And you thought working as a temp was bad — at least you don’t have to provide emotional support to royalty when nature calls.
Al Bundy of Married with Children fame often reminded us that the worst job in the world is selling women’s shoes. But after taking a gander at the historical record, we beg to differ.
Luckily for him (and us), these jobs do not exist anymore:
Groom Of The Stool
Thư viện ảnh HipVua Henry VIII có bốn người hầu và ông đã phong tước hiệp sĩ cho tất cả họ.
In medieval England, servants assisted monarchs in virtually everything — including providing royalty with “assistance” when it came time for the king in question to spend some time on the porcelain throne. These servants were known as the “grooms of the stool”, and it was they who would aid the king when nature called.
Essentially, the groom of the stool is required to carry around a portable toilet or “commode” and be around the king or queen at all times, along with water, towels, and a wash bowl. So whenever they “gotta go,” they have suitable facilities at their disposal.
Although the job might sound demeaning to us, it was actually a very coveted position that often went to sons of noblemen. The groom of the stool spent a lot of time with the king, which meant that he was privy to the confessions of monarchs at their most vulnerable.
WikimediaCommonsNhững chiếc bô như thế này luôn được người quản lý mang theo.
As you might imagine, grooms of the stool would often be rewarded with land and titles.
Groom prestige reached its peak during the Tudor period. Henry VII’s servant, Hugh Denys, became a trusted fiscal policy advisor. During this time, it became quite common for the groom of the stool to hold an unofficial position similar to that of treasurer. If you can handle feces, you can also handle a state’s finances, apparently.
The position was temporarily abolished in 1558, during the reign of Elizabeth I. Elizabeth replaced grooms of the stool with ladies of the bedchamber. Over the next two centuries, the job slowly began to veer away from its traditional role until Queen Victoria finally did away with anything like it entirely in the 19th century.
Powder Monkey
Wikimedia CommonsPowder monkey on a Union vessel during the American Civil War.
Children have historically been tasked with some of history’s worst and most dangerous jobs because they don’t really know what “collective bargaining” is. Case in point: the powder monkey.
During the Golden Age of Sail, the powder monkey would carry gunpowder from the powder magazine to the guns on an artillery ship. They also assisted with measuring the correct amount of ammo that was needed for the specific weapon. Armies created this job to save time during battle and fire more efficiently. Unfortunately, they did so at the expense of innocent young boys.
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Naturally, this was a very dangerous job, since enemy sharpshooters would try to knock them out in order to disable the artillery guns. An ideal powder monkey was agile and made for a small target. That’s why, generally speaking, no boy over the age of 14 would be considered for the job. Boys as young as age nine were given this job — including some of the children who served in the American Civil War.
And to make the position just that extra bit more gruesome, most kids didn’t volunteer to carry around explosives while people shot at them. They were kidnapped and forced into service. It’s incredibly hard to imagine what these kids went through and everyone should be glad that this job is no longer in existence.
Court Dwarf
Wikimedia CommonsKing Philip IV of Spain prized his court dwarfs so much that he commissioned portraits of himself with them by his side.
At one point in history, dwarfs were nothing but outcasts. True-life dwarfs didn’t even appear in recorded history until they began getting employed as court dwarfs. Some of the first histories of dwarfs happened as a result of their positions in royal courts.
The court dwarf fulfilled a role similar to the jester. His main job was to entertain the court, oftentimes using his diminutive stature for comedic effect. The practice dates back to ancient Egypt and Rome when dwarfs were traded as valuable commodities.
The custom spilled over to medieval Europe where, like the groom of the stool, the court dwarf was a demeaning but socially useful position.
Art Media/Print Collector/Getty ImagesA portrait of Court Dwarf Don Antonio el Inglés from the Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Court dwarfs were often positioned next to the king or queen to make them look taller by comparison.
Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, was a particularly big fan of the dwarfs. Her first miniature companion was Jeffrey Hudson, a young butcher’s boy who reached 3 feet 9 inches at his peak. Despite his size disadvantage, Hudson fought in the English Civil War and even killed a man in a duel.
