with a Sir John, whom Rykener said had once been chaplain at St Margaret Pattens. Rykener also met two other chaplains, whom became customers, in the back streets of St Katharine's by the Tower. Whether Rykener's clients wanted a man or a woman is unknown. Britby and Rykener were arrested later in Cheapside. Britby claimed to have been looking for a woman, but Dinshaw believed that, given he was under arrest at the time, he was hardly likely to say otherwise. Another client, Theydon Garnon's rector, also seems to have wanted a woman, and was never told otherwise. Arrest On the Sunday before Rykener's meeting with the mayor, between 8 and 9 o'clock in the evening, Rykener was by Soper Lane, off Cheapside, and looking—as Dinshaw phrases it—"woman enough" to attract the attention of the Yorkshireman John Britby. According to Rykener, Britby propositioned Rykener in Cheapside, and they went to Soper Lane. They also caught the attention of "certain officers of the city", who arrested them. They were accused of "lying by a certain stall in Soper's Lane, committing that detestable unmentionable and ignominious vice". Rykener was arrested in women's clothes and interrogated in them, and professed (to the mayor and officials during the proceedings) to have the name "Eleanor". The "unmentionable" act they were accused of committing, suggests Jeremy Goldberg, was presumably anal sex. There can be no certainty on this point, as, Goldberg has pointed out, the clerk's language often consists of what Goldberg labels "knowingly opaque circumlocution". Rykener and Britby were interrogated separately by the mayor, John Fresshe, and the collected aldermen of the common council. The precise date of the interrogations is unknown; the original document in the Common Council's Plea and Memoranda Rolls (itself, says Goldberg, only kept in a "rather loose chronological order") can be dated only by its position immediately preceding a plaint regarding a property dispute on 26 January 1395. Britby said that he was passing through Cheapside when he met Rykener, and acknowledged that he propositioned Rykener. Britby claimed to have done so in the belief that he was talking to a woman. Either way, Rykener had agreed to sex with him and named a price, which he agreed to pay. Rykener confirmed this story. The rest of it, the officials knew: caught in the act by the local watch, Rykener and Britby had been taken away and imprisoned. Rykener, asked