QI The Book of the Dead

the most formidable fighting bears of the era – ursine celebrities like Ned Whiting, Sackerson or Blind Harry Hunks – taking on a succession of dogs, swatting them from wherever their jaws had fastened hold, battling it out until either they or the dogs collapsed from exhaustion. As well as being a noisy, gruesome spectacle, bear-baiting was big business. A lot of money could be made betting on the outcome.
    It was a brutal, often dangerous, pastime. The animals were tethered to a stake in the centre of the arena, held by a 15-footchain or rope. The breeders stood in a circle, just out of range, holding their dogs by the ears. Once they were let loose, the contest would rage for as long as an hour. It wasn’t unusual for wounded animals to break free and chase their owners round the pit. Injuries were common; health and safety rules rudimentary. This was a man’s sport: the bear-pit was no place for a woman.
    But Mary Frith wasn’t going to let that put her off. She dressed, drank, smoked and swore like a man and the bear-pit was her passion. She bred mastiffs – the muscular, squat-faced, short-necked, strong-jawed ancestors of today’s bulldogs. In her own account of her life, published in 1662, three years after her death, we learn that her dogs were pampered like the children she never had (or wanted), each of them sleeping in their own bed, complete with sheets and blankets, and fed on a special food she boiled up herself.
    Mary had grown up just over the river, the daughter of a cobbler in Aldersgate Street, but Southwark was her spiritual home. The south bank of the Thames in the early seventeenth century was London’s pleasure-centre, though very much not what Epicurus had in mind. Twopence got you into the bear-garden; sixpence, an evening at the theatre or an hour with a whore. Beer was a penny a pint; tobacco, threepence a pipe-load; a decent tavern meal about the same. Given that the average wage was about 7 shillings a week, it’s not surprising that theft and gambling were rife. The entertainments brought in huge numbers of punters: an estimated 10 per cent of the entire population of London visited the theatre or the bear-garden every day. In the narrow maze of streets, gangs of professional criminals worked their routines assiduously.
    Mary Frith started out as a pickpocket. We first hear of her as ateenager in 1600, when she and two female accomplices were accused of stealing ‘2s and 11d in cash, from an unknown man at Clerkenwell’. Other arrests followed and, despite her protestations in her autobiography that she ‘never Actually or Instrumentally cut any Mans Purse’, she certainly worked as a part of a gang who did. But Mary had grander ambitions than a life of petty crime. By 1608 she was performing in the streets and taverns of Southwark. Dressed like a man, in a doublet and leather jerkin, a sword hanging by her side and a pipe clamped between her teeth, she would strum her lute, sing rude songs, dance jigs and tell stories. Perhaps the cross-dressing began as part of her pick-pocketing routine – it would certainly have made it easier it to blend into a crowd – but it soon became her calling card.
    A woman dressing as a man was far more shocking then than now. It was done in the theatre, of course – all the actors were men and boys in any case – but to do it openly on the streets was more than just an affront to the natural order of things. It was breaking the law. ‘Moll Cutpurse’, Mary’s alter ego, became an overnight sensation. She was more like a contemporary conceptual artist than the stage performers she hung round with – not only did she dress and perform as a man, she lived like one too. From the tavern to the bear-pit, her art was her life. By 1610, she had inspired one of the first female celebrity biographies, The Madde Prancks of Merry Moll of the Bankside with Her Walks in Man’s Apparel and to What Purpose , by the playwright John Day. In 1611 two of the most successful writers of the age, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, asked her to close a performance of the play they had written about her, The Roaring Girl . This was the big time – an audience of 2,000 people watching Moll Cutpurse playing herself.

    This stunt proved too much for the authorities. Mary was arrested for immoral behaviour and thrown into the correction house at Bridewell where she was subjected to the punishment usually reserved for prostitutes. She was soundly whipped and