Gone Medieval - Understanding Medieval Women Through Crime

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

Justice; the principle that people receive that which they deserve. But what did this mean for women when dealing with Medieval Law? In today's episode of Gone Medieval, Cat is joined by historian and author Teresa Phipps as we draw upon legal records. Examining women's involvement in crime and the legal system. How were women represented in late-medieval England?Don’t forget to leave us a rating and review while you're here!For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to the Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit history hit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to God Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. If you were a woman in the Middle Ages, what would happen to you if you started screaming and shouting in a public place or if someone committed some kind of crime towards you? Or what if you assaulted someone? Would they or you be brought to justice? And how were women represented? in the legal system. As it happens, legal records in English towns can tell us an awful lot about the roles of women

and their involvement, not just in what you or I might think of as crime, but also tell us some surprising facts about their roles and involvement in trade. To find out more about this topic, I've invited Dr. Teresa Phipps to the podcast today. She is from Swansea University, and she's written a book called Medieval Women and Urban Justice, commerce, crime and community in England, 1,300 to 1,500. Teresa, thank you so much for joining us here today. Thanks, Kat. It's really great to be here. I'm looking forward to talking to you. So this is such an interesting subject, and it's one that I don't know anything about really at all.

I didn't know until I started looking into it. And I think a lot of people don't have a lot of knowledge of the legal system in this time period instead of 14th to 16th century, which is your focus of your book. And I think we tend to think of it as quite simple and quite basic, perhaps. But I wanted to sort of see if we could just start with some of the basics, this legal system, which is really where you're getting all your information from. What sort of cases? Can you explain a little bit more how it works and some of the terminology that you'll be talking about here?

Yeah, sure. So on the whole, the legal system in the middle ages is actually really complicated. But it's really interesting to study because you can see a lot of, lot of the roots of the legal system that we have today. And I'm not a lawyer. I wouldn't call myself a legal historian, but I use legal records to kind of look at social history and women's history. The particular part of the legal system that I look at is courts that are kind of at the lowest level. So particularly for me, I'm looking at courts in towns. And generally speaking, every town would have had its own court. And there's lots of similarities between the way these courts worked in different towns, but also they all had their own kind of.

of different rules and different customs and different ways of keeping records and that kind of thing. So we have these town courts that are kind of the lowest level of the legal system, and then you have a whole load of other jurisdictions. So courts are operated by the church, courts that are kind of the King's courts that deal with more serious issues. And these jurisdictions kind of overlap in some ways. They're all kind of in a phase of developing and evolving during this period as well. really complicated and, you know, we don't need to go into all of the detail here, but we'll focus on the courts that I know about and the records that I look at. So in towns, in England, and also pretty similar in Wales and Scotland as well, but, you know, those different parts of Britain,

again, have their kind of specific differences. In towns and England, we have different types of court. So you have courts that hear cases that is one person coming to court and complaining about something that somebody else has done. And we can call this civil litigation. So it's me, Teresa, I might come to court and complain that cat, you have done something wrong. So there's no police involved. It's just one person deciding to pursue somebody else. Most of these cases are to do with money. So we have a lot of litigation to do with debt. And that's not because everyone was really poor or because they couldn't manage their finances, but it's because the way the economy worked was generally speaking, you might buy something from somebody and say, I'll pay you in two weeks

time when my payment from that other thing that I sold to somebody else has come through. So there's a lot of deferred payment and quite kind of complex credit networks. Now, sometimes people didn't pay on you might go to their house and say, hey, can you give me the money? And if that didn't work, eventually these things might end up coming to court. It doesn't mean that there's a huge kind of breakdown or necessarily a kind of falling out of people, but it's just a way to get those obligations fulfilled. And we see, you know, even the most important men in these towns are involved in these kind of cases. So you see the mayors of these towns being sued and also suing other people for money that they were owed. So it's a really kind of normal part of life. And I think that's important

