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Lupanaria

‘Quo loco recta vin ad lupanur, amicus?’ (‘Which way to the brothel, mate?’)

Southwark, Londinium, AD 80

Bruised, half-naked and in chains, the slave girls shivered on the docks, beneath the lashing rain and grey skies of Albion. Garments in rags, hair in rats’ tails, they faced a future of pain, exploitation and early death. Two thousand years before such matters were the stuff of international concern and television documentaries, these young women were London’s first sex slaves, brought in to service the Roman military in low-grade brothels or lupanaria.

This chapter tells how these women were brought to London to work in such horrific conditions, and why there were other women, also working in the sex trade, who were empowered and in control. We will also take a look at the age-old connection between sex and power, as demonstrated by the excesses of the Roman emperors, and why the flourishing underworld of brothels and bath houses disappeared along with the Roman rulers.

The wretched human freight which fetched up on our shores was corralled in a ‘Romeland’ or dockyard at Queenhithe, across the River Thames from Bankside. In this compound the unfortunate creatures were prepared for auction like cattle in a market, paraded before an audience of brothel keepers who were positively encouraged to handle the merchandise before purchase, and examine and fondle every part of their bodies.¹ Despite the depredations of a rough voyage, these were some of the most beautiful women in the world, sold into slavery from every part of the Roman Empire. Flame-haired Gauls with porcelain skin; ebony princesses seized in North Africa; sultry Sicilians ripped from the lemon groves; proud Jewish girls from the recently defeated Palestine, the cloudless skies and Mediterranean heat of their native country now only a distant memory.

The Roman troops that these pitiful women would service had been in the country since AD 43, when the Emperor Claudius had dispatched three legions of the Army of the Rhine and a contingent of the Praetorian Guard to seize the dark and murky island of Britannia for the greater glory of the Roman Empire.² Although the Britons had a reputation for being war-mad savages, this was not a particularly bloody campaign. King Cymbeline, who died in AD 43, had welcomed Roman traders and craftsmen to Britain, and there had been plenty of traffic in the opposite direction, with British noblemen enjoying the delights of Rome, and, somewhat less fortunately, British slaves exported to the Eternal City. Many members of the aristocracy, in debt to Roman usurers, saw the so-called invasion as the only way to fulfil their financial obligations.³

The Roman army, led by General Aulus Plautius, marched up from the coast until it arrived at a wide, estuarial river: the Tamesis, or Thames.⁴ It was here, while waiting for a standoff with the Britons, that the Roman engineers built pontoon bridges across the river, and it was here that they established their bridgehead, consisting of a small military settlement in the form of a fort, with an earthwork guarding the entrance to the bridge.

The Roman settlement on the Tamesis was of considerable size, consisting of a cohort (one tenth of a legion) constituting between 600 and 1000 men, along with their support systems and camp-followers, who provided food and sex, making the total establishment around 2000 people.⁵ Camp-followers led a rough and ready life, almost as unhappy as that of the slaves, following their men from one campaign to another but without the benefit of legal recognition, since Roman soldiers were not permitted to marry until the second century AD.

Scene from a Roman brothel or lupanar.

It was here, at the bridgehead, that the brothels, or lupanaria, were constructed, an essential resource providing release from sexual tension. For any soldier enquiring ‘quo loco recta via ad lupanar, amicus?’ (‘which way to the lupanaria, mate?’)⁶ a signpost at the turn-off from the highway would have indicated the way: however illiterate the soldiers and sailors disembarking from the warships nearby, there was one international symbol for a brothel: the palm of a hand. Lupanaria derives from lupa, the she-wolf who suckled the infants Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome. According to Livy, the she-wolf was a symbol for the famous whore Acca Laurentia; whores were associated with she-wolves on the grounds that they advertised their services with high-pitched, wolf-like cries and gave their bodies to all comers.⁷ Lupa was also suggestive in another sense: with the she-wolf’s propensity to lick her cubs came the implication that lupae were proficient in oral sex.

