Gone Medieval - Medieval Sex Workers

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

How did medieval cities manage and regulate sex work? Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by Dr. Jamie Page to discuss the lives of sex workers, the operation of municipal brothels, and the legal and societal challenges these women faced. They uncover detailed case studies and the broader implications of sex work regulations across medieval Europe contrasting the experiences of sex workers in different regions and highlighting the unique practices in the Holy Roman Empire compared to England.Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Edited by Amy Haddow, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.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: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianaga and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here. Before we get into today's episode of Gone Medieval, a word of warning.

We're talking about sex workers today and the brothels that they worked in. It's all about concepts and people and not sex as such, but if you have little ears listening, you might want to give this episode a miss. Further, there's some sad stuff in this episode about infanticide, so if you're feeling a little bit fragile, this might not be the episode for you. Having said all of that, this episode is really, really fun, I promise. The figure of the sex worker is one of those classic medieval tropes that comes up time and time again. Whether it's in medievalisms where we're shown fantastic and luxurious brothels alongside dragons and warring kings,

or the saucy tavern wench who's ready to serve up a lot more than just ale. We sort of expect sex workers to be around when we think about the medieval period. There's a good reason for that. They were. And as my previous conversations with people like the fabulous Kate Lister has shown,

there is rather a lot of opining on sex work and sex workers in the middle ages. Who are they? Where can they live in work? How will we organize our cities to accommodate them? When can they come to church? These are all questions that resurface time and time again. But when we talk about them, it's all just conceptual, really.

There's a lot of thinking about the idea of sex work and sex workers, but we don't often get to hear from the women in question. And that's a shame. After all, it's sort of rude to gossip about people and not even let them have a say back. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga, and today on Gone Medieval, I am delighted to welcome Dr. Jamie Page from the University of Gras, specifically to address this issue. Jamie is the author of the amazing book, Prostitution and Subjectivity in Late Medieval Germany, which specifically looks at the experiences of the women who worked in the brothels that I'm always going on and on about.

I may or may not be really, really overexcited about this one. So Jamie, welcome to God Medieval. Thank you so much. I am absolutely delighted to have you on, which is no surprise. I'm a huge fan of your work, and indeed we have worked together, which is why I really wanted to come and speak to you to get into more depth about ideas of medieval sex work. Because this is something I'm always kind of harping on everyone about because I think it's really interesting. But there is so much to it as a concept, and one of the things that your work does so elegantly, is it lets us find out more about the individuals themselves,

as opposed to just like the concept as an amorphous whole. Yeah, you're too kind. Thank you for that very nice introduction. You've really put your finger on it then. This is partly how I became interested in this topic, because we know a lot relatively about medieval sex work in terms of how it was structured, the kind of organization of what the church thought about it, etc. But the thing that has really been missing is some of the detail

and especially from the perspectives of people involved. So I'm really thinking about sex workers themselves. Women, and I can assume some men, although the evidence really is lacking for that, who did sex work, who worked in brothels, maybe also in the so-called black market privately, and what their lives were like, whether they believed in or reflected some of these discourses that we've heard so much about, about kind of hoarding, women's sin, all that kind of stuff. whether they take that on and what their eyes look like within this kind of context. Yeah, absolutely. So you hit on something already that I think is kind of important to get up front.

And, you know, I've talked about this in the past, especially with Kate Lister. But just if we can do a very quick primer on what medieval sex work looks like, and I mean, that's a huge thing to say about a thousand years of history. But of course, yeah. It's very, very different to the way that we treat it now. Yeah, I think it's a great question. I think we can assume that one, constant all through the period is that sex work is going on kind of all over the place and lots of different levels of society. So women, and again, I'm talking primarily about women. For them, it's a resource, especially poorer women, basically as a source of income, often next to other kind of

traditionally low paid jobs, so laundry, domestic service, that kind of thing. When we start to know the most about it is when we get urban sources. So when cities themselves are growing through the, from about the 12th century onwards. And we mostly know about it through initially attempts to, well, get rid of it. Surprise. Surprise, surprise, surprise. So it's the target of lots of legislation in cities, places like France, Italy, England. There comes a point, however, where the authorities in these places do a kind of calculation. They realize, you know, it's not going away. We've got to maybe accommodate it. And then we get sources that not just try to get rid of prostitution, but try to regulate it. And the real boon for historians is when we get the legalized brothel movement,

which is something that comes in, especially on the continent, much less so in England from around the 15th century, when cities actually set up brothels as a kind of public service. So there will be a town brothel in many places. The women there are kind of like municipal employees. It's the whole rationale is that they need these places, otherwise men will run wild if they haven't got this kind of sexual outlet as they see it. That's what we know the most about these places. They have rules. They have regulations. We know how much it costs, that kind of thing. And there's a whole culture of brothels as well as a kind of urban institution, something that offers hospitality. A bit like a kind of fancy tavern with extras is how I sometimes think about it. So that's the kind of big picture

of what it looks like in the Middle Ages. Yeah, absolutely. And I think here, an important thing to then talk about is that, you know, it's legal and very expressly legal. So that means that there is a right way and a wrong way to be doing it. So you can get in trouble if you're doing it the wrong way or how people think it is incorrect. You know, so the wrong part of town, you know, on the wrong days. You know, all these things can be regulated. But I think that kind of also lures people sometimes into a false idea about what actual attitudes towards sex work are. So can you expand on that a little bit? Yeah, of course. So I think that there's a real risk with this. We look at this topic and we read, for example, sermons about sex work or we read canon lawyers, theologians. And it's a very negative

picture. You know, the women are stintful. They do this because they have fallen, etc., etc. there's a risk. If we look too much at that, we get a one-sided picture of sex work. There is increasingly evidence, actually, that when we get closer to ordinary people, there was more room for tolerance and more understanding of the kind of circumstances that would see women. And again, I say women, I would love to find some evidence to male sex workers. Oh, God, yes. Collars right in. Holy grail. But really, it's women's lives we're talking about. I think there's good evidence that actually people understand.

