This five-volume collection of manorial court records, published between 1901 and 1945, is a unique resource for medieval historians.

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.

This book explores the experience of childhood and adolescence in later medieval English rural society from 1250 to 1450. Hit by major catastrophes – the Great Famine and then a few decades later the Black Death – this book examines how rural society coped with children left orphaned, and land inherited by children and adolescents considered too young to run their holdings. Using manorial court rolls, accounts and other documents, Miriam Müller looks at the guardians who looked after the children, and the chattels and lands the children brought with them. This book considers not just rural concepts of childhood, and the training and schooling young peasants received, but also the nature of supportive kinship networks, family structures and the roles of lordship, to offer insights into the experience of childhood and adolescence in medieval villages more broadly.

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

This edited collection, written by both established and new researchers, reveals the experiences of litigating women across premodern Europe and captures the current state of research in this ever-growing field. Individually, the chapters offer an insight into the motivations and strategies of women who engaged in legal action in a wide range of courts, from local rural and urban courts, to ecclesiastical courts and the highest jurisdictions of crown and parliament. Collectively, the focus on individual women litigants – rather than how women were defined by legal systems – highlights continuities in their experiences of justice, while also demonstrating the unique and intersecting factors that influenced each woman’s negotiation of the courts. Spanning a broad chronology and a wide range of contexts, these studies also offer a valuable insight into the practices and priorities of the many courts under discussion that goes beyond our focus on women litigants. Drawing on archival research from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, the Low Countries, Central and Eastern Europe, and Scandinavia, Litigating Women is the perfect resource for students and scholars interested in legal studies and gender in medieval and early modern Europe.

In recent years, work on the medieval English peasant has tended to stress the degree of interaction between the village and the world beyond its bounds. This book not only provides an overview of this research, but also develops this approach. Phillipp R. Schofield describes the traditional world of the peasant - with attention given to such issues as relations between lord and tenant, and the nature of the peasant family - and places the peasantry of the late middle ages within the wider political, legal, ecclesiastical and commercial world of the medieval community.

Women brewed and sold most of the ale consumed in medieval England, but after 1350, men slowly took over the trade. By 1600, most brewers in London were male, and men also dominated the trade in many towns and villages. This book asks how, when, and why brewing ceased to be women's work and instead became a job for men. Employing a wide variety of sources and methods, Bennett vividly describes how brewsters (that is, female brewers) gradually left the trade. She also offers a compelling account of the endurance of patriarchy during this time of dramatic change.

This definitive environmental history of medieval fish and fisheries provides a comprehensive examination of European engagement with aquatic systems between c. 500 and 1500 CE. Using textual, zooarchaeological, and natural records, Richard C. Hoffmann's unique study spans marine and freshwater fisheries across western Christendom, discusses effects of human-nature relations and presents a deeper understanding of evolving European aquatic ecosystems. Changing climates, landscapes, and fishing pressures affected local stocks enough to shift values of fish, fishing rights, and dietary expectations. Readers learn what the abbess Waldetrudis in seventh-century Hainault, King Ramiro II (d.1157) of Aragon, and thirteenth-century physician Aldebrandin of Siena shared with English antiquarian William Worcester (d. 1482), and the young Martin Luther growing up in Germany soon thereafter. Sturgeon and herring, carp, cod, and tuna played distinctive roles. Hoffmann highlights how encounters between medieval Europeans and fish had consequences for society and the environment - then and now.

This authoritative survey of Britain in the later Middle Ages comprises 28 chapters written by leading figures in the field. Covers social, economic, political, religious, and cultural history in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales Provides a guide to the historical debates over the later Middle Ages Addresses questions at the leading edge of historical scholarship Each chapter includes suggestions for further reading