The Origins of Sex

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Cover: Kitty Fisher by Nathaniel Hone, oil on canvas, 1765 (photograph © National Portrait Gallery, London)

Epilogue: Modern Cultures of Sex – from the Victorians to the Twenty-first Century

THE ORIGINS OF SEX

‘A revelation … The book is not simply a finely crafted work of history, but a study that will reshape the way its readers understand the most intimate level of their lives. It may even bring some sanity to modern debates about sexuality’ Diarmaid MacCulloch

‘An enthralling history of changing ideas about sexual freedom and desire … inspiring as well as provocative’ Sarah Bakewell, Independent

‘The depth of detailed historical research is as eye-catching as the breadth and topicality of Dabhoiwala’s argument … this is more than just exemplary history; it is timely and important work’ Ian Kelly, The Times

‘Dabhoiwala’s balanced and responsible study takes a fascinating subject seriously without being po-faced, and in doing so, holds up a mirror to our own contradictory times’ Lesley McDowell, Independent on Sunday

‘Impressive … erudite … packed with information and peppered with fascinating examples. It will delight students of social and sexual history, and anyone interested in the history of ideas’ Julie Peakman, The Times Literary Supplement

‘Forget the ’60s; sex started far earlier … Rich, crisply written and impressively well-researched … engrossing’ Michael Dirda, Washington Post

‘Exceptionally good … Dabhoiwala assembles a huge mass of information … his book has many lessons for us’ Brian Morton, Sunday Herald

An ‘exhilarating, ground-breaking book … the whole narrative is peppered with surprising revelations ... a meticulously researched, rigorously argued study … Its epic scope … brings universal truths into sharp focus … This is a lucid and stimulating book that challenges many of our assumptions about sex’ Mathew Green, History Today

‘An informative, wide-ranging book that is also compellingly readable … He has done a wonderful job … Dabhoiwala has to tread a difficult path through a more or less limitless field, and he manages it with great care and unselfconscious aplomb’ John Barrell, Guardian

‘Fascinating ... incorporates everything … an impressively illustrated argument, both literally and figuratively’ Hallie Rubenhold, BBC History Magazine

‘A deep [and] astonishingly wide-ranging and erudite history, which fascinates throughout’ Atte Jongstra, NRC Handelsblad

‘This landmark work … is a huge achievement. He has brought together a wide range of ideas and issues to show how the gap between pre-modern and modern ways of thinking about sex was bridged … this is an exciting, beautifully written, persuasively and finely argued book that will inspire great debate and revision, ensuring its place as a reference point in the histories of sex and of ideas for years to come’ Sarah Toulalan, Times Higher Education

‘A brilliant book … a monumental study … an epoch-making subject … surprising … amazing … The Origins of Sex opens up a new field … meticulously argued, strongly grounded in the sources, full of juicy examples’ Urs Gehriger, Die Weltwoche

‘Astonishing … striking … Presents a tremendously rich view of a fundamental change … and is equally challenging about the diversity of sexual moralities in the world today’ Thomas Lepeltier, Sciences Humaines

‘A sumptuously rich, learned and enlightening debut ... What makes Dabhoiwala’s book so gloriously enjoyable is its happy blend of provocative ideas with splendidly rich historical anecdotes … [a] lucidly written, densely researched and thoroughly persuasive book’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Faramerz Dabhoiwala was born in England, grew up in Amsterdam, and was educated at York and Oxford. He is the Senior Fellow in History at Exeter College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and the father of two children. This is his first book.

Acknowledgements

I should never have aspired to become a historian, nor persevered with this book, without the example and encouragement of several outstanding scholars and friends. I recall with gratitude the support of Ian Archer, Peter Biller, Jan Blokker, Michael Braddick, Robin Briggs, Marilyn Butler, Robert Darnton, Rees Davies, Anthony Fletcher, Clive Holmes, Joanna Innes, Ian Kershaw, Paul Langford, Diarmaid MacCulloch, David Parrott, Hanna Pickard, Lyndal Roper, Paul Slack, Robert Shoemaker, Lawrence Stone, Keith Thomas, Simon Walker, David Wootton, and Keith Wrightson. I am especially thankful for the unceasing kindness of Martin Ingram, who supervised my early researches, and of John Maddicott and Christina de Bellaigue, who have each helped me in innumerable ways.

