Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Medieval Bishop's Sex Workers

Episode Date: July 5, 2022

Outside Medieval London’s city walls, Southwark was a land without rules. It was the place where people went to partake in theatre, watch bear baiting and visit brothels. It was also under the control of the Bishop of Winchester.Kate is joined Betwixt the Sheets by Matt Lewis from History Hit’s Gone Medieval to talk about the sex workers of Southwark, once known as the Winchester Geese. They explore the role of the church and state in controlling Medieval sex work, and how this is mirrored today.*WARNING There are adult themes and discussion of sex, abuse and abortion in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Seyi Adaobi.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit. 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. This is Kate Lister, jumping in as per with your fair dues warning. This is a podcast where we talk about adult things in an adult way, and I keep swearing even though I'm trying very hard not to. And I don't think that you'll be offended because you must know this by now. But if you are shocked, fair do's, we warn you. Can't be mad at us.

But if this is up your alley as well, then let's get into it, you mucky pups. Let's do this. In today's episode we are talking about the Winchester geese. No, we have not veered into a bizarre crossover of sex history and ornithology for just a giggle. In this episode, we're talking about the Winchester geese, which was a euphemism for medieval sex workers who worked in Southwark underneath the Bishop of Winchester. In the 14th century church leaders were indeed making a tidy income from the prophets of sex workers. It doesn't sound like something that they would do, does it? Let's find out how this contradictory state of affairs came about.

What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello there, I'm Kate Lister. Welcome to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society.

Today we're talking about sex in the church in the Middle Ages. And how did Southwark become the Las Vegas of its time? I'm joined by Matt Lewis, host of our sister podcast Gone Medieval. And if you're interested in the so-called dark ages, do go and check it out. In this episode, we're discussing the bizarre rules and regulations that the church and the authorities laid down. in the Middle Ages for sex workers to follow, including wearing stripy hats, bells and not being allowed to sell pies. Basically what we're looking into is how did the church try and control sex work

across Europe and what lessons, if any, can we learn from the past? Enjoy. Matt Lewis, let's talk about Winchester Geese. Absolutely. Medieval sex workers working for a bishop in the Catholic church who gets rich off their work.

I mean, what's not to like? Isn't that kind of mad? though, when you just say that like that. I mean, the history of sex is infinitely varied, and the people who've been selling sex, laws and things and jurisdictions, they change wildly. But when you tell people, yeah,

the medieval church owned that area of Southwick and regulated and taxed the brothels there, it's kind of bonkers to say it. Yeah, well, medieval bishops of Winchester were always incredibly powerful people. So this dates back partly to the fact that as a hangover from the kingdom of Wessex, Winchester was really important. It used to be where the Royal Treasury was kept during the medieval period.

So bishops of Winchester were always quite wealthy, quite powerful. They tended to be high officials in the government. They were quite often chancellors to the king, so second in authority in the kingdom. And they got incredibly rich off various things, and part of it was owning a massive chunk of South of South of the City of London, which was outside the jurisdiction of the city of London, technically in the county of Surrey, but also outside the jurisdiction of the sheriffs and the county authorities of Surrey. So you get this thing called the Liberty of Winchester or the Liberty of the Clink, it gets known as a little bit later after the prison that's there, the clink. And they're allowed to effectively impose their own rules, set their own laws, taxation, all of that kind of stuff. And they just get incredibly rich out of these medieval oddities, I think.

And I think that's quite important to understand what's going on here, is it was outside the city of London. to its own jurisdictions and laws, but really, really close to the walls of London as well. You're on the south bank of the Thames, you know, a short riverboat journey across or strolling across the bridge if you want to, and you're in this, I don't know, is it something like the medieval Las Vegas? You know, you get there and all the lights are shining. There's suddenly no laws. There's no rules about what you can and can't do almost. There's a bishop who's in charge of everything, but all of this dodgy stuff going on, it's known for its lawlessness. gambling, bear baiting.