Open for business twenty-four hours a day, every day of the week, these brothels were primitive, functional places, with a no-frills approach to sexual satisfaction. Built of timber, with thatched roofs and brightly painted plaster interiors, they stood on clay foundations. Inside, the houses were divided into cells, each with its narrow wooden bunk and straw mattress. There were no refreshments, entertainments or preliminaries. Each man took his pleasure quickly, making way for the next. Eventually, these flimsy constructions were replaced with brick tenements, but they were rudimentary places, catering for the lowest common denominator, ‘the poor bloody infantry’. The women themselves had no rights: they were the absolute property of their leno (pimp) orlena(madam); they received no payment for their services and were treated with utter contempt; they had no more value than a fish. The name, puta, or ‘common whore’, derives from puteus, a well or a tank. Every single one of them faced the ultimate humiliation of a life on her back, submitting to whatever sexual indignity was forced upon her.⁸ It was a fate reflected upon by the dramatist Plautus. In his play Pseudolus, a jealous lover threatens his two mistresses that if they are found to be unfaithful, they will be carried away to a brothel and worked so hard they will die of exhaustion.⁹ Under these conditions, it was scarcely surprising that the majority of women were claimed by death before the age of thirty.¹⁰

The lupanaria attracted other forms of vice. The land beyond the fort consisted of a dank, marshy strip, known as the pomerium, or no-man’s land, deliberately left clear so that approaching enemies could be spotted from a distance. As the years passed, this region, which went by the name of Southwark, etablished itself as a den of iniquity. Taverns opened, where barmaids and waitresses competed for business with the unhappy denizens of the lupanaria. These girls were known as assellae because they traded their sexual services in return for the as, the smallest denomination of coin, as befitted their lowly nature.¹¹ As well as the sex industry, every other immoral activity moved in: gaming houses, cockpits and bear-baiting rings sprang up, attracting low-life of every description: thieves, cut-purses, con artists, runaway slaves and fugitives from justice, safe from prosecution outside the city limits. In its capacity as a pomerium, Southwark tolerated illegal or restricted activities. It was the Las Vegas of Londinium.

And, like Las Vegas, Southwark was a centre of sexual activity, where the popular sex gods Isis, Apollo and Hermes were worshipped in magnificent temples and celebrated in wild, wine-fuelled processions culminating in frenzied public orgies. During the mid twentieth century, archaeologists discovered the remains of a substantial Roman temple to the south of Southwark Cathedral, with stone foundations and tessellated floors. A jug inscribed with the legend ‘LONDINI AD FANUM ISIDIS’ (‘In London, at the Temple of Isis’) had been found nearby in 1912. This pottery jug would have been used during acts of worship and on the specific ‘days of drinking’ when devotees performed their religious duties at the temple,¹² including carrying the gigantic model phalluses in the procession. Isis, the principal goddess of Egypt, was a women’s deity; the wife of Osiris and mother of Horus, she was a fertility goddess, the universal mother and the queen of the dead. She took the form of a beautiful dark-haired woman in a tight-fitting dress, and women were her most constant devotees, from empresses to the lowest puta. The Temples of Isis were also well known as ‘houses of assignation’, where women conducting secret affairs could rendezvous with their lovers or ask the advice of the priestesses on all aspects of love, and where bored wives could pick up a willing toyboy.

There was also a temple to Harpocrates, a bringer of good luck, renowned for his sexual prowess and usually depicted as a man with a penis two or three times taller than the rest of him. Harpocrates’ picture was often to be found on the walls and ceilings of Roman brothels, to welcome the client and spur him on to maximum prowess. Figures with one vast penis, or multiple penises, were popular among the Romans. There were lamps consisting of male figures, with the oil or wick held in the erect penis; this item was designed to protect lovers from the evil demons lurking in the dark, and help them redouble their efforts in their amorous pursuits. Penises with wings were another popular conceit; and there were even phalluses engraved on the handles of workmen’s tools.¹³

Hermes was the women’s favourite male god and ‘Herms’, or fertility figures, were a common sight in the streets of early Londinium. These statues, sited at major intersections, consisted of upright squared pillars, six foot high, with a bust of Hermes on top and a large, erect penis, complete with testicles, on one side of the pillar. Passing women would touch or even fondle the stone penis, praying for the god’s intervention to make them more desirable, to arouse passion in a lover or to help them become pregnant.¹⁴

The annual procession devoted to Hermes consisted of priests and laymen carrying massive phalluses, followed by young girls carrying baskets of fruit and flowers while chanting a hymn to Priapus, the god of fertility. According to the Roman poet Catullus, women hung garlands on the god’s enormous penis to indicate how many lovers they had entertained the previous night. Quite often, the garlands of a single woman were sufficient to cover the penis from root to tip.¹⁵ In Bacchanalian scenes, crowds of drunken women danced naked, followed by scores of enthusiastic young men, events coming to an inevitable conclusion when they copulated in full public view while enthusiastic spectators cheered them on.

