Hepmangrove began as a suburb of Ramsey, but later was absorbed by Bury.

Financial legislation demonstrates the advancing role of law in the later middle ages.

"The people of Ramsey included clerics, knights, and laborers, and their activities overlapped to the point that the infamous tripartite division of medieval society - into those who prayed, fought, and worked - becomes meaningless. The book also crosses chronological boundaries, moving through decades of rebellion, plague, demographic turnover, violence, bloodshed, and war, and ending with religious upheaval that spelled the death of the 600-year-old abbey and the intrusion of an ambitious new lay landlord with courtly connections."--BOOK JACKET.

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.

Shows how lordship and state formation affected local authority in the transition between medieval and early modern England.