that this is part of life. And I've been lucky enough to work with a couple of cases from my area of expertise, which is really the German-speaking regions that show in quite clear details that this is the case, that people do this, and that it's not universally condemned like the way that it's done by churchmen.

Yeah, absolutely, because, you know, obviously the church is going to do since say certain things, but especially when it comes to sex. We know that people aren't, listening. You know, because it is just one of these things where, yeah, there's an ideal world where you do every single thing that the church wants, and then there's the real world where people are just kind of trying to get by and people are people. Yeah, they're hearing sermons and they're picking up the messages, but actually life is often a bit messier than that. And

I'm not saying people ignore that fully, but I think people have more flexibility in the middle ages to accommodate these messages, but also some of the kind of messy aspects of life lived in kind of real terms. Oh, absolutely. And I mean, I guess you can also forgive people for thinking, oh, well, you know, if the church says something in the Middle Ages, then everyone goes by it. Because the way that source survival works is that we get to hear from the church because, you know, they're writing rather a lot of things. And then they keep those sources. You know, so we know a lot about them because they are all literate and common people often aren't. So this is one of the big issues with studying sex work, right, is that we don't get to hear. You know, we don't get to

hear a lot from the people involved very often. Exactly. And it's not just a medieval thing by any means at all. It's a problem for today as well that the voices of sex workers are massively underrepresented in the record, even when, you know, today we have all the advantages we could want when it comes to recording and hearing marginalized voices. Discourse is dominated by the people who make the rules. And it's exaggerated really in the Middle Ages. We just don't have many sources at all through which, we can hear these people's voices. And even then when we do, there's all kinds of problems about, well, whose voice are we really hearing? It's a really interesting debate.

Yeah, okay. So, well, let's just get into that then. You know, these case studies that you find, what is it that you're looking at in order to hear more from these people? Well, the problem with this topic is that you can't go out directly. If you're looking for what sex workers in the middle ages said and did and thought, there's no diaries. There's no, there's no, there's no, sense in which these people, partly because many were likely to be illiterate, were able to record. So you need to go through another avenue. And as with so many aspects of kind of social history amongst non-elites is legal judicial records. So you mentioned church court records. That's one great avenue. What we see, especially with towns and cities growing in the late middle ages, is urban courts become more productive of written documents, especially when the term inquisition gets a bad rep.

But actually, inquisional sources are brilliant for this kind of thing because it's a kind of a rational mode of proof almost. An investigation is opened. The authorities come in, they interview people, they make a record of what they say, they compare what they're said to try and find a judgment, etc. There are a very small number of such cases from cities across Europe where those people are sex workers

or where we can assume that they might have been sex workers. And in sources like that, then we can get a sense of what life was like. Again, there are big problems. They don't just say what's on their mind. There's a court case happening in the background. They've got to respond to being interrogated and prompted with questions. And so if we read carefully into these sources, bearing in mind these factors, you can get something close to a kind of mediated voice from sex work in the period.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Because if you've got someone who's on the stand, you know, all they can do, is respond to the questions that they're being given by, you know, powerful men, elite men. Yeah, the way I've always thought about it is if you give a statement to the police now, for example, which, you know, is something I've done in the past. I won't go into details about exactly. Okay, Jamie. But what happens is you are questioned by a police officer typically,

you will say what you saw, et cetera, and then it's read back to you. And when this happened to me, I thought that's not me. You know, they've stitched it into a lovely narrative in which, you know, I was, sitting by my window at approximately 11.30 p.m. And I saw a Caucasian male at approximate height, etc. It's kind of legalese. And that same thing applies to medieval sources. You've got to try and work with the conventions of the document to get at the person behind it. So when we have these documents, right, you know, one of the big things that we end up finding out is when illegal things are happening, right? Because you sort of enter the historical record

when you've come to the attention of authorities, right? You know, the great majority of sex workers, we're never going to go and find anything about them because they're just living their lives within a system that permits them if it doesn't necessarily cheerlead them. But we find people when they're doing kind of illegal sex work, which is often, you know, kind of the informal kind. So, you know, where do we find out more about that?

So it's a great question. and you really hit the nail on the head with the problem here. One of the issues we have is that it's not until quite late in the middle ages that sex work actually does become specifically illegally. The authorities, they don't really care too much about it, and it's not until there's a kind of increasing religiosity of towns on the continent that really looking for sex work becomes an issue for the authorities. So, again, as historians, we've got to find other angles.

