The Hambleden Brothel
The Oxyrhyncus papyrii have proved to be one of the most informative sources for information on daily life in Egypt around the time of Christ. It has been estimated that 70% of all Greek literary papyrii so far discovered come from Oxyrhyncus - and only 10% of the Oxyrhyncus papyrii are literary! Personal and official accounts, tax returns, invoices, receipts, correspondence on every conceivable subject, certificates and government licences, even census returns, have all been found on what was the town's rubbish heap. Many of the discarded papyrii were doubly valuable because they had been reused: for example, one document that was found had a farm's accounts on one side and on the other a section from Homer, apparently written out by a student!
Some of the documents found are unique: there are plays by Menander that were otherwise known only by name; there are fragments of the Gospel of Thomas, one of the apocryphal Christian texts; there is even an arrest warrent made out against a Christian. So far seventy-one volumes of translated papryii have been published and there are fourteen volumes online and there are more to come. A new volume is published every year and there are no signs of the supply giving out.
Amid all these fascinating snippets of information, however, there is one private letter which never fails to fill me with horror when I read it. A certain Hilarion, who has gone to Alexandria in search of work, writes to his wife (whom he addresses respectfully as "sister") and contains instructions about the forthcoming birth of their child.
Hilarion to Alis his sister, heartiest greetings, and to my dear Berous and Apollonarion. Know that we are still even now in Alexandria. Do not worry if when all the others return I remain in Alexandria. I beg and beseech of you to take care of the little child, and as soon as we receive wages I will send them to you. If - good luck to you! - you bear offspring, if it is a male, let it live; if it is a female, expose it. You told Aphrodisias, 'Do not forget me.' How can I forget you? I beg you therefore not to worry.
The 29th year of Caesar, Pauni 23.
The casual way in which he instructs his wife to dispose of the baby if it is a girl seems incredible to modern Western ears. Exposure simply meant taking the baby out to some convenient place - usually the rubbish dump - and leaving it there. Usually the ubiquitous pariah dogs would make short work of it, but if the baby was left away from them, there were vultures or ants or even wild animals that would dispose of the unwanted little one.
Jews proudly claim the exposure of infants was unknown in ancient Israel (though child sacrifice certainly took place during periods of apostasy) but there is a horrifying account of an abandoned girl child who was rescued, given as a parable by the prophet Ezekiel.
This is what the Sovereign Lord says to Jerusalem: "Your ancestry and birth were in the land of the Canaanites; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. On the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to make you clean, nor were you rubbed with salt or wrapped in cloths. No one looked on you with pity or had compassion enough to do any of these things for you. Rather, you were thrown out into the open field, for on the day you were born you were despised. Then I passed by and saw you kicking about in your blood, and as you lay there in your blood I said to you, 'Live!'"
Ezekiel 16:3-6
The story goes on to tell how the rescuer later fell in love with the girl he had saved and to lament that she did not show proper gratitude but instead took advantage of his absence to have a series of lovers. The point is, however, that the situation described must have been familiar enough to the Jews who were listening to Ezekiel to be meaningful.
The problem was - and is - that girls are an expense while boys can be expected to contribute to the family income. Having to provide a girl with a suitable dowery can be a crippling expense to a poor family, so pity the man who has several daughters! In addition, a son will carry on your name and inherit your property whereas a girl will take another family's name and transfer your property to others.
There were, however, many reasons for getting rid of a baby apart from its sex or its potential cost and archaeologists working near the village of Hambleden in Buckinghamshire may have stumbled across another one.
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| A view of the excavations at Yewden Villa in 1912. The site is now under a wheat field. |
The Roman site known as the Yewden Villa was first excavated in 1912 by Alfred Heneage Cocks, a naturalist and archaeologist and curator of the Buckinghamshire County Museum, who duly reported his discoveries in 1921. Some three hundred boxes of photographs, drawings, artefacts (including pottery and bones) were deposited in the County Museum along with his meticulous written report and, like most such things, were safely stored down in the basement and forgotten about.