I am profoundly obliged to the institutions that have sustained me at Oxford: the Faculty of History, All Souls College, and, most of all, Exeter College. I must acknowledge as well the support of the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University and of the Arts and Humanities Research Board of the United Kingdom. And I rejoice in the vigilance and good humour of my publisher, Stuart Proffitt.

How very much I am indebted on particular points to the scholarship of others will, I hope, be evident from the notes. The book also owes an enormous amount to the intellectual stimulus of my students at Oxford, and to the benevolent interest of many colleagues across the world – historians, literary critics, lawyers, philosophers, and others – who have helped me discuss my ideas, supplied me with valuable references, and read drafts of the text. I am deeply grateful to them all.

The dedication records my happiest, most important obligation of all, to my three favourite readers.

Prologue: The Culture of Discipline

We could start anywhere in the British Isles, on any date almost from the dawn of recorded history to the later seventeenth century. But let’s pick Westminster, on the bank of the Thames. It is Tuesday, 10 March 1612. If we hurry into the town’s courthouse, we shall find its magistrates in session, dealing with a routine criminal case. An unmarried man and woman have been arrested and brought before them. They are accused of having had sex together. The woman confesses. The man denies it. It does not take long to decide their fate. They are put on trial before a jury of men, interrogated, and found guilty. Their punishment reflects the heinousness of their crime: not only did they have sex, they have brought into the world a bastard child. For this, Susan Perry and Robert Watson are to be cut off from their homes, their friends, their families, their livelihoods – to be forever expelled from the society in which they live. The judges order them to be taken directly

Sexual intercourse is a universal human practice. Yet sex also has a history. How we think about it, what meanings we invest in it, how we treat it as a society – all these things differ greatly across time and place. For most of western history the public punishment of men and women like Robert Watson and Susan Perry was a normal event. Sometimes they were treated more harshly, sometimes less, but all sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state, and ordinary people devoted huge efforts to suppressing and punishing it. It seemed obvious that illicit relations angered God, prevented salvation, damaged personal relations, and undermined social order. Nobody seriously disagreed with this, even if men and women regularly gave way to temptation and had to be flogged, imprisoned, fined, and shamed, in order to remind them. Though the details varied from place to place, every European society promoted the ideal of sexual discipline and punished people for consensual non-marital sex. So did their colonial off-shoots, in North America and elsewhere. This was a central feature of Christian civilization, one that had steadily grown in importance since the early middle ages. In Britain alone by the early seventeenth century, thousands of men and women suffered the consequences every year. Sometimes, as we shall see, they were even put to death.

Nowadays we regard such practices with repugnance. We associate them with the Taliban, with Sharia law, with people far away and alien in outlook. Yet until quite recently, until the Enlightenment, our own culture was like this too. This was one of the main differences between the pre-modern and the modern world. The emergence of modern attitudes to sex in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries therefore constituted a great revolution. The aim of this book is to explain how it came about.

The subject is immense, yet it is never studied – worse still, its existence is barely acknowledged. More than thirty years ago, Sir Keith Thomas and the late Lawrence Stone, its first major English historians, recognized that the period between 1660 and 1800 marked a momentous watershed, ‘a great secular change in sexual attitudes and sexual behaviour’, the birth of the modern mind-set. But its origins remained unexplained. Since then, the history of sex, though increasingly popular, has also become ever more narrowly specialized. Academic historians now know more and more about past ideals of femininity and masculinity, about attitudes to the body, and about other esoteric subjects. Some are fascinated by the minute exploration of particular texts and ideas. Others concentrate on one or two individuals and their sexual experiences. This intense focus on the trees, rather than the wood, has produced a wealth of brilliant in-depth studies and theoretical insights. I have learned immensely from this work, and drawn upon it gratefully. However, it also seems to me to have overlooked the world-changing cultural shift that was so obvious to earlier, bolder scholars.²

This book seeks to describe that central transformation, and to connect it to the major political, intellectual, and social trends of the period. The history of sex is usually treated as part of the history of private life, or of bodily experience. Yet that is itself a consequence of the Enlightenment’s conception of it as an essentially personal matter. My concern, by contrast, is not primarily to enter into the bedrooms and between the sheets of the past. It is to recover the history of sex as a central public preoccupation, and to demonstrate that how people in the past thought about and dealt with it was shaped by the most profound intellectual and social currents of their time. The Civil War and the execution of Charles I in 1649, the revolution of 1688, the growth of religious division, the expansion of urban society, the rise of the novel – all these developments, and many others, were intertwined with the dramatic changes in sexual culture that took place over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, my general aim has been to show that the sexual revolution was a central part of the European and North American Enlightenment: it helped create a wholly new model of western civilization, whose principles of individual privacy, equality, and freedom remain distinctive to this day.

