Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Medieval Sex Work

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

Despite Christianity coming in hot and heavy in the medieval period, sex work was thriving.In many places it was legal, even.In this second episode in our mini-series exploring sex work through history, Kate is joined by the legend of sex worker history, Ruth Karras.What did a medieval brothel look like? How did sex workers dress? And why does the word 'spinster' mean sex worker?This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You're listening to Betwicks the Sheets. So if this isn't the podcast that you are hoping for, this is your chance to get out now. And if that doesn't convince you that you are now on risky territory,

how about this? This is an adult podcast book by adults to other adults, about adultery things in an adultery way, covering a range of adults subjects, and you should be an adult too. We are actually covering some seriously challenging territory, including sexual violence. So that is your extra fair do's warning to the fair do's warning.

And if that doesn't convince you that this is a podcast to be handled delicately, then I don't know what will. Right, if there's anybody still listening. Is anyone still out there? Okay, I'm still here. Let's get on with the show. Have you ever been to a medieval brothel? I don't suppose you have.

Well, today is your lucky day, listeners. It is 1407, and I have popped over to southern France where sex work was completely legal and brothels were licensed. That was actually the state of things across the medieval world. In this brothel, which is owned by a madam called Janetta, we have got migrants, we've got citizens, we have got the local hoy-polloy,

all sitting around a large table sharing food, wine, and, well, the local sex workers. All lit by a fabulously large iron candelabra. It's pretty vibey, I'm not going to lie. Even the chief of police has stopped by, unofficial business, I'm sure. How do we know about this establishment? How do we know what Genetta kept in her brothel? Because she left us a list.

And how do I know about this? Because today's guest is the goat of medieval sex work historians. So let's grab some wine and find out what life was like back then. What do you look for a man? Oh, money of course. You're supposed to rise when I'm sorry. adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the fun.

Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Jerry. So, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. Sex in the medieval period was a funny one. That's putting it mildly. Mind it was weird wherever you went. It's pretty weird today.

But the medieval people, did have a certain flare all of their own. Very heavily influenced by Christian theology, but also quite permissive and a bit raunchy. How did this impact sex work? How was sex sold in the countryside as well as in the growing cities? Why did sex workers have to wear certain clothes to make them stand out? By law, by the way.

Well, in this second episode of our brand new mini-series, I am joined by the wonderful, the marvellous, Professor Ruth Karas, and she is going to take us Betwixt the Sheets of some medieval sex workers. Let's do it. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Ruth Karas. How are you doing? I'm very well.

I'm really happy to be back again. I had a good time last time. I had so much fun. And you are such a legend when it comes to this particular subject, medieval sexuality and medieval sex work. you are, as the kids would say, the OG, the original gangster. Yeah, I was just saying to my head of department, because I was telling him, I was doing this podcast, and, you know, I wrote this book 30 years ago, and it's still, you know, it's still the thing that people want to talk about.

It's such a brilliant book. The subject of sex work, it's notoriously elusive when you try and study it. Finding the sources is very difficult, and you've absolutely brilliant. blazed a trail in that department. But defining it can be very difficult as well. Like, you go into this stuff thinking, I know what that is. That's somebody that stands on a street corner and hitches their skirt up and says, give you a good time for a shilling governor. And you get into it and you suddenly realize that all the definitions that you think are going to be applicable, suddenly they all start blurring. How did you work with that? What's your

definition of a sex worker or a prostitute? So I did use the word prostitute in the book, although I wouldn't now, but I tried my best to avoid defining it in a medieval context. So I basically said today we think of it as being an explicit exchange of money for sex, but it's not always that. I mean, it's not always explicit. And when it's not explicit, is that sex work or not. In the middle ages, I tried to make the argument that we can't really classify people. I mean, there are some people who you can say, yes, they are sex workers. They're in a brothel and people come there and pay to have sex with them. That's fine.

There are lots of other people who have sex with people they're not married to, and money changes hands. But if you would ask them, they probably wouldn't have considered it work. And I'm speculating on what's going on in their heads. but I don't think that they would have considered it work. And what I did in the book is that rather than use the word prostitute to describe these medieval women, I'll use the word whore as a translation of the Latin word meritrix, which can mean a woman who engages in sex for money or it can mean a woman who engages in sex in a way that I don't approve of. Yes.

