Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Black Death: the Rise of Women, Witches & the Peasant’s Revolt

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

There’s not much good to come out of a plague, especially a bubonic plague in the 14th century. A pandemic which definitely didn't involve zoom quizzes and a video montage of celebrities singing 'Imagine' by John Lennon (actually, maybe they were better off in the 1300s).But something extraordinary happened after The Black Death, which killed around half of the population in England. Because of a shortage of men, women had more autonomy and opportunities; from work and apprenticeships, to being able to rent land in their own name.Kate is Betwixt the Sheets with Philippa Gregory to talk about how women's lives were impacted by the plague.Philippa's new book: Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History, is out on the 26th October.This podcast was edited by Tomos Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Kate Lister, Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code BETWIXT. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Super Twixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here once more, and you know what's coming your way? That's right. It is the fair do's warning. Here we go. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things

in an adulty way about a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. Will that do? Have you got it? Is it fair do's? You have been warned? I think so. Right, on with the show. The year is 1349 and we are in a small darkened room, lit only by a tallow candle and embers of a dying fire. The room smells dank, musky, with all herbs scattered all over the floor.

On the bed in front of us is a man writhing in pain. With black swellings all over his body, he is sweating and moaning as he takes his final few breaths and not in a good way. No, no, this is the black death, and it has well and truly arrived in England. All around us, people are dying horrible, horrible deaths, and the plague seems unstoppable, almost impossible to avoid. In the next few decades, the illness will ravage the world. In some places, it killed up to half the population.

But back to the bedside of the dying man, he is receiving his last rights, but the person listening to him confess his seat, sins on his deathbed is not an ordained male priest. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. It's not even a priest. It's not even a man. It's a woman who is delivering the last rights. Because so many priests died of the plague and the ones that were left were shit scared of it, the bishop of Bath and Wells allowed women to serve the church as if they were ordained priests and gave them the power to deliver the last rights. This doesn't sound like a huge deal to

us today, but it was massive, huge. And it wouldn't last long either, because once the plague was done and dusted, it would be almost 600 years until women were allowed to do this again. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Oh, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister.

There's not much good to come out of a plague, is there, really? Especially the bubonic plague in the 14th century. It has a reputation as being a properly crap time. Made even worse by the fact that this pandemic didn't have Zoom quizzes and video montages of celebrity singing Imagine by John Lennon. I'm not sure, actually, did that make it work? worse or better, but I think they were better off. But something extraordinary happened after the Great Pestilence.

Women had more working opportunities and single women had more autonomy than they ever had before. Why? Because so many men died. However, it wouldn't last long and what followed was a massive pushback, including making murdering your husband the worst crime that you could commit other than killing a monarch.

And here to talk about how women's lives were affected by the Black Death is none other than the legend that is Philippa Gregory herself. Buckle up, Betwixters. This one is so, so good. And welcome to Betwixta Sheets. It's only Philippa Gregory. How are you doing? I'm doing very, very well, Kate. Thank you for ask me onto your bed, presumably. I wouldn't want you anywhere else, Philippe, right frankly. I hear it all the time. I bet you do. But what a great place to be talking about your new book, which is absolutely fascinating.

Normal women, 900 years of making history. It was such a revelation to read it. I researched this. And I know this, this is my area, but it was just so vibrant. And reminder, I think we do need a reminder, don't we, that women have been here the whole time. I think what's so interesting is I had a sense that there was lots of history which had not been recorded or it's recorded in places where it's not particularly accessible and what nobody had done was pulled together all the history over 900 years. Or what you got was like histories of particular trades. So you had a long timeline for it,

but it was very specific to one particular act. And what I really wanted to do was to get away from the sort of the silo of history and go like, it's medieval. or it's modern. So you can find out, you know, there's loads of material on medieval women and there's loads of material on modern women. But, you know, what you don't get is a history

which goes, this is a national history over centuries. And we can start at 1066 and end in 1994. And, you know, all the histories that we read as the national history are actually history of Englishmen. You know, what I wanted was a history of English women. It sounds like it would be, I would say, to write because that's not true. Easy to write.