Compared with the Enlightenment in France, Germany, or Italy, that of the English-speaking world proceeded with so little fuss that, amazingly, historians still debate whether it can be said to have existed at all. This book takes a broad view of what the Enlightenment was – not merely a set of self-conscious philosophical debates amongst intellectuals, but a series of social and intellectual changes, across society, which altered almost everyone’s conceptions of religion, truth, nature, and morality. The sexual revolution demonstrates how far and how quickly enlightened ways of thinking spread, and what important effects they had on popular attitudes and behaviour.

That does not mean they affected everyone equally, or favourably. As we shall see, though in the long term the ideals of sexual freedom were to become much more broadly accepted, in the short term their advance, like that of other kinds of liberty, primarily benefited a minority of white, heterosexual, propertied men. I have tried to indicate some of the sexual revolution’s most obvious contradictions and disparities, especially for women. I hope that my analysis will provoke other scholars to explore further its varied implications for women and men, for same-sex relations, for different social classes and groups, and in other western societies.

The book’s argument is not just about new ways of thinking but also about changing ways of living. It attempts to show how people’s beliefs were affected by social circumstances, and how new forms of commerce, communication, and social organization transformed the perception, and the experience, of sex. Traditionally, most of the population had always lived in small, slow, rural communities in which social and moral conformity was easy to enforce. Life in big cities was different, in its scale and anonymity, the increasingly fast-paced circulation of news and ideas, and the sheer availability of sexual adventure. It placed the enforcement of sexual discipline under growing pressure. The first place to experience these changes was London, so that is where our attention will be focused.

This was the period in which London grew to be the largest metropolis in the world. For English-speaking people across the globe it was the epicentre of political power, of literature and culture, and of new ideas. Modern urban lifestyles and attitudes, new social, intellectual, and sexual trends: all were first created there, yet their effects were to be felt everywhere. What happened in London was eventually to shape the treatment of sexual issues nationally and internationally, across the British Empire – from Edinburgh to Brighton, from Dublin to New York, from Delhi to Melbourne. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the majority of the British population lived in towns, and by the end of this book we shall be in the recognizably familiar environment of Victorian and twentieth-century urban life. But the story begins in a very different world.

THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

The further back in time we go, the more fragmentary the record becomes. Most of it has been lost, and what survives is often sparse and abbreviated, so that we can gain only intermittent glimpses of the law in action. Yet its general thrust is clear: the principle that illicit sex was a public crime was asserted with increasing vigour from the early middle ages onwards.

Indeed, since the dawn of history every civilization had prescribed severe laws against at least some kinds of sexual immorality. The oldest surviving legal codes (c. 2100–1700 BCE), drawn up by the kings of Babylon, made adultery punishable by death, and most other near eastern and classical cultures also treated it as a serious offence: this was the view taken by the Assyrians, the ancient Egyptians, the Jews, the Greeks, and, to some extent, the Romans. The main concern of such laws was usually to uphold the honour and property rights of fathers, husbands, and higher-status groups. The same outlook underpinned the justice of the Germanic tribes that settled across western Europe and the British Isles in the final years of the Roman Empire: the Franks, the Goths, the Saxons, the Jutes, and others. Thus the earliest English law codes, which date from this time, evoke a society where women were bought and sold, and lived constantly under the guardianship of men. Even in cases of consensual sex, its system of justice was mainly concerned with the compensation one man should pay to another for unlawful copulation with his female chattel. The laws of Ethelbert (c. 602), the Anglo-Saxon king of Kent, stipulate the different fines payable ‘if a man takes a widow who does not belong to him’; for lying with servants or slave women of different classes; and for adultery with the wife of another freeman – in which case, as well as a heavy fine, the offender was ‘to obtain another wife with his own money, and bring her to the other’s home’. However, illicit sex was also, increasingly, abhorred for its own sake, and liable to harsh personal punishment. The code of Alfred the Great (c. 893) made it lawful for any man to kill another if he found him ‘with his wedded wife, within closed doors or under the same blanket, or with his legitimate daughter or his legitimate sister, or with his mother’. That of King Cnut (c. 1020–23) forbade married men even from fornicating with their own slaves, and ordered that adulteresses should be publicly disgraced, lose their goods, and have their ears and noses cut off.¹