The report was recently rediscovered and the person who idly read through it was astounded by one fact: Cocks found 97 babies. That in itself wouldn't be so surprising. Infant mortality was pretty high in Roman times and a large villa might indeed suffer 97 baby deaths over its lifetime. What was surprising was the fact that Cocks had detailed the find spot for every burial and instead of being interred in a common cemetery, these babies were buried all over the place - beneath walls, in courtyards, sometimes close to other burials and sometimes all on their own.
The second fact was that measurements of the bones indicated that all the babies had died at around 40 weeks after conception - in other words, very soon after birth. If these were natural deaths, the ages of the babies would have varied, some living to several years of age before succumbing to one of the many childhood diseases that were around. This appeared to indicate that the babies had been killed, rather than dying of natural causes.
The Yewden villa was an imposing two-storey building only a couple of hundred yards from the Thames. Coins and imported pottery found during the excavations point to a place of wealth and the remains of writing tablets and sylae point to a degree of culture. Cocks naturally concluded that the building was the residence of a wealthy Roman and his family. The discovery of so many babies killed at birth is, however, pointing to an entirely different source of wealth.
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| The pretty village of Hambleden lies just three-quarters of a mile from present course of the River Thames. |
Hambledon is not far from London, only a day's journey by boat, close enough for it to have been an exclusive country resort. Its position on the Thames meant that it was on a main route for travel, so it is not inconceivable to picture wealthy Romans coming here to relax away from the noise and bustle of busy Londinium. Verulamium, another important Roman town, was even closer. However while Verulamium had its own amphitheatre, what - apart from clean air and healthy water - might have been the attractions of Hambledon?
The answer is apallingly simple: girls.
Dr Jill Eyers, who is leading the reinvestigation of Yewden, is in no doubt on the subject. "The only explanation you keep coming back to is that it's got to be a brothel," she says. Not only would the prostitutes be more likely to conceive, owing to the nature of their work, but there would be strong economic motives for disposing of the results of a pregnancy as quickly as possible so that the mother could get back to work!
We know that the Romans were virtually amoral as far as sex was concerned. The findings at Pompeii show how large a part sex played in the pleasures on offer in a resort town and there is no reason to think that the Romans in Britain were any different from their cousins in Italy. We also know that the Romans did not consider children below about two years of age as fully human (rather as some modern moralists argue that a foetus is not fully human).
Putting it all together, we have the picture of this large building either being or becoming a brothel around the close of the second century AD, perhaps as the villa fell on hard times. Clients coming here would be entertained with imported wines and foods, encouraged to spend their money on games of chance, and finally treated to the very best of native and imported women, slave girls still young enough to bear children.
It wasn't until AD 374 that the practice of infanticide was banned, chiefly because of Christian concerns over the sanctity of life - a concern that leads many Christians today to oppose abortion. Today we find it incredible that a father could so casually condemn his baby daughter to a horrible death, but there is one final twist to the tale.
Dr Eyers is working with Dr Simon Mays, a skeletal biologist at English Heritage's Centre for Archaeology. As well as measuring the length of arm and leg bones to ascertain the baby's age at death, Dr Mays is also intending to conduct DNA testing to determine the sex of the babies and whether they are related. There is the possibility that here at Yewden it was boy babies who were disposed of and the girls kept. Female children could be added to the staff of the brothel at a horrifyingly young age.
Petronius, in the "Satyricon" tells of a mock marriage celebrated in a brothel between a customer and a little girl of seven. One of the onlookers remarks that she cannot remember when she lost her virginity, she was so young when it happened.
It is no wonder that St Paul and other early Christians were so loud in their condemnations of the immorality they saw about them. In his letter to the Corinthians - another town that was a byword for immorality - St Paul exclaims,
Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
1 Corinthians 6:9-11
Christians are often pilloried as prudes and kill-joys, but there is much to be said for the "Christian" virtues of chastity and faithfulness. A prominent Christian in Britain, Mary Whitehouse, attracted considerable opprobrium from the trendy lefties for her crusade to keep sex and violence out of broadcasting. One of those who led her critics was Dame Joan Bakewell who was at the time married to Michael Bakewell, head of plays at the BBC.
Mrs Whitehouse wanted nastiness of all kinds kept off the television. Within nastiness she included sex. She wanted us all to be satisfied with life just as she knew it, happily married to Ernest with three sons and a teaching job in a Midlands school.