But it's not because this is precisely the history as you've set up right from the beginning, that it's hidden, it's pushed out, it's not spoken about. Even when you're talking about women in the Doomsday book or really early on, if they get a mention, it's often just as such and such mum or such and such as wife. And that, it's fascinating that you just get these tiny glimpses of who these women are and you can't get to them. Was the research for this really difficult? I would be foolish to say it was easy. It wasn't easy. But what it is is it requires you to read the material imaginatively. You have to read through the archive. It's not, you can't go in and call up a book about women's landowning at the moment of the 1066 invasion. There is no such book. But what there is is, is there's lots of records of women in land owning positions or tenant positions, but they're all spread out over different things. So the records.

So the records of the manorial courts will list women tenants. Or every now and then you get a lease which names a woman. Or historians have done work on the change of landowning after the invasion. So you can see, for instance, in Oxford, you start off with something like, I don't know, 55 women landowners. And 15 years after, you've got like eight. So you can really see the change happening. But you have to really look for it. and be prepared to join up things that aren't joined up by other people.

We are here to talk about a very specific part of your book, which, as you say, it covers 900 years of history. But this particular part of history, I find this so fascinating. And I had never ever thought about the impact of it on women's roles. The Black Death in medieval, I can say Europe, but all around the world. And the impact that had on the roles of women. What made you want to tell this particular history? Well, partly because when you say I'm going to write a chronological history, starting in 100,

you get to the Black Death and the Black Death is clearly a big deal, just on its own account, never mind the consequences. The population is pretty well halved. So you have an extraordinary sort of jolt to the English countryside. I mean, everything changes really very rapidly. The first two years are the worst, and they are devastating. So some people even think that the little ice age that we know about that crops up in 15th, 16th century, that's actually caused by so much land all around the world coming out of agriculture and returning to forest. Wow.

I mean, just extraordinary. I mean, it's a global pandemic. It's a global event. I was writing about it at the time of the COVID pandemic. So it was rather a sort of startling moment in which you go, well, It feels pretty bad, but it's not so bad that animals are starving in the fields or that people are dying, locked up in their houses. I mean, it was a very chilling period to look at.

But as ever, whenever there's a massive crisis, because women are opportunistic and energetic and very, very able, you very soon see the part of the recovery is down to the work of women and women's lives really bounce back after the Black Death in a way which is so startling to see, and almost immediately you see pretty well the year after the first bad year, you start seeing women moving into jobs, moving into trades, getting educations, getting training, taking up leases because the previous tenants are dead and gone, moving into empty farms and becoming farmers, becoming landowners, literally by just walking in and starting the work. And then, you know, as follows, equal pay. Right the way back then.

Just in case anybody is listening to this podcast and they're going, what, the black what, just give us a very quick overview of what the black death was and when it hit and the devastation that it wrote. It's called the Great Pestilence. It hits in the middle of the 14th century. Initially, it looks like it comes from probably the far east and it spreads across Europe. If you have kids doing history at school, they do it as a topic. It's such a great topic for kids. So my grandsons came home and told me that it wasn't as many people thought flees on rats. It just, it spreads, you know, we're still examining it now. Quite recently, when somebody was digging up for foundations for HS2, they came across one of the plague burial pits in London and they did

some really interesting research on the bodies in the pit. And I believe this is going back a bit that when somebody was digging for the London Underground, they found live virus in the ground. I know. But it's okay. We've got vaccines for it now. Wow. I've never heard that before. I can't swear to it.

