Queer City

by Peter Ackroyd

  Another British penitential, compiled by Vinnian, also mentions fellatio. ‘Those who satisfy their desires with their lips, three years. If it has become a habit, seven years.’ He also denounces ‘in terga fornicantes’, having sex through the back, but leaves the punishment to the discretion of the priest-confessor. It is clear enough, however, that at no time did the canons of Christian law evince the slightest tolerance for same-sex love. It was always forbidden, even though it did not become a capital offence until the sixteenth century.

  The presence of same-sex love among women is noticed in the penitentials as well. ‘If a woman has intercourse with another woman, she is to fast three years.’ Another penitential discusses the use of a machina or instrument, which sounds very much like a dildo. Transvestism by either male or female is not considered a sexual offence but is regarded as an aspect of witchcraft or some other pagan practice. It is not uncommon for a male corpse to be buried alongside grave goods normally associated with females, a phenomenon that has prompted some archaeologists to contemplate the existence of a ‘third gender’ among the Anglo-Saxons. This would correspond with evidence from other parts of the world, from the berdaches of Dakota to the Bhoota dancers of South India. The questions of why and when this sexual diversity was restrained or eliminated, if in fact it ever was, are part of the story of the queer city.

  If men can be of ambiguous gender, so can women. There are many stories of religious women or holy women who dressed, worked and lived like men. They cut their hair, one of the prime tokens of femality. They might dress as monks in order to emphasise their double vocation. They have renounced their nature for service to God. Some of them were not discovered to be women until the time of their death.

  Another Anglo-Saxon penitential refers to a married man who enjoys having sex with male partners, and an aggressive male known as waepnedman (waepned with connotations of arms or armour) who has intercourse with similarly masculine men. We might say, therefore, that some of the characteristics of modern gay life are to be found in the first and second-century city. Terms such as baedling or mollis also indicate some kind of permanent sexual identity, part of a passive subculture that may have flourished in Anglo-Saxon London despite the strictures of the Church. The connotations and explanations, however, were different from those of the twenty-first century. The participants may or may not have been ‘queer’ but no one could tell. The matter is irrelevant. The word and concept were unknown.

  In some penitentials the punishments were relatively mild. Women were obliged to do penance of 160 days for same-sex love, and males incurred a year of fasting and prayer. But it was not condign punishment. A priest who went hunting, for example, was consigned to three years of penitence. It seems likely that same-sex activity was considered no more or less reprehensible than sex outside marriage. It was certainly favoured by the clergy. They may have taken their inspiration from the paired military saints, such as Juventin and Maximin, where fraternal love peeks over the borders of same-sex love. They may have been encouraged in England itself where, according to St Boniface in 744, the people were ‘lusting after the fashion of the people of Sodom’. One English cleric of the period, Alcuin, more associated with York rather than London, is very effusive in one letter to another man; he wants to lick his breast, and kiss his fingers and his toes. It has been suggested that this is part of an epistolary tradition but the language is so vivid that it is hard to know where custom ends and private passion begins. As C. S. Lewis remarked in The Allegory of Love (1936), ‘the deepest worldly emotion in this period is the love of man for man’.

  This was also the characteristic of the various invaders who conquered and occupied London over succeeding centuries, among them the Vikings and the Normans. Two Old Norse words, ‘ergi’ and ‘argr’, expressed dark or angry hints of homoeroticism and communal betrayal. Norse words existed for active as well as passive roles in same-sex intercourse although, curiously enough, the person who made the original accusation of sodomy was in danger of outlawry or even death. There was no penalty for the incident itself. The Vikings, having the sea in their blood, may have had that sexual insouciance which is supposedly characteristic of sailors. Their sagas abound in references to koerleikr, which can be construed as love between men.

