Imagine, if you will, the metallic, sickeningly sweet stench of blood pooling on uneven cobblestones. Picture the suffocating, gag-inducing fumes of raw, fermenting human excrement rising from deep, lightless pits in the dead of a freezing night. Envision a world where the very act of survival means wading waist-deep into festering, disease-ridden swamps, allowing parasitic worms and blood-sucking creatures to feast upon your bare flesh. This is not the plot of a twisted horror fantasy; this was reality. It was a waking, unrelenting nightmare that thousands of unfortunate souls were forced to endure simply to earn their daily bread.
Now, from our modern perspective, sitting in our comfortable, climate-controlled spaces, you wouldn’t expect—or at least, I would desperately hope not—to find collecting rotting bodies from plague-ridden streets or clearing out mountains of putrid feces from someone’s latrine as being anywhere near the top of the dream job list. We complain about tedious meetings, paper jams, and long commutes, blissfully unaware of the absolute horrors that once defined human labor.
But in the dark, unforgiving era of the Middle Ages, survival was a brutal game, and society’s judgment was even harsher. There were many professions that were considered deeply taboo, utterly repulsive, and entirely shameful. Surprisingly, this was not merely because they involved wading through literal filth or coming into contact with blood and guts. It went much deeper than simple hygiene. A job could damn you simply because it involved working with money, which was viewed with intense suspicion, or because it brushed dangerously close to the fires of hell. To perform these jobs was to wear a permanent stain upon your soul.
So, let us descend into the shadows of history. Let us peel back the romanticized tapestry of knights and castles to expose the horrific, rotting underbelly of medieval labor. Let us take a terrifyingly close look at some of these wretched jobs, and I want you to think—and perhaps let me know in the comments down below—how you truly believe your own modern job would be viewed by the fiercely judgmental medievals, and in particular, the all-powerful Church. Brace yourself. Let us travel back to the Middle Ages and take a long, unflinching look at death, dirt, and deadly sins. Welcome to Medieval Madness.
In the rigid, pious society of early Middle Age Europe, the Catholic Church played an absolutely massive, dictatorial role in deciding who was considered honorable and who was cast down as the lowest of the low. Your standing in society was inextricably linked to the divine. If your daily labor was linked to committing what the Church deemed a deadly sin, you were effectively a social pariah.
The Church vehemently taught that the absolute best, most pure work was the sort that echoed God’s own original act of creation. Therefore, farming stood proudly at the very top of the list. Working the land, coaxing life from the soil to feed the masses, was seen as deeply divine, sacred work. Artisans, too, held a place of respect. Men like blacksmiths, who used their calloused hands, fire, and anvil to shape raw, unyielding materials into useful tools, were also considered highly honorable. They were builders, creators, and molders of the earth’s bounty.
In stark, chilling contrast, there were many, many jobs that were seen as profoundly shameful simply because the workers were labeled as “spillers of blood.” To the medieval mind, tampering with the life force of a human or animal was a dark and dirty business. Doctors, butchers, and surgeons were routinely condemned by the pious. Furthermore, anyone who dealt primarily with money was viewed with deep, unyielding contempt. Merchants, who risked life and limb to transport goods across treacherous roads and seas, were entirely dismissed by the moral elite. They were seen merely to be transporters of goods rather than true creators. Because they produced nothing tangible from the earth, their profits were seen to be unjustly earned, tainted by the sin of avarice.
Worse still than the merchants were those who supposedly committed a deadly sin whilst simply going about their daily work. The moral tightrope was impossible to walk. Because the agonizing offense of lust was considered one of the absolute worst sins a soul could commit, the Church’s condemnation cast a wide, dark net. This condemned not only the actual sellers of sex, who were forced to live on the very fringes of society, but also anyone remotely associated with them.
The bathkeepers, who washed the weary; the innkeepers, who offered a bed for the night; and the tavern owners, who provided the fleeting, desperate pleasures of wine, gambling, and dancing, were all looked upon with severe disgust. They were the facilitators of sin.
Greed, or avarice, were the specific sins that doomed the judges and the lawyers to societal scorn, as they were believed to twist the truth for copper and silver. Gluttony brought heavy condemnation down upon cooks, who labored over hot fires to produce feasts they would never eat. Meanwhile, soldiers were already in dire peril of eternal damnation because of their blood-spilling on the battlefield.
