The Reformation and the Red Light
Nicholas Orme shows how Catholic and Protestant reformers alike campaigned rigorously against medieval attitudes to prostitution which were far less restrictive and oppressive than is often supposed.
Travellers crossing southwards over London Bridge in medieval or in Tudor times, left behind the busy commercial and respectable part of the capital. Once on the South Bank, they entered the notorious district of Southwark. This was the traditional location of various dissolute and disreputable activities which the City did not tolerate within its own walls. Here were the infamous prisons of the Marshalsea and the King's Bench, the bear gardens, and (later on) those houses of ill-fame, the public theatres – the rendezvous for thieves, horse- stealers, coney-catchers and contrivers of treason, as the Corporation of London described them in 1597.
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