Medieval England's Secret Police of Sex & Sexuality
England had its own version of the KGB or the Gestapo for punishing sexual criminals
We’ve all heard the term “blacklist.”
You’ve probably used it a few times, yourself. But do you know where the term comes from and what it means? Turns out, it has a dark and horrific history that goes back for centuries, and the word remains as a reminder of England’s gruesome anti-sexual past.
In the late 1600s, the Protestant Reformation had surpassed its peak. One of the qualms the Protestants had with the Catholic Church had to do with how the two churches viewed human sexuality.
Okay, it was a bit more than “a part” of the rift.
Divergences about sex were a crucial component of the Reformation and the religious wars that ensued across Europe for centuries. Thousands upon thousands of people were killed because Protestants believed that Catholics weren’t strict enough about sex.
The Catholic Church’s position on human sexuality was that it was an inevitable sin. While it was decreed since St. Augustine of Hippo that sex must be shunned in almost all cases, the Catholic Church also understood the frailty of the human condition and the errors we make throughout life. To the Protestants, this wasn’t good enough.
The Catholic Church believed they’d never be able to stamp out illicit sexuality—premarital sex (including people who were betrothed to be married), any sex that wasn’t for the strict purpose of procreation, including oral and anal sex.
The Protestant Church thought they could. They believed with enough force, they could stamp out what they deemed sexual offenses once and for all. As Faramerz Dabhoiwala writes in The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (available on Amazon here):
The most important difference between Catholic and Reformed attitudes to sex was the Protestant aspiration to perfection. The traditional Catholic view had been that fleshly lusts were reprehensible but inevitable: to restrain them completely might be impossible, or counter-productive.
The enforcement of sexual discipline was accordingly balanced by a certain amount of toleration of organized prostitution and of clerical concubines. In contrast, the Protestant tendency was to believe that unchastity truly could be banished from the world, or at least that Christians had a duty to eradicate it as thoroughly as possible.
As Archbishop Cranmer’s model eccelesiastical law of 1552 put it, “fornication and unbridled lusts of every kind are to be checked with great severity of punishment, so that they may eventually be uprooted from the kingdom,” Out of this difference came a greater demand for both personal and external discipline.
In today’s world, most sane people recoil in horror when you merely mention the word “pedophile,” as the word conjures up a negative image in the mind of a depraved sex offender.
In late-Medieval and Early Modern England, the same was true for terms like “sodomite” and “fornicator,” people who had sex outside of marriage and people who had sex for purposes besides procreation.
They burnt women at the stake. They branded “fornicators” and “sodomites” to scar their faces, casting them out of cities and towns and leaving them to fend for themselves in the woods. This was happening in the days before jury trials. All that was needed to secure a conviction against someone you didn’t like was an accusation.
In 1654, a woman named Susan Bounty was convicted of adultery in Devon, England, and was granted mercy for the fact that she was pregnant. At the time, people suspected of committing fornication, sodomy, or adultery were executed by hanging.
The Church court’s act of mercy was allowing her to carry her baby to term. A few minutes after she gave birth, the baby was forcibly ripped from her arms, and she was carried off to the gallows and executed.
Over the centuries between 1500 and the mid-1700s, secret police organizations were formed to patrol lubricious activity. In 1656, British military troops were sent to raid the streets of London and kidnap any woman suspected of committing sexual acts that were disallowed according to the Church, or “women of loose life.”
They kidnapped over 1,000 and put them on ships, and sent them across the Atlantic, so they could populate the new colony of Barbados. British women were enslaved by British men during the period and sent to The New World, though nowhere near the same numbers that African slaves were.
This leads me back to the term “blacklisting” and its origins. It wasn’t usually the British military conducting these kinds of moral raids, kidnapping, and selling or executing women. It was often a community-based approach that was done through secret societies.
In the late 1600s and early 1700s, a secret police force cropped up, much like the modern KGB or the Gestapo under the Nazis — The Tower Hamlets Society of England.
One of the earliest known uses of the term “blacklist” comes from this society.
The society was formed in the 17th century as a way for residents of the Tower Hamlets area of London to band together and attack criminals and people who they believed were ne’er-do-wells.
Members of the society would compile lists of troublemakers, i.e., people who engaged in the kinds of sex that the Church disapproved of. If caught, people on the list would be captured, imprisoned, and sometimes killed.
They would then circulate the lists among themselves, hanging them up in pubs and other hangouts around town, so they could catch sexual criminals.
They employed a network of spies or informants, much like the USSR did under Stalin when the government asked everyday citizens to spy on supposed counter-revolutionaries. Terrifying stuff.
While the group was seemingly volunteer-based and grassroots, it was also a very profitable business. This just goes to show you that human horror isn’t always the result of the asymmetrical power of a dictatorial state unjustly punishing innocent civilians.
But someone who informed for their local church parish could expect rather handsome monetary rewards, not to mention reputational ones. If they did well enough, they could expect to fast-track their way to a career in “criminal” justice, overseeing the expansive jail and prison system that housed criminals being held for sexual offenses.
It’s only by a stroke of luck that we no longer live this way. While the Enlightenment period certainly played a role in humanity’s progress out of the Dark Ages, the reason the Church was no longer able to police sex so strictly anymore was mostly due to demographics.
As cities got bigger and bigger, they became harder and harder for secret police forces to patrol. As the 1600s turned into the 1700s, policing people’s bedrooms was just too hard. There were just too many criminals to catch, and jails were overflowing. The movement to punish every single person having sex eventually lost a bit of steam.
But it never fully went away.
Blacklists changed from chasing after all sex criminals to primarily being used to hunt down prostitutes and women engaging in sex in bars and clubs. Gone were the days of kicking people’s doors down and snatching them out of bed, then hauling them off to prison, where they would await their execution.
Over time, the term “blacklist” came to be associated with these lists of known criminals. As the society grew, the lists became more organized and comprehensive. Eventually, the term was adopted more widely to describe any list of individuals who were considered undesirable or untrustworthy.
The use of blacklists became particularly prevalent during the 20th century when governments and private companies began using them to screen employees and prevent the spread of communism. During the McCarthy era in the United States, for example, thousands of people were blacklisted due to suspected communist sympathies.
Today, the term “blacklist” is still used in various contexts, usually to mean that someone is forbidden from working on future projects within an industry. But long ago, the term was much more gruesome and melancholic.
It remains with us today as a stark reminder that we must be vigilant to ensure society never slips back into that dark abyss of horror that was the Middle Ages. At a time when women’s rights are risking, stories like these remind us where we came from and where we can go back to if we’re not careful.
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OMG THE HORROR!
As "a woman of the loose life" myself, I'm very glad I live now and not then. Actually, that's not true, now sucks. I wish I'd been born in the mid-fifties or sixties. Ya know, like my parents who are still able to afford a house and car and health insurance and all the other trappings of a middle class life.
I hesitate to "like" this article because I am disgusted at the number of lives lost and ruined by this senseless violence. Nevertheless, thank you for reminding us how bad it has gotten--and can get without constant vigilance.