I’m speaking at Salon for the City on Thursday night this week. The title of the salon isLondon: City of Sex Work, and my co-speaker is Julie Peakman. I’ll be focusing on the 14th century in Southwark, but it’s not all about the Bankside brothels. In fact my annoyance about how guides usually talk about the Bankside was a reason I got into the guiding business. The picture shows me there along the river.
In a previous career as activist-public speaker about migration, prostitution law and sex workers’ rights I focused on the present day on an international level, because women who migrate from all parts of the world to all other parts of the world often sell sex at some point. They may have planned to or they may have been duped into it. They may hate or only tolerate selling sex – or they may find it works for them better than the other (less than desirable) jobs open to them as undocumented wanderers or purposeful migrants.
When I was doing a PhD I did long research into how societies have thought about prostitution, to understand the contemporary resistance to accepting sex work as a job. My book Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Rights and the Rescue Industry includes a historical chapter which as a primer I still recommend. In our own time the conflict about this topic feels endless and unproductive, a fight about what feminism is supposed to be. I was glad to leave that behind.
But when I decided to guide, a central motivation was to include people nearly always omitted from historical walks – not to say from historical accounts in general, where poorer working people form an inanimate background to Great Events. Including ordinary working people means including those who sell sex in many different settings and forms, in whatever era and place the walk is about.
For my walk Scratching Out a Living: the Medieval Female Proletariat I created six women working near the Thames in 14th-century Southwark. Their characters are based on long research, including in the world of illuminated manuscripts. I’ve written about this research, which led to creating a walk that first appeared as part of the Totally Thames Festival in September last year.
I’ll be talking about this at the Salon: how poorer women got by in a legal and social context that was all against them. Inevitably every one of them has some relation to the sex industry — and I use that term advisedly because everything isn’t now and wasn’t then ‘prostitution’. The brief talk aims to show how commercial sex was everywhere in the fabric of everyday life, as I believe it is now. The above picture is from marginalia in the Luttrell Psalter, catalogued as Add. 42130, f.63 at the British Library. Commentators usually say the woman on the left is a prostitute because she is vainly combing her hair and looking in a mirror (. . .)
I’m doing the walk again on 2 May as an after-work event with fellow-guide Rob Smith, who provides the Big-History context for the lives of the female proletariat. It’s a wonderful walk through areas you may think you already know (here for instance by Southwark Cathedral and Borough Market), and it ends in a riverside pub for refreshment and further conversation, which has become an integral part of my walks. I want to hear what everyone has to say. You can book here.
From Navvyman by Dick Sullivan via www.victorianweb.org
What do you think about when you hear the name Primrose Hill? Good pubs, celebrity-residents, the view over London? For me it’s a neighbourhood that looks as it does because of the building of the Regent’s Canal and the railways.
When the canal was being extended into the area, developers foresaw no obstacle to their plans for elegant houses like those along Regent’s Park: the digging was to be by hand, and the heaps of soil produced might be useful. But then they saw what building the railway did to nearby Camden Town – what Dickens in Dombey and Son called mud and ashes, frowzy fields, dunghills, dustheaps and ditches. When the soot thrown up turned to grime on the eastern edge of the new neighbourhood, all bets were off: Developers switched to building terraced houses.
Who did all the digging and throwing, who sweated and toiled to make the great engineering feats reality? They were called many names – Excavators, Cutters, Diggers, Bankers, Navigators – before Navvies was printed in a news item of 1830 and the name stuck. These itinerant workers became almost mythic figures, considered mysterious and fearsome because of how they lived: not in settled families, camping wherever the work decreed, swanning into streets and pubs in eye-catching dress.
To focus on folks like the navvies is why I became a guide: to tell histories of those often treated like props in the background on the stage of Big Events. This tradition is called History from Below, and it makes a great way to see with new eyes neighbourhoods you think you already know.
There are challenges, because whoever was recording events at the time almost always overlooked the labourers, whether they were scullery maids or navvies. But there are ways to find out, and tracking them down is my delight.
My moniker the Naked Anthropologist dates from decades when I was a researcher and activist with undocumented women. The anthropological stance of observing people as part of their own culture with its own logic allowed me to do the work. Naked Anthropology means Plain Speaking on subjects often ignored or swept under the rug; History from Below tries to do the same thing.
Jesus Being Raised From the Dead by Hans Feibusch, Church of St Alban the Martyr, Holborn
Consider Holborn, that shrine of eminent legal institutions and insurance titans. Less grand histories lurk beneath that surface. One of them, the migration of Italians, is well recognised, but for anyone interested in migration the area is a prime example of how migrating peoples move in, live side-by-side and mix with other ethnic or national groups and then move on again.
