Medieval Pleasures: What Was Sex Really Like in the Middle Ages?

[Music] [Applause] [Music] you might think of the medieval period as reserved and puritanical but actually medieval people had very different and more relaxed attitudes towards obscenity and sex than we do as a result in this episode be prepared to hear a few harsh words and shocking truths [Music] when you think about the tower of london and the medieval period more generally pleasure probably isn't the first thing you think about there's a couple reasons for this first we're taught that the middle ages is an unrelentingly grim time nothing but plagues wars and the church hiding under your bed to make sure that you don't have too much fun and secondly it's true that the church didn't want you to have a lot of fun and a lot of the sources that survive to us from the medieval period specifically come from the catholic church if you as a clergy member have to devote your life to piety and asceticism you're probably not going to be encouraging your flock to have a lot of fun in this series we'll be uncovering the sumptuous world of medieval pleasure from sex to booze to sport we'll look at how people in the middle ages enjoy themselves and sometimes each other starting with everyone's favorite subject sex [Music] to start our exploration of medieval sex i've headed to york because it was one of the most important cities in medieval england rivaled only in size by london itself york is a great place to understand what people were getting up to because well with this many people around someone was having sex because the middle ages is so long ago i mean the latest part is about 700 years in the past it's really easy for us to forget that they were normal people too we're here in the shambles in york which is a great way to get a physical idea about the world of medieval pleasure this would have been a thriving area of commerce fun booze all kinds of options about how to have a fun time this can help us to understand what it was like for our medieval ancestors when they went out looking for a bit of fun i met up with dr kate lister an expert in the history of sex to talk to her about where we might find clues about sex in medieval streets one street in particular stands out as a testament to what people would get up to when looking for some fun so kate you've taken me here to grapelane and that is a kind of secret about what used to happen here right great blaine is a contraction of grapp which this street was originally recorded as being grappling so are there other kind of similar names yes yeah yeah there are there so there are grape lanes as original all of britain was definitely one in southwark but there's also a record of [ __ ] lane uh horse mount there's all kinds of sit down hoe was one that's recorded as well medieval people didn't mess around when it came to naming your streets because you needed to know where to go in the medieval period you've got all these literal names about what you can buy there like milk street poultry street and grape street we tend to think about sex work as being this really modern invention and not only is it quite a medieval institution but it's really out in the open oh absolutely i mean it was as every part of york as much as the minster and the cobbled streets and that's true throughout the medieval world they had a much more i don't want to say less affair because that's not true they they regulated it and controlled it usually by zoning which is what the names were about so it was restricted to certain areas but it was certainly very prevalent very visible whereas in our modern society it's kind of like the sort of open secrets that it's kind of hidden away we certainly don't have streets named after it but we have areas that you know you can go to you know we tend to think oh attitudes towards sex are always getting more open how are attitudes towards sex different in the medieval period just like our own time there's not one distinct attitude there's many but you would probably be surprised if you were to go back in time to just how open and everyday this was and i think the answer for that is because how are you going to make your money it's a deeply patriarchal world now let alone back in the middle ages is it how are you what job are you going to go into where you can make some serious dollar it's really really limited and that doesn't mean that everybody turned to being on the game but it was an option that you can make a lot of money in a short amount of time and everybody knew about it as well the authorities are going to tolerate it but they need to be able to identify the people selling sex to differentiate them from good people so you get all kinds of sumptory laws and rulings and it's normally things like they have to wear raid or striped hoods so different things to different cities some of them were white and yellow some of them were black some of them were purple in vienna they had to wear bells oh yeah it's like they would literally be like jangling as they approached and but even that it's horrendous they're kind of marked out this way but that often sort of became like a symbol of who they were if you're looking at the viennese sex workers they were required to wear all this stuff and then they kind of made it like kitsch and sexy like had they had this sort of great big pool and like um stiletto shoe platform things and then it became something that the high-class lady started to imitate them