The Curious Case of the Leicestershire Spinster
George Joyce's life should have been wholly uneventful. Born in Leicestershire in 1636, he appears to have lived his whole life in the village of Blackfordby, some three miles from Ashby-de-la-Zouch. While Ashby, a Royalist stronghold, saw a good deal of fighting in the Civil War, neighbouring Blackfordby escaped relatively unscathed. The young George Joyce seems to have been unaffected by the conflict and after the war he continued to live a quiet life: he never married, and was eventually laid to rest in the same village chapel in which he was baptised. Yet by the end of his life it is clear that there was something very curious about George Joyce, because when he was buried in 1674 he was no longer called 'George'. He was 'Jane'.
Jane's baptism is recorded in the registers of St. Magaret's chapel, Blackfordby (hereafter I will refer to George as 'Jane'). She was baptised 'George' on the 13 December 1636 together with a sibling, Sarah, evidently a twin sister. [1] They were the children of Richard and Sarah Joyce, members of a prominent Blackfordby family whose importance was attested by numerous memorials in the chapel's burial ground. As well as their twins, Richard and Sarah also had an older daughter, Mary. Richard Joyce described himself as a carpenter and, later, a husbandman. His will (dated 1649) tells us he possessed a house and “yard land or farm” with tenements or cottages. At his death he left a gift of money to the village poor. Though perhaps not a major land owner, Richard Joyce appears to have been a local figure of some wealth and standing. [2]
Richard Joyce named three children in his will, but at no point did he mention a son. Instead, there is an extraordinary reference to “my daughter Jane alias George”. Jane was twelve-years-old when her father wrote his will. Sometime during her early childhood, then, Richard Joyce recognised that his son 'George' was really a girl. The will of Richard's wife, Sarah, was proved in 1656, by which time Jane would have been nineteen. Sarah makes no mention of a 'George' at all and simply refers to “my daughter Jane”. [3] What had happened, then, to Jane Joyce between her baptism and her early adulthood that led to this apparent re-assigning of her sex?
Certainly, in the 17th century there was report of children's sex being mis-assigned at birth. The Compleat Midwife's Practice Enlarged of 1656 explained such errors as “a mistake of not over-expert Midwives, who have been deceived by the evil conformation of the parts”. It is worth noting that The Complete Midwife was compiled from the writings of male anatomists and physicians, who were never shy in pointing out the deficiencies they saw in untrained, female midwives. The authors cited the example of a girl christened in Paris who turned out to have been a boy, and they went on to explain that “the over-far extension of the Clitoris in female Births, may have occasioned the like mistake”. [4] Here, then, is a 17th century explanation of the confusion surrounding Jane's sex at her birth – an over-large clitoris that was mistaken for a penis. Consequently, she was baptised as a boy. At some point (before Jane was twelve) the mistake was acknowledged by the parents, who accepted that their son was in fact a daughter and referred to her as Jane thereafter.
The Compleat Midwife's reference to an 'over-far extension of the Clitoris' leads naturally to the conclusion that Jane Joyce is an early-modern case of an intersex child – one whose ambiguous physicality leads to uncertainty as to what sex they are. Intersex is a modern scientific term that has now replaced the looser, more anecdotal term 'hermaphrodite' which would have been used in Jane's lifetime. Jane's case was by no means unique in the early modern period. In 1629 Thomasine Hall was accepted by the Virginia General Court as being both male and female, and required to wear a combination of female and male attire as a fitting indication of her true sexual identity. [5]
The most common cause of an enlarged clitoris – 'clitoromegaly' – is an exposure to hormones in the womb which causes a girl's genitals to appear masculinised. There is nothing in surviving documents to indicate that Jane's twin, Sarah, was anything other than a typical female. For Jane to be intersex while her twin sister was not is an extremely rare occurrence, through not unknown. [6] The number of intersex births is today estimated as being 1 in 4,500, although it may be as high as 1 in 2,000 [7]. Given that the population of England and Wales in the mid-seventeenth century was roughly five million, this would mean there would have been perhaps 1,000-2,500 people with some form of intersex condition during Jane's lifetime.
