Many of the bodily rules, taboos and injunctions of our Renaissance forebears have remained in place and unaltered. There are a few instances where we would have a few more scruples, such as a reluctance to spit in public, and there are conversely a few areas where our laxity would cause consternation, particularly in matters of bodily exposure, but on the whole, that which our parents drum into us in childhood is much the same as that which was drummed into our predecessors. Such common ground makes it remarkably easy for us to understand and emulate the badly behaved of the past.
Let us start with noses. These were supposed to be kept clean by the judicious application of handkerchiefs while turning ‘the body a little if there is any honest man there’, so that the action was at least partially obscured. Noses were never to be picked in public, especially not at the dinner table. Inspecting the contents of your handkerchief after blowing your nose was a particularly disgusting habit. Nor were you ever to emulate those who ‘thrust their fingers into their nostrils, and make pellets of that they pick out’ (a translation of Il Galateo by Giovanni Della Casa). Such manners are intimately familiar to us today and yet there are elements that might still fox a time traveller.
Not everyone, it was acknowledged, had a handkerchief to hand. If that proved to be the case, then it was preferable to blow your nose between a pinch of your finger and thumb and cast the offending matter onto the ground where you scuffed and ground it into the soil with your shoe rather than leaving a globule for other people to step in. You did not, if you wished to be seen as well mannered, wipe your nose on your sleeve (reminiscent of fishmongers) or upon your bonnet or gown, ‘being rustical and rude’ in Erasmus’s mind. In his manners book for boys, Sir Hugh Rhodes demanded that lads blow their noses first thing in the morning, upon waking, and again at the very beginning of their morning cleansing ritual before dressing. Across the board, the writers of manners books were keen for you to keep your phlegm out of other people’s business as much as possible. Loud nose blowing was condemned as ‘a filthy thinge’, while snorting and sniffing were worse.
The ideal was to be discreet and quiet about such actions, neither drawing attention nor leaving a mess that might dirty or inconvenience those around you. The bodily functions of the well behaved were to be kept as private as possible. Giving your nose a good blow first thing in the morning before venturing forth from your chamber reduced the chances of you needing to attend to it when you were out and about among other people. Turning aside from those present when you did need to blow both actually and symbolically removed the actions from other people’s immediate presence. These two simple principles of discretion and distancing informed much of the practical advice upon managing the body.
If, in another example, you had to fart – and it was best not to do so at all in company – then you should do so quietly and without making any movement or comment that alerted people to it. Such simple precepts made it very easy to manufacture offence when the desire took you. Placing your left hand upon your stomach, lifting your right buttock off the bench and sighing loudly, with or without the actual accompanying fart, could embarrass and discomfort a whole room full of fellow diners. Talk of ear wax, the fullness of your bladder or a persistent itch could be enough to make listeners uncomfortable, and if, having thus drawn their attention to the subject, you then proceeded to scratch at yourself, stick your finger in your ear or jiggle about from one foot to the other, discomfort could quickly turn to active distaste.
As we implied earlier, spitting was taken to be rather less rude throughout this early period than it is now. We have largely forgotten that spitting was as much a part of our cultural response to bodily processes as nose blowing (in preference to nose wiping or sniffing). Medical advice used to maintain that an occasional expectoration was necessary for health, expelling corrupt matter from the body. Certain medicines were available to stimulate the production of saliva in order to encourage the action. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, chewing tobacco was actively advertised in terms of its ‘beneficial stimulation of the saliva gland’.
For many of us, the only memory of this cultural phenomenon is found in the Western, where saloon bars have a spittoon in the corner. Their presence in such a setting, in the early years of the twentieth century, is apt, for they were indeed one of the last places that you would have found them. Pressure to stop spitting began in the second half of the nineteenth century in the cities of Britain where desperate overcrowding made tuberculosis a particularly virulent hazard, in part because of spit lying on streets and floors. Medical persuasion soon translated into strong social pressure and the change in manners rolled out across the nation and over the Atlantic. But even without this understanding of contagion, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries spitting could still carry some potential for offence.
Erasmus was most concerned that, as with nose blowing and snot, a person should turn aside in order to spit, that they should be careful not to spit on anyone and that they should take the time to grind the resultant mess into the ground so that ‘it trouble no mans heart nor stomacke’ – a comment that makes it very clear that discarded bodily fluids provoked physical revulsion. Handkerchiefs were again to be deployed if you needed to spit in formal indoor situations, and it was considered a particularly gross habit to spit across the dinner table.
Yet to not spit at all, to swallow a mouthful of spit, was also considered ‘fowle’ and ‘uncleanly’. Spitting was felt to be a necessary and unavoidable action that needed to be managed with discretion. Your duty as a well-behaved person of breeding and good reputation was to spare other people, as Richard Weste’s little ditties in his The Booke of Demeanor make clear:
If spitting chance to move thee so,
thou canst it not forbeare,
Remember do it modestly,
consider who is there.
There was also a worry that some people had allowed the action to become more than a necessity – that they had got into the habit of regular, frequent spitting, almost as a sort of punctuation to their speech.
Numerous Elizabethan texts mention ‘unnecessary’ spitting, and indeed coughing, peppered through people’s social interactions generally in a mildly reproving tone as if it was a bit annoying and not perfectly well mannered, but not all that objectionable either. So long as the action was well managed, with turning aside, handkerchiefs and so forth, frequent spitting could be overlooked. The line between necessary and unnecessary spitting, however, was clearly one of personal opinion. Context probably played a part in making this judgement; it certainly does today. Jogging, for example, appears to be an activity that excuses public spitting, as does some outdoor team sports, such as football. Interestingly, other forms of heavy exercise do not seem to generate the same tolerance and the same people usually refrain from spitting when they are out and about engaged in other activities.
Disgust and distaste in the face of slack bodily control was often expressed in terms of the animal kingdom. Belching, yawning, scratching and stretching all made people think of the behaviours of farmyard creatures. It was argued that God had given us bodies that carried out many of the same processes as beasts, but that he had also, uniquely among his creations, given us reason so that we might exercise control and choose to comport ourselves in a manner closer to the angels. Our expulsion from the Garden of Eden, theological thought proclaimed, had taught us shame and shown us, through the adoption of clothing, a new way of marking out our humanity. A godly person accepted the physical processes of their body but tamed, ordered and covered them in modesty. By doing so they learnt the lessons of original sin and indicated their willingness to strive for a better state in the life to come. Physical bodily discipline could help us to learn spiritual discipline. When we let physical control slip, we allowed the bestial to come to the fore; we became less human. Scratching yourself was ‘doglike’, yawning excessively made you into a frog, drooling was ‘swinish’ and those who farted resembled cows. This descent into the behaviours of the animal kingdom degraded and diminished an individual. When you spat or blew your nose without consideration of others, or ate with your mouth open, making slurping and wet chewing noises, you revolted people in a visceral manner, and at the same time you made yourself less worthy of consideration as a fellow human being – you became subhuman and unfit company. The offence was multi-layered.
Arse
As an allusion to the dirtiest of bodily functions – but without the actual excrement – farting and talking about farting were just naughty enough to provoke the more sensitive listener while raising a laugh in a more rambunctious one. One of my favourite subversively sly forms can be found in Timothy Kendall’s Flowers of Epigrammes from 1577:
She would not misse her fistyng curre [farting dog]
for any thing: and why?
Forsoothe when so she letts a scape,
she cries me, fie curre, fie.