Another popular god in Londinium was Attys, usually portrayed with his tunic pulled up to expose his enormous penis and testicles and a pendulous belly, indicating that he was not only a god of lechery but of gluttony too.¹⁶ Meanwhile, according to Juvenal, the all-female devotees of the goddess Bona Dea became so crazed with lust that they were prepared to rape any passing male or even drag donkeys from their stables, although Juvenal also claims that the occasions included ‘more than a suggestion of Lesbian practices’.¹⁷

Meanwhile, on the north bank of the Thames, Londinium was emerging. The wealthy economic migrants flooded in: governors, civil servants, administrators, merchants and professionals from all corners of the Roman Empire, bringing with them their retinue of family, servants, slaves. By AD 61, just as it was about to be burned to the ground by the vengeful Queen Boudicca, Londinium had become the epitome of Roman civilization, described by Tacitus as ‘a place not signified by the name of colonia but crowded with merchants and provisions’.¹⁸

Londinium recovered from Boudicca’s onslaught and rose again, like a phoenix from its own ashes. Three hundred years later the city was awarded the accolade Augusta (the Worshipful). With its palaces and temples, baths and theatres, shops, offices and villas, Londinium had become a byword for civic pride within the empire. These outstanding municipal achievements could only be matched, of course, by an equally magnificent sex industry, celebrated for the number and quality of its lupanaria and thermiae(bath houses, frequented by both men and women). Then there were the numerous meretrices (prostitutes, from merere, to earn), and prostibulae – the independent prostitutes who worked for themselves instead of handing their earnings over to a pimp or a madam. While the most wretched girls worked in the soul-destroying conditions already described in the military brothels, the high-class bordellos offered the greatest luxury, refreshment and entertainment. All tastes were catered for here: willing partners, male as well as female, were on hand to provide every form of sexual pleasure.

The Romans brought with them their outrageous attitude towards sex. The most pleasure-loving society on earth, this was also the cruellest: a culture in which human beings were pitted against wild animals in public circuses in the name of sport, and men possessed the power of life or death over their slaves, and even their own wives. A recurring theme of this book will be the link between voracious sexual appetite and immense power, and the extraordinary inability of the ruling class to adhere to the strict moral guidelines which they issue to their subjects.

We have only to look at the sex lives of the Roman emperors to gain some insight into the colossal double standards that operated. One reason for this, of course, was the Roman belief that their rulers were ‘divine’ and as such given total dispensation from any moral constraint. Like the gods above, they were entitled to do as they wished. As the Victorian historian of prostitution William Sanger commented, it was difficult to discover a single character in the long list of Roman rulers who was not ‘stained by the grossest habits’.¹⁹ These are but a few examples: Julius Caesar, ‘the bald adulterer’, was also known as ‘husband of all men’s wives’, as it was commonly accepted that any man in the empire would step aside and allow himself to be cuckolded. Augustus, who introduced legislation to enforce marriage and fidelity among his subjects, was a well-known adulterer who, as an older man, sent out his friends to procure women for him, having them stripped and inspected like slave girls. As for the Emperor Tiberius, according to the historian Suetonius, one of his retirement activities on the isle of Capri consisted of training up small boys, referred to as his ‘little fishes’, to swim between his thighs and nibble on his ‘secret parts like unweaned babes being put to the nipple of a breaste…’²⁰

The emperor Caligula (12 BC–AD 41), who succeeded Tiberius, committed incest with his sisters, set up a brothel in the imperial palace, and most famously attempted to make his favourite horse, Incitatus, a member of the Senate. The nature of Caligula’s relationship with the horse has not been recorded.

Lest we be lulled into a false sense of security and think it was only the men who behaved badly, let us take a look at some of the Roman Empire’s most notorious women: according to Seneca (4 BC–AD 65), Augustus’ daughter Julia had dozens of lovers. Julia roamed the streets at night looking for sex, and finding it in the Forum, the very place where her hypocritical father had laid down his laws against adultery. Meanwhile, the Empress Messalina, wife of Claudius (immortalized by Robert Graves in I, Claudius), was the most ill-famed woman in the imperial family, selling herself in the public street like a professional whore. Still unsatisfied when the brothels closed for the night, she had to be thrown out. Messalina’s most famous exploit was to hire a prostitute famous for her stamina and challenge her to a sex contest, to see who could accommodate the greatest number of men in a single night. Messalina won.²¹

