Original subtitles

World finance hub, heart of British government, home to millions.

Today's London is a well-oiled machine, a truly global city.

And at its heart lies the Square Mile,

the historic core from which the modern metropolis grew.

The city of London is 2,000 years old.

Every street, every square, is built on layer upon layer of history.

But London has a hidden past, a filthy secret,

and it's this untold story that I want to uncover.

Because so much of the London we know today was born from the dirt and disease of the 14th century,

a time when the city's authorities were so overwhelmed by an explosion

of people and their filth, that nothing short of a catastrophe would force them to clean up their act.

This is the story of how filth shaped this city,

of how 700 years ago, dirt and squalor and disease reached

such epidemic proportions that they sparked a revolution in attitude,

a revolution that would see all Londoners come together to declare war on filth.

'And as I'll discover, it was a truly disgusting battle.

'From rivers of animal guts to mountains of excrement,

'deadly diseases and bloody cures,

'the medieval authorities had a dirty fight on their hands.'

I'm going to get down and dirty in 14th century grime, to find out

the hard way just how much filth medieval London had to put up with,

and discover how this clean and modern city

began to emerge from the muck of the past.

This is London Bridge, a major thoroughfare

leading into the city of London, as it was 700 years ago.

Today, it's packed with thousands of commuters heading to work

in the Square Mile, but in half an hour it will be all but empty

and it will be a chance to catch your breath.

In 14th century London, though, there'd be no such let up.

As the only bridge over the Thames, it was a busy thoroughfare,

seething with people, animals and filth.

In such a prime location, space was at a premium, precarious high rises

crowded on either side, shop fronts opened out onto the road,

leaving only a single lane for traffic.

At times, it was virtually impassable.

And it wasn't just the bridge that was like this.

It was the whole city, all day, every day,

because London was at bursting point.

The population had gone up by nearly 500% from the previous

two centuries, overwhelming any attempt at town planning.

By the start of the 14th century,

London had grown from a small town of around 17,000 people,

into a thriving city, with as many as 100,000 inhabitants,

all hemmed in between the river and the old Roman walls.

There was no escaping the filth.

So why were they all here?

Reaching its peak at the start of the 14th century,

London had been growing for 200 years, ever since a radical change of ownership.

After Norman conquest in 1066, London became the centre

of a great empire that stretched, at its height,

across the British Isles and down to the Pyrenees.

It was a time of relative peace and prosperity, so the economy boomed and London,

which had once been a wooden city, was now recast in stone.

London, more wealthy and valuable than ever, was granted the power

to self govern, by successive writs and royal charters.

The mighty Tower of London,

an imposing stone bastion of royal power,

built by the king to protect his capital, but also a symbol

of just how important London was to the crown.

The Tower and the city, cheek by jowl.

The king needed the financial support of his richest city,

and Londoners were happy to have strong, stable government,

as long as it didn't interfere in their affairs.

Enjoying a certain autonomy from the crown,

London offered a way out of what, for many, was a tyrannical system.

Out in the countryside, the Normans had confiscated land

and imposed a system of enforced labour that turned many people

into serfs, little better than slaves.

But here in London it was much freer.

The king trod more warily when it came to his

rich and volatile capital city.

It had its own laws.

For example, if a serf could escape here

and survive for a year and a day, he'd become a free man.

And once you were here, the opportunities were endless.

Just like today, London offered the chance to forge a new life,

choose from a variety of trades, have the opportunity

to join a guild, or enter the world of commerce.

With its safe harbour, trade flowed in and out along the Thames.

Vast amounts of English wool were exported to Europe,

whilst wine, spices and fur headed into the city.

Myth has it that London was so prosperous

that the streets were paved with gold.

If you wanted to make it big, this was the place to do it.

When they arrived, they discovered that the streets were not paved with gold, far from it.

So what was beneath the feet of a 14th-century Londoner?

First ingredient, because it is England after all, is soaking wet mud.

'With few pavements or solid road surfaces,

'the ground underfoot was just earth, wet and sticky all winter,

'and choking dust in the summer.'

Ingredient number two, animal dung.

'There were as many animals as people in London.

'Horses, dogs and pigs jostled with people for space in the streets.'

Animal entrails.

'Any part of a carcass not worth eating would have been dumped in the road.'

Old rotting fish.

'Fish was plentiful, and a popular alternative to meat on holy days.

Beer. 'A safer option than drinking polluted medieval water.'

And then a few hours later, urine.

'Privies were a luxury not everyone could afford.

'Many people used a chamber pot and then emptied it out of the window.'

Right. I collected up all this mess,

it only remains to dump it on the streets.

That smells completely disgusting, unbelievable.

The idea that would have been spread around permanently is just terrible, and it would have been

mulched into the streets, and 100,000 Londoners walking on it daily.

There we go. That really does release the smell as well. Eugh!

Bear in mind, of course, lots of the sewers would be full,

they'd just be ditches anyway. There wouldn't be a proper way

of cleaning the streets, so especially in hot, summery weather,

this stuff would just sit around for weeks.

And there are stories of whole streets being made impassable,

you just couldn't get from one end to the other.

Londoners, they weren't stupid, they're just like you and me,

so they came up with solutions. They did not want to walk through this stuff.

So they came up with ingenious solutions, in fact.

New ways were invented to lift you above the squalor,

like these wooden over shoes known as pattens.

