Could You Make a Living in Medieval London?

[Music] [Applause] according to the medieval chronicler gregory of monmouth this is where britain started it was founded by brutus a trojan who following the trojan defeat in the trojan war gets on a ship and sails here defeats the race of giants then living in britain and builds his palace on this exact spot so if this is the founding myth about the london community generally what are the actual medieval london communities and where do we learn more about them [Music] our first stop is here at the london wall because there's literally no better way to define who is a member of the community of london by whether or not you're inside this wall or outside of it the wall itself was actually built by the romans when london was lyndinium and it was built from the second to the third century bc after they leave londinium london itself actually collapses and the settlement is moved sort of outside of london and outside of the walls but the walls still are used for important fortification purposes we do know that when battles would take place the anglo-saxons would come inside the walls and use them for defensive purposes still in 886 when london is re-established by alfred the great what he does is moves the anglo-saxon settlements from outside of the walls back in and rebuilds the initial roman walls as a symbol to say london is back again walls actually have a series of functions though yes sometimes they're protective london's extensive walls protected from armies down on the river the wall protects from pirates which believe it or not attack multiple times throughout the medieval and roman periods but they also have some purposes for taxation so say you want to bring your goods to market in london one of the largest cities in europe the wall means that you have to bring all of your goods through gates and there it can be checked by members of the city guards to see what you're bringing in and to make sure that you are paying an appropriate tax in order to put these things on sale [Music] for all intents and purposes now this is the middle of the city but for medieval london you're right at the edge of things and what that means is you're kind of at the edge of what the city can offer you as well oftentimes you would see that poorer neighborhoods are more distributed towards the outward end of things whereas the richer bits are right in the middle of town where things can be a little bit safer and a little bit better guarded one of the interesting things about the medieval wall and the fact that it's built off of the roman one is it shows us a really medieval idea of what makes things important for medieval people roman things were always considered to be better and a kind of position of authority so when alfred decided to move london again onto the old londonium and re-establish the old walls one of the things he's saying is that this is a big important city once again this is the sort of place where people rule from and one of the reasons that you do that and one of the ways that you do that is by trying to connect yourself to a roman heritage into a roman history so when alfred the great does that he's saying london is back it's important again when you have the normans take over after 1066 one of the first things they do is take these walls and rebuild them back again even bigger than before they add seven new gates and 13 new ones along the river everybody knows who's in charge and what london's doing we're here outside the temple which is actually a really good example of how communities work within london and how their fortunes can change very suddenly at the temple as the name suggests was actually set up because of the knights templar who were a crusading order that were initially established at jerusalem and it kind of worked as a bodyguard service more or less in the medieval period for most christians in the medieval period your number one goal is to someday go on pilgrimage to jerusalem because jerusalem is a dangerous place it's in hostile territory you're going to want to have some bodyguards while you do that and that's what the knights templar have to offer so they're an incredibly popular order and it's something that people really like to donate to they give lots of money if you want to prove that you're holy one of the things that you do is you say i'm going to make sure that the bodyguards are going to be there when i eventually do my trip to jerusalem so the knights templar are all across europe but here in london they have their own temple named after the temple of solomon that's in jerusalem which is where their home order technically is so they have that church in there but they also control all of this prime real estate in the middle of london this is all well and good until 1312. by then the knights templar have become so incredibly rich and powerful that they're starting to annoy the church and they're starting to annoy kings in france the king notices how much land and power the knights templar has and sees an opportunity so he accuses the knights templar of heresy and says that they've been worshiping the devil seeing this means that there's an opportunity for him to then take all of the property of the knights templar and make it his own this is a very popular idea so by 1312 the pope officially abolishes the order of the knights templar and the land is seen more or less as up for grabs by rulers but also by other religious orders technically all of the land of the knights templar is supposed to move over to another crusading order of the knights hospitaler who do more or less the same thing but with slightly more emphasis on the hospital thing and a little less on the nights the king at the time edward ii not a huge fan of passing it on to the hospitals he instead decides