This severity matched the attitude of the Christian church, and its growing status within European society during the early middle ages. Though Jesus is not recorded as having said much on the subject, he evidently did not condone adultery or promiscuity, and the later leaders of his religion developed increasingly restrictive doctrines of sexual morality. In doing so, they drew upon many earlier teachings, so that the outcome was, as one scholar puts it, ‘a complex assemblage of pagan and Jewish purity regulations, linked with primitive beliefs about the relationship between sex and the holy, joined to Stoic teachings about sexual ethics, and bound together by a patchwork of [new] doctrinal theories’. The Stoics, one of the most influential strands of Graeco-Roman philosophy, had generally distrusted sex as a low and dangerously corrupting pleasure. The same suspicion of sex as brutish and defiling ran through the Hebrew scriptures. Though the Old Testament lauded marriage as a socially and religiously indispensable institution, and sometimes (notably in the Song of Songs) celebrates marital eroticism, its overriding message was that sexual relations were unclean. Even between a husband and wife, sex was to be strictly limited in its timing, place, and purpose (only for procreation, not for pleasure), and had always to be followed by ritual purification, to wash away the dirtiness of the deed. The horror of pollution was evoked even more strongly by other forms of sex. God’s instructions on this score were detailed and unequivocal. ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ was the seventh of his Ten Commandments, and every adulterer and adulteress, he had ordered, ‘shall surely be put to death’. The same fate was to be imposed upon anyone guilty of incest or bestiality, as upon men who had sex with each other: all such people defiled themselves and the community. If the daughter of a priest were to fornicate, she should be burned alive. If a man lay with a menstruating woman, ‘both of them shall be cut off from among their people’. If any man should lie with a betrothed maid, God’s will was that ‘ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die’ – ‘so thou shalt put away evil from among you’.²

Christian teachings incorporated this basic outlook and went further still. Jewish law had been fairly tolerant of fornication between unmarried men and women, of men using Gentile prostitutes, and of concubines – indeed, as the Bible recorded, the ancient Hebrews had often had multiple wives. In its earliest centuries, Christianity too seems to have tolerated concubinage. More generally, however, the leaders of the new religion interpreted God’s commands as forbidding any sex at all outside marriage: that way lay hell-fire and damnation. Many of them were so repelled by sexual relations that they saw even marriage as a less pure and desirable state than complete celibacy. Already in Christianity’s earliest surviving texts this message is spelled out by St Paul, the dominant figure of the early church. ‘It is good for a man not to touch a woman’, he explained to the Christian community at Corinth around the middle of the first century, for even within marriage, sex seduced one’s mind and body away from its highest purpose of communing with God. Paul himself was pure, single, and abstinent, and that was the holiest state. ‘I would that all men were even as I myself,’ he wrote, and maids and widows too: ‘it is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain [their lusts], let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn’ (I Corinthians 7.1–40; see Romans 1 for his condemnation of same-sex relations). In other words, marriage was but a regrettable indulgence to those who were too weak to bridle their bodily urges.

In the centuries that followed, the leading authorities of the church (most of whom were themselves celibate men) developed further this essentially negative view of sex. The ascetic ideal of abstinence, particularly for the clergy but also for lay men and women, was ever more strongly stressed; whilst a huge body of teaching grew up in support of the notion that bodily desire was inherently shameful and sinful. The most powerful exponent of this view was St Augustine (354–430), bishop of the town of Hippo on the north African coast: probably no other person has had a more profound and lasting impact on western Christian attitudes towards sexuality. In his youth this would have seemed unlikely. Whilst building a career as a clever young academic, in north Africa and then in Italy, he lived for many years with his unmarried lover and their illegitimate son, and was far more attracted to Manichaeism than to mainstream Christianity. Even when, as he famously recalled in his Confessions, he had begun to see the error of his ways, his prayer to God had been ‘grant me chastity and self-control – but please not yet’: for he was still full of ‘lust which I was more anxious to satisfy than to snuff out’. Yet, as in the case of countless later critics of sensuality, it was precisely his experience of the force of human passion that led him, once converted and dedicated to a celibate life, to inveigh so vehemently against its foul, debilitating temptations. Ultimately, Augustine came to see lust as the most dangerous of all human drives. Like many other medieval theologians, he argued that it was a direct consequence of the Fall – sexual feelings were not a good at all but a punishment inflicted by God upon Adam and Eve and their descendants, an indelible marker of their sinful, corrupted state. After all, lust had an unparalleled power to overwhelm reason and human will: when aroused, men and women could not even control the stirrings of their own genitals. Worse still, no one could ever be sure of having conquered it for good, irrespective of their most strenuous efforts. In old age, almost forty years after becoming celibate, having dedicated his life to the mortification of desire, Augustine summed up his own experience in a letter to another bishop, Atticus of Constantinople. To restrain ‘this concupiscence of the flesh’, he complained, was a life-long battle for everyone, whether virgin, married, or widowed:

But it was not possible. As long as humankind remained in its fallen state, sexual procreation itself passed on the evil from generation to generation: ‘the guilt of this sin is contracted by birth’. Even in marriage, men and women had to be constantly on their guard against sinning through immoderate, unchaste, or unprocreative sex. For every Christian, throughout their life, sexual discipline was a fundamental, inescapable necessity.³

These were the doctrines that the church sought to instil in its followers everywhere that the new religion spread. In England, the earliest surviving handbooks for the Anglo-Saxon clergy (dating from the seventh to the eleventh century) describe in graphic detail the many different sexual sins, solitary, heterosexual, and homosexual, that laypeople and priests might commit, and the penalties for each of them – months or years of fasting, flogging, divorce, loss of clerical office.⁴ The propagation of Christian moral standards had an increasingly noticeable effect on lay attitudes. Under pressure from the clergy, the aristocratic custom of taking concubines gradually declined, and the church’s definition of monogamy slowly gained ground.⁵

The high middle ages saw a considerable acceleration in the theory and practice of sexual discipline. Between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, the western church greatly expanded its power in this sphere, in line with its growing social and intellectual dominance. Across Europe, ecclesiastical laws relating to sex and marriage were elaborated, standardized, and tightened up, for clergy and laypeople, kings and peasants alike. This was, for example, the point at which the leaders of the church began a concerted and increasingly successful campaign to enforce celibacy on all priests and to banish clerical marriage. The establishment of the church’s own permanent courts from about 1100 onwards likewise transformed the punishment of sexual offences amongst the population at large. From being primarily a matter of private confession and ad hoc jurisdiction, it now became the concern of an increasingly powerful system of public inquisition. Finally, the rise of towns and cities led to the addition of new civic penalties against adultery, fornication, and prostitution, alongside the older structures of royal, manorial, and ecclesiastical justice.⁶

By the later middle ages, extra-marital sex had come to be continually policed by a dense network of jurisdictions. Sexual and marital cases dominated the business of the English church courts: already in the later thirteenth century, they account for between 60 and 90 per cent of all litigation for which records survive, and most later fifteenth-and early sixteenth-century evidence reveals the same overwhelming focus on combating adultery, fornication, and prostitution. The penalties imposed varied by time and place. In fourteenth-century Rochester, men and women were sometimes sent on pilgrimages to atone for their sins, ordered to give alms to the poor, or allowed to commute their sentence into a fine. The most common penance was to be beaten, publicly and repeatedly, around the parish church and the market-place, as the entire community looked on.⁷ The same crimes were also punished by town courts. In Coventry in 1439, the magistrates ordered that William Powlet, a cap-maker, should be publicly paraded through town in an open cart together with his lover, ‘in example of punishment of sin’, and that henceforth all fornicators should be treated in the same way. In London, Bristol, and Gloucester, they constructed a special public ‘cage’ in the main market-place, in which to imprison and display prostitutes, adulterers, and lecherous priests; elsewhere, cucking-stools were used to punish whores. From at least the late fourteenth century, special campaigns against sexual offenders were a regular occurrence in London, on top of the more routine policing of unchastity. There also became established elaborate rituals of civic punishment for convicted whores, bawds, and adulterers. Serious offenders were taken on a long public procession through the city, dressed in symbolically degrading clothes and accompanied by the raucous clanging of pans and basins. Sometimes they would also be whipped, put in the pillory, have their hair shaved off, or be banished from the city.⁸