There we go.

And, of course, they'd have got quite proficient in these, unlike me.

We know about these because they've been found in archaeological digs.

I'm in wellies and it's pretty disgusting.

You really would have wanted a way to be lifted above the muck,

because there were no waterproof shoes in those days,

they were walking the streets in leather.

And on these, although they're quite unsteady, you could actually just about walk through the sludge.

But there's one vital ingredient for the medieval street

that I've avoided so far, and it's also the most disgusting.

It's something we're all familiar with,

but these days we've perfected ways of neutralising it.

Well, the smell's getting worse every step I take towards this building.

I still can't believe I'm voluntarily doing this.

That smell is, basically, poo particles in the air, attacking my nose.

Oh, that's appalling. Oh, God!

Doing other history programmes, I spend my time in the library.

This is Crossness Sewage Works in southeast London,

where the waste from over two million people is treated every day.

There's enough excrement here to fill 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools every hour.

Oh, Jill, what is this place? This is our fine screen plant,

where our aim is to get out as much rag as we can.

You can see a little raft of it there.

Once you've taken all the rubbish out, you just leave concentrated human waste?

Is that what this is? Yeah, this is sewage.

We still produce all this waste, but now we've just worked out

a sophisticated way of dealing with it. But back then,

they couldn't escape this, this was running down their street,

in the local brook, through the Thames.

It was just all around the whole time, this smell.

In the 14th century, of course, they had no public sanitation.

Undiluted raw sewage collected in open gutters in the street.

It would have smelled a whole lot worse.

The time has come to get face to face

with the final ingredient that we're missing from that medieval street.

Yeah, there's a little valve here that's going to allow me

to see some of this vital ingredient of medieval London.

The trouble is, I'm slightly concerned, because this is under very high pressure and I...

The last thing I want to do is spray it all over myself.

Here it comes, like Mr Whippy.

Whoa, whoa. Urgh!

Ergh! Oh! A little bit of splashing there.

Right, so here it is, the ingredient that every Londoner

would have been familiar with.

This is incredibly smelly because of the gases associated with it,

but it's also home to some of the deadliest pathogens known to man,

like salmonella and E. coli.

Now we've managed to contain it in these big tanks

and this little bottle here, but back then, it would have been everywhere.

So, here goes.

HE COUGHS

That's unbelievable.

Oh, God. Can I...

Can I go now?

The squalid state of London's streets may suggest its citizens were free to run riot.

But this was far from the case.

So who was in charge?

So, Ian, it's not like London's a sort of anarchy,

I mean, there is government here, isn't there?

There certainly is government and, in fact, London has had

its charter for over 200 years by the time the 14th century begins,

and that charter gives it privileges which it defends vigorously.

It elects, by the 14th century, its own mayor,

and that mayor is selected from 24 aldermen.

Those aldermen are each head of a ward of the specific bits of the city.

So it's got a very strong administrative structure.

Even so, the civic government was more concerned with law and order

and regulating trade, than dealing with unprecedented filth.

Cleanliness was a luxury few could afford.

Most people used the streets to trade or work in,

and, of course, as a place to dump their waste.

So this street follows the line of the original medieval street.

Can you give me any sense of what it must have been like here? Much darker.

You'd have found the houses either side leaning out over to the middle of the street as each storey

was built up higher. So you could perhaps have reached across and touched the house on the side.

But you wouldn't have been looking up, you'd have been looking down

at your feet and avoiding whatever you might have trodden in.

Even holder or tenement was meant to clear the area outside their house, but, of course, not many did.

If you think how few latrines there are in London and how much effort is required to shift everything

out of the city, you realise that it's not surprising that people do leave things in the street.

The infrastructure isn't there.

The history of cleanliness is a bit like a small child who's going to go to the loo, they don't mention

anything until they're absolutely desperate, and our records

are the records of absolute desperation,

when we can't put up with these terrible smells any longer.

Yes, you do have areas which really were revolting.

And one of the most desperate stories of medieval waste management

occurred in what used to be Ebbgate Lane.

Two proto dodgy plumbers, Hockiel and Witt, signed to build some toilets.

Like most medieval latrines, they were simply seats with a hole cut out and a long drop.

But according to the book of customs from 1321, their design left something to be desired.

By building their toilets as far out as possible,

they may have kept their own walls clean,

but it meant human filth now rained down onto the passersby below.

The street became impassable.

Hockiel and Witt were hauled in front of the mayor,

where they were hit with a big fine,

but I bet their neighbours wish they'd been hit with something else.

And it wasn't just Ebbgate Lane that was overflowing with filth.

All over the Square Mile, the street names give a vivid impression

of what conditions were like within the boundaries of the medieval city.

Some still exist - Gutter Lane, Seething Lane, Staining Lane -

testament to their grubby history, while others have been renamed to hide their mucky past.

This is Sherborne Lane, sounds rather gentile, but 700 years ago,

it had a far less salubrious name.

So were Londoners just mad, putting up with all this filth? How did they really feel about it?

And what was the medieval mindset like when it came to dealing with poo?

Remarkably, we do know the answer to some of these questions,

and they're hidden deep within the bowels of this building.

I'm about to have a look at a very rare and valuable document,

one of very few that survives from this period, and it's going to give me

a great sense of what life was actually like for normal Londoners in the 14th century.

