Parent or Pimp? Sexual Aiding and Abetting in a Fifteenth-Century Ecclesiastical Court.

“Lenocinium” was a charge used in the medieval ecclesiastical courts to prosecute people who aided or abetted sexual sins. Commonly, “lenocinium” has been described as “pimping,” “harboring,” or “pandering.” In the criminal proceedings of the English church courts, cases of lenocinium varied: from parents permitting adolescent fornication; to spouses consenting to adultery; to remunerated pimping and procuring. Because of its broad and often vague application against different people and circumstances, historians have struggled to define what lenocinium meant as a legal category. This Master of Arts thesis responds to this want in scholarship, not only in describing who and what was labeled lenocinium, but how and why. Through an analysis of the cases reported in one English church court over roughly eleven years of proceedings, this thesis argues one regular, categorical definition for lenocinium: failed responsibility incumbent upon the knowledge of another’s sin. Lenocinium was a criminal charge which penalized failing to act on a knowledge of sins committed by other people, thus obstructing the correction of sin. This was the core feature of lenocinium that touched both parent and pimp, allowing for their mutual yet recognizably distinct prosecution. This thesis also explores the implications of this categorical meaning within the moral/pastoral jurisprudence of the Church’s judicial system. This project is grounded in original primary-source research of nine manuscript “act books.” These are the records of the “rural consistory,” the main “criminal” church court in the diocese of Hereford. Using both “semi-quantitative” and qualitative methods, this thesis demonstrates and analyzes the conceptual “breadth” of lenocinium that had obtained in the diocese of Hereford by the fifteenth century. These methods and analyses make use of original, complete transcriptions of lenocinium cases from the primary-source act books. These transcriptions are presented in an appendix to this thesis. To conceptually frame historical cases of lenocinium, this thesis considers the symbiosis between the court and communities which heard and reported said cases. Thus, this thesis contributes to new institutional histories of the Church and its courts.