The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

by Michael Pye

  This idea of ‘marital affection’ changed the structure of families and the shape of people’s lives in the North, which helped send ideas and technology across the continent and gave money quite surprisingly modern uses. The personal isn’t just political; it is economic.

  You will, of course, be wondering about sex. In marriage it was a legal duty to be available on demand to make love or something similar, so much so that the famous Héloïse wanted to be the girlfriend of the famous Abelard, even his whore, so she could express all the love she felt without compulsion; married love was an obligation, she said. The simultaneous orgasm was much touted by the influential medical books from Salerno, very widely read in the North, because it causes such delight that the married couple want sex again and again; it was also, for a while, a moral good, since man and woman were both supposed to come at the same time in order to have a baby, and babies were the whole point of sex. The return of Aristotle to libraries and to favour across Europe rather scuppered this happy moment, since he reckoned a woman could conceive without feeling pleasure. And there was always the question of how to get where you meant to go: Ovid suggested gentleness, caresses and murmurs, but his thirteenth-century French translator suggested biting like a dog.46

  At least we know the rules and duties of marriage, and sometimes the troubles: the courts acknowledged cruelty as a reason to end a marriage while canon law was still limited to adultery, or spiritual fornication, which is heresy, or proven attempts to kill your spouse. But we don’t know the reality of people’s sex lives, and we don’t know exactly what happened before all those late marriages in Northern Europe: what everyone did, and nobody talked about.

  Our evidence comes from sermons and law courts, so what we know is a tabloid world.

  Eleanor was not a lady, not if she was working Cheapside when the light had gone on a Sunday night in December in 1394. Mind you, Eleanor was not a woman, either.47

  John Britby thought she was a woman, went to talk to her, asked her if she’d have sex with him; Eleanor wanted money, and Britby agreed. They went down Soper’s Lane and found a stall there and got down to business. They had just got properly detestable, unmentionable and ignominious when city officials spotted them, and Eleanor, still in all his finery, came before the Mayor and the aldermen of London to explain himself.

  Her name was John Rykener, he said, and he blamed a certain Anna, ‘whore of a former servant’ of a gentleman, who taught him to practise this vice ‘in the manner of a woman’. He didn’t mean dressing as a woman, though, because he said a woman called Elizabeth Brouderer had taught him that. This may be Elizabeth ‘the embroiderer’, in which case she may be Elizabeth Moring, who set up a school of embroidery with resident girls, who were then encouraged to stay out all night with friars and clerics. Elizabeth had some difficulty reminding the amateur girls they were supposed to bring home rewards for what they had done;48 in Eleanor’s case, she evidently did better.

  Rykener had a talent for shakedowns. Elizabeth would put her daughter into bed with a customer in a darkened room, then get her to leave before dawn; in the morning, the punter woke up to face Eleanor. Eleanor was, to put it gently, self-assertive. One vicar had sex with him, after which Eleanor removed two of the vicar’s robes; and when the victim wanted them back, Eleanor insisted his husband would be all too willing to take the vicar to court.

  Sometimes, though, Eleanor was just a tart. He had three ‘unsuspecting’ scholars in the marshes at Oxford while working there as an embroiderer, and in Burford he notched up two Franciscans and a Carmelite friar. His best price was two shillings, his best gift a gold ring and he said ‘he accommodated priests more readily than other people because they wished to give him more than others’. At Beaconsfield he seduced a certain Joan, ‘as a man’, and two foreign Franciscans ‘as a woman’. He claimed a vivid heterosexual career with nuns and ‘with many women both married and otherwise’ and he couldn’t count the priests who had had him.

  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 inst
ead 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.

  11.

  The plague laws

  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

  There had to be an answer to such a brute disease: something to do. You see it in the pictures between the
prayers in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry from the early fifteenth century: not just the processions of hooded men beating themselves with chains and cords, trying to make up for sin, but also the other processions, the dragon of plague being taken out to burn, the cross being carried back to show the devil dragon is dead. You could pray in all four directions, against all of the winds that carried clouds and mists of sickness. The Sorbonne doctors told Philippe VI, called the Lucky, to get out of town; they prescribed three words to chase the plague away, ‘vite’, or quick, for ‘leave quickly’; ‘loin’, or far, for ‘get a long way away’; and ‘longtemps’, or a long time, for ‘keep going’. If anyone stayed in Paris, the doctors suggested perfumes and spices to keep away the poisoned air, bleeding and purging, and a light diet. They had few ideas about what the community could do to save itself, but they were watching the horse slaughterers, the pigsties and the pig butchers, anywhere rotting flesh might stink above ground and corrupt the air. The butchers were too obstinately useful to move without a royal decree; only in 1415 were they finally pushed out of town to the Tuileries, which was close to the Louvre but just beyond the city limit. Trenches were dug there to collect the blood.

  Nobody had moved a whole profession out of town before, or made such a drastic decision about the plan for the city; that was a consequence of plague. The moves were not even about basic hygiene, just about making the air seem breathable. The same decree that worried about the waters of the Seine in Paris told the people of Orleans to throw all their rotten meat into the Loire. Nobody knew about the fleas that rats carried, and the sickness the fleas carried; so plague persisted.3 In time, quarantine and isolation may have helped control its spread in north-western Europe, fewer ships landing without being checked, but what made the disease disappear in the eighteenth century was largely accidental. People started to change their clothes when they went to bed at night, and to wash with a serious soap, the Marseilles soap made with olive oil, which kept down the fleas and lice. The price of arsenic tumbled, so there was a poison to dispose of mice and rats. But most important, and nothing at all to do with human beings, the bacterium that seems to cause plague, yersinia pestis, mutated into a close relative that was far less deadly; rats caught the mutant much as human beings would be immunized against diseases, and rats in Europe no longer carried plague. The rest of the world was not so fortunate.4