language hat on 5 Jul 2010  •  Link

A brothel, according to L&W.

cum salis grano on 5 Jul 2010  •  Link

as mention tis a bawdy-house
OED
3. Comb. bawdy-basket, a hawker of indecent literature; bawdy-house, a brothel.
1552 HULOET, Bawdye house or house of bawdrye..summ{oe}nium.
1567 HARMAN Caveat 65 These Bawdy baskets be..wemen, and go with baskets..where in they have laces, pynnes, nedles.
1785 GROSE Dict. Vulg. Tongue, Bawdy Basket, the twenty-third rank of canters, who carry pins, tape, ballads and obscene books to sell. 1
882 Ev. Man's Own Lawyer 390 The keeping a bawdy house is a common nuisance.

cum salis grano on 6 Jul 2010  •  Link

bawdy, a.2
1. Of, pertaining to, or befitting a bawd; lewd, obscene, unchaste. (Usually applied to language.)
1513

2. absol. quasi-n., esp. in phr. to talk bawdy (where perh. orig. adverbial): Lewd, obscene language, lewdness, obscenity.
1656 SANDERSON Serm. (1689) 16 To drink, talk bawdy, swear and stare

[Of uncertain origin: the original sense shows no approach to that of OF. baud, baude, ‘bold, lively, gay, merry’ (see BAUDE), to which it has often been referred: even allowing that ‘gay’ might have passed into the sense of ‘wanton, licentious, personally unchaste,’

no trace of such sense appears either in ME. or Fr.; nor is the Fr. word found as a n. The earliest instance yet found occurs in Piers Plowman, 1362, where one MS. reads BAWDSTROT. Bawd may not improbably be an abbreviation of that word, which is found in Fr. a century earlier.]

One employed in pandering to sexual debauchery; a procurer or procuress; orig. in a more general sense, and in the majority of passages masculine, a ‘go-between,’ a pander; since

c 1700 only feminine, and applied to a procuress, or a woman keeping a place of prostitution.
1362

b. fig. He who or that which panders to any evil design or vicious practice.

1607 HIERON Wks. I. 185 The mercy of God..is made..a Baude to all manner of vngodlinesse.

1688 LD. DELAMERE Wks. 12 Ignorant Ambitious Clergy, who in hopes of preferment have turned Bawds to Arbitrary Power

a bawd a hare