The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (43 page)

There’s something gloriously queenly
in Eleanor’s story: its insistence on what people gave him, his sheer exuberance
totting up the numbers and ranks of his clients, his willingness to make love
outdoors on a December night in London and
the way all this must have mystified the aldermen. They were not a church court, so they
couldn’t bring charges of sodomy or even prostitution; and then his taste for
being sodomized by priests and seducing nuns seemed to put him out of any obvious
category. Since it was hard to know what names to call him, he went free.

We know the tarts on a Paris street, in the
thirteenth century, shouted: ‘Sodomite!’ at any student who turned down
their offers; Jacques de Vitry said so. We know that in an Iceland penitential in the
1180s there is a trace of some kind of sex toy; the priests considered a man making love
to a woman rather less sinful than a man ‘polluted by drilled wood’.
⁴⁹

What we know best is that there has always
been a business in sex: not just selling sexual partners, but providing a chance to
meet, a place to make love, and sometimes dinner, too.

Prostitution was a sizeable business in
Bruges, which had the reputation of the whoriest city in Europe, which was saying
something. The fifteenth-century Rabbenu Judah Mintz thought that ‘it seems to the
gentiles that it is a good thing to place prostitutes in the marketplace and town
squares and in all the corners of their houses so as to save them from a graver sin,
that is, from relations with married women’.
⁵⁰

In Bruges the bathhouse customers, women and
men, sat down to their wine and their dinner at a common table in a vast wooden bath
tub, women naked but with their faces slightly veiled, until it was time to step down to
the floor between the dogs waiting there and then go to bed.
⁵¹
A Spaniard, Pero
Tafur, was in Bruges in 1435, and he wrote that ‘the bathing of men and women
together they take to be as honest as churchgoing with us’. It sounds agreeable,
but it was not quite as open as he thought. Leo of Rozmital, an ambassador from Bohemia,
visited at around the same time and discovered that a woman could spend the night with
any man she wanted at the Waterhalle, on condition the man never saw her face and did
not know who she was. The penalty for being known, he wrote, was death.

The bathhouses were mostly by the port,
since it was merchants
and sailors who
needed them. The brothels were women’s business for the most part; which is
perhaps not surprising since men who were merchants had to go travelling, and brothels
need constant attention. So from the mid-1350s women ran the houses in the town,
elbowing men out of the game, even old Weiter Balz, whose bathhouses had been fined
every year without exception from 1305 to 1355 for one offence or another. Madames were
left in control of the women called Frisian XX, Bette the Jewess, Marie the hatwasher,
Katherine the candle seller and the occasional woman who claimed to be a beguine when
she was appearing before the city authorities to get her licence to cruise.

All this regulation suggests a gentlemanly
business, but gentlemen got other kinds of offers. Tafur arrived in a year of famine,
and he was in the port when he was approached by a woman who offered him his choice of
two very young girls. The woman explained ‘she was almost dead with hunger, having
had nothing to eat for many days except a few small fish, and that the two girls were
like to die of starvation and that they were virgins’. Tafur gave her money; he
says he did not take the girls.
⁵²

We know that the brothels of Southwark, the
‘stews’ just outside London, had whitewashed walls and signs like pubs; we
know they offered baths because we know that their owners made their servants carry
water in tubs; and they offered women, often from Flanders. From around 1400 the London
authorities were especially wary of ‘Flemish women, who profess and follow such
shameful and dolorous life’ and caused spectacular fights in which ‘many men
have been slain and murdered’.
⁵³
Now this immigrant crew is a
curiosity, because there were quite enough poor young women coming into London from the
surrounding countryside. It almost seems that young women might go away from Flanders
for a while to make money, just as their journeyman brothers did, and go on the game
instead of going into service. They could then return home, leaving their reputations
behind in London.

Prostitution was not the whole story: there
was also the little war of guile that went before marriage. The Church considered any
couple married if they had consented to marry and made promises to
each other; the Church expected you to have the banns said,
and to appear in daylight before a priest to make your vows, but in theory consent and a
promise were enough. So the Bishop of Salisbury in the early 1200s had to tell men to
stop weaving straw rings on the hands of young women ‘in order to fornicate more
freely with them’. Women who thought they had a man’s consent often had to
be resolute. Matilda from East Grinstead in 1276 had a particular grievance: that three
of her friends had caught her making love and told her lover he could either marry her,
die, or kiss her arse. He promised to marry her, but he never did.

Love required care, especially in England. A
charge of fornication might lead to a public whipping, which was bad enough, but an
unmarried mother would get no sympathy in the wide world, might be cut off by charitable
bodies and even thrown out of town: four poor mothers and their six children were
expelled from Horsham in the 1280s.
⁵⁴
Something had to be done to hide
pregnancy, to stop pregnancy, to avoid getting pregnant in the first place or to give
the child away very quickly.

There were the usual expedients: anal sex,
oral sex, the medieval speciality of separating out the male and the female orgasms so
the male seed and the female seed could not mix, which everyone knew was required for
pregnancy. Courting couples were allowed heavy petting and by the time anyone was
printing books about such things, which in this case is 1637, there were sometimes
healthy outdoor games: boys throwing the girls into the sea off a Dutch beach and then
carefully drying them off, which was followed in very short order by walks in the nearby
woods.
⁵⁵
There was also coitus interruptus, but that required, as the
sixteenth-century memoirist Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de Brantôme, put it, being
careful and watching ‘for the time of the tidal wave when it was
coming’.

