in sex shops and by mail order, while softcore magazines continued to be sold openly in many British newsagents. This did not, however, result in the UK legalising all types of pornography. In the 2004–2005 fiscal year, the agents of HM Revenue and Customs seized 96,783 items of pornographic media carried by people travelling into the UK. Although the UK was a member state of the European Union until 2020, it was the only EU country to prohibit private imports of adult pornography by consumers travelling from other EU countries. Literature In Medieval England, erotic or pornographic publications were the concern of the ecclesiastical courts. After the Reformation the jurisdiction of these courts declined in favour of the Crown which licensed every printed book. In his diary, Samuel Pepys records purchasing a copy of L'Ecole des Filles, a French work printed in 1655 that is considered to be the beginning of pornography in France for solitary reading. He then burns it so that it would not be discovered by his wife; "the idle roguish book, L'escholle de filles; which I have bought in plain binding… because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it." An early pioneer of the publication of erotic works in England was Edmund Curll (1675–1747). The conviction of Curll in 1727 for the publication of Venus in the Cloister or the Nun in her Smock under the common law offence of disturbing the peace appears to be the first conviction for obscenity in the United Kingdom, and set a legal precedent for other convictions. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (later abridged and renamed Fanny Hill) was written in 1748 by John Cleland. It was scandalous for depicting a woman, the narrator, enjoying and even revelling in sexual acts with no dire moral or physical consequences. The text is hardly explicit as Cleland wrote the entire book using euphemisms for sex acts and body parts, employing 50 different ones just for the term penis. Cleland was arrested and briefly imprisoned but no proceedings were taken against the publishers. Fanny Hill continued to be published and is one of the most reprinted books in the English language. In the 18th century directories of prostitutes and their services, such as Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies (1757–1795), provided both entertainment and instruction. In the Victorian period, significant elements of sado-masochism were present in some