The history of streets from the Fleet Ditch to Grays Inn Road and from High Holborn to north of the Clerkenwell Road can be told through migrations of people looking for ways to make new lives, using their skills when possible or taking whatever jobs were going. Poor Irish, freed slaves, Jewish diamond-cutters and migrants from the rest of England all lived in this area when it held no appeal for wealthy Londoners. Some migrants didn’t want to come and others did: All have left their marks.
All our lives society has been represented to us as a hierarchy or pyramid in which the rich are located at the top, the middle class sits underneath and workers sprawl at the bottom. Anything lower than the bottom is called underclass, a lot of dysfunctional nobodies. Isn’t it still assumed everyone is striving to move up this ladder? Failure is constructed as happening downwards, a falling into an abyss – the word Jack London and Mary Higgs used to describe how the poor were forced to live.
For my history-walk about the poor in St Giles I did research on social reformers’ fear of cellars. How can that be? you’ll say, why, the best people now live in garden flats. From the 18th century for a long time cellar-living was considered to be appalling by those living well above ground. Cellar-dwellers were conceived of as more animal than human, an indistinguishable mass likened to moles and worms. Rescuers and reformers sought to raise up the miserable from their low position, Fallen Women first. In Gustave Doré’s drawing of the market in Dudley Street, the cellars are surrounded by old shoes and boots. Some see misery here; others don’t. Doré clearly felt sympathy with the cellar-dwellers.
What if instead of a hierarchy low-to-high we think of sides of the story: that the version we hear of current events and history is the Front Side, the official version told from the point of view of those who have the greatest communications-power. Their view places themselves at the centre, where stated aims and values are not questioned. The facade of the palace.
But for every such frontside, there are backsides, other realities, and that’s where the goings and comings of most people take place. Out of the limelight and usually out of historical accounts, too.
That’s the meaning in the title of my tour The Backside of Knightsbridge Barracks. The front of the barracks-complex faces Hyde Park; horse guards in military regalia on their way to perform ceremonial duties exit under an elaborate late-19th-century pediment. A classic Frontside.
The back of the buildings face onto where for several hundred years poorly-paid soldiers, their girlfriends, wives, children and hangers-on scraped together livings. Knightsbridge (the street) was scene of goings-on that wealthy folks called disorderly, meaning drunkenness, carousing, noise, fights, streetwalking, numerous pubs and two major music halls whose raucous style of entertainment suited the working class. Sites of Low Pleasures, according to those set on raising the tone of the area.
The walk looks at the houses where servants and tradespeople lived in what were built as mean and cheap little houses but are today the height of fashion. I talk about stable lads and grooms, dressmakers and laundresses, all the trades needed to service the rich. Two well-known courtesans appear, both with good manners and nice clothes but always trying to persuade their admirers to grant them annuities to live on and houses to live in. They don’t seem to be working-class, but they were certainly working. And there’s the story of a lowly horse guard and his dollymop-turned-wife, struggling to make ends meet. One Frontside superstar does appear, the Duke of Wellington, because he got in a fracas with one of the courtesans. Oh and his superstar horse Copenhagen appears when we’re walking in Rotten Row in the park. It’s a horsey walk.
The best thing about this award is the fact that someone like myself can qualify at all. The Women’s History Network, recognising those doing rigorous research without being employed academics, have a separate grant category for us. I shared this prize with three other women.
My proposal was to expand the research I did about working women in medieval Southwark to the same group in Norwich. While I was reading in the British Library, on and off for a couple of years, references often led me to Norwich’s development as a medieval urban centre, so of course I’ve wanted to research there. My questions would be the same I asked about Southwark: How did poorer women get by? What work did they do? Having comparable information from East Anglia will give shape and balance to the Southwark data about women I like to call the Medieval Female Proletariat.
One example from the Norfolk Record Office illustrates what I’d be looking for:
Norwich:File BL/CS 3/67
Proclamation by corporation of King’s Lynn ordering young unmarried women between 12 and 40, who have no visible means of living, to go out to service or be sent to the house of correction.
Singlewomen – the civil status assigned to women who’d never married – were considered loose cannon, prostitutes in the making, obvious troublemakers. Singlewomen couldn’t by definition be heads of households; they were told to become a servant in someone else’s household if they couldn’t manage to get married. As a wife, they would be ‘protected’ by husbands, which is another way to say they’d be kept in line.
This example also signals the connection between this project and my decades of previous research into migration: Women leave home to find new places to try to live without authority figures trying to crush them into being housemaids, unwilling wives or prisoners.
What did I promise to do with the results of this research? Why create a walk about it in Norwich of course. And include it in the Southwark walk and probably some other new walk I haven’t invented yet. It’s encouraging the Women’s History Network recognise walks as a good product of research.
So sometime this winter when prices are lower and the weather absolute crap, I’ll go to Norwich for some days and visit the cathedral to see in person this sculpture of a medieval laundress in the act of being robbed by a barefoot boy. She’s a roof boss in the cloister, one of very few representations of medieval women to be seen in a public English place.
