The Quakers
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George Fox (1624–91) was a travelling shoemaker who founded the Society of Friends, or Quakers as they became known. Preaching throughout the Midlands and the north of England, his denunciations that people should communicate directly with God instead of through the intermediary of a corrupt church landed him in prison twice. One of his earliest converts in the county of Yorkshire, Thomas Aldam, was also the first of many Quakers imprisoned in York Castle for their religious principles.
Committed to gaol in 1652, Adlam remained a prisoner for about two and a half years, during which time his wife and family were frequently denied visiting rights. During this particular confinement Adlam was brought before Judge Parker, where he declined to remove his hat on conscientious motives and insisted on addressing the judge as ‘thee’ instead of ‘you’. This conduct cost Adlam dearly and he was fined £40 and committed to prison until the fine was paid. However, on application to Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth granted an order for Adlam’s liberation.
In 1651, George Fox had travelled to York, two days before what he termed as ‘the time called Christmas’, as he was commanded by the Lord to go to the minster to do his bidding. The following is taken from his autobiography:
York Minster steps, the scene of Fox’s enforced tumble.
Speak to priest Bowles and his hearers in their great cathedral. Accordingly I went. When the priest had done, I told them I had something from the Lord God to speak to the priest and people. ‘Then say on quickly’ said a professor, for there was frost and snow, and it was very cold weather. Then I told them that this was the Word of the Lord God unto them – that they lived in words, but God Almighty looked for fruits amongst them.
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, they hurried me out, and threw me down the steps. But I got up again without hurt, and went to my lodging.
Probably the only religious founder to have ever been thrown down the steps of York Minster, Fox was lucky to escape with only the odd bump and bruise, as opposed to being sent for another spell in York Castle, or suffering the fate of some of his staunchly persecuted forebears, who paid with their lives for adhering to their religious constancy.
CHAPTER TWELVE
CARNAL CRIMES
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The Oldest Profession
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Throughout England’s history, the illegality of prostitution seemingly did nothing to diminish the demand for the services of ‘fallen women’, or have a detrimental effect on the level of street-walkers and brothel-keepers over the centuries, and it was the same in York as anywhere else.
While the presence and scale of prostitution in a seemingly genteel cathedral city such as York may seem surprising, the industrial boom that built up cities like Leeds, Bradford and Sheffield, offering employment opportunities for women as well as men, for the most part passed York by, and with the rapid population increase in the first half of the nineteenth century, prostitution provided a means to an end. However, records indicate that certain areas of York, such as the central part of the walled city, were concentrated areas for harlotry and brothels since the Middle Ages, long before the advent of the pressing overcrowding of the Victorian era.
Grape Lane, York,
The Blue Bicycle Restaurant in Fossgate. Today, the presence of the Blue Bicycle outside the premises indicates service of the culinary kind.
Today’s Grape Lane, just a stone’s throw from the minster and linking Petergate with Swinegate, was once a dark alley called ‘Grapecuntlane’ – grape originally meaning to grope, the rest of the interpretation I leave to the reader and their own sensibilities! It was normal practice for a medieval street name to reflect its economic activity or function, and adjacent to Grape Lane is Finkle Street, a thoroughfare of similarly indecent reputation that as late as the nineteenth century was still known as ‘Murky (or Mucky) Peg Lane’. Another acknowledged centre of prostitution was St Andrewsgate, where the partially derelict church of St Andrew was given over to use as a brothel in the sixteenth century (St Andrews has since reverted back to its original more orthodox usage and is now home to the York Brethren Assembly).
Now known as something of a dining landmark, the Blue Bicycle Restaurant in York’s Fossgate is so named because at the turn of the last century the cellar was employed as a brothel of some repute. The lady owner of this establishment always rode a blue bicycle, and when the bicycle was propped against the wall outside her premises, clients would know that the brothel was open for business.
Street Girls
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Perhaps not as salubrious as Fossgate, the Waters lanes of the city was then a collection of dark, overcrowded, filthy tenements and was populated with those forced by circumstance into thieving and prostitution.
Isabella Campbell and Caroline Nicholson were two such ‘street girls’ from Middle Water Lane, both aged around nineteen and already known to the police. Isabella and Caroline were described as ‘resembling the lower and more degrading class of street walker’ with their coercion of one unwilling client resulting in murder.
On a December evening in 1853, upon returning from the York Horse Show – the once nationally renowned sale always held in the last full week before Christmas – the rather inebriated John Hall was weaving his way back to his lodgings after selling his horse at the market, and celebrating the successful sale in the White Swan enroute, a coaching inn on the Pavement. Hall’s advanced state of drunkenness was clearly evident to the girls, who obviously decided he was an easy mark. Isabella and Caroline accosted him, one on each side, and led Hall onto the Staith, the street skirting the banks of the Ouse, and headed toward their lodgings. However, as Hall’s reluctance became apparent, the girls changed tactic, and in their attempts to search his overcoat in order to steal his purse, John Hall was edged further towards the river’s edge. As Hall’s protestations and refusal to give up his money increased, Isabella, with very little effort, pushed the unfortunate man into the icy winter waters.
