The Spirits of Crossbones Graveyard: Time, Ritual, and Sexual Commerce in London

By Sondra L. Hausner

Every month, a ragtag group of Londoners gather in the site known as Crossbones Graveyard to commemorate the souls of medieval prostitutes believed to be buried there—the "Winchester Geese," women who were under the protection of the Church but denied Christian burial. In the Borough of Southwark, not far from Shakespeare's Globe, is a pilgrimage site for self-identified misfits, nonconformists, and contemporary sex workers who leave memorials to the outcast dead. Ceremonies combining raucous humor and eclectic spirituality are led by a local playwright, John Constable, also known as John Crow. His interpretation of the history of the site has struck a chord with many who feel alienated in present-day London. Sondra L. Hausner offers a nuanced ethnography of Crossbones that tacks between past and present to look at the historical practices of sex work, the relation of the Church to these professions, and their representation in the present. She draws on anthropological approaches to ritual and time to understand the forms of spiritual healing conveyed by the Crossbones rites. She shows that ritual is a way of creating the present by mobilizing the stories of the past for contemporary purposes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9780253021472

Book preview

The Spirits of Crossbones Graveyard

London and the Borough of Southwark, 1720.

The Spirits of Crossbones Graveyard

TIME, RITUAL, AND SEXUAL COMMERCE IN LONDON

Sondra L. Hausner

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

BLOOMINGTON & INDIANAPOLIS

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

© 2016 by Sondra L. Hausner

Lyrics from Mind Games Written by John Lennon

© 1973 Lenono Music. Reprinted by permission.

© The British Library Board, Maps.Crace.II.81

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-253-02124-3 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-253-02136-6 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-253-02147-2 (ebook)

1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16

For Ion

Ion Alexis Will (December 10, 1941–December 26, 2010)

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION Set and Setting

ONE The Myth of the Winchester Goose

TWO Medieval Bankside

THREE Shamanism and the Ritual Oscillation of Time

FOUR The Virgin Queen and the English Nation

FIVE Southwark, Then and Now

CONCLUSION Making the Present

EPILOGUE Crossbones Garden

PERMISSIONS FOR TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project did not start as a book, but as the 2010 Barbara E. Ward Memorial Lecture, which I gave under the title of Ritual Redemption in London’s Economy of Love at the invitation of Oxford’s Institute for Gender Studies, and I remain grateful to Peggy Morgan and Maria Jaschok for thinking of me at the time. Rather than stopping there, it became a book at the encouragement of my institution, the Faculty of Theology—now the Faculty of Theology and Religion—at the University of Oxford, and particularly the rallying of my senior colleagues, including Sarah Foot, Paul Joyce (whose visit to the ritual with me was memorable), George Pattison, Guy Stroumsa, and Johannes Zachhuber, all of whom were willing and delighted to have an anthropologist visit the habits of English history.

But it is no mean task to undertake a historical investigation when one’s colleagues are the best historians in the trade. Mark Edwards has been a constant source of intellectual support and inexhaustible knowledge, and a dear friend throughout. Diarmaid MacCulloch encouraged me to work in the thick of Reformation history when he knew full well I was a novice; his scholarship is an inspiration. Sarah Apetrei offered kind and helpful commentary. The historians of St. Peter’s College, Oxford—most especially experts in the medieval histories of gender, Henrietta Leyser and Caroline Barron—gave me a green light and an encouraging push, and graciously introduced me to the larger world of medieval scholarship. Martha Carlin took considerable care to teach me something of Southwark in the Middle Ages. More than the usual scholarly caveat, any errors in this text are mine alone.

I have relied on long-standing academic mentorship as well as recent collegiality: I am lucky to have had mentorship and training on gender and sexuality early on in academic life, and the inspiration of anthropologist and theorist Carole Vance, as well as the friendship of Diane di Mauro, influence me still. The late professor A. Thomas Kirsch trained me as an anthropologist of religion, and I am honored to follow in his footsteps in this fulfilling profession. Since 2007, the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford has been a disciplinary intellectual home.