If you are struggling with the language there, don’t worry – an emblem engraved by George Glover around the same time makes it much clearer. The image is of a fashionable lady with a flower and a small lapdog under the title ‘oderatus’. It is intended to be a visual representation of the sense of smell and the accompanying verse says:
Wee that are Dames of the most dainty nose,
Sometimes the Violet sent, and then the Rose,
But if about us all things prove not well,
Our doggs are neere, that can excuse the smell.
Blaming your farts on the dog wasn’t always entirely effective, it seems; then, as now, people were wise to it.
Talk of farts was in this case used to repurpose one of the usually worthy and rather ponderous renditions of mottos, emblems and ‘devices’. It was also perfect for political satire. ‘The Parliament Fart’ of 1607 was one of the most popular and long-running political commentaries of the time, regularly added to and updated well into the 1630s. Inspired by a real fart – a particularly loud and opportunely timed one, let loose by Henry Ludlow – that had the House of Commons in fits of laughter, it begins: ‘Never was bestowed such art, / upon the tuning of a fart’. Puns abound throughout the poem, as do the names of all the prominent MPs of the day:
… a very ill motion,
not soe neither quoth Sir Henry Jenkin,
the motion was good; but for the stinking.
(Motion, of course, is the word generally used both for a bowel movement and for a formal proposal in Parliament.) The poem may have enjoyed so long a life because of its robust humour, and a simple, predictable structure that lent itself to being turned into a popular ballad and sung to a well-known tune. The ease with which anyone of a suitably scatological wit was able to compose their own additional lines to fit the format surely helped as well.
‘Thanke God quoth Sir Edward Hungerford / That this Fart proved not a Turdd’, continues ‘The Parliament Fart’. For talking turds was just one step further down the repulsive road than talking farts. When Thomas Dekker, in his evocation of terrible gul behaviour, decided to portray the very worst of table manners at a tavern, he did so by reference to bare bottoms and defecation. ‘Call for a close stoole, protesting all the gentlemen that it costs you a hundred poundes a yeare in phy-sicke’, he began. This offended against the ‘don’t draw attention’ rule in dramatic fashion. All the conduct books told youngsters to make sure they went and relieved themselves before a meal in order to avoid having to leave the table mid-meal. To call for a close stool (a chair with a built-in chamber pot and a lid that you could drop after use to contain the smell) was to loudly announce your intention to the whole room, and a close stool was worse than a mere chamber pot, implying defecation rather than just urination. The mention of physic expanded the theme by bringing purges and loose bowels to mind; for after blood letting, medicine to induce ‘the shits’ was the physician’s basic stock in trade.
In addition to verbal discretion, polite people, in total contrast to Mr Dekker’s guls, were also discreet about any behaviour that might draw attention to bodily functions. ‘It does not befit a modest, honourable man to prepare to relieve nature in the presence of other people, nor to do up his clothes afterwards in their presence. Similarly, he will not wash his hands on returning to decent society from private places, as the reason for washing his hands will arouse disagreeable thoughts in people.’ These were Giovanni Della Casa’s instructions in 1558 requiring gentlemen to make a thorough job of cleaning and redressing themselves in private, emerging only when bodies were once again ‘sweet and neat’ and fully covered. The whole process was to be conducted in private, giving people no clue as to where you had been or what you had done there.
Attempting to shock, revolt and wickedly amuse his readers, Thomas Dekker did not stop with talk of visits to the close stool but advised his guls to ‘invite some special friend of yours, from the table, to hold discourse with you as you sit in that withdrawing chamber’. Having alerted everyone to your least savoury bodily functions, he advised you to put social pressure upon someone to join you as you left the dining room and went into another space where the close stool had been set up. This was the equivalent of inviting someone into the public toilet cubicle with you.
Relieving yourself was supposed to be a private activity. In fact, it was so firmly associated with privacy that the image of a man upon the privy with his breeches around his knees is one that Wenceslaus Hollar used to illustrate his character ‘All-hidd’, or ‘he that absents himself not to be chidd’, on one of a set of themed playing cards. In a world of almost continual company, where even beds – never mind bedchambers – are shared spaces, the one and only place where solitude could be guaranteed, where you could hide from social disapproval, was upon the privy or close stool. (Indeed, the word privy is a shortening of the term ‘place of privacy’.) Even our outrageous Mr Dekker felt the need to back up the instruction to obtain an audience by quoting a supposedly real-life, admittedly foreign and infamous example. For when he instructed his guls to invite a friend along, he added the phrase, ‘as your great French Lord doth’. Seeking to pile on more gullish misdeeds and extend the topic, he finished by recommending that upon returning to the dining chamber you raised the question of which literature would be most suitable for wiping your backside with, allowing yourself the opportunity of metaphorically smearing excrement all over other people’s literary efforts.
Upon the privy. Note the presence of a long shirt pushed up out of the way, but there is no sign of any drawers or underbreeches.
Dirty, smelly, leaky and shameful, human bodies were best kept firmly out of the sight and minds of polite people. Arses, of course, were the most likely of the ‘private’ parts of the body to be exposed in the usual course of the day. Men had the option of untying their codpieces (rather like unzipping one’s fly) if they just needed to urinate. Turning one’s back successfully hid the nakedness and there were things that you could do to mask the sound and smell. Every now and then one comes across references, for example, to pissing in chimneys, fireplaces or chimney corners. This was a smell reduction tactic, particularly if aimed into a chamber pot. The draught of the chimney tended to carry odour up and away along with the smoke. The smell of smoke additionally worked to cover any lingering hint of urine. Less polite men, or those caught short, might urinate directly into the fire or ashes where it would quickly evaporate. This does smell bad for a few moments before dissipating (yes, I have been subjected to it). If the fire is out, or the number of men so indulging themselves is too high, it is a foul and very smelly option. In high concentration the smell of urine is not so much masked by the ash as turned into a potent, almost sulphurous version that lingers and lingers.
Relieving yourself outdoors was supposed to involve the strategic use of a bush or tree, as the German traveller Thomas Platter’s commentary makes clear. He was writing about some extraordinary behaviour at Balaruc near Montpellier that he witnessed in 1595. The tone of his remarks is somewhat gleeful as he enjoys a good sneer at the foreigners. Balaruc was one of the first of the spa towns where people drank the waters for therapeutic purposes. Having drunk their allotted glass the wealthy patrons walked abroad and ‘as the water acts promptly, and causes abundant stools, it is a curious spectacle to see everyone firing off in full view, and even vying with each other; for there is no bush or tree to give cover’.
Female evacuations could be managed more discreetly than male operations with no overt nakedness by dint of long skirts and no knickers. One simply placed the chamber pot in a convenient location, stepped into position and lowered oneself in a squat surrounded by a tent of skirtage. If one was within a privy, a quick hitch of petticoats sufficed.
