the part of the court nor any further notice of Rykener". There are no explicit charges, verdict or sentence. Contemporaries understood a prostitute was not just a woman who took money for sex, but a sinful woman. Therefore, even if a man took money for sex, which is likely how Rykener would have been perceived, they could not be—to the medieval mind—a prostitute, and so could not be prosecuted as one. If Rykener was eventually released after interrogation but without charge, it may have been because the mayor and aldermen of London "did not quite know what to make of him". Indeed, it was extremely unusual for a case like Rykener's to be heard in a mayoral court in the first place. It is not clear what form of legal process was followed. There may have been some confusion among the interrogators regarding how Rykener was to be dealt with: sodomy was beyond the court's jurisdiction. Political context and later events Rykener disappeared from historical records after the interrogation, with nothing certain known of the sex worker's later life. The name itself is sufficiently unusual to have allowed researchers to speculate. Jeremy Goldberg tentatively identified Rykener as the John Rykener who was imprisoned in the Bishop of London's gaol in Bishop's Stortford, and who escaped in 1399. The reason for this person's imprisonment is unknown. That he fell under episcopal jurisdiction suggests he had ecclesiastical status, most probably being an ecclesiastical clerk. In this gaol, most prisoners were convicted clerks. If this is the same John Rykener, imprisonment in Bishop's Stortford would not have been for the same offences Rykener was questioned for in 1394: having sexual relations would not get a bishop's clerk imprisoned. Contemporary records report nothing of this Rykener's background or events after the escape. There was an investigation, but this focused on the Bishop of London's poor record in keeping his prisoners secure rather than on the individuals themselves. John/Eleanor Rykener's arrest and interrogation took place at the height of the spread of Lollardy. Lollardism was deemed heresy, and it was only a few weeks after Rykener's arrest that its followers promulgated their Twelve Conclusions. The Rykener case, comments Dinshaw, must have been "like a nightmare of the Lollard imagination", consisting as it did of a "cross-dressed prostitute who had had sex with so many clerics s/he couldn't remember them all confirm[ing] the Lollards' lowest expectations