Understandably, given role models such as these, sexual excess was socially acceptable. Inevitably, brothels played an essential part in public life. Young Romans were encouraged to take their pleasure with prostitutes rather than seduce and violate other men’s wives and daughters, a sentiment that originated in Ancient Greece when the statesman and philosopher Solon established the first state-run brothels, or pornai, in Athens in 600 BC, using the revenue to finance military campaigns. Cato the Elder (234–149 BC) regarded brothels as an essential public service. ‘Blessed be they who are virtuous, who when they feel their virile members swollen with lust, visit a brothel rather than grind at some husband’s private mill!’²² Encountering a young acquaintance leaving a brothel in Rome one afternoon, Cato greeted him with the words, ‘well done, my boy!’, although when he saw the youth leaving the brothel again later that same day, he did add, ‘when I said “well done!” I didn’t mean that you should make the whorehouse your home!’²³

Freedom of sexual expression was, of course, available only to men. While brothels were regarded as a healthy outlet for the male appetite, a formidable double standard dictated that patrician wives and daughters must be paragons of chastity, beyond reproach. The age of marriage was twelve years old for a girl, affairs were forbidden (though they inevitably occurred as frequently as in any other culture) and widows were not permitted to remarry.

The wretched young women left shivering on the docks of Queenhithe at the start of this chapter were forced into a life of sexual slavery; they possessed no autonomy. But some women made a conscious decision to enter the oldest profession. And, in Londinium, prostitution was controlled with as much zealous bureaucracy as every other aspect of Roman life. A woman who wished to become a prostitute (rather than being forced into it) had to go before a public official known as the aedile, who was responsible for public health and sanitation. Londinium’s aedile was based at the Cripplegate Fort, or near the crossroads now known as Addle Street and Wood Street.²⁴ The aspiring whore then had to complete an application stating her name, date of birth, status and the name under which she wished to trade. Status was considered significant as, at one stage, extremely high-born women were seeking permission to become prostitutes, and the role of the aedile was to dissuade them.

However, if a woman persisted, she was granted a licence, or Licentia Stupro (licence to carry out a shameful practice), which set out her charges. If she worked in a brothel, this list would be displayed outside her cubicle, like a menu. Being licensed also ensured that she got paid. If the client refused to pay, she was legally entitled to sue him.²⁵ In return for the professional protection afforded by licensing, the prostitute was required to pay a fee, the Lenonium Vectigal, originally introduced by Caligula. One paragraph of this law stated that the prostitute must pay a portion of her daily earnings to the state. The tax was adjusted annually, via a census of the prostitutes. This law applied to male prostitutes as well and provided a massive income to the government, distributed according to the current emperor’s ethical scruples or political needs.²⁶

Thus prostitution in Roman London was a business like any other. We know this from the existence of spintriae, or brothel tokens, which clearly indicated the services a whore was willing to provide, on a sliding scale of prices. Like the pornographic artwork recovered from the ruins of Pompeii, spintriae were for many years locked away in museums for fear of offending delicate sensibilities, and only went on public display towards the end of the twentieth century. But they provide a fascinating guide to the generous selection of sexual positions on offer. Fellatio, for instance, was cheaper than vaginal intercourse, while the deeply penetrative positions, such as ‘doggy style’ (sex from behind) were more expensive as they put the prostitute at greater risk of vaginal soreness, meaning that she could service fewer clients.²⁷

Another legal requirement was that prostitutes undergo regular inspection for venereal disease or morbus indecens aie cunnientis – otherwise known as ‘the filthy disease of the cunt’. This occupational hazard of the prostitute and the military man, which has blighted the history of sexuality ever since, first appeared in Rome in 183 BC when General Manlius’ troops returned victorious from Asia Minor, accompanied by thousands of Syrian girls, who were sold at the slave market and launched an epidemic of venereal disease, characterized by a sore known as the ulcus turpe, or ‘shameful ulcer’, which was probably a form of syphilis. As a result, the army introduced draconian rules in 150 BC about frequent bathing and washing the genitals.²⁸ But these measures were insufficient to prevent the spread of the disease. The historian Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79), anxious to exonerate the Romans from the spread of the disease, blamed it on the ‘dirty Egyptians’. The euphemism ficus, or ‘figs’, was used to describe the nodules characteristic of syphilis, as in a poem by Martial, dating from AD 100, where a young man asks Priapus whether a girl is playing hard to get because she is ‘full of figs’. The condition is mentioned by Ovid and Catullus, and over 200 years later, another writer, D. Magus Ansonius, describes a wretched citizen unsuccessfully trying to get rid of the putrid ulcers on his penis by repeated washing.²⁹