According to the famous German philosopher, Albertus Magnus, soldiers were fundamentally flawed. He argued that they exhibited greed because of the constant lure of greater gains in seeking the bloody spoils of war. He claimed they exhibited vanity because of their boastful display of physical strength.
“Worst of all,”
he noted, was their inherent breaking of the sixth commandment:
“Thou shalt not kill.”
This was entirely unavoidable in their brutal murder of innocents during military campaigns. Even able-bodied beggars, who often had no other choice in a world without safety nets, came under heavy fire from the Church. They were viciously accused of not wanting to work out of pure sloth, resigning themselves to the sins of laziness.
We have carefully ranked this grim list of professions in order of best to worst. So, let us dive into the muck and misery.
Curiously enough, the humble, seemingly innocent pot washer was seen as deeply contemptible during the early Middle Ages. Scrubbing wooden or tin plates, heavy earthenware, blackened metal pots, and other crude utensils was a far cry from the modern dishwasher. It was agonizing, skin-destroying labor. This mind-numbing task was usually done hunched over a crude bucket or a massive, filthy container of stagnant water.
A ragged piece of cloth and either coarse sand or caustic lye ash was used as a crude cleaning agent. The chemical reaction was utterly brutal. Often, the skin of the washer’s hands and forearms became violently rough, cracked, and painfully sore because of the constant, unending exposure to these harsh chemicals and the heavily contaminated, greasy water.
The physical workplace wouldn’t have been too lugubrious or comfortable, either. In fact, it was akin to a dungeon. Stuck at the very back of a smoky, chaotic kitchen, usually kneeling on a freezing cold stone floor, or even banished outside to face the biting frost and pouring rain in all weathers, the scullions suffered immensely. They were firmly positioned at the absolute bottom rung in the strict hierarchy of the kitchen staff. They were the unseen ghosts who dealt with the aftermath of gluttony.
The revered Italian Dominican friar and philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, held a particularly harsh view of these laborers. He mercilessly referred to them as the absolute lowest of the low. In his eyes, they carried out a job that was tragically lacking in both human dignity and intellect, reducing them to mere beasts of burden scrubbing away the sins of the table.
Moving from the freezing kitchens to the broader economy, many medieval people desperately tried to make money from the main, booming industry of the Middle Ages: the vital wool trade. The endless spinning and weaving of raw cloth from sheep’s wool and flax was mostly done in cramped conditions by women and exhausted children within the home. And with the revolutionary spinning wheel not even making its appearance in Europe until the 13th century, doing everything entirely by hand was both mind-numbingly tedious and physically arduous work.
But one of the very worst, most deeply revolting jobs that came directly from the lucrative wool trade was carried out not with the hands, but with the bare feet.
After the rough, scratchy cloth finally came off the wooden loom, it desperately had to be finished. This vital process was required to make the fabric soft enough to wear, to completely close the large, drafty gaps in the tight weave, and to chemically strip away the heavy, foul-smelling grease, known as lanolin, naturally found in sheep’s wool.
This horrifying process entailed placing the heavy yards of cloth into massive, wooden vats. But these vats were not filled with fresh water and soap. They were filled to the brim with gallons upon gallons of stale, collected human urine. The worker, known as a fuller, would hike up their clothes, step barefoot into the noxious vat, and begin trampling violently on the cloth for a good couple of exhausting hours.
Try to truly imagine that reality. That is freezing cold, eye-watering, throat-burning, fly-attracting, ripe human urine being vigorously trodden under your bare feet. All day. Every single day. The stench would seep into their skin, their hair, and their very souls, permanently marking them as an outcast even as they produced the fine clothing worn by the very people who shunned them.
If wading in human waste wasn’t enough, consider a job that required you to literally drain your own life force. Bloodletting was absolutely big business during the Middle Ages. The medical field was primitive, operating on the theory of bodily humors. Most esteemed physicians firmly regarded bloodletting as a vital preventative medicine and something of an absolute cure-all for any ailment under the sun.