That's a kind of, it might even be a modern myth. Certainly I was told it by a historian, but I've not seen it written up. So caution with the sources of that. But, I mean, there's no reason why there shouldn't be live. Virus is still alive. And as you rightly said there, up to half the population, some place, places died. And COVID gave us a tiny, tiny, tiny glimpse into that, I think. And I thought that when we were going through it, of like, hardly even comparable to what happened. But even so, we got a

sense of mass fear and no one really knew what to do. And you saw strange superstitions starting to come out and people acting in very paranoid ways. And I found myself wondering, what on earth must have this been like during the Black Death? If this is happening now and we've got antibiotics and we know what we're doing. Yes, I mean, I think the fear all the way through the medieval world, you see a world which is intensely superstitious, but that's because there isn't any science. There isn't anything but superstition. They don't have any idea of transmission. There's no theory of germs. Nobody has any idea of disinfecting anything because there's no idea of contagion. So literally, they believe that it's a bad wind that blows and people get sick.

And, you know, there's so much faith in life after death and in religion that people genuinely believe that if you have a piece of, you know, communion wafer, or if you have a little piece of writing, which has got the Lord's Prayer written on it, or especially the Lord's Prayer written backwards, or an Ave Maria, you know, these are little tokens that may save your life. And of course, every time someone escapes infection, then they think it's because of something that they did, which is where you get these really, really, you know, frightening beliefs, which don't help anybody really very much at all, but, you know, the takeoff of all sorts of cults and magical beliefs. The thing that, if you study the history of the Black Death, especially if you're around small children that are studying it, and as you rightly said, they've got a lot to say. And I wanted to laugh at them because my nephew is studying it. And he's full of gruesome information now, and he loves to tell me all about it. You never really think about the aftermath of it.

Like the fun bit, if it is fun, is the sores and the death toll and the superstitious. and the awfulness. But it's easy to forget that the world after that, half the people in some places were dead. That's not just half the people that you know. That's half the infrastructure. That's half the landowners, half the people that make the food, half the people that provide medical care such as it was. The infrastructure is profoundly changed. And people have to step up to that, don't they? Well, they do. And of course, for women, it's intensely liberating. This was a period where a woman had no rights of herself. She didn't even have a right to her own body on marriage.

Her husband could have sex with her whenever and whenever he wanted. And that was legal. He was allowed to beat her as long as he didn't disturb the community and as long as he didn't use unreasonable force. So to be a woman, to be a wife, especially a young wife in those circumstances and have your husband and father die, though you might experience it as personal loss, you would certainly experience it as the greatest freedom

you could possibly win. Suddenly, nobody owns you. And suddenly there's also nobody there to collect the taxes. There's nobody there to connect your rents. It may be that the Lord of your manner is dead, so you don't owe any fealty to anybody at all. You are now in a position where you can say, I think I would like to live somewhere else.

And you are for the first time in your life, free to get up and go. I never thought about it like that. I knew that there was a massive shift in a class perspective after the Black Death because the peasants and the people work in the land were in the position for the first time to go, no, I don't think I'm going to work here for this much money. I'm going to go over there. But the roles of women that they can now leave their home, they can, what kind of freedoms could they marry more freely?

Could they enter the workforce in ways that they hadn't done before? They could enter the workforce in ways they hadn't before because there were not enough workers. So you see women inheriting their father's businesses. We've got details of a woman who's a stonemason and an architect. And she inherits her father's business and becomes, she designs Queen Isabella's tomb. You have people who literally, you know, their fathers are dead and their brothers are dead.

They become the heir to the business and they become the master craftsman. You have women whose husbands die, and they just literally take over the business and run the whole family. So even amongst elite families, you have a woman who was the wife of the Lord of the Manor is the only adult who can run the place. So she becomes Lord of the Manor, having her own court, having people who are sworn to obey her, having her own army, having her own obligations to the king. So she might have to lead detachment of armed forces into battle or into training because now she's the Lord of the Manor. So, I mean, it's literally, it's incredibly liberating for women and they take the opportunity and absolutely run with it. And you find all sorts of women moving into all sorts of trade and skills and crafts, which had not been closed to them officially before, but in which they would have to compete with other men. you know, brothers or husbands or fathers,

but which now, because half of the men are dead, just as half of the women are dead, there's vacancies in a way that there's never been before. I can't help but think there might have been a fair few medieval funerals with the women stood around going, oh, I'm so sad, honestly. This is just so tragic what's happened here. If most of your marriages are arranged, then most of the happiest people in the country are going to be widows.