so as ever they are trendsetters this is a great way to look at what ordinary women can do in cities because you know you can't just go into a trade and if you're a poor girl from off of the farm and you want to come to the big city like this is one of the ways into a really lucrative career what are you gonna do yeah there aren't a lot of options right absolutely and there are family trades that you could go into there's big industries i mean i guess you could become a nun you could marry that was like really your goal as a woman is when you wanted money you'd have to marry it which is sex work one man at a time more than anything else it's so frustrating because we don't have like financial records of these women of course leftovers it's always like whispers and hints and stories and here and there but there was a lot of money to be made there absolutely was and the kind of redemption arc that you see in a lot of medieval saints is testament to that they generally don't start by going she was um she was on the game and absolutely hated it it's generally like she had a really great shoe collection and then she found christ it busts one of the big myths about the medieval period which is that people don't bathe they did bathe let's just put that one to bed they were as conscious of smelling bad as uri they just didn't have the means to be having showers hot showers every single day but they they worked around that by having public bathing and mixed communal bathing as well so that's you know that should also help to just by the idea that they're quite prudish because you'd just go into town and have a bath with your mates i don't think i've ever had a bath with my mates but obviously at the at the heart of that is the sex workers because that's a really great place to find clients and you can actually see that embedded in the language a slang term for sex workers i think it's concerned from the 14th century was a lavender that comes from the lavender that was used to fragrance the laundry houses and also the bath houses that's how common it was and there was association of lawn dresses with uh sex work poor women who would you know supplement their income that way and the stews which was another name for the brothel that's linked directly to the bathhouses as well yeah you'd go and stew in the water and they became known as a brothel so it's absolutely at the heart of it so obviously here we are place of commercial sex but it's not like medieval people don't have regular flirtations and trying to get ahold of each other god yeah absolutely they did so i have gathered from andreas capilano's de amore or the art of courtly love several key medieval chat up lines my challenge to you kate lister is to pick up a fine gentleman on the streets of york using only medieval pickup lines [Music] armed with the most refined chat up lines that courtly love has to offer kate was eager to try out her charms on york's unsuspecting suitors when the divine being made you he left nothing undone absolutely which is good that's a four or five for him good two and a half i i appreciate a hit yes you must know that many days ago i was smitten with the arrow of your love and that i tried with all my might to conceal the wound that's a 5. that's doing it for me yeah i would say it's on top but not quite okay to tell you the truth i am an ambassador sent to you from the court of love try again buddy no that's not doing good i'm sorry so much nobility is apparent in you and you are distinguished by so much courtesy and believe in your presence i may say that all those things that are lying in my heart waiting to be said four and a half to five yeah yeah very valentine's day i do like it i'm not running screaming because clearly you don't know who i am if you think that i'm noble and courteous [Music] the catholic church quite literally towered over medieval cities like york and it served as a constant physical reminder to everyone about how they should live their life in public and in private we're here at the york minster not just because it's a beautiful building which it is but because it's a great way to think about the physical presence that the church had on people's lives in the medieval period think about the fact that most people live in a building that's not even higher than two stories tall and then what a huge building like this would mean in your life so it's a physical reminder of what the church teaches about sexuality as well as everything else for medieval christians sex was a moral tightrope of course everybody had to have sex that's how you get children but the church had long been of the opinion that any sex for anything other than procreation was a no the church's position is that the only time sex is acceptable is between two married people for procreative purposes and on top of that there's a lot of other rules as well no sex on saturdays and sundays in case you're too turned on during mass only have sex in the missionary position because anything else subverts the natural relationship between men and women don't get fully naked during sex because it's just too exciting in short during sex you should be trying to have the least amount of fun possible the thing about all these rules nobody really listened to them perhaps surprisingly to our modern sensibilities some of the biggest rule breakers could actually be found among the clergy we keep mentioning that sex is considered sinful by the catholic church what are