Author: By Katherine Angel

A plaque told me that this was the site of the Crossbones Graveyard, from late
medieval times an unconsecrated burial site for prostitutes ? and later,
paupers ? until its closure in the 19th century on public-health grounds.
The “shrine” around it honoured up to 15,000 bodies buried on the
site, and was, I read, a “place of healing where the Wild Feminine is
honoured and celebrated for all that she is ? whore and virgin, mother and
lover, maiden and crone, creator and destroyer”.

Whose voice was this? Who had threaded the ribbons into the wire, tied the
doll to the fence, typed up the prayers, cut the lace? Who were the
Londoners who felt compelled to mark a humdrum space with this iconography
of femininity and death? The answer, I discovered later, was the Friends of
the Crossbones Graveyard, in particular its charismatic motivating force,
the local writer (and creator of The Southwark Mysteries) John Constable ?
or rather, his alter ego, John Crow. The Friends campaign for the
preservation of the site, with some precarious success. They hold a
candlelit vigil here every month for the “outcast dead”, and have,
for the past 10 years, held a Crossbones Halloween Event ? to which I went
last year, curious and unaccountably nervous.

Constable, white-haired, pacing about in a dark robe, welcomed the hundred or
so of us into a circular room on Southwark Street. His resonant voice
invited us to place mementos or photographs of lost ones on a makeshift
altar at the front of the room. We were each given a white ribbon with the
name of one of the Crossbones dead, taken from the London Metropolitan
Archives. We were to adopt their spirit for the course of the evening. At
this, I felt a spasm of rationalism; a twist of anxiety at memories of
school drama; a desire to bolt. Would we have to get naked? Commune with
something I didn’t know I wanted to commune with? I sat in a chair towards
the back.

Constable swooped about in his cape. An expectant buzz mounted.

A priestess started things off, leading us in a meditative moment of humming.
A single note was held, surprisingly tunefully, by the crowd. I felt a space
open up in the room. My ears, my whiskers perked up; I was suddenly alert
and curious. A witch broke into a rap. I squirmed, feeling a tickle of
laughter taunt my belly, my nose. Someone then asked us to close our eyes
and think of the dead. To think of past pain, past loss, past regret ? and
let these go. We each read out a word: light, compassion, generosity ?
things to wish for and cherish.

Constable then took over, adopting the persona of John Crow, his “trickster-shaman”.
Actress Michelle Watson became the Goose, a prostitute on the Bankside, a
wise and sassy creature with a throaty voice, radiating erotic scorn.
Together, Crow and the Goose performed, in verse and song, sections of
Constable’s poetry, bringing to life the women refused burial on consecrated
ground by the very Church that licensed their practice.

In 1107, a stretch of land on the southern bank of the Thames was granted to
the Bishop of Winchester. The Bishop’s estates came to be known as the
Liberty of the Clink ? “Clink” because the Manor House
straddled this underground prison, and “Liberty” because the Manor
lay outside the City’s jurisdiction. Much that was forbidden elsewhere ?
including theatre and bear-baiting ? was allowed here, and it was in this
spot that the “Geese” (perhaps so-called for the white aprons they
wore, or for their white breasts bared to river visitors) could practise.
Brothels, or “stewes”, were licensed and regulated by Henry II’s
1161 ordinance, with the Bishops collecting fees and fines paid by brothel
licensees.

Crow’s Goose had, in fact, visited John Constable one night in a vision. “She
simply walked in,” he told me, and took him for a walk in the Southwark
streets. He returned home and feverishly wrote ? transcribed, he says ? the
verses that have remained largely untouched since. In “John Crow’s
Riddle”, Constable wrote:

For tonight in Hell

They are tolling the bell

For the Whore that lay at the Tabard,

And well we know

How the carrion crow

Doth feast in our Crossbones Graveyard.

Constable had no idea what the Crossbones Graveyard was; it was just one of
many phrases that came pouring out of him in that frenzied night of writing.
Some time later, Constable heard about the Museum of London cautioning
against planning applications for the Jubilee Line extension works, due to
post-medieval burials from the “Skull and Crossbones” cemetery
being disturbed. (The museum removed 148 skeletons in excavations before the
works began ? less than 1 per cent of the burials, it claims.) Constable
went to see the site and recognised it as one of the places the Goose had
led him that hallucinatory night. Returning to the verses, he noticed the
reference in the poem and felt the Goose’s presence nearby ? arms folded, a
mocking smile.