that this land is a prime opportunity for his friends to get a hold of some really good real estate at cut down rates the knights hospital are they're not a fan of the king's idea and they begin to actually sue to get the land back this goes on for about 25 years and at that point in time the land inside the temple is broken into two bits you have the consecrated ground of the inner temple which goes to the hospitalers and the unconsecrated ground of the middle temple which continues to be at least through the king to his friends a few years later in 1347 eventually the knights hospital are win their legal cases and all of the land comes under their own control but by this point the legal cases have been going on for so long it does them no good they haven't been using it they haven't been able to use it so they begin to lease these same properties out themselves for a tidy sum to various guilds of lawyers and this is exactly what the temple is used for today it's where we keep lots of our inns of court and their various groups of lawyers who have amazing and impressive houses like this where they do their own work sometimes you have lawyers that stay within there so this has been going on since the medieval period it's been a place where lawyers have been but technically for a while it was controlled by religious houses with the abolition of the monasteries under henry viii henry viii keeps the lawyers but cuts out the middleman of any church and he begins to take rents from the lawyers but since that period we've always had lawyers within the temple and even though it's got a name that's specifically religious it's got a heritage that's specifically about one order of people it's actually changed hands multiple times and the meaning has changed as well as we'll see with all communities in london their fortunes can rise and fall sometimes you're up sometimes you're down sometimes your knights sometimes your lawyers these things can change very quickly depending on who's in power and what people need from you and a lot of times depending on whether or not there's money on the line [Music] if you're wondering why you need so much room for lawyers over at the temple it's because of this the royal courts of justice technically our first written records referring to the medieval law courts come from 1589 but we know that it certainly existed before that you know because of all the lawyers so why are there so many lawyers in london it's because legal code specifically in the medieval period is most usually tied with the personage of the king and the king has his center here in london so if you get into a legal predicament odds are in the medieval period you've got an issue with the king you've got an issue with royal law you're going to have to come to the royal courts of justice but who can come to the royal courts of justice not everybody not everyone technically comes under the legal jurisdiction of the crown if you live in the countryside which 80 percent of the european population does in the medieval period you're not actually going to be under the crown's jurisdiction most of the time you'll be under the jurisdiction of your local lord so you know account or a duke something like that if you live in london you're almost guaranteed to be underneath the jurisdiction of the crown however because london itself is controlled as a royal city your taxes go to the crown your taxes go to the city and you're under a specific royal legal code so londoners are here at the court extremely wealthy people are here at the court so say you're one of those dukes or counts and you've got a problem with another duke or count and you want to take it to court you're taking it to royal court say that you are one of the specific groups in the city like the jewish population you have specific royal law protections that say that you are only subject to the royal laws so it doesn't matter where you get in trouble in england you're going to have to come to the royal courts of justice here in london and so here is where specifically laws are made that affect the rest of the country provided that the king is involved but more specifically they're about laws that affect different communities within london that affects merchants that affect guilds that affect traders so not every single english person is going to want need understand or actually be allowed to use the royal courts of justice it's specifically more of a london thing for londoners [Music] so dan we have already been by the temple yep we've already been by the royal courts of justice uh now we're here at the old bailey how do these things connect to each other so this is the central courts in london and central criminal courses it's proper title everyone always calls it the el bailly because it's on the old baby this is where you know some of the most infamous and famous cases in history have been tried and i think one of the things that's really interesting about this building is you know you look at the statue of justice at the top of it and it's the pinnacle and of the way that our legal system has developed but actually it was newgate prison um and the old bailey is built on the size of newgate prison which by all accounts was a pretty awful prison a lot of public executions took place here and the last public execution in the uk happened here in i think 1868 it was we look at it now and it all everything feels very ordered and very reasonable but for a long time it's been a really um quite controversial place say you're a londoner yeah there's something going on you have to get involved with the legal system yeah are you more likely to be here or are you more likely to end up over at the royal courts of justice so it depends what you've done is the answer to that inevitably um if you've stabbed someone or