St. Peter’s College has been a support in many ways, specifically the women’s empowerment network that comprised Hanneke Grootenboer, Abigail Williams, Claire Williams, and myself. This book would not have seen the light of day—nor any of us the joy of being together at Oxford—without our sisterhood. The St. Peter’s College Library patiently extended my long list of borrowed books on women’s histories in England time and time again—and Janet Foot and David Johnson insisted that they wanted to see the finished product in a way that kept me going. My students at St. Peter’s and at other Colleges across the University cannot know how much they helped me think through the layered terrain of ritual thought and action.

Women friends in Oxford and in London have been the most sustaining part of the last five years, during which this book was conceived, researched, written, and rewritten: Jocelyn Alexander, Bridget Anderson, Rutvica Andrijasevic, Julie Archambault, Elizabeth Frood, Clare Harris, Hélène Neveu Kringelbach, Emily Paddon, and Isabel Shutes—all wonderful scholars in their own right but, more importantly, wonderful friends—made the complex worlds of gender theory and academic life rich and fruitful. In addition, many dear ones have supported me along the way, and accompanied me to the ritual on which this book is based: Ben Eaton (who also gave me remedial history lessons); the late Lindsay Friedman; my mother and sister, Nancy and Ellen Hausner; and the memory of my father, Bernard Hausner. On the other side of the Atlantic, I am lucky to have Greta Austin, church historian and close friend. Most importantly, John Constable-Crow supported the writing of this book and the investigations it elicited: it was a treat to have him hear an early reading and disagree with parts. John and his flock have welcomed me with open arms, for which I owe much thanks.

Early versions of chapter 4, under the name Gender, Resistance, and the Origins of English Transnationalism (1558–Present), were given in 2014 at the Radical Anthropology Group in London, the Religious History Seminar in Oxford, and the Wednesday Club at Christ Church. My thanks go to convenors and open-minded audiences both, who received the argument with some curiosity but also genuine interest in the combined contours of cultural history and social theory. The Humanities Division at Oxford supported the project throughout, including with a John Fell Fund grant in 2011 to enable writing at what turned out to be an early stage. The wondrous Bodleian Libraries never disappointed, and the Southwark Local History Library gave me a taste of what it was to be a practicing historian.

A project of temporal complexity goes through many phases of its own. The last stages of writing took place during a visiting appointment at the University of Tübingen in 2015, where the book as a whole was presented to the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology; my thanks go to Roland Hardenberg for that generous invitation. Final editing took place at the gracious home of Sophia Preza and Ira Schepetin in Woodstock, New York, with the support of many New York City friends and family members. At Indiana University Press, three anonymous readers kept me true both to the ethos of the project and to the discipline of anthropology, and Rebecca Tolen remained a steadfast support and superb editor. Darja Malcolm-Clarke was an exceptionally patient and kind project manager.

The book is dedicated to Ion Will, known to me since early life as Wicked Uncle Ion, who inspired me to end up at Oxford, much as he insisted that I attend the ritual in the first place. He was sure John and I would have a lot to say to each other. He did not live to see the book come to fruition, but he knew it was in process and that it would be for him. He was an inspiration to see the world with mischievous eyes, never to take anything for granted, and to commune with the spirits who had been around the block—and listen to what they might have to say.

The Spirits of Crossbones Graveyard

John Crow

Introduction

SET AND SETTING

So keep on playing those mind games together

Doing the ritual dance in the sun

Millions of mind guerrillas

Putting their soul power to the karmic wheel

Keep on playing those mind games together

Raising the spirit of peace and love

John Lennon, Mind Games (1973)

On November 23, 1996, a London playwright and performer by the name of John Constable had a shamanic vision. In it, a totemic Goose appeared to tell him her tale. She was the spirit of a particular Goose, one who hailed from the jurisdiction of Winchester. In fact, she identified as a Winchester Goose, argot for a medieval prostitute. She and her fellow Winchester Geese had been sex workers in what were called stews (or stewes) or brothels—or, in later colloquial accounts, nunneries¹—on London’s South Bank, in what is now the Borough of Southwark, a mere five hundred years ago.

