YOU wouldn’t believe the things they got up to in medieval London, a city of brothels and binge drinking.

Archaeologists at the Museum of London have unearthed an 11th century whip with wooden handle and knotted leather thongs, clearly designed to inflict pain. But they cannot decide whether it was an instrument of sado-masochism in a Saxon brothel, or to keep slaves in order. The well-preserved whip was discovered in a house dating from about 900 to 1050, on the site of a new development at the corner of Cheapside and Queen Street — near a former narrow alley known as Grope Street.

No evidence of a brothel in the area has yet been uncovered, as most of the red light districts were outside the city walls. But Queen Street is the site of the former Soper Lane, notorious for a case in 1395 when a male transvestite prostitute called John Rykener, working under the name of Eleanor, was caught in flagrante on a market stall with a gentleman from Yorkshire.

For early medieval Christian philosophers sex was wicked. Anglo-Saxon penitentials gave exhaustive lists of days of abstinence, which led only to hypocrisy and the driving of sexual activity into secrecy. The Bishop of Winchester derived a living from prostitutes working from brothels on his Bankside estate in Southwark, and many other houses of ill repute were tolerated by both Church and State.

However, John Clark, curator of medieval collections at the museum, believes that the whip may be the first physical evidence of slavery in Saxon London. “It is early medieval, from the turn of the 11th century. I don’t imagine they had sex toys as early as that.”

London had long been involved in the slave trade. In the 11th century Lady Gytha, sister-in-law of King Cnut, is thought to have dispatched pretty young English slave girls to Denmark. Servants and farm workers were slaves, as were prisoners of war and criminals. All could be flogged for minor offences, or mutilated or killed for more serious offences.

Mr Clark is exploring another theory, that the whip was a religious relic used by a medieval fanatic. “At the height of the Black Death, in September 1349, a group of 120 flagellants from Holland arrived in London, processing through the city and beating themselves till the blood ran, in the hope of averting the God-sent plague.”

The whip will go on display in the museum’s new Medieval Gallery this week, as will a range of items, including contemporary pottery mugs and rare enamelled wine goblets, reminding visitors just how much the Londoners of old drank.

As England and Wales prepare for relaxed licensing laws this week, the museum will show that binge-drinking is not a new phenomenon. Seven hundred years ago, London had 1,300 alehouses, one for every 50 citizens and each one filled with “idle, lewd, young and lazy customers”. “Most people, including children, drank ale. They even drank it for breakfast, and got through up to a gallon a day each,” Mr Clark said.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Milk: do we need a dairy godmother?
• DIY: the women doing it for themselves
• First double portrait of Princes unveiled