Just off Redcross Way in Southwark an estimated 15,000 people are buried in a mass paupers’ graveyard known as Crossbones. For many years the site was largely forgotten until an archeological dig in the 1990s uncovered it.
There is a long-established tradition that this was the “single women’s churchyard”, as described by historian John Stow in the late 16th century, where sex workers who “were forbidden the rites of the church so long as they continued that sinful life, and were excluded from Christian burial if they were not reconciled before their death” were laid to rest.
While it remains unclear if this was the site Stow was referring to, the peaceful garden at Crossbones remains a fitting place to remember the dead. Many of those buried here were women that worked in the brothels in Bankside which were licensed by the Bishops of Winchester.
Bishop’s stews
During medieval times, on the other side of the river, there were a number of attempts to rid prostitution from the City of London. It is claimed that in 1162 Henry II issued royal ordinances recognising Southwark as the designated district for the illicit trade to operate. And in 1393 a proclamation was issued which permitted brothels to just two areas of London: Cokkes Lane in Smithfield and the Bishop of Winchester’s Clink liberty in Southwark.
The Bankside brothels became known as ‘stews’, a name perhaps derived from the stoves which were used to heat bathhouses where prostitution was known to have taken place. Another explanation was that they were named after the nearby stewponds on the Bishop of Winchester’s estate. And such was the trade’s strong association with the clergy that the sex workers became known as ‘Winchester Geese’ – although it’s unclear where the reference to the birds came from.
An early example of a prostitute working in Bankside was a woman called ‘Cristina la Frowe’ who was believed to have been from Flanders. The Bishop of Winchester’s Pipe Rolls (1299 to 1300-1) recorded that she was fined. In 1381 there were said to be seven ‘stew-mongers’ operating on Bankside, according to poll tax returns, and by 1506 18 stews were in operation in the district.
The stews were typically housed in detached timber buildings, standing in their own gardens and set back from the riverfront. John Stow commented that they had signs on the outside facing the Thames, “not hanged out, but painted on the walls” which acted as advertising to alert potential customers as to what was on offer inside. Stow recorded the names of some of the brothels: ‘Beares heade, the Crosse Keyes, the Gunne, the Castle, the Crane, the Cardinals Hatte, the Bell, the Swanne.’
Bankside’s stews were governed by a series of ordinances dating back to the 12th century and subsequently documented in a 15th century ‘customary’. These rules addressed concerns about protecting society’s good morals and religion. In that vein, sex workers were forbidden from wearing aprons which would have enabled them to pass as respectable women. If they got married, fell pregnant or joined a religious order they were no longer allowed to work in the stewhouses. And officials were required to check stew-houses were closed on Sundays and other public holidays.
Health concerns were also addressed: stew-holders weren’t permitted to allow prostitutes from operating on their premises if they had the pox (“hath the perilous infirmity of burning”). Meanwhile, boatmen were forbidden from bringing any man or woman to the stews between sunset and sunrise (stewholders weren’t permitted to keep their own boats). While so much of the focus of the regulations was given over to everything but the rights of the sex workers themselves, they did however state that no woman could be held against her will. Unfortunately, there is evidence, though, of a number of people being kidnapped and forcibly taken to work in the Bankside stewhouses.
It is clear that the Bishop of Winchester was the main beneficiary of the ordinances given they legitimised a trade which they profited from. They gained rent from the stewholders (who in turn were paid a rent by the prostitutes operating in the establishments). And if the “wholesome rules” were broken those found guilty could be thrown into the Bishop’s Clink prison where fines were levied or another punishment was issued. The historian Richard Rex has said that the stews’ “permission to operate only came at a price and it was in the bishop’s power to close or prevent operation of any brothel by declaring the operator in breach of one regulation or another.”
End of Bankside brothels
In 1504 the 18 stews in operation were ordered to close on account of fears that syphilis was spreading but the ban didn’t last. There was another attempt to close the Bankside brothels in 1546, with Henry VIII calling on his subjects “to avoid the abominable place called the Stewes.” But all this did was push prostitution to other areas of London and different venues.