And if there’s any way to stretch the money I’ll go to Portsmouth, too.
If you’re not an insider in ticket-buying circles, how to do it may not be obvious. Eventbrite is the name of an easy-to-use service that takes care of the financial transaction. If you search the Eventbrite website for topics you’ll be shown relevant walks. If you were to search for medieval women, for example, my walk Scratching out a living comes right up (and has little competition, which is kind of my point).
You can see what walks I have coming up via the tab on the top menu called Walks Calendar. The screenshot to the right isn’t clickable, but from this calendar the links take you to the same Eventbrite ticket-buying site. There are presently 5 walks listed; I’ll keep adding more – there’s no topic of London history that historians haven’t left women out of! I’ll be describing my thinking for each walk here on the blog, as I did for Scratching out a living: the Medieval Female Proletariat.
And there’s always following me on Eventbrite to receive alerts to new walks. (I know I’m being repetitive but I’m trying to get a new business off the ground so bear with me please.)
Why do most historical accounts fail to mention women? And not only women but just about every ordinary non-famous non-rich person that ever was, even in accounts of poverty and want? Why do historians make men 100% of the protagonists in all events? Remember the example of the 11th-century Bayeux Tapestry: 70 metres long depicting 626 human figures, 190 horses, 35 dogs and 3 women. Does anyone believe women weren’t there, in any of the scenes, on either side of the Channel, doing anything significant for a long period culminating in the Battle of Hastings? The idea is ridiculous. But as the pictures accompanying this post show, men are usually the only ones portrayed.
This post launches my new business, which I had first thought of calling the Little Shop of Women’s Walks. Twenty years ago I think that name would have been fine, but nowadays the word – the very category – women is fraught with conflict. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who identifies as a woman can be one; I’m not making a category with boundaries. And I’m not only interested in females of the species. I could say women and other marginalised people, but do I have to? My interest is to uncover and create histories of those usually left out of historical accounts, and that often means everyone who isn’t an educated man. Oh sure, a few heroic or social-reforming women and people of colour get talked about, but in many cases it’s because they were literate and could nearly pass as middle-class.
When considering telling a history, whose point of view do you take? In most histories the author presumes to have an objective meta-overview of events and to know what’s important and what’s trivial. In these accounts women are usually subordinates or walk-on characters and the poor and working-class hardly appear unless they are the objects of bourgeois charity. When Antonio Gramsci referred to the subaltern and Southeast Asian scholars built a field of studies on it, they put at the centre people rarely given their due in histories.
So: far from being original I’m building on everyone who’s griped about the omissions for a long time. It’s what I did in the research for Sex at the Margins, when I asked why a lot of feminist and middle-class activists and commentators were so upset about ‘prostitution’ when so many people prefer selling sex to their other options for making money. For so many women primarily but also for so many queers, gays, neurodivergent, disabled and a list of other identities and physical traits. Now I want to take this view to the streets, on guided walks anyone can sign up for, in versions of history where the Usual Suspects aren’t the main characters.
Of course some tours do take women as their subjects, most often middle-class reformers or philanthropists, nurses and doctors, creative artists and authors. The mistresses of important men are mentioned, as well as queens and aristocrats. All I want to do is focus on everyone not in those groups!
To sum up, I’m describing my business as London Walks with Gender, Sex and Class. Social class is even probably the most obvious thing I want to focus on: lives of working folks, hoi polloi, proletarians. The assumption that everyone wants to become Middle Class or higher permeates culture, its being understood that achieving that status requires not only having more money but also embracing the values and etiquette.
I’m closing in on 78 years old, which nowadays doesn’t even mean much, in the sense one is not necessarily ill or lame. I’ve liked computers from the beginning and don’t mind learning new routines and mastering the details, but I don’t want to spend all my time in front of screens. A lot of that is required to plan and research a walking tour, but afterwards I get to spend time in the streets, in all weathers, with live people: talking about things that matter to me, answering questions and objection,s and if I can manage it ending in a pub.
I’ve put four walks up for sale inmy Eventbrite account. The first I described in Scratching Out A Living, about 14th-century working women in Southwark, and two more treat the very poor in 18th-century Seven Dials and working people ranged around the Knightsbridge Barracks in the 19th century. Then there’s a walk in Primrose Hill that rather than focusing on famous ‘celebrities’ that have lived there looks at how the area came to be because of the coming of the railway, whose workers lived there first. I’ll be repeating these walks on future dates, so if something looks interesting but the date doesn’t work, there will be other chances.
follow me on Eventbrite to receive alerts about new dates for walks.
I’ve officially qualified, having done a very long course with Camden Tour Guides Association (Camden is a central London borough), so I’m covered by public liability insurance to guide anywhere in the UK, and am also guiding in Essex with Rob Smith.