the theological reasons for that you might ask and there are several some of the oldest conceptions about this date to saint augustine at the end of the antique period he thinks very very deeply about sex a lot of the time because he had a bunch of it before he joined the clergy himself his idea about sex is this sex is very sinful because if we still lived in the garden of eden if adam and eve hadn't fallen to original sin when you wanted to have children you would simply think about it you would then simply insert tab a to slot b decide now is the moment for conception and it would happen boom you got a baby and you wouldn't feel anything about that at all it wouldn't feel sexy it wouldn't feel lustful it would be pleasurable you would only be doing it in order to have a kid fast forward to post the fall of man and everyone is actually turned on when they want to have sex and that's the thing that makes it sinful it's absolutely fine to have a baby the problem is liking the actual act of sex too much in the 13th century thomas aquinas then ranks sex in terms of how sinful it is sex is more sinful if it is more illogical in his opinion the most logical sex is sex between two married people who specifically want a baby nothing sinful about that but it can become sinful if you're too turned on in the process so for example thomas aquinas warns you that you shouldn't have too many lascivious kisses you shouldn't be groping your partner too much ideally you don't actually get naked and you wear some clothing during sex then forms of sex are ranked as less logical from there so things that we don't necessarily consider as quote unquote real sex medieval people are actually more interested in so things like manual sex or oral sex are technically sodomy sodomy is defined as any type of sex that can not result in procreation and it doesn't matter who is doing it it doesn't matter if you are married to your wife and you're engaging in these acts if it can't lead to a baby then it's sinful all of this is directly tied up with the idea that in the garden of eden you wouldn't have any fun so what is sinful about sex purely pleasure but as we've already mentioned not even the clergy always followed their own rules about sex some of my favorite references to the clergy behaving badly come from 14th century prague there's a great document called the archdiaconet protocol where basically the church goes door to door to every church and asks parishioners do you have any problems and a lot of the parishioners in prague say that they have problems specifically with sex and they're priests what kind of problems well we've got priests who are living openly with concubines there's one priest who is operating a brothel out of his own house that includes about four different women there's a priest who sees a sex worker very very regularly and when he's confronted about it by the church he says well yes i see a sex worker but i always pay her right away and make her leave immediately after but probably my very favorite priest from prague is one who gets caught in a brothel and wants to run away before he gets arrested so he lights out of the house completely naked and runs down the streets of prague where all his parishioners see him imagine you're getting a lecture from the pulpit on a sunday about all the sex you shouldn't be having and you're getting it from the guy who you saw naked last night these are the reasons why it makes it clear that nobody really necessarily cares what the church has to say about sex if priests themselves can't follow the rules why are the day-to-day lay members going to care if we want to get a better idea of people's sex life in the medieval period it's helpful to have a look at some of the places that they would have been expected to do the deed because the bedrooms of everyday people during this period weren't exactly comfortable and they certainly weren't private so one of the things that we need to know first of all is although there's just one bed here with us in a servant's room that almost certainly wouldn't have been single occupancy you would be sharing it i guess sex was almost a public affair in the middle ages privacy would be a really really rare commodity so say you have a dorm like this probably you know you're not going to be on the pole trying to bring a girl back to this sort of a situation but it's not exactly unheard of either is it well i mean like where are you gonna go like what are your options right there's nowhere to be hanging a tie on the door to say say don't come back you're either gonna take the chance and do it in shared rooms or you're gonna have to try and find sex outdoors i suppose or a quiet area somewhere and in a city like york that's probably going to be a bit hard to come by it's going to be tricky it's it's i mean you'll find dark corners all over the place but quiet maybe not so much so i suppose yeah you would be used to people having sex around you not constantly but i mean if you're growing up in in a home and like where families were sharing one room probably growing up and heard your parents have sex [Music] one of my favorite documents from the medieval period that talks about sex comes from a penitential which is you know a guidebook for priests to ask people in confession have you done these bad sins it's written by bouchard of worms he's a bishop he lives in the century he says that you should ask women have you ever made an object in the shape and size to