The registered prostitute faced other legal requirements. For instance, she was permitted to wear the toga, the sleeveless tunic worn by Roman men but not the stola, the long elegant tunic worn by Roman matrons. She was expected to wear a distinctive floral fabric which distinguished her from ‘respectable’ women and she was not permitted to wear purple, the colour associated with imperium, or power. But these regulations were frequently broken, and many prostitutes defiantly dressed in diaphanous silk gowns which ‘seemed invented to exhibit more conspicuously what they were intended to hide’³⁰ and lightened their hair with henna or lemon juice.

Like the other trades of Londinium, the brothels flourished magnificently. With the garrisons full to overflowing with military men, trade was brisk in the lupanaria, while the brothels were always busy. These marble palaces witnessed scenes of depravity not just inside but outside too. To the edification of passers-by, prostitutes and their clients copulated freely underneath the arches, or fornices, an activity subsequently described as ‘fornication’. Debased by the Teutons to vokken, this was the origin of the modern ‘fucking’.³¹

Whores were everywhere, hanging around the race courses to tempt the lucky punters or console the losers; they were on hand at the circuses, to provide additional excitement, and there to add to the spectacle at the public games. Public gardens were popular, too, with the whores lying in wait for their punters, and frolicking among the statues and temples.³² Even grocery stores were not immune, with the girls soliciting in the butchers’, and bakers’ shops offering space for prostitutes to ply their trade ‘round the back’, after tempting their clients with saucy colyphia, little bread rolls shaped like penises (from colyphium, the gladiators’ term for penis).³³

There has long been an association between sex and death, and some women, known as bustuariae, even worked the cemeteries which lined the roads out of Londinium, using gravestones to advertise their services. A prostitute would chalk up her speciality and prices on a particular tombstone, enabling prospective clients to liaise with her in the graveyard after sunset. The tomb operated as her bed and, when not engaged with a client, she doubled at burials as a professional mourner.³⁴

Alongside the experienced prostitutes, another type of woman was exploited in the form of the virgin. Whenever a pimp acquired a fresh virgin (usually a slave girl), he would leave a laurel wreath on the front door, together with a lamp and a posted description of the young girl’s attributes. She was then put up for auction, and the ‘lucky man’ was crowned with the laurel wreath when he succeeded in taking her virginity.³⁵

But it was in the bath houses that the most scandalous behaviour took place. Bath houses, or thermiae, were magnificent establishments, more like our modern spas or expensive leisure clubs. Although they were designed for getting clean, many other activities legitimate and otherwise took place in these awesome buildings. Intended for social, if not sexual, intercourse, they featured art galleries, gift shops, reading rooms and restaurants, and also served as hotels, offering a bed for the night to travellers and guests.

Women were charged more than men to enter the bath houses, since it was assumed that they could easily earn back the entrance fee from eager clients. A number of leather ‘bikinis’, dating from the first century AD and now on display at the Museum of London, may well have been the uniform of the local prostitutes.³⁶ Whores and their clients soon infiltrated the bath houses, to such an extent that special areas were incorporated into the design to accommodate them, with private spaces for massage and ‘extras’ provided by skilled fellatrices – male as well as female. This was indeed the birth of the massage parlour.³⁷ Inevitably, such establishments attracted less salubrious neighbours. Outside the baths sprang up the pervigiles popinae, or all-night bars, which became the focus for antisocial behaviour culminating in street fights, stabbings and even murders. This must have been the scene witnessed by regulars at the Roman baths excavated at Cheapside and Huggin Hill, near Queenhithe, the latter dating from the second century ADand constructed from the best Purbeck marble, imported from Dorset, and fed by a natural spring.

The walls of the baths featured graffiti, similar to those found in Pompeii, and the baths, like the brothels, catered for all tastes. Plutarch mentions that the palaestrae, or exercise yards, of the bath houses were much frequented by homosexuals.³⁸ The bath houses were, like today’s private leisure clubs, the province of the rich. The poor simply could not afford the fees, in the form of ‘oil money’, the cleansing procedure performed by the sordidus unctor, or attendant, which had to be undergone before one was admitted to the water. This process consisted of having olive oil rubbed all over one’s body, which was then scraped off with a blunt blade, removing the oil and the dirt from the skin. Although in one instance Emperor Septimus Severus issued instructions in Rome that oil money was to be distributed free to the citizens, and it is possible that a similar system operated in Londinium to bribe the British populace into taking a bath.