Frankly, it does not seem a terribly bad thing to want - a happy marriage, happy children doing well at school, a respectable job, a loving and faithful husband - and Dame Joan has come to realise it. As she wrote in an article in Britain's Radio Times in June, 2010,
The Pill allowed women to make choices for themselves. Of course, that meant the risk of making the wrong choice. But we all hoped girls would grow to handle the new freedoms wisely. Then everything came to be about money – so now sex is about money, too. Why else sexualise the clothes of little girls, run TV channels of naked wives, have sex magazines edging out the serious stuff on newsagents' shelves? It's money that's corrupted us and women are being used and are even collaborating. I never thought I would hear myself say as much, but I'm with Mrs Whitehouse on this one.
Virtue may not be as much "fun" as sin, but it brings happiness in its wake - and it keeps the babies alive.
modern Western ears Regrettably, many modern eastern countries would not find it at all strange. The leading killers of baby girls these days are India and China, though these days the comparatively sophisticated method of abortion is used rather than exposure or infanticide. Although we rightly condemn this, before we wax too indignant it behoves us to remember that modern Western countries abort thousands of healthy babies every year. All infanticide is wrong (with the sole exception of when the mother's physical life is in danger) and being impartial as to whether you are killing a male child or a female one does not, in my opinion, do much to mitigate the evil. Return
girls are an expense I was amused to read a report recently which estimated that a girl costs a modern family about £200 per month more than a boy of the same age. The extra cost was made up of clothes (more expensive and more of them), cosmetics, extra pocket money, extra lessons in things such as ballet and horse riding, and, of course, phone bills! I don't think the cost of the wedding was factored in. Return
a brothel Some have objected to Dr Eyers' conclusion. English Heritage describes the site as:
A Romano-British homestead built before the mid-1st century and occupied until the end of the 4th, comprising four buildings with an enclosure wall. The principal dwelling house, 92 x 82 ft, was of the double corridor type; the large number of furnaces found suggest that the establishment was engaged in corn production on a large scale. ... An extensive complex of buildings and fields arranged alongside a paved road. It seems likely that this was more than a villa complex: traces of at least 21 buildings have been recorded, all with stone foundations.
They also point out that the Romans had access to various contraceptives, the most popular of which was a herb called "silphium". Perhaps most cogent of all is the observation that the "brothel period", if we may call it that, lasted for nearly two centuries - in other words, that a baby was buried about once every two years.
Unfortunately the two arguments tend to cancel each other out. If the Romans had effective contraceptives then a pregnancy every two years is not excessive. The conclusion that the building was a brothel is based, not so much on the number of burials nor their frequency, but on the fact that the babies were all about the same age (bone measuring in such young infants is accurate to without about two weeks) and also on the manner of their burial.
Roman cemeteries were all outside the town; in fact, it was against the law to bury a person within the urban area. If these babies had been buried openly, they would surely have been buried in a cemetery and we would find not only a range of infant ages, but also adults buried in the same place. Burial within a building points to secrecy. In addition, while baby burials are not unknown in Roman villas, the number of burials at Yewden far exceeds those found anywhere else.
Others have pointed out that exposed babies would not be buried but left out in the open to be disposed of by wild animals. While this is true, the argument assumes that this was the invariable practice when disposing of an unwanted baby. In fact some of the bones bear cut marks, which would be consistent with a knife or dagger being used to kill the baby and others may have been buried alive or smothered and then buried.
A second suggestion is that Yewden Villa was a Roman supply depot, which would explain the large number of writing tablets and iron stylae found. If there was a large number of slave women employed in the depot, the desire to keep them working might explain the infanticide. Although attractive, in my opinion this is a less tenable theory - particularly when it is suggested that the women may have been the scribes and therefore too important to allow time off. Literate women were a rareity in Roman times, particularly among the working and slave classes.
Finally, although the villa may have been built as a working farm, change of use was not unknown in the Roman world. A number of the large villas in Pompeii were divided up into appartments for poorer families or into workshops and shops. It is not impossible, therefore, for the villa to have had a change of use and farming may even have been a profitable sideline, providing food for the staff and fodder for the customers' animals.
Thus although there are arguments against Dr Eyers' conclusion, on the whole I think the evidence supports her. Return
© Kendall K. Down 2010
