Free If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley Page B

time’. In 1763, James Boswell exceeded him with a clever actress/prostitute named Louisa: ‘a more voluptuous night I never enjoyed. Five times was I fairly lost in rapture … I was somewhat proud of my performance.’ On this occasion they were in a bed, but it’s only fair to point out that the lanes and fields were far more attractive to medieval and Tudor young people who lived in otherwise communal spaces. The fact that early bedrooms were shared could certainly inhibit romance. The seventeenth-centuryAbigail Willey of Oyster River, New England, would stop her husband ‘coming to her’ when she didn’t feel like it by making her two children sleep in the middle of the bed rather than taking their usual position at the sides.
    We don’t hear Harrold’s wife’s or Louisa’s side of the story, and there’s a widely held notion that the church has always encouraged the missionary position as it kept a woman in her rightly subordinate place. But Harrold would have sex with his wife both in the ‘old fashion’ (missionary position) and the ‘new fashion’ (her on top), the latter especially when she was pregnant. And in fact, pre-modern female sexuality was considered to be powerful, formidable and valuable.
    Medieval women who considered their husbands to be unsatisfactory could always pray at the shrine of St Uncumber in Westminster Abbey to be rid of them. (‘If the man’s member is always found useless and as if dead, the couple are well able to be separated.’) Alison, Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’ in The Canterbury Tales , devoured no less than five husbands in her attempt to satiate her sexual appetite, and male impotence is no modern bedroom problem. Sir Tristram in Sir Thomas Malory’s King Arthur and his Knights could not perform with his wife because of intrusive memories of his former lover, Isolde. As soon as Isolde popped into his mind, he became all ‘dismayed, and other cheer made he none’. And having spoken of Henry VIII’s impotence was one of the accusations made of Anne Boleyn at her trial in 1536.
    Medieval women were considered to have a right to an orgasm. As the author of the thirteenth-century Romance of the Rose put it, ‘one should not abandon the other, nor should either cease his voyage until they reach port together’. One fourteenth-century Oxford doctor recommended that frustrated sisters should simply do it for themselves: a woman should get her midwife to lubricate her fingers with oil, insert them into the vagina and ‘move them vigorously about’.
    Yet society also condoned a long-standing division of labour between a mistress (provider of pleasure) and a wife (mother of children), and only a minority made a successful transition from the former to the financial security of the latter. Anne Boleyn was a notable exception, and did so by making Henry VIII wait six years before consummating their relationship. She allowed him addictive tasters along the way. As he wrote to Anne when they were apart, Henry was often lost in daydreams about her: ‘wishing myself … in my sweetheart’s arms, whose pretty duckies I trust shortly to kiss’. Once Anne was married, though, she had to put up with the occasional infidelity, especially during her pregnancies, when she was curtly told by her husband to ‘shut her eyes and endure as her betters had done’.
    To modern eyes, a striking emphasis was placed upon a woman’s sexual pleasure in medieval times. This was because in medical terms the medieval female body was thought of as simply a weaker version of the male, a kind of mirror image of it, with the sexual organs placed inside rather than outside. The female orgasm, therefore, was thought essential to conception, just as the male orgasm was. (At the same time, Tudor medicine books contained remedies for complaints affecting a man’s ‘womb’.) The idea that a female orgasm led to conception was put like this in the seventeenth century: if a man feels