And I felt like whore was a pretty good modern translation for that. because it can mean a woman who engages in sex for money, or it can be just a generalized insult for any woman whose sexual activity you don't approve of. And so I think a lot of times when you have a medieval source, you could translate it as condemning prostitution, but you can also translate it as condemning whoredom. And I think there are a lot of women who basically, what I argued in the book,

and I might not take such a strong position on this, now, but there wasn't really very much room in medieval society for a sexually active single woman, okay? Like a single woman was either meant to be married in the future, in which case she was expected to remain chased, or she was expected to become a member of religious order, in which case she would remain chased. And a lot of unmarried women just got labeled as whores because they were sexually active. I mean, the term could also mean sometimes the word concubine is used in English.

That also has a lot of negative connotations, but there are a lot of instances in medieval text where I think the best translation is domestic partner. So it's John Smith and his whore, you know, or John Smith and Elizabeth, his whore, you know, are come into court to be punished. And I think the best translation for that is, you know, his partner. They're not married, but they're living together. And it also captures the level of judgment that was going on there, doesn't it? Which is obviously when you're talking about somebody selling sexual services today in the present

and you recognize autonomy and you'll use a word like sex work, but I think unpicking the language of how this was spoken about is particularly revealing and that in itself can tell us a lot. As you're very well aware, the issue of autonomy and sex work is very much. debated because as people who are not sex workers, it's incumbent on us to let people describe themselves and to act autonomously. But there are also women trafficked into sex work. There are women who are under huge financial pressure. There are women who are in debt to people involved in organized crime and forced into it. So it covers a huge range of kinds of working situations. today, and the ideal would be for all those women and men to have made the choice to go into

that line of work and the ones who say, you know, yes, I made this choice and should be treated properly accordingly, but it's important also to recognize, you know, that it's not always a choice. I think it's completely the same in the Middle Ages. Just about to ask you that. I never talk about the modern period except when I'm going to make a medieval comparison. There is a story from the London court records of a young woman who comes to town and is looking for work as a housemaid and is not able to find it. And she meets a woman who said, oh, I have a really good job for you. And it turns out to be as a sex worker in a brothel.

And, you know, that's one case. There are some other similar ones. but I think that must have gone on a lot. Late medieval Europe especially, it's a very mobile society. And women in particular are drawn to towns. Often their agricultural labor is less well paid than men's. And they go off to town in the hopes of getting domestic work in a great household.

And that doesn't always happen. It still happens today. That's still the case today in a lot of travel. trafficking incidences somebody's promised work and then they sign up for it and then they get there and then the work is in what they were told it was. Then they're told that they're indebted, that they owe them money for their travel and their ticket and their food and they create this sense of indentured servitude. So that hasn't changed since the earliest records of this.

Yeah, I mean, the one thing that has changed, I think that's a complicating factor today is two things. One is drugs. Yes. So that people are made to be dependent, not just, you know, financially, but also for drugs. And also because if you are a trafficked sex worker and you're seeing a large number of customers per day and you're sort of kept imprisoned more or less, you know, it's a horrible life. And drugs are one way of getting out, well, not out, but of alleviating it. And as far as I know, you didn't have that in the Middle Ages. I mean, certainly alcohol. There are examples of women on the street who will basically sell themselves for a farthing cake and a farthing worth of ale.

The sex work today is, as we've just been alleged to, it's a very, very complex experience. And contained within that are the experiences of people who have been abused and trafficked or people that feel they have no other choice, but also people that do want to do this work, people who make good money from it. this is a choice, is what they want to do. Through to now, we've got things like, as you're saying, online expressions, only fans, etc. It's so complex. And although they didn't have the internet in the Middle Ages,

that level of complexity would still have existed through from your royal mistresses right up at the top, who probably wouldn't have said that they were prostities, probably would have taken great offence if you'd said that to them, right down to the people who we've just been discussing. So when you're researching something like that, How do you work with that broader spectrum of different people that you could be talking about? So I was less interested in royal mistresses.

And I kind of let the language used in the sources guide me, which meant that you do end up with the occasional royal mistress because they get called the same words that streetwalkers get called. But I was going mainly on the basis of court records, involved the lower end of society and then also religious texts like sermons, lives of saints, edifying materials. And they are mostly talking about at least the middle levels of society rather than the upper. The other thing is that the Middle Ages, it's a huge amount of history. Yes. In the popular imagination, if you say Middle Ages, I guess people might think of Game of Thrones,

just your average Joe on the street. And you think of the Middle Ages as being this very romanticized, stylized, point in history. But it was a thousand years of history. And when you think about how much sex work, sex work law, how we've understood it, the language around it has changed in the last 20 years, a thousand years. So what time periods were you looking at within that?

