The Sexual History of London (6 page)

The milder-sounding ‘ducking' or gagging stool, where the miserable villain was dipped only in water, was not really preferable: although in theory the miscreant was dipped only two or three times to the point of suffocation, many mistakes were made, ending with the occupant of the chair being drowned, either by accident or intentionally.
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Then there was the ‘thew', a special type of pillory like an upright crucifix, into which the victim's head and wrists were locked. For an hour or two, this could be tolerated as a punishment by ridicule. But it developed into an instrument of torture, with victims being locked in the apparatus for days. While friends and relations might feed the victim, others would pelt him with bricks, stones, rotten vegetables and dung. The victims would inevitably defecate where they stood, fully clothed, to their infinite humiliation. Compared with this, the stocks, where only the legs were locked up, was comparatively tame.

At the very least, prostitutes did not escape being whipped at the cart's arse, paraded through the streets and imprisoned in Newgate gaol, while their pimps received comparatively light sentences. One such was William de Dalton, imprisoned in 1338 for keeping a house of assignation in the city. Within two months, his influential friends had obtained his release, allowing him to set up shop elsewhere.
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In the same year, Robert de Stratford, a cordwainer who belonged to a powerful guild (a tradesmen's organization), was charged with living off the immoral earnings of Alice Donbelly and Alice Tredewedowe and others. He agreed to be tried by jury, and was fined six shillings and eightpence, a comparatively small amount. His guild was no doubt influential in saving him from the humiliation and embarrassment of the common pimp's punishment: being whipped at the cart's arse and put in the stocks.
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Criminal prosecution seemed to have little effect on the flourishing trade. More brothel districts sprang up north-west of the city, including Moorgate, Cripplegate, Holborn, Shoe Lane, Fleet Street and Chancery Lane. In January 1340, one Gilbert le Strengmakere, along with Margery de Wantynge, Isabella Actone, Joseph Sewy and his concubine Salerna Livynge were charged with keeping disorderly houses and harbouring prostitutes and men of ill fame.
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The same charge sheet features two sisters, Agnes and Juliana, who were apprehended running a house of ill repute in Holborn, and Agnes, widow of Robert-at-Hale, for letting a house in Shoe Lane to ‘a woman of bad character'.
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One intriguing aspect of these documents is that many of the prostitutes have unusual names: for every Agnes or Alice, there was a Juliana or a Salerna. It was the custom for whores to use assumed names, partly to protect their identities and partly to make them appear more exotic. ‘Ionette' was in fact ‘Janet', from the stews of Southwark, while the exotic-sounding Petronella doubtless began life with a more sober moniker. Petronella was a favourite name with prostitutes for centuries.