Men wishing to defecate, however, did have to bare their backside and, depending upon the fashion of the time, this could be a right palaver. The man of sartorial elegance, just like his poorer and more practical-minded brethren, suspended his trunk hose or breeches at the waist from his doublet. This was a continuation of long-standing male clothing tradition where full-length leg coverings had been supported by a short and simple waistcoat-like garment worn beneath the coat or gown. Holding up your lower garments with a belt is a much more modern habit. In the early years this support was achieved by means of a series of ties, known as ‘points’, while later on hooks and eyes became the main form of support. Surviving garments indicate a number of different strategies. Sir Rowland Cotton, Member of Parliament and wealthy gentleman, for example, had a cream satin suit that he wore when he had his portrait painted in 1618. The suit is now part of the Victoria and Albert Museum collection in London and boasts forty eyelet holes around the waist of both the doublet and breeches. The two would have been fastened together using twenty points. Each point would have consisted of a length of cord or ribbon around eight inches long with metal ‘aglets’ at the ends to make it easier to thread them through the eyelet holes. Each point was first passed through one eyelet upon the doublet, from the outside towards the body, then it went through a corresponding eyelet upon the waistband of the breeches, again heading inwards, along to the next eyelet and outwards through this one and the corresponding doublet eyelet. Now the two ends were secured with a single looped bow. Twenty such fastenings ensured that Sir Richard Cotton’s suit lay evenly and smoothly upon his body with no pulling or sagging at the waist and absolutely no chance of any embarrassing slippage.
Both the aristocratic Swedish Sture brothers (famously murdered in Uppsala Cathedral where the clothes they were wearing at the time of their deaths were kept as memorials) and Cosimo de’ Medici, ruler of Florence, were happy to trust to twelve pairs of eyelets to keep themselves secure, but one anonymous German gentleman had thirty-nine. Now, just imagine yourself in the privy trying to deal not just with numerous bows to undo and then poke back through those eyelets and retie, but having to do so when half of them are around the back of your clothing.
Your first line of defence was the regular morning evacuation. From Erasmus onwards, all the writers of practical instruction for elite boys and gentlemen advise a profound visit to the privy, close stool or chamber pot first thing in the morning before you got dressed. Hopefully, that would deal with the business so that once ‘trussed’ you had no further need to bare your backside during the day. But if you did? One possibility for the powerful (and arrogant) was to have a lowly personal servant accompany you in order to untruss and retruss you, even if they left or turned away during the actual event. Forcing them to remain, or even wipe your backside, was grossly bad behaviour, but nothing like as bad as that of our gul who forced a social equal into that very position.
Without a raft of lowly servants, the pressures of elegant court life or utterly reliable bowels, most men went for a less pointed approach. Ordinary men seem to have had far fewer pairs of these fastenings joining the two garments – they were not so worried about achieving a perfect look – but the basic problem was much the same whether you were rich or poor and gave rise to two fairly simple and practical solutions.
Breeches generally stay up quite well when supported mostly at the sides and front. If you thought that you might have to manage alone, you just didn’t tie up the points at the back. When you wished to drop your breeches, you simply loosened off the side fastenings, which allowed you to slip your rear end free in the manner of the ‘All-hidd’ character. When you had finished you had merely to tuck yourself back in and retighten the side points, which had remained threaded in position. Mind you, such a strategy can give a somewhat saggy-arsed look when you stand up. Those wishing to retain elegance and independence could instead unbutton their doublets and shrug the whole suit off their shoulders in one, still fastened, piece, to fall crumpled at their ankles. Re-dressing involved hauling it back onto the shoulders and doing up the buttons. Your tailor probably thought that this was extraordinarily bad behaviour, as a well-cut and perfectly fitted suit was put under major seam-damaging pressure during these manoeuvres. (Most of the men of my acquaintance who regularly wear Elizabethan clothing go for this approach, which they assure me is quite straightforward and relatively speedy.) However, it not only preserved your sartorial elegance but prevented you from exposing another offensive reminder of bodily functions: dirty shirt tails.
As we briefly mentioned in discussing female evacuations, women generally didn’t wear knickers, and nor did many men. There is a small body of evidence for knicker-wearing men, but it is even smaller for women. Italian courtesans, for example, are described and pictured as wearing large, bloomer-like undergarments for additional titillation, and the effigy of Elizabeth I in Westminster Abbey has a pair of linen drawers that may or may not be original, along with a more convincingly original corset. The account books of the Newdigate brothers, John and Richard, during their time as students in Oxford in 1619 mentions male drawers twice, once when they are laundered alongside some stockings and once when they are mended. In 1688, Randle Holme, describing articles for use in heraldic representations in his The Academy of Armoury, defines drawers as a pair of linen under-breeches that some men wear. But it is all pretty scanty.
Images of bare arses, male or female, within an English context often also portray the clothing that has been pushed aside. Shirts, smocks and stockings are much in evidence; knickers, bloomers and drawers are not. Even the Newdigate accounts are not quite as emphatic as you might think. The drawers are mentioned just twice, in close proximity to each other, as if the laundering highlighted a problem and was closely followed by the repair work. In addition to laundry bills, the accounts, which roughly cover a three-year period first at Oxford and then at the Inns of Court in London, mention the making of new shirts for the two men on five separate occasions and around a dozen payments for new stockings, numerous purchases of ruffs and cuffs, but no new drawers. When they were worn, drawers were not meant to be seen, so perhaps their appearance was unimportant. Equally, they might have been made of particularly hard-wearing stuff and therefore didn’t require frequent replacements. The other possibility is that the Newdigate brothers, although unusual in recording their possession of drawers (there are almost no other such incidents among account books or inventories until later historical periods), were not all that unusual in their daily habits. Perhaps they didn’t feel the need to wear drawers every day; perhaps such items of clothing were additional extras when donning one’s very best embroidered shirt. For it was shirt tails that provided most men’s washable posterior coverage.
Both surviving shirts and the cloth requirements mentioned in various accounts for making up shirts indicate that the basic shirt was intended to reach down to just above a man’s knees. There was a slit at both sides that ran from the hemline up to the top of the thigh allowing the material to be quickly and easily tucked around one’s nether regions both front and back without impeding movement. Any unpleasant ‘skid marks’ or ‘accidents’ that might occur did so upon the shirt tails, keeping the lining of the breeches clean. Shirt tails, therefore, were considered to be inherently dirty, and allowing them to hang out was filthy upon two levels. Visible shirt tails not only brought the whole business of the privy to mind, but, in addition, the presence of shirt tails on the outside of the breeches implied the lack of shirt tails within the breeches.
Girls Aloud
Let’s talk about periods, ladies. Boldly, loudly and publicly. This was one bodily function that caused widespread repugnance. To this day people are much less willing to talk or joke openly about menstruation than they are about farting, defecation or urination. The generalized advice that bodily processes be kept private and that their management be discreet in both speech and action have consistently been more closely and conscientiously followed here than in any other aspect of body management. While popular ballads abound in references to people pissing, farting, vomiting, shitting, spitting, belching and even ejaculating, I have yet to find one single mention of, or even a vague allusion to, monthly flows in this format. Plays, poems, joke or jest books, letters and court cases all maintain the silence. Only in a small number of medical texts can the menses be regularly found. Even here many try to skip over the subject of female bodies, presenting the male form as the pattern for mankind and shying away from discussing the female form in fear of ‘lewdness’, as if sex was located purely in the feminine.
From Avicenna (the Persian scholar more properly known as Ibn Sina, who died in 1038) onwards, the majority of male medical authors drew together a variety of Ancient Greek, Roman and Arabic sources that described the womb as a sewer that channelled the toxins and filth of the female body out and away in the form of menstrual blood. A 1586 text, for example, claimed, ‘It is agreed by all Physicians, that the womb is like dregs and a drain’. Ancient religious beliefs had also held that menstruating women were ‘impure’, and that their presence could curdle milk, turn wine sour, cause mirrors to become cloudy and make ivory ‘obscure’. While this was not official Christian doctrine, such beliefs were widely held among the populace at large. Not all medical men, however, were convinced; as the herbalist Nicholas Culpeper wrote in his Directory for Midwives in 1651, ‘Writers disagree about this’. Certainly Thomas Raynold, the author of the first full gynaecological text in English, The Birthe of Mankinde, published in 1545, felt very strongly that menstruation was not intrinsically dirty. ‘I know nothing in woman so privy ne so secret, that they should need to care who knew of it; neither is there any part in women more to be abhorre’d, than in man,’ he stated.