murdered someone you're much more likely to end up here to give it some context you know if i sell small claims against someone you're not you're very unlikely to end up in the royal courts of justice okay and you're much more likely to end up in a small county court of which there are many many around the country and also in in london so one of the things i find interesting about medieval law is that even though you know we're talking about this exciting sexy stuff that happens here which is like crimes against people that's not what the majority of medieval law is really is it no it isn't really i mean one of the most important things in english law and one of the key tenets of it that has always been protected hugely as property and the idea of property ownership and the punishments that are doled out if you breach that ownership and take something which isn't yours and nowadays what we would consider to be pretty horrific and quite brutal um but obviously imprisonment was one of the was one of the key ones and people would end up in in a prison like newgate prison for that so what kind of crimes are we talking about that get you sent to newgate kind of more specifically so it could really be anything i mean you know if you stole a pig that's the kind of thing that could end up with you being in there but one of the things i've always been really interested in is um the criminalization of debt and that's quite an interesting um topic which we don't perceive now we all have credit cards and we all have you know mortgages and everything else and unfortunately people get into trouble and that has become civil and is now seen as very much a civil thing but back in the medieval period and after that that could you and you you know could result in you being put in prison and for really quite long periods of time for you to be unable to pay you know to pay debts back um which i think is a really interesting concept very much about you know how easy we are about debt now and relaxed that we are about it but in those days it really wasn't as simple as that so people who are getting in trouble for things like debt um what are we talking about in terms of like who's legally culpable are these all adults like when does the conception of kind of an adult begin from a medieval standpoint yeah the early modern period is the first time when people start to begin to see children in a different way to adults and begin to dress them in a different way and treat them legally in a different way debtors and people who have been arrested for property offences and everything else who end up in prison they're children i mean what we would now describe as children who are being um you know found guilty of crimes and and locked away effectively so the people who are getting in trouble for debt is it always what you and i would consider to be you know poor people or who is actually getting into this sort of trouble no it's not i mean you know regularly perhaps not regularly but it does happen whereas you know aristocrats and nobles are also put in prison for debt related issues your experience is very different depending on whether you're wealthy or not wealthy you know if you're wealthy you can afford better foods you can get better rooms you can have a nicer experience and you can bring servants with you and they will look after you if you're poor you're effectively thrown into a room and sort of left to get on with it and which is it's not it's not great i mean when you when we're talking about dentist business they would often have to buy their own food which of course if you don't have any money and you can't afford you know and you're in there because you're in debt you just end up getting into more debts generally this awful cycle where they're never going to escape um so yeah really tricky so the reasons why you end up in jail here or at court here are completely different from the reasons why you end up in court over at the royal courts of justice yeah no they they are very different and they work in a very different way and they always have which is is this the interesting part yeah yeah yeah ely place is one of my favorite places in the city of london because technically it's not in the city of london it's in cambridgeshire as the name indicates uh ealy place is owned and under the jurisdiction of the bishop of ely the bishop of ely had his palace here in ely place so if he needed to attend to legal matters meet with the king for any reason he could come and stay in his palace here because it's under the jurisdiction of the bishop of ely this church here one of the few medieval churches left in the city of london is technically named after an ely based saint saint ethelreta the church here is specifically named after her to spread the cult in london itself saint etheres was very famous in the medieval period for growing the best strawberries in london and there's still a strawberry fair here every august the reason why this legality is interesting other than just you know pub trivia is say that you've broken a law you're on the run from a posse you know you're going to be cornered soon if you're running through london you get yourself to ely place come and duck into the pub technically the posse has no legal jurisdiction here you can sit back and relax and sink a couple without them being able to do anything we're moving on now from the old bailey we've been to the royal courts of justice but the thing about the way that punishment works in medieval london is it's not always tied to actual courts right yeah that's that's right i mean one of the things that happens a lot um is of course executions and you know places of execution and that's obviously um you know a really big topic of of interest and we're actually walking now towards one of the big ones which