It's held here at the London Metropolitan Archive

and its hardly been touched for 700 years.

This is the Assize of Nuisance, just basically a list of grievances

brought by the people of London to the attention of the government.

It's absolutely beautiful, it's hard to believe it's 700 years old.

Many of these complaints actually refer to the issue of filth,

and, to me, it's such an important reminder that Londoners

weren't just the impotent victims of the mess that lay all around them,

they were actually trying to do something about it.

There were regulations in place to stop Londoners throwing

their waste onto the street, even though they were often ignored.

And these records show that some people were coming up with ingenious ways

of getting rid of it, often giving their neighbours cause to complain.

Here's a classic, the case of Henry Young and John Koenig from 1347.

The Assize concerns their waste pipe, which they had diverted

to pump their effluent into the cellar of the property next door.

This fantastic case of medieval NIMBY-ism was investigated and upheld by the mayor and alderman,

who ordered the pipe to be removed within 40 days.

If this manuscript's going to last another 700 years,

people like me with sweaty, dirty hands are going to have to wear

these gloves when they handle it.

And the next example is that of Alice Wade,

just here, I think.

Now, she didn't really want to pipe her waste into the street.

So instead she came up with an ingenious solution of sending it into the rainwater gutter.

She made a wooden pipe to channel it away.

The problem was, the poo often blocked up the gutter,

so her neighbours were greatly inconvenienced by the stench.

Again, she was given 40 days to remove the nuisance.

Londoners were becoming increasingly sick of taking crap from their neighbours.

With so many peed off citizens, the authorities had their work cut out.

It's all too easy to imagine medieval London as one great, anarchic mess.

But this document is a sharp reminder that we're dealing with a complex, regulated society.

There are just some of the many attempts that were made

to overcome the problems created by that number of people living in such close proximity with each other.

The fact they all too often failed to deal with those problems

wasn't because they were mad or stupid,

it just shows that the sheer scale of that challenge

overwhelmed their resources.

Punishing individuals in a city of thousands wasn't going to get the streets clean.

Even fines, which were hard to enforce, did little to change the culture of medieval fly tipping.

In 1309, a charge of 40p was levied on anyone who was found dumping

rubbish outside their own house, or anyone else's.

The trouble is, wealthy Londoners seemed quite happy to pay the fine,

if and when they got caught, and the city was probably pretty glad to collect the money.

So as nothing could stop the people making a mess, it fell to the authorities to clean it up.

And they came up with three professions, without which no modern city could survive.

'For years, muck rakers have been on the city's books,

'gathering filth and rubbish from the streets

'and taking it by cart, or boat, beyond the city walls.

'They were the first street cleaners.'

By the turn of the century, surveyors of the pavement

were added to the payroll, paid for by each ward.

They were there to preserve the pavement and remove all nuisances of filth.

The bin men had arrived.

It all seems rather obvious.

I mean, London would grind to a halt today without these guys.

But, of course, that's exactly what was happening in medieval London.

It was grinding to a halt under its own grime.

And the task of cleaning London 700 years ago was so massive

that it would become one of the most disgusting jobs in history.

I'm going to find out exactly what they were up against,

by having a go at the worst job of all,

the third and final role created in medieval London.

The inventively named gong farmers.

They were early drain cleaners, I suppose, and they had to go round cleaning out

cesspits and privies, which meant using one of these and one of these,

you had to clean up a lot of that.

That smells appalling.

It's also really warm.

HE COUGHS

Oh! I gag every time it does that.

If you're wondering why we're dumping horse manure on a street in the city of London,

it's because we have a record of one particular gong farmer, a guy called Thomas Mason.

Now, this superhuman gong farmer managed to clean up, on this street,

six tonnes of human and animal waste in one night,

so that's one man, one street, six tonnes.

Thomas Mason, just how tough are you?

The gong farmers faced a mammoth task.

Medieval Londoners produced around 50 tonnes of excrement every day.

There were no proper sewers, so all of it had to be removed by hand,

dug out of the cesspits, of all the privies and public latrines in London.

Inhaling all that horse poo

is getting a little boring.

They had to be emptied regularly to stop the build up of noxious smells,

and often at night, to make sure they could be kept open all day.

Evening.

'Not only was the work disgusting, it was also fraught with danger.

'It's hard enough shifting a pile that's sitting on the street.

'Down in the cesspits, filled with thousands of litres of raw excrement,

'there was a chance of being asphyxiated by the fumes, or worse,

'picking up a lethal disease lurking in the rotting faeces.'

Not very efficient.

'As one celebrated case illustrates,

'medieval cleaners could come to a sticky end.'

FARTING

Richard, a successful muck raker, was fortunate enough to own

his own privy, in his house in the parish of Little Saint Bartholomew.

According to the coroner's roll of 1326, despite slaving away

cleaning up other people's filth, it appears that Richard had a rather unfortunate accident in his own.

The floorboards of his privy had become so rotten they could no longer take his weight.

Richard dropped into his own excrement and died,

only for his body to be discovered by fellow muck raker, William Scott.

But the gong farmer's revolting and hazardous profession wasn't without its perks.

The reason they did this

frankly awful work was because, actually,

it was very well rewarded.

The average wage for a normal labourer doing anything else

was about six pence a day, but a gong farmer could get 18 pence

for clearing away one tonne of waste,

so he's earning several times that of an equivalent labourer.