to emphasize, because I think for us now in the 21st century, if I said to you, oh, cat, I'm going to court next week, you'd probably think, oh, like what's happened? What have you done? Or what's somebody done to you? It would be a real kind of crisis moment in my life, probably. But in the late medieval period in these town courts, it doesn't really work in the same way. Does that mean? It's sort of almost part of the process. So you trade and you're liking to come across these sort of things in your business? Yeah, it's very normal, I think. And I think perhaps another reason why it's so common is a lot of these transactions are just oral, so nobody's writing anything down. Maybe people are kind of keeping, you know, accounts within their own house or their

own business, but they're not necessarily saying, oh, like, John owes me six pence for this, and Robert owes me 10 pence for this, and Agnes owes me this, and these are the dates. it's much more kind of informal than that. But by coming to court, that's a way of getting these things written down because the court keeps records. So that's another aspect of it as well. And I use quite a few examples of kind of imaginary men's names there, but we do see women in these cases as well.

The other main type of case we see where it's one person complaining against another is what's called trespass litigation or trespass litigation. please. So again, today we think of trespass as kind of going onto somebody's land when you didn't have permission, very kind of basically speaking. In the medieval period, this term trespass is much broader. And when we look at the Latin, the Latin word is basically transgression. So it's this really broad category of rule breaking. Typically, it's things like minor assaults, theft. It does include going into someone's house or property when you've not been invited. And it also sometimes includes kind of verbal assault, so name calling, that kind of thing. And often these complaints, it will be

lots of those things all kind of lumped into one. So it might be that you're complaining that somebody's beaten you and come into your house without you inviting them and they stole some stuff and they called you names, called you a false merchant or something like that. And these, I find these cases is really interesting because to me they're very real. And sometimes we think of the medieval period as it's really distant and it's so different to the world that we live in today. But actually, you know, our lives and kind of human society today,

we fall out with people, hopefully not very often, but sometimes people steal things, people get assaulted. You know, we have arguments with our neighbours about your dogs come into my garden and mess things up, that kind of thing. And this is the kind of thing that we're seeing in these, complaints again. But again, there's no policing involved. It's just one person choosing to complain about somebody else. Yeah, that does make it so real and so human, exactly as you say.

And you're saying this is sort of the lowest part of this whole system. Does this mean that this is very much everyday people like you and me or is it a sort of class-based? Do you actually have to have quite a lot of money to be able to take a case like this to court if my neighbor's dog is eating my turnips or something. Can I only do that if I have money or is it sort of open to everyone? No, it's pretty accessible. So you did have to pay to bring these cases to court, but it's usually kind of a few pence. And so we see the kind of elites within urban society, but also much more ordinary people. And you can look at, so when people are complaining about money that they're owed, sometimes they're taking someone to court and they're saying they owe them two pence or four pence.

So, you know, the smallest amounts, that's maybe, you know, a day's work for a kind of a skilled labourer. So it's not nothing, but it's not life-changing either. And to me, that says that these are very accessible courts because if you were, you know, so kind of poor that you couldn't afford to go to court to seek that small amount of money, then you wouldn't have bothered. So it does really allow us to get an insight into the identities of who these ordinary people are that are living within these towns. and that's why I think these records are so fascinating because otherwise we wouldn't really know that these people ever existed. We wouldn't know their names. We definitely wouldn't know kind of what type of work they were doing. We wouldn't know who they're having a kind of falling out with, who they might have beaten up down the road, all of that kind of stuff. And that's why I find

them so kind of fascinating and interesting to study. Yeah, absolutely. So, but you're saying, so there's no sort of police or authorities, this is all just people who are, bringing them forward themselves because it's happened to them. Is there another level where some kind of officials or anybody else would bring these cases to court as well? Yeah. So there's another kind of category of legal actions and is sometimes this is a kind of a separate court. Sometimes it all happens as part of the same court. Probably in reality, this is all taking place in the same physical space. So there's not one court building for one issue and one for another, but sometimes they have different names, but we do have other offences that are dealt in slightly more

kind of policing manner. These are often referred to as presentments. So in these instances, you have people who are very kind of low-level local officials. They're all men, but they tend to be kind of normal residents who, for example, in Nottingham, there would be a pair of men who are responsible for kind of presenting what's been going on in their street. And when they're listed in the records, it will have the names. And then it says the street that they're responsible for. And these people would come to the court and they just kind of report what's been going on. Usually they're reporting violence. And it's referred to in terms of a phrase. And a phrase is a, you know, a word we still have in policing today. Seems a bit old fashioned, but it's still around.