The logic was simple, if deeply flawed: draining away a patient’s blood meant physically getting rid of the “badness” or corrupt humors trapped inside a person’s body. Sometimes, this violent procedure was done by slicing the terrified patient open on the soft inside of the arm, just below the elbow, and catching the spurting, crimson blood in a metal or wooden container.
However, another highly popular way to achieve this was to use live leeches. These slimy parasites were highly prized, as they would not only painlessly suck out the supposedly bad blood, but they would also greedily eat away at any black, rotting flesh surrounding an infected wound.
This intense medical reliance meant that there was an incredibly high, constant demand for fresh leeches. Because these creatures naturally lived in murky, marshy, stagnant areas, professional leech gatherers would deliberately go out onto the treacherous marshlands. They would strip down and wade out deep into the freezing, muddy water, entirely bare-legged.
They were human bait. Once the hungry leeches had successfully attached themselves to the gatherer’s bare skin, sinking their tiny, jagged jaws in, the worker would then carefully pick them off, one by one, and place them securely in a container to be transported back to the bustling town.
Because the leech naturally uses a special enzyme in its spit which chemically stops the blood from clotting, the initial bite wounds on the gatherer’s legs would continue to bleed profusely long after the creature was removed. Sometimes this occurred to such a terrifying extent that the exhausted collector would feel dizzy and faint simply through sheer blood loss.
Furthermore, these open, bleeding wounds were constantly exposed to any microscopic horrors and foul germs that might be lurking around in the stagnant marsh water. The desperate collectors could easily pick up all sorts of horrific diseases. They suffered from Weil’s disease, a severe bacterial infection, alongside countless other terrifying parasitic infections, as well as debilitating bouts of malaria. It was, without a shadow of a doubt, a rather gruesome, life-threatening occupational hazard for a mere handful of coins.
Perhaps you need a simple haircut, or maybe, God forbid, a full limb amputation? Well, in the medieval town square, you could conveniently visit the exact same man for both procedures: the local barber surgeon.
Being far more common, and much more importantly, significantly cheaper than a university-trained physician, the rugged barber surgeon was the ultimate go-to tradesman. You sought him out when you desperately needed a gaping, infected wound cauterized with white-hot iron, a shattered bone violently snapped back into place, a blinding cataract sliced out of your eye, or a massive, agonizing boil lanced open.
He handled all of the truly wonderful, stomach-churning jobs. And, of course, while you were there, you could also get some routine bloodletting done just to keep your general health in good check. This was conveniently possible because the barber surgeon’s shop was exactly the bustling place where the exhausted, half-bled leech collectors came to sell their wriggling wares.
Do not be fooled into thinking this was a sterile environment. Anesthetics of a sort were technically available, but they were incredibly expensive, reserved only for those wealthy enough who could easily afford the luxury. For the common peasant, the anesthesia plan was brutal and simple: knock back as much cheap, burning alcohol as physically possible, bite down hard on a piece of leather or wood, and just hope for the absolute best, really.
The surgeon’s young, burly apprentice often came in incredibly handy for this part, using his sheer body weight to physically pin the thrashing, screaming patient down against the wooden table. Furthermore, the shrewd barber surgeon always demanded his payment upfront in cold, hard coin. You know, just in case his unfortunate client tragically didn’t survive the trauma of the surgery.
It was a nasty, excessively gory, and deeply traumatizing job. The “operating theater” featured incredibly low lighting, sawdust on the floor to soak up the inevitable mess, and just a simple, unsterilized scalpel, a sharp razor, or a heavy knife for tools. The screams echoing from the shop were a normal part of city ambiance.
If none of this graphic horror has successfully convinced you to go visit your friendly local barber surgeon, then please don’t forget one final service: if you happened to have a blinding, agonizing toothache, he would also happily take a pair of iron pliers and violently pull a couple of rotting teeth straight out of your jaw for you as well.
As horrifying as the surgeon’s table was, there was a man whose job was far darker, stepping fully into the realm of the damned: the executioner, widely viewed as the Devil’s own henchman.
In a tragic twist of fate, most executioners did not choose their grim path; they were forced into the horrific job by circumstance or decree. Once trapped in the profession, the cursed position was inevitably passed down through the bloodline, from doomed father to doomed son.