King Philip IV of Spain was also a huge fan of court dwarfs. He even commissioned painter Diego Velázquez to create a portrait series of his diminutive entourage.
Whipping Boy
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Many princes were without a doubt spoiled, obnoxious brats who would inevitably misbehave and require some form of punishment to keep them from waging an unnecessary war.
Administering the punishment proved to be somewhat tricky, though, since technically nobody was allowed to strike the king’s son except the king himself. However, since most kings were busy running an empire, someone needed to step in. Meet the whipping boy.
According to popular belief, when the prince misbehaved, the whipping boy would receive the physical punishment instead. The prince and whipping boy would usually grow up together and form a close friendship, which theoretically meant that the prince would avoid acting up and be more considerate of others.
Getty ImagesAn engraving of a parish schoolmaster spanking a child.
Sometimes this worked; sometimes it didn’t. Unsurprisingly, many whipping boys received generous benefits once they grew up and their BFFs became King of England.
Tales of whipping boys have managed to stay alive for many a century, but there isn’t exactly any concrete evidence that this was actually a job. Whipping boys have been referenced in plays and in literature.
But historically speaking their existence hasn’t been recorded — even though the term “whipping boy” is officially recognized in the dictionary. Even if the position didn’t actually exist, the term and the way it’s used today pretty much speaks for itself.
Sin Eater
Wikimedia CommonsAn image from the book Ars Moriendi (The Art of Dying).
In the 18th and 19th centuries in England, Scotland, and Wales when a family member or loved one passed away, a particularly interesting ritual took place that required a specific kind of job.
People generally requested the services of a sin-eater after someone had died to metaphorically get rid of their sins. The way it worked is that someone would place a piece of bread over the deceased person’s body, which at the time was believed to soak up the sins of that person, and then the sin eater would eat the bread and wash it down with some ale.
The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty ImagesA painting of a Scottish funeral.
The idea was that the sins would then inhabit the sin eater’s body, and the departed would be able to get into heaven free of sin and without any issues.
Sin eaters took this job mostly because they were seen as outcasts in their society already, unable to find work elsewhere. Because they were already shunned by the community, it was fitting that they’d eat other persons’ sins and performed a service.
When not at a funeral to do their job, sin eaters were homeless and lived life pretty much in squalor. Villages usually had their designated village sin eater, and believed that with each visit they made they became more and more evil with all the sins they’d been consuming.
It was definitely not a desirable job, but it was considered a necessary one at the time.
Resurectionist
Wikimedia CommonsA nightwatchman disturbs a body-snatcher who has dropped the stolen corpse he had been carrying in a hamper.
Medical students are required to practice procedures on human cadavers before they can graduate to working on live people. Back in the 19th century, the concept of organ donation and donating your body to science after passing was as far-fetched as you can get.
So what did medical students and faculty do at the time? They enlisted the help of a resurrectionist. Also referred to as a body snatcher, resurrectionists stole dead bodies from graves and sold them to anyone that needed them.
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At the time, the only legal way to obtain a dead body was after a criminal execution, but they weren’t held as frequently as was necessary to meet the supply demands of medical schools. The popularity of medical schools was increasing, and as more opened up, crime seemed to be decreasing at the time. As a result, the resurrectionist role was born.
For obvious reasons, resurrectionists mainly worked at night. They were able to get a nice chunk of money for their line of work, seeing as it was dangerous for both legal and spiritual reasons.
Legally speaking, stealing a dead body only constituted a misdemeanor. But religiously, it was a grave sin to dig up a dead body.
Knocker Up
Quora
Even before the days of alarm clocks, people still needed to get to work on time. Enter the knocker up, or the human equivalent of an alarm clock. Knocker-ups were hired to wake up people that needed to go to work. At first, they’d go to your door, but after a while this way of waking people up became inefficient.
So to fix this problem knocker ups would tap on people’s windows, typically using a long stick to reach the apartments that were higher up in the buildings. In some parts of England, knocker ups managed to remarkably stay in demand into the 1970s.
