Southwark, on the south side of the River Thames in London, housed a busy community of workers within its built-up streets and huddles of large buildings. Within the lanes and along the riverside, there were wood and timber merchants, shipwrights and bargemen and watermen, providing travel between Southwark and the other areas of London. There were also inns and taverns, perfect for visitors - one of the most famous being The Tabard, mentioned by Geoffrey Chaucer in a poem in the fourteenth century. Another was the White Hart, where Jack Cade had established a base during his attack on London in 1450. However, the area was also home to stew-houses - buildings where women worked as prostitutes.
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| Public Domain, Metropolitan Museum of Art |
The Stews of Southwark were well established by the early medieval period, and Henry II tried to regulate the industry with a number of rules to attempt to make womens' livelihoods there safer. They included:
No Stewholder to keep any Woman to Board, but she to Board abroad at her pleasure
To take no more for the Woman’s Chamber in the Week, than fourteen pence
Not to keep open his Doors upon the Holy days
No Stewholder to receive any Woman of Religion, or any Man’s Wife
No man to be drawn or enticed into any Stewhouse
There were also restrictions on houses selling ‘bread, ale, flesh, fish, wood, coal or any victuals’, and Henry also ordered that the ‘Constables, Bayliff, and others’ were to regularly search each stewhouse to ensure order was being kept and his rules were being observed. Another interesting order was that a woman was not permitted to agree a price for a single act of sex with a man, but ‘may lie with him all Night, till the Morrow’. One tried to prevent women being captured and detained to provide services against their will. ‘No Stewholder, or his wife’, ordered Henry, ‘should let or stay [stop] any Single Woman to go and come freely at all times, when they listed [wanted]’. The fact that these rules needed to be written strongly suggests that stewholders were known to keep women against their will.
Considering Southwark’s central location and its convenience on the banks of the Thames, stew-houses enjoyed a lively trade. Run jointly by men and their wives, they were owned by others with links to power. During the reign of Richard II, William Walworth the Mayor of London complained that his stew was damaged by rebels during the rebellion headed by Wat Tyler, the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381. The Bishop of Winchester was associated with the stews, as his house was close by, built in 1107.
In the early sixteenth century, the fronts of these premises were painted with signs, names such as The Boar’s Head, Cross Keys, The Gun, The Castle, The Crane, The Cardinal’s Hat, The Bell and The Swan. However in 1546 Henry VIII outlawed them, and the blast of a trumpet in Southwark marked the moment that ‘the inhabitants of the same [were] to keep good and honest rule as in other places of this realm’. However during the reign of his son Edward VI, one commentator argued that prostitution was still busy, and not just in Southwark, saying that ‘I hear say, there is now more whoredom in England than ever there was on that Bank’.
The women who worked in the stews, unsurprisingly, suffered from damage to their local reputations and were often side-lined by their community. In the Survey of the City of London and Westminster by John Stow and edited in the early seventeenth century by John Strype, it was noted that prostitutes, when they died, were ‘excluded from Christian burial’ and ‘forbidden the rights of the Church’. If a woman left the profession, she was permitted to return to her parish church and receive burial there. But if not, she would be buried in the Singlewoman’s Church Yard, away from the local church. As they were not permitted to live in the stew where they worked, they would have encountered some resistance too from the wives of their parish. It is telling that one of Henry II's rules was that no stew holder could permit a man’s wife to work there, there were no restrictions on allowing husbands of local wives of course to make use of their facilities.
Bearing in mind the medical understanding of the period, with no idea of bacteria, viral infections or other health problems, women working in the stews would have been exposed to a wide variety of illnesses. As well as sexually-transmitted diseases, there were colds, flu and viruses they would have contracted, and it is likely that many of them became pregnant through their work. Ironically, the chances of pregnancy or spread of disease was increased by one of the rules Henry II imposed on the industry. Laying with a customer all night, rather than for one act of sex would have likely resulted in more sessions of intercourse and a greater exposure to viruses. Women would have been subject to violence too, and Stow in his survey of the area mentions the Clink, a nearby prison ‘for such as should brabble, fray, or break the peace on the said Bank, or in the Brothel Houses’.
You might also like The Medieval and Tudor Archers of Finsbury, London and Tudor Tourists: Sightseeing in Elizabethan London.
Source:
The Survey of the City of London, Strype, London 1720 Vols 1 and 2. archive.org
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