It's where all the theatres spring up later in the early modern period. It's where Shakespeare has his Globe theatre and all that kind of thing. Because all of this stuff goes on around Southwark and it's odd that it just belongs to a bishop because you don't associate the church with being willing to do all of that kind of entertaining stuff. No, what happens in Southwark stays in Southwark. Yeah, absolutely. But I think thinking of it is like the medieval Las Vegas, like,

yeah, that's pretty close, isn't it? Because you could be thrown out of the city of London for doing all manner of stuff. Definitely hoaring was one of them, procuring, pimping, running, but all of these things, if you got caught doing that in the city of London, repeatedly, you would be banished to outside the city walls,

which sounds terrible until you realise that it's actually just a short ferry journey over the Thames. Woohoo! To Southwark, where all those things are allowed. And that's where everyone ended up. And so what do we know about? about laws around the sale of sex and buying sex in medieval Europe, in a broader picture,

before we get to London. Was the church in other areas involved in this? What we're talking about? I think the church and secular rulers all have this really odd relationship with sex work because they can't work out, I mean, how do you control sex work? We're still trying to deal with all of that sort of stuff now. It's not something that humankind has ever managed to sufficiently sought out. But it's been going, I mean, so we get this law code that's written by Edward the Elder, who was a king in Anglo-Saxon England from 975 to 978. So over a thousand years ago, he's writing a law code. And it's odd the company that he put sex workers into, because it says, if wizards or sorcerers, magicians, or prostitutes, those who secretly compass death or perjurers

be met anywhere in the land, they shall be zealously driven from this land and the nation, be purified. Otherwise, they should be utterly destroyed in the land. That's amazing. He's equating sex workers at that point with sorcerers and wizards and people who are trying to kill people as corruptors of the soul and the nation. But then we get, within 50 years of that, Ethel Red the Unready, rewrites that law code slightly. And he says, which is magicians and haws must be diligently driven out of the country, else they make strict monetary compensation. So all of a sudden we get this change from it being about protecting the moral fibre of the community to being about raising money. There's an

opportunity there to create a law so that people can break it and you can find them for it as a money-raising endeavour. And we get all kinds of these ways that rulers try to deal with it. So the church also has this odd relationship with it. The church kind of ranks degrees of sin. So sex work is ranked below adultery and various other things like that. that. So it's less bad than committing adultery. And you get some medieval writings by church theologians who say that, so Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century compared sex work to a sewer in a palace. And he says, if you take away the sewer, you'll fill the palace with corruption. So it's not a very nice metaphor, but what he's saying is humankind can't cope without sex workers being around.

I think that possibly Thomas Aquinas needed a better plumber and better sex. That would be my first thoughts about that. But he's not the only one, is there? There is this idea that we need to tolerate people selling sex because they will keep them away from worse sins somehow. Yeah, so it's that idea that you grade the sins, and if you allow sex work, you stop some of those worse sins from happening. I think we tend to think that the church viewed sin as black and white.

Either you were sinful or you were good. But actually they had this sort of grading system. You know, there was A grade sins, but you could work your way down through a B and a C. And we could allow a couple of C grade sins as long as you didn't get to the really bad stuff. That's more than... If you're not committing adultery

because you're visiting a sex worker, that's cool. There's some mental gymnastics around that, isn't there? My goodness. There is crazy stuff that goes on. And I mean, some of the other secular ways that people try and deal with it, I think it reflects stuff that's been going on throughout history in attempts to deal with sex work. They try to tackle it by attacking or aiming at different aspects.

And it's striking how rarely they actually aim at the sex worker themselves. Apart from finding them for being inside city walls and things like that when they shouldn't be, they quite often aim at either the people who run boarding houses, which are used as brothels, or they aim at the other people who make money out of the sex workers rather than aiming directly at the sex workers. So Frederick Barbarossa, who was a Holy Roman emperor in the 12th century, when his army goes into Italy, he sets out all these ordinances to deal with what are called camp followers, which is a euphemism for the sex workers that follow the soldiers around. And he sets out severe punishment for any soldiers using a sex worker, but also that the woman

should have her nose cut off. And I guess the idea is there is to make her less attractive and less able to make money doing what she's doing. So it's pretty horrible. But Alfinery, So the 9th of Castile, so another late 12th, early 13th century ruler, really aimed at those who were making their money from exploiting these sex workers. And he divided it up into five categories. So anyone who trafficked women for sex work was to be exiled. Landlords who rented their rooms to sex workers would have their house seized and a fine imposed on them. Anyone keeping a brothel would be forced to free all of the women who were inside it, but also to find them all husbands. Oh my God. If he didn't find husbands for every woman that was working in his brothel, he could be executed.

