The Spirits of Crossbones Graveyard
Time, Ritual and Sexual Commerce in London
Down a little sidestreet a few minutes’ walk from London Bridge station, an iron fence by a small patch of land is festooned with brightly coloured ribbons. A plaque informs us that “In medieval times this was an unconsecrated graveyard for prostitutes or ‘Winchester Geese’”. These women, we’re told, were licensed by the Bishop of Winchester to ply their trade, but because of that trade they were not allowed burial in consecrated ground. Tudor historian John Stow wrote in 1598 of “a Plot of Ground, called the Singlewoman’s Church yard”, singlewoman being a euphemism for prostitute. Over the years it became more generally a paupers’ graveyard until, “overcharged with dead” (i.e. full to overflowing), it was closed in 1853. When the Jubilee line was constructed nearby in the 1990s, 148 skeletons were uncovered by Museum of London archæologists, a tiny proportion of those thought to be there.
On the 23rd of every month, local playwright and poet John Constable, who discovered the story of Crossbones Graveyard in a shamanic vision in 1996 and has protected and promoted it ever since, leads a short public ritual at the fence to remember “the outcast dead”, drawing from many spiritual traditions. His mystery play, The Southwark
Mysteries, telling the story of the prostitutes, has been performed in the Globe Theatre and in Southwark Cathedral in 2000 and 2010 (see FT264:38–39). Southwark is just across the river from the City of London, and outside its restrictions; it was where Londoners went not just for prostitutes but for bearbaiting and, famously, theatres; the Globe and the Rose are nearby.
How much of the Crossbones story is fact, and how much myth? This is the question asked by Oxford anthropologist Prof Sondra Hausner in the first academic work on Crossbones. In part it’s a history of the role of prostitutes in society, and in part a study of the value of ritual; the narrative slips back and forth between the past and the present. “We make ourselves through ritual,” she says, and yes, ritual links to the past. “But what all these places and memories and identities and acts of empowerment, individual and collective, are about is the present, the discovery and articulation of who we are now. That is the transformative power of ritual.”
The Church had an oddly practical view of prostitution. Hausner quotes the 4th-century Augustine: “If you remove harlots from society you will disrupt everything because of lust.” The 13th-century Thomas Aquinas was even more forthright: sex work is “like a sewer in a palace. Take away the sewer, and you will fill the palace with pollution … Take away prostitutes from the world and you will fill it with sodomy” (any “unnatural” sex).
The Bishop of Winchester didn’t actually license prostitutes, she says, but he took rent from the brothels on his land. Remarkably, there were regulations on how brothel keepers were to treat the prostitutes: the women worked for themselves, not for the brothel keepers, who couldn’t take any cut beyond the rent for the room; they must have freedom of movement and could not be kept against their will.
But was Crossbones actually a mediæval prostitutes’ graveyard? Hausner says there is no archæological or cartographic evidence for it being any older than early 18th century. “Crossbones is not a medieval graveyard, but an early modern one; it is the St Saviour’s burying ground, but it is not Stow’s ‘Plot of Ground’, which remains unidentified. This is not that place,” she states categorically.
But she goes on: “It is not a 15th-century graveyard, but we are in mythic time and ritual space: does it matter?” Her conclusion, having summarily demythologised – indeed, debunked – John Constable’s Crossbones story, is that the myth is hugely powerful in its own right. The essence of the story is (more or less) true; what does it matter if the monthly ritual, the fence and plaque and, since last year, the beautiful and peaceful Garden of Remembrance, are in the wrong place?