History's dark chapters: Winchester Geese and Gropecunt Lane

Oxford, September 2018: The sign across the street reads “Magpie Lane, formerly Grove Street", but doesn't say what it was called originally. So let me bore you, once again, with a story...

If you are of a religious cast of mind, you will be shocked to hear that for centuries the Christian Church made a good living from the prosperous business of prostitution. The Church had also been one of the world’s most vicious slave traders, but let’s concentrate on sex for now and let’s travel 60 miles south-east, to the capital, where it all started. The prostitutes of Southwark, in central London, were known as the "Bishop of Winchester’s Geese". This was nothing more than a eulogy to the Bishop of Winchester who was collecting rents from the numerous brothels he owned. His Eminence was a shrewd businessman but also an ungrateful one, because when a prostitute died in the diocese he made sure that the Church wouldn’t allow her to be buried in consecrated ground. This grim part of history can be still glimpsed nowadays: not far from Red Cross Way in Southwark there is a remnant of Cross Bones Graveyard where the dead prostitutes were buried. The Bishop was legitimate, because a royal decree issued in AD1171 granted him the license of the brothels known as "stews". Brothels and drinking houses in Southwark survived until the death of King Charles I and the subsequent arrival Oliver Cromwell's Puritan government. Upon prostitutes' departure, the poor arrived. By the middle of 19th century this had turned to a filthy and dangerous part of London. An excavation in 1900 discovered around 150 skeletons, mostly women, some of whom with the clear marks of syphilis. But there is more…

In the Middle Ages, people took a far more liberal view of life than the modern age and sex was far more acceptable in public context. A testament to this is some of the extraordinary London street old names, so extraordinary by our standards that they simply would not be allowed today. “Addle Street” appears on many earlier maps; to a medieval Londoner that literally meant "filthy spot", because one of the definitions for "addle" is "rotten". After the Reformation and with party-pooper Protestants dominating public life, those names were slowly dropped. “Shiteburn Lane”, near Cannon Street in the City of London, was named thus because of the number of cesspits (huge tanks for urine and faeces) found there. It later had to change to a more genteel sounding “Sherborne Lane”, which remains to this day. The most extraordinary name of all though was a small lane that ran close to Cheapside, also in the City of London, called "Gropecunt Lane", a compound that leaves little to guess regarding its etymology. It was called thus because it was a haunt of prostitutes, in which unceremonious acts of groping were the norm. In Medieval England there was plenty of lascivious entertainment, hence a few Gropecunt Lanes. The illustrated, in Oxford, is now called Magpie Lane.

The most profound, perhaps, purpose of history is to provide answers to "when", "how" and "why". Such answers are found not only in tales of chivalry and valour. They are also found in suppressed accounts, forgotten or hidden away in dusty archives. These insane-sounding accounts detail events that have shaped our society and left imprints that are visible to this day. So, would you ever seek goodness in the moral preachings of the Church? Goodness me… it sounds as promising as looking for a chastity belt in Gropecunt Lane.
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