Now, if you imagine the kind of life circumstances of anyone doing sex work in the middle ages, an era before reliable contraception, one of the big risks, of course, is for women as pregnancy. And there are a limited number of options of what you can do if you're doing this work and you become pregnant. So abortion and infanticide is a real theme for people doing sex work at this time. And those are legal issues of exactly the kind that you mentioned, which can get us a little bit closer. So for me, it's been productive to use that kind of lens. to look for evidence within the archives of sex word being done. Yeah, and I think that an important point to make here as well is that this isn't necessarily

something that just happens within sex work. We see infanticide being a real issue across medieval Europe generally because if you get pregnant in the wrong circumstances, kind of what do you do? Which is why the church often, from a medieval standpoint, is kind of like pretty chill comparatively about like abortion in the first trimester and then it gets like much more slippery after that. But it is certainly something that's on the cards, right? You know, because here are women who are in really difficult social circumstances. I mean, it's very difficult to raise a kid in a brothel, right? Like that's that that's a hard thing to do. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you know,

or what if you're one of these women who, this is sort of like your side hustle. You know, you're a laundry woman. Yeah. And, you know, you pick up extra work on the side. Exactly. Yeah. So these are the kind of risks that women face. The other one, of course, is the whole reputation issue. How do you negotiate that in your community if you, through economic circumstances, maybe like you say, you do a bit of laundry, you do some domestic service, you do a bit of sex work on the side, how do you negotiate what your neighbors think of you? And again, we talked earlier on about this, buying too much into the whole religious condemnation of it. That is a factor. And if you jump into any archive of insult and slander, the number one way in which women are abused verbally in this period is

by calling them a whore. But I still think people who do sex work are able to negotiate and can have a role in their communities where it's kind of understood what they do. And if they're skilled in the way they interact with their neighbors and others who know them, they can kind of make it through, as it were. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think that this is such an important point, though, because it's always difficult when you're dealing with issues of sex in medieval documents, because, yeah, you get people in court all the time, specifically for concepts of whoredom, but it's because the chick down the street and you got in a screaming match and each started calling each other a whore. Their term not ours, everybody. I'd like to

point that out. And, you know, they're in a screaming match. They get called before the court for slander and insults. And like no one involved actually does any form of sex work. They just don't like each other. Yeah, you never know. It's just, it's the most common form of abuse. It's like every single man is called thief or I love some of the cases that I've got the kind of antiquated, kind of posh, oh, you knave, that kind of thing and you scoundrel and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, these are nasty terms of abuse at the time. But to us, they sound. kind of cute till almost. Yeah, bring back knave, you know.

What can I say? Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things that is really difficult is kind of sorting through these issues. And you have really broad terms, especially across sexuality, that can mean all sorts of things, like raptists, which we often translate as being rape, can also just mean, like, taking someone from someone's house. And that can mean that, like, you ran off with your boyfriend, you know, sodomy, which can mean that two people.

of the same sex are having sex, or it can mean that two married people are having a kind of sex that can't relate in procreation. So we always have to be so careful when we're sifting through these things, which makes it even more difficult to the unsex workers, you know? I know. Even our ideas, you know, our concept of sex work, you know,

wouldn't really have been recognized as such in the Middle Ages, although as again, is this point I'm really insisting on, I think people do have a sense that sex can be work at this time, and they recognize it as a survival strategy for single women especially. Yeah, absolutely. You know, like say you managed to run away from the farm, congratulations. And, you know, you make it to the city and you need a job. But, you know, you've just been a peasant your whole life.

And, you know, you can do all the normal peasant things like run a farm and brew beer and do all these things. But yeah, that's maybe not going to get you by in London. So, yeah, you pick up odd jobs here and there. Or, you know, you can go to one of the brothels. and you can make a lot of money really quickly. I mean, this is one thing that a lot of the sources often talk about. And probably, you know, this is exaggerated because we know that there's a whole gamut of people who are performing sex work. You know, there's people who are incredibly low paid and they live in really difficult conditions.

And we know there's chicks who are like raking it in as well. Yeah, there's a whole spectrum. I think you're right. And the tricky thing is we know a minuscule percentage of what was going on. so hardly any of the evidence is truly representative. I think it's quite likely that at one end of the scale, yet people could probably do quite well financially. I mean, the real kind of classic case of this is if you go into Renaissance Italy, the figure of the courtesan appears.

And these are women who are totally out open and public. They have big reputations in every sense. And they're making money. They're making a whole kind of living down the other end of the scale. you know, it's really a kind of a way just to survive. And, you know, brothels probably sit somewhere to the kind of middle, lower end of that, where you can make money, but socially it's difficult to get back out of that kind of situation. Once you've been in the brothel, you're kind of stigmatized. And as we can go on and talk about, some of these places are

not nice, not easy to exist and work in financial exploitation is pretty much the rule. Yeah, okay, so let's get into it, right? Because there's the city brothels, which are a whole institution in and of themselves. So can you tell us a little bit about how they worked? Yeah, absolutely. So the basic idea is they're underpinned by this sense that sex is everywhere in the city. Sex workers exist. If we follow our theologians, Augustine, for example, then by far the best course of action is not to get rid of it entirely. We're able to try and accommodate it, partly because men, it's thought, need this. They need kind of sexual outlets. So we're have a groffle. It's a public institution. It is usually a house or several houses. Some cities have