Thomas Raynold was a practising physician who had translated the main body of his text from a book originally written in German, but he added and amended freely where his own understanding and beliefs differed from the original, and this positive, if strongly defensive, attitude towards the female reproductive system was one of those changes he introduced. Nicholas Culpeper, a man who followed Raynold’s way of thinking, neatly laid out the two opposing arguments. One group of physicians characterized menstrual blood as ‘venomous’, a concentrated concoction of various waste products and outright poisons. Much of their medical practice revolved around ensuring that it was fulsomely cast out of the body at regular intervals as the retention of even trace amounts could have dire consequences for a woman’s physical and mental health. They promoted a range of remedies that ‘brought on a woman’s flows’ (remedies that incidentally often contained abortificants such as the herb pennyroyal). Yet mainstream medical theory also held that during pregnancy this same menstrual blood ceased to flow out of the body because it was diverted to nourishing the growing child through the umbilical cord. Moreover, after the birth the menstrual blood was converted into mother’s milk and continued to provide sustenance to the newborn. These two medical ‘facts’ led other physicians to argue that the blood could not be ‘venomous’ but could ‘offend only in plenty’, as in only when there was too much or too little. That it could and did go wrong quite frequently was an article of belief that Culpeper, despite his championing of the natural healthiness of the female reproductive system, was quite willing to go along with. Mixed with ‘bad humours’ or ‘kept too long in the body’, menstrual blood became ‘corrupted’ and caused ‘great symptoms’.
The casebooks of John Hall (Shakespeare’s son-in-law) show the typical medical man’s response to female patients. He included ninety-three female patients within the selection that he presented for publication, fourteen of whom he treated for menstrual problems, with approximately half of them diagnosed as having too heavy a flow and half as having too light a flow. Very crudely put, his cure for both ‘disorders’ were different sorts of purges, and in the case of his own daughter he records the number of stools she produced after each dose. Such a high percentage of menstrual problems among a group of patients suggests that John Hall was actively looking for such issues, that questions about the state of a woman’s ‘courses’ was one of his standard questions during a consultation. He was expecting trouble in this department. His daughter, for example, was suffering from ‘convulsion of the mouth’ yet much of the treatment was centred around the fact that her courses had also ceased. The restarting of her menses is closely linked within the account with her recovery. Whether a physician believed that the menstrual blood was positively venomous or not, the general feeling that this was a difficult and dangerous area pervaded society.
The casebooks of Simon Forman show similar thinking. A significant proportion of his patients were female. His practice was based upon a mixture of astrology, Galenic mainstream medicine and the more alchemical works of Paracelsus. According to the historian Lauren Kassell’s analysis, 44 per cent of his case notes upon female patients mention the reproductive system with particular emphasis upon ‘the stopping of the matrix due to congealed humours’ (retained menstrual blood), prompting him to write a treatise upon the subject. Both his astrological charts and his observations of ‘diverse women that have bine troubled herwithe’, as well as his readings of medical texts, had led him to the conclusion that a large percentage of female health problems, physical, mental and emotional, were ultimately traceable back to the proper regular cleaning out of the womb. His investigations of the matter led him to record some of the astonishingly rare female voices upon the subject of menstruation. ‘I have made diligente inquisition amonge grave matrons and midwives and others to knowe wher the matrix doth exempte himself of any thinge that yt receyveth of man more than once in a month or noe. And they have told me yea, that yt doth exempte yt selfe of any thing that yt receiveth of man and doth vomite out wind (like as the stomacke doth) at the vulva’. This little nugget of practical information, that semen is not held within the womb from one month until the next, that menstrual blood is not packed with rotted seed, was one that he had been unable to find in any medical text.
Such understandings and misunderstandings of the nature of menstruation lent a distaste and disgust to the subject in non-medical circles. A reluctance to speak of the issue was one response to this uneasy state of affairs. When one vicar, Ambrose Westrop, made mention of ‘matters concerning the secrets of women’ in the pulpit, his parishioners considered that he had profaned the ‘ordinance of preaching’ and were heartily offended. It was cited as a major complaint against him in the sequestrations of 1643 when he was removed from office. Public discussion, particularly in a religious context, of such female bodily functions was not to be endured.
But there was much more to such revulsion than worries about the physical corruption inherent in menstrual blood. There were also the religious and spiritual connotations to take into account. In the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mind, the entire female reproductive system was overshadowed by the special spiritual disgrace associated with daughters of Eve. Adam, too, had sinned in the Garden of Eden, but his sin was considered to be less wicked and the ongoing taint was correspondingly thought to be milder. The fall of mankind from God’s grace was firmly blamed on Eve tempting Adam. For those not brought up within the Christian, Jewish or Islamic tradition, the idea that the person who breaks the law (don’t eat the apple) is less guilty than the one who tempts them to break the law is an odd one, but the power of that interpretation cannot be historically overstated. Religious-minded men of every hue and in many different formats marked women out as particularly prone to sin, to lapses of morals and poor judgement as a result of their descent from Eve. Women’s words and women’s actions were not to be trusted. Lifelong supervision by fathers, brothers and husbands was considered essential by the majority of the population. Women, too, surrounded by such messages from early childhood, accepted and usually actively supported this analysis. Femaleness was inferior and suspect, and the menses were the very essence of this difference from the stronger, purer male pattern.
As an inherently female experience, the majority of men could dismiss menstruation, if they so wished, as something that happened to weaker, lesser beings – something linked to the sinfulness of Eve and her shame. Silence about the subject suited these men admirably. Even as fathers and husbands, men could choose to distance themselves from the ‘taint’ of menstruation by insisting that these were ‘women’s matters’, never to be discussed in front of men, and that the practicalities were kept from their sight. The mess and the pain were to be dealt with discreetly and silently. How individual men responded to menstruation in private is, of course, unknown; there may well have been many who were supportive and unembarrassed within a family context, but society and the ideologies of the day permitted and indeed enabled responses of guilt, shame and secrecy.
The pain and danger of childbirth, which was certainly more widely spoken about, was presented by the majority of Protestant divines as God’s rightful punishment of women, an opportunity for them to atone for their original sin. The pain was supposed to be accepted as ‘a mercy’ that allowed them to approach nearer to a blessed state. Prayers for women to use in the birth room frequently included phrases thanking God and accepting the agonies as ‘just reward for my manifold sins’. Concerns about spiritual purity and concerns about physical purity frequently became intertwined in these outpourings. John Donne’s 1618 sermon in St Paul’s Cathedral, celebrating the successful delivery of a child to Lady Doncaster, for example, made the commonplace connection between the physical mess, bloodiness and ‘filth’ of childbirth with the spiritual impurity of original sin and Eve’s part in the fall from grace. ‘Our mothers conceived us in sin, and being wrapped up in uncleanness there, can any man bring a clean thing out of filthiness?’ he asked, continuing with long references to dung, blood and human excrement.