Surnames were also adaptable. At this period, many people did not possess a specific surname, so the authorities would invent one. Some anonymous clerk of the charge sheet has given us the memorable Alice Strumpette (in order to distinguish her from other, law-abiding, Alices) and the delightful Clarice la Claterballock, whose speciality consisted of clattering her clients' ‘ballocks', conjuring up a vivid mental image of her particular technique.
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These records also remind us of the darker side of the criminal underworld and go some way to explaining why the authorities were so keen to crack down on prostitution. At Christmas 1339 an unpleasant incident occurred at the home of Ellen de Evesham, who kept a disorderly house just off Fleet Street. That week, ‘certain foreigners from her house attacked a man who was passing along the highway with a light, bound and beat him up, and carried him to the said Ellen's house while she was present, with a lighted candle in her hand.'
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As well as this form of violence (which appears to have been an abduction or punishment for a client who had reneged on his payment), other aspects of the dark side of the trade emerge. Prostitutes have been mistreated by their pimps and madams from time immemorial; what is perhaps less well known is that such households contain other victims of abuse. How else to explain the curious story of one John Bunny, whose case came up in 1366? Bunny had been sold, with his master's estate, to Joan Hunt, who kept a brothel on the far side of London Bridge. Joan had set him to hard work, treated him badly and starved him, and, through this hard labour, Bunny had developed physical injuries, probably a hernia. When Bunny complained, Joan's lover, Bernard, physically assaulted him. When Bunny fell ill, she turned him out on the streets to starve. It is not known what punishment Joan received for her harsh treatment, but, mercifully, the story has a happy ending. The judge was so appalled by Bunny's condition that he set him free.
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Another grim aspect of prostitution comes to light with an account from 1438, when a woman called Margaret was charged with: ‘Procuring a young girl named Isabel Lane for certain Lombards and men unknown; which Isabel was deflowered against her will in Margaret's house and elsewhere, for certayne sums of money which Margaret collected, and then afterwards took the girl over to the common stews on the banks of the Thames in Surrey against her will for immoral purposes with a certain gentleman on four occasions against her will'.
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Margaret was a real hard case. In the same indictment she was also charged with taking a girl named Joan Wakelyn to a house in the parish of St Katherine Coleman as agreed with ‘a certain important Lombard' who paid Joan 12d. For her ‘wicked and unlawful behaviour', Joan had to give Margaret 4d from her earnings. And in turn Joan pimped Margaret, taking her, at dark, to the home of a ‘very prodigal Venetian'. The report concludes that ‘both women for a long time taking no thought for the safety of their souls had carried on this base and detestable manner of life…'
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Another explanation for the authorities clamping down on prostitution and other forms of lawlessness was the fear of imminent revolt. Among the disenchanted masses, political dissent was on the rise. Brothels, taverns and even church crypts proved handy meeting places for the disillusioned peasantry; largely illiterate, they could at least foment opinion, share their views and make plans for revolt, aided and abetted by organizers such as John Ball, the worker priest who preached equality for all men with the slogan ‘When Adam dalf and Eve span, Wo was thane a gentilman?'
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Unlike the prostitutes, whose ultimate goal was to earn a crust and eventually retire, these were potential revolutionaries, many of them former soldiers who had served in the Hundred Years War and remembered the horrors of the conflict, as described by Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘the thousand carrion corpses lying in the bushes with their throats slit, the towns burnt to the ground with nothing left standing'.
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They had arms in their cottages and they knew how to use them. They were violent agitators, who represented a real danger to the king.

But, before the rebels could organize sufficiently to overthrow the government, the land was plunged into crisis by a far more terrifying adversary than a crew of political agitators. The Black Death made its inexorable progress through England, Scotland and Wales, as vividly described by the Welsh poet Jeuan Gethin (died 1349):

The Black Death, which killed about half the population of England and one third to half of the population of London alone, inspired utter terror and desperation. Whilst one might be tempted to conclude that it also killed off sexual desire and put a temporary end to prostitution, nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of repressing desire, the Black Death created an extraordinary mood of sexual profligacy, with victims and potential victims giving themselves over to pleasure, despite the fact that crowding into taverns and brothels inevitably caused the plague to spread faster.

Many believed that victims of venereal disease could not catch the plague; others, that sexual intercourse prevented it. An obsession with marriage developed, with widows and widowers rushing to the altar while they still had the chance. And, since an urban myth sprang up that sex with a prostitute actually guaranteed immunity from this plague, trade had never been better.

Members of the oldest profession displayed a similar resilience in 1381, when years of unrest and economic decline following the Black Death finally culminated in the Peasants' Revolt. When the rebel leaders, Wat Tyler, Jack Straw and John Ball, arrived in Southwark preparing to march on London, they ‘despoyled' a brothel in the neighbourhood run by a Flemish woman (who leased the house from Walworth, the mayor of London). This was despite the fact that these institutions provided the only possible income for many of their ‘sisters'. The whores were not to be out-done, however. Just as, centuries later, such women threw in their lot with the French and Russian revolutionaries, the girls of the Bankside immediately grasped the potential of such a mass uprising. When, the following morning, on the feast of Corpus Christi, the rebels surged peacefully across London Bridge and into the city, the whores marched alongside them, offering comfort and support as they threw open the prisons. The revolt concluded in tragedy, of course. Richard II, having promised the rebels a pardon, arranged a meeting the following day with Wat Tyler at Smithfield; when he arrived, Tyler was seized and stabbed to death by Mayor Walworth, the latter receiving a knighthood for this act of betrayal.