The accepted remedy for clitoromegaly at the time was to remove the clitoris by amputation. A graphical depiction of a clitorodectomy is included in The Chyrgeon's Store-house of 1674. [8] Surgical removal of the clitoris is a procedure still commonly carried out intersex births today in a parental belief that “irregular-looking genitals would be extremely difficult to live with”. [9] Given what we know of the Joyces' social standing such a procedure was not beyond their finances, although it is impossible to say whether or not such an operation was carried out on Jane.
It would be good to think that once her true sex had been recognised and accepted that Jane could have continued to lead a typical, quiet life. However, there are indications in the written sources that this was not the case. While hermaphroditism was seen in the 17th century as a purely physical condition, evidenced solely from a person's sexually-ambiguous anatomy, the intersex condition is today understood to be far more complex and to work on a chromosomal level. Those who are intersex but live their lives as women may encounter a host of symptoms that set them apart from others. Many such women articulated the problems they encountered in their day-to-day lives in a 2006 article for the New York Times magazine. Some could not menstruate. Some had difficulty finding women's clothes that would fit them. Some described simply being unable to look or feel as other women do: “I grew up a girl [but] I was always a tomboy, I wrestled, I played softball”, sentiments which echo The Compleat Midwife's observation that some hermaphrodites might chose to live as a women “yet still retaining a manlike fashion, both in voice and gesture.” [10] Indeed, in renaming their child 'Jane' and encouraging her to live as a girl, the Joyces' may have been responsible for forcing someone into the persona of a woman who was neither wholly female nor suited to such a role.
There are hints that Jane's life was not as straightforward as one might wish. Following their mother's death in 1656, it was the daughter Sarah who was given sole responsibility for overseeing the family affairs. The eldest daughter, Mary, had by this time married and lived away from home, but why should the responsibility have not fallen on Jane who, as her mother's will indicates, was the first-born of the twins? [11] There has to be the possibility that Jane was considered to lack the temperament needed to oversee her mother's estate and manage the family financial affairs. Instead, Jane was given £25, the largest single amount of money in her mother's will. This, along with other substantial bequests (a bed, the “best bolster”), suggests that the nineteen-year-old Jane was being prepared for life on her own, while Sarah was to oversee the family's land and other property. This was despite the fact that their father's will of 1649 stipulated that the family wealth be divided equally between the three daughters on the mother's death. [12] Jane was also granted “the coffer which was her ffathers”, phrased in such a way as to suggest a sentimental attachment which was somehow more important to Jane than to her sisters: the eldest daughter Mary was simply bequeathed 'a coffer'. All of this intimates an isolated life, emotionally difficult and out of joint with the people around her, feelings which have been recognised in many people who are intersex. [13]
If Jane's intersex condition was observable in her appearance, maybe the surroundings of a crowded market town or city would have rendered her unobtrusive. But in a small village such as Blackfordby it could hardly have gone unnoticed that the Joyces' son, George, had grown into Jane.
What other people might have thought of Jane's hermaphrodite condition is revealed in The Compleat Midwife's phrase “the evil conformation” of a subject's ambiguous genitalia. The sixteenth-century French surgeon Ambrose Pare termed hermaphroditism and its inherent sexual confusion an “extremly monstrous thing”. Like cross-dressing, it was considered a dangerous and wicked distortion of true reality in the early-modern period. [14] Older anatomical theory, still current in the early 17th century, maintained that the boundary between the sexes was dangerously unstable, and that adopting manly fashions and acting in a masculine way was enough to tip a woman over the edge and become a male in physical form. Instances had been recorded of girls who, it was believed, through some violent conduct in adolescence sprouted a penis. Clitoromegaly could be thought as symptomatic of a woman who was metamorphosing into a man because she had not conducted herself in a suitably feminine manner. It was considered “a common disease among the Aegptians and Arabians”; it was pruriently associated with lesbianism because the condition was believed to make a woman “able to converse with other Women like unto men”. It was therefore the province of the exotic and the strange. Responses to hermaphroditism were, predictably, caustic. The Compleat Midwife warned against the “unworthy Reader, that makes use of such things only for mockery, and a May-game, and to promote idle and lascivious discourse.” [15] But the reaction produced could be much stronger than derision. It could be sinister and, in Jane Joyce's case, murderous.