It is impossible to establish exactly when these Southwark stews were first set up, but we know they operated at least from the late fourteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century. Prostitution in the area very likely preceded this date, however, and we know from court documents intending to bring offenders to trial that it continued long after. Sex work, lest we forget, is the world’s oldest profession, and places on the periphery—where Southwark once was—are likely to be the host locations for the perennial trade of love for money, whether or not that exchange is considered a sin.

Whether such a transaction is more sinful than most is the subject of much debate in many places and among many populations. The halls of academe and the churches of England are some of the places where people have pondered whether prostitution should be legal or illegal, supported or barred—and whether the women who sell sex should be pitied or protected, kept down or bolstered up. Religious institutions throughout history and across the world have had to negotiate the ineffable power of sexual attraction and desire—and the resultant place of sex work in society—no matter how much emphasis they also place on moral sexual standards, or on the importance of family, kinship, and marital relations within the home.

The Winchester Goose did not appear to John in order to argue that her trade was sacred, as prostitution might be cast in some religious contexts. She was simply asking for respect: since it had not been accorded her in her own lifetime or era, might she be recognized now, in the twenty-first century? A historical injustice, she claimed, had been done: she and her fellow Geese were not illegal sex workers or trafficked women, but prostitutes who worked under the jurisdiction of the church—under the aegis of none other than the Bishop of Winchester, to be precise, who, it is said by her shamanic advocate, issued her license. And yet, when she died, as she inevitably would, she was buried in unconsecrated ground, as an outcast, to become a pile of bones in an unmarked graveyard a stone’s throw from the parish church, or what is now Southwark Cathedral. She may have been licensed by the bishop, but she was denied her funereal rights, which is to say her funeral rites. She was buried in what John calls a paupers’ burial ground, along with orphans and other destitute members of her class—anyone without money, connections, or status—without, as John says, a Christian burial.

The medieval church clearly acknowledged the realities of prostitution, not only in the iconic figure of Mary Magdalene, but as an inevitable eruption of all the social, physical, and emotional dimensions of a dense, thriving urban location. Although much debated in early Christian doctrine and law, prostitution in pre-Reformation Europe was largely seen as a necessary outlet for human passions. The church licensed the women who would later come to be called Winchester Geese to practice, and also put a number of rules in place to ensure their integrity. (Some of these medieval ordinances might provide models for sex worker advocates today: brothel owners were not allowed to prevent prostitutes from moving freely, for example, so no one would have been caged in, or prevented from leaving brothel premises of her own volition.) But prostitutes’ graves were separated from the church’s proper cemeteries, their contemporary lobbyists tell us, and in death, their status as the lowest of the low and the poorest of the poor was confirmed.

Going South of the River Thames

The River Thames is famed as a glorious, winding artery through the south of England, forming the central visual course of contemporary London’s landscape. It was not always so: for centuries, the Thames was a place of refuse, its banks a smelly border lining the capital city. And yet city life thrived: a neighborhood known as Bankside, just south of the River Thames, is where Shakespeare first staged his plays at the Globe Theatre in the late sixteenth century. As glamorous as the Globe may sound to early-twenty-first-century tourists, open-air theaters were not particularly respectable institutions, faring little better in public reputation than the stews that had been located a few blocks away just fifty years before Shakespeare started producing plays in the area.

Southwark is—and always has been, arguably, at least since the Norman invasion if not earlier—notably diverse nationally, ethnically, and economically. A place of immigration and considerable poverty (at least in patches) through the sixteenth century, and even into the present (although efforts to clean it up intensified once the Reformation began in earnest), the dense area of the Borough near the River Thames was basically considered a slum for a millennium. Southwark was as urban as the City of London, but the river conveniently—geographically—separated its less reputable goings-on from the center of what would soon become the British Empire.

