STEWS

1 definition found

From Bouvier's Law Dictionary, Revised 6th Ed (1856) [bouvier]:

  STEWS, Eng. law., Places formerly permitted in England to women of professed 
  lewdness, and who, for hire, would prostitute their bodies to all comers. 
       2. These places were so called because the dissolute persons who 
  visited them prepared themselves by bathing; the word stews being derived 
  from the old French estuves, stove, or hot bath. 3 Inst. 205.