4 - Verbal Violence

Summary

In the late medieval church, the ‘sins of the tongue’ were taken seriously. Dives and Pauper, a fifteenth century treatise on the Ten Commandments, includes the prohibition of verbal abuse twice, under the headings of both ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal’. It is especially vehement against ‘bacbytynge’, the sin of destroying a person's reputation by slander. There is no indication in the treatise that this, or any other form of verbal offence, was particularly associated with women. Yet ‘scolding’ had come to be regarded as a largely female offence. Indeed, the punishment of women for scolding is a topic of perennial popular interest, and has been extensively written about. Male ‘scolds’, and other manifestations of verbal violence by men, though their existence has been acknowledged, have received much less attention. This chapter is about those cases in both the ecclesiastical and secular courts where the sole or main charge against the defendant, male or female, appears to be the use of offensive words. It does not cover cases of heresy, sedition or witchcraft, although the spoken word could sometimes be construed as involving these offences. Firstly the legal status of the gendered offence of ‘scolding’, and what it meant in practice are discussed. Questions of the chronology and extent of prosecutions for verbal offences are considered next, and then the cases from the Kent records are examined in more detail. It seems that, while verbal abuse was particularly associated with women, prosecutions of men for verbal offences were equally numerous, and that the almost exclusively female offence of being a scold covers a wider range of offences than has generally been assumed. Some of the women prosecuted as scolds may have actually committed the same offence as most male defendants on verbal abuse charges, namely showing disrespect to figures of authority, often in the context of being presented in court for another offence. But men seem seldom to have been prosecuted for verbal abuse of anyone other than officeholders or social superiors, while the targets of many women described as scolds were their social equals. Being a scold, or in church court terminology a defamer, was thus a gendered offence for which women were prosecuted disproportionately to men.