The Invention of the Scold

Abstract

The figure of the nagging, shrewish, sharp-tongued woman became a familiar presence in English local court records from the mid-fourteenth century. As Sandy Bardsley explains in her stimulating interdisciplinary study, the scold's invention needs to be seen in the context of wider developments in the repression of disruptive speech. Late medieval English legislators began to police speech in earnest in the late thirteenth century, through laws prohibiting the defamation of the king or his magnates passed by the Statutes of Westminster of 1275, and through fourteenth-century legislation which reiterated the ban on slander against the powerful men of the kingdom. Around the same time the offence of barratry emerged. While the legal sense of a ‘barrator’ was someone who was perceived to be wasting the court's time by pressing weak or false suits, it also had the broader meaning of ‘troublemaker’ or ‘agitator’, and by the late fourteenth century was...