The frequency with which these punishments were imposed throughout the later middle ages points to the persistence of sex outside marriage. Both in medieval literature and in daily life, illicit love and mercenary sex were often discussed in a more matter-of-fact way, implying that they might not always be culpable. Many people believed that fornication was not a serious offence, reported a twelfth-century bishop of Exeter; and though in 1287 the idea that it was wholly blameless was formally classified as a heresy, it persisted. It was especially accepted that young people fell in love, and that they might sometimes fool around. As the leaders of the early Tudor church were to complain in the 1540s, ‘among many, it is counted no sin at all, but rather a pastime, a dalliance, and but a touch of youth: not rebuked, but winked at: not punished, but laughed at’.⁹

There were also obvious limits and inconsistencies in official attitudes to sexual discipline.¹⁰ Unmarried cohabitation, both amongst the clergy and the laity, was commonplace until the high middle ages, and endured right up to the Reformation. The criminalization of fornication was further complicated by the church’s own law of marriage, which was codified in the twelfth century (and not altered in England until the Marriage Act of 1753). All that it required for an unbreakable wedlock was that a marriageable man and woman exchanged vows in words of the present tense (and if they did so in words of the future tense, a single act of intercourse would create a legal union). In theory the legitimation of sex therefore required only the consent of the couple themselves, without the need for any priest, witnesses, or ceremony. In practice the church tried, with increasing success, to discourage and penalize all forms of quick, irregular, and clandestine marriage: already by the later middle ages the norm was a wedding that was advertised publicly, long in advance, and solemnized by a priest in the parish church, in front of the local community.¹¹ Yet the idea never completely died out that, ultimately, it was for a couple themselves to decide whether or not they were married in the sight of God (as we shall see in Chapter 2). Finally, public prostitution was tolerated, and in the later middle ages increasingly sanctioned, as a necessary evil. Given that in practice it was impossible to restrain the lusts of unmarried laymen and clerics, so the argument ran, it was better to allow brothels than to provoke seduction, rape, adultery, and worse. As a popular medieval analogy had it, ‘remove the sewer, and you will fill the palace with a stench … take away whores from the world, and you will fill it with sodomy’.¹²

All the same, the main trend over time was towards ever-tighter control and punishment of non-marital sex, by secular and ecclesiastical authorities alike. It is also evident that, over the course of the middle ages, the gap between Christian precepts and popular attitudes had steadily narrowed. Though people might quibble about the limits of sexual discipline, or resent its imposition on them personally, its effects were ubiquitous, and its necessity was taken for granted.

REFORMED MORALITY

In fact, by the early sixteenth century the main public criticism was that existing practice was far too lenient. This was a major complaint of the Protestant movement, which began around 1500 as a campaign to purify the church from within, but pretty soon developed into a cataclysmic struggle for truth that tore apart the unity of western Christendom. By the later sixteenth century, the western world (including its growing overseas colonies) was to be bitterly and permanently divided along religious lines – between Catholics and Protestants, and between different varieties of Protestantism. What Protestants had in common was a belief that the Catholic church’s doctrines and practice had become corrupt and worldly. Their ambition was to rediscover what God really demanded of Christians, and to order their own societies accordingly: not just in terms of religious worship, but in every sphere of life. Rather than the accumulated dogma of the church and its popes and priests, their chief basis for this was to be the direct inspiration of the word of God: the text of the Bible.

Sex was central to the Reformation’s reshaping of the world. To Protestant eyes, the Catholic church’s whole attitude to sexual morality seemed pathetically lax and dishonest. Its priests were lecherous parasites: the ideal of clerical celibacy was no more than a joke. Ecclesiastical courts were not nearly fierce enough in pursuing sexual offenders and punishing their mortal sins. Particularly scandalous was the toleration of prostitution. As far as the reformers were concerned, overt vice was, if anything, more dangerous than secret liaisons: the open sight of whores and brothels set a terrible example to young people, tempted men and women into sin, and was especially provoking to God. What is more, by allowing and regulating sexual trade, the Catholic church – the Whore of Babylon – was literally maintaining itself on the proceeds of fornication and adultery. ‘Oh Rome!’, ran the conventional Protestant denunciation, ‘the courtesan keeps open shop, pays yearly rent to his Holiness’s treasury, and takes a license for her trade’.¹ Meanwhile, as the morals of the people were left to decay, the church itself grew rich on the proceeds of fines, indulgences, and the other tricks it imposed on its hapless flock. In short, there was a direct connection between the spiritual and sexual corruption of the papacy and its followers. This proved to be an extremely powerful polemical connection, which Protestants were to exploit ever afterwards.²

