Moll cutpurse biography

On Christmas Day 1611, a woman named Mary Frith – better known to her contemporaries by the nickname Moll Cutpurse – was arrested at St Paul’s Cathedral for a whole host of ‘unwomanly acts’: she drank, she smoked, she swore, and worst of all, she walked the streets of London dressed in men’s clothes.

The result was a charge of public immorality, and a punishment designed to humiliate and correct her: she would do public penance in a white sheet, at the open-air pulpit of St Paul’s Cross within the cathedral grounds, where all could bear witness to her forced repentance and the symbolic purification of her soul.

There was just one problem.

The ecclesiastical court, which dealt with all lapses in personal morality, was attempting to shame and reform a woman who would not be shamed or reformed. When the day came, Mary Frith could barely bring herself to take the thing seriously – it was noted by one onlooker that this ‘notorious baggage’ was drunk throughout proceedings and weeping on