was smithfield and it's where for example you know william wallace was executed there and you know a lot of common criminals are executed there as well it's you know real real hot spot for us so you say common criminals what are people doing that gets them executed as opposed to put in jail so it's what we would probably call um the more serious crimes nowadays so things like you know murder um some crimes that we wouldn't necessarily imagine things like counterfeiting you know that was a real problem and has been a problem in the medieval period and into the early modern period and it's one of the reasons why coins have ridges around the side of them so that you can't shave a bit off and then set coins it's an incredibly important place in the medieval period but you could almost be forgiven for not knowing that because when you come around the corner the first thing you see is the giant victorian meat market absolutely you know obviously it would have been fields which of course is why it's called smithfield um almost impossible to really imagine it to be honest but there is a reason that you come to somewhere like smithfield to do your execution right as opposed to doing it down the road at the jail yeah absolutely i mean one of the things that mark smithfield out is it's a real um display and it's a real active um place to be able to make a very clear statement and what you have to imagine is there's no regular police force and the chances of being caught when you commit a crime are lower and so when they do catch someone they want to really make a big thing out of it and you know they're popular i mean one of the reasons why it's down here is because there is enough room this this was then outside of the city walls and there's enough room to do them because you know thousands of people turn up on you know it's a really big day out there's um you know lots of fast food it's like going to the football doesn't it but the thing about smithfield or smoothfield it's called in the medieval period is it's this big place of you know public execution but it's also a literal meat market right yes yeah it's literally the meat market so the cattle are driven in a lot of them are killed and cole's actually here obviously not anymore but they they were and um you know it it is described in a lot of um accounts as being a really noisy um brutal dirty disgusting place effectively um which i guess is one of the reasons why it then becomes suitable for for executions and to have the space to do it so you have a lot of dead animals you got a lot of dead people but because it's outside of the city walls it sort of allows you space to do the less pleasant things that keep a city moving yeah exactly it's a real exhibition space in some ways a lot of the stuff which keeps the city moving in terms of crime and punishment and in terms of physically feeding the city happens around here um which is obviously not what you see today which is quite interesting [Music] but it's not all blood and guts at smithfields people come for fun things like tournaments or fairs and they also come for miracles here we are in the corner of smithfield market at one of the few remaining medieval churches in london st bartholomew the greater known colloquially now as saint barts it was founded in 1123 by a man named rahiri rahiri very well connected to court he was somebody over at saint paul's he's a very important guy he's got a lot of money he's religious and important he goes on pilgrimage not to jerusalem but to rome and while he's in rome he catches a very bad fever and he's on death's door so like any good religious man of the time he prays to god and says you know god if you bring me through this illness when i get back to london i'm going to establish a church and lo and behold richard recovers and off he goes on the way back to london on his way back he has a vision from saint bartholomew who tells him god didn't save you i saved you and so when you get back to london you're naming a church after me he does this and the result is saint bartholomew's and interestingly at st bartholomew's miracles begin to occur specifically on st bart's feast day in august but over and over again you have people come who say that they've been spontaneously cured and it starts to get a reputation and more people start to come and more people start to come and the augustinian friars who stay at st bart's eventually end up having to found a hospital to care for all of the sick people who come along so if you come to st bart's maybe you'll get a miracle worst case scenario you have a bunch of monks who have good medical training look after you for free it's a bit of a win-win and a great way to have your healthcare needs taken care of in medieval london [Music] this is guild hall never the guild hall always guild hall and interestingly we don't actually know where that name comes from our best guess is that it comes from guild in anglo-saxon meaning gold and that this is where taxation used to take place in medieval london we also know that this was a very important place for the office of the mayor and it's one of the most unique things about london in general in the medieval period it has a mirror and it has a mayor specifically because the king has allowed that to happen so london is a weird kind of anomaly they pay taxes to the king they're under the jurisdiction of the king but they have their own municipal government that they themselves are allowed to vote in this is really uncommon in the medieval period and most cities wouldn't necessarily have their own government that they get to elect in any way shape or form instead they're either under the jurisdiction of the king himself or their local noblemen and this is one of the things that makes london such an interesting community because to a