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Sandy Bardsley examines the complex relationship between speech and gender in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and engages debates on the static nature of women's status after the Black Death. Focusing on England, Venomous Tongues uses a combination of legal, literary, and artistic sources to show how deviant speech was increasingly feminized in the later Middle Ages. Women of all social classes and marital statuses ran the risk of being charged as scolds, and local jurisdictions interpreted the label \"scold\" in a way that best fit their particular circumstances. Indeed, Bardsley demonstrates, this flexibility of definition helped to ensure the longevity of the term: women were punished as scolds as late as the early nineteenth century.The tongue, according to late medieval moralists, was a dangerous weapon that tempted people to sin. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, clerics railed against blasphemers, liars, and slanderers, while village and town elites prosecuted those who abused officials or committed the newly devised offense of scolding. In courts, women in particular were prosecuted and punished for insulting others or talking too much in a public setting. In literature, both men and women were warned about women's propensity to gossip and quarrel, while characters such as Noah's Wife and the Wife of Bath demonstrate the development of a stereotypically garrulous woman. Visual representations, such as depictions of women gossiping in church, also reinforced the message that women's speech was likely to be disruptive and deviant.

This article proposes that late medieval English men may have outnumbered women by a significant margin, perhaps as high as 110 to 115 men for every 100 women. Data from both documentary and archaeological sources suggest that fewer females survived to adulthood and that those who did may have died younger than their husbands and brothers. Historians of medieval England have said little about the possibility of a skewed sex ratio, yet if women were indeed “missing” from the population as a whole in a significant and sustained way, we must reinterpret much of the social, economic, gender, and cultural history of late medieval England.

This study argues that women's ownership of land – an important component of their status – changed little, if at all, after the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century. Using rentals and obit data from court rolls, a new formula for measuring female inheritance is devised which shows that daughters received even less of their expected due during the plague years. While high death rates might predict that brotherless daughters would be more likely to inherit land, inheritance practices shifted so that women continued to hold much the same total area as before. The article considers several reasons for this continuity, concluding that women found it especially hard to compete in an era of acute labour shortage. Dans cet article, l'auteur soutient que la part des femmes en matière de propriété foncière – une composante importante de leur statut – a peu changé (et même n'a peut-être pas changé du tout) avec la peste noire qui sévit au milieu du XIVe siècle. Reposant sur l’étude des baux de location et des données post portem archivées par les cours de justice, une formule est mise au point pour mesurer la part des paysannes à l'héritage foncier. Les résultats montrent que, pendant les années de peste, les filles reçurent moins en héritage qu'elles n'auraient normalement dû. Pourtant, des taux de mortalité élevés auraient pu laisser prédire que les filles qui n'avaient pas de frère seraient susceptibles de recevoir des propriétés foncières en plus grande quantité, mais les pratiques d'héritage se modifièrent de sorte que les femmes continuèrent à tenir au total la même superficie foncière qu'auparavant. L'auteur envisage plusieurs raisons pour expliquer cette continuité, et conclut qu'il fut particulièrement difficile pour les femmes de rivaliser, à une époque qui connaissait une pénurie de main-d’œuvre aiguë. Dieser Beitrag vertritt die These, dass weiblicher Landbesitz – ein bedeutendes Merkmal des Status als Frau – nach dem Schwarzen Tod in der Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts sich nur wenig – wenn überhaupt – veränderte. Unter Verwendung von Zinsbüchern und Todesdaten in grundherrschaftlichen Gerichtsrollen wird eine neue Formel zur Messung weiblicher Erbschaften entworfen, die zeigt, dass Töchter während der Pestjahre sogar weniger als ihre erwarteten Anteile erhielten. Während man bei hohen Todesraten erwarten könnte, dass Töchter ohne Bruder mit höherer Wahrscheinlichkeit Land erbten, führte ein Umschwung der Vererbungspraktiken dazu, dass Frauen weiterhin über etwa dieselbe gesamte Landfläche verfügten wie zuvor. Der Beitrag wägt unterschiedliche Gründe für diese Kontinuität ab und kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass Frauen es besonders schwer hatten, in einer Zeit akuten Arbeitskräftemangels gegen Männer zu konkurrieren.

Though it seems logical, hard evidence to support the notion that women in post-plague England enjoyed a 'golden age' has proved elusive. Using both new and familiar sources, argues that the rate of rural women's wages remained consistent before and after the plague - they were paid at about the same rate as that of other members of the 'second-rate' workforce: boys, elderly and disabled men. Gender was not the only determinant of wages but it was significant and enduring. The picture of the agricultural workforce that emerges from the sources is complex and the debate over women's status after the Black Death is unresolved, but it seems that patriarchal structures proved more powerful than demographic crisis. (Quotes from original text)

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

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