In fact we know that what a gong farmer could earn in just 11 nights,

it would take a skilled labourer six months to earn.

Where there's muck, there's brass, and London had plenty of muck.

'So much of it, in fact, that the city's army of cleaners found themselves fighting a losing battle.

'London, like Richard the raker, continued to flounder in its own waste.'

So what did the gong farmers do with all this mess once they'd collected it up?

Well, they were supposed to take it far outside the city walls and dump it.

Some of them could make extra money selling it as fertiliser.

But truth be told, a lot of them just got rid of it inside the city,

on someone else's patch, or, of course,

they just threw it in the Thames.

Take her away.

So it wasn't just the streets that were beginning to overflow with filth.

Well, I've been up all night shovelling horse poo.

The smell's still in my nose, I've got poo on my clothes, on my skin.

What I need is a bath.

Despite the common use of London's waterways for dumping waste into,

they were also the place many people went to bathe.

In the middle ages, from king to commoner, you'd have stunk to the 21st century nose.

But it's a common misperception that they were all dirty people.

They weren't, they used to wash their hands and their faces,

and they associated cleanliness with godliness.

Dirt was for the devil.

They wouldn't have had that much chance to wash, of course.

In the winter, the rivers all froze over,

so it would have been limited to a few baths every summer,

in the Thames.

Pretty chilly, given it's the height of summer,

but like the gong farmers, I'm going to wash in the Thames.

Like them, of course, I don't have any soap.

The trouble is, as the population of medieval London expanded,

this river became a dumping ground for all their waste.

So whilst some people tried to bathe in it, even drink it,

just up the way, there might be people pooing in it.

By 1345, one Thames dock had become so corrupted by dung and other filth

that the city's government insisted on a tax on all boats using it -

a tax which, in turn, was used to pay five carters to cleanse it.

If the water remained foul, the men were to be thrown into prison.

The rising tide of excrement wasn't the only dirty problem

the mayor and the alderman had on their hands.

London's commercial success had created great wealth and power

and that brought a different kind of filth to the city.

Like it or not, putting up with the grime

was the price Londoners had to pay to be close to the action.

By the 14th century, the kings of England had decided they needed

a permanent seat for royal government, and chose Westminster,

about a mile up river from the City of London,

where the river water was a lot fresher.

And they built this magnificent palace,

designed to overawe their subjects.

The palace of Westminster occupied a prime riverfront location

to the west, and up wind of the busy, dirty city of London.

And around it formed a more upmarket community,

a magnet for nobility, courtiers and the rich.

Now one of London's wealthiest areas,

back then, Westminster was a separate town,

and over the centuries, it became the political heart of the country,

a role it still plays today.

This giant Westminster hall is the oldest surviving part of that palace.

Anyone who wanted to be close to royal power,

to come to the Courts of Justice held in this hall,

or the coronation banquets also held here,

or attend Parliament, that was next door,

needed to have a house nearby.

And that new class of people brought with them great wealth

and an insatiable appetite for luxury goods,

and the City of London was ideally placed to meet those demands.

Many London merchants grew rich furnishing this extravagance,

and they in turn wanted to emulate the luxury lifestyle.

The word was out, there was money in these filthy streets

and fortunes to be made.

As more and more people flocked to London to get a slice of the action,

London experienced the growing pains of a city that was forced to exist

in an area barely larger than that of a village.

By the 14th century, the overcrowded capital

had become filthier than ever,

thanks to a mini medieval industrial revolution.

Foul chemicals from leather-tanning factories,

putrid run-off from brewers and fishmongers

spilled into the street and rivers.

But there was one profession that saw London sink to new depths

when it came to industrial waste.

London's mercantile elite were keen to show off their wealth,

and what better way to do it than to eat the food of kings?

They demanded meat and lots of it.

Lift at the end. Getting round that corner was interesting.

'700 years ago, without refrigeration,

'preserving meat meant drying, salting or pickling it.

'But to provide fresh meat,

'the only way was to walk a live beast into town, kill it...'

First, we've got to shave him. We need hot water, so we've got a big copper on the go.

'..and butcher it at the point of sale.

'But butchery was a messy business.

'Records show that dealing with butcher's waste

'was an ongoing problem for the city's authorities.'

Whoa, so scald him?

'First-hand experience gives you some idea of what they were up against.'

Then we get the knives. There we go.

Now just imagine you're... Shaving. Doing your shaving, yep.

'It wasn't just butchers clogging up the streets with foul animal remains.

'Furriers and tanners also plied their filthy trades inside the city walls.'

So they'd do this out in the street, or in the cellar in the house?

You wouldn't want to do it indoors, cos it's pretty messy.

You've got all this outer layer skin and some of the less useful hair.

So the best thing to do is just do it out in the alley. Agh...

So much waste was being dumped, that in 1310,

the scouring of furs was banned in the main streets.

A year later the flaying, or skinning, of horses

was also completely outlawed in the city.

We are creating a lot of mess here.

It's all the stuff you exfoliate when you get your pumice stone out.

I'm not a regular exfoliator myself. I'm constantly amazed,

why did people go to the cities in the first place?

Fame, money, opportunity.

Why do they do it now? It's still a nasty hell hole.

Cos this is lovely.

