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  The women were not spared attention. The eleventh of the ‘Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards’ alludes to ‘secret sins’ of the women of the Church, and that women ‘who are fickle and imperfect by nature’ are ‘the cause of bringing the most horrible sin possible to mankind’. There is no doubt about the nature of the sin. The spiritual guide for the nuns of England in the early thirteenth century, the Ancrene Riwle, mentions (although it says that it will not mention) ‘the scorpion of stynkande Leccherie’. Again the reference to same-sex passion is clear. The phenomenon was perfectly well known as ‘mulier cum muliere fornicans’ or ‘muliercum muliere fornicationem committens’, which perhaps does not need translation. It was rumoured that women mixed male sperm with their food to make them more manly, and that they frequently fashioned a ‘heavy contrivance in the shape of a male member’. It was believed that females were sexually insatiable, and so were inclined to leap into bed with each other. It was not a question of being gay or queer, or whatever word we choose to use, but simply an outpouring of the nature of womankind. It was Eve’s sin of lasciviousness or, perhaps, of curiosity.

  By the late thirteenth century, however, certain signs of disapproval became more manifest in England. As early as 1250 the Bishop of London, Fulk Bassett, called for the punishment of sodomites. The wrath of the clergy grew fiercer. A legal compilation known as Britton declares that the penalty for sodomy was death by fire. A treatise of 1290, Fleta, was named after the fact that its author lived in Fleet Street, London. It stated that a convicted sodomite should be buried alive. Every sort of explanation has been offered for this apparent sea change in judicial policy, from the hegemony of the Church to the threat of the Turks in the East and to the rise of centralised monarchies, but it seems likely that the law was meant to bark rather than bite. No cases of burning or premature burial are recorded in London. The deliciousness of revenge could be relished in texts, however; the Golden Legend of 1260 comments that, at the time of the birth of Christ, all sodomites suddenly expired.

  4

  The friend

  Piers Gaveston, the younger son of a Gascon knight, entered the service of Edward I in the army at Flanders in 1297 but the king, impressed by the grace and bearing of the young man, soon appointed him to the household of the Prince of Wales. He may have been considered a model of male conduct and deportment from which the prince would learn. Prince Edward seems to have learned other lessons from his new companion, however, and as a result the king sent Gaveston into temporary exile, though the young man was still granted an annuity ‘for as long as he shall remain in parts beyond the sea during the king’s pleasure and waiting recall’. It would appear that the king wished to keep him apart from his son, perhaps as a punishment to the prince himself.

  It has been asserted that the young men were ‘sworn brothers’ rather than lovers. An anonymous chronicler states that ‘when the king’s son gazed upon him, he immediately felt so much love for him that he entered into a covenant of brotherhood with him and firmly resolved to bind himself to him, before all mortals, in an unbreakable bond of love’. They became what were known as ‘wedded brethren’, a union which could in fact be solemnised before the altar. It is one explanation that would address the very florid ties of manhood that characterised the early fourteenth century. But it emphasises the fine, and perhaps non-existent, line between male camaraderie and same-sex love. The chroniclers recall that the relationship between them was ‘excessive’ and ‘immoderate’ which suggests that it went beyond the chivalric bond. This was also the charge later raised against Richard II and his ‘obscene intimacies’ with his favourite, Robert de Vere. These accusations were the occupational hazard of any young king and his companions.

  On the death of his father in 1307, Edward II recalled Gaveston and bestowed upon him the earldom of Cornwall as well as other lavish gifts. The two men were inseparable, to the growing alarm of the greater lords, and when Gaveston was appointed custos regni, or regent, in anticipation of the departure of the king for France, the dismay of his rivals grew. The Earl of Cornwall’s closeness to the king became even more notorious on the occasion of Edward’s marriage to Isabella of France; the earl took the lead in the ceremonies, and monopolised the king’s attention to such an extent that Isabella’s relatives walked out in disgust.