Water Lane in 1853, by Francis Bedford. (Courtesy of York Museums Trust , York Art Gallery)
The King’s Staith, next to today’s waterside.
The girls made a sharp exit onto Ouse Bridge, but Police Constable Catton, who was patrolling the vicinity that evening, noticed the guilty pair pass as they made for McGregor’s Dram Shop on Low Ousegate. The constable’s attention was then drawn by the uproar of a crowd that had gathered after the commotion, some of who had witnessed Hall’s subsequent fall into the river. Hall was beyond rescue, however, and his body was found later that evening some 500 feet downstream, close to the public washing area known as ‘Pudding Holes’. One of the onlookers was able to positively identify Isabella and Caroline though, and when PC Catton caught up with them and arrested them both on the corner of Nessgate, Campbell and Nicholson were taken into custody. While at the station, they were searched by another police officer’s wife (as was procedure), and a purse was found on Isabella Campbell’s person.
The following day, when the girls appeared before the magistrates at the Guildhall, they were ordered to be remanded in the House of Correction at Toft’s Green, near Micklegate Bar. The coroner’s inquest the following day sealed their fates as it was put to the jury that the girls had wilfully pushed John Hall into the river while trying to rob him, and were, therefore, guilty of murder. If Hall had been physically cajoled while the girls were trying to persuade him in the direction of their lodgings then this would only be deemed as manslaughter; after a deliberation of just one hour the jury returned a verdict of ‘wilful murder’.
Punishing Prostitution
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Methods of visible chastisement were the favoured punishments for prostitution, including branding, whipping, ear clipping, nose slitting and shaving off their hair. As an additional penalty, prostitutes were forbidden to wear aprons, as this garment was regarded as the mark of a ‘respectable woman’. In 1513, a proclamatio
n was made that prostitutes be punished by branding on the face, thereby ensuring that any future entry into respectable society would be impossible. In 1623, this ‘Branding Act’ was extended so that ‘any woman convicted of taking goods valued at more than twelvepence would suffer, in addition to a whipping or other punishment, the branding of a letter ‘T’ with a hot burning iron on her left thumb.’ The penalty of branding was often carried out immediately after a sentence had been given, to ensure that the officiating magistrates could witness ‘the smoke from the offender’s singed skin to prevent a less than scalding hot iron from being used in return for a bribe.’
As was the case with adulterers and slanderers, public shaming was an integral part of the chastisement process, with prostitutes, bawds and scolds taken in open carts to the place of punishment.
Brothel keepers were also subject to prosecution and punishable by branding on the face. Keeping a house of ill repute, where prostitution was encouraged, was an offence, as was the misdemeanour of keeping a ‘molly house’ for ‘sodomitical practices’. Under the Buggery Act of 1533, buggery (in law, a term often interchangeable with sodomy) was deemed a capital offence in England. However, prosecution of homosexuality was not restricted to the confines of these molly houses, as the case and ultimate execution of thirty-two-year-old Thomas Rogers attests, when he was hanged for an ‘unnatural crime’ on Saturday, 26 April 1834.
The period from 1828 to 1836 saw the end of capital punishment for crimes other than murder and attempted murder, and after 1836 these were the only crimes, in practice, attracting the death penalty. However, when Rogers committed the crime of sodomy with his fellow servant George Bennett (aged fourteen years) in 1834, it was still deemed a capital offence. During this time, prosecutions for homosexuality accounted for 2 per cent of the overall executions in England.
Unnatural Crimes
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The Buggery Act also covered the offence of bestiality – a crime for which seventy-seven-year-old John Hoyland was controversially tried and executed in 1793. One newspaper at the time termed the accusation as ‘A crime we cannot name’. But it seems, in all probability, that the accusation made against John Hoyland was entirely false and generated by the motivation of ‘blood money’.
Hoyland, who was described as a ‘simple, apparently harmless man’, had raised a large family in what was then rural Attercliffe, who were in turn unkindly described as ‘scarcely removed from a state of idiocy, and some of them dumb.’ Sadly, Hoyland had been the victim of appalling domestic violence instigated by his sons, who would often beat their father so severely that he ‘frequently was weeks together with bruises on him.’
On the day of the alleged offence, 15 July 1793, two Sheffield labourers, William Warburton and John Hunt, stated that they had seen Hoyland coupling with an ass. At this time, there were statutes in existence, offering financial reward to anyone instrumental in prosecuting a felon to conviction, hence the term ‘blood money’. Not surprisingly this system was open to abuse, and in this instance, as the accusation was generally held to be spurious by John’s neighbours, it was likely that Warburton and Hunt’s motives were purely pecuniary.
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‘Victim of appalling domestic violence’
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John Hoyland protested his innocence up to the moment the noose was tied around his neck, and insisted to the spectators in the crowd that ‘he would not change places with the men who had sworn his life away.’
While Hoyland’s case acted as a catalyst for the alteration of the legislation governing ‘blood money’, it was not until 1818 that the fixed rewards offered on the statutes were replaced by discretionary rewards made by the court, thereby removing the assurance and lure of the prospect of ‘blood money’ for good.
COPYRIGHT
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First published in 2013
The History Press
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This ebook edition first published in 2013
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© Summer Strevens, 2013
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