There was some regulation. Butchers had specific areas of the city

where they were allowed to do their work.

There were three open-air slaughter houses, known as shambles in medieval London,

where the blood of countless animals flowed into runnels

directed towards the city's clogged gutters.

Right, there's your spine, and without my fingers in the way,

you're going to smash straight through that. Feeling accurate?

Yeah, pretty... Go for it.

That's better, that's sounding good. Oh, straight in.

Just get sprayed with bone fragments.

The smell is making me slightly queasy. It will get a lot worse when we open the insides up.

Good.

Pork was a popular favourite with medieval diners.

A pig's ability to eat pretty much anything and turn it into protein

meant that many people kept their own pigs.

Is that enough? If you're not sure, stick your finger in

and see if you can pop through into the space. I think I can feel it...

You're in. Hook the point then pull it down?

Work it down until you hit the breast bone,

then you can't go any further that way.

HISSING

That's a definite puncture, that's the gas coming out.

Starting to get that little whiff about it. Oh, my God!

That is disgusting.

'Domestic pigs were supposed to be penned up,

'but records show regular complaints of them roaming the streets

'or breaking into gardens.'

Oh, man, this is just disgusting.

'At one stage, there were so many escaped pigs fouling the city

'that killers of swine were appointed to keep the numbers down.'

Drop them into the bowl there. Let's let that knife down.

'The most disgusting part of my medieval butchery adventure...'

Oh, God. Oh...

'..is taking out the steaming entrails.'

This is extraordinary.

'Around five kilos of organs and stinking poo,

'wrapped in slimy membrane.'

I will never, ever, ever eat pork again, in the same way.

'But in a time when meat was expensive,

'no part of the animal went to waste.'

I think I've got the heart - it's like a muscle. Yep. Big...muscle.

And they'd have eaten this? Absolutely, roast heart's lovely.

'The prime cuts were destined for the wealthy.

'And for those less well-off, they got the rest.'

That's a heart. Yep.

'The offal, head and trotters - even the entrails - have their use.'

If you want to have sausages, the next thing we've got to do

is find the right-sized bits of tubing,

which we've got down the bottom... This is quite warm still.

That's ideal for sausage skins, you can just split it off

away from the back there, you've got a nice bit of piping.

And all of that, you can smell the excrement in it, can't you? Yep.

Yep. Well, you've got to wash that out next. What?

It's amazing what you get used to in this life.

I've never butchered an animal before, and now I'm squeezing poo

out of it's not-long-dead intestine.

You wonder how people lived amongst the excrement and mess, and here we are,

within a day, I'm getting quite used to it. This seems normal. Yeah.

Everything we've done today has involved pouring huge amounts of muck onto the streets.

You wouldn't want it in the house, would you?

So what happens to it there? Ah, a simple solution.

Bucket of water, send it downhill to the neighbours.

There you go, just flush it away.

You always want to live uphill, don't you?

As long as your house is clean, you're fine,

it's now somebody else's problem.

London was producing gigantic amounts of animal waste,

streets were overflowing with the stuff.

The city had to act.

The way the medieval authorities tackled the butcher's discarded offal

is a great example of their trial-and-error approach.

So much animal waste was now being produced, that the age-old solution

of just dumping it in the streets was no longer acceptable.

The sights and smells of all those animal entrails

running down the middle of the street

was driving even the most filth-hardened Londoners crazy.

The authorities came up with a new solution, and that lay under my feet.

This is what's left of the Fleet River - it's now a sewer -

which is pretty much what it ended up being seven centuries ago.

So somewhere round here, in 1343,

the butchers were told to come and dump all their waste,

as it was said at the time, for the cleanliness and decency of the city.

And they did so, and the price they paid was, appropriately enough, a boar's head.

But soon even the fast-flowing Fleet was overwhelmed,

it became a putrid sewer and absolutely stank,

so much so that it was said to be injurious to the health of prisoners in a nearby prison.

The authorities needed another plan, they needed a bigger river.

London's biggest river, in fact.

The butchers were sent, with their waste,

to the banks of the mighty Thames.

Right near this spot was St Nicholas Shambles,

where animals were slaughtered.

All that needed to be done was to transport the unwanted parts

down to the Thames - simple.

But there was one flaw in this brilliant plan,

and that is that the Thames is a long way over there.

In fact, the Thames was a bumpy 10-minute walk through London's busy streets.

The plan was that they would dump all this offal

off a long wooden pier that was built out into the Thames,

where Blackfriars is today.

It was known as Bocker's Brigga - butcher's bridge.

The trouble was, of course, after a long day of butchery and slaughter,

safe waste disposal was the last thing on your mind,

and all too often, a lot of this fell out along the way.

The excessive amount of bloody remains being dropped in the streets and the river

became so bad that even the King complained.

He said, "From the putrefied blood running in the streets

"and the entrails thrown into the water of the Thames,

"the air in the city has been greatly corrupted and infected."

Neither solution was perfect -

you either had rotting flesh, entrails and waste products

clogging up the streets of London, or the Thames.

So as a result, after years of dithering and indecision,

butchers were banned from the city.

And there's another way in which modern butchers are a world away

from those in the 14th century.

These days, butcher's shops are models of antibacterial cleanliness.

700 years ago, what you found on a chopping block

could be rather more hit-and-miss.