Jesus, whoa. I'm laughing, but that is just, wow. Any husband who turned their wife to sex work would be executed. There's a capital offence to make your wife do that. And anyone who procured a woman to be put to work as a sex worker would be flogged for the first attempt and then sent to the galleys as a criminal for a second offence. He didn't really worry too much about the women. I mean, in some senses, he's trying to get them out of that life by forcing people to find husbands for them and things like that. But he's really aiming at the people who are profiting from having these women at work as a way to shut them down.

And what he's kind of doing is it's a tactic that's deployed. You sort of go back through the history of this stuff. And what you see is it's very cyclical is it comes in waves. There's like we move through waves of persecution and attempting to abolish anyone selling or buying sex with really harsh dreadful punishments. And then there might be a period of easy toleration. And then there might be some attempt at control and legislation. And then there'll be resistance. And then we go right back again to this really aggressive abolishing.

And wherever you find attempts at regulate in a sale of sex, they tend to sort of fit into one of these categories. And it's quite horrendous. I haven't actually heard of the trying to force people make them all get a husband before. That's wow. And the one as well that I really like there was the fact that sex workers are considered in the same category as witches and wizards. That's just really tickled me.

That's a Harry Potter offshoot that I want to see immediately. But when we get to medieval London, so within the city itself, there are repeated efforts to banish hores and whoremongers. And as you said, a lot of this is directed at what we'd now call pimping about making money from the exploitation of people selling sex. And a lot of that is banished to the outside of the city, but they end up in Southwick.

Yeah, so it's a running theme that whenever cities and officials try to deal with this, they never want it inside the city walls. So this is where they consider all of the good people to be, the people who need to be protected. And so they want to shove anything that doesn't fit into nice, neat, suburban Christian life, shove it outside the walls and almost pretend it doesn't happen. But they all know it does happen. You get these weird degrees of toleration. And if we can tax it and find people for it,

then that's even better because we can raise some money from all of this. It's very much like we're just going to pretend that that's not happening, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. But I mean, you get, so Southwark becomes a great example. So, as I said, often quite powerful, influential, important people make it to be Bishop of Winchester. And when Southwark is granted to the Bishop of Winchester, It's a man called Henry of Blas, who is the brother of King Stephen at the time. And when was that, roughly?

So we're in the middle of the 12th century here. So the period of English history that we call the anarchy. So Stephen and Matilda fighting each other for the throne of England. Do you think they'll call our own particular time, the anarchy? I quite like that idea, like a thousand years will be referred to as to the anarchy. You wonder how they'll teach 2020 to 2022 history is going to be a really odd textbook that tries to explain this. It will be. Yeah.

And we need to find some good names for historical periods as well. I mean, this civil war is called the anarchy, and then you get the wars of the roses, which is kind of all flowery, and then you just get the civil war. That's quite cool. Yeah. When did we stop calling things the anarchy and all that? Yeah, we need some better names. So we need to think of a name for our period of history.

What can we call it? The mess. Yeah, the mess. Perfect. Okay, so they're in a period called the anarchy, which should give you some idea to how things are being run at the time. And the Bishop of Winchester, how does he end up with all? all these brothels. So he gets given a load of land in Southwark. And to some extent, I think all of this stuff is already going on in Southwark. And then you get in 1161, so just after the

anarchy, Henry II is on the throne, so the son of Empress Matilda, the anarchy is sort of settled. You get these ordinances that are produced in 1161. And I should say there is some discussion about the fact that these could be 15th century ordinances that a bishop of Winchester sort of dug up and tried to back date and say, these are hundreds of years old, so they must be in effect. But they do claim to be from that period, don't they? Yeah, they date themselves from 1161, and they talk about Thomas Beckett being Chancellor at the time, which fits with all of that period. So we maybe have to treat these with a little bit of a pinch of salt about when they date from. But nevertheless, whenever they date from,

they still talk about how to regulate sex work in Southwark under the Bishop of Winchester. So whether it's 1161 or a couple of centuries later, they're still doing the same thing, really. But I mean, interestingly, if they do date from anywhere near 1161, it's probably one of the first kind of officially licensed red light districts that are set up in Europe. It's all been quite unofficial until then, but this is the king creating a set of rules for what happened. And it's also a little bit of the king getting in on that money raising side. And all of this stuff is going on just over the Thames from the city of London and outside of the king's jurisdiction and his reach. So the king has an interest in seeing if he can get a thumb in that pie kind of thing. So yeah, you get all of these ordinances.