  A medical compendium of the early eleventh century described ‘a disease which befalls a man who is accustomed to have other men lie on him. He has great sexual desire, and a great deal of sperm, which is not moved.’ It goes on to counsel ‘the men who try to cure these people’ that ‘their illness lies in their imagination. It is not natural. The only cure is to break their desire through sadness, hunger, sleeplessness, imprisonment and flogging.’ It is another example that sexual passivity was considered to be more troubling and disruptive than sexual activity. ‘Sadness’ can be interpreted as seriousness or gravity; the queers were guilty, among much else, of frivolity.

  By the twelfth century same-sex love came to be considered as the prevailing vice of Norman nobles, princes and kings. How could it not be so in a military caste that relied upon masculine loyalty and friendship? The Normans were in fact notorious for their sexual preference. Willing boys were no doubt to be found by the military fortifications of Montfichet Tower, Baynard’s Castle and the south-east section of the Wall that later became known as the Tower.

  William I, or ‘Conqueror’, was not of their number; but his son, William II or William Rufus, was inclined to the practices of Sodom. He never married and had no children, a startling circumstance for a king. Even those who disliked their wives usually did their duty and continued the line. Instead he surrounded himself with what the chroniclers call ‘effeminates’ with mincing step and loose or extravagant clothing. His friends loved soft clothes and soft bedding. They wore tight shirts and tunics. They wore shoes with pointed toes. They wore their long hair loose, with ringlets that tumbled down to the shoulders and were sometimes decorated with ribbons; crisping irons were in regular use, as they were in the later reign of John. The English historian William of Malmesbury commented that the youths were often naked and competed with each other for the softness of their skin; they ‘break their step with a licentious gesture’. It was said that at night the lamps of the court were extinguished so that sexual sins might be committed under the cover of darkness. Yet an alternative explanation is possible. The young men were called ‘effeminate’ because they loved women too much. That was one of the meanings of the word. It has been proposed that the allusions to homosexuality were really part of the propaganda against the Norman overseers. This proviso must always be kept in mind.

  Nevertheless it was widely considered to set an unfortunate example to the subjects of the king, and it was constantly assailed by the more vigorous or courageous Anglo-Norman clerics. Anselm, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093, preached against the male tradition of long hair at court and requested that William II should convene a conference on the evils of his reign, particuarly ‘the most shameful crime of sodomy’. The king ordered his archbishop never to mention the matter again. It made no difference in any case. Anselm’s biographer, Eadmer, mentions that long hair became so much the fashion that short-haired courtiers were known as ‘country bumpkins’ or even ‘priests’. A question was asked: ‘If you don’t do what courtiers do, what are you doing in court?’

  It was said that, after the Normans came, homosexuality spread in England like syrup through water. It was largely considered to be an urban phenomenon and certain London monasteries, such as those in Bermondsey, Aldgate, Clerkenwell, Shoreditch, Cornhill, Holborn and Cripplegate, were not immune. The abbot of Rievaulx, even in far-off Yorkshire, allowed his monks to hold hands as a mark of their affection. It was based on the model of Jonathan’s intense love for David ‘passing the love of women’. Would it have been worse in London itself, at the centre of insatiable sin? An eleventh-century manuscript shows a group of sodomites, huddled together, staring intently at each other. William Rufus established
a number of monasteries in London where young men and boys mingled. Sodomy may not have been their purpose, but sodomy was the effect. We come across the name of one Robert Badding which, from its association with baedling, implies that he was an effeminate man. There were many others.

  The jokes and innuendoes, concerning ‘foul catamites’, ‘loathsome Ganymedes’, ‘effeminates’ and ‘sodomite-things’ are in any case extant. The worst was always to be assumed. Monks and their entourage of pupils or novices were open to remark in the public streets. St Bernard of Clairvaux took a crippled boy to bed. It was supposed to elicit a miracle but did not. The chronicler, Walter Map, remarked that ‘he was then the most unlucky of monks, for I have heard before now of a monk throwing himself upon a boy, but always, when the man rose up, the boy rose up too’. It was universally agreed that monks did it. Indeed there was probably something wrong with them if they did not. When relationships between the same sex happen to fit a particular social unit or social institution, the results will be obvious.

