Innocent new arrivals in London were preyed on by brothel owners and gaming houses, says KJ Maitland, author of Rivers of Treason. Here she looks at the kinds of establishments that reeled so-called pigeons and plump virgins into trugging houses and nunneries (low- and high-class brothels) and rigged gaming tables where fools and their money were soon parted.
During the 1600s, around 30,000 displaced people from the country were living in London – men deprived of a living by land enclosures and young women whose families could not afford to support them.
They came to the city in search of a better life, and some found it. Those who didn’t, often ended up as beggars or in criminal gangs, and many found themselves working in brothels or illicit gaming houses.
A popular meeting place in London was the vast nave of the old St Paul’s Cathedral, where merchants, con-artists and cut-purses crowded daily to do business. Students and young men from the country were fresh meat to the army of pimps, prostitutes and escheaters (cheaters) who loitered there to befriend these innocents and invite them home.
Many gaming houses were disguised as private homes, both to fool the authorities and trick the ‘gudgeons’ or ‘pigeons’ into thinking they were going to enjoy a good meal, welcomed by their new friend’s ‘wife’. Other ‘guests’ would arrive and servants would appear with dice and cards.
The gentleman would offer to teach the young man a new game on which, after initially winning, he would lose heavily and he’d be invited back to try again. These pigeons rapidly found themselves so deep in debt that they had no choice but to work for the men who had conned them.
Newly arrived girls were targeted too, but for a different purpose. Apple-squires and elderly women were paid to linger where the girls from the country arrived on carts. They’d offer them employment as a servant in a grand household or an inn, but many would instead find themselves trapped in one of the lower-class brothels, called trugging-houses. These were violent, dirty and disease-ridden, used mainly by sailors and working men who risked having their clothes and valuables stolen while they were otherwise occupied.
But Shakespeare’s London also offered high-class brothels, known as ‘nunneries’, which in addition to catering for every sexual appetite, also served as pleasure palaces offering the finest food, wine and many forms of gambling, as well as costly temptations such as recently imported opium, smuggled spirits from Europe, and the extremely intoxicating ‘double-double’ beer, outlawed by Elizabeth I.
Some of these nunneries even boasted their own a bowling green, which could be flooded in winter to make ice, and real-tennis courts. A gudgeon might easily find himself running up a huge bill for extras he didn’t know he was paying for.
King James I and his favourites were regular customers of a nunnery called The Manor in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames. In 1542, the King’s Bailiff, William Baseley, had bought the lease to the manor house, converting it into a gaming house. Later, Queen Elizabeth I’s cousin, Henry Carey, acquired it and added prostitutes.
It became the playground of the wealthy where they could enjoy gambling, food, wine and sex. But in 1603 it was acquired by a woman calling herself Donna Britannica Hollandia who was determined to turn into a very exclusive pleasure palace.
She had worked first as prostitute in Cripplegate, then as the ‘abbess’ of a nunnery at St Andrews-by-the-Wardrobe, where she had the foresight to keep a record of her influential clients’ vices. So, when she was imprisoned in Newgate for running a bawdy house, she was able to blackmail them into helping her escape.
She decided it was safer to have an establishment on the South Bank, free from the control of the city fathers. The Manor had its own extensive gardens as well as a moat, drawbridge, portcullis, and guards. In addition to her experienced ‘queans’, she had wagonloads of ‘plump virgins’ brought up from the country.
Prospective clients were obliged to present their papers and would be questioned to ensure only the better sort were admitted. She never allowed credit and everyone had to prove they could pay before being allowed in. And pay they did, for nunneries provided an entire afternoon and evening of entertainment, including music, drinking, dancing and especially gambling, which often proved the most expensive indulgence of them all.
The gaming tables in nunneries were frequently leased out by the abbesses, who received a good sum in rent without taking any of the risks of gambling. So those who rented the tables tried to cover their overheads by rigging the games.
Tables, chequers or ‘quek’ were games in which marbles or coins were rolled across a board and players bet on them landing on the white or black squares. The outcome could be rigged, by having some of the black squares raised slightly higher than the white or vice-versa. The chequer board pattern made it impossible to see this, especially in flickering candle-light.
Playing cards could be marked or pricked with a needle. Mirrors and silver witch balls, could be placed behind the player, so that someone else could see his hand. Prisoners in gaol were secretly paid to produced rigged dice for gaming houses.
Dice with a hidden cavity scooped in them were known as gourds. Fullams were dice weighted with metal on one side. A skilled sharper would invite his pigeon to examine the pair of straight dice, then palm them and use a rigged pair.
You could even make money out of selling the client ‘luck’ in the form of tiny boxes containing bees or flies. The gudgeon was told the fly was a spirit who would tell him how to bet or influence the outcome. Consulting with spirits carried a potential death sentence, but in the 1570s, Adam Squier, Master of Balliol College, Oxford, had a profitable side-line in supplying these boxes to the gullible, a scam only exposed when three men were foolish enough to complain to a magistrate they had bought a fly from him to go dicing and had lost heavily.
Throughout Elizabeth’s and James’s reigns many books and pamphlets were printed to instruct students and those newly arrived in the wicked city about the tricks and traps that they could call fall prey to, but, like Squier’s victims, few took this advice until it was too late.
Rivers of Treason by K J Maitland is published on 13 April, 2023.
It’s the third of her Jacobean crime thriller Daniel Pursglove series set in the dark world of spies, murder and treason following the failed Gunpowder Plot.
See more about this book.
Karen has written about the background to her first two Pursglove books in People-smuggling in Tudor and Jacobean times and How to serve a Tudor feast.
You may also enjoy Historia’s interview with her, too.
Images:
- Card players in a brothel by Wouter Crabeth II: National Museum in Warsaw via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Gambling in a Brothel at the time of Queen Elizabeth I from Phillip Stubbes’s Anatomy of the abuses in England in Shakspere’s youth, 1583, edited by Frederick J Furnivall: © Wellcome Collection
- A lower-class brothel or trugging-house, after Cornelis Massijs, 1580: Prentenkabinet (Leiden University Library) via Wikimedia (public domain)
- At the procuress by Jan van Bijlert, after c1625: National Museum in Warsaw via Wikimedia (public domain)
- An older woman holds a mirror over her head: Cheating at Cards by Jan Miense Molenaer: Rijksmuseum via Picryl (public domain)