Lancashire Mining Museum
Knocker ups, sometimes referred to as “knocker-uppers,” became a popular job during the First Industrial Revolution, when many people started to work at factories and needed to arrive on time and at the same time. It can be said that this was likely the world’s first introduction to the 9 a.m.- 5 p.m. work schedule.
One odd tale involved London’s famed knocker-upper Mary Smith. She became a national sensation after a newspaper photograph showed her using a peashooter to wake people up. She charged her clients sixpence a week for her services, and her daughter followed in her footsteps and took over the family business once Smith stopped working.
Pure Finder
Wikimedia CommonsThe pure finder hunts for dog poop in the sewers.
Don’t be fooled by the name for this position — a pure finder was anything but an enjoyable job. Being a pure finder during the Victorian era in England required whoever was performing the job to collect dog poop found on the street and sell it to tanners.
Leather became very popular in the late 1800s, and in order to soften leather pieces, dog poop was used as a softener of sorts. Dog poop was known as “pure” because of the cleansing and softening effects that it had on the tough leather fibers.
Boyer/Roger Viollet/Getty Images
Pure hunters scoured the streets for stray dog droppings and actually made a decent living doing so. When the job was first introduced in the 1830s there weren’t as many pure finders working so there wasn’t much competition.
But by the late 1800s, more people started to hunt for dog feces, which in turn lowered the price that was paid for the product. There were only about 30 tanneries in operation at the time, and too many people took up pure finding for it to be as lucrative as it once was.
The supply of pure finders outgrew the demand for the feces as new solutions emerged and eventually the job became unneeded.
Wool Fuller
Wikimedia CommonsDetail of an 18th-century engraving of Scotswomen fulling cloth with their feet and singing.
Before fabric softener existed, people had a very peculiar way of making cloth feel more pleasant on the skin. The people that were enlisted to perform this job was dubbed the fuller, and the fabric that most commonly needed to be softened was wool.
That’s when the fuller — or wool fuller — would come into the picture. Wool fullers basically “fulled” whatever cloth they were working with using their feet. It doesn’t sound like a terribly painful job, but there’s an element of what the role entailed that is definitely less than desirable.
Stale urine was the ingredient of choice that helped make fabrics softer, believe it or not. The ammonium salts that can be found in the urine help soften and cleanse the cloth, and also brightened white clothing as well. Urine was even taxed because of how often it was used for fulling purposes — that’s how important this process and job was back in the day.
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Fulling may be dated back to ancient Roman times, but this job was especially important in medieval England. Wool became an incredibly lucrative business at the time, so fullers were always needed.
While the English wouldn’t make the wool clothing items themselves, they exported the wool to other countries, notably Flanders, where the demand for English wool was extremely high.
So the fullers would have to stomp around in other people’s old urine for hours at a time until the fabrics were soft enough to wear.
Matchstick Maker
TUC Library Collections, London Metropolitan UniversityMembers of the Matchmakers Inion in London.
Although matchstick making sounds like a simple job, the consequences of working around the materials that were needed to make them were absolutely terrible.
Matchsticks were made in factories by women and children 12 to 16 hours a day, and the process involved dipping the wood matchsticks into a phosphorous solution. The problem with the job was that too much exposure to phosphorus carried a risk specific to matchstick makers — phossy jaw.
Essentially, phossy jaw is a physical ailment that causes the jaw bone to rot. The disease was known to spread to the brain and cause a very painful death unless the jaw was removed. Even with jaw removal, these factory workers still weren’t guaranteed to live.
Wikimedia CommonsAn anatomical sketch displaying the effects that phossy jaw has on the teeth and face.
These factory workers were making very little and working in such terrible conditions, risking their lives for the pennies that they made. The awful work environment inspired 1,400 women and girls to go out on strike.
Working with white phosphorus also led to lung inflammation and other pulmonary issues. Workers often threw up fluorescent vomit and had bluish-looking breath. But none of the side-effects of phosphorous held a candle to the pain of getting infected with phossy jaw.
Wikimedia CommonsThe effects of phossy jaw on a factory worker.