So they're called stew holders. And the stew probably comes from the fact that a lot of these were old bathhouses. So you go and stew in the bath for a while. Bath houses get turned into bordellos, brothels, things like that. And that's where the women lodge. But you get this quite strange situation where they're not brothels because the women aren't allowed to live there. They're allowed to rent a room there to work in. but they're not allowed to live there

and they're not allowed to be under the control of the man who owns the stew house. So he is very clearly not their pimp or anything like that. He's not allowed to take money off them other than money for the room that they board. He's not in control of them. They're allowed to come and go as they wish. Any stew holder who is found to be keeping women hostage

or against their will is fined and potentially loses his licence to hold a stew. And I don't want to, for one second, that this is progressive because I think that whenever you've got governments attempting to regulate this stuff, it generally goes ass about TIP pretty quick because it's still the government deciding what's what. But it is true that these ordinances are largely focused on stopping exploitation, or at least what it perceived as exploitation. Like you said, it's trying to stop the women who work they can't stay over because they're trying to stop anyone being held there

against their will. And there's other laws like, one of the stricter ones in there is that none of the women working can have a long-term partner or like what we'd call a boyfriend, because again, that's supposed to be stopping pimping. And then there's some really mad ones, like they can't make pies as well. Yeah, yeah. I mean, things like that are an odd one because the church particularly wants women to be reformed from sex work. They kind of use the model of Mary Magdalene that you can be saved from this life and that the church ought to be trying to be trying to, discourage people from doing it whilst accepting that it does happen and that people live those lives. And I think it's odd then that you're sort of barred from getting a boyfriend

because surely that's your route out of that life. Yeah. A lot of it doesn't, well, I mean, you can see like the pit holes in it, can't you? Like, so you can't have a long-term partner, so you kind of just stuck there is a definite oversight. I think the one about making pies and pastries was about trying to make sure that the only thing that you were doing there was selling sex and that you weren't profiting from anything else. And to some extent, I think that the men who are running the shoes aren't profiting from the women in different ways, so they're not forcing them to do other work when they're not doing sex work.

I mean, some places had rules about sex workers weren't allowed to touch food in a marketplace and all of that kind of thing. I did read that one of those in Italy once. I don't know how widespread that was, but there were laws about where they can go, what they can where. You can only go to the market at 8am, and you can only get this time. of bread and then be off with you. No more.

It's like the thoughts behind it. Yeah, I mean, you get the golden hour in photography. I don't know what you call the hour that sex workers are allowed to visit the market. But there are rules in these Henry II laws that say these women have to be clearly identifiable from, I'm doing air quotes, honest women. And normally that would mean housewife would wear an apron. So that's kind of almost like your badge, your armour of being a good honest woman is that you're wearing an apron.

So a sex worker can't wear an apron because they can't try and look like anything other than they are. Nope. And there were other sumptory laws, weren't there, about what they could and couldn't wear? And something that I've seen again and again talking about medieval sex work is this idea of a raid hood,

which is a striped hood, a stripy hood. And that seems to have been sumptory laws in certain cities, not just in Britain, but all around Europe, about different colours, different places, but they have to be identifiable.

You can't wear an apron and you have to wear a stripy hat. There were some that even said you have to have bells on your hood. I mean, that's a crap hat. That's just like, it's not only is it, like, it's just a bad stripy hat with bells on and you can't get a pie. If you want to do this, you've got to be a fashion victim and no pie for you. No pie for you. It's really tickled me. Right.