In 14th century London, the Guild of Butchers did what they could

to provide quality control.

They appointed master butchers to regulate the industry

and try and enforce some standards.

But there's evidence that even the Guild of Butchers

struggled to control some Londoners who were on the make.

Protected by the anonymity of a big city,

some saw the chance to make a quick buck by flogging manky meat.

Records described how one makeshift butcher, John Jarlson,

was found guilty of selling "putrid and stinking meat to the peril of lives",

after he tried to sell the flesh of a dead sow he'd found in a ditch.

Cracking down on butchers trying to use the cloak of night

to hide the quality of their wares,

the city authorities ordered that butchers,

"shall sell no meat by the light of candle, but by clear daylight only."

And it seems they made the punishment fit the crime.

Anyone caught breaking the law was tied to a pillory,

to have the dodgy meat burnt under their nose.

With the streets and rivers full of excrement and rotting carcasses,

and no real understanding of the link between disease and filth,

it's not surprising that sickness was rife.

But if the diseases were dangerous enough,

the treatments were often worse.

Many sick people were treated by barbers,

hairdressers, who had the skills and tools to cut and chop, so were allowed to pull teeth, or let blood.

With the discovery of microbes not due for another three centuries, there was no scientific knowledge

of how illness could be linked to the unhygienic conditions in the streets.

Hiya.

'And, as I'm about to find out,

'the tools and techniques used to treat illness were just as filthy and dangerous.'

What chance did medieval medicine have of curing what ails you?

Mmm, not very good - it depends how ill you were.

If I went to a medieval doctor,

what principles would they use

to treat me? Firstly, it's to get things OUT of the body.

For example, if you had a very bad eye infection, what I would do is,

I'd get dry dog poo, grind it up, put it in a piece of folded paper and literally blow it into your eye.

We believe this would irritate the eye,

make the eye water, and bring out all the impurities of the eye at the same time, so cure the eye.

So the idea is to remove these evil things from your body.

What other kind of techniques would they use?

If you suffer from a slight madness, what we would do is, is we'd actually...

Well, get on your knees and I'll show you.

What I'd do is I'd get a knife like this one here,

I would make

a Y-shaped cut into your skull.

We would pare back the skin.

Now, you're quite lucky, that's the only bit that hurts.

'The invisible cause of some illness was put down to evil spirits and called for radical intervention.

'Trepanning, an ancient technique of drilling'

or scraping a hole in the skull, thought to release the spirit, was still practised in medieval times.

'It was more likely to cause a nasty infection and indeed, records detail

'many cases of barber surgeons maiming, or even killing, their patients'

with their questionable techniques.

I'm not looking forward to my treatment.

Imagine I went to a medieval doctor, were they good at diagnosis?

They would do a diagnosis, they would look at you, they would see what's wrong with you,

as like we do nowadays, but for internally, what they would do is, a bit like today,

they'd like a bit of your wee.

Is that an invitation?

Well, if you want to get some,

and then we'll see how you are. I'll be back in a sec.

Sorry, it's not much, you caught me by surprise a bit there.

No, that's fine, that's fine. I'm very pleased, it's clear, that's very good. That is very, very good.

I'd hope so. But I am a bit concerned about the colour.

Really? Yes. It's golden!

I find that, to me it's got a green tinge. What?

If you hold up the jar, I would look at the colour and decide how well or unwell you are.

The darker it is, the more unhealthy you are.

Basically there'd be a lot of blood in the urine, and at that point,

you'd be very, very unwell, and what you need to do is to be bled. You're a sadist.

I think this is really taking the idea of getting things out of me to the extreme.

You'd be bled at least once a year, if you're high ranking, because it was felt it was good for you.

Several leeches were typically applied to the prescribed body part,

and each leech can absorb four to six times its own body weight in human blood.

No wonder they only feed about once a year. Is it hungry?

Yes, it should be hungry.

I'm sure it's in my head, but I can sort of...

I'm imagining it just draining all the blood out of my arm.

Such was their enthusiasm for bloodletting that some barber surgeons used knifes,

and sometimes accidentally cut into arteries and killed their patients.

Eventually the authorities stepped in. That is really

wriggling around now, it's having a great feed at my expense.

Master surgeons were ordered to oversee their juniors

in cases where their clients were in peril of death.

Even so, records show barber surgeons continued to kill and maim their patients.

14th century England was a pretty dangerous place - the average

life expectancy was 35, so at 31 years old, I wouldn't have much time left.

There was a lack of understanding about hygiene and medicine and filth everywhere.

People found it hard to even work out what the problem was, let alone come up with any solutions.

It would only take one more ingredient to tip London over the edge into total catastrophe.

By the middle of the 14th century, London was as densely-populated as it had ever been.

The authorities' attempts to clean up were piecemeal, reactive

or, all too often, simply ignored.

Despite the squalor, London continued to boom.

Since the Norman conquest, international trade had expanded, and so too had the city.

The port of London went into overdrive.

In one year alone, the records show that 20,000 tonnes - that's about

18 million litres of wine - were imported here.

To meet this bulging demand, new and bigger merchant ships were built.

And of course, as fast as London grew, so did the rubbish and filth.

But in the docks, resourceful Londoners found a use for it.

With all that merchandise getting shifted, space on the docks really was at a premium.

Then the merchants came up with an idea that solved two of London's

most pressing problems - that lack of space and the over-abundance of waste.