It's a lot easier to look at it after the 12th century. in the Middle Ages, and I think this is still true today, it's mainly something that is policed on the municipal level. And so you don't really get that until you get towns. I mean, I'm sure there were peasant women who sold sex, probably not as their sole means of support, but, you know, I'm sure there were. But there weren't, as far as I know, brothels in rural areas and so on. It's with the rise of towns, you get municipalities deciding that control of sex work is a major way that they need to maintain public order. So there's less evidence for rural sex work than there is for urban sex work. How was it being

regulated by the authorities in a town like London or York? What kind of controls were they putting in? And were they putting in controls? Yeah, so in many places in Europe, and it includes several towns in England, not London, not York, Southampton, probably because it was a port. And in London, Southark, which was at that point not part of the city of London, but it was a separate borough, they had legal brothels, which the ones in Southark were owned by the Bishop of Winchester, because it was on his. his land. I love that fact. In Shakespeare, you'll see women who are called Winchester Geese, and those are the sex workers from those brothels. And they drew customers from London and taking customers across the river was major trade. And the bishop didn't manage them. He rented them out and delegated the management, but there is a set of regulations which purports to be

from the 12th century, but it's not. Your book was where I first learned that. It's like, damn up and taken in by a hoax. What is the document, when does it date from? It's from the 15th century, and it's a set of regulations for the brothels in Southwark, and it basically says it regulates, you know, with women are to pay for their food, when they can and can't leave. They're not supposed to have lovers, that is they're not supposed to have men with

whom they have sex for free, I guess. And I think the concern is that the brothel, wants the women to remain under their control rather than to have a man advocating for her or a man profiting from selling her. There are municipal brothels like this. They're not that common in England. They're all over the south of France. They're all over Germany. They exist in Italy. The document creating them in the city of Florence is very interesting because it gives reasons. And the reasons that are usually given are to maintain public order. You know, we're going to restrict sex work to this one area of town, what we would now call the red light district, and so

respectable women can walk around in other parts of town without being harassed. But the one from Florence says they're concerned about the population decline. It had not gone back to its pre-plague levels. and they said, men are getting married too late. And I don't remember the exact phrasing, but it's basically, there's too many men having sex with other men. I remember reading that now. Yes. So we want to, you know, make sure that they, you know, experience the joy of having sex with women. And that way they'll want to get married and have children.

And so they establish a municipal brothel for an opportunity for men to have sex with women. Some mental gymnastics. Yeah, you know, who knows whether that's the real justification or not. But so many, many towns did that. It's to stop men being gay. That's one of the reasons. That's one of the reasons. Yeah.

I love that. The other one is to stop men hitting on respectable women. Of course. We need to draw a line between respectable and non-respectable women. And non-respectable women are fair game. Nobody thought to say to the men, could you stop hitting on women? women that you don't know. That wasn't part of this. Right. Okay. There's a text that's attributed to Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Aquinas actually didn't write it, but he uses the metaphor of a sewer,

you know, and it's what I've called the hydraulic model of male sexuality. So there's this great flow that's being penned up and it has to be released somewhere. And if you don't provide a brothel in which to release this drive, then it's going to be released in worse ways. And he uses the metaphor of a sewer. Nice. The city needs a sewer. You know, it's nasty. You don't want to have it in your house, but you need for there to be one, because if there isn't one, the whole city is going to sting. And so sex workers for him are the sewer. Nice. They sort of absorb all the evil and the sin and bodily fluids. And, you know, that keeps honest women safe.

I'll be back with Ruth after this short break. You see that justification cropping up. I've don't know if Florence is unique for the, there are too many gay men around here. We need a brothel quick. But definitely you see the, well, we need to do something with them because otherwise the men are just going to go mad with lust and we need to protect the good, honest, virtuous women.

