Lives Before Ours

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15 films, 1250 BC – 1850s

Ordered the way the centuries ran. Each entry opens onto that film’s chapters and the sources it was built from.

Antiquity

6 films·1250 BC – AD 120

The oldest world we can still read directly, and it is far better documented than it looks: an attendance register kept in two colours of ink outside Thebes, marble building accounts from the Athenian acropolis, a birthday invitation written on birch wood at a fort in northern Britain, and a town buried with its election notices still on the walls.

Thebes, 1250 BC — an illustration made for this film. 1250 BC

The Village of the Tomb-Makers

Thebes·City film In the fortieth year of Ramesses the Great, a scribe in a walled village outside Thebes wrote forty names down a piece of limestone in black ink — and beside each one, in red, the reason that man had not come to work. 2:46:53 Athens, 430 BC — an illustration made for this film. 430 BC

The Golden Age of Pericles

Athens·City film In the summer of 430 BC, the Parthenon was two years old. There were farmers asleep in the colonnades at the foot of the hill it stood on, and they had been there for more than a year. 2:52:04 Pompeii, AD 79 — an illustration made for this film. AD 79

The Other Three Thousand Days

Pompeii·City film Everything about Pompeii gets told through one afternoon in the year 79. This is about the other three thousand days. 2:43:57 Vindolanda, Britannia, c. AD 100 — an illustration made for this film. c. AD 100

Claudia Severa’s Invitation

Vindolanda, Britannia·Single subject In Roman Britain around AD 100, a woman named Claudia Severa wrote a birthday invitation in her own hand — and the wood survived. 2:17:15 The Roman empire, 1st–2nd c. AD — an illustration made for this film. 1st–2nd c. AD

An Afternoon at the Baths

The Roman empire·Single subject The Roman bath has come down to us as a symbol of cleanliness. The reality, read from the ruins of Pompeii and the curse tablets of Bath, is murkier — the same warm water, used by hundreds through the day and changed only rarely. 1:49:14 Rome, AD 120 — an illustration made for this film. AD 120

The City of Hadrian

Rome·City film Most Romans slept four or five floors above the street, in a room with no kitchen, no chimney and no water. The building might burn down. It might simply fall down. 3:10:39

The Middle Ages

4 films·1250s – 14th–17th c.

Cities that counted everything and wrote most of it down. These films are built from coroners’ rolls and assize records, guild statutes and street cries, manorial accounts — and, increasingly, from the rubbish pits and the bones underneath them.

Paris, 1250s — an illustration made for this film. 1250s

The City of Saint Louis

Paris·City film The first sound of a Paris morning in 1256 was a man walking the streets shouting that the baths were hot. 2:57:17 An English village, c. 1300 — an illustration made for this film. c. 1300

What They Actually Ate

An English village·Single subject The history books promised them grey gruel and little else. What the manor rolls, the rubbish pits, and their own bones actually reveal is a table far richer — and far stranger — than the legend ever allowed. 2:26:56 London, 1340s — an illustration made for this film. 1340s

The Last Ordinary Generation

London·City film It is just before dawn in the London of 1340, the largest city in England — and not one of the tens of thousands waking inside its old Roman walls has ever seen a clock. This is the last ordinary generation before the Black Death, and tonight we walk it slowly, and quietly, until sleep takes you. 2:23:40 London, 14th–17th c. — an illustration made for this film. 14th–17th c.

The Gong Farmer

London·Single subject By law, the work could begin only after nine at night. A small gang would open a brick shaft in a London cellar, light a single candle, and climb down into the dark to empty the house’s cesspit by hand. 2:16:54

The Early Modern World

3 films·1543 – 1700

Parish ledgers, household accounts and printed guides — the century when the paperwork of ordinary life becomes thick enough to follow one woman through a single working Monday, or to price the water arriving in a city of a million people through wooden pipes.

Hampton Court, 1543 — an illustration made for this film. 1543

The King’s Laundress

Hampton Court·Single subject The hidden chemistry behind Tudor laundry — and why Henry VIII’s linen was whiter than anything we wash today. A long, slow documentary on the forgotten science of clean cloth in sixteenth-century England. 3:39:29 London, 1665 — an illustration made for this film. 1665

One Monday in the Plague Summer

London·City film In 1665, during the Great Plague of London, Samuel Pepys called the parish nurses thieves. The records of one Westminster parish say he was wrong. 2:02:44 Edo (Tokyo), 1700 — an illustration made for this film. 1700

The Largest City on Earth

Edo (Tokyo)·City film Edo in 1700 was almost certainly the largest city on earth. A million people, no sewers worth the name, and a warrior class that had not fought a war in eighty-five years. 2:28:58

The Industrial Age

2 films·1841 – 1850s

The era that investigated itself. Parliamentary inquiries, censuses, sanitary reports and cheap newspapers mean the poorest people in these films are frequently speaking under their own names — a nine-year-old collier among them.

Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, 1841 — an illustration made for this film. 1841

Phillip Phillips, Witness No. 43

Merthyr Tydfil, Wales·Single subject On a single afternoon in 1841, a Welsh inspector found a 9-year-old boy named Phillip Phillips sitting alone in a coal mine, his face scarred from a fire he’d survived a year earlier — and he was still working. 2:32:22 London, 1850s — an illustration made for this film. 1850s

The City of the Great Exhibition

London·City film In 1847, the poorest Londoners had between 52 and 175 cubic feet of air each. Prison regulations of the same decade required a thousand. 2:53:27