but all they do in these cases is they just present who was involved so this person attacked this other person and sometimes they say whether or not there was bloodshed involved the bloodshed is important because in some cases so again in Nottingham certainly if there was no bloodshed involved you'd be fined six pence if there was bloodshed you'd be fined so it's double and and maybe, you know, generally speaking, blood equals kind of more violence, but also I think it's symbolic as well. In those cases, you don't get any opportunity to come and say, no, I didn't do it, or actually it was more complicated.

She started it first and I was defending myself. There's none of that. It's just, you've done this, you've got to come to court and you've got to pay the fine. So we have those as well. In reality, there's quite a lot of overlap between those kind of offenses and the trespass, the wrongdoing where it's somebody complaining this person did this to me. But for one reason or another, and it's not really very clear, they're kind of dealt with in different ways. And it's just down to whether the victim has chosen to take it to court or whether these officials have

reported it to the court. Right. Okay. So let's get to the key part of your research than about the women. So that's really good to understand the range of cases we're looking at. But how How represented are women in these things? Because this is sort of surprised me. I think with my sort of prejudice for this, I would have assumed that there was very little on women there at all. But in your research, how represented are they?

Is it sort of rare to find women in those records? Yeah, so I think we have a lot of maybe kind of preconceptions about women in the medieval period and that they were kind of powerless or maybe downtrodden. And then we've got these figures like Made Marion, who are these kind of exceptional women, or women from other parts of literature. But what I really like about looking at these court records

is we get to find these real women and we know their names and what they were doing. And yes, they're always a minority if we do some kind of statistical or counting up the numbers of individuals who are appearing in all these different types of courts and different cases. Women always appear in lower numbers than men, but at the same time, they're not exceptional.

You know, we're not talking one, two, three, In some types of cases that I've looked at, we've got maybe up to sort of 25% of the litigants being women, and that's on both sides. So those cases where it's one person complaining about another, we have women doing the complaining, but also being the subjects of the complaints as well. So I think we'd always expect to find more men in these records than women, and we do. But they're not so unusual that it's kind of exceptional. And they're definitely not so unusual that it's not worth studying them and looking at them and trying to kind of piece together their stories

and understand more about how the courts kind of perceived women and their actions within society. And so when you're looking at these cases, you've been looking at both sides of the story, so you're looking at some cases where people are accusing someone of doing something and others where they are being accused. Is there a difference there in where women turn up? Are they more often the victims of something?

Or are you seeing them? on both sides? We definitely see them on both sides. For me, there's not a kind of clear cut. Yes, they're definitely more often victims or they're definitely more often the people doing the complaining. There's, you know, you could do lots of different analysis and count different records from different places. You probably get a different answer every time. The one area where we maybe do see a bit more of women being victims is when we're looking at those instances where officials are presenting violence that's been done. So women are more often victims there. But again, it's not completely one side. So we do also have women who are attacking other women,

but also attacking other men. And in the trespass complaints, the men have actively chosen to go to court and kind of publicise what's happened. And they're choosing to complain that a woman has beaten them up or assaulted them or called them names. So, you know, there's ideas about, you know, would that damage their masculinity? Men wouldn't want to do that because it kind of damages their reputation. But actually they are. And I think that's really interesting

because that's something that historians have kind of talked about in the past that men wouldn't want to admit that women could harm them. But actually they did and they're actively choosing to do that. And I think that's really fascinating. But again, to me, it's kind of, that's real life. That's how societies work sometimes. Yeah, absolutely. Hi everyone, I'm Jimmy Doherty, TV presenter, farmer and conservationist. I've got a brand new podcast where we discuss all things green, from nature to recycling, to foraging to potty training cows. Yeah, I'm not joking, apparently it helps