Okay, so what are some of the other laws that these women are living by? They've got the stripy hats, they've got the bells. No pie for you. There's things like if a woman has discovered inside. a stew house who's got an STI, who's got venereal disease. There's a fine of 20 shillings, but it's the stew holder that's fined, not the woman. So he's fined for having a woman who is suffering from a sexually transmitted infection on his premises. And similarly for people who are hidden, so if the authorities are allowed to go and search every stew house in Southwick, every week,

and a few times a year they're supposed to have a proper good route through everything that's in there, And if they find anybody who's not supposed to be there or who's being kept there against their will, then the stew holder can be fined quite heavily and lose their licence. I think one of the oddities with that is that one of the smallest fines that's in this set of ordinances is a 14 pence fine for someone who is found with a nun in their stew house. I don't know why nuns are singled out for, you know, it's not great if you're kind of abducting nuns and putting them to work in a stew house. For 14 pence, though, maybe that's worth the first.

I don't know where these nuns are coming from or how they're ending up in Southwick, but clearly there's a problem with nuns. There must be a problem with nuns in stew houses. Somebody's had to look, we need a lot about this. We keep finding nuns in brothels. 14 pence should cover it. Yeah, yeah. And so if a woman is found in a stew house who isn't supposed to be there,

so who isn't licensed to be there or known to the authorities, the stew holder gets fined 40 shillings, and she'll get fined 20 shillings and get fined 20 shillings and get three dunkings on a ducking stool. I'll be back with Matt after this short break. Airplanes, space suits, condoms, coffee, plastic surgery, warships. Over on the patented podcast by History Hit, we bring you the fascinating stories of history's most impactful inventions

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sad. I think it's a worthwhile thing to do. And the thing that really makes it worthwhile, it's a worthwhile. is the fact that you could make it go on forever. So subscribe to patented from History Hit on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to catch new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. You didn't mess around with the punishments, is it? I mean, you can look at some of this stuff as, I guess it offered more protection

than trying to just abolish it and cutting people's noses off. I suppose it did that, and there was some kind of legal recourse, but it would be wrong to sort of think that this document was specifically drawn up to protect these women? I think one of the most striking things about the women is the lack of concern for them. So there's lots of concern for public health, the men that are running, quite often the men,

I mean, a married woman could run a stew as well. A single woman wasn't allowed to. But most of the concern is for the stews and the stew holders rather than the women themselves, other than that they can't be kept against their will. For example, there's lots of things that talk about. about the women aren't allowed, so they have to be clearly identifiable as a sex worker. They can't pretend to be, air quotes, an honest woman. But they also can't do very much to attract men to their place of work. So they have to basically sit by the door and let men come and go

as they want. They can't, you know, try and drag men. There's rules that specifically say you can't drag a man by his cloak or his hood, you know, into the place and pounce on him and then charge him for the privilege afterwards. You can't pull faces is another one. You can't. can't pull faces at a man. You can't pull faces. Can't pull faces and you can't throw stones at the river to try and attract the attention of passing boatmen. All of these things will get you find. I mean, I don't know what qualifies as pulling a face and how you prove that, but you could be fine. That's a weird difficult one to prove. So you've just got to sit there with your stripy hat on.

Yeah. Wow. Look, in a fashion disaster, who hasn't had a good pie for a while and hope that men are just going to wonder over. There are lots of laws like that that are kind of when you find these zoned areas and a lot of them are you can't harass. men, you can't steal from the men, you can't say you'll have sex with them and then not, etc. And it sort of suggests to me that that did happen quite a lot if they've had to do it. And I think that if your livelihood is dependent on this and you need to drum up business, the one thing that I can tell you about sex workers all throughout history is they are a wily

group who can get round rules excellently and always have done. I don't think they'd have sat there quietly in their stripy hats. No, there's ways round all of these rules. but I only think it's striking that there's lots of rules about what the women can't do to attract clientele and things like that. You know, you can't grab a man by his cloak and pull him inside the building, but there's nothing about what the man can and can't do to the sex worker once he's in there. There's no protection for women who suffer any kind of physical violence or anything like that. That's just not accounted for.