They drove piles out there, in the river, boarded them up and filled up this space with thousands of tonnes

of London's waste, thereby reclaiming land that could be used as walks, sometimes stretching

as far as 100 metres out into the river.

London became bigger and busier than ever.

London's port was flooded with goods and people from around the world,

which was great for business, but left London wide open to other less desirable visitors.

When reports of a terrible disease spreading across Western Europe

reached Britain, international trade continued virtually unchecked.

And filthy London was defenceless against a new and deadly import.

The rubbish-filled streets may have been wretched for humans, but they were paradise for these.

Rats pretty much had the run of the place.

Black rats are different from their modern brown cousins, who like the low life.

These black Asian rats were tree dwellers, and they liked to climb.

Preferring the high life, these rats moved into the rafters of houses, along with their fleas.

And in the autumn of 1348, they brought with them an epidemic

so catastrophic it would ultimately redefine the political and social structure of the entire country.

In busy London, they were brought in to close contact with humans, rich and poor alike.

Records show that very near this spot, the artist John De Mims lived

with his wife Matilda and his daughters Isabella and Alice.

They would have been completely unaware

that their furry house guests were more than an inconvenience,

because circulating in their blood was one of the deadliest bacteria known to man, Yersinia pestis,

the bubonic plague.

As the rats succumbed to disease, their resident fleas hopped off

to find a new home, with devastating effect,

because a single flea carries around 100 plague bacteria in its guts.

One bite can be lethal.

London and the De Mims soon found themselves in the grip of a cataclysmic plague.

On 19th of March 1349, just five months into the plague epidemic,

he decided to prepare for the worst, and wrote a will in which he left all his property to his wife.

The bubonic plague is still deadly today.

As many as 3,000 cases are reported worldwide every year.

Scientists are still struggling to defeat this age-old enemy.

This is the Ministry of Defence's state-of-the-art, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory.

Behind these two-metre thick concrete walls,

lie some of the deadliest microorganisms on the planet.

Bubonic plague is so lethal that this is one of only a handful

of labs anywhere in the world that's secure enough to study it.

Here, I'm about two metres away from Petra, who's working on it now, and it's very sobering being this close.

She's holding it up to the window now.

It's amazing to think that even though this

is one of the most sophisticated containment facilities in the world, I'm still feeling this nervous.

Back then, of course, there wouldn't have been these walls

and these doors separating me from that disease.

Back then, it was on your street, it was in your house and it was killing members of your family.

To give me an idea

of the extreme precautions that are taken when handling the plague,

I've been allowed into an ultra-secure lab.

So the last time I touched a Petri dish was when I did GCSE chemistry, and that was a long time ago.

I never thought that my pursuit of history would take me to a high-security

military technology lab, dealing with dangerous pathogens.

But Yersinia pestis is far too dangerous for an amateur like me to get anywhere near.

That's E-coli there?

That's E-coli, and plague looks a bit like that. It's a relative of E-coli.

Really? A bit of a bad boy, though.

It's worse than E-coli? Just a bit worse.

And you wouldn't let me touch plague like this? No.

Say a healthy person develops plague, what happens to them and how quickly does it happen?

Bubonic plague, so that's after you've been bitten by an infected flea, after several days

you would develop the bubo, which is a swelling of the lymph node draining the site of the bite.

Bubonic plague gets its name from the bubos, or pus-filled swellings which form at the lymph node

nearest to the site of a bite from an infected flea.

But it would come to be known by a simpler name - the Black Death.

Why was it known as the Black Death? There's so many bacteria in the blood that your body can't cope with it,

and it triggers coagulation in the blood vessels, and that tends to collect at the fingers and toes.

It takes about two weeks for bubonic plague to kill its victims.

But the bacteria can go airborne

and go straight into someone else's lungs.

That's called pneumonic plague, and it's much more deadly.

Trouble is, before the study of microbiology, no-one knew how it spread

or how to deal with it, as records from later outbreaks show.

Pneumonic plague has a death rate of 100%.

Everybody dies. If you had one case in the house, they would shut the house up.

So it wasn't a case of saying goodbye to your father and leaving because you were healthy.

You had to be locked in the house with this person that you know is your death sentence.

Why do you crazy people keep things like plague?

Why not just destroy it all?

You need to understand your enemy, so we spend a lot of time here understanding plague, understanding

how it causes disease, so we can test antibiotics. And there's a need for a vaccine.

The only way you can protect large populations of people, really, is with a vaccine.

We are just as vulnerable to plague now as we've ever been?

As individuals, yes.

I would hope that in the developed world we would be somewhat better equipped than medieval London,

although the impact would still be massive if you had a similar outbreak like you had in the 1300s.

Seven centuries later, we're still working on a vaccine that's effective against the plague.

14th century medicine stood no chance.

Three weeks after Mims wrote his will, he was dead.

When his widow came to make her will, she made no mention of her

two daughters, and we can only assume that they too had perished.

Swift, virulent and incurable, the Black Death wiped out entire families in days.

In London's dirty, overcrowded streets, the spread was irresistible.

The city's authorities were powerless to contain the outbreak.

All they could do was try to deal with the accelerating death toll.

Contemporary accounts reported that over 200 bodies a day were being buried.

The Black Death gripped London for up to two years.