certain extent it is self-governing even more confusingly the guild or tax would be coming from guilds some of the most powerful associations within london themselves guilds can kind of be thought about as sort of like a medieval trade union so the mercers or cloth makers would get together and they would say in order to be able to sell cloth in london you have to be a member of this particular guild this is a way of regulating quality you know that if you're getting a london gilded cloth it's always going to be of high quality because these people have to answer to their guild about it but it's also kind of an extortion racket because it means that there's no way in unless the guild says that you're allowed it at any rate these people become fabulously wealthy they're the sort of person who gets elected mayor and they're the people who are paying taxes at guildhall [Music] while what we see here is a 15th century building it was built on top of the roman coliseum that was initially here when this was londinium so this is again another great example of how londoners enjoy taking roman things and rebuilding to associate themselves with it and make sure that everyone understands how important a particular place is [Music] you might be wondering why we are on such a distinctly not medieval looking street in order to talk about medieval london and that's because it's sort of the point this is the old jewelry and it used to be the center for jewish life in london the only thing that we have left of it anymore is this plaque up there the jewish history in england is a super interesting one we know that there were jews living in the country kind of in the 6th century and we know this because of laws prohibiting christians from having dinner with jews the jewish community greatly expands however after the norman conquest when the jewish community in rua was invited over along with william the conqueror the jewish community was invited to london to do one specific service especially lend money this is because for medieval people lending money at interest was considered a sin for christians it was sinful to lend money to christians and for jewish people it was sinful to lend money to other jewish people but jewish people had a proviso where they were allowed to lend money to christians especially and this is very useful so the sin of usury or lending that interest did not count for them the jewish community was invited in expressly to provide these financial services and in fact they had a royal law that said that they could do this this is called the jewish charter the jewish charter did two things first it made sure that there would be the financial capital available to make london a new financial center under the new norman rulers secondly it established that the king was the only person who got to tax the jewish population a population that is making all their money through financials means that there is a lot more tax coming through as a part of this jewish people were also only subject to royal law exclusively no matter where you were even if you weren't in the city of london you would always go to a royal court if you got in trouble this was seen as a win-win by everyone other than the people who were borrowing extensively from jewish people eventually over the centuries resentment towards the jewish population began to build up jewish people would be accused of what is called blood libel essentially any time a christian child showed up dead jewish people would have been accused of murdering them of course it was all nonsense but it was also linked to the fact that christians really resented jewish people because of the debts they owed to them of course this was not the fault of jewish people who were literally only allowed to be here if they were lending money so they were in a tight spot unfortunately over time this resentment built up to such a level that there were multiple pogroms against jews which would mean that people would come in and literally burn down their synagogues burn down their houses and take their things in london in particular this built up until 1272 when the great synagogue here was itself abolished jewish people were told well you have to stop lending money but this led to a question if they were legally obliged to lend money and could now no longer lend money what were they supposed to do eventually in 1290 this led to the edict of the expulsion of the jews and they were all asked to leave england this made england and london in particular anomaly in medieval europe every other major financial capital would have a thriving jewish population who was providing financial services england and london stood alone in making sure that they no longer had a jewish population that could do that so this is another sad story about the rise and falls of particular communities within london and it's another story about how communities can completely be discarded once they are no longer useful to the individuals who asked them to be here in the first place and in particular the reason why jewish people in london fell out of favor was being too good at their own jobs eventually the king was in more debt to jewish people than he was making in taxes from jewish people and at that point they're asked to leave it's another opportunity for us to ask how communities work who's a part of a community how do they serve it and how do we delineate between those two things [Music] we're here in southwark which is technically not a part of medieval london in order to talk about a community of people that was considered absolutely indispensable for medieval london who served medieval london but by their very definition were not allowed to be in medieval london i am talking about the winchester geese otherwise known as the sex workers of southern sex work