He also mentions a girl who was sleeping
with an apothecary who gave her ‘antidotes to guard from being pregnant’ and
knew about drugs which would make her fat flow away so gently if she did happen to
conceive that she would ‘feel nothing but wind’.
⁵⁶
Long before that
lecherous druggist, women knew very well how to avoid having babies, and so did rather
holy persons.
Abortion was wrong,
contraception was wrong, the true purpose, and only excuse, for any sexual act was to
get babies; and yet there are manuscripts written in ninth-century German monasteries
which give detailed, even plausible, instructions for making the menses flow. One
includes parsley, the coarse-leaved hartwart, rue, black pepper, lovage, thyme and
celery seeds, a kitchen recipe. A bishop of Rennes in his twelfth-century herbal
suggests spearmint applied to the womb – ‘a woman will not conceive’ – and
artemisia, the wormwood of the Bible, to cause abortions. The saintly philosopher
Albertus Magnus, the man who gave Aristotle back to the world, roared against
contraception when he was writing theology; but in his work on minerals he writes
helpfully that jasper, especially the green translucent kind, will marvellously check
the flow of blood, prevent conception and help birth, and there is also oristes, a
precious stone that stops a woman conceiving if she just wears it. Albertus, being an
alchemist, knew such things.
⁵⁷

None of the rest was secret knowledge. An
equally saintly woman, the twelfth-century Hildegard of Bingen in her closed convent,
asked her neighbours about herbs which could make the menstrual fluids flow and some
that deliberately provoked abortion. She wrote the details down, to share them: told her
readers, in her book
Physica
, about feverfew to control menstruation, white
hellebore to help a girl’s first period, the wild ginger spikenard to bring on
either abortion or else menstruation when it has not happened for a while. She was the
first to mention the same use for the brilliant yellow tansy, a staple among
Charlemagne’s herbs and in monastic gardens. Even when Hildegard warns against a
herb, as she does with the silver-leaved oleaster, the wild olive, she says ‘it
makes an abortion to a pregnant woman with a danger to her body’, as though there
were other ways that were not so dangerous.
⁵⁸

There is something even odder here.
Contraception was wrong in marriage, more or less murder, but encouraged outside it. A
man did more penance if he fathered a baby while misbehaving, perhaps because he caused
more scandal; an Irish penitential, known from a ninth-century copy, lays down three
years’ penance for a layman who corrupts a virgin promised to God if he has a baby
by her and
ruins her reputation, but only
one year for uncomplicated corruption. The means might be sexual practice – oral sex,
anal sex, coitus interruptus – or they might be ‘the poisons of sterility’,
which early on were associated with witchcraft, but the message was unambiguous: no
babies. The sixteenth-century Thomas Sanchez, the greatest Jesuit expert on marriage,
had all kinds of reservations about sex inside marriage – he was particularly against
women on top in the sexual act – but he conceded that a fornicator could not be blamed
for coitus interruptus because he was at least avoiding the greater evil of fathering a
bastard.
⁵⁹

There’s no way to know how this
knowledge was used; what matters is that it was available. If a woman wanted to delay
having children, or to prevent having children, she could find the means readily enough;
and the information was as open in the most respectable convent in Bingen as it was in
any brothel in Bruges. Her choice was real, for the time being.

The sick had fever, ulcers, vomiting and
diarrhoea, choked lungs and great swellings in the groin or armpits or behind the ears.
Those were not even the worst of it, because some people survived all those symptoms.
More deadly were the small lumps that criss-crossed the body, ‘brittle coal
fragments’, according to the Welsh poet Llywelyn Fychan mourning his four dead
daughters, or ‘shower of peas giving rise to affliction, messenger of swift
death’.
¹
The Black Death was an assault.

A sailor off a ship could infect a town. The
opening of a cargo hold seemed enough to let loose the sickness, and just talking to
someone could pass the disease; or so people thought because they thought they had seen
it happen. Death was very quick. The menace was real, but not understood, and it seemed
new so it must have been brought from somewhere else, somewhere over the seas; but
because the information was so thin, plague unsettled everything and left a perverse
residue of irrational fears about a very real danger. It was rather like a terrorist
attack: something had to be done, but there was nothing to be done, so it was necessary
to control everything, just in case. The death toll was unimaginable so people imagined
the restoration of an order that never was.

This medieval horror had very long
consequences. It is the start of the process we still know of anxious, insistent social
controls, of policing lives; and what goes with it, an official suspicion of the poor
and the workless, who are never just unfortunate. Our nightmares begin with their
nightmares, in the 1340s.

The Black Death was perhaps the greatest natural catastrophe
of the millennium. ‘So great a death toll was never heard of before,’ says
the chronicle of England known as the
Brut
, in a version written around 1400.
‘It wasted the people so that only the tenth person was left alive.’ He is
almost right; manorial records show villages around Worcester and in Cambridgeshire
where four out of five people died. In two years, one person in three across Northern
Europe would be dead.

There had been rain, every night, every day,
and then around Michaelmas the plague came to London, and remained until the next
August. ‘He that fell ill one day was dead the third day after’, according
to the
Brut
. People ran from the sickness and carried it with them.
‘There was death without sorrow, wedding without friendship, wilful penance,
dearth without scarcity and fleeing without refuge or help.’ It was an event so
strange and radical that ‘all that were born after that pestilence had two teeth
less than they had before’.
²