No. There's nothing in there about like what happens if he gets violent, what happens if he hits you, what happens if he wants a service that you're not willing to provide, none of that is accounted for in this at all. No, absolutely not. So there's lots of stuff about the things that go on outside the door and lots of stuff about the relationship between the stew holder and the sex worker, but very little about the relationship between sex workers and their clients other than the fact that you can't

pull faces at them, throw stones at them or drag them. And it's frustrating, isn't it? because we just don't have information about who these women were. We've got flashes and glimps. I think some of the names of the brothels are recorded. There's like the Cardinals hat and the bell and the swan and all of these things, but we just don't know who weren't there. They're so rare that we hear the voices from inside these places.

There is one case from 1471 in Nordlingen in Germany, where a husband and wife team who ran a brothel in Nordlingen were brought up on charges. and 12 of the women who worked in their establishment gave evidence against them. And it's incredibly rare. It's a great insight into what went on and what they accused these people of. But it's so rare that you get to hear those voices. And it all comes out of a woman who was supposedly the brothel's kitchen made,

but who was also put to work by this husband and wife who sound like a pretty horrendous couple. So she fell pregnant as a result of this. And the wife who ran the brothel forced her to drink something that she, put together to abort the pregnancy. And the other women found her in the kitchens in a complete nutter state having delivered this aborted fetus, which they estimated was about 20 weeks old, so a fully formed baby. And as a result of this, 12 of the women that worked there went to the authorities and brought charges against this couple who were running the place. And they told stories, I mean, pretty horrendous stories about being forced to work on inappropriate days.

They were forced to work holy days, which they weren't allowed to do, but they were also forced to work while they were menstruating. They weren't given any kind of break during that period as well. They were frequently physically beaten by the people that ran the brothel. They were forced into debt. So if a meal cost 10 pence somewhere, they'd be charged 11 or 12 pence. On entry into the brothel, all of their clothes, anything that was worth any value was taken from them and held by the brothel owners, who would also frequently steal their tips, steal money from them, extort money. they were stopped from going to church, so they were allowed to leave in order to attend church services and stuff like this.

And so you do get the names of some of the women that are involved here and some of the experiences that they say they're going through in a kind of 15th century brothel in Germany. And there's some argument that, you know, because this is so singular, do we believe all of the things that they say? Well, I think you have to in the absence of anything else. But also the fact that the authorities find in their favour, so this husband and wife team lose their license to have the brothel. It's termed as being dismissed from their posts, you know.

It's like it was a job that they held and they get the sack for it. They're both banished from the city forever for what they've done. And on top of this, Barbara, the wife, who had given Elle's this drink to abort her pregnancy, was branded across her forehead because that was seen as the worst crime that they'd committed was that they'd forced this woman to abort her pregnancy and to kill her baby. And so she's branded and they're both forced to leave the city forever. So, you know, there obviously was some concern for the women that were inside, these buildings. I guess the question is, how able were they to be heard? How able were they to go to

the authorities and say, this has happened to us? Is this an extreme case? Or is this what was going on in most places, but it was kept quiet? I would be inclined to believe them for all the reasons that you've just said there. And also, there's a wealth of evidence all throughout history and right up to the present day that where people are forced into sexual exploitation by people. These are tactics that they still use. The debt tactic is still deployed today of like you've got to stay here and pay off the money that we've used to get you over here, the money for the passport, the money for the clothes, etc. That is still being recorded, being used. So I would believe them on those grounds. Yeah. And it's shocking that precisely that is nothing new. 550 years ago, someone is doing that

to women in Germany, keeping them in debt so that they can never, ever pay their way out of it and they can never ever get out of that life if they want to. Using fear and intimidation and physical assaults and all of these things are still recognised today. And these women did manage to find a way to report to the authorities, but that again takes us back to a very central issue with sex work throughout history. Who do you report to when it's criminalised, stigmatised, and you might not be believed? That's it. To some extent, what the authorities do facilitates all of that, doesn't it? Because if you're committing a crime and a crime is committed against you while you're committing the crime,

you almost have to go and say, hi, I'm a criminal, and a crime's been committed against me, so you're opening yourself up to all kinds of problems and charges as well. Absolutely, absolutely. As long as you've made it illegal or criminalised, in order to get any kind of protection, I have to first of all admit to a crime that I was doing. And that's something that you see right up,

and it still happens around the world today, is that sex workers at a court by the police issued with a fine and they have to go out to make more money to pay off the fine that they were issued for, and it's just, it goes, on and on and on and on. But let's go back to the bishop and is Winchester geese.