  It could only end in tears. In 1308 the great barons of the realm demanded that the favourite go once more into exile, with the implicit threat of civil war if the king declined to order his departure. He was forced to comply but, a month later, he appointed his favourite as king’s lieutenant in Ireland. Gaveston returned to England but was once more forced into exile in 1311. He still retained the love of the king, however, and came back at the beginning of 1312. But this was the last time. He was surrounded and arrested by the barons, his head cut off by the Earl of Warwick on 19 June 1312.

  This is one of the first instances in the English historical record when a queer relationship between king and courtier has been suggested, or surmised, or hinted at, by the chroniclers. The anonymous author of a life of Edward II, written soon after the events related, added that ‘I do not remember to have heard that one man so loved another … our king was incapable of moderate favour, and on account of Piers was said to forget himself. And so Piers was accounted a sorcerer.’ His audience would have known well enough that sorcery was associated with sodomy. A Cistercian chronicler recorded that Edward II ‘in vitio sodomitico nimium delectabat’, or, in other words, that he wallowed in sodomy. This did not of course prevent him from fathering five children, one of them illegitimate; our modern descriptions of what is gay or queer need to be thoroughly revised in order to understand the past.

  5

  No cunt

  Geoffrey Chaucer provided one of the first portraits, or caricatures, of a London queer. The Pardoner is among the last of the Canterbury pilgrims to be mentioned in Chaucer’s human panorama, but he is one of the most distinctive. He has blond hair which he wears long across his shoulders in wisps and locks; this was seen to be the sign of the sodomite. He wears no hood in concordance with the ‘the newe jet’, or the new fashion. His eyes are shining like those of a hare, another well-known sign of difference. His voice is as high as that of a nanny goat. He has no beard, nor would ever possess one. He is perpetually fair-shaven.

  The narrator of The Canterbury Tales eventually declares that ‘I believe he was a gelding or a mare’ – that, literally, he was either a eunuch or a woman. But ‘mare’ was also used as a term for effeminate men. The Pardoner was one who ‘sinned against kind’, a ‘nurrit’, a ‘will-jick’, in the phrases of the period. The fact that he bartered indulgences and sold false relics only amplified his nature as a ‘ful vicious man’ and perhaps a heretic as well. He may have also traded other favours. The narrator remarks that ‘the somonour bar to hym a stif burdoun’. This might conventionally mean that he furnished the bass harmony for a song but the ‘stif burdoun’ also has sexual connotations. The narrator notes of the Summoner that ‘ful prively a fynch eek koude he pulle’ which can imply illicit sexual intercourse with a minor. The Pardoner and the Summoner were, to put it no lower, a couple of reprobates. Out of twenty-three pilgrims only these two are suspected of same-sex love; whether that reflects its general prevalence cannot be known.

  At the end of the tale the Pardoner asks the Host to kiss his ‘relics’, to which comes a thunderous answer:

  ‘Let be,’ quoth he, ‘it shall not be, so the’ch.

  Thou wouldest make me kiss thine olde breech,

  And swear it were a relic of a saint,

  Though it were with thy fundament depaint.

  But, by the cross which that Saint Helen fand,

  I would I had thy coilons in mine hand,

  Instead of relics, or of sanctuary.

  Let cut them off, I will thee help them carry;

  They shall be shrined in a hogge’s turd.’

  The Pardoner answered not one word;

 
So wroth he was, no worde would he say.

  This torrent of words, including ‘fundament’ and ‘breech’, ‘coilons’ (testicles) and ‘turd’, testifies to the range of associations which even an allusion to being a homosexual can summon forth from the deep. Chaucer apologised for his lapse of taste but pleaded that the Bible itself contains references to sodomy but that the holy text is no more defiled by it ‘than the sun that shines on a dunghill’.

  In the treatises written in the lifetime of Geoffrey Chaucer, the effeminate man is characterised as fearful and timid, like a hare; he has little body hair, and is deceitful. This could well be the Pardoner who, it has also been suggested, might be a female transvestite and even perhaps a hermaphrodite. This emphasises the fruitful confusion of gender roles in the period. There may have been many individuals who would now be classified as ‘transgender’, even though such a role or classification was not then available. They suffered the hell of perpetual bewilderment on the earth.

