“To What Bawdy House Doth Your Maister Belong?”: Barbers, Bawds, and Vice in the Early Modern London Barbershop

Abstract

In early modern London, barbers—who represented only a small fraction of a multifarious array of health practitioners operating in and around the city by the beginning of the seventeenth century— competed in a medical marketplace that historians have suggested was highly sensitive to patient demand.¹ Margaret Pelling has argued, moreover, that to compete in that market, English barber-surgeons were routinely engaged in considerable occupational diversity, activity we should regard “not… as an indication that there was a low level of demand for medical advice” but, on the contrary, as confirmation that there was “consistently high demand for medical services …probably at every level of society, and irrespective of the usual criteria of effectiveness.”² By the beginning of the seventeenth century, as the number of Londoners diagnosed with venereal disease rose, unprecedented numbers of the urban sick began to demand treatments and the market, in turn, responded to meet that rising demand.³ Offering London’s male population congregation, fraternization, and fellowship, together with a variety of medical and cosmetic services and products, the early modern barber and his shop functioned as cultural palimpsests that contradictorily signaled both pleasure and pain, health and contagion, licit and illicit activity.⁴