multiple properties, which is bought by the authorities and then farmed out to an individual or some individuals brothel keepers effectively. So it's a farming system. They are basically responsible for running these places. Sometimes to make a profit, and we know that some brothels did make a profit, but basically to provide the public service that are therefore to fill them with women who are healthy, able to do the work, and to make them kind of appealing as well. There's no good having a brothel if it's, you know, nasty, cold, dark and dirty. It needs to look nice. It needs to be kind of luxurious. There's many reasons. There's medievalists to take issue with Game of Thrones. But if you think back to that image, the little finger brothel, it's not totally off the mark as to what

these things might have looked like. They've got to be appealing. So they'd have a stove, you know, big whoop the woman might be dressed in kind of fancy clothing the some of them might be kind of dressed up a bit like a kind of court as in like the princely court so as a kind of fantasy aspect and again this is something that you know still characterizes brothels there's one near me where I work in grats which is kind of roman themed so as a kind of fantasy element though as part of the whole package that's a kind of factor which has never really gone away what happens then well clients come into the brothel, they pay a nominal amount, and the prices are deliberately kept affordable. The whole idea is that men who are unmarried, so journeymen, apprentices, should have

access to these places. So the price of visiting the brothel is something like the equivalent of a meal or two, something you should be able to spend your wages on. Once you've done that, as a client, you would find yourself in effectively a bar, they're a bit like a kind of tavern. you would be able to interact with the women who are there who work and live themselves in the brothel and some places different in the way they operated you'd have in some places access to a whole night with a woman other places you would have you'd go out to a room, have sex

and then that's it all paid for and you'd go off again they'd be eating, drinking, fighting probably and hit like a tabern in every sense and the money would generally be paid into a kind of central chest that women are not allowed to keep it initially. From that, however, they're then paid a wage by the brothel keeper, which in theory allows them to subsist, basically. But they also, they live in these places so that they're not coming into work.

They are there. And in the real worst-case scenarios, they're basically imprisoned. It's hard to actually physically get out of these places. Yeah, because you have found some documents very specifically talking about that, right? where, I mean, one of the things that is supposed to happen in an idealized world with these brothels is that you can kind of pick it up and put it down. It's a job like, not necessarily like any other, but it is a job. And when you're done, you can go get married and leave it all behind you in theory. Yeah.

But in practice, you found some sources that show that it's very difficult to get out. Yeah. I mean, I think you're exactly right. So what my work has been based on, going back to an earlier point, is trying to find sources that give us a sense of the every day. We've got the top-down picture that I've just kind of sketched out. What does it look like from the perspective of people who live and work in these places? So one particular case that I've worked on extensively for 10, 15 years now, on and all, gives us a kind of micro-historical insider's perspective of one particular brothel in the city of Nervis.

Nurglingen, which is in the southwest of Germany, on the romantic road, if you find yourself for juristic purposes down that way. So it's a lovely place. Actually, what I would say to your listeners is pause for a second, go on Google Maps, look up Nurtlingan, and then zoom out and put the satellite feature on. You will see the city sits in a meteorite crater. It's a very interesting place for all kinds of reasons. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. If you sit in the middle of the city and look outwards, you will see kind of distant mountains, and those are the rim of the old meteorite crater. that I think 90-odd million years ago impacted anyway, much more interestingly about noting it. This is the site of, in the late 15th century, so 1471, 72 is what we're talking about, of this absolutely spectacular. I mean, also grim, brutal, awful case, but spectacular for its insights into what brothels were like in the middle ages. The circumstances basically are these.

the city council somehow, we don't know exactly how, but somehow gets word that one of the women in the brothel, and her name was Ells, Els von Eichstedt, which is a town quite nearby, who'd started off working as a kitchen maid, had at some point be forced to start seeing clients in the brothel, and as a result of that, she had become pregnant. So it's going the way of what we talked about earlier. What happens then, and I'll explain how we know this, but the story that then unfolds is that she tells one of the brothel keepers there are two in Nurtlingan, may have been a husband and wife, and the wife's name is Barbara. Else goes to Barbara and says, I haven't had my period. I'm a bit worried. What should I do? Barbara takes her a set and says, don't you worry, I'm going to make you a drink that will fix the problem.

And she's ambiguous in the way that she uses this language. She goes away and we get a report of what went into this drink. and the ingredients are quite innocently kind of cloves and wine. It sounds initially quite nice, kind of thing you might buy at a Christmas market. But then also Penny Royal and Queen Anne's Lace, which we know through testing as our effective abortifacians, so something that could induce a miscarriage. So else describes this happening when she later was to testify about all these events,

and she also describes how some of the other woman began to notice what was going on and warned out, do not take this mixture, do not drink what the brothel keeper is making up for you if you're concerned that you're pregnant. When the time comes to take it, as Elsie herself described, she said that she refused, didn't want to take it, but Barbara then took her a stick, a staff, and stood over her and forced her to. With the results that you might expect, she immediately began to suffer cramps as she described it, and then within a couple of hours was basically bedridden and soon after that miscarried a child, which, which she and some of the other women described as being about 20 weeks old, a male child.