I’ve also begun to offer private tours on a platform called ToursByLocals. There you can get a walking tour for just you and a friend designed for you by me. So if you like the sound of one of the walks you see but want to change it, you can ask by pressing the message-button. These custom-created tours often involve doing original research, and if you want to know the quality of my research look at the Publications tag on the top menu on this page: many of the items there could only have been written by doing careful research, and I don’t mean googling a topic and looking at random webpages. Reading books can be a long slog, but it’s how you do historical research, preferably in primary sources, to avoid perpetuating myths found in erroneous accounts of events. You read to understand the broader context for the specific event that interests you.
Or you can write to me on the contact form on the right-hand side of this page and ask for what you want, custom-made for you, outside the ToursByLocals platform. If you’ve researched someone non-famous who lived in London or nearby (perhaps during Ancestry searches) and would like to be shown the area, I’ll do the research to create a tour about that person in the relevant epoch in that place. There only needs to be a tube or rail station fairly near the destination, or a bus or even a taxi that can be called for a last remote stretch. I’m not a driver-guide or a black cabbie: my walks are about the joy of walking.
Follow this blog: Encourage me if nothing else. It’s no longer easy to distribute via social media without paying, and I’m not convinced, if I were to pay, that the famous algorithms would send the post to a rather subtle target-audience. The place to enter your email address is at the top of the right-hand column on this page.
You get my point about the pictures: They all came up quickly in a simple random search of the word history on a site offering images in the public domain.
My title is a paraphrase of Margaret Thatcher’s dissing of Hackney, but prejudice against Essex is knee-jerk amongst loads of middle class folks who didn’t like her. Much of the prejudice is about culture and social class – Essex is said to be full of cockneys, wide boys, girls with silicone breasts and botoxed lips, Brexiteers – but the prejudice also applies to the landscape, even the coastal edges along the North Sea. A few Essex destinations are popular to visit, such as Southend-on-Sea, with its long pier; otherwise it’s Suffolk people visit, making a point of skipping over Essex.
I on the other hand love areas of Essex that are said to be bleak, homely and full of mud. And unpopularity means that when one goes there the coast is clear. There are not only no crowds but sometimes no others on the paths at all. Friend Rob Smith shares this enthusiasm, and we’ve begun to lead walks in the Essex estuaries, the first of which I wrote about in the Witches of Manningtree. The picture above from that walk shows how an estuary-river looks when the tide is running out – flat and muddy. The River Roach at Rochford, Essex, is much less picturesque, to my mind brilliantly so, and we are doing a walk there in late October.
Part of the walk leaves the town and winds through an abandoned industrial area (a mill) that’s located on a saltmarsh. When we were standing on this bridge recently I showed Rob a sketch of birds who like salty wet muddy scrubby land, and he said Oh we’re not really on the saltmarsh yet, and then a pink-footed goose flew in to support me.
River Roach at Stambridge, Terryjoyce CC licence
So that is the saltmarsh, but when you make the detour round the site of the mill and come out onto the river, the perspective is quite different. When there’s been no rain it can look like this, or it can look green and verdant. The Roach empties into the River Crouch, after passing the final resting place of Darwin’s ship the Beagle in Paglesham. We don’t get that far.
The walk is 5 miles in order to take in Rochford Hall, home to dastard Richard Rich in Tudor times, as well as a town-centre with houses you will recognise if you know ‘New England’, the variably green and brown route to the river and then the estuary-river, where houses are distant and few. We come back to town through a good field.
But what’s there for me to talk about?The New England connection is key. Margery Allingham called Essex the nursery of Non-conformism. John Winthrop, a Puritan founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, lived just outside Rochford.There is a plaque to a local martyr of Bloody Mary’s rampage against all Protestants. The plainness of the Congregationalist church recalls its Puritan roots: separatists who tried making a colony in the Netherlands and later voyaged on the Mayflower to found the Plymouth Colony. The Civil War was in great part an argument about how the state church of England should be; some were fed up enough to leave the country altogether, but many others stayed and formed new sects, almost always with the idea of making church a more democratic (less-, or even anti- hierarchical) institution. Wesleyans (Methodists) were important in Rochford, and out of them grew a sect called the Peculiar People. Meanwhile the Church of England remained in the old churches, and Rochford has a pretty one at St Andrew’s.
Nowadays we refer to Protestant denominations without thinking what they meant when founded – not only theologically but in terms of society’s dividing itself up into groups with different customs. Now this impulse to cavil and divide goes on in arguments about ‘politics’, but that’s also what religious dissenting was about. I want to talk about their ideas about women, since Non-conformism – especially Puritanism of course – has a lot to answer for in the present, not only for women but for anyone outside the patriarchal mould.
Do consider coming on the walk on 28 October. Rochford is about 50 minutes east of London on a train journey with views of fields and villages. Wear shoes with good soles, as the pathways could be muddy (though Essex is England’s driest county). We’ll have a half-hour break at a pub when we leave town for the marshes.