  In 1120 a ship bearing the only son and heir of Henry I, William Adeline, perished on some rocks between France and England with only two survivors. The cause of the shipwreck was generally assigned to the number of court sodomites on board.

  3

  A military lay

  In 1102 a Church council met in solemn conclave in London, confirming the status of the capital as one of the great cities of the Holy Roman Empire. William Rufus had been dead two years and Archbishop Anselm now pressed the case against sodomy he had been pursuing for most of his career. It was the central concern of the conference, all the more pertinent in a city where the activity was prevalent. An edict was drawn up condemning ‘the shameful sin of sodomy’, but very little seems to have been done about it. Anselm himself confessed ‘this sin has hitherto been so public that hardly anyone is embarrassed by it, and many have therefore fallen into it because they were unaware of its seriousness’. It was reported by Roger of Chester, however, that ‘eight abbots, with a great crew of inferior priests and friars, were found guilty’. One feature of early medieval life is the passing of strong edicts and the threats of serious punishments as a way of avoiding any action at all. Fines were more convenient. Henry I, the new king, probably needed all the money he could mulct from the clergy for their abominable vices. There does seem to have been a supplementary desire to cut long hair from the heads of men and to cut beards from those ‘bearded like goats or Saracens’ but, of its nature, the persecution did not endure.

  It could not have withstood the opposition of the knights who gathered around a succeeding king. The funereal effigy of Richard I at Fontevraud Abbey shows him with flowing hair and a full beard. He, too, has over the centuries been accused of queer proclivities. He often berated himself for what he called, obliquely, ‘that sin’. While Duke of Aquitaine he engaged in a close friendship with Philip, King of France, to the extent that his father, Henry II, ‘was absolutely astonished at the passionate love between them and marvelled at it’. No bed separated them. Yet it may have been merely a political gesture. Why else would you sleep with a king? He was also supposed to be interested in Raife de Clermon, a young knight whom he rescued from captivity.

  The bonds between military men in a feudal state are always open to question, of course. The companionship of knights seems to know no bounds, and the mutual gaze between them can be interpreted as a form of touch. In the Anglo-Norman military lay ‘Sir Launfal’, the hero is told that ‘you have no desire for women. You have well trained young men and enjoy yourself with them.’ If you live, eat, sleep and hunt together what else might you do? The love between men was the basis of the feudal ties between warrriors. The chansons and lais were written to celebrate the love of comrades, or of an older for a younger man. Boys over the age of seven were considered to be susceptible to ‘the sin against kind’. Many of the sagas attend exclusively to the homosocial bond. Layamon’s Brut, the metrical chronicle of England begun in the late twelfth century, states that in court ‘men loved men’ – ‘wapmon luuede wapmon’ – and despised women.

  Bands of noble youths might endure for twenty years, spending every moment in the company of one another. When a group of companions left their household in Cester or Chester they returned, according to Ordericus Vitalis, ‘quasi di flammis Sodomiae’, as if from the flames of Sodom. Thomas Malory recalls the presence of transvestite knights in chivalric contests. It was an old tradition, evoking the tournament as a play world in which sex is ambiguous. This was also the period when ‘Hilary the Englishman’ composed his poems in honour of the beauty of boys, two of them to English boys of sweet flesh and golden hair, who duplicated the roles of cup-bearer or bedfellow. An English cleric, John of Salisbury, describes with some interest the gestures of a ‘wanton’ who begins to stroke and caress the hands and legs of a desired one. ‘Growing bolder he allows his hand to pass over the entire body with lecherous caress, incites the lascivious thrill he has aroused, and fans the flames of languishing desire.’

  London itself had evolved vigorously and rapidly, with all the attendant problems of overpopulation, poverty and disease; greater sexual freedom was an inevitable consequence. Men of sodomitical persuasion were said to be ‘as numerous as grains of barley, as many as the shells of the sea, or the sands of the shore’. Richard of Devizes, a late-twelfth-century chronicler, described how ‘all sorts of men crowd together there from every country under the heavens … every quarter of it abounds in great obscenities’ and among them were glabriones (smooth-skinned, pretty boys), pusiones (hustlers), molles (effeminates) and mascularii (man lovers). It could be a picture of London over the centuries.