So really, it's a distressing case. What we then get is lots of further descriptions about what happened afterwards, especially the attempts of the brothel keepers to try and hush this up, because this is a crime at this point. You can't do this. 20 weeks, that is, the church is not happy about that one. You know, like you get 12 weeks, let's get out of jail free, but 20, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

it fits every definition of abortion and infanticide, which they would need to prosecute and convey someone. So what happens next is that there's a kind of attempt to cover it up by the brothel keeper. They beat Elst savagely, as it described, with a stick. The Rod mentioned earlier with a bullwhip as well. They try and intimidate her physically. She is defiant. She refuses as she describes it to go along with it.

And they reach a point where the brothel keepers, Babava, and who may have been a hundred, husband, his name is Lienhard, come to her, and they say, right, we will offer you a bargain. You can leave the brothel, and we will cancel all the debt that you owe to us, and you can leave the town if you promise never to tell anyone what has happened. And she says, okay, fine, we're going to do this, but tells everyone else working with her, all of her colleagues, so to speak in the brothel about what's going to happen. And then right at the end, we get this just kind of incredible scene in which, as it's described, all the women are sitting down to dinner, and Barbara tells

else, off you go to the kitchen, get some milk, serve the other women, else leaves the room, and then secretly climbs over the fence of the brothel and leaves town. Once that's happened, Barbara comes back in and says loudly, oh, where could else have gone? We need to have a look for her. She could have escaped, et cetera, et cetera. The women do this, but of course they know what's happened. that had been let into the plan. And there's a kind of big fake search for her, but she's gone. She's out of time.

Which is kind of where that part of the record ends. This is so interesting on any number of levels, right? Because we have this classic hallmark of this case. The reason we're hearing about these women at all is some terrible things have happened, right? But it's about, you know, abortion that gets this in here. And the other thing that gets it in is this. question of unfree labor. And that comes up a lot, especially in late medieval discussions of sex work, because one of the big ways that women kind of fall into it, it's not necessarily that

they're like, oh, yeah, well, here's a good job for me. And I'm going to do this. Like, I mean, we have tons and tons of records about this from Prague, for example, quite nearby, where people move into town and, you know, your landlady says, oh, yeah, you can get this room and I'll give you on credit and you know what you can just work it off you can work off this debt that you're going to owe me and then the girls say oh yeah sure that sounds great and then they find out later the work in question is sex work so there's like a lot of trapping people through debt but that is legal in a way and then you can just say oh yeah well you're in debt and then that's how you say you can't leave right is by saying you can't leave because you owe me a debt not you can't leave because

you're a sex worker and this is a brothel and you belong here now. There's all these ways of entrapping people. Exactly. And it's such a familiar trap in the context of sex work and by no means just in the middle ages. I mean, I say that's any sociologist of a sex work looking at today and it's a common pattern. And it's exactly what's going on in Erklingen and by extension through some of what the women say when this all comes to trial elsewhere in Germany. And anywhere where there's a kind of brothel system, we can kind of assume that this is a risk. So I've told the whole story about the abortion. That's actually only one part of this, this incredible kind of package of sources, because what happens as well is once the canals

discovered, what's going on and else has been interrogated and told this story that I've then related, what they also do is they have a second parallel investigation when what they do is unprecedented. They get all the women working in NERDlingen at that time, and they have them testify about what has happened in the brothel, what the working conditions are like, how they've been abused in various ways. The reason for this actually is quite pragmatic at heart. The brothel is supposed to be a public institution. It's supposed to work in a kind of orderly fashion. And if you can have a situation where someone is being forced into aborting a child committing a crime, then of course that's a big problem for the authorities. It totally turns on his head this idea

that it's all for the greater good. It's all, you know, the kind of lesser evil argument. So what we get alongside this abortion investigation is a kind of catalog through the voices, through the perspectives of these women of what's going on in this brothel and by extension probably other ones. And it's exactly that picture that you've touched on of financial exploitation of trapping people in the brothel. The first thing that happens to most of these women when they arrive in a brothel is they immediately have all their possessions confiscated. So this is me quoting, effectively, what the women say. There's one in particular, one woman who, she's the kind of spokesperson. of the whole brothel. Her name is Anna, Anna von Ulm, which is about 50 miles away from Nurtlingen.

And she really stepped forward in the trial and grabs this whole thing by the collar and gives a really full, you can sense kind of angry account of what life is like. And so it's financial exploitation. The first thing that happens, the women come at the door, everything they own is confiscated. So all their clothes, anything they've got now belongs to the brothel keeper. And they have to work to buy it back. Everything they buy, all the food and drink is given to them at massively inflated prices, and they have to work to get it back. Of course, the way the trap works, they're never going to make enough money. And the result is they are, well, I think you could call it debt bondage, if not modern slavery is what we'd say if it was happening, which it is today.