It is profoundly shocking and deeply unsettling to think that, as a mere apprentice, an innocent young boy might be actively learning the dark, precise skills of an executioner—how to snap a neck, how to sever a spine with one blow—from the tender age of just eleven or twelve years old.
Legally speaking, executioners were given an official, royal or city warrant. Therefore, they were completely exempt from any formal criminal charges and officially absolved by the authorities from the mortal sin of murder. They were merely the instruments of the law.
But a piece of parchment meant nothing to the superstitious masses. That legal protection absolutely did not stop most ordinary people from fiercely believing that these men were fundamentally tainted and permanently cursed by the blood they spilled. Executioners and their entire, isolated families were heavily shunned by mainstream society. They were treated as literal untouchables, and usually had to live in lonely, heavily fortified houses on the very extreme outskirts of town, often near the gallows themselves.
They were generally barred, by law or by mob enforcement, from all public establishments as well. This meant absolutely no relaxing visits to the public bathhouses, no sharing a pint at the local tavern, and even being turned away from the sanctuary of the local churches.
Despite popular, Hollywood-fueled belief, bloody executions were not an everyday, daily occurrence. The executioner had a lot of downtime, but it wasn’t spent in leisure. Because they were already deemed unclean, these outcast men were also officially charged with the stomach-churning tasks of clearing bloated animal carcasses and rotting human corpses from the surrounding region. They were also the enforcers tasked with violently running sick, terrified lepers out of the town limits.
It took an incredibly strong, iron-clad stomach and a very specific, deeply hardened sort of personality to be able to routinely flog a thief’s back to ribbons, hang a starving peasant, behead a noble, or set fire to a screaming human being tied to a wooden stake.
But when it finally came to the ultimate punishment—the public execution of a man convicted of high treason—the medieval justice system was breathtakingly, unimaginably brutal.
Drawn violently to the towering gallows while strapped to a wooden hurdle dragged behind a horse, the terrified prisoner would eventually arrive at the horrific scene. He would then be completely stripped of his clothing and his dignity. The executioner would hang him by the neck until he was agonizingly close to death, suffocating and thrashing.
But before the sweet release of death could take him, the prisoner was swiftly cut down, gasping for air. While fully conscious, he would be forcefully restrained. The executioner would then meticulously disembowel him, slicing open his abdomen. He would be completely emasculated. Finally, his body would be brutally quartered—chopped into four separate, bloody pieces to be displayed across the kingdom as a grim warning.
By the beginning of the 15th century, this hellish punishment had been tweaked slightly by authorities to maximize the sheer psychological terror. The horrific disembowelment legally took place before the actual hanging.
History records the grim fate of a man named John Hall. He was taken to the infamous Tyburn gallows in 1399. He was brutally disemboweled while wide awake, and he was forced to watch as his own bloody entrails were tossed into a roaring fire burning right in front of his fading eyes. And if that unimaginable agony wasn’t somehow enough, his mutilated body was then dragged up, hanged, beheaded, and viciously quartered.
To successfully stop the massive evisceration trauma from accidentally killing the victim too quickly before he is actually hanged, the highly skilled executioner got the absolutely lovely, delicate job of meticulously tying the victim’s slippery digestive tubes up into knots. This was done specifically and sadistically just so the doomed prisoner has the horrifying privilege of remaining conscious to watch his own entrails being burnt to ash. Lovely, indeed.
Is this career path simply not for you? Well, perhaps you can force yourself to throw your delicate morals and your queasy, modern stomach entirely aside. Because, did I happen to mention that the financial pay for this blood-soaked nightmare was actually incredibly good?
An official executioner working steadily in the 13th century might easily take home as much as a staggering five shillings per successful kill. To put that into perspective, that is almost an entire month’s worth of hard-earned wages for a standard, highly skilled artisan or worker. It was a fortune in blood money.
Furthermore, you might even manage to extort or be gifted a little extra silver on the side directly from the grieving family of the condemned prisoner. They would pay handsomely if you quietly promised to give their loved one a swift, clean, and entirely painless death, sparing them the extended torture.
However, when you truly sit down to weigh up the severe pros and cons of being a professional executioner, the undeniably high wages probably don’t really come close to compensating for the soul-crushing social isolation and the severe, unending psychological distress.