Oh, God. It's so true. One of the things that I really stood out to me from your book, I'd never come across this before, I'd never thought about it before, was that during the actual Black Death, when it was literally all hands to the pumps, some women were allowed to give the last rights, which that's huge.

That's the biggest thing, really, in terms of the status of women. So this is a period where people seriously discuss whether women have souls or not. And they, although the church councilor, at Machon decides in the sixth century that women do have souls, they are nonetheless not allowed to speak directly to God. If you as a woman want to speak to God, you might go to your husband

and he might speak to the priest or you might go to the priest and speak to the priest. And he will intercede for you with God. What you can't do is speak for God. You can't preach. You can't speak in church. and you can't speak to God directly with any expectation of God hearing you. Well, so many priests die that an English bishop gives the advice that if you are dying, you can confess and receive extreme unction from a layman.

And if you can't find a layman who will listen to your confession, your deathbed confession, then you can confess to a woman, which means that the woman can convey the grace of God by saying, I forgive you your sin, so you can die not in sin, which means that women were acting as ordained priests. And it takes 600 years for us to get back to that status in the Church of England. And the Roman Catholic Church has never achieved it. When they said it, you could confess to a layman. Does that just mean any man? A man who isn't ordained. Yeah, just any old dude. And if you can't find one of them, all right, we'll get a woman in. All right, a bird.

Yeah. But still, I was so surprised because that, it's just this sort of like little loophole, this little moment in medieval history of, but it's so profound in church law. It didn't last, though, did it? No, it doesn't last. I mean, as soon as there are enough ordained priests to go around, it's all right. But I think it remains the case that if you can't get anybody and you're dying, can confess to anybody.

but certainly it's only authorized by a bishop in the plague years, in the extremity of the plague years. Did you find any records at all about women, not just giving the last rights, but maybe delivering a service? Is there anything like that? Maybe it wouldn't have been recorded. Probably would have been recorded if it had happened, but I don't think it happened because the church is closed, I mean, physically closed. Yes, of course. So it's not going to happen formally like that, but what you see is, of course, cults developing. And in the early sects, the early alternative churches, they are significant in that they do allow women to preach and they do allow women to lead these little fringy sort of culty churches.

And so this is a subject that's quite close to my own heart. But how did things change for the single ladies during the Black Death? In this occasion, when people start to get back to ordinary life, the women marry later. so because they've been able to move into economic independence, there's no big hurry to give it up. And you find the towns are really desperate to attract workers. And so they make special deals like outside nightclubs when a woman can get it for free. So the towns need women workers desperately in order to maintain their prosperity and to fill the jobs in the towns.

So a town like, I think Lewis says, that if a woman comes to the town, they don't ask whether she's got permission to come. They don't ask of her relationship to her lord of her manner. She can just come without telling about her history at all, and she can have the status of a townsman. So she gets to vote. She might be able to be some of the town officers, and she gets the freedom of the town. She can set up a business and trade in there. It says that women can take up more than one trade, but a man can only take up one. So there's a real demand for women because of their flexibility, because of their skills and because of their entrepreneurial energy. So towns are really trying to attract women. And women get licenses

very easily to work in different trades. So women get licensed as ale wives. So they can be brewers, which is an absolute sort of golden ticket. You know, you've got something that everybody needs and you have the license to brew it. I'll be back with you. I'll be back with Philippa after this short break. One of my specialist areas of historical research is the history of people that sold sex. And how did sex workers fare during the Black Death? I'm going to guess not well. I think the answer is not well. Yes. I mean, there's as soon as it happens, there starts to be a real pushback against sex workers generally and also against women generally. So there's a belief that, for instance, there is a belief that leprosy is caught by a man