There is no evidence of organized prostitution in Britain before the Romans, but human nature alone suggests that every settlement must have had its share of good-time girls. What does emerge is that Celtic women seemed to have had a far greater degree of sexual equality than their Roman counterparts, as this exchange from AD 151 between the Empress Julia Domna and the wife of the Caledonian chieftain Argentocoxus indicates. Julia, who had something of a reputation as a flirt, was the consort of Emperor Septimus Severus, who spent some time in Britain. Apparently she teased Argentocoxus’ wife about the Scottish habit of sharing their women. The chieftainess retorted: ‘We have intercourse openly with the best of our men; while you allow yourselves to be seduced in private by anyone including the worst of men!’³⁹

The Britons did not treat their women as possessions or inferiors, but as equals. The Roman historian Strabo observed that the women ‘fought alongside their menfolk, and as bravely’.⁴⁰ The Romans could not have produced a Boudicca, for they would never have taken orders from a woman. Sadly, however, the British resistance was eventually broken, and these brave, free-spirited women reduced to slavery and the brothels.

We began this chapter by reflecting on the unhappy fate of the slaves deposited at Queenhithe. This was just the start. During the 400 years of Roman occupation, Londinium became a dockside city, with ocean-going merchant ships and warships arriving in town, bearing their parties of sailors anxious for shore leave. This was another explanation for the development of brothels. According to ancient superstition, women, whores or otherwise, were not permitted on board ship: they were regarded as unlucky and any unfortunate woman who found herself on board would have been thrown overboard to drown.

Business flourished until AD 409 when the legions were recalled to Rome by Emperor Honorius, and the Britons were left to the tender mercies of the raiding Saxons. Thousands of Britons chose to leave their homeland with the Romans, and those who remained spent the next forty years unsuccessfully attempting to stem the Saxon tide. Eventually, in 457, the Roman-British forces were overwhelmed at the battle of Crayford, and Southwark and then Londinium fell to the Saxons.

Following the departure of the Romans, the loss of an affluent leisured class had led to the collapse of the sex trade, at least in the form in which it had previously operated. As Londinium ceased to function like a Roman city and disintegrated into a series of settlements along the banks of the Thames, the bath houses and the pleasure domes and their urbane professional clients became things of the past; and the whores were forced to change their modus operandi.

Little is known of what became of the prostitutes of this period. It is known, however, that brothels as such did not exist in Northern Europe. Instead, each Saxon village had its local prostitute, who lived slightly apart from the main settlement. The word ‘whore’ derives from hore or hure or hore-cwen, a filthy woman, and by association hore-hus is a whorehouse or brothel.⁴¹

The solitary whore’s clientele consisted of local older men, horny youngsters, husbands and the occasional stranger. She could usually expect to live in peace and provide a service to the community, although penalties, when the elders chose to impose them, were severe: the Visigoths ruled that whores must be publicly whipped and their noses split open, whilst one early Aryan form of Christianity practised among the German tribes saw promiscuous girls and women put to death.⁴² If this seems grim, it is worth recalling that conditions for ‘respectable’ women were little better: regarded as the property of their husbands and fathers, they were traded like horses and sold into wedlock for financial or political gain (wed means payment or pledge, later symbolized by a ring).

Ironically, despite the deeply misogynistic attitudes of the Church, it was the arrival of Christianity on these shores which provided a boost for women, and whores in particular. In one respect, the Augustinian form of Christianity as practised in London offered salvation for women; no longer merely seen as chattels to be bought and sold, they achieved a certain status. A great deal of the early converts to Christianity were women, and particularly prostitutes, who were impressed by the fact that the original ‘scarlet woman’ of the Christian story, Mary Magdalene, played such an important role in Christ’s life. In her capacity as a reformed prostitute who became one of his greatest followers, Magdalene was an impressive role model.

By 670 Christianity had been imposed throughout the land, and by 850 the Bishop of Winchester (later known as St Swithin) had established the nunnery of St Mary Overie. This establishment was founded on the same spot as the Roman garrison where the first of London’s prostitutes had serviced the Roman army. Built in Southwark, it would become one of the most notorious brothels in London, and the ‘nuns’ who dwelt there would become known as ‘the Winchester Geese’. From servicing their colonial masters, the prostitutes of London were now, to all intents and purposes, owned by the Church.