To the author of the fifteenth-century morality play quoted above, speech was a waste product, something as odious and polluting as goose dung. He was not alone in his disgust: throughout late medieval England, the “sins of the tongue” attracted acute concern. Clerics railed against blasphemers, liars, and slanderers, while village and town elites prosecuted those who abused officials, gossiped in court or church, or committed the newly devised offense of scolding. Poets illustrated the varieties and the consequences of dangerous speech, while artists depicted the gaping mouth of hell and the demons who recorded illicit words. Nor was the...

The entrance to hell, according to medieval artists, was an enormous gaping mouth. In wall paintings, stained-glass windows, carvings, and manuscript illuminations, sinners were cast through this ignoble opening, propelled by demons of all shapes, sizes, and colors. Some of the damned were rounded up with ropes and dragged toward hellmouth, while others were pushed in wheelbarrows or threatened with pitchforks. The point was reinforced in elaborately staged mystery plays which included a hellmouth in their stage props, ready to swallow sinners who deserved damnation. While hellmouth images had been around since as early as the eleventh century, they were...

Speech in general attracted concern in late medieval England, but women’s speech was especially problematic. For one thing, women were considered particularly garrulous. “Where women are,” claimed a fifteenth-century playwright, “are many words.”¹ A similar phrase was reiterated in sixteenth-century aphorisms: the 1542 poemThe School House of Womencommented that “where [there] be women, are many words,” and the phrase “Many women many words” was already cited as an “old proverb” in a book of 1600.² During the late Middle Ages, the discourse on the “sins of the tongue” was increasingly gendered, with women especially likely to be identified...

Imagine this scene in a small medieval town. It is dusk on a late summer’s day. Townsfolk hired to help with the harvest on nearby manors are trudging back home. Craftsmen and their wives have stopped work and closed up their stalls in the marketplace. People are lingering outdoors: in front of the church, beside the river, or outside the tavern. Illustrators of medieval manuscripts would have us think that such bucolic scenes typified the lives of ordinary people in the late Middle Ages: they worked hard, played hard, and went to bed happy. And maybe some did. The court...

Associations between women and disruptive speech had major implications for men as well as women. Because the category of women was so closely associated with illicit speech, men accused of speaking in problematic ways risked being labeled as womanly. In an age when masculinity might best be described, in the words of Vern Bullough, as “fragile,” a man who was disruptive or excessive in speech risked his gender identity in a way that a woman did not.¹ Indeed, the term “old woman,” sometimes applied to gossipy men in modern society, demonstrates the ways in which masculinity can still be undermined...

On Tuesday July 23, 1426, almost the entire session of the borough court of Middlewich was given over to ten cases of scolding. First to be accused was Margery, wife of Thomas del Mulne. The town bailiff reported that Margery had scolded (obiurgata fuit) Isabel, widow of Thomas Dun, calling her a whore and “other dishonest words” and saying that Isabel’s mother, father, and late husband were thieves. Isabel, also charged as a scold, responded by calling Margery a whore and saying that Margery’s parents were thieves. Next came the cases of Alice Haynesson and Agnes Daa. Alice, it was...

Alice Inchemerssh of Kingsland (Herefordshire), wife of Thomas London, found herself in serious trouble on June 7, 1397. The parishioners of Kingsland told the bishop of Hereford that she was both a scold (communis diffamatrix vicinorum suorum) and an adulterer. Alice was accused in the church’s court of committing adultery with three men: Roger Mascald, Wilkoc Walker, and John Ledder. For her crimes, Alice was suspended from the church; presumably she was re-admitted after performing the appropriate penance.¹

Fifteen years later and one hundred miles to the south, in the manor of Carhampton (Somerset) in 1412, Margery Bythewater and her...

In 1387, Helen, wife of Hugh Plombere of Bridgwater (Somerset), was sentenced to the pillory. Helen had been convicted as a scold (communis garulatrix) and disturber of the peace, and her prescribed punishment suggests that she was a repeat offender. In theory at least, scolds convicted in manorial or borough courts faced the same punishment as alewives and bakers who cheated their customers: they were fined for their first three offenses, and subject to the “cucking stool” thereafter. A “cucking stool,” also known as a “ducking stool,” “tumbrel,” or “thewe,” consisted of a chair attached to the end of a...