having sex with the menstruating woman. Who told them that? No one was supposed to tell them that. So it's women's fault. And so it's very easy to move from that to believe that the plague comes from something women are doing. This is at a time where the medical information is such that women contain in their bodies infectious diseases anyway. It's not that they've caught them from men. Even as late as the 18th century, 19th century, there is a belief that sexually transmitted diseases are generated by women who have too much sex, i.e. more than one sexual partner, and that they give it to men who nobody thinks then pass it on to anybody. They just think then men have it. So you've got this real connection from the very early days. It goes on for a long,

long time between women having more than one sexual partner and having diseases. So there's a lot of blaming of women for the plague. And one town in particular says that women have the plague as punishment for the sin of vanity. So their town has particularly vain women, which is why they've got the plague and they say for example they wear their skirts so tight that they have to put a fox tail on their bottom so that you can't see the crack of the buttocks that's definitely leads well you know on that but i mean where do they get all the foxes from bothers me but never mind that's in the side but yeah absolutely okay i mean it's some i suppose we have to attempt to look at it within the context of like nobody knew what was going on and there was so many fears and phobes

but linking it to while these women have got fox tails hanging off their bottoms, that's wow. It is a bit well. And the thing about, I mean, especially medieval history, you do have to put yourself in two minds. One of you is going like, this is nuts and sometimes very comical. And the other part of your mind has to go like, you know, people today think ridiculous things. Or, you know, even a generation ago, stuff we didn't know about science reads really ridiculous. now. And what you have to remember is that, you know, you are not immune from the prejudices and stupidities of your historical era. You know, we are not yet at a position of complete objective truth. Was there a class thing with this? Because it sounds really interesting that the black death allowed a lot of freedom for women. Are we talking all women? Are we talking rich women? No, we're talking all women. I mean, the interesting thing about the black death is it was no respecter of class. That because, I mean, there was, there was, obviously rich people might have a country house to get away to, but because it was so terribly

infectious that you don't see like the wealthy escaping, as you do from other infections much more. It literally ripped across the country and it had killed pretty even-handedly across the classes. So elite women, yes, enjoyed freedom if they survived from male control. But Working class women were probably the greatest beneficiaries because their situation was worse before the black death. So the absence of a husband and a father. If you survived, I mean, you know, you have to remember that, you know, there were famines after as well because people weren't able to get the crops in or to, you know, manage food. But by and large, it was incredibly liberating for all women. It didn't last, though. Why didn't it continue? It doesn't seem to

have lasted. Was there any immediate backlash to this and women that they're having apprenticeships and they're moving into different trades? Well, historians call it a, there's an old-fashioned view which said this is a golden age for women immediately after the black death when women move into trades and education and skills and money-making opportunities and even civic roles of civic responsibility and elite women move into positions of power. And I think there is genuinely probably about 25 years in which you can see women's position, status and wealth equalizing with men. Women are really moving into all of these vacancies. But then you get a completely conscious and deliberate pushback

when the employers locally in all the localities make a little ring and agree how much they're going to pay, say a plowman, and how much they're going to pay, say, a dairy maid, and they agree that the dairymaid's rate is going to be less than the plowman's rate. When there isn't a terrible problem with a shortage of labour, that's when, of course, employers start to push wages down because then they can. You know, the jobs that women have moved into, they offer them to men, and when they do employed women, they offer them lower rate.

And then you get up until, you know, Battle of Bosworth, and the arrival of the Tudors, and then you start getting a real centralisation of administration and control, and by the time you get to Elizabeth, you have the first laws to manage, which set the price of labour, and which control labour mobility.

