Roaring Girls - Holly Kyte

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from comic to defiant to political and even preachy.

      This ‘diary’, then, is an unreliable account of Mary’s life, though that’s not to say it’s worthless. Plenty of the details within its pages chime with what we know to be true. It’s plausible that the authors had their anecdotes either directly from Mary when she was alive – an old woman entertaining anyone in the alehouse who would listen with tales of her outrageous youth – or from those who knew her, or, more likely, that they adapted them from the tales of her exploits that had been passed from gossip to gossip for decades. Mary had already written herself into London’s folklore with her riotous escapades, leaving the diary’s anonymous authors the task of matching, if not surpassing, these outlandish oral tales.

      But herein lies the problem with Mary Frith. With the historical records frustratingly reticent on her real life (her appearances in them are few, though always revealing), much of what we know – or think we know – of her comes from the various fictionalised versions that appeared over the years, making her as slippery a character in death as she was in life. The legend who features in the ‘diary’, the character who walked the stage and the flesh-and-blood woman who left an imprint on the records don’t always agree, splitting her image into hazy triplicate. The diarists were aware of the issue. Their excuse for the ‘abruptness and discontinuance’ of their story is that ‘it was impossible to make one piece of so various a subject’.[5] This isn’t just an unwitting admission of their own fudged documentation of her life; evidently Mary’s baffling complexity made her as intangible to her contemporaries as she is to us.

      Lower-class, lawless, unconventional and disobedient, Mary Frith was disturbing – but also strangely alluring; she represented an unusual kind of woman in the seventeenth century, one to whom society had no answer. By definition, such women lived a precarious life and needed cunning strategies to survive, and in Mary’s case that meant barricading herself in behind a protective wall of myth and mystique, cultivating multiple personalities and perfecting her performance of each one until the real woman became as elusive as wisps of smoke. With so many Marys before us, it’s as if she’s laid down a challenge: to find the real Mary Frith, and catch her if we can.

      A VERY TOMRIG OR RUMPSCUTTLE

      The mystery authors of The Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith do their best to get to the bottom of this unfathomable woman, but she is ‘so difficult a mixture’ of male and female, of ‘dishonesty and fair and civil deportment’, that they seem torn from the start between admiration and alarm. Faced with a cross-dressing thief who on the one hand must surely be morally reprehensible, but on the other was famed for her good humour and entertaining shenanigans, they delight in her one minute, sneer at her the next – sometimes all at once. Their introduction showers Mary with mock-heroic epithets: she is ‘a prodigy’, an ‘epicoene wonder’, ‘the oracle of felony’, the gold-standard bearer of thievery – a profession that is now in ‘sad decays’ without her; but she is also a ‘virago’, a ‘bono roba’ (prostitute), a monstrous hybrid of masculine and feminine, so unattractive that she was ‘not made for the pleasure or delight of man’. Such a woman made little sense to her peers; she was as much a side-show freak as she was a folkloric heroine, and needed to be explained to the uncomprehending but fascinated public.

      In their attempt to do just that, the authors begin at the beginning, with Mary’s childhood, which, if the bare bones of their introduction are to be believed, served as a dress rehearsal for the role she would play in later life. With an air of surprise, they report that this natural rebel was born to perfectly ordinary, law-abiding parents – an ‘honest shoemaker’ and his wife, who lived in the Barbican area of London – in the latter years of Elizabeth I’s reign (the exact year is unclear). Tender, affectionate and indulgent, Mr and Mrs Frith offered their daughter a humble upbringing, though a happy and stable one.[6] By rights, she ought to have been just another honest, hard-working young woman who soon married and settled into her predetermined roles of wife and mother. But no.

      Mary’s ‘boisterous and masculine spirit’ manifested itself early and would not be tamed. To curb her unruly ways, we’re told that her parents took particular care over her education (which by the standards of the day meant teaching her to read but not to write, as well as a few domestic accomplishments), but their efforts had little effect. Young Mary was a child of action, not academia. She was an archetypal tomboy – ‘a very tomrig or rumpscuttle’ – fizzing with energy, and resistant to every norm of female behaviour: she would ‘fight with boys, and courageously beat them’; ‘run, jump, leap or hop with any of them’, and ravage her pretty girls’ clothes in the scuffles. She didn’t care – her dresses hung awkwardly on her ungainly frame and only annoyed her.

      Drawn to the places where the rabble congregated, this scrappy urchin spent most of her time at the Bear Garden, the rowdy entertainment arena wedged in among the playhouses of Bankside, where bear-baiting, bull-baiting and dog fighting kept the blood-lusty crowds amused. Here, in the fug of the bustling, stinking, noisy Southwark streets, all the vices were out on display: drunks and tavern brawlers, punters and prostitutes, cutpurses and cheats jostled along together, while down the road, above the gateway of old London Bridge, the heads of traitors sat on spikes, like gruesome lollipops in a sweet-shop window. Young Mary saw it all, and she wasn’t fazed in the least; in fact, she fitted right in.

      However unladylike, this was the world where Mary Frith felt at home, for she was ‘too great a libertine … to be enclosed in the limits of a private domestic life’. As womanhood approached, she showed no interest in the feminine pursuits she was expected to learn: ‘she could not endure that sedentary life of sewing or stitching’, preferring a sword and a dagger to a needle and thimble. The bakehouse and the laundry were alien to her, and the ‘magpie chat of the wenches’ an irritation. Mary preferred a more direct form of expression. Even when she was young she was ‘not for mincing obscenity’; by adulthood, the habit had developed into ‘downright swearing’. Such profane language from a woman was unfeminine and unacceptable and, along with the rest of her behaviour, it had to be policed (as Mary would later discover – her reputed potty mouth would be listed in the court records as one of her many arrestable offences). To complete this picture of the ultimate anti-woman, we’re told that ‘above all she had a natural abhorrence to the tending of children’, and steered well clear of becoming a mother (another claim that is borne out by the records).

      If this character portrait is accurate, Mary was a woman destined to offend and perplex seventeenth-century society in every way. Indeed, so far was she from the meek, mild, modest woman that custom demanded that it was doubted she was a woman at all. She had unsexed herself, become a ‘hermaphrodite in manners as well as in habit’; she was ‘the living description of a schism and separation’, combining the ‘female subtlety’ of one sex and the ‘manly resolution’ of the other – and to a society that only dealt in strict gender binaries, such a combination was profoundly unnerving.

      A lower-class girl with no money, little education and scant opportunities had very few options in life even if she conformed, but if, like Mary, she either would not or could not conform, the choice was almost made for her. Such girls often found themselves tripping over into the wrong side of the law in order to survive, usually through thievery or prostitution, but even in that world there was a hierarchy to climb. If Mary wanted to live differently to most women, she would have to behave differently to most women. And if she wanted a modicum of the power and freedom that men had, then she would have to settle for power and freedom in the criminal underworld.

      MOLL CUTPURSE

      Too proud to beg, too wild for domestic drudgery and quite possibly too repulsed by men to contemplate prostitution, Mary Frith decided to make her living as a cutpurse. It was the most dangerous choice of all these unappealing options, for to embark upon a career of thievery automatically meant risking her liberty and her life. England in the early seventeenth century was a visibly savage place: legal punishments were reliably disproportionate to the crime and barbaric public executions were a favoured form of entertainment. With property deemed as valuable as human life – and frequently even more so – theft and burglary were among the country’s

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