Holland's Leaguer

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Holland's Leaguer or the Paris Garden mansion

Holland's Leaguer was the name of a Dutch - English brothel in London between 1603 and January 1632. It is considered the most famous brothel in 17th century England.

The establishment

The Holland's Leaguer was a high-priced establishment, which King James I and George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham also counted among its customers. The brothel was run by Elizabeth Bess Holland. (She should not be confused with the mistress of the same name, who died in 1547, of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk .)

She was probably married to a man from the Holland family, a notorious underworld clan during the time of Elisabeth I. At the time, it was common to assume that you would meet mostly Dutch prostitutes there. Due to the encounters between English soldiers and Dutch prostitutes (or normal love affairs) in the Eighty Years' War , Dutch women were considered the epitome of sexual freedom - comparable in this country to the popular depictions of a relevant nature from Scandinavia in the early 1970s or "French love" over the centuries before. The name “Leaguer” ( field camp ) was therefore deliberately chosen. The interior was based on the Belgian model of the Schoen Majken establishment in Brussels . There was luxurious furnishings, good food, clean sheets and modern sanitary facilities.

place

The Holland's Leaguer was located in a former manor in Paris Garden , Southwark , near the Thames . This district was outside the jurisdiction of the City of London . The previous owner, Francis Langley , a London fabric checker and loan shark (1548–1602), built the highly acclaimed Swan Theater there alongside residential houses . The property, once part of the possessions of the Templar monastery , and subsequently the Order of Malta of Bermondsey , came into royal and then private ownership after the English monasteries were dissolved . It was below the high water level and the manor house was in a corresponding state. John Carey, 3rd Baron Hunsdon , bought it after Langley's death and leased it to Bess Holland in 1603. It was surrounded by a moat, had a small drawbridge and a portcullis . Henry VIII banned the prostitutes' houses on the Bankside in the 1540s , but this ban did not last long.

London apprentices

The brothel was at the beginning of 1631 to talk than on Shrove Tuesday was stormed (Engl. Shrove Tuesday) by the apprentices of London and devastated. Shrove Tuesday is a day off for the young trainees that they like to spend wandering around, all too often causing devastating mischief. The Cockpit Theater also fell victim to this dubious custom in 1617 . Brothels were a recurring target of the rampaging apprentices.

closure

In December 1631 King Charles I ordered the house to be closed and sent soldiers to carry out the order. Bess Holland pulled up the little bridge over the moat. As a result, the soldiers are said to have fallen into the water and were also doused with excrement by the employees of the house. The brothel was cordoned off and besieged for a month and finally closed in January 1632. Holland managed to escape and she opened a new brothel elsewhere.

The mansion was called “beggars hall” (“beggar's home”) from 1688 to 1699, which indicates that it was a poor quarter. In 1821, several very old Christchurch parish residents remembered that when they were children there was a raised area in a rectangular shape called Holland's Leaguer , adjacent to Holland Street and neighboring houses, surrounded by tidal flooding of a nearby sluice (" Cat's Dock "). It was accessed via a series of old and rotted stone steps and found a house and wasteland strewn with garbage.

Contemporary representations

The siege of Holland’s Leaguer was depicted in the pamphlet Holland’s Leaguer by Nicholas Goodman. Likewise in the play of the same name by Shackerley Marmion . Laurence Price's ballad “News from Holland's Leaguer” also deals with the famous establishment on the banks of the Thames.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Siobhán Higgins (ed.): Britain's Bourse: cultural and literary exchanges between England and the Low Countries in the early modern era (c. 1580-1620) . 2017 (English, PDF, 2.2 MB ). ,
  2. ^ A b Edward Walford: Southwark: Winchester House and Barclay's Brewery . In: Old and New London: Volume 6 . British History Online, London 1878, pp. 29-44.
  3. ↑ a b c Victoria E Price (Ed.): Holland's Leaguer. In: Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work . Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006, ISBN 978-0-313-32968-5 (English).
  4. ↑ a b Today in London's immoral history: 'Holland's Leaguer', notorious Bankside brothel, resists siege by constables, 1632. ( en ) January 26, 2017. Retrieved September 16, 2019.
  5. ↑ Vill you not stay in my bosom tonight, love? . Retrieved September 16, 2019.
  6. ^ A b Anne K. Kaler (Ed.): The Picara: From Hera to Fantasy Heroine . Popular Press, 1991, ISBN 978-0-87972-516-7 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  7. ↑ Wolf-Dieter Roth: Hot films from the cool north in Telepolis on November 11, 2006
  8. ^ Joseph Q. Adams, Shakespearean Playhouses: A History of English Theaters from the Beginnings to the Restoration . Cornell University, 1917; Pages 160-180.
  9. ↑ Conspiracies, whorehouses, and flying horses ( s ) 8. January 2014. Accessed September 16 of 2019.
  10. ↑ Gordon Williams (Ed.): A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature: Three Volume Set Volume I AF Volume II GP Volume III QZ . A&C Black, 2001, ISBN 978-0-485-11393-8 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  11. ↑ Jean Elizabeth Howard (ed.): Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642 . University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-8122-3978-2 , pp. 27 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  12. ^ Hyder Edward Rollins (ed.): A Pepysian Garland: Black-letter Broadside Ballads of the Years 1595-1639, Chiefly from the Collection of Samuel Pepys . CUP Archive ,, 1922, p. 490 (English, limited preview in Google Book search).
  13. ↑ Thomas St Nicholas (Ed.): At Vacant Hours . A&C Black, 2002, ISBN 978-1-902459-32-5 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  14. ^ Sian Rees (ed.): Moll: The Life and Times of Moll Flanders . Pimlico, 2012, ISBN 978-1-84595-193-1 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  15. ^ Nicholas Goodmann (Ed.): Hollands leaguer: A critical Edition . Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-158825-4 , p. 9 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  16. ↑ Philip Norman: The Accounts of the overseers of the poor of Paris Garden , in Surrey Archaeological Collections, Issue 16, published 1901, online as PDF 30MB (with map)
  17. ^ William Herbert and Robert Wilkinson: Londina Illustrata , London 1808-1823
  18. ↑ Patricia Fumerton, Anita Guerrini, Kris McAbee (Eds.): Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800 . Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2010, ISBN 978-0-7546-6248-8 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).

Coordinates: 51 ° 30 ′ 28.5 "  N , 0 ° 6 ′ 11.9"  W.