Before the printed page reached ordinary people, the news had a voice, a uniform, and a bell. The town crier, or bellman, was the official mouthpiece of the market square: he rang a heavy handbell to gather a crowd, called out “Oyez! Oyez!”, and then read aloud the proclamations of the Crown, the orders of the local authorities, the times of markets, the announcements of sales, and the plain news of the day. In a society where most people could not read, the crier was not merely a herald of information; in a real sense, he was the news.
The office was old, traceable in Britain at least to the medieval period, and it carried genuine authority. The crier spoke in the name of the monarch or the town, and that borrowed authority was protected by law: to assault or obstruct a crier, who might be delivering unwelcome news of taxes or conscription, could be treated as an offense against the Crown itself. He wore a distinctive livery, often a coat, breeches, tricorn hat, and white gloves, marking him as a figure of office rather than a mere shouter in the street, and his cry, accompanied by the bell, was a recognized legal act of publication.
The related practice of “posting” survived alongside the spoken word. Notices were nailed to the door of the church, the market cross, or the inn, the physical ancestor of the modern term to “post” a message. But for the majority who could not read those papers, it was the crier’s voice that mattered, and the same words were both cried in the square and posted on the door.
The trade was undone by literacy and cheap print. As schooling spread and the cost of newspapers and broadsheets collapsed through the 19th century, especially after Britain abolished the newspaper stamp duty in 1855 and a flood of penny papers followed, the crier’s monopoly on reaching the public dissolved. People could now read the news for themselves, in their own time, and later the telegraph and broadcasting finished the job. The crier did not vanish so much as retire into ceremony, surviving today purely as a civic and festive figure rather than a working channel of information.
In Georgian and Victorian Britain, when rats infested homes, granaries, sewers, and ships in numbers no one could ignore, the answer was a freelance specialist with a sack, a few terriers, and a pocketful of ferrets. The rat-catcher was hired by households, farms, warehouses, and parishes to clear out vermin, and he did it with a hands-on repertoire that mixed cunning, showmanship, and real physical courage. He set traps, sent ferrets into burrows, loosed dogs, and, notoriously, caught rats alive with his bare hands, building a trade out of an animal everyone else loathed.
The emblematic figure is Jack Black, who styled himself “rat and mole destroyer to Her Majesty,” cut a flamboyant figure in a homemade uniform with a sash of cast-iron rats, and was interviewed by the journalist Henry Mayhew for his great survey of the metropolitan poor, “London Labour and the London Poor.” Black caught rats for government departments and the royal parks, sold live rats to the pits where dogs were timed killing them for sport and gambling, and, in a curious sideline, bred unusually coloured rats and sold them as pets to ladies, helping to start the fancy-rat hobby almost by accident.
The work was dangerous and dirty. Rat-catchers were bitten constantly, risked serious infection including what is now called Weil’s disease, and handled home-brewed poisons, often arsenic-based, that could sicken or kill the catcher as readily as the rat. Each practitioner guarded his own secret lures and mixtures, and the trade had more in common with a folk craft passed between individuals than with any organized profession.
The rat-catcher was not so much exterminated as absorbed. Germ theory and the great Victorian public-health reforms reframed rats as a disease vector and made their control a matter of municipal sanitation, sewers, and law rather than freelance heroics. Regulated commercial rodenticides, and from 1950 the safer anticoagulant warfarin, replaced secret arsenic recipes; licensing and the rise of a professional pest-control industry did the rest. The colourful freelancer with his ferrets and terriers gave way to the uniformed technician with a clipboard, and the trade survives, transformed, as modern pest control.
For most of the nineteenth century, a substantial fraction of European medicine ran on a small black worm pulled out of a pond by a person standing waist-deep in cold water. The medicinal leech, Hirudo medicinalis, was the living instrument of bloodletting — the centuries-old practice of drawing blood to rebalance the body’s “humors” — and demand for it became so enormous that an entire rural trade grew up to supply it. The leech collector, or leech gatherer, was the person at the bottom of that supply chain: usually poor, often a woman, frequently working alone in marshland for a pittance per dozen.
The method was as direct as it was grim. Collectors waded into ponds, ditches, and slow streams in the warm months, exposing their bare legs as bait. Leeches, drawn to the warmth and movement, fastened on and began to feed; the collector let them attach, then pried them loose and dropped them into a damp cloth bag or a water-filled jar. A good gatherer might come home with several dozen worms and legs covered in slow, leaking bites, because a leech secretes an anticoagulant (hirudin) that keeps a wound bleeding long after the animal lets go.
The trade peaked during a period sometimes called the “leech mania,” driven above all by the French physician Francois-Joseph-Victor Broussais, who taught that nearly all disease was inflammation to be drained by leeches. At the height of the craze France imported leeches by the tens of millions in a single year — figures of roughly 33 to 42 million were reported in the early 1830s — and a Manchester infirmary alone is documented using around 50,000 leeches in 1831. Wild populations across Ireland, England, Wales, and the Low Countries were collected toward local extinction, which in turn forced the rise of deliberate leech “farming.”
William Wordsworth had already memorialized the figure in his 1802 poem “Resolution and Independence,” whose aged leech-gatherer wanders the moors as the ponds empty and “his body bent double” by a lifetime of stooping in the water. By the time the craze faded, the gatherer was already a symbol of obsolescence — a person whose entire livelihood depended on a medical theory that was about to be abandoned.
In late-Georgian Britain, the anatomy schools that trained the nation’s surgeons had a problem they could not legally solve: they needed dead bodies, and the law allowed them almost none. The only fully lawful source of cadavers for dissection was the corpses of executed murderers, handed over under the Murder Act of 1752 as an added punishment. But executions were comparatively few while medical schools, especially in London and Edinburgh, were expanding fast and needed hundreds of bodies a year for teaching.
Into that gap stepped the resurrectionists — also called “resurrection men” or body snatchers. Working at night in small gangs, they dug up the freshly buried dead and sold them to anatomists. A legal quirk made the trade attractive: a corpse was held to be no one’s property, so stealing a body itself was not a felony but at most a misdemeanour. The shrouds, coffins, and grave goods were property and could not be touched; the naked body could. Gangs learned to lift a corpse cleanly and leave the grave clothes behind precisely to stay on the lighter side of the law.
The public response was fear and fury. Bereaved families and churchyards defended their dead with mortsafes (heavy iron cages over graves), watch-towers, hired guards, iron coffins, and burial clubs that paid for vigilance through the dangerous first weeks of decay. The trade poisoned the ordinary grief of burial with the knowledge that a fresh grave was a target.
Then the trade tipped into murder. In Edinburgh in 1828, William Burke and William Hare bypassed the graveyard entirely and simply killed people to sell, suffocating around sixteen victims for the anatomist Robert Knox. In London in 1831, the “London Burkers” — Bishop, Williams, and Head — murdered to order in the “Italian Boy” case. The horror these crimes produced was the political force that ended the trade by law.