London loves its eccentrics. We carve them into blue plaques, mutter their names in pub stories, and stitch them into the long, messy quilt of the city’s history. Some are kings and reformers; others are bawds and tricksters. Among the latter, few shine brighter—or stranger—than Priss (or Priscilla) Fotheringham, the Restoration sex worker whose “chucking” act made her both infamous and unforgettable.
Today, on Whitecross Street in East London, a sly parody of an English Heritage plaque commemorates her. Installed not by the heritage authorities but by street artist Carrie Reichardt during the Whitecross Street Party in 2012, the disc reads: “English Hedonists: Priss Fotheringham, Prostitute, 17th Century.” It is not official, but it is, in its way, truer than truth. London is a city built as much on scandal as on ceremony.
Who was Priss?
Priscilla Carsewell—later Fotheringham after marrying a man named Edmund—was born around 1615, probably in Scotland. By the 1640s she had made her way to London and set up in or near Whitecross Street, an area already notorious for its stews, taverns, and tenements. She quickly earned a reputation as one of the capital’s most daring sex workers, appearing in the bawdy pamphlet The Wandring Whore and its sequels.
Her renown was such that she was once called “the second-best whore in the city.” The backhanded compliment suggests that even within Restoration London’s competitive marketplace of scandal, Priss stood out. She was a madam, a performer, and, if the pamphlets are to be believed, something of a proto-celebrity.
The Art of “Chucking”
So what, exactly, made Priss famous? The answer is “chucking.” Modern readers might assume this meant throwing punches—or grabbing male anatomy—but the truth, recorded in the pamphlets of the 1660s, is even more bizarre.
According to The Wandring Whore and other printed dialogues of the period, Priss ran what was known as a “chuck-office.” There, she would perform a party trick of staggering audacity:
- She stood on her head, legs apart.
- Clients or spectators would chuck coins—half-crowns, pistoles, whatever currency they fancied—into her exposed orifice.
- The sport was to see how many she could take. Some tracts boast she could hold sixteen half-crowns.
- Occasionally, the stunt involved not coins but wine, with predictably uncomfortable results.
It is grotesque, humiliating, and theatrical—part sex act, part sideshow, part proto-performance art. And it was this spectacle that fixed her name in the Restoration imagination.
Pamphlet Celebrity
Priss’s reputation comes down to us through pamphlets, those cheap printed sheets that fluttered through London’s coffee-houses and taverns. The Wandring Whore, a satirical series first published in 1660, specialised in lurid exposés of bawds and prostitutes. It reads today like a blend of scandal sheet and grotesque farce, full of Restoration slang and moral outrage.
The “chuck-office” is described as a place where coins and foreign pistols (both weapons and currency) were “as plentifully poured in … as Rhenish wine.” Another section imagines her “standing upon her head with naked breech, spread legs, and the orifice of her rima magna open, whilst several Cully-Rumpers chuck sixteen half-crowns into it for their pleasure and my profit.”
This was not sober biography but salacious pamphleteering. Yet the repeated references across different editions suggest that the act, or at least the idea of it, was widely associated with her. In other words, “chucking” became her brand.
A Life on the Margins
Beyond the pamphlets, glimpses of the real Priss emerge. Records place her in and out of prison, including stints in Newgate. She ran a brothel, collected fines, and weathered the same hazards as many sex workers of her day: disease, poverty, and sudden shifts in the moral climate. The 1650s and 1660s were especially volatile decades, as the Puritan Commonwealth gave way to the licentious court of Charles II.
Her marriage to Edmund Fotheringham did little to dampen her notoriety. In fact, it may have lent her a degree of protection or legitimacy, allowing her to operate more openly. Still, hers was a precarious existence, lived on the thin edge between notoriety and ruin.
The Plaque and the Legacy
Fast-forward three centuries, and Priss Fotheringham is remembered not in parish registers or legal records but in art. Carrie Reichardt’s spoof blue plaque on Whitecross Street is both a joke and a corrective: a reminder that history is not only bishops and generals but also the women who made a living by selling their bodies and their wits.
The plaque fits its neighbourhood. Whitecross Street, with its long tradition of markets, murals, and community festivals, is the perfect stage for a Restoration bawd to wink at the modern city. Unlike the official blue plaques, which gravely mark birthplaces of the great and good, this one is anarchic, irreverent, and—fittingly—hedonistic.
Why Remember Priss?
Why does a woman like Priss deserve commemoration? Precisely because she disrupts the tidy narrative. She reminds us that London’s history is not a gallery of saints but a carnival of contradictions. She was exploited and exploitative, degraded and defiant, a victim of circumstance and a canny self-publicist. Most of all, she shows how women on the margins carved space for themselves, however precariously, in a brutal and unequal city. “Chucking” may shock us today, but in its own obscene way, it was also an assertion: of body, of commerce, of spectacle.
More London Characters:
Pete & Bas: London’s Rapping Grandfathers
Gilbert & George: London’s Walking Pieces of Art
Paul Raymond: King of Soho