  We cannot at this late date take off the roofs of the houses, in the literary conceit of the period, but we can see the life of the city from a distance. Male servants generally slept together. Male guests in a hostel or inn were expected to sleep together, generally naked. The head of the household would have every opportunity to indulge his tastes. An unmarried master and his apprentice might share a rudimentary bed. The beds were everywhere in the house, and the concept of privacy did not exist. It was a public and intensely social world.

  Schoolmasters paid as much attention to the buttocks as the brains of their little pupils. Everyone knew, or was told, that the aristocrats and the senior clergy were engaged with their own sex all the time. Undergraduates at the two universities slept together, if only to keep warm. Public baths on the model of the Turkish hammam were established with all the refinements which the Eastern world knew. This was one of the more sybaritic legacies of the Crusades.

  The recesses of London Bridge, erected in 1209, were used for other purposes as well as public latrines. A case of 1306 reveals that a plaintiff asked his servant to follow the defendant, ‘the which he did through diverse streets until they came to London Bridge where he [the defendant] told the servant to wait for him while he went to the privy there … and then left the privy by another entrance’. So there was room for assignations and sudden departures. By the Thames at Queenhithe a ‘necessary house’ was greatly enlarged in 1237, and no doubt attracted the usual clients or customers.

  Some charges of 1339 outline the contours of queer London in the packed and dirty streets of Holborn, the Fleet, Chancery Lane and Shoe Lane. Gilbert le Strengmaker, of the Hospital Rents in Fleet Street, was accused of harbouring ‘men of ill fame’ in what seems to have been a brothel. Agnes and Juliana, two sisters from Holborn, were accused of the same crime. Suspect houses were mentioned in Chancery Lane, Fetter Lane, Shoe Lane and Hosier Lane. It may be that the men of ill fame were commonplace thieves or robbbers, but the context suggests another explanation.

  The strange denunciations and counter-accusations of the Lombards, the Knights Templar, and others, heightened the atmosphere. When Peter Pateshull preached against the Augustinians in the pulpit of St Christopher’s, London, in 1387, his Lollard followers attacked the friars with the cry ‘Incendamus sodomitas’. Let us burn these
sodomites! The Lollards nailed up the ‘Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards’ to the great doors of Westminster Hall during the parliamentary session of 1395 with the stark message that ‘the English people bewail the crime of Sodom’. The third ‘conclusion’ states that sodomy can be the result of overeating delicate foods; sodomites vomit and they have to be purged, which might be seen as an image of sexual horror. It adds that ‘the secret test of such men is, that they like no women; and when you prove such a man mark him well, for he is one of those’. Sodomy was also a ‘priue synne’, a private sin; secrecy was of its essence, just as a heretic might skulk in the shadows. An anonymous verse claims that ‘the race of the Lollards is the vile race of Sodom’. The charge was ubiquitous precisely because it was elusive and indefinite.

  Many marginal groups were considered, at one stage, to be heretical and therefore capable of sodomy. Some say that one of the directives of the Knights Templar was to go out and sin with one another by way of buggery; others say that they were obliged to copulate as part of their order. This is speculation. It is a matter of record, however, that one Londoner, Robertus le Dorturer, a notary of the city, accused a member of the order of trying to sodomise him. Another London witness, Johannes de Presbur, accused a Templar of trying to have sex with one of his male relatives. These two instances do not make a high summer of sodomy. It is certainly true that the reigning monarch, Edward II, did not fully believe the reports of their activities and avoided bringing the Knights to trial until the last minute. He may have had some sympathy for their plight if not necessarily their tastes. They were burned in Paris, in large quantities, but not in London. The courts at Westminster sent them into exile at Ponthieu, one of Edward’s French territories.