Thanks to the Rochford Town Team for creating a website with themed walks, good photos and especially for videos giving town history snippets in current residents’ own voices. Also thanks to authors of books about Essex that resist the stereotyping referred to earlier: Strange Magic, a novel by Syd Moore, and Low Country, by Tom Bolton, spring immediately to mind.
PS: The Manningtree witch-craze walk is on again in November, when I hope the landscape will be suitably bleak.
As part of the Totally Thames Festival to be held in September 2023 I’m offering a walk I created, Scratching out a living by the river: The Medieval female proletariat, on the 10th and the 20th. This guided walk reflects years of work searching for histories of women who weren’t nobles or royals or kings’ mistresses in the Middle Ages. I’m interested in the medieval female proletariat, as was obvious in my previous walk on the Witches of Manningtree.
In the near-total absence of mention of ordinary (non-wealthy) women in all kinds of histories, and after reading long and hard about everything else about the period, I created six characters who were in search of an author: Me. You’ll meet them on this tour: scullery maid, alewife, washerwoman, brothel worker, huckster, vitteller. A huckster was a woman selling goods in the street, and a vitteller (victualler) was a foodmonger, selling in various settings (think of the word ‘vittels’ in old Western movies). Since few poor women could subsist on the takings from only one job, others besides the brothel-worker sold sex in the streets or in unlicensed bawdy houses. The map at the top, Norden’s from 1593, captures well the area of the river near London Bridge.
The British Library, Add. 42130 f.163v Detail from the Luttrell Psalter, 1325-35, showing women milking sheep and carrying things on their heads.
During several long lockdowns in London, the British Library instated a booking system and procedures for using the Reading Rooms that made working there sometimes infuriating – but also somehow more satisfying than usual. At a certain point I knew there’d be no mentions of individual poorer women anywhere I looked and decided to examine illuminated manuscripts. For a brief period scribes and illustrators (most not monks), mostly in East Anglia, decorated the margins of English manuscripts of religious texts with drawings of people: sometimes peasants, often hybrid monsters and sometimes recognisable women. Working in the Manuscript Room was a revelation, and I did learn how women were looked at – mostly in ways we call misogynistic. Women were considered lustful, untrustworthy and inferior, the sources of men’s problems. Hey ho, I’m an anthropologist and can cope.
The question was How do we know what women were doing if no man recorded it? Before the coming of the printing-press, scribes kept track of certain kinds of accounts and activities, and some monks wrote diaries. But no one described in words what poor women were doing: They belonged to the lowest order of society, close to beasts, and their activities were clearly not thought worth describing: someone had to scrub the floors and empty the chamberpots, that’s all.
Gender-discrimination is key. Take the 11th-century Bayeux Tapestry, which is 70 metres long, depicting 626 human figures, 190 horses, 35 dogs and 3 women. Three in a long story taking place in multiple houses, castles, ships and towns in the build-up to the Battle of Hastings. Does anyone think women weren’t there, leaving battles out of it for the moment? One of the three was a queen, one is considered a mysterious figure and the third is a sort of Everywoman, seen fleeing from the burning of her village (holding a child’s hand, above). The number increases to four if you include a naked female in a sex-scene in the margin. Women were disappeared from history simply by not including pictures of them.
The British Library, Women spinning and carding wool, Detail from the Luttrell Psalter, 1325-35, Add. 42130.
Another kind of disappearance can be seen in guilds like the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers, who formed in the 16th century by amalgamating earlier companies of weavers, fullers and shearmen. But when the clothworkers defined themselves they began at a point in the production of cloth after all tasks conventionally allotted to women were finished: carding, combing and spinning the wool that were necessary before weaving and producing something called cloth. Entrepreneurial men called clothiers organised the distribution and collection of wool carded, combed and spun in women’s homes, and then when guilds were forming they simply left out all that processing. Spinning on the Great Wheel takes great skill, so it couldn’t be claimed that those early processes were somehow too easy to include. One woman historian charmed me by concluding, after long study of spinning all over the British Isles, that men weren’t able to do it.
And of course disappearance of women was also juridical, as when women married and ceased to appear in records. Many women ran businesses of their own in the City of London around Cheapside, a centre of London shopping: we know this because of the trade cards they had printed to advertise, such as this one for Esther Burney. But if they married their names disappeared from the record, their businesses now legally belonging to their husbands. The women were most probably still running them but they suffered a civil death (known as coverture).
The question is what you think history is: The formal activities of royalty and nobility, a tiny proportion of the whole population? The activities of men, particularly the wealthy? Anything related to national government policy and the politicians who made it? For me such histories are simply inadequate.