match your carnal desire and have you ever taken the object fastened it about your waist and used it on another woman so basically have you ever made a dildo and have you turned it into a strap-on and used it with other women see that's you've just got to know where to look for this stuff it's there actual sexual objects or apparatuses left over from the medieval period are extremely rare and this makes a lot of sense by their very nature these are the sorts of objects that are secretive and they aren't exactly passed down from person to person however there are other resources that we can look at that might tell us more about medieval people's sex lives so we don't really have medieval objects but we definitely do have medieval images of sex right someone had to thought that it was worth saving to survive basically so we do have evidence of sex in like medieval manuscripts for example especially in the marginalia the kind of little doodles of course yeah the [ __ ] doodles all around the side which is perplexed scholars ever since they were written it's like this is a really really holy book and here is a picture of women putting penises in a tree i love it why is that doing that thing we don't know but that's good evidence uh we also have surviving badges from pilgrimages oh i love pilgrim badges a lot of them are sort of late medieval 15th century they come from the lowlands i've got a very very favorite one um and it is a vulva that is wearing a crown and she is being carried on a little litter by three phalluses who all have little legs and a tail and where did you go to get that back or whatever it was yeah it's it's amazing right because it shows us all kinds of different ways of relating to pilgrimage and the sex that you might be having on it because you might be having a lot of sex when you're on pilgrimage because you're under plenary indulgence so that means that like any sins that you're doing such as having sex will be forgiven or it might mean that people are hoping to for example cure something like impotence or they're really hoping for fertility and that's why they're going on holiday but it certainly shows us that medieval people have this real sense of humor about sex where they don't mind kind of showing off their interest in it yeah i know it's really difficult for us to look back and say this was exactly that because we don't have the context but i can't look at those items and not think that they there was humor in it but they thought that that was funny that that was something that they're playing about with it even if it had a wider significance like fertility is it was definitely having fun with it definitely my big joke about being a sex historian is that i gossip about dead people's sex lives so in that vein what is your favorite piece of gossip about a dead person's sex life since we're in york there is one story that i remember about a man in york and i think it was the 13th century his name was john and he was subjected to an impotence test by the church this goes back to a medieval um custom that you could have your marriage annulled if things were working in the bedroom on the grounds of annulment because the church is like well that's what marriage is for right it's to produce and procreate and if things aren't working then you can have it annulled but the church also doesn't like to just hand out annulments of course because if you just didn't like your husband you could go oh sorry it's not it's not working it's not working for me and then go off so they came up with this idea that you had to prove it how do you prove impotence so that that involved a custom known as congress where wise matrons of the town would be instructed to try and rouse this poor guy's member to see if the charges of impotence were actually correct and poor old john from york he was subject to this by several wise matrons who we're told expose their breasts to him that rubbed him very greatly and eventually had to declare his member was utterly useless oh poor john i mean i just i can't imagine a more unlikely situation in which you could prove that things were working no right the threat of divorce a bunch of women you barely know and you absolutely have to perform in that moment and now here we are 800 years later still making fun of jonathan about oh john john oh despite what the church wanted and told people sex was happening in a variety of ways in the medieval period accounts from the time can also tell us a little bit about medieval people's attitudes surrounding gender and sexuality [Music] there was a particularly interesting case in 14th century london where there were strict laws on where sex workers could carry out their trade in 1394 a woman named eleanor reichner a sex worker is caught up on sheepside with a client named john bickley they're in trouble because they are having sex in the wrong place inside of london city walls as eleanor is asked to testify she says that she ordinarily sees clients here around the tower of london instead but the court record reveals something interesting about eleanor she'd originally been called john reichner at birth but had been living as a woman for years now and she primarily worked in commercial sex both in london and also for a time in oxfordshire she knew about the ins and outs of commercial sex because that's how she made her living and it wasn't really a problem that she was what we would call trans or that she was a sex worker the only thing she