So this statue of artifices, as it's called, meaning the law on workers, says, firstly, the wages are to be agreed by all the landlords working together, Nobody is to pay more than they've agreed, and workers are not allowed to move from one employer to another seeking better wages. They're not allowed to move at all. So you start to get a really hostile environment for workers, and the effect of that is to pay women less and to trap them in their home parishes. And it wasn't just economic laws and sanctions that were changed.

there was, I don't know I say that a law was brought in about killing your husband because that's always been frowned upon, but it was definitely tightened up, wasn't it, the law that women killing men? I mean, it's never been encouraged. It's been okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's always been considered as inappropriate behaviour in a wife. Frowned upon, yeah. But what becomes really interesting is killing your husband becomes defined as petty treason. So it's of the same order as treason, which, is killing the king. So petty treason is killing your worldly superior. So if a husband kills his wife,

it's murder, if they can prove that it's done with intent, then it's murder and he might suffer the death penalty for it. Or given that he is allowed to punish his wife to a really quite extreme level, if I was a murderous husband, I would say I was just beating her to teach her a lesson and unfortunately it went wrong and he'd get off with manslaughter. But if a wife attacked and killed her husband, she would not be punished with execution or beheading. She would be killed by being boiled in oil. Jesus, holy, wow. It's obviously legislation which comes from real fear that servants might attack masters and that clerks might attack priests and that women might attack husbands. It's about holding women down in the class position more than punishing them for being women. It's about

really holding the order in which a woman, however wealthy or skilled or genteel she is, she is inferior to her husband. He is her master. Was that ever enacted that punishment? Oh, yeah. Oh my God. Not frequently, but equally, not infrequently. And it stays as law for a surprisingly long time. I think it's actually repealed as petty treason in something like, I think, the 18th or 19th century. And then it's just normal murder for which you would be executed. There was also a pushback against healers, women healers. I sort of got a sense that it's not just because they're healers, it's because these are professions that women were typically, they could get a bit of money and agency in. The pushback against women healers is very interesting. And I have

I have to say some of this is my speculation. It's not that I've sourced it from anyone else. But I think a number of things happen at the same time. I think, first of all, a global pandemic makes everybody doubt the healers because nobody comes up with anything that prevents it from happening and nobody can tell you what to do to save yourself from dying. So there's this, I think, real skepticism. And at the time of the Black Death, the Great Pestilence, the 14th century, Most of the witches are men, and about 70% of the people accused of witchcraft are male practitioners, and women are less so. And I think one of the things that the black death does is it makes men realize that there's not enough money to be made in medicine, and there's no status to be made in medicine, because everybody's going like, there's no point hiring you because you can't save me from this death. So there are vacancies then for local healers, and as always, women move into those vacancies,

which means that they are moving into it at a time when it is least credible. Then switch forward a couple of centuries. You have the formation of the guilds of surgeons and colleges of physicians, and they specify that women cannot be licensed by them. They don't do it directly by saying, this is a men-only occupation. They say you can only join if you're a graduate from a university, if you've got a university degree.

And of course, women don't get university degrees till 1920. So there's no point hanging on and hoping you'll get it later. So literally women are banned from medicine. One of the ways of getting their fees up and getting their prestige up is by deriding women, folk, herbalists, practitioners, even midwives. So there just starts to be this whole sense that women aren't any good at medicine. That medicine itself is not always, it's certainly no good unless you've got a graduate

giving you completely an effectual remedy, which is all he has anyway. And then the way is sort of prepared for prejudice against women, healers and practitioners. And I think that really flourishes under James, the first, when you've got this real paranoia about witchcraft. And there you've got your kind of target victims of the witchcraft scare. And of course it's women. And of course it's poor women. And it's poor women in their community where they cannot get status.

