Eavesdropping (20 page)

Laws against disturbing the peace make sense, but a crime that could only be committed by women? How can there be a law that is only breakable by females? Even modern rape laws are gender-neutral. But the reference to angry women is no illusion. In his
Commentaries on English Law
, Sir William Blackstone wrote of the charge of scolding, “our law confines it to the feminine gender.”
⁴³
Why associate brawling and wrangling with women; and who were their victims?

Scolding was a public attack on a person, to her face. It was usually set in motion by information, which may or may not have been reliable. If even marginally credible, scolding—like every case of garden-variety slander—could seriously injure the reputation and social standing of the victim. If such an invaluable asset could be damaged by scolding, one would hardly need to cast around for reasons to prosecute it.

Scolding consumed a lot of court time. In the two centuries beginning in 1370, scolding was the most frequent of all social offences, and in the typical case, the accuser and the accused were
both females. In the vast majority of scolding cases—over nine in ten—the charge was of a sexual nature, according to Laura Gowing’s analyses. In over a third of these sexual allegations, it was lexically specific: “Whore!”
⁴⁴

In the winter of 1610 Alice Rochester hurled a whore charge at Jane Lilham in earshot of their neighbors in London. “Thow art a whore and an arrant whore and a common carted whore,” Mrs. Rochester said. But Mrs. Rochester had something more specific on her mind that day—something more personal. For she continued, more pointedly,
“thow art my husbandes whore
.” Her husband, Mrs. Rochester screamed at Miss Lilham, “hath kept thee a great while at Newcastle and all that he got he spent on thee …
thow has lyne of tener with him then he hath done with me
.” Miss Lilham took Alice to court six months later, and five female ear witnesses testified on her behalf.

Mrs. Rochester believed, and may have known, that she was losing her husband—his affections, his earnings—to a competitor. The female scold’s accusation of whoring undoubtedly attracted some measure of sympathy, at least from other married women, who potentially faced the same threats.

In some cases of whore-scolding, there was no reference to a husband. In 1495 court records in Waddesdon, England indicate that one Elizabeth Godday was charged with calling Katherine Walrond a whore, and the charge did implicate a man. But it was not Elizabeth’s husband, if indeed she was married, but Sir Thomas Couley, a chaplain, whom Katherine was allegedly tempting into a sexual relationship. The case against Elizabeth was dismissed when she “purged herself” of the accusation. Ten years later, Agnes Horton and Joan Whitescale were summoned to court, evidently to receive judicial rebuke, for calling each other a “strong whore.” In 1521 Agnes Yve, of Chesham, set a new record of sorts. She hurled the whore charge so often that
forty women
turned up in court to support the accusation of scolding.
⁴⁵

Anxieties about reputation and discord were sufficient to prosecute charges of scolding, but that doesn’t mean they were the sole basis for such charges. Indeed, these were just the tip of a more complex and interesting iceberg. In the submerged portion were two freedoms. One was single women’s freedom to poach a married man. The other was married men’s freedom to engage in extramarital sex.

The first and most direct targets of scolding were other women—single women. These women were loudly and publicly “addressed,” and this was overheard by others at home, usually women. This was no accident. The scold intended that her insults and charges become public knowledge.

The typical scold was a married woman. Her marital status was well worth preserving; early modern women had few ways to make money. Their financial security was no stronger than their marriage. Anything that might loosen marital bonds was a serious threat. The single greatest threat was mate-poaching—competition for the husband’s affections—and in the typical case of whore-scolding a wife was claiming that another woman had engaged in sex with her husband, or at least attempted to alienate his affections. This is understandable: adultery was considered sinful and this undoubtedly emboldened the wife to make a fairly public sort of charge. But an implication of the charge was that her husband may have already become involved in an extramarital relationship. If so, she was indirectly charging him with something.

This could not have gone down well with many of the men in the community, and it is a major reason why female vocal abuse would have been prosecuted by the male-dominated courts with unusual vigor. When forty women file into court to support a friend, men have grounds for fearing the power of scolding. An isolated case of whore-accusation is one thing, but a recurrent pattern might well have consolidated to form a clear and present threat to men’s biological imperatives, at least those that involved extra-marital sex.

There is a timeless quality to these events, as timeless as human biology. I have taken a look at the titles of the Jerry Springer show for the three television seasons beginning in 1991, 1996, and 1997. Of over five hundred titles, 39 percent were explicitly about some aspect of sex. In the final year, 63 percent involved this subject. Breaking down “sex” into ten categories, I found that the single most popular topic on Jerry Springer was
sexual competition and adultery
. Overall, one out of three programs involved this topic.
⁴⁶

The sexual competition category is interesting. By itself, this category comprised 20 percent of all the sex-linked programs. Some of the titles include:

“Back Off … He’s Mine”

“He Doesn’t Want You! He’s Mine”

“Stop Stalking My Man”

“Leave My Man Alone”

“You Can’t Have My Man”

“Hands Off My Lover!”

“Get Away From My Man!”

“Stay Away From My Lover”

“You Won’t Steal My Lover”

“Get Your Own Man

Medieval men obviously did not want the whole community to know the content of their private life. They also did not want women to have the authority to decide what others would know about them. This second concern would have been less acutely felt if women had been ignorant or privileged, but they were neither. Married women had a great deal of knowledge about the details of their husbands’ private lives, which could be divulged at any time. This placed men perpetually on notice. If they did anything that crossed the lines drawn by their spouses, there could be ruinous consequences.

