Chapter 1 "Scolding Impudent Slut": Fishwives and the Gendering of Billingsgate

In Nathan Bailey's An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721), "Billingsgate" is defined as "a scolding impudent Slut."1 Billingsgate was a ward, port, and harbor on the north bank of the Thames between London Bridge and the Tower of London that was renowned for the sounds, smells, and scenes of its famous market. Rather than simply identifying a specific area of London, however, Bailey's definition genders Billingsgate as female, and not simply any female but one with a loud voice, defiant attitude, and scandalous sexual proclivities. This definition encapsulates the result of a literary trend in which early modern authors associated Billingsgate with a particular group of non-elite, working women-the fishwives who hawked their wares on the streets of this ward. For over one hundred years, a variety of literary genres depict a link between Billingsgate and fishwives, a construction that linguistically impacts the definition of "billingsgate," demonstrating the significance of the affiliation in the early modern cultural imagination. I argue in this chapter that representations of fishwives, reacting to and enabling certain cultural forces in London, circumscribed actual fishwives in Billingsgate, an unofficial fish market and disreputable London area, in order to purify the official fish markets from the presence of these working women. In doing so, these works contributed to a social environment that inhibited the street trade of these laborers, furthering their cultural, economic, and spatial marginalization. The inequities fishwives faced, as Soja theorizes, were thus enmeshed in the geographical areas in which they worked.

This chapter details how the name of a London place, Billingsgate, was linguistically aligned with fishwives and then evolved in meaning to the modern definition, "scurrilous vituperation, violent abuse."2 As Tuan contends, place can be transformed, through the power of words, of naming.3 This London neighborhood, imaginatively linked to fishwives through rhetorical tropes, first became defined through their scolding habits and then transformed linguistically to the generalized habit itself. The most prominent study of marketplace language, or "billingsgate," is Mikhail Bakhtin's in Rabelais and His World. Bakhtin explains that billingsgate "became a reservoir in which various speech patterns excluded from official intercourse could freely accumulate." He argues that "these genres were filled with the carnival spirit, transformed their primitive verbal functions, acquired a general tone of laughter, and became, as it were, so many sparks of the carnival bonfire which renews the world."4 Though Bakhtin captures the carnivalesque essence of low, unofficial marketplace language, he presents a rather utopian view of its potential and disregards the underlying economic injustices that affected market workers and their circumstances. Moreover, his analysis does not address Billingsgate as an actual locale in early modern London or the spatial practices and ideologies that underpinned this market. This chapter makes a crucial intervention in this respect by outlining the evolution of the word "Billingsgate," from London place, to its gendered definition of "scolding impudent Slut," and then to its broader meaning of scolding rhetoric, which, I argue, is the linguistic consequence of the neighborhood's connection to fishwives.

Early modern authors align fishwives with the Billingsgate Market by positing an intersecting correlation, as Bailey's definiton of "scolding impudent Slut" would suggest, between their itinerant fish selling and 1) their proverbial scolding nature, a reputation that likely stemmed from the loud hawking by which they peddled their wares; 2) their perceived illegitimate urban knowledge (often pitted against classical male education) which they acquired through their work; 3) their presumed promiscuity, a characterization to which their public presence on London streets made them vulnerable; and 4) their disreputable appearances and habits, another by-product of their street work. As such, the circumstances of their trade, the fulcrum for these stereotypical associations, certainly had an impact on depictions of fishwives and are thus outlined in detail in the next section of this chapter. After the historical context, the subsequent sections analyze literary representations of fishwives, thematically organized by the stereotypical associations of noise, sexuality, and filth. I specifically examine Ben Jonson's Epicene, or The Silent Woman (1616), George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston's Eastward Ho! (1605), two ballads from the period, "Billingsgate, or the School of Rhetoric" and "The Bloody Battle at Billingsgate, Beginning with a Scolding bout between two young Fish-women, Doll and Kate" (1675-1696?), Donald Lupton's pamphlet, London and the Countrey Carbonadoed and Quartred into Severall Characters (1632), Edward Ward's satirical prose work, The London-Spy (1698-1700), and literary works that allude to the "Boss of Billingsgate," which was both a prominent water fountain and notorious fishwife. This diverse literary sample reached a wide variety of Londoners, from crowds on London streets to more elite audiences, confirming the wide scope of this gendered place narrative.

The fishwives' exclusion from official London fish markets triggered their literary association with the Billingsgate Market. The Billingsgate/fishwife connection became what Stallybrass and White have called a "domain of transgression," whereby the social order could legitimate itself.5 Billingsgate was the central port of London by the late sixteenth century, according to John Stow.6 However, Billingsgate Market was not recognized as a legitimate fish market until 1699, when an Act of Parliament made it a "free and open market" for the selling of fish.7 The three official places designated for the retail sale of fish were Old Fish Street, New Fish Street (or Fish Street Hill), and the stalls at the Stocks, markets that were controlled by and restricted to citizen fishmongers exclusively.8 By the end of the sixteenth century fishwives could resell fish in the Billingsgate Market, so these women had an actual presence there throughout the seventeeth century. This place, in contrast to the indications of literary depictions, was not their sole site for business. They thronged other markets and streets throughout London, as historical accounts demonstrate. It is reasonable to assume, then, that literary works reacted to and enabled a prevailing ideological order that consigned fishwives' trade to the fringes of the fish industry, cementing social and economic injustice into the fabric of London geography.

The relegation of fishwives to Billingsgate in the cultural consciousness figuratively kept them from the official London fish markets, which undoubtedly facilitated their actual exclusion. As geographer David Sibley observes in Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West, there is a "history of imaginary geographies which cast minorities, 'imperfect' people, and a list of others who are seen to pose a threat to the dominant group in society as polluting bodies or folk devils who are then located 'elsewhere.'"9 Exclusion occurs when groups create boundaries "between clean and dirty, ordered and disordered, 'us' and 'them,'" effectively purifying geographical space.10 Yet such "imaginary geographies" do not simply locate fishwives in Billingsgate, since this London place itself takes on disreputable characteristics by virtue of the association. Through their gendered place narratives, authors consign fishwife trade to an unofficial London fish market and then scapegoat these workers as the cause of the place's decline and illegitimacy. The circular interplay of historical circumstances and discursive responses instituted exclusionary methods to underpin the unjust conditions of fishwives and the London places where they worked.

In order to circumscribe fishwives in Billingsgate, early modern authors figuratively link these female laborers to this place through metaphors of bodily incontinence. They rely on what Tim Cresswell has labeled "metaphors of displacement," which are figurative devices and political tools that "tell us what and who belong where."11 In their depictions authors employ metaphors of noise, sexuality, and filth to inscribe fishwives' strident tongues and foul bodies onto Billingsgate topography. Collectively, these associations signal a deeper, more fundamental anxiety regarding these laborers-the fact that they congregated in groups without men, and did so in public places such as the market, the tavern, and the street, no less. They reveal that fishwives, operating at the center of an early modern counterpublic, enacted public, performative modes of resistance to dominant political and economic structures. Counterpublics, as outlined in the introduction in this book, are self-organized groups of strangers, associated through participation alone, who circulate forms of discourse. According to Warner, counterpublics "mark themselves off unmistakably from any general or dominant public. Their members are understood to be not merely...