One of the things that you discussed in your book, and again, I'd never thought about it before, the peasants revolt. So the peasants revolt is often framed as it was an event that happened. It was after the black death. It was after peasants work in the lands. decided they wanted more rights they'd had before and then eventually there was a bit of a pushback and there was an revolt, there was a revolt,

lots of communities marched on London. But you've identified women leading it, women who were there. And I'd never thought to actually interrogate that before. And I guess that's my own bias. Even as a historian who studies women's history, it had never occurred to me that there would be women there. Well, I think historians of women

tend to be quite tight in their own periods. So what you don't get, you know, what I'm so pleased about the book that I've had the luxury of time to write is to go from 1066 in 1994, which at one level is insane because you can't write a history of 900 years. But on the other hand, somebody has to have a shot at it because if you don't, then, you know, the people who are very, very good historians of, say, suffragettes have no idea that women are voting for, you know, local. civic and indeed some local positions way back in the Middle Ages. Women have the vote. It gets taken from them rather insidiously and rather quietly. So you wouldn't necessarily know about the Peasants' Revolt in any detail unless you were a historian of that period of time. And even then, it's very difficult to get past the fact that it's called What Tyler's Revolt. And there you've got what Tyler in negotiation with the Young King and the Young King's advisors. And what you don't,

have in the history of names, in most histories, are the names of the women who, while he is negotiating with the king at Smithfield, are literally pulling the Chief Justice of England out the Tower of London and beheading him. And that's two women doing that. What Tyler's first act is to break open Canterbury jail and free the first rebels in the Peasant's Revolt, which are two women. And they march with him to London. We don't know what he was thinking. But Like, that's the first thing he does. He gets the two women out and then they all march together to London. I mean, presumably it was worth his while.

He probably didn't think he'd get a turnout that he needed without those women at the head of the march. It's not just his march. It's a march led by three people and two of them are women. And I've been on a night out in Bradford. I know that if you want a riot, women are the ones that you should be asking. That makes perfect sense to me. Actually, if you look at nine centuries of women's history, it's always women doing the rights.

It's always still women. Now there's a reason for that also, because women have no rights in law, they also aren't answerable to the law. So until about the middle of the 18th century, there is a genuine belief that the law specifies, and indeed the law does specify, that women cannot be arrested for anything less than capital offenses, anything else, it's responsibility of their husbands and fathers,

who will be called to court, have to answer for them. Now there's a get out of jail free card. It's literally a get out of jail free card. And that's why all of the big riots against enclosure, you know, the riots, the food riots, I mean, in England in the 17th century, there's not a day goes by,

but there isn't a food riot somewhere or other. And they are almost always led by women because women are the riotous sex. Because the local authorities think you can't arrest women, also think you can't identify women, you know, like it's just a crowd of women yelling, you know, you don't know who they are anyway. And their husbands and fathers, of course,

won't turn them in because they would be the ones who were punished. Wow. Okay, my final question. So your book is about trying to find these forgotten voices and they're so elusive that it's like you know that they're there. Of course they were there, but it's finding the evidence to prove that they were there. If I could give you a time machine and you can go back to one point in history and go there and look around and go, oh, here are all of the women and talk to them. What would be your point?

What would you want to go to actually get those answers? Who was there? I can't answer. I literally can't. There are so many places you would like to go back and see. And in a way, that's not the question for me. The book looks as if it's about the untold stories of women. but actually it's doing something a little bit different.

It's looking at the national story and seeing that there are women in it. We know they're there. It's literally looking at the interplay between the events and women, as opposed to assuming that the events are done by men. So it's not so much the stories of the women. It's more the national story. It's more how the huge shifts in social and eco-economic. and political and religious life are powered by the women. So it's more about the changes than it is

about the individual women doing them. Feltb, you have been incredible to talk to you today. Thank you so much. I've really, really enjoyed it. I mean, don't go to Leeds for a while if I were here. Yeah, and I live in Leeds. I'm okay. I can say that. I'm a Leeds lass. And Philip, do you want to give us the full title of your book so people can run, run together? So the book is called No More Women, 900 Years of Making History. Thank you so much. You've been an absolute pleasure to talk to. It's been enjoyed.

Thank you so much. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Philippa for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review, and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you want us to explore a subject, or if you just fancied saying hello,

please email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. We have got episodes on everything from Hitler's sex life to a mini-series on the Kennedy women, all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the seeds of the History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit.