Tudor jobs • Page 4
Already got knarled, calloused hands as good as a permanent pair of rubber gloves? Great! Send in an application today for the post of royal washerwoman.
You'll have to shoulder a heavy yoke and two buckets, hefting all of the water needed for your task from the nearest source – say, the moat. Then the nasty business of making an alkaline 'soap' solution needs to be done by filtering the water through wood-ash. If the resulting lye water doesn't shift dirt, nothing can – it should cut through grease, giving you whites that are whiter than … well, white. After piling the soiled linen into a vat, or bucking basket, of lye water, you can pound away with your battledore to cleanse the royal cloth.
Beware of gossips creeping up behind you to glean information about the queen's monthly cycle. You may be scrubbing the grubby smalls, but your access to highly private details of royal life makes you a target for courtly intrigue.
The recent scare of the Spanish Armada has created massive growth in the shipbuilding sector. With 40,000 tons of wood to be cut into planks to build ships for our expanding navy, all the experienced chaps have been promoted to top sawyer, so we've got several hundred openings for under-sawyers.
Down in the pit at the sorry end of the two-man saw, you can enjoy the smell of freshly cut oak as the sawdust rains down on you eight hours a day, six days a week. Of course, no goggles will be made available as you need to keep an eye on the cutting line. Whatever the weather, the pit will be your home, so be prepared for a little trench foot on top of the increased risk of emphysema. Tweezers are recommended for removing splinters from your face and hands.
Professional sailors wanted. To work in the navy, you will need to be fit and strong, with a head for heights, a stomach of iron – and your own corset. Spilling your guts through the muscles of your torso is highly likely as ruptures regularly occur when hoisting wet canvas sails and heave-ho-ing on the capstan winch to raise the anchor.
At sea, you will subsist on a poor diet shared with weevils and rats and, compared with landlubbers, have a much increased risk of suffering from disease (especially on voyages to the tropics). A barber-surgeon will be on hand to provide basic medical support and a haircut should you need one or the other or both.
In this dangerous job, you will benefit from working with an international crew and from the protection of naval law, which is dished out with extreme discipline and is fraught with hideous punishments for any who infringe it. See the world with the navy, and if you're an old hand, you can even enjoy pressgang outings when you can kidnap poor unfortunates to join the service.
Are you fussy about cleanliness, yet economical with the truth? The swabber's mate needs to be conniving and generally untrustworthy to start with, yet not particularly clever: already in the navy's employ, you have to be caught lying to get this position.
This post is more of a punishment than a job, as the price you pay for lying will be to grab a handful of old rags (swabs) and a bucket of seawater and scrub the muck off the ship with gusto. Of course, it's not just cleaning decks – that's actually the nice part. You'll also need to bring along a peg for your nose as you get strapped into the boson's chair and dangled over the 'business' end of the ship, up by the beak head. It's here that some 300 bottoms a day unload, leaving a considerable build-up of skids and detritus.
Scraping and sponging the hull clean, you can rest assured that you're doing your bit to keep the crew healthy, but don't forget to wash your hands afterwards.
For more about life in the navy – this time in the 18th and early 19th century – see Nelson's Navy.
