“Winchester Geese”

This is one of the most fantastic pieces of pottery ever. Dating to about 1590, it depicts three women changing into geese, with the label “Winchester Geese” at the bottom of the platter. The shapes surrounding the geese might look like rounded diamonds, or alternatively, like vulvas. Give me a minute, and you’re probably going to agree with me that they represent the latter.

The “Winchester Geese” refer to the prostitutes of Medieval London who lived on the Southbank. They were named such in part because they were under the legal jurisdiction of the Bishop of Winchester. In Medieval England, as in other parts of Medieval Europe, prostitution was not only legal but could be a money-making enterprise for those powerful enough to collect revenue from brothels — like the Bishop of Winchester. The “geese” part of the epithet might have come from the white breasts of the sex workers that they flashed at potential customers.

It’s even known who made this piece of slipware: Nan the Potter — she worked not only in pottery but as a prostitute at the Southwark London brothel called the Cardinal’s Cap, named after the Bishop of Winchester.

The Winchester Geese, like other sex workers, night have been allowed to carry on their trade with the Church justifying it as a way to keep the purer women (read: those with more money or proper connections) from having extra-marital sex. However, the Church didn’t go so far as to grant these prostitutes a burial in a consecrated graveyard — they were not in communion with the Church, and their remains thus belonged elsewhere.

In fact, Cross Bones Graveyard in London today has a memorial for all of the Medieval sex workers, as well as later people considered outcast, whose remains were deposited there. In 1598, a surveyor of the city named John Stow wrote that “I have heard ancient men of good credit report, that these single women were forbidden the rights of the Church, so long as they continued that sinful life, and were excluded from Christian burial, if they were not reconciled before their death. And therefore there was a plot of ground, called the single women’s churchyard, appointed for them, far from the parish church”