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Tune into on Timmie's Farm from History Here, follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I do have to ask because I know that you've got some really brilliant examples in your research and in your book that you write about. So can you talk us through some of the most interesting cases and some of these individuals that you managed to sort of dig out of the records? Yeah, so one of my favourites in terms of kind of imagining the real life of this involves a married couple. So this is from Nottingham and this is a case that's being presented by those local officials who were kind of policing their neighbourhood. So there's these two officials that are reporting and a fray or a fight and they come to the court and they said that a man called

Thomas Benton, who is a barber. He seized another man called Hugh Wimslow by his breast. So he's kind of grabbed him maybe by his clothing, by the chest. And this has happened in the common hall. And this is where the court sat and, you know, the most kind of important civic building in the town. So these two men, Thomas has grabbed Hugh in the common hall. And then Thomas drew his knife, which you're not allowed to do.

So everyone carries knives, but you're not. allowed to kind of take it out that in itself is kind of as an offence. He's drawn his knife and he's said malicious words. That's how they report it. So we can imagine what he might have said, kind of swearing, you know, accusing him or something. And this was so bad that Hugh feared for his life. So as a result of this, Thomas Benton was fined 12 pence. Then the next entry in these court records relates to Joan, who's the wife of Hugh Wimslow. So, the wife of the man that's just been attacked. She came into the common hall, so the same building,

and she spoke malicious words to Thomas Benton, the attacker, and slapped him in the face. And she's also fined 12 pence. Now, we don't know if these things happened kind of directly one after the other, but the fact they're recorded underneath each other in the record suggests that it's pretty close together. And I just love this because I imagine it like something from extenders. that these men, for whatever reason,

have had some kind of altercation. They're having a bit of a fight. It's in a very public place in this common hall. And then Joan, whose wife has heard about it. And she's come in there and she's, you know, this is not acceptable. She's kind of taking her retribution. So she's grabbed this Thomas Benton, slapped him,

had a go at him. What are you doing, beating up my husband, you this and that, calling him some names. and it's just again that's so kind of real to me and you can yeah you can imagine it in Albert Square in Eastenders or any kind of soap opera what I also find really interesting about this is so normally these kind of instances of violence

the fine is six pence because it doesn't say anything about bloodshed being involved but for both of these in both cases Thomas Benton who did the initial kind of attack and then Joan, who's kind of taking retribution for her husband, both of them are fine 12 pence, which is a departure from this normal pattern. And it's more than they should be fined. And I think it's because it happened in the common hall. And this is meant to be the kind of place of law and government in the town.

So to kind of have this kind of violence and disturbance going on there is a more serious disruption and then if it had happened in another street elsewhere. That's my kind of assumption based on that. But I just think it's great because, again, it kind of challenges our image of women and married women, particularly in this period. They're at home with the children. They're, you know, cooking and cleaning and doing all of this.

No, she's coming out and defending her husband because she perhaps, you know, feels affronted as a result of the attack on him. Maybe he's gone home and he's like, you've never known what that Thomas did to me today. And she's like, right, I'm going to go and find him and give him. them a piece of my mind and I just think it's brilliant. That is really fantastic. So it is saying a lot about that behaviour and also the fact that they are being fine the same. So they clearly treated the same than in the eyes of the law there. There seems to be no difference. So yeah, that's a fantastic story. And I mean,

what generally do these then tell us about attitudes towards women's behaviour? I mean, you're saying earlier on that they didn't really sort of stand out. Does that mean that most of the time, if women do these things, it isn't treated at something really shocking? Is it giving us some of that nuance as well? Definitely. I think on the whole, my kind of reading of all of these records of these different types of offences and different complaints is that it's more about

the behaviour or the wrongdoing or the obligation that hasn't been met. That's the crux of it. It's not about the individuals who are involved and it's whether a woman being violent is worse than a man being violent. It's not. It's the violence that's,

