CHAPTER 41
You Sexy Thing
Sex, in the city, has commonly been associated with dirt and disease; if not with these, then with trade. The resemblance exists even within the language itself; “hard core” is a term conventionally applied to pornography but its original meaning, in a London context, was that of “hard, rock-like rubbish” used in the building of roads and houses. Where there is rubbish, there is also death. The area around the Haymarket, a notorious haunt of prostitutes, encompasses “a march of the dead. It is a plague-spot-the real plague spot.”
From its earliest days London has been the site of sexual activity. A Roman model of a phallus was found in Coleman Street-later, paradoxically, a haven for Lollards and Puritans-as well as an architrave depicting three prostitutes. In the precincts of the Roman temple, where Gracechurch Street and Leadenhall Street now are, there would have been erotic celebrations connected with Saturn or Priapus, and beside the amphitheatre on the present site of the Guildhall we might expect to find a palaestra or promenade frequented by male and female prostitutes. There were brothels licensed by the Roman authorities, as well as “fornixes” or arches beneath which were located “mere dirty shacks” employed for the purposes of fornication. E.J. Burford, in his learned London: the Synfulle Citie, has remarked that on certain street corners a “herm” was placed, “a short stone pillar of Hermes” with an erect penis and “prepuce painted a brilliant red.”
Yet the use of arches and brothels meant that, in this most commercial of cities, sex had itself already been commercialised. In the centuries of Danish and Saxon occupation, young women were bought and sold like any other merchandise. “Gif a man buy a mayden with cattle,” according to one Saxon injunction, “let the bargain stand if it be without guile.” A thousand years later an eighteenth-century nursery rhyme contained the line, “I had to go to London town and buy me a wife.” There are supposed to have been auctions for women in certain secret markets, continuing well into the nineteenth century, and the emphasis upon finance is sustained by the enquiry of the late twentieth-century prostitute, “Do you want any business?” So does the spirit of London imprint itself upon the desires of its inhabitants. London is dedicated to selling. But the poor have nothing to sell, so they sell their bodies. Thus, sexual lust is free to roam down every lane and alley. London has always been the scene of covert debauchery.
Those medieval chroniclers who cited London for its drunkenness and sinfulness also rebuked it for its rapists and its lechers, its harlots and its sodomites. In the twelfth century there is reference to Bordhawe, an area of brothels in the parish of St. Mary Colechurch. In the thirteenth century, and probably much earlier, there was a Gropecuntlane in the two parishes of St. Pancras and St. Mary Colechurch (also known as Groppecountelane, 1276 and Gropecontelane, 1279); the context and meaning here are obvious enough. In the same period there are references to Love Lane “where yonge couples were wont to sport” and Maid Lane “so-called of wantons there.”
Beside Smithfields there was also Cock Lane, which in 1241 was “assigned” for sexual congress. It became in a sense the first red-light district, notorious for prostitutes; “at the approach of night they sally forth from their homes … low taverns serve them as a retreat to receive their gallants.” The description was pertinent at any time from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and serves to emphasise how one small area can continue the same activity even as the city changes all around it. That lane was inhabited by the very types of London, such as Mrs. Martha King, “a little fat woman, known last winter by her velvet gown and pettecoat,” Mrs. Elizabeth Brown, “who has been a dealer in cullies [young girls] ever since she was fifteen; modest and pleasant enough, till after the third bottle,” and Mrs. Sarah Farmer, “a great two-handed strapper, having no charms either in person or in humour.” In Piers Plowman (c. 1362) Langland also commemorates “Clarice, of cokkeslane, and the clerke of the cherche.”
In the fourteenth century there are records of proceedings against whores, courtesans and bawds as well as whoremongers. In June 1338 William de Dalton was arrested for “keeping a house of ill fame in which married women and their paramours were wont to resort” and in the following month Robert de Stratford was arraigned for harbouring prostitutes.
In the following year Gilbert le Strengmaker, of Fleet Street, was charged with maintaining “a Disorderly House harbouring prostitutes and sodomites” while at the same sessions two courtesans, “Agnes and Juliana of Holborne,” were also accused of harbouring sodomites. So there was in medieval London a thriving homosexual community, which aligned itself with the world of brothels and bawds. It would be tempting to describe it as an underworld except that it was well known and ubiquitous.
Charges were laid against brothels in the wards of Aldersgate, the Tower, Billingsgate, Bridge (here one prostitute was known as Clarice la Claterballock), Broad Street, Aldgate, Farringdon and elsewhere. Many of those arrested for sexual offences came from areas far from London itself, however, suggesting that the reports of sexual licence-and profit-had spread throughout the country. London had long ago become the centre of England’s sinfulness. A great chronicle of the period, Brut, remarks upon “ladies … waerynge Foxtayles sewed wythynne to hide their arses,” while another reports on the ladies of the town with “breasts and bellies exposed.” There were in fact sumptuary laws which proscribed lewd women from wearing the same clothes as “noble Dames and Damsels of the Realm”; they were obliged to wear striped garments as a sign of their profession, which indirectly suggests the level of tolerance exercised in medieval Catholic London: prostitution was neither banned nor excluded.
The level of vice was in late medieval London far higher, or at least more open, than at any period in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries; it reached such an extent that it provoked alarm among the city authorities who in 1483 published a proclamation against “the Stynkynge and Horrible Synne of Lecherie … which dayly groweth and is used more than in dayes past by the means of Strumpettes, mysguded and idyll women dayly vagraunt.” There were attempts then to remove the “mysguded” from the more respectable thoroughfares of the city, by confining the women to the areas of Smithfield and Southwark beyond the walls. But in Southwark the Bankside brothels south of the river were continually placed in jeopardy by the whims or panics of the authorities, and the women themselves chose to congregate in areas such as St. Giles, Shoreditch (where they still can be seen), and Ave Maria Alley beside St. Paul’s Cathedral. They were also to be found in the Harry in Cheapside, the Bell in Gracechurch Street, and a score of other stews within the city. The derivation of the term “stews” comes not from some reference to cloying meat or hot broth, but from the old French for artificially stocked fishponds-estuier, to shut up. That sense of closeted heat, stew-boiled, was exacerbated by the incidence of syphilis which in the sixteenth century became the object of outrage from moralists and rage from satirists.