11 December 2024
The arrest of Eleanor Rykener
Exactly 630 years ago today, a woman called Eleanor Rykener found herself in trouble. On the night of 11 December 1394, on Soper’s Lane off Cheapside, she had agreed to go into a stall with a client named John Britby, having first demanded an unspecified amount of money for her services. Medieval London’s anti-prostitution laws made this a hazardous venture, but Eleanor was an experienced sex worker, and must have concluded that Britby’s money was worth the risk. Unfortunately, they were discovered by city officials while engaging in ‘that detestable, unmentionable, and ignominious vice’, and were hauled up before the Mayor of London for questioning. It was during the questioning that Eleanor, still wearing the dress she had been arrested in, was revealed to have been born John Rykener. We might describe her, in modern terms, as a transgender woman. Eleanor’s remarkable story is preserved in a single document: the record of her questioning held in the London Archives, currently on display in our exhibition Medieval Women: In Their Own Words.
‘Calling [herself] Eleanor’; the account of Eleanor Rykener and her arrest; London, 1395: The London Archives, Plea and Memoranda Roll A34, Membrane 2.
The manuscript and its account are not immediately eye-catching—a dense block of unadorned, bureaucratic text written on a parchment roll, bookended by many other accounts—and, indeed, it went almost entirely unnoticed for several centuries. This is partially due to deliberate censorship: a 1932 summary of the Plea and Memoranda Rolls completely obscured Eleanor’s gender-nonconformity, describing the case as an ‘examination of two men charged with immorality’. The truth of the case was eventually uncovered by Ruth Mazo Karras and David Lorenzo Boyd in 1995. Since then, it has generated a huge amount of scholarship and popular interest, pivoting around fascinating and complex questions: what does it mean to describe a fourteenth-century individual as ‘trans’? Was Eleanor’s supposed ‘crime’ sodomy, sex work, gender nonconformity, or something else entirely? And—perhaps the most conspicuous gap in the record—what happened to her after this one recorded moment of her questioning?
It’s not possible to answer all those questions today, but we can focus on what we do know of Eleanor’s story, as recorded by a court clerk. Even though her narrative was doubtless filtered through the preconceptions and prejudices of the court that sought to judge her, it remains one of the most detailed accounts we have of a medieval sex worker in something close to her own words.
Eleanor’s early life—the period in which she was, presumably, still known as ‘John’—is completely obscure to us. Her story in the record begins at some unspecified point in time before her arrest with Britby, when a woman named Anna, also a sex worker, ‘taught’ Eleanor how to have sex ‘in the manner of a woman’. It is worth noting that, while the courtroom must have been dominated by men, Eleanor begins her account with a moment of intimacy, knowledge-sharing, and perhaps even friendship between herself and another woman. This theme of feminine community continues when Rykener describes herself being ‘dressed in women’s clothing’ and employed in sex work by a certain bawd called Elizabeth Brouderer (‘Embroiderer’).
Joan of Arc chases away a group of sex workers from her army camp, from Martial d’Auvergne’s Vigiles de Charles VII: Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 5054, f. 60v
Eleanor practiced more than just sex work with Elizabeth. It may well have been in her house that she picked up the embroidery skills she put to work while she was living in Oxford. Eleanor’s employment history—she worked for stints as an embroideress and barmaid alongside sex work—indicates that her feminine self-presentation was not confined to sexual role-playing. She positioned herself, and was apparently read, as a woman in almost all aspects of her daily life, including in the courtroom, where she insistently ‘call[ed herself] Eleanor’ and retained her feminine attire. This cannot have been easy. Existing as a woman—let alone a trans woman—in the world of medieval England was often a gruelling business. The fact that Eleanor chose to do so suggests that there were reasons, known only to her, because of which she felt more comfortable as a woman. A trans identification, or something like it, is one plausible explanation for the shape of Eleanor’s life.
The Assyrian king Sardanapalus dressed in women’s clothing spinning silk with a group of noble women, from a 15th-century copy of Valerius Maximus’ Facta et Dicta Memorabilia: Harley MS 4375/3, f. 179r
There are still more complexities to Eleanor’s story. While she had sex ‘as a woman’ with several named and unnamed male clients (she preferred taking on priests, she explains, because they tended to pay better), she also had sex ‘as a man’ with ‘many nuns’ and ‘many women both married and unmarried’: too many, apparently, for Eleanor to keep count. Several aspects of this part of the story are unclear. Were the women also clients, or did Eleanor have sex with them without financial motive? Did she genuinely desire these women—was she possibly, to use more modern terms, bisexual or queer?
We can never know the answer to these, and countless other, questions about Eleanor. As mentioned above, this is the only known surviving record of her life, and will remain so, barring another remarkable discovery in the archives. We don’t even know if she was found guilty of any crime or faced punishment. What we do have is a glimpse into the life of an exceptional, resourceful woman making her way in the medieval world, one of many on display in our exhibition Medieval Women: In Their Own Words.
The roll bearing the account of Eleanor’s case on display
To see Eleanor Rykener’s account in person, visit our exhibition Medieval Women: In Their Own Words, on show at the British Library from 25 October 2024 to 2 March 2025. You can purchase your tickets online now.
This exhibition is made possible with support from Joanna and Graham Barker, Unwin Charitable Trust, and Cockayne – Grants for the Arts: a donor advised fund held at the London Community Foundation.
Rowan Wilson
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