Some believed the trade actually increased after Henry VIII’s proclamation banning them. “The Stewes in England bore a beastly sway, Til the eight Henry banish’d them away: And since these common whores were quite put down, A damned crew of private whores are grown, So that the devil will be doing still, Either with public or with private ill,” noted contemporary John Taylor. Bishop Latimer also complained in a sermon in 1549, attended by Edward VI, that the practice continued: “My Lords you have put down the stews: but I pray to you what has amended? … Ye have but changed the place and not taken the whoredom away…. I here say there is now more whoredom in London than ever there was on the Bank.”
One of the most famous of the Bankside brothels, located in the liberty of Paris Garden which bordered the Clink, opened after Henry VIII’s 1546 proclamation. Run in the old manor house in the early 1630s by a “woman of ill disrepute” called Elizabeth (Bess) Holland, it was surrounded by a moat, drawbridge and portcullis, and boasted gardens where well-to-do visitors could do “fine work” such as flirtation. Members of King James I’s court, including the Duke of Buckingham, were said to be among those who frequented Paris Garden.
There is a fascinating story of soldiers arriving to shut the premises. Bess enticed them onto the drawbridge which she then released so they landed in the moat and prostitutes emptied their chamber pots over them. Bess managed to evade the authorities, however, and re-established her business at another location. The incident became known as ‘Holland’s Leaguer’ and it provided the inspiration for Shakerley Marmion’s comic play of the same name, which was premiered in 1631. The site is remembered by Holland Street, near the Tate Modern gallery.
In the 1650s, when the Puritans enjoyed considerable influence in Parliament, the Adultery Act was passed which said that prostitutes and brothel-keepers should be whipped, branded with ‘B’ on their foreheads and sent to prison for three years, while re-offenders could be hanged. But even with this strict legislation in place prostitution in Bankside wouldn’t have completely disappeared – it merely went underground and moved to out-of-sight venues.
Archeological discovery and preservation
Ahead of the construction of a new electricity substation for the Jubilee Line extension during the 1990 archeologists discovered the skeletons of nearly 150 people at Crossbones. This was just a fraction of the estimated 15,000 men, women and children who are believed to be buried here. Work carried out in the 1990s found that the graveyard contained the bodies of the poorest members of the community, with around 18% of those here coming from the parish workhouse.
It is disputed that this was the “single woman’s graveyard” referred to by John Stow in the late 16th century where it was suggested that medieval sex workers were buried. Historian Steph Bern said that “archaeologists’ excavations could not confirm or deny the presence of the medieval graveyard.” There is disagreement as to when Crossbones was firmly used as a paupers’ burial ground, with some suggesting it was from the mid-17th century and other sources suggesting the 18th century. But by the mid-19th century the graveyard was deemed full and it was closed to new burials in 1852.
Over the last three decades various groups and individuals have been working to protect the Crossbones site and promote its important history. One of the those is the writer John Constable, who in 1996 had a vision in which ‘The Goose’ (one of the Winchester Geese, mentioned earlier) revealed the graveyard’s secret history to him. This episode provided the inspiration for Constable’s Southwark Mysteries, a series of plays and poems performed at Southwark Cathedral and the Globe Theatre.
Bankside Open Spaces Trust, which manages the site, has worked with a number of local groups and volunteers to develop Crossbones as a garden of remembrance dedicated to the outcast dead. Volunteers open up this space to the public on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday lunchtimes. When I visited recently it was a hive of activity with bushes being pruned and weeds cleared.
And the Friends of Crossbones organises vigils for the outcast at 7pm on the 23rd of every month during which those from the past and more recent times are remembered. If you visit Crossbones today, it’s hard to miss the colourful display of ribbons carefully tied onto tall, sturdy gates at the entrance to the site. They remember those buried at the site, stretching back hundreds of years and whose identities have been forgotten.
Wrong Side of the River: Borough and Bankside's disreputable past 
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