was in trouble for was having sex in the wrong place if she went back to work here by the tower technically it would be fine it's only a matter of record with the courts because of where she was having sex we don't know exactly what happened to eleanor as a result of all of this but her story is proof that what we would call queer people now existed in medieval london just as much as they do today and they were having sex to our way of thinking sex in the medieval period for the everyday person wasn't exactly a relaxing affair if you weren't out in the open you were in a cramped and often crowded communal room but what if you were lucky enough to be from the upper classes of society well in the tower of london we have a fantastic recreation of a bedroom to give us an idea of what the private or not so private lives of the royalty were like this is one of the finest medieval bedrooms that you were ever likely to see because it is fit for a king king edward the first more specifically who ordered this bedroom built in 1280. it's been redecorated based on manuscript evidence of what we think it might have looked like even now we associate four poster beds like this with romance and well sex this is an extraordinarily fine example it's based off of descriptions made for king edward the first it's a royal bed so this is as fine as it's possible for a bed to be kings would get themselves beds like this hugely extravagant objects not just because they were beautiful but because they afforded them privacy in a king's bed chamber like this you wouldn't just expect to find the king and queen there would often be servants courtiers going in and out it would be a through way so if you wanted to actually have sex and you wanted some privacy you'd close these curtains and give yourself some extra space however rich people of all types are going to want beds like this if they can afford them it's just this is the finest example of the medieval bed you're ever likely to see so how crowded was a royal bed chamber likely to be well it was probably at its max capacity during something called the betting ceremony that would happen on a royal wedding night betting ceremonies vary across europe and across time in the medieval period but in england there were some specifics to it the first thing that would happen was a priest would come and bless the bed after that there would be a big party while the king and queen got into their pajamas and enjoyed some spiced wine after that the groomsmen and bridesmaid would put them into the bed and begin throwing stockings at each other there was a reason for this apparently if you hit the king or queen with your stalking that meant that you would be the next person to marry after all of this rowdiness then the king and queen would in theory close the bed curtains and get down to consummating the marriage which is absolutely essential for a marriage to be considered legitimate so why are so many people involved in the betting ceremony and why do they care if the king and queen are having sex well this is the only way that marriage exists it's for having heirs and having sex no sex no marriage they absolutely have to have sex on their wedding night in order for the marriage to be legal this is also a matter of importance for the dynasty as a whole and every courtier has an interest in that no kids no dynasty that's why you get married so it might not be the most romantic thing in the world but it is something that the court's involved in your royal sex life if trying to have sex after the betting ceremony doesn't sound like a lot of fun to you that's because royal sex wasn't supposed to be fun you know what was fun courtly love [Music] courtly love when we say the word conjures up ideas of romance and that's certainly true but it's a kind of romance that isn't very modern at all that's because it takes place almost exclusively between married women and the unmarried men in the court's retinue unmarried men would write love songs they would write poetry they would do anything in theory for the woman of their dreams and part of that was finding ways to have sex that wouldn't endanger their marriages so the payoff of courtly love is usually non-procreative types of sex not in beds not with your husband anywhere at court that you can smash a moment of time there's a real worry within courtly love literature specifically about endangering your heirs and endangering the line of succession therefore there's also warnings about having procreative sex with the person that you're in love with for example in arthuriana guinevere and lancelot accidentally bring down camelot when they have procreative sex whether or not people actually listen to these warnings is not something that we can actually tell no one tends to write down yeah i had adulterous sex last night however we do know that there is some kind of tension there and there are lines that are being drawn and redrawn all the time about what is acceptable and romantic so we tend to think about medieval people as being real prudes however they're interested in all kinds of sex and romance that we would find completely unacceptable even at court in one of the most important places in england you'll see people that are breaking rules that we think are written in stone it doesn't matter what the church thinks doesn't matter what even our theory and literature thinks people are going to find a way to have some fun with each other one way or another and usually