Why were they called geese, do you think? It's a hard one. I mean, there's no written-down answer to this. I've seen it suggested that because, you know, the competitive squawking for business sounds like a gaggle of geese. I think it's also possible that geese were a big thing that was farmed, you know, particularly in East Anglia

and stuff like that. So you would have people herding geese to market and all of that kind of thing. So is it the... that they're thought of as like a body of livestock, you know. Is it something like that? I don't know. But they used to make little boots for geese to make them walk to market in

so they didn't damage their feet. If only we'd taken as much care of our sex workers as we did of our geese, I don't know. Right. Absolutely. So I don't quite know, but you do get all of this other terminology attached to it. So being bitten by a Winchester goose was to get an STI, goose bumps. That's Shakespearean, isn't it? That crops up in one of his plays being bitten by a goose.

Yeah, goosebumps is perhaps another euphemism for contracting an SDI, so we've got goosebumps. That's interesting. And that there is, in London today, in Southwark, it's called the Crossbones Graveyard, and that has got links to the Winchester Geese, doesn't it? It does. So this is a place that it's long been believed was essentially a graveyard for the women who'd worked as Winchester Geese. So because if they died while they were still sex workers, they were considered outside the care of the church, they weren't buried on consecrated ground. So the Bishop of Winchester sort of set aside this piece of land where anybody who couldn't be buried on consecrated ground could be buried.

So that could be unbaptized babies and all sorts of things like that, excommunicated people. But may well have included a lot of the sex workers that were Winchester geese as well. So I guess, you know, the final condemnation from the church is that you've worked under license from the Bishop of Winchester. You've made him an awful lot of money, but you aren't worthy of getting into heaven. You aren't allowed to be buried on consecrated ground. We're going to create this place over there where you can all go and we can kind of forget about you. And you can still visit Crossburns today. It's now the place of the outcast dead.

And there has been research done. The land was excavated. and it's probably not medieval, probably is not. But there are sources that date to the 16th century that say exactly what you're saying, and that that's where this idea comes from, is that that was a land for unconsecrated single women to be buried in. Yeah, and it carries on in service.

So the stews in Southwark are outlawed by Henry VIII in 1546. Do you not think, like Henry the 8th's dishing out sexual, moral advice now, right, okay. But I think that's also around a lot of concern about fairly rampant venereal disease and all that sort of stuff. One thing about Henry the 8th is he was terrified of catching any disease or anything that might harm him. Well, I'm not surprised.

Running around London like a dog with two dick, so I'm not surprised. Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, he's terrified of the plague. He evacuates London anytime there's any kind of plague. I think he's a germaphobe, you know, absolutely terrified of anything like this. So I think the idea that there was all of this VD just over the river. in the Thames and people are heading out of London to visit this place and then coming back, I think that might well have terrified Henry VIII to the point where he has to do away with

all of this because he's so petrified of catching anything, not just STIs, but any kind of disease, he's absolutely terrified, especially when he hasn't got a son to succeed him. It's one of his big preoccupations. I'd not heard that before, but that kind of makes sense, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah. I think it's one of his big preoccupations and perhaps plays into the reason why he does away with all of these stews in Southwark in the end. So we do get a source, a man called John Stowe

who wonders around the country writing about all sorts of things right at the end of the 16th century. He talks about crossbones, graveyards, as being about a single woman's churchyard, which again is just a euphemism for sex workers being in there. But I mean, it carries on being used right up until the middle of the 19th century. So clearly it isn't about the Winchester Geese

for several hundred years of its existence. And by the middle of the 19th century, it's so packed that the authorities are saying, you know, we're having to bury people in shallow graves on top of other coffins here. And the smell is pretty bad. Oh, right. The chance of disease is pretty awful.

So they have to close it because it's just full. It's full to overflowing. Oh, I mean, that's just... And it was a pauper's graveyard, wasn't it? That always gets me, like, when you're talking about areas of London that were once slums, and now you're like, well, I could barely afford, like, a train ticket. to that area of London now.

