Sex, Sin, and Survival in Medieval Southwark

Where morality was negotiable, and survival was not.

Cross the Thames in the Middle Ages and you stepped into another London. Southwark was just outside the City walls, in the Bishop of Winchester’s Liberty of the Clink. Here, the rules of morality bent differently. What was banned in the City: prostitution, gambling, bawdy entertainment, was openly licensed under the Bishop’s authority. To respectable Londoners, Bankside was a den of sin. To those who lived and worked there, it was an economy of survival.

The Stewhouses and Their Ordinances

The stewhouses of Southwark were bathhouses that doubled as brothels. They were regulated by the Bishop’s ordinances as early as the 12th century, giving the illusion of order while ensuring the Church profited. These ordinances were detailed, even petty. Women could not work on holy days; they could not wear striped hoods or aprons, garments reserved for wives; they could not live in the stewhouses during Lent. They were forbidden from marrying, ensuring they remained transient, rootless, and controllable. These were not protections. They were restrictions that marked women as outsiders and reinforced their dependence on the stewhouses.

Profit and Hypocrisy

The Bishop “farmed out” licences to brothel keepers and pocketed fines from both the women and the stewholders who broke the rules. Prostitution was officially condemned as sinful, yet it was simultaneously one of the Church’s revenue streams. The very institution that barred women from burial in consecrated ground grew rich from their labour in life. This double standard was so notorious that syphilis became nicknamed the “Winchester goose.”

Women in the Records

Most of the women themselves remain nameless. When they appear in court rolls, it is usually as objects of discipline rather than subjects with voices. Isabel Lane was reportedly coerced into sex work by her mistress. Margery Curson appears as a bawd, prosecuted for managing other women. Such fragments reveal a world where women’s agency was constrained, their labour commodified, and their bodies subject to surveillance. Men, by contrast, were rarely prosecuted. The asymmetry is stark.

The Wider Survival Economy

Prostitution did not exist in isolation. It was embedded in Southwark’s wider culture of commerce and entertainment. Taverns served ale to sailors and nobles alike. Bear-baiting pits and cockfighting arenas drew raucous crowds. Theatres such as the Globe staged plays that often referenced the bawdy realities of their neighbourhood. Ferrymen transported visitors across the Thames, while lodging houses sheltered them overnight. Entire economies, legal and illicit, were sustained by Southwark’s “sinful” reputation.

Language and Stigma

Language itself reinforced exclusion. Parish records used euphemisms like “single women” or “common women” to mark prostitutes. These terms blurred social reality but sharpened stigma. To be a “Winchester Goose” was to be animalised, reduced to flesh for sale. Even illness became mockery: contracting syphilis meant “getting the goose.” Words became weapons, branding women as immoral and unworthy of sympathy.

Southwark in Culture

Writers of the time reflected and reinforced these perceptions. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales begins in Southwark, with pilgrims departing from an inn that would have been surrounded by taverns and stewhouses. Shakespeare drew on his neighbourhood’s mixture of revelry and danger. Southwark’s reputation seeped into literature, cementing it as a space of both fascination and condemnation.

Contemporary Echoes

To look at Southwark only as a vice district is to miss its deeper truth. It was a survival economy, structured by power and hypocrisy. The Church profited while condemning; the City scorned while indulging. The women bore the risk, the stigma, and the exclusion. Today’s debates about sex work, whether to criminalise, regulate, or decriminalise, echo these same tensions. Who benefits from regulation? Who is harmed by stigma? Whose voices are missing from the record?

Southwark forces us to confront uncomfortable truths. Morality was not universal, but wielded by institutions to control and profit. The women mocked as “geese” were workers, survivors, and scapegoats. To remember them differently is to challenge the story that vice was their choice and shame their legacy. It is to see their lives as labour, resilience, and survival on the margins of a city that could not function without them.

A figurine of a 'Winchester Goose' at Crossbones Graveyard and Garden of Remembrance