The particular project reflected in my Southwark walk concerned the river. Some years ago I did a training run by the Thames Discovery Programme to join the Foreshore Recording and Observation Group (FROG – the foreshore being the area along the Thames covered and uncovered by twice-a-day tides). At one point a document was written giving a history of human activities alongside and on the river. There was no single mention of women or female activities anywhere, and I decided That’s it, I’m doing something about this. So I set out to research and as described above found almost nothing there.
So: How do we know what women were and weren’t doing on the river if they are never mentioned in histories? We can’t conclude they stayed at home taking care of children all the time if they were poor. We can’t even conclude they had a home, though obviously they ate and slept somewhere. We can’t know they didn’t participate in the many occupations recorded for men, because there’s no evidence of their being forbidden. Occupation-names often included -man, but that doesn’t mean the person involved was male.
If what is called data is required, then the first that informs us about poorer women’s work in London may be the Poll Tax Return of 1381 for Southwark, now a borough of the city lying at the southern end of London Bridge. For centuries Southwark’s population lived mainly along the riverside, so this area is a good place to begin to create history about what women were doing. The occupations of my characters were all common and known, though most of them probably didn’t pay well enough income to make them liable for paying poll tax.
Photo looking down at the Stew Lane foreshore by Uy Hoang, from Google streetview
All the women relied on water-sources (the river, tidal marshes and springs) to do their work. I have tried to bring them to life in talks I’ve given, and now on a walk where we can stand where they would have stood. Tiny remnants of the 14th century do remain if you use your imagination, like with this image by Uy Hoang from Google streetview that shows the foreshore at the end of Stew Lane on the north bank of the river. This is where the guided walk ends, where wherries picked up clients bound for the brothels and rowed them to the south bank. Whether you call them sex workers, prostitutes or whores, they belonged to the medieval female proletariat.
To follow the story of how I am researching women-and-other-oddballs’ histories to make guided walks, please subscribe to this blog at the top of the right-hand column.
PUBLIC NOTICE: I’ve become a qualified tour guide. Not because I want to take tourists to see the changing of the guard or other typical tourist delights but because I’ve been an inveterate walker all my life and I like talking about pieces of the past other folks might not know about – while walking. You can see me doing it in this photo from my first paid walk, and you can read more about it on the page called London Walks. My fists are out because I was demonstrating a method for ‘swimming’ women accused of witchcraft.
This walk was led along with Rob Smith, a longtime guide and friend. In the past year we have become enamoured with estuaries in the county of Essex – sprawling tidal rivers that end at the North Sea. The landscape can be spectacularly bleak when the tide is out and all is mud.
The co-leading project started last year when we were walking in Manningtree and Mistley, two small towns on the south bank of the River Stour. Various signs portrayed a man named Matthew Hopkins, who had a brief but nasty career identifying witches in East Anglia in the 17th century. You may remember him as the villain played by Vincent Price in the 1968 horror film Witchfinder-General. Price was nearly 60 when he played the actually only 24-year-old Hopkins, but Never mind, villains who cruelly misuse innocent women are a classic trope, and good fun was had by all watching the movie.
What happened was Rob began making comments about Hopkins and witches, and I kept saying Er, not really, it was more like this or that, and suchlike. Because in my decades of studying the victimising of women I must have thought as much about witches as about prostitutes. The walk proceeded to other things, but towards the end Hopkins reappeared as one-time landlord of a pub with a misleading plaque about him on the wall. I objected, and we discussed it some more, and eventually Rob suggested we do a walk on it.
My stops, as they’re called in the trade, addressed the witch craze. But instead of centring Hopkins I focused on three women accused of witchcraft: Anne and Rebecca West of Lawford and Elizabeth Clarke of Manningtree. We know a few facts about these women because they were accused, charged and tried, and two of them were hanged.
The backdrop to this witch craze was the English Civil War, which for the Parliamentary side (Roundheads) was a moral crusade. For them the Reformation had not gone far enough; war was required to establish true religion and halt the roman catholic back-sliding of Charles I.
The two-guide walk began on a recent Saturday in the village of Lawford, whose church bears the scars of iconoclasm: sculpture with heads smashed in by Roundhead troops or locals offended by objects associated with old bad ways (click on the picture to see the smashes).
By the mid-17th century numerous Protestant groups had disassociated themselves from the established church of England; they are often grouped together as Dissenters or Non-conformists. But there was one group more passionately attached to this war than others: the Puritans. In East Anglia and Essex, Puritans were numerous and powerful. Their goal was to purify England’s religion; it was a struggle against the anti-Christ that entailed finding and rooting out those in league with the devil.
In the atmosphere of insecurity and mistrust that reigns in civil-war societies, paranoia about the neighbours easily comes to seem normal. This is the context in which a wave of witchcraft accusations swept through the Manningtree area. Witchcraft had always been considered a fact of life: that some people have the ability to damage others by wishing them evil. Demonology was a popular topic; James I had written one of his own.