Is it true that some sex workers in medieval Europe were made to wear distinctive clothing? Yes. To single them out. that is true. Okay. That is true. Okay, so there's two different things going on. I mean, one is in many places there are sumptuary laws generally which say how expensive of clothing people can wear and mostly women. So only the upper classes are allowed to wear fur. So only the royals are allowed to wear ermine fur. Okay. Okay. The white with the black speckles. And then only the

upper classes are allowed to wear other kinds of fur and so on all the way down. It's justified. in various ways. One is that, so that people will know immediately what quality you are. And it's also justified in terms of waste that women, of course, women are the problem. Women are asking their husbands for more and fancier clothing and pressuring the husbands. And the husbands are wasting their money on fancy clothing for their wives. So if we have a law that says that, you know, bourgeois wives can't wear certain expensive types of clothing, then husbands will be put in a bad position. So that's one aspect of it. And so there, because sex workers are sort of lower down in society, they're not supposed to be dressing so fancy. But then you have sort of the flip side. Some towns, and again,

you would find this mainly in Italy, regulated clothing, not by saying people with less money can't wear the fancy stuff, but people who are not sex workers can't wear. the fancy stuff. So certain kinds of gowns only sex workers should wear. And that's supposed to keep women from demanding these fancy new gowns from their husbands because it would mark them out as a sex worker. But I think some of the same thing is going on that you see today where it used to be that fashion went from the top down. But today it often, it goes from the bottom up. And what people with money wear is often a couture version. of what people with less money are wearing.

Some of that may have been going on there too. Then in some places, sex workers had to be particularly marked out. This you see in England, they had to wear striped hoods. And I don't know what the significance of the stripes were. It may be that that kind of cloth was cheaper, but that would mark you out as a sex worker, meaning that it's okay to accost you in the street. and even on occasion that you consent to sex doesn't matter.

Wow. There are discussions about whether a meritrix, a whore, can be raped. And the idea is that she is common to all. This is kind of why I use the title, Common Women for my book. It wasn't really specifically phrased in terms of ownership because legally during the Middle Ages, women are not property, I mean, except in slave women, but married women are not their husband's property. Daughters are not their father's property. That's, you know, technically, legally speaking, but in practice, this idea of common women was if a woman wasn't attached to one man, then she's considered common to all.

And just like in those days, a wife was considered to have given consent to her husband by marrying him. So it wasn't possible for a husband to rape his wife. Under law, it wasn't possible. It would not be considered rape because she had given consent by marrying him. A woman who had sex outside of marriage was risked being classified as a whore and considered to have given consent. So this is not settled law. It's something that's discussed whether a sex worker legally can be raped. I am quite sure that sex workers were raped all the time in the middle ages and in any time period.

I mean, these are women who are vulnerable and who men are encouraged not to have a lot of respect for. Yeah. Yeah. Still the case today, unfortunately. Do we have any idea of what life was like inside these brothels? You mentioned the document pertaining to the stews of Southwick, but do we have anything that tells us what the day-to-day life of a woman working there would be like? Like, did she live somewhere else?

Did she live in? Was food provided? Anything like that? It varies a lot from place to place. In Southark, she lived out, and she had to pay the brothel keeper for the food that she ate when she was there, and I expect the rates weren't cheap.

In some places, there are rules in the south of France where they lived in. The women went to Mass on Sunday. and they would all go in a group and they would be shepherded, you know, there by the brothel keepers. And I'm sure everybody else, you know, in church, like looked at them, but they weren't supposed to talk to them. There's a very interesting document that has been written about in a very nice online

piece by Susan McDonough. It's about a brothel keeper in the south of France who went on pilgrimage. So she left an inventory of all her goods when she went on pilgrimage so that whoever was supposed to manage her goods for her while she was gone would have a list. And it included a huge amount of cooking utensils and supplies and so on. And it seems like there anyway, this holds up in medieval art where you see scenes that are meant to take place in a brothel. They're usually men sitting, eating, and drinking with a woman at their side. And it seems like it was, a place for partying. Men didn't just go there, you know, and have sex and leave. They went there

for an evening of food and drink and sex. And I wonder if it might not have been like, quote, unquote, gentlemen's clubs today where it's the woman's job to get the man to buy as much alcohol as possible at really inflated prices. Yes. So I think the women pretty often ate. in the brothel with the customer as part of one of the things that men are getting from the brothel is some companionship as well as sex. And don't forget, this is one of the things that the sex worker has to provide. I mean, sometimes it's just, you know, okay, I'll tap you on the shoulder of the street. Let's go into that dark lane and do it quickly. But very often, these are men who are merchants who are foreigners and they want some female companionship and what the woman has to

provide is not just the sex but also she has to act like she's enjoying being with him and having a good time. There's a lot of emotional labor there isn't that? Right. That's one thing. The other thing that was really striking in this inventory is, well first of all, this brothel keeper is going on pilgrimage and her partner is going with her. So she lives with a man to whom she's not married. He's not the one who's keeping her property for her while she's gone, and so he may be going with her. So you think, well, why is a brothel keeper going on pilgrimage? I mean, aren't they doing something that the church says is an absolute no-no? And then in the list of the inventory of things in the house, one of the items is a portable altar to the Virgin Mary. And again, why does a

