Early, Erotic and Alien: Women Dressed as Men in Late Medieval London

In the century after 1450, thirteen women incurred the ire of London’s governors by cross-dressing as men. This is a small number of women, spread over many years, from a long time ago, and their experiences are a far cry from female cross-dressers today, whether drag kings, stone butches, trans men-in-the-making, or opera singers in trouser roles. Yet these thirteen women challenge us to rethink female cross-dressing, both in the middle ages and today. We can easily recognize what these women did so long ago: they cut their hair short; they wore men’s hats; they donned men’s clothing. But why they did these things is a different matter, and so, too, is how their behaviour was understood by those who saw them.

The Cases

The appendix places these thirteen late medieval cross-dressers (cases 3–9 and 11–16) within a longer chronology of all known instances of cross-dressing in London before 1603. Most of our late medieval cases derive from legal records: City courts (7), the Bishop of London’s Commissary Court (4), Chancery (1) and the Lisle letters (1). Clerks usually recorded few details, noting merely that these women offended by wearing a ‘man’s gown’, or ‘man’s array’. Elizabeth Chekyn wore a priest’s gown in 1516, perhaps because she was having sex with priests or perhaps, as the clerk implied, to mock the priesthood (case 11); her attire offended by crossing status as well as gender. Margaret Cotton allegedly obtained her man’s gown from a tailor and her hat from a servant (case 3). Her manly hat did double duty – both hiding her long hair and suggesting masculinity. Margery Brett, Margery Smyth and Margery Tyler adopted a more direct approach; they cut their hair short in 1519 (cases 12–14), an action deemed a ‘lewd [read: vulgar] pleasure’ and ‘a great displeasure of God and an abomination to the world’. It was also not unprecedented. Just nine years earlier, Agnes Nelee’s neighbours whispered that she had whored with a friar and had her hair cut ‘like a friar’ (case 10).

These women who put on men’s clothes, wore men’s hats, and even cut their hair like men were usually noticed by London’s courts in one context only: moral oversight of sexual misbehaviour. Morality was the manifest concern of the Commissary Court (cases 4, 5, 8 and 9), and cross-dressed women brought before civic courts were also – usually indeed, primarily – accused as concubines or whores (case 3 is the sole exception).¹ Sometimes one accusation provoked copycats, as in cases 4 and 5, two near-simultaneous charges of adultery with a cross-dressed teutonica or Dutch/German woman (two different women were probably involved, as the accusations arose from parishes in different parts of the City). Sometimes cross-dressers were caught in larger civic sweeps against whores (a category that included all women of ungoverned sexuality) and bawds (intermediaries akin to today’s pimps). Trude Garard’s offence of wearing ‘man’s array’ (case 6) came to civic attention during such a campaign in spring 1473, and what mattered to the men who judged her was that she, like dozens of others punished that April and May, was a ‘common strumpet’; her cross-dressing was a side issue. Brett, Smyth and Tyler had somewhat similar experiences when they were indicted, along with Elizabeth Thomson, as ‘strumpets and common harlots of their bodies’ during a royally mandated crackdown in 1519 (cases 12–14).² Save for the piquant requirement (doubtless prompted by their shorn heads) that they be led from prison wearing men’s bonnets, their punishment matched that of their co-defendant and, indeed, prostitutes generally. Even the one case recovered from a non-legal source – Alice Wolfe, reported in a private letter as having escaped from the Tower wearing men’s clothes (case 15) – was refracted through her reputation for whoredom. She had earlier been publicly accused (in the parliamentary act that attainted her for murder...