Many able and intelligent men had left their villages to fight in the war. Women left behind were viewed according to marital status: Wives enjoyed the legal protection of their husbands; widows had rights. But singlewomen, the term used for the never-married, were thought to be morally weak, uncontrolled and unreliable, making them quite vulnerable to exploitation.
There is also a sexual component: Puritans wanted to suppress activities previously seen as acceptable, like theatre, dancing and sex outside marriage. They saw these behaviours as evidence of ‘witches’ sabbaths’: carousing and sex with the devil. Young women like Rebecca were easily viewed as dangerously lustful.
The witch-finding described here took place between 1644 and 1647 within a legal framework. Three acts had been passed in the previous century: in 1542, 1562 and 1604. But for the law to proceed against anyone, someone had to make an accusation against them, citing a specific harm done.
Anne and Rebecca West had a history of tiffs with their close neighbours, the Harts, and now Prudence Hart said she suffered a painful miscarriage and paralysis at the hands of Rebecca. Thomas Hart said their son had died crying Rebecca’s name, and Anne was accused of causing a boy’s death some years earlier.
In Manningtree, just to the east of Lawford, a man named John Rivet accused 80-yr-old Elizabeth Clarke of bewitching his wife. Elizabeth said she was a witch and knew other witches, but she wouldn’t name them. Remember that the word witch could connote good powers as well as bad, and a woman who knew herbs and felt spiritual, clairvoyant or intuitive did not have to be ashamed of it. Some folks were called white witches, good witches, blessers, wizards, sorcerers and cunning or wise folk. But the news of Clarke’s confession was taken to a local landowner, John Stearne, who took it to magistrates. They gave him permission to investigate Clarke. Matthew Hopkins, son of a Suffolk minister, had moved to Manningtree and volunteered to help Stearne. Both men had read the many treatises against witchcraft and believed in the evil.
In her confession Clarke implicated other women including Anne and Rebecca West. All three women were accused of entertaining demons in the shape of small animals called familiars, or imps. Cats, dogs, rabbits, frogs, ferrets, owls appear in pictures of the time. Stearne and Hopkins watched Clarke for three nights and said they saw her familiars. Under the 1604 Act Against Witchcraft, the keeping of familiars was punishable by death.
Investigations consisted largely in interrogating women to get them to confess to pacts with the devil. They were walked up and down night after night to prevent their sleeping. Respected women of the town were given the job of searching the accuseds’ bodies looking for ‘devil’s marks’ or ‘teats’ their familiars were thought to suck blood from. The marks were searched for and found between women’s legs, using a metal pricking device. The test was said to be that if women didn’t scream in pain when pricked on a teat then they must be witches. But the tool was spring-loaded so the pricker could be retracted into the handle, meaning women didn’t scream – which constituted evidence of being a witch. [This device is on display in Colchester Castle.]
A number of local women became expert searchers. Mary Phillips was a Manningtree midwife who accompanied Hopkins and Stearne when they began travelling. The focus on marks was a hallmark of English trials.
Accused women were also tested by ‘swimming’ in a pond, tied crossways (opposite thumbs to big toes) and held by a rope under their armpits so they could be dragged in and out of the water. Since it was believed the pure element of water would reject evil, floating was believed to be a sign of guilt. But the men wielding the rope would have had good control over this test, and it is this specific practice that provoked most opposition to the witch-finders. Parliament eventually forbade the use of swimming in these investigations.
Hopkins called himself Witchfinder-General and had local support, but he had no mandate from parliament. It’s useful to remember that at this period there was no institution of police, so individuals’ taking it upon themselves to catch criminals was normal. In the legal framework, however, neither he nor Stearne could decide to investigate on their own initiative: there had to be an accusation from an ordinary citizen. What the two men did is awful, but neither of them has struck me as particularly fiendish or even interesting. By offering to investigate they gained power and status and some money, but the amounts weren’t enough to make them rich.
Word of the investigations spread, and Hopkins and Stearne were invited to other towns: to so many places over a short period that it merits being called a witch craze, the term usually used about the phenomenon in European countries. Amounts are recorded in the towns of Aldeburgh and Stowmarket in Suffolk and Kings Lynn in Norfolk that were paid to the men to clear the towns of witches.
There were doubters, and in some East Anglian places opposition nipped witch-finding in the bud. For this to happen there had to be male authority-figures present who dared to scoff. A minister named John Gaule of Great Staughton in Huntingdonshire objected that parishioners were talking more about witch trials than about God and made it clear that witchfinders were not welcome. Hopkins was questioned at the Norfolk Assizes about his methods and about how was it that he was able to detect witches: was he something special? This led to his publishing a defence, The Discovery of Witches, where he answered criticisms point by point. The bible was quoted: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. (Exodus 22:18).