So the model is pragmatically, it's supposed to be a kind of neat solution, but actually the way it actually works is to trap women into what is seen as a sinful lifestyle. But they do kind of get some justice, these women, at the end of it, in terms of what happens to the brothel owners, though, yes? Yeah, there's a kind of happy ending. To this one, happy ending in the context of all kinds of other groom stuff. What basically happens is we get to the end of the investigation, and it's pretty clear that the court views these women with a lot of credibility

because the brothel keeper, Leonhardt, is more or less immediately dismissed from his post. So he gets off quite lightly, actually. He's just sacked and then dismissed for the. the town. So, off you go, not allowed to work here anymore. Babba, his potential wife partner, doesn't have it quite as easy. She is convicted of causing an abortion. There's a record in the town archive in the so-called blood book, which is a record of all the kind of capital corporal punishments, which states that she was branded, probably on the cheeks, and then banished across the rhine. So she's expelled from the town, not allowed to return on pain of death, probably. And then we have

some indication that there's a new set of rules brought in shortly afterwards. We have a new rule book for the brothel brought in in 1472, which has a lot of what was discussed by the women as is represented in this new rule book. So the women are not, for example, allowed to be kept physically in a brothel. They're supposed to be able to come and go, to leave the sinful life as it put as they as they want to. There's attempts to address some of the other abuses that they describe. They talk about being given terrible food. They talk about violence, being routine, all that kind of stuff. So we've got this new regime.

Whether that had any kind of long-term impact, I think it's probably doubtful. I suspect it probably returned to a kind of unpleasant status quo quite quickly. But they did at least live to see the kind of hated oppressors dismissed and got rid of in this immediate set of events. Yeah, I think of that, you know, the one good thing about reading that case is I was like, well, at least those people got in trouble. Yeah, it really, and I think it's so wonderful, actually,

to hear from Anna when you look at these sources because, you know, she's so eloquent and able to talk about what their situation is. And she comes across very clearly. And, you know, I'm jealous of this source because, you know, a lot of the sources that I'm working with in Prague with sex workers, I don't get to hear from them directly. I get to hear men talk about them, right? And there's this one that I just kind of like want to throw out kind of in contrast. to nerdling it, I guess, is the way. Because there is a particular brothel in Prague in the 14th century called Oborah. And Obora is kind of up near the castle, kind of, oh, fancy, you know, you know, kind of a thing. And I found out that it existed because there are churchmen complaining about it. There's this guy, Master Ulrich, and his deal is that he thinks that there shouldn't be a brothel there. So he's constantly going in and attempting to run the women at. out. And I would imagine

through violence, there's probably some like violent coercion going on there. And he complains to the church that every time he does this, so it's like, I guess this is Ulrich's hobby, right? He gets bored. He attempts to break up a brothel. The women

then go to the town council and say, he's in there again. And the town council is like, Ulrich, get out of the brothel. Right? Like, you need to go. So it's really interesting because he says that it's these women who are doing it. And it's like we don't hear from like a brothel keeper in particular. And he doesn't say that there's a madam, which you know there might be.

You know, madams come up a lot in all of these things. And the thing is they love to get mad at a madam. What we see from the case, Nedlingen, is that they come down very heavily on Barbara. And I mean, quite right too. You know, she's the one who caused the abortion and all of these things. But there is kind of a way of looking at women in particular. you know, as panders, we get that term a lot. Yeah, exactly.

Where it's like, oh, this is really bad. You know, it's a woman who, you know, she's not doing it herself, but she's kind of promoting this lifestyle. So you would think that if there was a madam involved, Master Ulrich would be like, oh, and there's this terrible madam. But no, it seems like there's these women who are doing this work, and they're like, I live here.

This is my, and they're trying to get back into the brothel. And the priest's complaint is that they do this really successfully. And they advocate for themselves. And I'm like, I just, I'm so desperate. to hear more from these women. And I can't, you know, I can't find anything yet. Yeah, but it seems like some kind of corporate organization amongst the mute. I think, you know, is there, is there, there's no sense of a spokeswoman or someone could do. The women, quote unquote. And so, you know, someday, you know, I will, I will,

I will at some point get far enough through, you know, the Prox City archives that I will, that I will find one of these women. I'm determined. It is interesting, right, because you have, on the one hand, some women who seem as though they're quite in control of things. And on the other, you have these really terrible conditions. So there's this huge spectrum in terms of brothel work. And it's one that we don't get to hear tons a lot about. But, okay, we've got all of these sources. We've got all of like this incredible stuff that we hear.

But you and I are talking about cities in the Holy Roman Empire. Uh-huh. Right? And we don't necessarily get this same kind of story. system or the same way of looking at sex work everywhere in Europe, do we? Right? It's not the same, for example, in England. That's something I wish I knew more about. We don't get that kind of bruffel movement in England in the way that we do in European cities. There are a couple of exceptions.

Kind of incongruously, I think Sandwich in Kent has got kind of municipal brothel. All right, sandwich. Yeah. And I think there are some port towns in East Anglia as well. And I guess the logic there is maybe these are places where you have a lot of foreign men coming in and they expect to find conditions that they know from home. And if they don't find those conditions, then there's, again, a kind of public risk to women. There's also, of course, there's the famous brothels in Southwark, which are, I think, ultimately belongs to the Bishop of Southwark, don't they, or Archbishop of Southwark. Yeah, and Winchester as well. He rents a lot of them out. Yeah.