  Other poems of the period, written in what has become known as ‘Middle English’, are witness to the extent of interest in the subject of same-sex intercourse. Passages of Cleanness written in the late fourteenth century are devoted to the acts ‘contrived against nature’ when ‘each male takes as his mate a man like himself’ and, in the same style as the words of the Host to the Pardoner, the subject elicits allusions to arse, the breech, breeches and intolerable smells. The references here are to anal sex. In Vision of Piers Plowman (1370–90) William Langland writes of the period when, after heterosexual intercourse, ‘males drowen hem to males’. In a morality play of 1470, Mankind, the character of ‘New Guise’ is portrayed as an effeminate homosexual. ‘Alas, master, alas,’ he calls out at an awkward moment, ‘My privity!’ To which Mischief replies, ‘Wait! I shall see it all too soon.’

  These were not merely literary allusions. Between the hours of eight and nine on a Sunday night, in early December 1394, some London officials picked up a prostitute, John Rykener, ‘calling him/herself Eleanor’. He was arrested in Soper Lane, south of Cheapside, a place of small shops, sheds and movable stalls for merchandise. Rykener was ‘detected in women’s clothing’ while ‘committing that detestable, unmentionable and ignominious vice’ with a client called John Britby. Britby, ‘thinking he was a woman’, had approached him in Cheap and asked if he might ‘as he would a woman … commit a libidinous act with her’ whereupon Rykener asked for money. The nature of the act is not specified; it might be anything from fellatio to anal intercourse. They had been using one of the stalls when they were taken up.

  In the course of his examination before the city officers Rykener revealed that he been taught his trade by Anna, ‘the whore of a former servant of Sir Thomas Blount’. He had then learned how to dress as a woman in the household of an embroiderer, Elizabeth Brouderer, and that in Brouderer’s house he had sexual intercourse with a priest ‘as with a woman’. The priest, Philip, came from Theydon Garnon in Essex and may not have been used to urban wiliness. Rykener took two of the priest’s gowns, no doubt as a form of payment, and, when asked to return them, he replied that he was ‘the wife of a certain man and that, if Philip wished to ask for them back, he would make his husband bring suit upon him’. Rykener was a thief and blackmailer as well as prostitute, and casts an intriguing light on medieval London.

  He then travelled up to Oxford, nominally as an embroiderer, where he and three scholars ‘practiced the abominable vice often’. He was then employed as a tapster in the Swan Inn at Burford, where he had sex with two Franciscans, one Carmelite and six ‘foreign men’. He confessed that on his return to London he had intercourse with three chaplains in the lanes behind St Katherine’s by the Tower. In fact he had enjoyed intimacy with innumerable priests and friars, and really could not remember all their names. He confessed, too, that ‘as a man’ he enjoyed sexual intercourse with countless women, among them many nuns.

  It is a queer story, with friars and nuns paying for different types of intercourse with the no doubt attractive and presumably effeminate youth. He was libidinous but was he homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual, or all of them at once? Once again the categories do not apply. Sexuality was a fluid, infinitely malleable and indefinite condition. It permeated the streets of London like the smell of pies and sweetmeats. The case ended inconclusively, and no further action seems to have been taken. Did the officials of the Guildhall simply not know how to proceed? Only the Church courts, in any case, could try offences of sodomy. But John Mirk’s Instructions to Parish Priests, written in the late fourteenth century, advises other priests never to mention the subject to their congregations; they were not to teach or preach about it, for fear of corrupting the faithful. It was perhaps considered to be so attractive a sin that the very mention of it might provoke interest.

  Rykener himself simply disappears. He may have made his way back to Foul Lane or Naked Boy Alley, to the kitchen gardens and latrines, the orchards and the cloisters. There was plenty of open space in the city. A raid by inspectors prompted the report that ‘behind The Pie in Queenhithe is a privy place which is a good shadowing for thieves and many evil bargains have been made there’. Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange soon became a place for queer assignations, and a male brothel was established opposite the Old Bailey. It was widely reported that barbers’ shops, tailors and milliners were very good for custom, and were so thought in subsequent centuries. The young men who were employed in the fashionable clothes’ shops of Ludgate Hill, in 1709, for example, were well known for effeminacy. The Times of 1857 called attention to ‘the mincing and bowing’ of drapers’ assistants. It represents a long tradition.