Instead of such wickedness, Protestants advanced a purer, more rigorous morality. The Catholic aspiration to celibacy was jettisoned as unrealistic and counter-productive. For all men, including priests, marriage was henceforth to be the only appropriate outlet for sexual desire. On the other hand, God’s many pronouncements against whoredom were to be taken even more seriously: all sex outside marriage should be severely punished. That adulterers ought to be put to death was the ideal of Luther, Zwingli, Bucer, Bullinger, and other leading reformers.³ The consequence was that wherever the Reformation succeeded it was followed by self-conscious efforts to tighten moral discipline: the closure of brothels, the expulsion of prostitutes, and the introduction of harsher punishments for adultery and fornication. In response to the Protestant challenge, more rigorous sexual policing equally became a feature of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Throughout the western world, the period saw an intensification of Christian propaganda, and action, against fornication, adultery, prostitution, and sodomy.⁴

England was no exception. It is unclear why, but already in the later middle ages its mores seem to have been less permissive than those of continental Christendom. Very few towns appear to have allowed licensed brothels; and there is no evidence at all of religious foundations to assist penitent prostitutes, which were popular elsewhere in western Europe.⁵ Throughout the sixteenth century there were many attempts to enact harsher national laws against sexual offenders. A statute of 1534 made ‘buggery’, whether with another person or an animal, punishable by death. Another, in 1576, empowered justices of the peace to punish the parents of any infant born out of wedlock.* Meanwhile, many churchmen and parliamentarians worked towards still greater discipline. In 1552, a wholesale revision of canon law led by Archbishop Cranmer recommended that adulterers should suffer life imprisonment or exile (though stoning to death, the commissioners noted wistfully, had been ‘by our godly forefathers [the] punishment specially designed for it’).⁶ At the very least, whores, fornicators, and adulterers ought to be seared with hot irons on their cheeks or foreheads, suggested the writer Philip Stubbes, so that ‘honest and chaste Christians might be discerned from the adulterous children of Satan’. Many others urged that adultery should be a capital crime. The official Tudor homily against whoredom, which from 1547 was regularly recited in every parish church across the land, noted approvingly that many foreign and heathen nations of the past and present executed sexual sinners, just as God had commanded in the Bible. As a result, every English man and woman of the period would have known that, for example, ‘among the Turks … they that be taken in adultery, both man and woman, are stoned straightaway to death, without mercy’.⁷ The effects of this growing disapproval can be seen even amongst the highest ranks. Many medieval and early sixteenth-century noblemen had owned their bastards, or openly kept mistresses. After the Reformation, however, such behaviour was to become more controversial – by the early seventeenth century, aristocratic immorality provoked growing unease about the degeneration of the ruling classes.⁸

[* 25 Henry VIII c. 6; 18 Elizabeth c. 3. The latter law was probably intended to apply only where the bastard child was likely to require financial support from the parish. When the legislation was updated in 1610 the new statute made this explicit: henceforth the mothers of bastards who were a charge on the parish were to be imprisoned at hard labour for a year (7 James I c. 4). They were often also whipped.]

From the later sixteenth century onwards, in line with this hardening of attitudes, local church courts stepped up their efforts against sex before marriage, illicit pregnancies, bastardy, and related matters.⁹ So did the governors of towns and cities. In Southampton and Norwich in the 1550s, notorious whores were expelled from the city, on pain of being whipped and branded in the face if they dared return. In Rye, fornicators were forced to wear special yellow and green collars around their necks. Elsewhere, they were flogged, carted, or put in the stocks. Especially elaborate rituals were devised at Bury St Edmunds in the later 1570s. On Sundays, sexual offenders were paraded to the public whipping-post. The women had their hair cut off. Then they were all tied up and left for a whole day and night, at the mercy of the elements and the contempt of their community. Finally, on the following market day, they were publicly whipped, ‘receiving thirty stripes well laid on till the blood come’.¹⁰