Now, technically none of these concerns, misunderstandings and worries apply in the modern Western world. Doctors have long accepted that menstrual blood is not poisonous or rotten. The presence of a menstruating woman, most people would agree, does not curdle milk. Wombs full of retained blood are not the root cause of female mental illness, nor indeed of many physical complaints. Very few religious leaders hark on about women’s additional burden of original sin (at least, not to the same degree or with the same vehemence of their forebears). And yet embarrassment and secrecy persist. Even adverts for feminine hygiene products remain rather shy and coy creatures, with their iconic blue liquids to demonstrate absorbency rates and lots of healthy young women tripping lightly through sunlit meadows. Start a conversation about menstruation in a public place and people try to shush you; men often blush, turn away or leave. Often it is those men who most loudly indulge in crude language and misogynistic jokes that are most perturbed by such talk. I can’t be the only woman who has spoken deliberately to disconcert and subvert in such a social situation. But if, in our supposedly enlightened world, talk of the monthly flows can be seen as behaving badly, just think how very offensive public mention of such matters was when all those worries seemed justified, when doctors of medicine and men of the cloth agreed wholeheartedly that the womb and its cycles were potentially dangerous, morally, spiritually and physically.
No wonder then the silences that greet those in search of information about women’s periods. What ballad writer would wish to include a line that would upset his clientele so absolutely? He could write of almost every other bodily function and expect to raise a smile among at least some of his potential audience. He could rail against almost any transgression, from adultery to thievery, witchcraft to heresy, giving graphic descriptions of repulsive and shocking behaviour, but there were no words that he could use about menstruation and still expect to sell copies.
So how did women manage their periods? It’s a question that I am often asked, although usually only when older, more confident women can catch me in a more retired and private environment. And I can only guess. The silence is almost total. Two possibilities spring to mind: belts and pessaries. With no tradition of underwear wearing, any absorbent pad would have to be supported by a belt of some kind. Now this is certainly what happened within the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where we have both surviving examples and women’s accounts. Such pads could be folded cloth or a cloth bag stuffed with other disposable absorbent material. The cloth elements required laundry, much as baby’s nappies do, beginning with a soak in cold water, followed by a vigorous scrub. If modern – or at least recent – practice is anything to go by, this particular type of laundry happened outside of the normal household routine. Women’s accounts of twentieth-century practice, including those of my own family, tell of rinsing and scrubbing such articles separately and privately, each woman dealing with her own. The idea that these scraps of stained fabric might be seen, even by one’s immediate female family, was shameful. Indeed, my family discussions of 1940s and ’50s systems caused otherwise forthright women to blush and become decidedly agitated at the idea of adding feminine hygiene cloths to the general whites wash.
Pads and belts are rather cumbersome and uncomfortable contrivances, which may have led a proportion of women to turn to the pessary option. We today would use the word ‘tampon’ in this context. The use of medicinal pessaries at the time is well recorded; take, for example, this remedy for an insufficient flow included in Culpeper’s book: ‘If she be no Virgin, put Mercury bruised in a Bag for a Pessary, with Centaury flowers. Or Garlick beaten with Oyl of Spike’. The proviso ‘if she be no Virgin’ is an important one. It makes clear that this pessary was intended to be inserted into the vagina and it indicates the assumption that cloth would play a part. It also highlights the cultural importance of not inserting anything into the vaginas of virgins, in order to preserve that vital moment of wedding-night ‘deflowering’. Tampons, if they existed (and I can’t categorically prove that they did), were for experienced, married women, not young girls.
Two practical methods are, however, possible. One is to extend the medicinal pessary form, imagining a small linen cloth bag that was packed with absorbent materials of one sort or another, although this option leaves open the possibility of bags breaking, which would not be all that pleasant. The other option is the single strip of linen wound tightly into a cylinder. The shape receives some historical validation from its presence among the range of bandages, plasters and cloth bolsters and wound packers used by medical men. John Taylor’s mock heroic poem of 1630, ‘In Praise of Clean Linen’, helpfully talks of the fate of worn-out shirts, sheets and handkerchiefs:
Which though it be but thin and poore in shape,
A Surgeon into lint the same will scrape,
Or rolles, or bolsters, or with plaster spread,
To dress and cure, all hurts from heele to head.
He doesn’t, of course, mention menstruation as such, but the use of rolls of old, worn and thus especially absorbent linen to staunch blood flow is suggestive. This usage is much closer in form to the tampons of today and carries much less risk of difficulties than a bag. A small strip of linen would be easy to launder – more so than the pads or bags of other methods. In the spirit of historical experimentation I have tried all three of these options, and it is most definitely this linen-strip method that gets my vote. It was more secure, more comfortable and easier to manage cleanly than the others.
The Naked Truth
Mere nakedness was considered rather less repulsive than the display of menstrual cloths or public discussions of such practicalities. Nakedness was wicked and shameful, but also titillating and not beyond the pale of discussion. You could talk about nakedness, preach about nakedness, publish accounts and even pictures of naked people, so long as you did so with some semblance of reprimand – rather like the newspapers that go to great lengths to dig up scandals so that they can indulge their readers with exciting and juicy details of bad behaviour. Pretending to hold the moral high ground and condemning the transgressions of others, they have a licence to vicariously roll in the filth, to fantasize with impunity.
Most famously in this vein were the mid-seventeenth-century accounts of Anabaptists, Ranters, Diggers, Quakers and Adamites, religious and political extremists in an age of intellectual and philosophical experimentation. Religious and political opponents of these groups (virtually everybody) commonly accused them of practising nudity. It was a highly effective slur containing, as it did, just a germ of truth along with a hearty helping of fascinated and gleeful repulsion.
Preachers of various opinions had been harking on about ‘naked truth’ and condemning the vanities of fashion and the evils of disguising one’s true nature for decades. Remember, too, all the worry and anguish about falseness in greeting rituals, table manners and misleading dress. Deciding to abandon clothing as a gesture of spiritual commitment and purity, therefore, held a certain resonance. But, on the other hand, bare bodies were suspect, uncontrolled, lewd and sinful.
In 1641, when censorship of print had effectively broken down, the first of a series of pamphlets describing and denouncing religious deviation appeared, complete with graphic woodcuts of nudity during worship. ‘A New Sect of Religion Decryed Called Adamites’ pictured a naked man standing upon a stool while preaching. A naked woman with a luxuriant mane of untrammelled hair stood nearby with her discarded smock at her feet. The sight had clearly had an effect upon the preacher, who is shown sporting a large erection. Before him stands a second naked man armed with a long pole beating at his upright penis. A speech bubble issues from the pole man’s mouth containing the words, ‘Down proud flesh, Down’. Such an image was bound to attract attention upon the bookseller’s shelf or in the ballad seller’s pack. The body of the text accompanying the image described a supposed group of ardent Protestants who stood naked before God during their prayer meetings and refused to follow the usual forms of marriage, permitting men to have sex with any woman they felt desire for (women were not granted the same agency). It is hard, in truth, to find any hard evidence that this sect existed or operated in this manner outside of tabloid-style exposés, but the publishers and public were loath to let go of the idea.
The same year that ‘A New Sect’ was published, a second version of the Adamite creed went into print with another, particularly crudely carved woodcut featuring eight naked figures, an erect penis, some sticks and the words ‘Downe Lust’ within a speech bubble. Both woodcuts were to enjoy long, active careers, appearing upon various pamphlets for the next fifteen years or so. ‘Downe Lust’ accompanied, for example, a text called ‘Love one another’ in 1642, ‘A Sermon preached the first day in Leaden Hall St’ in 1643 and ‘The Ranters Religion’ in 1650. A further development of the theme amalgamated several scenes, including a woman upon her knees kissing the bared arse of a man and a small mixed-sex group of naked dancers celebrating the banned feast of Christmas.