at the core of it or the not paying the money on time that's at the core of it. And the way that the records are written, there's no kind of distinction in how they record, you know, things that women have done or things that men have done. The one, I guess, exception to that or caveat is in relation to offences to do with kind of this idea of disruptive speech. So we have this kind of character of the scold, which in later period, you have this. You have this this kind of scolds bridle, and it's one of these things that's kind of permeated into the popular imagination about kind of medieval, early modern society. But in the records that I'm looking at, you have this offence of scolding. It's essentially disruptive speech,

maybe shouting, maybe nagging, particularly nagging your husband. And largely, this is an offence that is reserved for women. You do have a handful of men who are also punished for being scolds, but the majority of people that we see being named as scolds are women. And again, this is one of those offences where it's just reported by those local officials. So there's just the name and it says usually they're called a common scold. And that use of that word common is because it's about this idea that you're disrupting kind of everyone, everyone in the community. So it's not about what's going on in your house. It's kind of you're disturbing your neighbours. So it's something that's affecting the community more widely.

So that's the main area where we see different attitudes to the behaviour of women and men. And again, we do have some men called scolds, but it's a real kind of small amount compared to the number of women. And so, I mean, you said before that there was sort of religious courts and that sort of thing as well. I mean, are the cases you're looking at in these records sort of detached from religious beliefs and things,

or are they just very practical, very sort of day-to-day things? Or is any of this behaviour relating to sort of religious requirements or rules as well? So, yes, in the town courts, they're very kind of practical issues and these kind of interpersonal issues about, you know, relationships breaking down. In church courts, which are a whole separate jurisdiction, you do have more of these kind of moral offences and lots of cases relating to maths. marriage, a lot of defamation as well, because that was seen as a kind of moral spiritual offence. So you don't really see that in town courts because it's a separate jurisdiction.

I think underpinning a lot of these kind of rules and expectations about how people should behave, yes, that kind of does go back to religion and, you know, even tracing these things back to the Ten Commandments about what's acceptable behavior. But it's not, you don't kind of see those kind of religious ideas at the forefront. It's much more about how can we govern our towns so that they're peaceful and that they're good places to trade and make money and kind of boost the prosperity of our community because that's what towns are essentially for. Towns are places for trade. So by enforcing the law and giving people a place where they can deal with their disputes, make sure their obligations and payments are made and that kind of thing,

all of that is going to work in the interest of hopefully, you know, fostering a good place to work and trade and boost the reputation of that town as well within the wider society. So when we were thinking about this trade then and your research into women, is this giving us quite a good idea of how involved women were in trade more generally? Yeah, so these court records and particularly the records relating to debt, so where somebody is complaining that somebody owes them some money, they are really among the best evidence that we have for the type of work and trade that women were involved in in this period. Without these, you know, we wouldn't know a lot of these women's names and we definitely wouldn't know what kind of work they were doing because those kind of records just weren't kept. You know, we might have archaeological material that can tell us about that kind of stuff, but on the individual level, these records are so valuable for giving an insight into that. And the way that we can use these to explore women's work and trade is by looking at what kind of items, what kind of products those debts are arising from. So a typical case might say that somebody owes somebody six pence for malt.

So we know that malt is part of the brewing process. And if we look at the individuals there, then it tells us that those two individuals are in some way involved. in brewing. So one woman that illustrates this really well is a woman from Nottingham called Agnes Hallam. So she's not famous. She's not particularly extraordinary or doing anything particularly notable. But what is notable about her is that she happened to go to court a lot. So I've been able to piece together all these different court appearances to kind of find out a bit more about her life. Agnes Hallam, so we're talking here about the kind of 1370s to 1390s. She was involved in lots of different court cases relating to debt arising from various aspects of the brewing process.

