. Odd in an age when people were, disemboweled, drawn & quartered at the drop of a hat, but please, no educational dissection of this temple of the Soul.

[MagnusBruce]

Quite right. In a history course I did a few years back on Medicine Through Time the role of religion and government was often a factor which prevented progress.

[mmedefarge]

The trouble with religion & government is that they were so often one and the same.

[MagnusBruce]

This is true, thankfully now the West has pretty much divided state from religion, although I still think that religion is taken too seriously and literally by some people. But that's another debate altogether.

[mmedefarge]

.Had they only remembered the Roman recipe for mortar, they probably would have built much sturdier and more water proof dwellings using ordinary rocks.

[Tia1ko]

The show producers or the people of that time? :)

[Milenium412]

A horrible job..

[hihosilverlining2]

one of my favourite series of programmes

[Existantia]

I bought his book "Worst Childrens Job in History" Loved it.

[strawman888]

Great video - thank you for the upload!

[askungen01]

theres a great companion book too. thanks for the upload

[N0vaR0ma]

fist time i thought is a woman talkin

[electropopprincess]

I'm so glad these are up- I love anything with Tony Robinson in it! I didn't catch every episode when they had their original run so thank you! I can finally watch every instalment :)

[demonella]

You are SO awesome ^_^

[CaptainOvious123]

Is Tony Robinson the person from that show Blackadder?

[madhatter666666]

Baldrick!

[CaptainOvious123]

Thought so! Thanks.

[mozarttheraver123]

@madhatter666666 Yep - Tony Robinson is the hilarious Baldrick*

[dumbdude3535]

Man Ilove these TY!!!! for putting these up I hope you dont get purged :) alot of shows are :( 5*

[TalkCreativePlanet]

So do I, God willing they will stick around for a while!

[hoodzie066]

TalkCreativePlanet you God!

[TalkCreativePlanet]

Walk into the light my son !

[moyno85]

hey thanks for putting this up, i love this series.

[TalkCreativePlanet]

No problem - enjoy !