brothelkeeper have this in her house. And I mean, I bet that if you went and talked to a group of sex workers today, you would find some who considered themselves Christian and who go to church. And they don't necessarily see a disconnect there. They are doing what they are doing, you know, as a job. And maybe it's something that the church doesn't approve of, but everybody does lots of things that the church doesn't approve of, and you can do penance and get absolution for it. And these people may have been just as devout and just as non-devout as your average medieval person. And the brothel keeper, her name was Joannetta, Joanna. Yes. I'll be back with Ruth after this short break. I had a look at the list of the inventory,

because I knew I was going to talk to you. And my Latin is appalling, by which I'm, I mean, Google Translate. But some other things on the list, there were beds, linen mattresses, makes sense. Salt shakers, copper kettles, candelabras made of iron, lamps, tables, benches, a new chair, curtains, the altarpiece of the Virgin Mary, a woman's skirt and sprouts,

but that one may be wrong. I don't know why they would have sprouts there. I might have mistranslated that. It's quite a domestic list that. There seems to be a lot of things about cooking. copper kettles, salt shakers. It would have been sort of like a tavern. I mean, what I was really struck by

is that there are a lot of wine jugs. Wine jugs, yes. Yes, I didn't get that one on my list. I told you I was bad at it. That would make perfect sense that you've got to provide some kind of entertainment as well, that these are sort of rowdy places,

houses of ill repute, I suppose. Is there any truth in the narrative that if you were a sex worker, you couldn't be buried in consecrated ground. Just going back to what you're saying about religion and sex work being compatible. Well, it would really depend a lot on the individual church and on whether you had made a proper deathbed confession. So it wasn't a sort of overall church law. But individual churches would have been, I think, quite reluctant.

I think that one came about. It was written not in the medieval period, but long after. after it about a graveyard in Southwick that was called the single woman's graveyard. And there's one mention that single women couldn't be buried in consecrated ground. But I've never seen that corroborated anywhere else. Like you said, as long as they confessed. I have not either. It wouldn't surprise me that it was a graveyard where the use of single women here is very interesting. I mean, it was used in Southwark as a synonym for sex worker. But as was the term spinster. Oh, I didn't know that.

Which also means an unmarried woman, but it comes from a woman who spins. And this is where I think that connection may come from between single women and spinster, is that when they weren't with a customer, the women in the Southwark stews were supposed to spin wool or flax for the brothel keeper. And so a spinster could be a euphemism for the women in the stews. didn't know that. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a graveyard where they were typically buried. There's not a canon law blanket prohibition on single women or sex workers not being buried in consecrated ground. Unrepentant sinners in general are not meant to be buried in consecrated ground. So you wanted to make an act of contrition and receive the last rights. But sex workers were

not excluded from that. So there's a final question then. Whenever you're researching this history, what you tend to get is names that appear in court records or inventory lists or sort of some kind of legal proceeding. But then they just vanish. And you never find out what happened afterwards. It's like a proper cliffhanger. Have you ever been able to trace like the life cycle, the life story of a medieval sex worker in full? Or is it all just little moments of their lives? It's all just. just little flashes. It's really frustrating. Wouldn't you love to know what happened? Yeah, I would. Like, what was the pilgrimage like Janetta? You know, like did you get everything back? The one person who I think has maybe come the closest to analyzing what the life would have been like

is Jamie Page, who's written about sex work and other sorts of sexual relationships in late medieval Germany. and the sources that he has have allowed him to get into the people's lives a little bit more, you know, because you have people actually giving testimony about their lives, which I have not found very much in the work that I did, which was on England. So, yeah, Page's work is very interesting for that. Ruth, you have been wonderful to talk to you. You always are. If people want to know more about you and your research,

can they find you? I'm pretty easily Googleable because it's not that common of a surname, and I teach at Trinity College Dublin, and the Trinity College Dublin website has some more information about me and my scholarship. Thank you so much for coming to talk to us. I've thoroughly enjoyed myself. No, thanks for inviting me again. Thanks for listening and thank you to Ruth for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello,

then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. Coming up, we have got an episode on the Kinsey Report and the third installment of our SexWork series where we will be exploring the Renaissance. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckworth, the senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society,

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