Last Thursday I was in Shrewsbury, county town of the county of my birth. Shrewsbury is steeped in a wealth of medieval history, including plenty of ancient street names, amongst them the intriguingly titled Grope Lane.
Grope Lane in Shrewsbury is a narrow alley connecting High Street and Fish Street in the heart of the old medieval town, as shown on the location map below.
As with many towns in the Middle Ages, Shrewsbury’s Fish Street (and nearby Butcher Row. Ed.) are named after the trades that occupied them. However, Grope Lane is also reputed to be linked to trade – this time the pleasures of the flesh.
Wikipedia has an excellent page on this street name in its unsanitised version.
Gropec*nt Lane, says Wikipedia, was a street name found in English towns and cities during the Middle Ages, believed to be a reference to the prostitution centred on those areas… Gropec*nt, the earliest known use of which is in about 1230, appears to have been derived as a compound of the words grope and c*nt (our medieval forebears were less sensitive and more earthy in their use of language than their modern descendants, as anyone who had read Chaucer in the original Middle English can testify. Ed.). Streets with that name were often in the busiest parts of medieval towns and cities.
Towns and cities with active quays or ports often had an adjacent Grope(c*nt) Lane, as in the case of Bristol, although that street name recorded in the reign of Edward III (1312-1377), was subsequently changed to Hauliers Lane and has since been changed again (see below).
Although the name was once common throughout England, changes in attitude resulted in its replacement by more innocuous versions such as Grape Lane. A variation of Gropec*nt was last recorded as a street name in 1561.
In Shrewsbury a street called Grope Countelane existed as recently as 1561 and connected the town’s two principal marketplaces. At some unspecified date the street was renamed Grope Lane, which it has retained to the present day. In Thomas Phillips’ History and Antiquities of Shrewsbury (1799) the author is explicit in his understanding of the origin of the name as a place of “scandalous lewdness and venery”, but Archdeacon Hugh Owen’s Some account of the ancient and present state of Shrewsbury (1808) describes it as “called Grope, or the Dark Lane”. As a result of these differing accounts, some local tour guides attribute the name to “feeling one’s way along a dark and narrow thoroughfare”.
Other towns and cities in England also had their own local Grope(c*nt) Lane including the following:
- London (several examples);
- Bristol (now called Nelson Street);
- York;
- Newcastle upon Tyne;
- Worcester;
- Hereford;
- Oxford (now Magpie Lane);
- Norwich (now Opie Street);
- Banbury (now Parsons Street);
- Glastonbury (now St Benedicts Court); and
- Wells.