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When her Master told her she would be caged and balled, Delores had imagined something a lot more active! Image source: Sex and Submission.
Johnson’s other chief adult relationship was with Hester Thrale, the wife of a wealthy Streatham brewer. Hester kept the morose widower supplied with ‘meats, pies, puddings and tarts’, of the pastry variety. Whether it was a sexual union is disputed, though their correspondence contains kinky references to chains, keys and bondage.
The girl lay on a stone bed in the tiny cubicle, awaiting her next customer with weary resignation.
In Londinium, there was no shortage of men wanting a few moments of sexual pleasure: merchants, officials, freed slaves from around the Roman Empire and, of course, soldiers.
Sure enough, the flimsy curtain was drawn back and a Roman legionary entered the room. He handed over a small bronze token.
The girl looked at it. The image on the front depicted the act he required — it showed a woman face down on a couch and a man on top of her.
On the reverse, the number 14 referred to the price he had paid: 14 asses, the equivalent of a day’s pay for a labourer in the first century AD — not that the girl would see any of that money.
For the girl would have been a slave, possibly a native Briton captured in the rebellious north of the country — enslaving women was one Roman way of subjugating and humiliating these savage tribes.
Some ended up in Rome, where their fair skin and blonde hair could fetch a high price.