It claimed the lives of half the city's population, maybe as many as 50,000 people.

With half its workforce gone and a third of its civic government wiped out,

you might think that London would have descended into total chaos.

But in fact, something quite surprising happened.

One of the most revealing insights into the way

London's authorities coped with the epidemic, was the way

they dealt with the huge number of dead.

Wow. So this is a plague victim, is it, Jelena?

This skeleton is a male skeleton,

and he was found from East Smithfield,

which is the catastrophe cemetery

just near the Tower of London. It's a unique site, there isn't another site

like it in Great Britain, and it's because it has such tightly-dated parameters

for 1348/1350, that we know the individuals buried there died from the plague.

So this was a special cemetery just for plague victims?

It was, yes. It was actually planned and thought out and prepared in trying to cope with the amount

of people that were dying so quickly. So how exactly were they all buried?

There were individual burials, and then also there were these mass trenches,

that were very long lines, and within that you had people that were just neatly placed out in rows.

In the spaces in between the adults, they often would find children.

The people, as they were buried, were in the orientation that we would expect, on an east to west,

very carefully, in nice, neat rows, and not just thrown in rather randomly, as you would think,

when you were faced with a catastrophe like that and people are dying very, very quickly.

You imagine the plague as sort of anarchy or social breakdown,

but it sounds to me like if they're setting aside bits of land,

digging neat trenches, that someone's still in charge, that the systems are in place?

Yeah, it is remarkable, because if we think of the amount of people

that were dying, the rapidity of it, everything really is sort of falling apart almost,

but they were able to carry on,

put things into place, prepare an area and try to cope with all of those people dying, and so quickly.

It's very sobering. It makes you think whether modern government,

even with all its resources would be able to cope in the same way.

Yes, I'm not quite sure whether they would. I always hope they would.

They don't like an inch of snow, do they?

It seems the city strove to bury its dead with dignity, even during the horror of the plague years.

This refusal to submit is an indication of 14th century Londoners' astonishing resilience.

The city kept going, in some ways, it was reborn.

The records show that despite devastating fatalities,

the growing civil service managed to hold things together.

This magnificent guildhall was built just after the plague,

by the government of London, to show off their power and prestige.

London was beginning to function like a proper city.

The number of civil servants tripled from just eight

at the start of the 1300s,

earning a total of £20 per year,

to 24, with an annual income of up to £200, by the following century.

With a bigger, better-funded civil service,

looking after a greatly-reduced population,

London's government launched an all-out assault on the city's grime.

The plague had focused Londoners' minds on the filth around them.

A link between dirt and disease was made, even if it was understood from a distinctly medieval point of view.

The foul smells themselves, evil miasmas, were thought to be the cause of sickness.

Taking no chances after the catastrophic scale of the plague, London began to clean up its act.

The role of Sergeant of the Channels was created, the first civil servant charged with keeping the city clean.

The number of city cleaners was ramped up, and the fine for illegally dumping waste

shot up to a staggering £20, the equivalent of over £10,000 today.

It didn't happen overnight, but a cleaner London was beginning to emerge.

But most crucially of all, a new civic pride was borne on London's grimy streets.

People were learning that co-operation and collective action

were a necessity of urban life, and the arrival of one man would come to encapsulate the idea

of common good that was penetrating to the heart of London's government.

When Dick Whittington first arrived in London, he was a young man

with one thing on his mind - making lots of money.

And indeed, he did make a fortune in filthy London and became lord mayor three times.

But he also embodies the new collective, responsible spirit

of the age which followed the catastrophe of the plague.

He spent his life supporting charitable works.

He founded this church, for example.

And when he died, he left nearly all of his money to improving the city,

building free toilets for the public to use, and hospitals for the poor.

In the mid-20th century, they tried to dig up his body, which was buried in this church.

And they discovered no body.

What they did find was a mummified cat.

'And the legacy lives on.'

First formed in the medieval period, the governing body of the square mile

is the City of London Corporation, the oldest of its kind in the world.

And one of its key roles has always been organising the collection and disposal of its citizens' waste.

I've tried to catch a glimpse, and hopefully that's all I've caught,

of how the muck and grime that nearly destroyed London

seven centuries ago, in fact laid the foundations on which the modern metropolis was built.

Rubbish then, like now, was taken outside the city and disposed of away from the homes of Londoners.

It's amazing to think that so much of London's waste is still moved in an organised way by river.

It's a system that really is the descendant of the 14th century's fight against filth.

And it's this ability to co-operate and take collective action, even in the face of a catastrophe

like the plague, that would prove vital to the expansion of urban life.

And London, once a filthy city, would in time become the centre

of the richest and most powerful empire in history,

and remains to this day, one of the greatest cities on earth.

Next time on Filthy Cities, revolutionary Paris.

Just 200 years ago, Paris was famously one of the foulest and smelliest cities in Europe.

I'll be sniffing out the rotten story of how filth and squalor drove Parisians to revolution.

I'll experience the most stinking of Paris' gruelling industries,

recreate the foul smell that choked the streets,

and come face to face with the ultimate killing machine. Yikes!

All to understand how ordinary Parisians fought to clean up their ancient cesspit from the bottom up.

And you can join me in my immersive journey online.

You can find out where to get your scratch and sniff card,

then you'll be able to really experience stinky Paris during its most disgusting period in history.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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