Beginning in the late fourteenth century, the Tudor monarchs tried to rid Southwark of its vagabonds and its rogues; in the late 1500s, Queen Elizabeth I insisted that the area be evacuated and closed when a cholera epidemic broke out. Close to a century later, in 1642, under the reign of Charles I, the Globe was shut again, in response to the English Civil War, the renewed war of the Reformation, when Puritan sentiment could no longer accept such bawdry public displays in the city (or a king who married a Catholic; Charles’s efforts to subdue the population backfired, and he was beheaded in 1649). In early modern England, theaters—like their predecessors, the brothels of Bankside—were bawdy, tawdry places where human emotion and raucous behavior might be put on display, or even unleashed—an unbecoming prospect in a cultural setting dominated by a powerful Protestant ethos.

Through the centuries, Southwark was a receptive society, easier to penetrate than London proper. Arguments for culture should not depend on geography, and yet all these activities arguably derived from Southwark’s position: close to but just outside of London, the Borough was a place where immigrants landed, waiting to get into the big city—and it was a convenient location to which the famous capital could outsource its more practical human needs. Goods and people both had to travel through Southwark to get to the city; it was (and remains) the location of prominent bridges that crossed into London proper. South of the river, Southwark was just far enough from the City of London, where, by contrast, the noble matters of government and commerce had to be buffered. Southwark—the Borough, pronounced the burra—thus became what anthropologists today might call a border crossing, or what sociologists might call a host society for migrant workers, including prostitutes in the medieval period. Many of these visitors to England—traders, merchants, entertainers, travelers—provided rowdy entertainment that the city’s inhabitants, eager to let off steam, could not legally find in their own local areas. Luckily, Southwark was just a boat ride away.

For close to a thousand years then (and possibly longer, if we consider that Saxons arrived and fought on these banks in the ninth and tenth centuries), Southwark was known as the seedy side of town, where questionable or seemingly low-life activities—taverns, stews, bear-baiting, street theater—were exiled across the river from the City of London. Bankside was the area with the poorest streets of London, as John Constable puts it, as chronicled by the Reformation historian John Stow and recounted by the nineteenth-century English writer Charles Dickens. It was an urban periphery, where most everyone in pre-Reformation and Elizabethan England struggled to make a buck.

This history appears to be undisputed. Even the contemporary London Borough of Southwark confirms that the red-light district and theatres became established in Southwark because the City of London was sufficiently powerful to exclude them from the area it administered and the weaker, or more tolerant, jurisdiction … allowed them to settle (Reilly and Marshall 2001:19). Unlike many public campaigns that insist that illicit histories were respectable in their way, Southwark apparently revels in its nefarious past: it may have been weak in comparison to London, but so too was it tolerant of these necessary pastimes.

Boasting a countercultural history does not protect a central location from developers, however. The Southwark Council may claim its red-light past proudly, but the Borough—and it is still called that, as an homage to its renegade history—is no longer what nineteenth-century demographers might have called a Malthusian tableau. Since the completion of the Shard, Europe’s tallest building, in 2012, Southwark has consolidated its reputation as one of the most up-and-coming parts of the great city. Just around the corner, Borough Market, which claims to be a thousand years old and London’s oldest produce market, was refurbished over the course of a decade; the multimillion-pound project is now a major international tourist attraction. In 2013, a two-bedroom apartment or flat cost more than half a million pounds: being just south of the Thames means that Southwark is now at the heart of contemporary central London.

Although it has gradually become part of the City of London (a process that spanned many centuries, concluding only in the mid-twentieth), Southwark has never minded its riotous history and is not about to start apologizing for it: who could begrudge an affinity with Shakespeare? Arguably the greatest writer in the English language plied his trade on these very streets, seedy though they may have been. All that human passion served great ends for art, and for humanity. Southwark’s underclass history is long, but it is productive, and contemporary activists do not want that truth forgotten.