Sometimes the people accused of such practices were Adamites, sometimes Ranters and sometimes the Quakers, such as in one entitled ‘The Quakers Dream’ of 1655. Anyone with odd or unusual religious beliefs seemed to be fair game. There was certainly no shortage of odd and unusual religious beliefs around, as sects divided, merged and divided again. Debates raged, even at the heart of government, about what form of Protestantism the country should follow. Popular confusion upon the issue is well expressed in one rather exasperatedly amused ballad:
The Synod have full four years sate,
To find out a Religion,
Yet to conclude, they know not what,
They want a new Edition.
Say all wise men, what shall we be?
Brownists, or else Presbyters?
Of the Antinomian Heresie?
Or Independent-Fighters?
Shall we be harmless Adamites?
And weare no cloaths upon us?
Historians are divided in their opinions of whether the Adamites ever existed as a real religious sect, and divided, too, over whether they believe that other, better-documented groups, such as the Ranters, actually used nudity in their worship, but there is a strong possibility that, fictitious or factual, the discussion of such antics in the popular press inspired acts of nakedness among slightly later Quakers. ‘Going naked as a sign’ is a phrase that turns up several times in the early writings of Quakerism, and the denunciation of that form of faith by one who had once been a Quaker himself includes a claim that ‘twas usual with him [Abiezer Crippe] to preach stark naked many blasphemies’. Should such hostile comments be taken at face value or with a generous pinch of salt? It is hard to know for certain but there was certainly an opportunity here for scandalizing the neighbours and shaking up their belief systems.
Working up a Sweat
Even a couple of inches of skin could offend against codes of modesty and cleanliness. And yes, I do mean cleanliness in a physical, bodily sense of the word and not just spiritual or moral cleanliness. Bodies were observed to be fundamentally dirty, exuding sweat, grease and bad smells alongside the more obvious waste products and bodily fluids. Cleanliness, according to the Tudor and Stuart mind, was located in the regular renewing of clean linen cloth encasing the body. It was the ‘shifting’ of dirty linen underwear for a fresh, clean layer of linen that drew away the bodily filth from the skin, rendering a person ‘clean, sweet and neat’.
In popular accounts of Tudor and Stuart life, much is made of the lack of water washing; we are often encouraged to sneer and laugh at courtiers who have elaborate and extortionately expensive clothing covering stinking, festering bodies. But that is not how they saw it at all. If you spend any time reading Tudor and Stuart writings of almost any sort, you will quickly notice the near obsession with cleanliness. Everything good is ‘sweet and clean’ and everything bad is ‘dirty’ or ‘filthy’. Remember how often the insult strings of words included accusations of dirt, lice and filth. Sermons, too, return time and again to purity, cleanliness and unspotted virtue in opposition to besmirched, soiled, stinking sin. The beautiful are generally described as sweet smelling and neat about their persons, while the ugly are often described as foul and disordered in their dress. It is frequently said that the Victorians believed that cleanliness was next to godliness, that they made housework and hygiene into a veritable idol, but if you read the literature of the two eras, the impression that you are left with is that it was the Tudors and early Stuarts who were the clean freaks. At least in theory.
Achieving clean bodies was another matter. No one wanted to risk soap and hot water. The soap would scour away the natural oils protecting the skin and the hot water would cause the pores of the skin to open. This was considered to be a very dangerous state of affairs, for open, oil-denuded skin made a person vulnerable, according to the medical understandings of the day, to disease. Sources of infection were thought to be carried invisibly through the air in swirling miasmas ready to insinuate themselves into bodies by any and every available means. Noses were clearly the most open orifices through which disease could enter. Luckily, miasmas, although invisible, were thought to betray their presence through smell. The avoidance of bad smells was, therefore, everyone’s first line of defence. Cleanliness had a vital role to play here, driving out bad smells from the home and the clothes and bodies of family and household members.
Mouths were the next most vulnerable points of entry, requiring food and drink to be as pure and as cleanly prepared as possible. It also encouraged people to keep their mouths closed, as good manners dictated. Slack-jawed, open-mouthed people were clearly idiots, and probably diseased idiots, too, as miasmas could so easily enter these badly guarded portals. But after mouths and noses it was through the open pores of the skin that people expected disease to enter the body. Experience had shown that the public bath houses of the past had spread some of the most unpleasant and frightening of diseases through their clientele (including syphilis, which was particularly prevalent in this place where so many prostitutes and their clients met) and fear of hot water only grew when the government shut the baths down as a public health measure.
Cleanliness was thus vital to health, but how was it to be achieved without opening the pores? Thankfully, there was linen. Clean linen. For men it came mostly in the form of shirts, the occasional pair of drawers and plenty of hose or stockings, a few nightcaps, collars and cuffs. Between them, these garments provided near total body coverage. For women, the smock did the main duty, reaching down to the mid-shin, where hose or stockings took over. Linen caps were worn both day and night, while an array of cuffs, kerchiefs, pinners, partlets, rails and veils filled in all the gaps apart from the face and hands.
Linen was quite unlike the other two main fibres, wool and silk, because linen absorbed water and grease where wool and silk repelled them. It also becomes more efficient at this job with time and wear. Worn, much-washed linen cloth takes in far more unwanted matter than newer fabrics. There is also the useful fact that the dirt and grease show up well upon white linen, so you and everyone else is aware of how clean or dirty it is. This visibility of filth provided a good spur to vigilance in the battle for hygiene and gave reassurance to others that you really were clean and therefore no danger to their health. The more often you changed your linen clothes, the more often you laundered them, the more waste matter was absorbed and removed.
In the past, I have often recounted (in books and on television) how I have personally experimented with this hygiene regime, living for extended periods without water washing, instead wearing and regularly changing a full set of linen undergarments. And to my surprise, I have found that a quite acceptable level of personal cleanliness can be maintained in this manner. One is not quite as sweet smelling as those following the daily showering regime that modern life promotes, but on the other hand one is not foul and stinking either. There is a light smell up close but the skin remains in good health – better, if I am honest, than with the showering regime.
The old belief in the cleaning power of linen is not at all stupid, but reflects a truth: that frequently laundered clothes are a path to cleanliness. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most people washed hands, faces and feet with water. A few were able to indulge in private, hot-water baths and steam baths (Henry VIII, for example, had extensive bathrooms built in his palaces), but most relied upon the laundress and the action of clean linen to care for the rest of the body. This was the reality of daily life. Nudity, therefore, could conjure up thoughts of dirt, of sweaty armpits and greasy necks untouched by the exfoliating and absorbing rub of linen, and of dirt left lying upon the surface of the skin rather than being carried away to the wash tub. Bare skin was dirty skin.
This aspect of nudity is well expressed by our friend Mr Dekker when he advises his guls to wander about their chambers in the morning before dressing, ‘either in thy thin shirt onely, or else … strip thyselfe stark naked’. Then, if the weather is cold, he instructs his young fools to ‘creep into the chimney corner … till by sitting in that hot house of the chimney, thou feelest the fat dew of thy body (like basting) run trickling down thy sides’. No one suggested that there was anything unpleasant or dirty about sitting near a fire fully clothed. But imagining sweat left to linger on a naked body was truly repulsive.
