Whores provided a necessary service, so the medieval attitude goes. Statistically, medieval men married at around age 24, but those crazy hormones and immoral thoughts kicked in at about age 14. Most men had to fight off their wicked urges for nearly a decade before they got some church-approved post-marital action. That’s a long time of keeping something in their pants that really wanted to be elsewhere… like in a vagina.
Willpower being as fickle then as it is now, many men gave in to their penises and sought the special pleasures of a lady long before they uttered the words “I do”. If not for the available vagina of the prostitute, an impatient chap may defile an innocent maiden. Or two. Or three. He may become so consumed by his lust and carnal desire, medieval townsmen worried, that he would run willy-nilly through the village with his willy all a-nilly, plucking every cherry he sees. Whew!
Thank goodness for those prostitutes. By willingly sacrificing their vaginas to the whims of every penis with a shilling, harlots and hookers were, in fact, saving the good and pure women of the town so that each may remain chaste until her wedding night, when she trades her virginity for the sanctity of marriage… when she sells her vagina to her husband in exchange for food, shelter and protections. Saved from one form of prostitution and forced into another. Hmmm. In fact, this is the premise of The Shipman’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, from which the quote at the beginning of this chapter can be found.
Much like Las Vegas today, prostitution in the Middle Ages was legal, as long as it could be regulated by the church and the crown. Regulated = taxed. City and village leaders in Medieval England sanctioned (and, we are sure, frequented) brothels that were strategically build just a hop, skip and a va-jay-jay away from the heart of the town, so visitors to the ye olde faire village wouldn’t see this den of fornication and sin, but not so far away that lustful, out-of-town johns couldn’t find it.
The government leaders didn’t just dictate where the whorehouse could be; they also specified who could work there. Licensing, laws and regulations that survive from the Middle Ages shows us that lawfully permitted hookers were either single women of disgraced and impoverished backgrounds, or despondent, desolate and desperate widows. In many locations, prostitutes were required to hail from a different town so that a prior acquaintance with a john wouldn’t inhibit them from providing excellent customer service. Town regulations also declared that whores be attractive. If the idea of legalized, sanctioned prostitution was to give gentlemen a controlled outlet for their yearning and to safe guard the fine daughters and wives of the community, then the harlots should be an attractive option. And besides, who wants to bang an ugly whore?
There was another reason why pretty prostitutes were preferred. According to the church, the more beautiful a woman was, the less sinful it was to screw her. Seriously, this was church doctrine! It was the woman’s fault, of course, that a man got all hot and bothered when he saw her. Popping a boner was beyond his control and the degree of male responsibility was in direct proportion to female prettiness. The resulting sinful act could be forgiven because, after all, the man wouldn’t have been acting in a wicked manner had he not been tempted by the comely maiden. So if a medieval man has sex with an attractive hooker, he wasn’t really sinning. (Gotta love the rationale of the medieval clergy.) Sounds to us like an excuse to cover their own visits to the best little whorehouses in medieval England.
Hookers helped divert men away from sin in another way, too. Pent up sexual energy could cause a frustrated young man to resort to even more lurid and sinful actions to relieve his tension — like sodomy or masturbation. Any homosexual goings-on, such as sodomy, were a medieval no-no because it was a sin against nature. Sex was for one purpose only and that is baby-making. Doing the nasty in such a way that pregnancy was impossible was flat-out wrong. Obviously, man-on-man action isn’t going to create a baby so medieval moralists deemed it to be an unnaturally evil deed. Likewise, masturbation.
Medieval theologians believed masturbation was a scourge on society that could, if left unchecked, deplete the entire population. Sounds like a bunch of extremists but they took this matter seriously. Mere parish priests lacked the power to absolve a masturbatory sinner; it took the special skills of a bishop. The only time jacking off was seen as tolerable was nighttime emissions. Wet dreams were considered a result of the body needing to rid itself of excess semen in a natural attempt to maintain balance and equilibrium. That couldn’t be helped. But any other form of handiwork was enormously wrong. Cue the whores. Sure was good of those prostitutes to offer such a necessary service: otherwise sex-crazed medieval lads would have to go sinfully solo.
As for the whores themselves, the crown and the clergy, in general, accepted them and the work they did. Perhaps they were reminded of the precedent set by the forgiveness of Mary Magdalene in Bible. Or perhaps it is because, according to some scholarly research, the clergy members accounted for about twenty percent of all whorehouse visitors. And they weren’t there for Bible study! As frequent flyers, it is no wonder the men of the cloth found creative ways to make themselves feel good about their own immoral bush-whacking. But we digress. Hookers regularly gave offerings in the collection plate at church and confessed their sins to the local priest; some prostitutes were even buried in church cemeteries.
It was believed that a whore was a whore because of her desperate situation; therefore she could be forgiven from her sins and delivered to salvation. A prostitute who entered the profession because she enjoyed sex with a multitude of strangers, well, that was another situation entirely. Heaven had no place for nymphomaniacs. Fortunately, nymphos were a rare breed. Most hookers sought and received some sort of repentance. Some could even hope to find a husband. Pope Innocent III encouraged medieval men to take a former hooker as a wife in an ultimate act of Christian charity. Indeed, that would be one way for a poor man to earn brownie points into heaven.
Brothel owners could, and often did, acquired fresh blood through dubious means. Fine, upstanding young ladies were sometimes targeted to become hookers, despite their respectable upbringing and highly regarded family names. Procurement gangs, fully understanding the value of a good reputation, would select a pretty young lady from a decent, upwardly mobile village family and viciously and publically rape her. The ensuing humiliation and tainting of her good name would totally destroy her marriageability. It was not uncommon for her embarrassed family to cast her out, choosing to sever familial ties rather than further tarnish the family’s social standing. The poor victim had nowhere to go and no means of supporting herself. In swept the procurement gang, offering the broke and desperate girl the only option available to a girl in her situation, work as a “common woman,” or prostitute.
Still, other medieval women worked as freelance hookers. In most cases, those women were not your ordinary whore-next-door. Instead, they were married ladies who worked alongside their husbands as shopkeepers, craftsmen and merchants. When business was slow, these resourceful businesswomen turned a few tricks in the backroom to supplement the family income. And with a steady stream of customers to her legitimate business, an enterprising medieval whore was sure to find a john when she needed one. Government officials frowned on this type of prostitution because it couldn’t be regulated and taxed. Indeed, merchants were careful to keep this income off the books.