it means that they're not feeling particularly romantic about their husband or wife when they do it [Music] if courtly love stories offered a refined way to talk about sex and sexuality at the other end of the spectrum were all sorts of body and lewd tales that would really offend our own sensibilities however these sorts of smut had an almost universal appeal in the medieval period and individuals from all walks of life would compete to tell lusty puns dirty stories and all kinds of jokes in places such as banquets but first we need to address the part [Laughter] the banqueting hall is it's not just somewhere that you come to get your food it's kind of the epicenter of the house the percentage of culture there'd be musicians there might be dances happening and the one thing that they loved is a story you had your fair share of real high brow stuff cartly love at night damsels and all of that stuff but there's absolutely no doubt that the medieval people love this mutty story and this is the thing so you know you could be in the richest situation in the world and you're still gonna hear something like for example chaucer one of my favorite stories is the miller's tale within that you have someone who you know she's married to an older man and she convinces him that a giant flood has come in order to have sex with their lodger who lives in the house and it's really really involved and then it ends with a fart joke yes it does it's a really convoluted like fast basically of a young woman trying to have sex with someone who isn't her husband and then there's another suitor on the scene who's like wooing her and he tries to get her attention by singing under her window while she's in bed with another man and she thinks it's really funny so she opens the window and she basically sticks her ass out and says um kiss this and he does but the whole joke is the fact that um that he kind of leaps back and goes oh my god women don't have beards and like that's just hilarious to all medieval people you know chaucer does come from a highbrow context he is kind of a noble so you know this is the sort of conversation that you could expect to have at table but we don't expect that and i suppose what it kind of really tells us is that the history of sex and in the kind of pleasure of that is not this big straight line forward into being more and more comfortable about sex because actually in a lot of ways we've come really far backward from being able to have those sorts of conversations openly yeah i mean we're better like we are more open than perhaps our grandparents were but in many ways we're not open like the medieval people were we don't have public communal bathing we don't have sex in the same room as other people we don't go to a high brow dinner party and tell pubic hair jokes maybe you don't well maybe you don't but he's pretty sure not to get invited back pretty quick but like this this is like you know the equivalent of having dinner with you know like the the creme de la creme of society and sitting around you know making jokes about asses and sex and you know i would have loved it but it's kind of like a strange thing to be doing in this kind of really high brow situation but yeah they did they loved it it was just part of their humor and the the world view so okay over this episode we have established that medieval people really quite randy whether that's people from a royal household having sex in the same room as members of their household whether that is being totally comfortable with pretty raunchy names for streets totally accepting sex work or even having sex in public because i have got a great poem for you it is called the maid servants holiday it's from the 15th century and it goes thusly jack will pay my share on sunday at the ale fest jack will salsa well my throat every good holiday soon he will take me by the hand and he will lay me out on the ground so that my buttocks are in the dirt upon this high holiday in he thrust and out he drew and ever i lay beneath him so i think you know other than being quite funny what this poem also makes really clear is that medieval people really like to mix their pleasures sex that goes with booze on that note our next episode is going to be all about alcohol jizz if like me you're craving a stiff drink after all that smut you're in luck in our next episode we'll be filling your tanker to the brim with every tipple from the middle ages from the brewsters and pubs of the peasantry to the royal sellers at hampton court i'll even be heading to wild card brewery to try a real medieval beer [Music] welcome to the history hit youtube channel hope you enjoyed that video and if you'd like to see more videos where we attempt to try and bring history to life please don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell cheers guys [Music]

Channel: History Hit

Views: 5,906,641

Keywords: medieval history, history of sex, kate lister sex history, medieval sex, sex in the middle ages, history hit tv, history hit youtube, medieval pleasures, history hit, medieval sexuality, sex history, medieval times, sex in medieval times, sex in middle ages, medival sex, what was sex like in the middle ages, history hit medieval, sex in history, sex middle ages, history sex, mideval sex, medieval sex lives, eleanor janega, history hit medieval pleasures

Id: R8JPN9tWVPQ

Length: 33min 51sec (2031 seconds)

Published: Mon May 02 2022

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