So this was either her complaining that somebody owed her money or other people complaining that she owed the money. And you see here they'll say that she owes money for malt, which is a key part of the brewing process. Also things to do with the equipment that's used in the brewing process. and the frequency of these over, you know, 10, 20 years tells us she must have been brewing on a pretty kind of professional scale. Because when you look at the amount of money involved as well, it's not just a few pence. It's sometimes, you know, 10 shillings worth of malt. So that's a significant amount. There are also cases that relate to her selling ale onto other women.

And then perhaps they've not paid her on time. So there's a woman called Marjorie Tapster, and the surname Tapster relates to selling ale. So perhaps Agnes Hallam is brewing ale on quite a big scale, and then she's selling it onto other people who will then go and sell it sort of by the cup. So you've got that kind of chain of production there. Some of these cases involve her kind of dealing with the elite of the towns, so men who were kind of mayors or came from, there were certain families in Nottingham who, you know, over the years, all various. different men were the mayors of Nottingham. So you can see she's connected to these kind of most important people. And then the other thing that tells us a little bit more about her brewing is we have a case where

she, this is a trespass place, so she's complaining about wrongdoing. She complains that this man called Adam Panya assaulted her and kind of broke some pots and, you know, there was a bit of a disturbance. And it says in her house where she ran a tavern. so she's not just brewing the ale, but she's made, whether, you know, full time or sometimes she's kind of running a pub, essentially. So people are coming into her house to buy and drink her ale.

And then this one time this mad Adam Panya has caused a bit of a disturbance and assaulted her. So we kind of pieced together this image of her of this professional brewer landlady. I like to kind of imagine her a bit of a Peggy Mitchell of late medieval Nottingham, maybe quite a strong independent businesswoman. And we wouldn't know any of that if we didn't have these court records.

And as I said, she's not famous. She's not going to be kind of recorded in other documents. It's only through these court records that we know about her. And there will have been hundreds of other women like her, probably some in Nottingham and in other towns as well. But unless we look at these records and we happen to get lucky that the right ones have survived, that kind of thing, we don't know that these women even exist. That's absolutely fantastic.

I love that fact that you can sort of track this over time a bit and piece together this jigsaw of a life that's just sort of gone from everyone's memory really. But presumably it might have been quite an important character in that time and place. Yeah, I'm sure she was well known within the town. When you look at these court cases, so I counted them up and I found at least 35 different cases. and most of those involved different people. So you think of that as a kind of web of connections. I'm sure people knew her and maybe she was a bit notorious because she was coming to court a lot.

But I don't think we should read too much into that. I think it's more about people are just using the court to enforce their business dealings, really. Fantastic. So you've got her name in these records and she's doing all of this business. And of course, we sort of mentioned briefly before the case of husbands and marriage and so on.

I mean, in this case, is she, clearly, is she single? Is she acting on her own? Or do we know more about her life? So at first, I thought she's probably single or maybe a widow, because she just keeps appearing in court on her own. And then the more I looked into it, I found a few cases where she appears with her husband, who's called John Hallam.

So in these cases, they usually say John Hallam and his wife, Agnes. So you know they're definitely married. You know, you know, she's not his sister. They are married. And these are kind of at the same time as all her other cases are going on where she's appearing on her own. John Hallam, you can tell from the cases he's involved and he's involved in some way in the cloth trade. And we know Agnes is doing her brewing. And they appear sometimes in these debt cases together and their issues that either relate to brewing or to cloth production.

So we can see that sometimes their business is kind of overlapping. but what's really interesting for me is most of the time she's off doing her own thing going to court on her own he's probably running his own business and in the legal records they don't tend to overlap that much and this is really interesting because it complicates these ideas that we have about women once they're married their identity becomes kind of joined up with their husband and there's this idea of coverture. So very kind of simply speaking that married women are covered by their husbands and that their husbands are responsible for their actions. So if you're kind of ascribing to that rule of coverture, why is Agnes Hallam appearing in court on her own? It doesn't really quite

make sense. But to me, this suggests that the way these things worked in reality, I think the court and the people that Agnes Hallam was kind of working and trading with knew that she she was working independently and they knew her husband was doing something completely different and they're happy to kind of deal with her on her own terms. And to me it makes a lot more sense because the alternative would be somebody says, oh, Agnes owes me some money and she says, well, my husband's not here. So we can't do anything about it. You'll have to wait until two weeks time and then maybe my husband will show up in court then and maybe we can talk about it then and just nothing would ever get resolved, right?