The Ritual

Today, to commemorate the outcast dead, a somewhat ragged group of self-identified misfits meet at their graveside, at 7:00 PM on the dot, on the twenty-third of every month. Now named the Crossbones Graveyard, it really is an unmarked burial site: the yew trees found in church cemeteries throughout England are nowhere in sight. Normally, in fact, all that is visible is a metal gate covered with ribbons and lace—mementoes placed there during the monthly ritual that John began after his vision. The graveyard is also a contested building site: in 2002 it was meant to become a parking garage or carpark, but John successfully lobbied the Southwark Council to prevent its construction. For years, a cramped garden and a small Madonna-like statue were all that were visible behind the gate; a large wooden wall cordoned off the neighboring area, which had been bought by developers. Over the summer of 2014, work on the site behind the gate had to begin, but by that time John and his fellow advocates had raised enough of a ruckus in the neighborhood to make the corporation that owned the property, Transport for London, move the shrine-like fence two hundred yards down the street so that it could retain its local presence.

John’s vision has enabled the gradual restoration of not only this small shrined area itself, but, in his rendering, a long-overdue respect for the Winchester Geese as central to the cultural life of Bankside. Building support slowly but surely, John and his partner, Katy Nicholls, have held a ritual every month since 2004: Someone has always been there … maybe only two or three people, but we’ve kept it going. Every month, rain or shine, summer or winter, you know where they will be. By word of mouth, however, the location is not necessarily easy to find: to a newcomer, the area is a maze of alleyways near the now popular Borough Market. One landmark is a long-standing pub across the street, the Boot and Flogger, a family business that sells a red wine known simply as French No. 1 by the bottle. The site is on a side street evocatively named Redcross Way; a small alley, it is in the London A to Z, and luckily, it is well marked once you find it. And once you’ve been there the first time, it’s easy to spot: in keeping with the artistic character of the once radical neighborhood, dozens of multicolored lights mark the tunnel that turns into Redcross Way, as if to encircle the gates. You can see it from a distance, and they give the entrance to the alley a psychedelic effect, as if you are entering Oz.

The ritual itself is a simple affair. Incense is already lit when John chimes two Tibetan cymbals together to begin the ritual, bringing us into silence. It is not precisely timed, but the gathering rarely lasts longer than forty minutes or an hour. Spirits of the dead! Spirits of the living! John incants, inviting these souls and spirits into the space. He welcomes the group (of the living), however large or small it may be on a particular twenty-third. And then he begins to orate. He tells the tale of his vision. He sings a song or two from his play, The Southwark Mysteries. He invites others to tell a story that needs to be told; sometimes people take him up on it. On some occasions, others sing, or recite poetry. All are invited to speak about what moves them, or what is on their minds and relevant to this intimate (if open-air) space. We are given the opportunity to cite the names of those we’ve loved and lost. John reports on community efforts to protect the Memorial Gates and to create a Crossbones Garden, which would be a community memorial garden of renewal; he updates us with responses the council or the mayor’s office may have sent. He explains again why we are here: to acknowledge those aspects of ourselves that need redemption; to include those of us who are more akin to social outcasts; and to form a community when we might have none. It is an ecumenical event, based on presence, narrative, and a sense of social justice.

Tied to the Memorial Gates—just a municipal fence that has been transformed into a public shrine—are hundreds of mementoes of mourning and remembrance: lace, costume jewelry, notes, poems, baubles, ribbons, and pearls. Girly things! This is a women’s graveyard! reminds John. Each month, we are invited to tie a bauble or a ribbon onto these gates; in case we don’t have one of our own to offer, we are handed a red or a white ribbon to affix to the railings, as part of the ritual to create and re-create these gates of memory, and as a contemporary testament to the spirits that lie unmarked within. The group might light candles or stand in silence. In some senses, it is deferential: we do as we are told by our charismatic leader as if he is our guide. Half a millennium after the fact, John has created a graveyard for