Declaring modesty (after all, she was still a virgin… wink wink), Lady Frances asked to wear a veil during her examination, giving fodder to the conspiracy theories that were to come. Rumors circulated through court that a more virtuous maiden, reportedly the daughter of Sir Thomas Monson, was the substitute vagina for the testing, which was administered by ten courtly matrons and two midwives, under the discreet supervision of representatives of the court. Lo and behold… Lady Frances (or should we say “Lady Frances” with exaggerated air-quotes) was declared an intact virgin to the cheers of the awaiting crowds.
Now all the courtly busy-bodies started pointing their fingers at the Earl of Essex, whispering about his erectile dysfunction. To put the rumor to rest and to disprove Lady Frances’s second claim, the Earl strolled up to a group of his male buddies gathered in the courtyard one morning. The Earl lifted his night-shirt, displaying his little soldier, standing at attention for all to see, thus proving that his plumbing worked well enough to deflower Lady Frances, had he wanted to. He declared he avoided his wife because of her snarly disposition, stating “she reviled him, and miscalled him, terming him a cow, and coward, and beast.”
More accusations were flung, including hints of witchcraft and Satanism and even a murder plot, but the annulment of the marriage of Lady Frances and the Earl of Essex was granted on September 25, 1613. The annulment was based primarily on the results of her fraudulent virginity test, leaving Frances free to marry her lover, the Earl of Somerset on December 26, 1613.
A pelvic exam wasn’t the only means of testing a maiden’s virgin status. Often the best proof of virginity was the loss of it. The blood-stained sheets from the honeymoon romp were proof positive that the new bride was pure.
This concept is centuries old and can even be found in the Bible, in Deuteronomy 22:17, “And, lo, he hath given occasions of speech against her, saying, I found not thy daughter a maid; and yet these are the tokens of my daughter’s virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city.”
One common legend was that Katherine of Aragon held onto her wedding night sheets for three decades and was able to present them during the annulment case brought against her by Henry VIII. Yes, the bloody bedding could be on public display for all to see. And this wasn’t humiliating at all. Blushing brides were proud to be able to verify their purity with what Robert Burton coined the “first night’s bloody napkin” in his 1621 book, Anatomy of Melancholy. Yet even bloody napkins could be faked, and often they were.
Blood was easy to acquire in the Middle Ages. The agrarian lifestyle with freshly butchered dinners ensured that an experienced bride could find a bit of blood, most likely chicken blood, to simulate her loss of virginity. Vials of animal blood could be hidden in a medieval negligee or piece of jewelry and dribbled onto the sheets when the groom was distracted. Or if the groom was really distracted, a cunning, tarnished bride could even slip a whole different person in his bed without his knowledge. It was unusually dark (no electricity) in a castle bedchamber, and we assume the groom was so eager to boink his new bride that he was like a horse (probably, a stallion) with blinders on… blocking out the face for the more tantalizing parts, making it easy for a surrogate virgin to step up to the plate.
Inconceivable, you say! Who would sacrifice her own virginity so that another woman could save face with her new husband? We aren’t certain this ever happened in real life, but it was the plot of The Changeling, the acclaimed 1622 play by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley.
For a medieval play, The Changeling was dripping with sexual innuendos and adult themes and situations (definitely R-rated stuff). For our purposes, we are going to skip ahead to Act IV, Scene 1 in which the main character, Beatrice, has already slept with her lover, De Flores, but she just married Alsemero, so she was stressing that her groom will discover her past infidelity when there is no blood on the wedding night sheets.
Snooping in Alsemero’s closet, Beatrice finds a cache of medicine, including a pregnancy test and a virginity test. In walks her loyal maid, Diaphanta, and both girls take both tests. Neither is pregnant. Diaphanta is a virgin, but Beatrice is not. Beatrice offers her maid 1000 ducats to take her place in Alsermero’s wedding night bed. Diaphanta, who needs the cash, agrees and the switch is made. We won’t detail the outcome of this but (spoiler alert) it doesn’t end well for either Beatrice or Diaphanta.
So here we have references to virginity testing, “first night’s bloody napkin”, and a sneaky-sneak way of getting around it. We are not sure what this virginity test kit in The Changeling included but it appears to have been accurate. Other means of testing virginity status were not grounded in medical or scientific fact but in magic and folklore, which meant the results were unreliable and open to interpretation.
Virgins, according to legends and myths, could do all kinds of hocus-pocus that was chalked up to their virgo intacta. A virgin could hold running water in her hands, calm angry bees, fit into clothing unpure women couldn’t wear, tame wild beasts, and hold her pee. Really! We know that childbirth can ruin a lady’s bladder but medieval folks thought regular ol’ sex did, too. And this idea found its way into medical books from the Middle Ages.
Basically, the dame in question was given copious amounts of a diuretic cocktail to drink. If she pissed afterwards, she was not a virgin. Historians and scholars believe that most of the recipes for this kind of virginity test all derive from Pliny the Elder’s potion in his History of the World, written some four hundred-plus years before the start of the Middle Ages. The key ingredient seems to be black lignite, or powdered jet.
Pliny the Elder wrote, “if a woman drink it fasting presently it provoketh urine, if she be not a pure virgin.” St. Albertus Magnus, also known by the modest moniker Albert the Great, wrote in his 13th century Book of Secrets that mere contact with the lignite stone could solve a virginity question. “If the stone be broken and washed, or given to a woman to be washed, if she be not a virgin, she will piss soon, if she be a virgin, she will not piss,” he wrote.
Examining the urine could also establish virginity status. A virgin’s pee sample was said to be clear and sparkling whereas an experienced “maiden” passed cloudy pee. We chuckle to imagine what conclusion would be drawn from a woman who recently ate asparagus! Virginity testing played a pivotal role in medieval dramas and literature but there is something rather unromantic about pee, therefore some authors opted to romanticize the process. In James Shirley’s Hyde Park, written in 1632, the play’s hero declares, “I’ll know’t by a kiss, better than any doctor by her urine.”
This connection between peeing and virginity is closely connected to one of the other folkloric legends… virgins holding running water in their hands. Virgins were tested by drinking from a horn or cup. If she was a sullied maiden, she would spill or dribble the drink. If a virgin crossed a stream, the water would remain clear, yet if an impure dame traversed the stream, the water would become cloudy and muddy.
One common way to test a maiden’s virginity status was to hand her a sieve and see if, in her pure and virginal hands, it would hold water. A leaky sieve, like a leaky bladder, was bad news. The metaphor of the water-tight sieve was so prevalent in the Middle Ages that this symbol can be seen in art and literature of the time. Cesare Ripa’s 1611 woodcut illustration depicts the personification of Chastity, fighting off Cupid with one hand while holding a sieve in the other. The famous 1579 painting of Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, shows her holding a sieve.