So to me, it says that these courts are sometimes a lot more practical in how they're interpreting these ideas about married women and some of the limitations about their legal status, but also the kind of realities of the work they're doing and the lives they're living. And of course, they are kind of separate people with their own minds and, you know, sometimes running their own businesses as well. So to me, it really makes sense. But it was a surprise when I was piecing this all together and suddenly thought, oh, gee, she is. is married, and I assume that she wasn't. So is that relationship, that marriage between Agnes and her husband, is that come up in the actual trading or in the sort of legal cases at all in any way, or is it just sort of an aside?

So we've got a couple of cases where they're kind of involved in these complaints together, where they're owing money together. And then there's this other case, again, this is kind of the final piece of the jigsaw, where Agnes Hallam is sued for assaulting a woman, a woman who probably who was also called Agnes, who was probably a servant of a man in the town. And this man comes to the court and says, Agnes Hallam has assaulted my servant.

But Agnes Hallam says, you can't sue me for this. I'm not going to answer you because my husband's not here. You haven't named my husband in the complaint. And as a result, the case gets. gets dropped and the man gets fined for kind of breaking the rules of the court. So in this instance, she's kind of flipped those rules of curvature and used it to her advantage, whereas in all those other cases, she's very happy to answer complaints relating to her business alone. But when somebody

accused her of violence, she says, no, you know, you need to speak to my husband. He's not here. So you haven't got a case. And it works. It's wonderful because it's so, she's kind of playing the to her advantage and the court seems happy to go along with it. Fantastic. So she really knows the system, doesn't she? She knows how to use it in her favour and we're not to. That's fantastic. So interesting. And I think that really demonstrates quite nicely how a lot of women's roles in the past and certainly in this period and how they were treated in society could really actually be a lot more flexible than what we tend to think in our sort of 21st century perspectives. We quite often describe the sort of quite strict rules

in the past thinking that must have been how it was. But I mean, this seems like there's quite a lot of flexibility as opposed, just individual situations and personalities. Would you say that's right? Yeah. And I'm not trying to say that, you know, married women were equal to their husbands or anything near that. But I think this is why looking at these kind of records.

They're the records of legal practice. And, you know, through that we get these insights into people's everyday lives. That tells us a lot more than some of those. kind of legal theory. We have in this period lawyers writing texts about this is how the law works, but that's not the same as looking at, okay, but how is it actually working in practice? And it's only by looking at these records of practice that we get to kind of really test some of these theories. And generally speaking, the answer for me is always it's complicated or it's more complicated than you might have thought. And it's only by giving.

those kind of examples of people like Agnes Hallam and, you know, plenty more as well that allow us to get that insight. I think somebody should write a book about Agnes or a film or something along those lines. Yeah, it's brilliant. She's, over the years I've been kind of studying this and I tell my friends about Agnes Hallam and it's so great to be able to kind of tell these stories of these women. And again, you know, she's not particularly famous. She's not particularly important in the grand scheme of history. But, you know, she's like all of us, just kind of ordinary people, ordinary women trying to make a living and live our lives and get on with our neighbours and all of those things that we try to do every day. And that's why I think that story resonates so well for

me. Fantastic. Absolutely love it. Teresa, that was absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much for joining me today and talking about this topic. Thanks, Kat. It's been really great. So do have a look at for Teresa's book. So that's called Medieval Women and urban justice, commerce, crime and community in England, 1,300, I'd highly recommend having a look for it. So thank you all for listening so much today. This has been an episode of Gone Medieval Buy History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman, and I hope you will join us again. Please do subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already, and you can also subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter. Just look in the episode notes for how to do that, and I hope you will join us again soon.