Exactly. So we've got those brilliant rules, which, again, have a lot of similarities with what you see on the continent. But we don't get that kind of. a widespread municipal brothel movement that we see in German cities, in some French cities, Iberia as well, and I think Italian cities also have this feature as well. And it's something I wish I knew more about or understood better. Why do we think England is so weird? Huge question, you know, whole show, whole show, why is England weird? You know, like, I mean, what is it about England that it doesn't kind of adopt the same continental standards about these sort of things. My best guess really is that the kind of cities that you and I are looking at are,

they're basically city states almost, they are, they're highly independent, they have a lot of power to make their own policy and decide things like, what do we do about, about sex workers. For us in England, cities are not anything like as free to operate, there's more kind of heavy royal and seniorial power in the background, which prevents that would be my best guess, but I'm not totally sure. Ah, it's always, you know, the debate. The imperial royal debate, Jamie. Just like, this is why the Holy Roman Empire is so interesting. I can't help it. You know, I simply... Everyone should do more Holy Roman Empire history.

That's right. What we're getting from this. That's right. All right. Okay, you have a situation where there's all of these brothels. And, you know, maybe we don't get to hear from them as much as we would like. But, you know, you and I are both like, oh, that's an interesting brothel. Check out my brothel. You know, because we're cool, right? But then... Ellen, we are not cool. I hate to break it dear, but... Jamie, let me have this.

Well, you may be. You may be. I'm not. I'm not going to claim that. Okay. We have this big crackdown, right? Kind of, from the 16th century onwards, suddenly, what is this municipal institution? And at the very least, suddenly gets cracked down on. I think that's a safe thing to say, right? I'd call it that as well. So, I mean, I generally... tell people that why this tends to happen is a result of the Reformation, right?

You have this big kind of, I always say it's a spiritual arms race, right? Where like, the Protestants are like, we're really holy. And the Catholics are like, no, no, you're not. And then everyone goes, well, if you're so holy, then why is there a brothel? And then you kind of like have to shut down all of them. And like, that's certainly in there, right? Yeah, spiritual arms race. I'm going to use that.

That, I think, is probably still the best explanation. What you can see is there's an increasing religious. of town government towards the end of the Middle Ages. So we're talking about the late 15th century when city governments become increasingly confident in their ability to govern, but also aware that they are the ones who are responsible for shaping the godly community. And this kind of moral compromise that has allowed the brothel to exist just becomes increasingly difficult to uphold in that kind of atmosphere. And stories like that of nerdling can only make it more difficult. How can you claim to be acting for the common good if this kind of stuff is

happening in your public institutions would be one way to attack them? And then when as we get towards the reformation, as you say, we actually get targeted campaigns from preachers who will come into a town and whip up public sentiment by pointing to the brothel as an instance of the kind of corruption what's going on. Even then, however, they're very persistent brothels or resistant rather, with lots of times where long into the 16th century, there is still a public brothel. And it does take some time for the movement to go away. And of course, it doesn't mean that prostitution vanishes.

It still continues as just unofficial, illegal, black market, whatever you want to call it, after that point. I mean, yeah, absolutely. You've already mentioned, for example, that, like, meanwhile in Venice, right? And during this period, actually, the courtesons sort of take off, and they're just making more money now. Now they're very, very fancy indeed, right? So there are always exceptions to this rule.

But, I mean, certainly here in London, there's a big crackdown led by Henry the 8th, you know. One of the most spiritual guys who ever lived, right? Where he tries very famously to kind of close the stews, which are the series of bathhouses and brothels down in Southark. And he says, no, like, we're not doing that anymore. And it becomes this kind of way of showing that you care about the... these things, even if it is just, you know, some kind of flex. And, you know, yeah, the fact of the matter remains that this doesn't get rid of sex work. Like, you know, you can't get rid of sex work. That's just not going to happen. No, it's a way for rulers to kind of throw their weight around and

to be, you know, ostentatiously doing the public good. And, you know, there's a whole other debate as to whether, you know, is this ultimately a public good if prostitution is legalized and regulated and so on and so forth, which has never gone away. Yeah. And I mean, I suppose that one of the big things that we end up seeing as a result of all this. You know, there are, of course, those who say, oh, and isn't it great because, you know, now women aren't being abused in these particularized way. But what ends up happening as a result, as well, is that now individual women get a whole lot of stick for being what they call horse, right? And suddenly now your very identity is a crime. For sure. And there's definitely a sense that when we get this atmosphere,

towards the end of the Middle Ages, especially in European cities, where the brothel is becoming more controversial and some of them are closing and people are preaching more about sexual behavior. Life for women who are doing sex work, whether in brothels or out with them, gets increasingly difficult. What we see in criminal archives especially is that just as you describe that women are now being picked up by the authorities or being prostitutes, not just for, as seen in the past for kind of auxiliary stuff like abortion and infanticide, it becomes, there's an increasing sense of this solidifying as a crime. And they are asked specifically about sex they've had with whom, where they've been, where there might be private brothels operating.

And there's a kind of general atmosphere that it's becoming harder and harder to kind of make it through than it had been in the earlier period. And I suppose that the other thing to just kind of acknowledge here as well is when whore as a slur is something that gets thrown around all the time. There's also the fact that there are a lot of women who get called whores and certainly

that get brought before the authorities and it has nothing to do with sex work. So, you know, I've got cases wherein women are called suspect so they'll call them suspect women. And why are they suspect? Well, they're at the beer hall. Yeah.

Right. who spend time in kind of male spaces or even who are in the streets who are visibly present and who don't have a chaperone or any kind of legitimate, obvious, visually, obvious reason to be there run the risk of this kind of labeling. And certainly we see that being a problem when we look at women even into the modern period, you know, because Hallie Rubenholds work on, for example, the Jack the Ripper cases has shown that a lot of the women that we said, oh, well, they were sex workers. It's like, that was just a chick who went to a bar.