There were plenty of different ways to excite or repulse people with your sexual behaviour. Indeed, lewdness formed the core of many of the most vehement rants of the era. Many of the behaviours that we have already discussed were presented in this manner: the flirty suggestiveness of inappropriate clothing, the luxuriating and corrupting influence of skirts worn by men, the sexual invitation implied within the bell-like walk of fashion. Language on the streets was frequently highly sexual in nature and popular literature was packed with smutty innuendo, enough to prompt Thomas Brice in 1570 to publish a ballad entitled ‘Againste filthy writing’, asking ‘is Christ, or Cupide Lord?’ and deploring the ‘wanton sound and filthie sense’ that he found therein.
But sex itself was by no means all repulsive and bad. Enthusiastic, vigorous and pleasurable sex was excellent behaviour, so long as it was within marriage and undertaken for the procreation of children and the strengthening of the bond between husband and wife. Medical men and churchmen both agreed that marital sex was healthy and approved by God. It promoted harmony within the family and a contented state of mind that helped both partners live good lives. Mutual pleasure was an essential component of legitimate sexual relations, according to people in all walks of life; although the idea was perhaps strongest among the most educated and the most religiously committed.
The Catholic Church had always carried a certain ambiguity in its attitudes to sex and marriage, holding up a model of celibacy as the ideal for a spiritual life, while accepting and promoting the institution of marriage as one sanctioned by God for the conceiving and bringing up of children. From the very beginning, however, Protestantism turned its back on the celibate life. Many of the abuses and failings of the Catholic Church which had goaded religious reformers into action were felt to be centred within the enclosed and celibate communities of wealthy monasteries and convents. There would be no monks or nuns following the new reformed faith; Martin Luther himself famously married, raised a family and encouraged other priests to follow his lead.
For many people who thought of themselves as Protestants, the ideas of adult celibacy and popery were intricately linked, providing a subtle pressure upon those with strong Protestant beliefs to embrace marriage and sex. This religious endorsement of an active sex life was backed up by the medical men of the day. The human reproductive system, especially those aspects that pertained to the female body, was subject to a great deal of confusion and uncertainty within the medical community. Did women produce seed as men did? Was the womb simply a receptacle like an oven that cooked the seed planted by men? How long was gestation? Could conditions within the womb change the temperament or physical form of the growing child? Learned men held a range of opinions. If the woman did produce seed, they opined, then surely, just as in men, that seed would only be produced at the height of pleasure. Female sexual pleasure would, therefore, be just as necessary as male sexual pleasure when conceiving a child. Those who were most swayed by religious teachings that held companionship and procreation as paramount, were, therefore, once again being encouraged towards an active and enjoyable experience within the marriage bed. When we think of the more serious godly members of society, we should remember that they were just as keen, maybe more keen, on good sex than their more disordered neighbours.
The perceived problem, of course, was bad sex, and that was most commonly seen as stemming from female insatiability. Medical men sometimes described cool phlegm-humoured women as being desirous of the hot blood humour of men, hungry wombs sucking up the male seed, but they all repeated, as a self evident truth, that women had a much greater and less regulated sexual appetite than men. The Church, unsurprisingly, saw it as a consequence of Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden – once a temptress, always a temptress.
Popular culture seems to have been even more convinced of the magnitude of female desire and relished stories of voracious wives out on the prowl. Collections of short stories such as the anonymous Tales and Quick Answers, Very Merry, and Pleasant to Rede (1567) and The Deceyte of Women (1557), also anonymous, are dominated by storylines focused upon women in search of extramarital sex. Think back, too, to how much of the language of insult revolved around women and sex. Women taking lovers, working as whores, ‘waggletails’ and ‘salted bitches’ turning weak and inadequate husbands into cuckolds and wittols. Ballads abound with such subject matter. ‘The Seven Merry Wives of London’ (c. 1681) is a little unusual in featuring a robust all-female cast of women expressing their own desires by complaining about their husbands’ sexual inadequacies:
The Shoe-makers Wife fill’d a bowl to the brim
Crying out, Here’s a Bumper, sweet Sisters, to him
That is able to please a young wife to the heart,
But alas, to my sorrow, the truth I’ll impart;
I’m afraid I shall ne’er have a Daughter or Son;
Tho’ I labour a Woman’s work never is done.
She attributes her lack of satisfaction to his having ‘a short peging aul’, a handy tool of his trade as well as an obvious euphemism. The pewterer’s wife complains that her husband will ‘seldom cast into the mould’, while the surgeon’s wife demands sympathy since she has been married for over a year and ‘Yet he never had enter’d nor found the right Vein’. The pavier suffers both from only having ‘one stone’ besides being ‘the worst Rammer as ever was known’ and the fiddler is always ‘out of tune’. Only the blacksmith’s wife is contented since he ‘follow’d his labor with hammer and tongs’.
The insults, the ballads and the stories all express a widespread belief in the lustful nature of women. Maids, it was generally agreed, were shyer and more reserved, but wives could be sexually demanding and widows, having once known the pleasures of the marriage bed, were very eager to ‘have a young-man their aprons to brush’, according to The Wiving Age, another ballad, of around 1625.
The printed matter reflects the male viewpoint, both ballads and other forms of popular literature being, as far as we can tell, penned by men; but invective in the street was frequently feminine in origin and not confined to the ranks of the literate. Women, everyone agreed, liked sex, and being but weak and feeble creatures they were not always very good at controlling themselves.
When you look at much of the literature about female bad behaviour, there is within it a lingering disapproval being expressed towards husbands who had failed sexually, who had not satisfied or controlled the appetites of their wives. For example, one of the women expressing her disappointment in the ballad of the ‘Seven Merry Wives’ above threatens to find an alternative if the situation does not soon improve, while the very first verse relates the adventures of the washerwoman who does laundry for young trainee lawyers at the Inns of Court and boasts that they supply ‘pretty sport’ when her husband neglects his duty. The stories contained within The Deceyte of Women frequently include unflattering descriptions of useless doddery husbands and make sharp comments such as, ‘And if my lorde had biden at home peradventure the woman had never fallen to that’. Even more typical is the jigg Singing Simpkin (a short play that was sung and danced by comic actors, often after the main feature at the theatre). A young wife with an old and frequently absent husband entertains a succession of lovers and has to resort to hiding them in chests to prevent them finding out about each other. The action is pure bedroom farce, but of all the characters it is probably the young wife who is portrayed most sympathetically. The men are either stupid, cowardly or both. She is presented as a deceitful but capable woman surrounded by several sorts of idiot. Most of the blame within the jigg is placed upon the situation that she finds herself in – what else is a young woman to do when her husband cannot perform? It seems that a lack of ability, or enthusiasm, for sex among husbands was in itself seen as bad behaviour, a linked but separate failing to that of not exercising control over a wife’s behaviour.
It should come as no surprise that any form of sex that did not take place within the bounds of marriage counted as bad behaviour. Taking a lover, a mistress or paying for sex, whether your partner was male or female, human or animal, it was all very bad and there was no shortage of people willing to tell you so. Churchmen thundered from pulpits, neighbours shouted in the street, doctors wrote texts outlining the physical damage that could be expected, courts handed out punishments to those who were caught and made sure that those punishments were as public as possible in order to deter others.