From the blood-soaked scaffold, we move back to the filth of daily life. The medieval world operated on a simple rule: waste not, want not.
You probably already know, from history books or common sense, that urban sanitation wasn’t exactly great or efficient during the Middle Ages. There was no indoor plumbing, no flushing toilets. Instead, there were massive, deep cesspits dug into the earth beneath homes and privies. And these deep, dark pits certainly didn’t magically empty themselves when they filled to the brim.
So, when the stench became utterly unbearable and the waste threatened to overflow into the muddy streets, this is exactly where the unfortunate gong farmer finally came in.
Because the sight and smell of their work was so offensive to the general public, they were strictly forced by law to work usually at night, under the cover of darkness. Armed with little more than a lantern and a shovel, they had the lovely, vomit-inducing job of physically climbing deep down into enclosed pits from both public and private latrines.
Once down in the suffocating darkness, they spent hours shoveling out the heavy, fermenting mountains of human waste. In the larger, deeper pits, they might sometimes find themselves slipping and literally standing up to their very necks in absolute, unadulterated filth.
Using a sturdy wooden bucket attached to a thick rope, the exhausted gong farmer would heave and pass up the heavy, sloshing waste to the surface. Waiting above was usually one of the unfortunate young, impoverished boys that the farmer had working as an apprentice for him.
Once the horrific pit was finally scraped empty, the crew would haul the hundreds of pounds of solid and liquid waste away on their creaking, horse-drawn wooden cart. They were required to transport and dump it all in designated muck-heaps situated far, far away from the heavily populated residential areas.
In massive, booming cities such as medieval London, the sheer scale of the problem was mind-boggling. There would literally be thousands upon thousands of gallons of rotting, disease-ridden excrement that desperately needed to be manually cleared out every single night just to keep the city functioning.
The financial compensation, surprisingly, wasn’t bad at all. In fact, the money was relatively high, as it accurately reflected the severe, life-threatening risks involved. There was the constant, almost guaranteed risk of picking up the odd, flesh-eating parasitic worm or bacterial infection.
More terrifyingly, there was a very real, deadly chance of suddenly passing out from the concentrated, highly noxious methane fumes trapped in the unventilated pits. If you lost consciousness down there, the result was fatal. There was the ever-present danger of literally drowning to death in the thick, suffocating mess.
This nightmare scenario is precisely what tragically happened in the year 1326 to a specific gong farmer known as Richard the Raker. According to historical records, the rotting wooden planks covering the drop collapsed, and he fell heavily into a massive, overflowing cesspit whilst working in the dark. He suffocated and drowned in human excrement before anyone could pull him free.
The very foul, inescapable nature of their daily work meant that, much like the executioners, gong farmers were permanently shunned and avoided by the rest of polite society. Because of the lingering, sickening smell that clung to their skin and clothes, they usually lived in isolated shanties entirely away from the general population.
And let us absolutely not forget the harsh reality of their era: they are not exactly getting off a shift, heading home, and taking a long, hot, soapy shower afterwards. In a medieval city, there may not have been much, if any, clean, fresh water to spare simply to wash down a laborer with after a long, horrific night of work. They lived, breathed, and slept in the stench of the city.
But all of these horrors—the lye, the urine, the blood, the waste—pale in comparison to the apocalyptic nightmare that descended upon the world, giving rise to the most terrifying profession of all: the body collector, the harbinger of the plague.
In the late 1340s, a silent, invisible terror crept into the bustling ports and crowded cities. A plague hit the entire continent of Europe with such relentless, unimaginable ferocity that it must have truly seemed to the terrified medievals to clearly signal the literal, biblical ending of the world.
The Black Death, as it has chillingly become known to history, was a catastrophic pandemic caused by the Yersinia pestis bacteria. It was a tidal wave of death that is widely thought by modern historians to have violently wiped out perhaps half of the entire European population. Men, women, and children died in their absolute millions, their bodies turning black with necrotic buboes.
The social fabric of the world disintegrated entirely. Some unfortunate souls left this mortal life completely alone in the dark, without having a single friend or family member left alive to mourn their passing or properly bury them in consecrated ground. Many victims, struck by sudden, blinding fevers and lung-destroying coughs, simply dropped dead in the very middle of the dirt streets, left to rot where they fell. Many more died trapped and screaming in their own locked homes, the stench of decay eventually acting as their only obituary.