At some point during the night of 13 April 1674 Jane Joyce was killed by an unknown assailant. The entry in the parish burial register in the only source of information as to the circumstances:
George alias Jane Joyce one of the coe heires of Richard Joyce of this towne had her throate cut in the night uppon the thriteenth day of April & shee lived until the fifteenth day & died & was buried in our chappell [16]
George alias Jane Joyce one of the coe heires of Richard Joyce of this towne had her throate cut in the night uppon the thriteenth day of April & shee lived until the fifteenth day & died & was buried in our chappell [16]
That the act was carried out “in the night” intensifies the menace of the situation, and that Jane 'had' her throat cut would appear to rule out any possibility that this was suicide. It is by no means certain that her intersex condition was the reason for this apparent attack, but given the circumstantial evidence it should not be ruled out. The identity of Jane's killer is unknown and there is no reference to the murder in surviving court records of the period. [17] A theory put forward by writer John Harrison, that Jane was really a male Parliamentarian in disguise and murdered by Royalists, is wholly unfounded, and clearly demonstrated as such by the surviving source material referenced above. [18]
One last note ought to be made about the wording of the burial entry in the parish register. It has been seen that Richard and Sarah Joyce referred to 'George' as Jane and considered her their daughter. The burial register's reference to 'George' reveals that, while acknowledging Jane's femininity (“her throate”), there must have been some people in the wider community continued to recognise the ambiguity of her sex – Jane Joyce's true intersex nature.
Robert Hodkinson
June 2019
June 2019
Notes
1. Payne, B. (2003) Transcriptions of baptisms of the chapelry of Blackfordby, RootsWeb [online]. Available: http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~brett/genealogy/blackfordby/bfordby_bap_1700.html
[accessed 24.02.2019]
2. Gresley, J. M. (1862) “Blackfordby, Leicestershire”, in: Transactions of the Leicestershire Architectural and Archaeological Society, vol. 1, part 1 (Leicester: Crossley and Clarke), pp.27-30
3. Will of Richard Joyce (1649) PROB/11/208. The National Archives, London. Will of Sarah Joyce (1656) PROB/11/260. The National Archives, London.
4. Pechet, J. (ed.) (1697) The Compleat Midwife Enlarged (5th edn.) (London), p.288
5.'Molly' (2011) "Discussion of Elizabeth Reiss's 'Impossible Hermaphrodites'”, slideshare.net [online] available: https://www.slideshare.net/PerpetualRevision/mb-presentreishermaphrodites
[accessed 24.02.2019]
6. see for example, Jinadu, F. O. et al. (2013) “Clitoromegaly with Associated Anomalies in the Female of a Fraternal Twin: A Case Report”, in: Asian Journal of Pharmacy, Nursing and Medical Services. Vol. 1, (4), pp. 109-112.
7. Weil, E. (2006) “What if It's (sort of) a Boy and (sort of) a Girl?”, in: New York Times Magazine [online] available: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/magazine/24intersexkids.html
[accessed 22.02.2019]
8. Traub, V. (2002) The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p.434, n.90
9. Weil, op. cit.
10. The Compleat Midwife Enlarged, p.289
11. Will of Sarah Joyce, op. cit.
12. Will of Richard Joyce, op. cit.
13 “These are not all happy people either . . . Some of them have isolated, difficult lives. Some of the surgery patients are fine, and some of them are not, and it’s very hard to separate all the things out.” Quoted in Weil, op. cit.
14. Pare, quoted in Park, K. (1997) “The Rediscovery of the Clitoris: French Medicine and the Tribade, 1570-1620”, in: Hillman, D. and Mazzio, C. (eds.) The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge). For further reading on the issue of cross-dressing in the period see Capp, B. (2003) “Playgoers, Players and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern London: The Bridewell Evidence”, in The Seventeenth Century, xviii, pp.159-71.
15. The Compleat Midwife Enlarged, pp.289-90
16. Blackfordby Parish Registers: Baptisms, Marriages, Burials 1653-1746
17. see for example DE2392/99-153, “Misc. quarter sessions working papers, etc., 1662-1867”; “Quarter Session Papers, 1665-1973”, Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland.
18. Edwards, J. (2003) “He cut the King's head off, then fled”, Mail Online [online] available: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/columnists/article-229598/He-cut-Kings-head-fled.html
[accessed: 20.02.2019]. See also, Aylmer, G. E. (2004) “Joyce, George (b. 1618)”, in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press).