But his chief defence was that he and Stearne only went where they were invited. Even in Manningtree Hopkins and Stearne couldn’t have succeeded without support: at least 100 witnesses testified against accused women. Eventually 36 women from the Manningtree area (the Tendring Hundred) were arrested on charges of witchcraft and imprisoned in ghastly conditions in Colchester Castle. Four died of plague. Hopkins travelled there to get Rebecca West to tell him about witches’ sabbaths attended by the group: This would be proof they were in league with each other. Rebecca gave him what he wanted.
The women were taken to Chelmsford Assizes to be tried. Elizabeth Clarke and 31 others were convicted and hanged there. Four of the convicted were brought to the village green in Manningtree and hanged: Anne West was one of them. Rebecca was spared, having testified against her mother. Did Anne advise Rebecca to save herself? Did Hopkins offer her a deal?
To me the fundamental question is how could it become common and acceptable to accuse your neighbours of witchcraft knowing death was the penalty? The county of Essex accounted for 59% of witchcraft prosecutions, and another large per cent occurred nearby. During the Hopkins-Stearne trials some 250 witches were accused and at least 100 were hanged.
Hopkins’s death at age 26 in August 1647 is recorded in the Mistley parish register; Stearne said he died of consumption. He was buried in a churchyard now decrepit, and his ghost is said to haunt a nearby pond. In the face of growing opposition Stearne found he had other things to do, though he also published a treaty on witchfinding. He then retired, and the craze fizzled out.
Novels written by historians can often illuminate sketchy history, bringing unknown persons from the past to life. I can recommend A. K. Blakemore’s novel The Manningtree Witches, in which Rebecca is the principal character. After the hangings she leaves town and travels to London, surely a likely outcome after what she’d been through. Blakemore then has her getting a ship to the New World. Since the destination could well have been Massachusetts, already settled by many Essex Puritans, word of who she was would follow her, making this quite a charged proposition. She could easily have become a prostitute, though.
What I’ve recounted here took place on a walk through rolling countryside on the eastern edge of Dedham Vale (Constable country), on paths Rebecca and Anne would have trodden, then along the River Stour at high tide with a classic beach-scene in progress, and on streets where 16th- and 17th-century houses are masked by Georgian facades. Rob talked about other periods, including Richard Rigby’s failed attempt to make Mistley a spa in the 18th century. We saw Robert Adam-designed towers and late 19th-century factory buildings and pubs where Hopkins and Stearne could have met with locals to gossip. We all stopped for a drink in one that’s next to the green where Anne West was hanged: the darkest moment in the walk, but somehow more meaningful because you are actually there. We stopped at the kind of pond where ‘swimming’ would have been carried out, which you see me describing in the photo at the start.
Many dismiss the events I’ve described as being nowadays unthinkable superstitious hooey. Hangings aside, I can personally think of several similar crazes that have happened in my lifetime that punish innocent-enough individuals, which you can read about in posts on this blog going back to 2008.
Note about sources: I’ve been able to see assize-court records, as well as mass-printed news pamphlets, which is where ordinary people would have become familiar with names, accusations and hangings and seen wood-cuts depicting witches’ activities. Those were the popular media of the time. I read many scholarly works giving statistics and interpreting events in various ways. As for focusing on the accused women, I’m far from the first person to do it. In the course of my research I was given two walking brochures by Alison Rowlands at the University of Essex that centre victims, created by a number of local Essex women. One is called Walking with Witches. Alison also gave me the name of a former student, James Cundick, who made maps of Hopkins and Stearne’s travels, as well of those of William Dowsing, the Iconoclast-General in charge of smashing down popishness in churches. In the screen-capture above, taken from James’s map, you see the area I’ve been talking about. All these sources helped me put together my own ideas. Thank you James and Alison.
I took the photo in Lawford church, Rob took the other photos, and I believe the various woodcuts and early printings are in the public domain. If they’re not, please let me know.
Yes we’ll offer the walk again, and we’re getting another estuary walk ready now. Yes my own walks will be in London; I’m working on those. Subscribe to this blog and you’ll find out. Leave any questions or comments below and I’ll respond.
The New Abolitionist Model The New Abolitionist Model By Laura Agustín, was published in Jacobin Magazine 6 December 2017. I wrote this after reading...
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When considering telling a history, whose point of view do you take? In most histories the author presumes to have an objective meta-overview of events and to know what’s important and what’s trivial. In these accounts women are usually subordinates or walk-on characters and the poor and working-class hardly appear unless they are the objects of bourgeois charity. When Antonio Gramsci referred to the subaltern and Southeast Asian scholars built a field of studies on it, they put at the centre people rarely given their due in histories.
PUBLIC NOTICE: I’ve become a qualified tour guide. Not because I want to take tourists to see the changing of the guard or other typical tourist delights but because I’ve been an inveterate walker all my life and I like talking about pieces of the past other folks might not know about – while walking. You can see me doing it in this photo from my first paid walk, and you can read more about it on the page called 