Men value their autonomy. Intimacy is a form of vulnerability and is therefore a threat to autonomy. If married women talked to their friends about intimate experiences, including their own, men would surely panic at the thought that aspects of their own sexuality were being broadly, if quietly, cast around their tiny villages. In a short essay published in 1678, a scold was caricatured as “a Devil of the feminine gender; a serpent, perpetually hissing, and spitting of venom; a composition of ill-nature and clamour … animated gunpowder, a walking Mount Etna that is always belching forth
flames of sulphur … a real purgatory.”
⁴⁷
Nearly four hundred years ago, Alexander Roberts wrote that women “are of a slippery tongue, and full of words.” If they know of “wicked practises,” Roberts wrote, they “are not able to hold them, but communicate the same with their husbands, children, consorts, and inward acquaintance; who not consideratly weighing what the issue and end thereof may be, entertaine the same, and so the poyson is dispersed.”
⁴⁸
In 1653
A Brief Anatomie of Women
identified the tongue, “that stirring and active member,” as one of women’s greatest liabilities.
⁴⁹
It’s hard to see how men could have expressed more emphatically their fear of vocal women, a fear that the men themselves would have failed to comprehend.

The literature of the seventeenth century contains clues to gender concerns in the hurtful use of speech. One of the poems published in that period—Robert Harper’s
Anatomy of a Woman’s Tongue
, published in 1638—likened women’s speech to a poison:

A Man that had a nimble-tongue Wife,
With whom he liv’d a discontented Life;
For she would tell all that her Husband did,
And from her Gossips nothing should be hid.
If he sometimes did come Home drunk to Bed,
About the Town it should be published.
If he a Woman do salute or kiss,
Why all the Town forsooth must know of this.

Harper concluded his poem with a plea:

O Women, be not cruel unto Men,
Ill Words are worse than Poison now and then.

The worry embedded in Harper’s poem was explicit—that women would broadcast harmful information about men’s intimate activities. An indication of how far men were prepared to go to
limit the communicative power of women is in the punishments they invented, and meted out, for exercising too much of it.
⁵⁰

The penalty for eavesdropping was often a small fine, but there were two rather severe punishments for scolding—the behavior that was frequently set up by eavesdropping. The legally prescribed one was dunking, which dated back to the twelfth century. In dunking (or “ducking”), the guilty party was placed in a “scoldcart” or “ducking stool,” sometimes called “cucking” stool from the semantic association with “cuckquean,” the female equivalent of “cuckold.” In essence, the stool was an armchair fastened to one end of a long pole. The pole was hinged to a pedestal that was dug into the ground, affixed to the side of a bridge, or mounted on a trolley. It worked like a seesaw. Men raised the opposing end of the pole, dunking the scold. One stool had such a long pole that the scold could receive her dunking “while the administrators of the Ducking stand on dry land,” gushed one admiring (male) narrative from the time.

Dunking was not the most practical means of punishment for a speech-related crime. An Oxford don noted in 1686 that dunking, whatever its other virtues, “gives the tongue liberty, ’twixt every dipp.”
⁵¹
But this may have been construed as an advantage, for it gave the “administrators” the opportunity to repeatedly dunk convicted scolds until all signs of hateful speech were extinguished. “If the confirmed termagant vented her angry clamour as soon as she recovered her breath after the plunge,” wrote Leominster’s local historian, F. Gainsford Blacklock, “the Ducking was repeated till exhaustion caused silence.”
⁵²

A popular alternative to the stool, dating to about 162°, was the scold’s bridle, a helmet-like structure made of thin iron bars and secured by a padlock. The of fender’s nose was held by an opening in the front, just above a long metal bit or “tongue depressor” that
lay flat on the tongue. The bits ranged from 1¼ inch to 3 inches in length. “If more than 2¼ inches,” wrote T. N. Brushfield, who examined a number of bridles in the mid-1800s, “the punishment would be much increased,” for “it would not only arrest the action of the tongue, but also excite distressing symptoms of sickness, more especially if the wearer became at all unruly.”
⁵³
In some bridles, the bit terminated in a bulb that was covered with iron pins. In practice, these often punctured the victim’s tongue.

As barbaric as the bridles were, some level of admiration was expressed both for the form and function of these “engines,” at
least by men. It was “a very ingenious contrivance,” wrote one gentleman, James Lackington, in his late eighteenth-century memoirs. Lackington advised any would-be manufacturers, however, “to be cautious in offering them to public sale, and by no means to advertise them, especially if a married man, or having any views towards matrimony.”
⁵⁴

Exhibit 17 Scold’s bridle

A rare first-person account of bridling, dating back to 1656, survives. Earlier on the day in question, Dorothy Waugh, a Quaker, had spent some time in the town market of Carlisle, railing against sin. At some point a town official appeared and hauled her off to jail, where the mayor subjected Miss Waugh to interrogation. Dissatisfied with her responses, he decided it was time to take the town bridle off the shelf. There were “three barrs of Iron to come over my face,” Miss Waugh later wrote, “and a peece of it was put in my mouth, which was so unreasonable big a thing for that place as cannot be well related, which was locked to my head, and so I stood their time with my hands bound behind me with the stone weight of Iron upon my head, and the bitt in my mouth to keep me from speaking.”
⁵⁵
Miss Waugh endured this for three hours, after which she was unbridled and held in jail for a period, then rebridled and whipped out of town by the constable.

To some degree, what posed as a community control problem was, in actuality, a desire by men to bridle “inconvenient women.” Men were concerned with vocal abuse purely as a woman-out-of-control problem. But if whore charging was taken seriously, male sexual behavior outside marriage would surely be curtailed.