A JOURNAL OF ACADEMIC WRITING VOLUME 8

society. Prostitution allowed those women who worked in the
trade to have spaces of their own.
Civic regulations in medieval England were another way
for men to maintain control over prostitutes because they could
do little to stop prostitution, and town authorities claimed
regulations were needed to “keep sexually active women from
threatening social order.” 20 Working as both brothel women
and as independent operators, prostitutes controlled their
own trade and money. As members of taverns and brothels,
prostitutes did experience some legal protection under malecentered
urban regulations. A surviving example of these
civic regulations comes from Southwark in London. Written
in 1162 CE during the rule of Henry II, the Southwark
regulations demanded that the owners of “stewholders [†]
be men; they could be accompanied by their wives, but no
unmarried woman could keep a stewhouse.” 21 Again, the
connections to marriage continue to persist—the theory is
such that if a man cannot control sexuality, it might be better
to make it so women can practice the trade but not own it.
Regardless of civic incursion, women’s activities outside of their
traditional spaces challenged male control, and men identified
their behavior with “tainted womanhood.” 22 Nevertheless,
whores maintained a decent amount of control over their trade,
and in several instances women were fined for running brothels
in London, proving that women were using their status as a
necessary sex source to run thriving business ventures. Since
some women who decided to work taverns were “at risk of
being pimped by their master and mistress,” 23 many turned
to private practice, opting to rent space from people who had
rooms to spare. Understanding the need for prostitution, town
authorities did not actively attempt to “stamp out prostitution”
as the church would have liked, “but rather to control it as
disorderly” 24 and profit from it by imposing tax regulations on
the trade. 25 As a result, town regulations in medieval England
sought to reap the monetary benefits that their conformity to
the humours provided, a conformity that whores used to wedge
20 Karras, “The Regulation of Brothels in Later Medieval England,” 406.
† A term for brothel.
21 Karras, “The Regulation of Brothels in Later Medieval England,” 412.
22 Barbara Hanawalt, “The Host, the Law, and the Ambiguous Space
of Medieval London Taverns,” in Medieval Crime and Social Control,
ed. Barbara Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1998), 17.
23 Hanawalt, “Medieval English Women in Rural and Urban Domestic
Space,” 25.
24 Karras, “The Regulation of Brothels in Later Medieval England,” 412.
25 “The London government as a whole showed a greater interest in
prosecuting these types of offences than is found in the provincial towns.
Letter Book I contains a (possibly incomplete) list of those convicted
of immorality before the mayor between January 1400 and July 1439,
which features 69 cases, of which 66 are clearly convictions for sexual
offences, involving both lay people and clerics. Of the 66, punishments
are specified in 32 cases. There were six cases which clearly involved
prostitution, procuring or other acts against public morality, and these
were punished by the civic authorities.” H Carrel, “Disputing Legal
Privilege: Civic Relations with the Church in Late Medieval England,”
Journal of Medieval History, 35 (2009): 290.
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themselves into a society of patriarchal control that believed it
could not survive without them.
Medieval English literature, with its stories of courtly love
and chivalry have become the ideas we equate with medieval
English women. The truth, however, is much less appealing.
Women were sexually oppressed and their ability to move freely
in their own society was minimal at the most. Thanks to the
accepted cannon of the western Church, sex had to be within
the confines of marriage, and women were the greatest threat to
marriage’s sanctity because of their ‘sexual nature.’ Ironically,
the women who were able to exist in the sexually oppressive
world of medieval England were the ones whose livelihood
existed because of sex. Prostitutes relished public and religious
approval of humour theory because it made their services
necessary. Even though Church cannon firmly disapproved
of prostitution, acceptance of the humours created a sexual
contradiction for the unmarried segments of the population.
Prostitutes served as a method of sexual satisfaction for men
looking to release sexual humours—which civic leaders believed
was necessary to maintain social harmony because sexual need
greatly endangered chaste society. For this reason, prostitutes
became unlikely but necessary wardens of chastity, protecting
virginity by offering an alternative. Their trade offered an
alternative to normal female existence. Whores could walk
city streets, drink in taverns, rent rooms for their business
activities, and look men in the eye if they wished. By no
means were prostitutes free in the way we understand freedom
today. Nevertheless, these uniquely different women used
public acceptance of the humours to exist outside traditional
boundaries within male dominated spaces in medieval English
towns, serving as the unlikely protectors of virginity and as a
socially necessary sexual outlet.
Bibliography
Ashley, Kathleen, and Robert L. A. Clark, eds. Medieval
Conduct. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Benson, Larry D. The Riverside Chaucer. New York: Houghton
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Boitani, Piero and Jill Mann, ed. The Cambridge Companion
to Chaucer. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2003.
Boon, Marc. “State Power and Illicit Sexuality: The Persecution
of Sodomy in Late Medieval Bruges.” Journal of Medieval
History, Vol. 22, no. 2 (1996): 135-153.
Brown, Peter, ed. A Companion to Chaucer. Oxford, UK:
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Brundage, James A. “Juridical Space: Female Witnesses in Canon
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