Suddick, if you want to try and buy somewhere in Southwick now, ha. But for hundreds of years, that was a paupers graveyard, wasn't it? That was where the poorest of the poor were buried. It was, yeah. It's on Red Crossway in Southwark. You know, like you say, you couldn't afford to buy a house there now. But it's where all of the paupers, unbaptised babies, potentially some of the sex workers from medieval London,

were all buried to be forgotten out of the way in this corner of London, where kind of anything had gone for centuries. Wow. And you can still visit it today. People still go and tie little memorial ribbons and things along. There's like railings outside of it you can go and see. And every so often people meet there. Yeah.

Yeah, there's a plaque there. So it's sort of dedicated to forgotten people from history, you know, the unknown dead of whom there are billions. But it has a plaque on the gates and you can visit it. And as you say, people quite often tie ribbons to the vents to remember some of these people. Now obviously Henry the 8th abolished the stews in Southwark If memory serves, there was an announcement made Need 11 days to clear out

So cheers Henry And obviously that was a massive success And no one ever sold sex in the city of London ever again Obviously, that was the end of it Henry the 8th solved that problem for us Isn't he a great guy? I think the thing is we deal with this today So it's a difficult, complex, hard issue

That we haven't got to grips with But I think what we can see from some of this And, you know, go back to Roman legions had, I'm doing air quotes again, camp followers. Camp followers. And they were quite happy for these women to be there to help keep the men in line and whatever else. And the church has this odd relationship with it where they deem it less of a sin than other sins. And they think if you do away with sex workers, you undermine the moral fabric of society. But also the sex workers themselves undermine the moral fabric of society.

It's a really weird, complex issue that we haven't got to grips with it in terms of the church. and religion. We haven't got to grips with it in terms of secular authorities and the law at all yet. And I think all of this shows that we've been trying to find an approach for well over a thousand years. And we haven't found one that works yet. So can't we rack our brains a little bit and bring together, you know, the entirety of human experience over the last thousand odd years and find a solution that actually works? It can't be impossible. It can't be impossible. The one thing that we've never done, and history will show that quite well, especially with the story of the Winchester geese, as we've just said, is we don't listen to the people themselves. There's no accounts of anyone sitting down with one of these women in Southwark and saying, what would you like?

What would work for you? But we are in quite an exciting time now, or at least a very new and radical time now, which is where sex workers have their own voices now. And there are sex worker organisations, the English collective of prostitutes, and the sex worker activity, resistance movement, swarm, and many others are all their fighting for sex worker rights today. So what would be great would be that in another thousand years, there's not going to be some historians sat around going, I wish we knew what they wanted, but no one ever asked them the question.

Yeah, I think it's great if we can because how are you ever going to solve a problem without engaging with the people involved in it. Or maybe it would be me saying that it's a problem is the problem. But we do have an issue that we need to resolve. We need to find a way for this to exist because it exists. It always has. It always will. And no amount of persecution has managed to make anyone any safer.

If we've not learned anything from medieval religious history, it's that persecution doesn't work. So let's listen to the people who have a vested interest in, this story, let's hear them and let's find a solution that works. I couldn't agree more. What a fabulous place to draw this to a close. Let's listen to those instead of those writing about them. Sounds perfect to me. There are voices there to be heard. Historians constantly complain, particularly about the positions of women in history that we don't hear their voices. In 2022, we can hear the voices if we want to listen. They're right there.

They're right there talking to us. We just need to open our ears and listen to what they're saying. Facing many of the same issues that they were facing back in medieval London, which is that the authorities are trying to regulate, trying to suppress, trying to get them into zones, people are more concerned about the client, and where are their rights? So it's wild that it's this far after, and we're still having the same debates. But hopefully what will shift is that we can listen to the people themselves and they can tell us what would work for them.

Yes, and we need to listen. Oh, Matt Lewis, it's been so much fun talking to you. Thank you very much, Kate. that. I loved it. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening everyone. Please remember to like, review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Honestly, it helps us so much. We've got other episodes in our back catalogue that I think that you'll enjoy including a whole episode on medieval sex, poppers and a whole load more. Stay tuned for episodes on the history of bras, women of the Wild West and Queen Nazinger all coming your way.