The quaint villages, the sprawling towns, and the once-mighty cities were soon heavily strewn with thousands of bloated, rotting corpses. The smell was indescribable; a thick, sweet, rotting miasma that hung over the world like a heavy fog. These bodies absolutely had to be disposed of, lest the rot poison the air itself.
And so, out of the sheer, desperate necessity of the apocalypse, a brand new, incredibly dark fraternity arose from the shadows: the professional body collectors.
As well as taking on the gruesome task of clearing the public streets and alleyways of the decomposing dead, they dragged their creaking wooden carts from house to infected house. They callously picked up the rigid bodies of mothers, fathers, and children that had been desperately left outside front doors by surviving relatives. They piled the human cargo high, arms and legs tangled together on their rough carts, before whipping their horses and taking them away to the outskirts of the city.
The death toll was so incredibly high that the traditional infrastructure of grief completely collapsed. As there simply wasn’t anywhere near enough hallowed, sacred ground left in the traditional churchyards for dignified, individual burials, massive, gaping trenches were frantically dug into the earth. These were the infamous plague pits. Into these massive, muddy scars in the earth, the endless multitude of naked, twisted bodies were unceremoniously tipped, layered like cordwood.
After each massive trench was finally filled to the very absolute brim with rotting flesh, it was then hastily covered over with a thin, insufficient layer of soil. Without a moment to rest, the exhausted body collectors immediately turned their empty carts around and went right back out into the diseased streets, hunting for more dead on what must have truly seemed like a hellish, endless task with no finish line.
Given the profound trauma and the sheer horror of their daily interactions, it’s really not surprising to learn that these rough, hardened men were universally despised by the survivors. They held a terrifying monopoly on death. Because they were the only ones willing to touch the infected corpses, they often aggressively charged incredibly large, extortionate amounts of money for simply taking away the rotting bodies of a family’s loved ones.
In the beautiful, plague-ravaged city of Florence, the famous Italian poet and writer Giovanni Boccaccio, who tragically lived through the height of the Black Death, wrote scathing, horrified accounts about these men.
“The corpse carriers drawn from the baser ranks,” Boccaccio noted with disgust.
These terrifying, opportunistic gangs of shovel-wielding gravediggers became widely known to the terrified Italian populace as the Becchini. They violently stalked the quiet, death-filled streets, physically striking the air and the populace with the sickening, overpowering effluvia of death that clung to their clothes. And yet, amid the end of the world, they were suddenly earning vastly more coin than they had ever done before in their miserable lives.
Some of these hardened body collectors ruthlessly exploited their terrifying new role. They showed no mercy, charging absolutely exorbitant, crippling fees or aggressively demanding heavy bribes just to perform the basic necessity of removing the infectious dead from a family’s threshold.
Some of the most evil among them even actively threatened to murder healthy people in their beds and intentionally disguise the violent murder as just another plague death unless the terrified victims immediately paid them whatever silver they demanded.
Several of these Becchini were formally accused of gross, horrific misconduct amid the chaos. One horrified historical chronicle claimed that these men arrogantly showed off their newfound, blood-soaked wealth by loudly laughing in the streets, drinking heavily stolen wine in the taverns, and physically assaulting innocent, grieving people who crossed their path.
When you picture the scene, it is incredibly easy to see exactly why the traumatized, starving people of the city would deeply resent someone joyously celebrating and getting drunk with the very money they had just been forcefully extorted to pay, simply to have a beloved mother or child’s rotting corpse removed from their home.
Although, the grieving, bitter families might have eventually felt a dark, vindictive sense of justice and a fleeting moment of happiness remembering one undeniable fact: many of the greedy body collectors, despite their bravado, inevitably caught the agonizing plague themselves. They died screaming, choking on their own blood, suffering the exact same fate as their cargo whilst carrying out their horrific, corrupt, but ultimately necessary task.
And so, we leave behind the blood, the muck, and the plague pits. The medieval world was a terrifying place, built on the broken backs and stained souls of those forced into the darkest corners of society.