One element of all this disapproval that we, as a modern audience, might note is the lack of precision in the condemnations and descriptions of transgression. We saw right at the start of this book how the language of insult lumped all forms of female sexual misdemeanour together in the epithet ‘whore’, whether a woman was being accused of selling her body or taking a lover; even suggestive behaviour or flirting could attract the word. The same was true of all forms of sexual ‘immorality’. People used a host of words that we now regard as referring to specific sexual practices in a seemingly wide-ranging manner. For example, bestiality is used to describe sex between humans and animals, anal sex between two male partners, anal sex between a man and a woman, and general ‘beastliness’ is used as a description for all bad sexual behaviour of any sort. The word ‘sodomy’ could be employed for a similar wide range of behaviours, and in the 1570 ballad ‘The Horrible and Woeful Destruction of Sodome and Gomorra’ its meaning even extended to describing incest.
What such fluid language reveals to us is a feeling that chastity and good behaviour is all about self-control. God had given mankind certain feelings and drives and marked out a proper and particular sphere for their expression. Holding firmly to that covenant, the institution of marriage was the human and Christian thing to do. Beasts partook of indiscriminate sex; people revealed their nature as creatures with souls by their restraint and discrimination. With a simple boundary set around marriage the chaste and the impure were divided into two distinct groups; you didn’t really need to define types of impure or immoral people, all could be lumped into the same category. Immoral behaviour was loose behaviour, and was enacted by people who had abandoned control and self-restraint. The poet and clergyman John Donne, for example, describes a debauched courtier as one ‘who loves whores ... boys and ... goats.’ (‘Satire 4’, 1597) and links two forms of sexual misbehaviour with dirt and bare skin in the first of his satires: ‘But, in rank itchy lust, desire and love / The nakedness and bareness to enjoy / Of thy plump muddy whore or prostitute boy.’ Once you stepped over the line from chaste to unchaste, all manner of immorality was likely to ensue. A man, according to this way of thinking, who took a female lover probably also took male and animal lovers, too.
We have already encountered numerous loose men and women, or at least many people who were accused of being such. They were prominent among the gangs of elite young men, openly flaunting their mistresses, as well as in the fictional versions of wayward wives and cuckolded husbands who populated plays and ballads. And if angry neighbours are to be believed, real-life naughty nookie lay around every corner in every town: masters taking advantage of maid servants, wives entertaining lovers while their husbands were out, abandoned sweethearts already with child, widows eyeing up all the young men. The church courts are packed with such stories and accusations. One such story was that told by Elizabeth Barwicke in 1627 to her neighbours in London (and she was sued for doing so). She said that upon noticing that Mary Wharton was in a room with Mr Pierson with the door locked she, Elizabeth, had been forced to ‘breake open the doore upon them, and there found Mr Pierson ... in a great sweate, and thinke you ... what they were doing’. While in Canterbury Mary Philpott allegedly caught William Atkin as he came ‘from the bed of John Knoth’s wife’ when, suspecting them of immorality she wrenched open the chamber window from the street.
A loose woman. It is interesting to see how, in addition to loose clothing, smoking is used in this image as a suggestion of bad behaviour. Step outside the bounds of good behaviour in one area, this engraving is saying, and you will be open to them all.
Wherever the church courts met they record numerous similar tales. Most were heartily denied (we are after all generally hearing about them when the accused adulterers sued for defamation of character) but there are also cases where the guilty confessed to their sexual misbehaviour as Michael Fludd did in 1598. His accuser was Margaret Browne who went to quite some lengths to put a stop to the frolicking next door. On 13 May, when Clement Underhill’s husband was away and Michael arrived and slipped upstairs, Margaret took herself off to a small spyhole in the wall and watched. At six o clock Clement shut up shop downstairs and joined Michael in the chamber where the two of them had ‘carnal copulation’ after which Margaret saw Fludd ‘wipe his yard on her smock’ and then wash his penis in ‘a pail or a tub of water’. Margaret called her husband over to look and he saw Fludd ‘with his hose hanging about his legs’. Margaret reported the whole matter to the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen who referred the matter to the Court of Bridewell. Clement was ‘punished’ (probably a whipping) and Michael was fined one pound.
Much of the pressure and rationale for reporting and punishing perceived immorality came from a belief in divine collective correction. The subject of Sodom and Gomorrah was a popular one for sermons both in the pulpit and in print, and the lesson that such preachers wished to be learnt from the tale of God’s wrathful punishment of an entire city (save for the one ‘just’ man) was that the sins of the individual could bring down God’s vengeance upon an entire people. The idea was particularly strong in the first half of the seventeenth century. We were our brother’s keepers. Plagues, floods and tempests were understood in a similar way, as collective punishments for failing to live as a proper Christian community. Heresy, it was believed, earned very similar community-wide retribution and bad sexual behaviour was frequently closely linked with bad theology.
Take another look at our naked Ranters Ranting, images of threateningly unorthodox thinkers. Their religious errors were endangering their souls, but also endangering the health and safety of the people around them. If their strange form of worship angered the Almighty his response might not just encompass those untrue Christians, but include their neighbours who had failed in their duty to teach, control and guide them along the right path. Displaying their naked bodies and inappropriate sexual excitement along with the accusations of free love, these pamphlets and images are outlining the two great causes of potential public catastrophe. Those erect penises, if permitted to continue unchecked, could cause the heavens to open and pour down fire and brimstone.
The secret, then, to repulsing people with your very presence was to let it all hang out. The more exposed your body was, the more open your orifices, the more you were seen to lust after those you were not wedded to the more worry and revulsion you could generate. Casually revealing intimate physicality was bad, but you could generate even more offence if you could force the sight, smell or sounds of your body upon people. An accidental, quietly managed fart at the dinner table was considered unpleasant, but people understood that holding it in might not always be possible. A wet-sounding fart repulsed more than a dryer noise, calling to mind bodily waste much more fulsomely and hinted at less control of the sphincter. Lifting a buttock, however, and sighing loudly or making some comment to draw attention not only forced everyone, including those out of range of the smell, to think about farts, but also implied that the action was intentional, that you had farted on purpose. A deliberate fart didn’t just produce physical distaste but made people feel disrespected.
Chewing with your mouth open, as we saw in the previous chapter, similarly gave an opportunity for two-fold offence, with the lack of care and consideration offering insult while the sight and sound of wet, saliva-coated food in an overly intimate open mouth prompted revulsion. Turn to face someone in particular while you slobbered and drooled and you made the action into something akin to an attack. To this day, most people will pull away when faced with such sights and sounds.
Nudity, too, could be alarming, or even hints of nudity. Think of that scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet when the prince presents himself to Ophelia ‘with his doublet all unbrac’d; / No hat upon his head; his stockings foul’d, / Ungarter’d, and down gyved to his ankle’, or in other words with bare shins, an unbuttoned doublet that shows his shirt and no hat. She thinks he looks ‘As if he had been loosed out of hell’. Her father, from this description, assumes that he has gone mad. Naked shins and a flash of shirt! Aaaghhh! It seems such an overreaction to our modern sensibilities until you recall all the beliefs about bodies that we have discussed: the importance of clothing after the fall from grace in the Garden of Eden; the need to set our human selves apart from soulless beasts through our behaviour; the dirtiness of nudity and the understanding of shirts as a filth-collecting layer. This was a play intended for performance upon a public stage, so a man’s bare shins were probably as far down the actual nudity road as the play could go without censorship, but it was still sufficient to add a frisson of shock to the scene. The exposed shirt alluded strongly to sweat and, because it was loose and visible, to a loss of control. Sexy, in a rather animalistic way, but do remember that animalistic behaviours were not given such a positive spin as they might be today; think perverse more than raunchy. The loose, untamed body could be a worrying thing indeed.