The impetus for this growing severity came partly from religious zeal: the most enthusiastic punishers of whoredom were often the most evangelical Protestants, who sought the ever-further purification of society (‘Puritans’, as they came to be called in England). It also reflected mounting social pressures. The sixteenth century was a period of unprecedented population growth and economic upheaval. By the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) this was resulting in considerable hardship, overpopulation, and pressure on local resources. The increasingly virulent spread of syphilis from the end of the fifteenth century onwards provoked growing anxiety, especially in towns. Against this background, the social problems caused by sexual immorality – crime, disease, bastardy, impoverishment – came to be ever more acutely felt. The sharpening of measures against adultery and fornication can, therefore, be seen as part of a broader late-Tudor attempt to combat impoverishment and social disorder, through the foundation of new kinds of prisons and workhouses, a wholly new system of poor relief, and a crack-down on other kinds of anti-social behaviour, such as drunkenness, vagrancy, and begging. Taken together, this amounted to a significant expansion of governmental intervention in economic and social problems.

London was the epicentre of Protestant enthusiasm, of civic and central power, and of novel initiatives. From the early sixteenth century onwards, in line with the advance of Protestantism and of syphilis, immorality was treated with renewed hostility. Already in 1506 the licensed brothels of Southwark were temporarily shut down; in 1546 they were abolished for good. A succession of evangelical lord mayors and aldermen launched their own crusades against sexual offenders – not just ordering prostitutes to be carted, pilloried, flogged, banished, and dragged through the Thames, but using the secular law to pursue fornicators and adulterers systematically as well. When Rowland Hill, Lord Mayor in 1550, instigated the carting of notable citizens for unchastity, several of them ‘told him that it was not right to be so severe, and said that it would cost him dear when he finished his office, but he did not cease on that account, although many men would have paid large sums of money to be saved from disgrace’.¹¹

Particularly important was the foundation in the 1550s of an entirely new kind of penal institution, Bridewell, to deal with the City’s sexual miscreants, beggars, vagrants, and other petty criminals. This building on the western border of the City, originally one of Henry VIII’s palaces, was the first English ‘house of correction’: a place to which offenders were summarily committed, not just for a sharp whipping, but for weeks of incarceration and hard labour, in order to instil in them the fear of God and the habit of industry. It was a model that was eventually to be adopted by every other city and county in England (the name ‘bridewell’ likewise became a generic term for any house of correction). Its foundation had an immediate effect on the punishment of sexual offences in London. This single institution alone punished hundreds of unchaste men and women per year – in addition to the large numbers that must have been dealt with by the capital’s parish officers and church courts, its neighbourhood ward meetings, its livery companies and other corporate bodies, and its justices of the peace. By the end of the sixteenth century, sexual immorality was probably being policed with greater vigour in London than it had ever been before.

POWER AND PUNISHMENT

The orthodox ideals of the church and state continually came up against attitudes that were more tolerant of illicit sex. These alternative views are, however, not easy to recover in detail. Because they were neither respectable nor very fully developed, they were rarely written down at length. In poetry and fiction, love was endlessly celebrated, but sexual passion more often implied than directly described. Yet the basic idea that sex was fun, and that men and women desired it, indeed required it, was relayed in countless jokes, chapbooks, and other forms of popular communication. The ballad ‘A Remedy for the Green Sickness’ (c. 1670), for example, took its cue from the popular seventeenth-century idea that it was unhealthy for women to remain virgins for too long:

Around the same time, an anonymous English writer, translating an erotic French text, set down an unusually lengthy description of how a seventeenth-century woman might, in more explicit language, have experienced and described the throes of passion with her lover:

The unmediated voices of real women are much harder to recover. Even within marriage, it is rare before the eighteenth century to find female correspondence that alludes even as vaguely to sexual passion as the reply that the Wiltshire gentlewoman Maria Thynne wrote around 1607 to a now lost letter from her husband Thomas, far away from her in London. Their union was an extraordinary one. They had encountered each other for the first time one evening in May 1594, at a party in a Buckinghamshire tavern. She had come there from Queen Elizabeth’s court, he from Oxford, where he was studying. They were both only sixteen. Yet that very day they were secretly married, and spent their first night together. Their families were bitter, powerful enemies, and Thomas’s parents did all they could to undo the marriage: but their love was strong. Their story may well have inspired William Shakespeare, shortly afterwards, to set down his play Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595–6). Here is Maria, by now aged about twenty-seven, a few years after she and Thomas were finally able to start living together:

FARAMERZ DABHOIWALA