And we're really desperate to say, well, she must have been because she was in a bar. And people did that in the medieval period as well. And then that means that it just becomes illegal to be a woman in public. It becomes illegal to be a woman in a masculine space. And so there is this idea of saving women in all of this, like from themselves. But what it also means is that there is a name. of the acceptable places for women to be in the world. Yeah, and there's, even before that,

there have been attempts to kind of force sex workers to display themselves as such through certain types of clothing. So if you go out on the street, you'll need to wear, well, it differs from different towns, whether it's a red cap or some kind of sash or something, to try and eliminate who is and who isn't. But once we get to the later period and sex work in general is much more heavily, well, outlawed,

any woman can run the risk of being classified in this way just by being out and about in public and not visibly with a man, you know, related to her or through marriage, etc. Yeah. I guess there are also these knock-on effects because, as you say, sex work doesn't go away, right? You know, even in an increasingly hostile place, and you still kind of have some legal brothel keepers, and then you have kind of the more clandestine sex. or I'm stealing words. No, it's a good.

It's a good term. That's a good term. That's a good term that some of my sources use, right? And then they end up like beefing in public. And then there's like a whole other crime because they're like fighting and pulling each other's hair. Yeah.

And actually, some of some really interesting sources towards the end of the Middle Ages when the whole market is contracting a bit and it's more difficult and there's increased competition and so on, which show that there could, be kind of rivalry between sex workers who are working in different ways. I mean, the NERGing in case, I think, is a great example of the kind of solidarity amongst women, but we've also got cases where that is not the case. We get petitions, for example, there's a great one given to the

City Council of Nuremberg in the 1490s by the women of the public brothel, so they are, you know, official municipal sex workers, and they have caught wind of private operators elsewhere in the city and they send in this list and say exactly where they are and where the council can find them and they say go and get them. There's a really nice turn of phrase in which they say, you know, they're out there and they're working much more kind of rudely or roughly than we do in the public brothel. So there's a sense, you know, there's decorum and sex work and then there's, you know, beyond the pale. Girl on girl crime. I hate to see it, you know. You're often glad when you find stories of solidarity, but there's, you know, the other side of the climate is really much

part of the picture as well. I mean, I suppose it is an important thing to say here as well because we've both brought them up, but you know, the kind of reverse image of all of this crackdown and the legality questions and the kind of scrapping for survival is, of course, the Italian cortisans. But they are also a particularly rarefied group, right? Like, they're not the same thing as like the nerdling and girls at all. no though there was actually one Italian woman in the Brussels in working and who well I don't know whether maybe she had been a court of

than it's not sure but I mean all that tells us about is the kind of extent to which some of these women were trafficked and moved around but yeah just to circle back exactly as you say there is there was a real spectrum of sex work across the whole period when we look at what there is at the very kind of top end not you know kind of morally or that perspective but financially economically there is the kind of cortisanne picture, very much part of that Renaissance Italy

context. And then at the other end, there's people who are really skrimping and saving and just trying to survive, really, for whom life I think is much more difficult. And I mean, I suppose that's the thing is it's a broad church. And when we talk about medieval sex work or indeed early

modern sex work, that can mean all sorts of different things. And it's been so useful to have you come along today because I think it is incredibly important that we do find these records of actual individual women instead of just conceptualizing it, instead of just saying, oh, here's the way that you think about sex work, and that's how life was for people, because until you have the words out of individuals' mouths, it's not always clear how that shakes down. Yeah, I think we need both parts of the picture.

The only note of caution is that just because there are so few sources that have the individuals themselves at their center, you've always got to ask, well, high representative really is it? Do they speak for other people or has this case only survived because it's particularly egregious and grim and awful? Was it like that for most people in reality? So again, all I'm talking about is just is being careful the way you read the sources. You can get a lot from looking at individual case studies, I think, but you need to be careful and mindful of context when you do that kind of history. Yeah, absolutely. You know, not every single person was being treated this way. And that That's why it goes to court.

Yeah. And in fact, if we can quote Anna von Ulm again, she does say, well, I've worked in other brothels, and this is by far the worst one. So she gives us a little insight into maybe nerdling and was a particularly bad example of something that was nevertheless going on more broadly. Thank you, Anna. Like, what a queen. She's brilliant.

So good. Well, Jamie, this has been an absolute pleasure. Likewise, thank you so much for having me on it. I can talk to you about this all day. Sorry for being too enthusiastic, but it's just been brilliant. Thank you so much. No, you're incredibly welcome. Thank you. Thanks so much to Jamie once again for joining me, and thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you were interested in this topic, you might want to check out my past episode with Kate Lister, where we talked about the medieval rules of sex.

Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and add free podcasts by signing up at a history hit.com forward slash subscription. There are some fabulous films that we've made for you to enjoy there, including my episode on Life and Death in Medieval London, where we look at the final resting place of some of

London's medieval sex workers. Remember, you can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have a moment, please drop us a review or rate us everywhere you listen to podcasts and tell your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Otherwise, the wonderful Matt Lewis will be back on Friday for more medieval action.

And I'll see you all, as always, next Tuesday. Until next time.