  Only one case of sodomy came before the Church courts of London in the fifteenth century. William Smyth announced publicly, no doubt from a street pulpit, that he had engaged in ‘a sodomitic crime with master Thomas Tunley’. This sounds like a malicious attempt to compromise Tunley, and no further action was taken. In the same set of records Agnes Andrew testified that the husband of Margaret Myler was in fact a woman who was accustomed to ‘grab’ priests between their legs. Whether this was a case of male or female transvestism, or sheer calumny, is not clear; once more the case was set aside. Two further cases, of priests exposing their ‘secreta sua’, or privy members, in public, complete the bare record.

  We must travel much further for more news. In the Arap mosque of Istanbul two knights, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, are buried side by side in a joint tomb. On their headstone are inscribed two helmets placed in such a position that they seem to be kissing, while their shields overlap. Both men were well acquainted with Chaucer and were no doubt part of the circle of ‘Lollard knights’ at the court of Richard II in London. They had travelled far to engage in a campaign by the Duke of Bourbon against Tunis. They would have been well rewarded, but for the fact that Clanvowe died during the campaign; the event, according to a monkish chronicle, provoked such ‘inconsolable sorrow’ in Neville ‘that he never took food again and two days afterwards breathed his last, greatly mourned in the same village’. In a treatise on arms the herald gave the two knights the same arrangement of arms as a married couple, which confirms the natural supposition that they were in fact themselves married in some fashion. There are many examples of male friends being united in lasting bonds with oaths and ritual acts. We are once more at a loss in deciding what was really going on. The phrases used are ‘sworn brothers’ or ‘wed brethren’ in ‘trouth-plight’, and the term ‘wedding’ was applied both to two males as well as male and female. In a scrap of verse, written in the reign of Henry VI, come lines that tell the same story:

  Freris hase thame umbythoght, and sworne ilkane to other,

  Salle never no counte betyne mane bycomen ther brother.

  The friars have sworn to one another that no cunt [woman] shall come between them.

  The monks and friars of London were, however, soon to be sorely surprised. The hostility of Henry VIII against their faith, and his desir
e to exploit their riches, led him to attack what was considered their essential weakness. In 1533, two years before his officials ‘visited’ the monasteries in search of sin and wealth, the Buggery Act was passed. Buggery, or anal intercourse, was now deemed to be an offence worthy of death ‘because there was not sufficient punishment for this abominable vice’. It became of pressing significance in this reign because of the official animus against the Roman Catholic establishment. In the reign of the monarch’s father, Henry VII, queerness had not been a problem at all; Castiglione commented on the number of ‘womanish men’ at court.

  Now all was changed. Catholicism was now ‘the other’, the shadowland, the source of treason, sin, crime and sickness. Those priests and friars who refused to assent to the Act of Supremacy in 1534, whereby Henry was proclaimed to be head of the Church in England, were rendered suspect. The Treasons Act, which shortly followed, declared such defiance as worthy of death by beheading or worse. Death was the fate of Thomas More and of John Fisher, and also of many other friars and monks. The Buggery Act, which gave Henry’s officials licence to roam through the monasteries, convents and friaries in search of gold and other treasures, had led the way.

  The Act proscribed same-sex activity within the circle of civil rather than ecclesiastical law. Buggery, a popular word that had replaced the biblical associations of sodomy, was unlawful as well as immoral; as so often with the king’s commandments, a measure designed for specific purposes had wide and unintended consequences. The desire of the king for the wealth of the Church had turned a sin into a crime. The Buggery Act was repealed and then restored in the Tudor period. According to the members of Elizabeth’s first parliament, as a result of the repeal under the Catholic Queen Mary Tudor, ‘diverse evil disposed persons have been the more bold to commit the said most horrible and detestable vice of buggery aforesaid, to the high displeasure of almighty God’. Buggery had first been grouped with sorcery and witchcraft but at a later stage sodomy and black magic were treated as separate crimes. Buggery was no longer a purely religious heresy but had implications for the whole of the body politic.