occupies a really nuanced position in the medieval world because it's considered to be absolutely necessary for the functioning of a good society st thomas aquinas has referred to sex work as the cesspool that keeps the palace of god clean so what that indicates is that while it's certainly something that is considered necessary it's not generally considered to be laudable and sex work in any major city has usually take place somewhere not in the middle of it because it's no one's favorite feature so sometimes that would mean that you needed to do sex work up against the city walls just outside of the city walls or here in london across the river in southwark sex work in this instance is not what we would call specifically decriminalized but it's legal so there's a right way to do it there's a wrong way to do it there's a right place to do it there's a wrong place to do it so in london you need to be here in southwark but you also need to be wearing specific clothing also called a hood of ray which is kind of head dress that we know was made out of black and white striped cloth so basically as soon as someone sees you they can identify that you're a sex worker and you definitely have to be doing your sex work here in what is kind of like a pleasure district so some of the things that go on in southwark are certainly sex work but there's also the southwark stews which are just up on the river and that's where people go to bathe for pleasure contrary to popular opinion bathing huge in the medieval period they absolutely love it they see it as going to the spa and that's where you get your bathing done but everyone's kind of hot everyone's kind of naked and wet and that lends itself to kind of sexy thoughts and the sex workers are here to kind of take advantage of that [Music] so what happens if you are one of the hundreds of women who's required to do sex work in the city of london well if you do it legally and you do it right it doesn't have the same kind of stigma that it has today so say you work as a sex worker and you're tired of it you're a little bit over it you want to do something else what you do is you go to your local priest and you say bless me father for i've sinned i've been working as a sex worker he'll say no worries my child welcome back to the fold your penance is that you have to get married and start a family and then that's it you're out but what happens if you don't make that 180 well unfortunately you might end up when you die in somewhere like this it's a very beautiful spot but this is the crossbones graveyard it's unhallowed ground where all of the unrepentant sex workers were buried because they died outside of communion with the catholic church so if you die in a state of sin you have to be buried here instead of a regular church yard or a graveyard sadly along with the sex workers there's also a number of children who are buried here there's a very high infant mortality rate and very high child mortality rate in the medieval period and if your child as a sex worker dies then they're considered slightly sinful as well and they are often buried in the same place that their mothers ended up so as i said before one of the colloquial terms for sex workers were the winchester geese where'd they get that name well this is a nice little business opportunity for those who are ready to exploit it and one of the primary people who was interested in exploiting it traditionally was the bishop of winchester much like the bishop of ely having land in london the bishop of winchester owns almost the entire south bank of the river here in southark and this is a place where again all the stews are people come to take baths people come to see sex workers he sees this as a nice business opportunity so he rents out the land to various sex workers and he gets to recoup the money from that and his soul and conscience are completely clear this is something that is completely acceptable within a catholic context but it's also massively hypocritical he's recouping all of the money that all these women are making but if they're dying in that profession they're dying outside of his care and they're buried here away from it [Music] so this is another example of a medieval community who are considered absolutely indispensable completely necessary for urban life and when they are financially expedient and it's making money for someone else but the second it becomes theologically difficult they can be disposed of without it ever troubling your own conscience medieval london is a community but within that community there are several separate other communities that have their own parts to play whether they're legal religious pleasure centered or financial and each one of those communities fortunes can rise and fall depending on their use to the other individuals within that same community so when we're talking about medieval london we're definitely talking about one city but we're talking about several communities within that as well in other words we can think of medieval london like one beautiful tapestry lots of individual interrelated threads come together with their own important influences to create one contiguous and beautiful whole you

Channel: History Hit

Views: 940,951

Keywords: medieval history, middle ages, eleanor janega, medieval history documentary, medieval london documentary, medieval london bridge, medieval london tour, london medieval times, life in medieval london, life and death in medieval london, middle ages london, mediaeval london, history hit, medieval london, dr eleanor janega, history hit tv, medieval pleasures, london history, history hit medieval, medieval life, medieval england, medieval documentary, history hits

Id: MmyCnA7xC4A

Length: 33min 58sec (2038 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 31 2022