Lady Godiva and “Peeping Tom” According to legend, Lady Godiva (shown in this 1890 illustration) rode naked through the streets of Coventry, England, in order to persuade her husband, the earl of Mercia, to stop taxing the city’s poor. Although all townspeople were ordered to stay inside their homes with shutters drawn during her eleventh-century ride, a tailor named Tom “could not contain his sexual curiosity and drilled a hole in his shutter in order to watch Lady Godiva pass by” (Mann et al., 2008). Since then, the term “Peeping Tom” has been used to refer to people with voyeuristic disorder.