As a response to the revolt, the climate of public tolerance towards all so-called sex crimes quickly began to erode. The streets teemed with spies, ready to apprehend ‘strollers' and any woman who was not either handsome or rich enough to bribe the authorities to turn a blind eye was carted through the streets and publicly humiliated with great pomp and ceremony, her hair shorn as pipes and trumpets belted out. Later that same year, when John Kempe and Isabelle Smythe were found guilty of adultery, they were taken to the mayor's court and charged a heavy fine.
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In another move to control the sex trade, a new dress code was enforced, designed to distinguish ‘ladies' from ‘women'. Just as the Roman whore was officially banned from wearing the
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of her respectable counterpart, so ‘women' were informed that they must not ape the dress of their female betters. ‘No such lewd [proletarian] woman shall be so daring as to be attired either by day or night in any kind of vesture trimmed with fur such as miniver, grey work [badger], squirrel, or any other manner of noble budge [fur] or lined with sendale, bokerames, samytes [rich silk] or any other noble lining, on pain of forfeting the said vestments.' Instead, they were ordered to wear a hood of ray (striped cloth) and plain undecorated clothes, ‘that all folks native and strangers may have knowledge of what rank they are'.
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As Burford notes, this early form of apartheid operated for another couple of centuries and served to safeguard the status quo by prescribing in minute detail what might be worn by the nobility and the lower orders.

Despite the income derived from prostitution, the ecclesiastical authorities felt compelled to crack down on the sex trade, as did a succession of reigning monarchs. Henry V attempted to abolish the stews in a fit of self-righteous bigotry, while his son, Henry VI, ordered a commission of inquiry in 1460, during one of his last periods of lucidity before succumbing to insanity. The report of this commission of inquiry concluded that the stews were a social menace and attracted violent antisocial behaviour: ‘the number of prostitutes in Southwark and other places adjacent' caused ‘many homicides, plundering and improprieties' which the ecclesiastical authorities were incapable of containing.
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Within a year of this inquiry, Henry VI was dead, murdered in the Tower of London, and his son Edward IV, the pleasure-loving ‘sun in splendour', took the throne. And once again, London's moral climate changed.

It is tempting to regard this period as a grim catalogue of cruelty and abuse, but it is worth reminding ourselves that not every good-time girl came to a bad end. Indeed, many ‘whores', amateur and professional, made enough of a success of their life on the game to retire and enjoy a healthy, wealthy old age. Their stories are untold: personal discretion, lack of historical records and the fact that until recently the lives of women were not considered worth recording account for this. But one documented case is the story of London's first courtesan, Jane Shore, ‘harlot and heroine', mistress of Edward IV, victim of Richard III, and resourceful survivor of one of the darkest periods of English history.
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Jane was not potential harlot material. Born Elizabeth Jane Lambert in 1445 to the London merchant John Lambert and his wife, Amy, Jane seemed destined to become a prosperous nonentity. She was married ‘ere she were ripe', to a goldsmith, Matthew Shore, who was considerably older, but the marriage was not a success. According to Sir Thomas More, Jane was ‘not very fervently loved by her husband' and the marriage was eventually annulled on the grounds of his impotence.
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Petite, curvy and round-faced, Jane was celebrated more for her personality and wit than her looks. But it was not long before she caught the eye of the king, Edward IV, and became his mistress. Edward was married, of course, and had a selection of mistresses, but his wife, Elizabeth Woodville (another great survivor), accepted her as the king's chief mistress, and it is at this period that she took the name ‘Jane', to appease Elizabeth and avoid confusion with the queen. Jane's status changed with the death of Edward IV in 1483 and the accession of Richard III, who promptly consigned her to the Tower of London. Accused of being a harlot, Jane was sentenced by the Bishop of London to perform the traditional penance for that offence: she had to walk barefoot through the streets from St Paul's in a procession led by a choir and a priest carrying a cross. Dressed only in her petticoats with her hair hanging down, she carried a lit candle and had to endure the attentions of a noisy and ogling crowd, something which she managed with great dignity. She won over the onlookers with her ‘womanliness and patience' during this ordeal. Following her penance, Jane was incarcerated in Ludgate prison, where she met the king's solicitor, Thomas Lyneham, who was so smitten that he proposed to her.