A melée of voices intertwine in the poems: the Goose, bawdy, world-weary,
wise; a Caribbean, earthy male voice; a Dylan-esque troubadour; an
Elizabethan rhythm. “Liberty” is a recurring theme in both the
writings and the Halloween event. The Goose, fond and defiant, writes:

And when our Lords in Westminster

Denounce my ‘Impious Blasphemy’,

My gob in the face of all God-fearing

Servants of His Majesty.

What though they throw me in The Clink,

Or King’s Bench or Marshalsea,

And leave me there to rot, they think,

For brazen acts of harlotry?

I call upon my Bishop

As Defender of my Liberty.

When all-mighty City Fathers,

Those dread Guardians of Morality,

Do ban ‘all gaming, drunkenness

And acts of gross effrontery’.

What though they thunder Over There?

It matters not a fig to me,

Over ‘ere’s the Ward Without

The Law of London City,

Where Whores are subject only to

Fair Southwark and Her Liberty

London’s sexual history, with its episode of ecclesiastical brothel licensing,
has fascinated various writers. EJ Burford wrote, in The Bishop’s Brothels
of 1976, that when Henry VIII annulled Henry II’s ordinance, he demolished “at
a stroke four hundred years of the most picturesque and picaresque history”
of the Bankside. Henry II’s ordinance had helped to make “Southwark the
pleasure-garden of London for many centuries”. The city’s sexual past
is seen here through misty eyes, as a liberatory and joyful state of nature,
which in Constable’s prose is also a state of grace.

Brothel licensing, however, has a regulatory rather than liberatory rationale:
the management of syphilis ? the “filthy disease” ? and of
the swelling ranks of prostitutes, widows and orphans of the Crusaders. The
ordinance provided a measure of protection: no “stew-holder” was
to “keepe any woman to boord but she to boord at her pleasure” ?
prostitutes could come and go as they pleased. And no “single woman”
is to “bee kept against her will that would leave her sinne”. But
prostitutes were forbidden from having a “paramour”. Punishment
for some freely chosen pleasure with a lover included a hefty fine, three
weeks in prison, a session on the “cucking-stool”, and ejection
from the Liberty.

The Crossbones campaign celebrates a strong, elemental and witchy female
sexuality; it thumbs its nose at a feminism that has cast prostitutes as
victims of misogyny and coercion. And this it has in common with the growing
public voice of sex-worker campaigns, which have enthusiastically embraced
Crossbones and conduct tours of the site. At the Halloween event, a
representative from the International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW) spoke
about its campaign to have the Crossbones site earmarked as a memorial for
sex workers. The organisation likens the prostitutes’ regulation by the
Church and their exclusion from Christian burial to the contemporary
semi-legality of prostitution in the UK.

The IUSW, like many sex-worker campaigns, insists on sex work as autonomously
and freely chosen, and defiantly requests a dignity denied to sex workers
both by puritanical right-wing moralism and by puritanical feminism. The
right to autonomous sexual self-expression, whether commercial or not, is
key not just to libertarianism but also to the post-feminism that has become
the core of contemporary young femininity. Here, feminism is cast as having
achieved its aims ? namely, the equality of men and women. Young girls are
therefore free to enjoy their sexuality without worrying about the political
ramifications of its expression. This is the language Crossbones speaks in,
most eloquently through the “Whores d’Oeuvres” at the Halloween
event: two women in basques who schooled us in the spiritual potential of
our pelvic floors. We held hands with our neighbours, breathed and moved our
hips in unison ? a lesson in spiritual burlesque.

These harnessings of the past to contemporary sexual politics made my feminist
and historical antennae twitch. A historical Liberty which denied women
numerous viable means of economic independence, which punished women for
their very own pleasure, and protected them under a regulatory system
entirely at the discretion of brothel-keepers and Bishops, isn’t much of a
Liberty.

And yet, as I breathed in unison with 100 others, under the tutelage of the
Whores d’Oeuvres, I laughed, and felt humbled ? holding hands with
strangers, and allowing the centrality of sex to be fully, joyfully,
playfully acknowledged. In Redcross Way, where we processed with candles,
Constable made a gin offering to the Spirit of the Goose. I closed my eyes
and thought about desire ? its power and its vulnerability; the
vulnerability of sex workers; the spectre of violence and murder always
hovering over the figure of the prostitute, the shadow of the Ripper never
far away. The shame associated with sex work; the vulnerability that desire
confers on all of us.

Later, over coffee in Borough Market, Constable spoke to me of “Liberty”
not as a political or historical reality, but as a state to which we might
aspire, “in this life or a future life”, a place where all ideas
can coexist.

Back in Redcross Way, I drank from the gin being passed around. I tied my
ribbon to the fence. The Goose, I thought ? this Goose ? is Loose. Whatever
the Liberty. For details of tonight’s Halloween ritual, see crossbones.org.uk

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