Damaris Page

[1] In 1655, she was brought to court for bigamy, as it was stated that she also had been married to a William Baker of Stepney for the previous 15 years, though is likely that it was a fabricated charge as there was no evidence of this marriage in the parish registers.

[2] Page became rich during the boom years of economic development of the East End of London, offering services as a prostitute to the burgeoning population of seafaring workers of the docks and later through running brothels.

[1] She ran the Three Tuns in Stepney for seamen and another brothel in Rosemary Lane, near the Tower of London, for naval officers who moved in richer circles.

[3] She drew many of her prostitutes from the cohort of women whose husbands had been recruited to fight in naval battles or had been killed there, leaving their wives without any means of support.

She built houses on the Ratcliffe Highway, north of Wapping, and around in residential areas near the Tower of London, the income from which supported her for the rest of her life.

[4] The subject of Grub Street pamphlets in 1660, characterised as "The Wandring Whore" and the "Crafty Bawd",[1] she may have been one of the inspirations for the character of Moll Flanders (1721), created by Daniel Defoe.

The work itself was so finely tuned to the political dynamics of the day that though the printer was arrested, the court censor writes that "I can fasten nothing on The Poor Whore's Petition that a jury will take notice of."

The historian James Turner terms this event as an example of a "new carnivalisation of sexuality" in Restoration England, where genuine political attack, satire, street commentary and bawdy theatre came together.