‘Menacing layeth together fire and coals in the house of peace, assault bloweth it and maketh it burn. And battery doth endeavour to consume the whole building to the ground.’ Early modern legal classifications of non-lethal violence perceived bodily harm and aggressive words and gestures not as separate categories, but to lie upon a continuum of violence. Threatening words, attempted harm by force and violence, and battery involving actual loss or injury were ‘things of several natures’. Yet their purpose was the same: ‘to hurt him against whom they are bent’. ‘Bitter’ or ‘disgrace[ful]’ speeches were not merely like ‘smoke, a breath, or blast of wind’ that would ‘vanish and be dispersed in the air like dust’. Verbal abuses constituted ‘the chief impediment’ to the peace of the realm. They were ‘firebrands’ to ‘grudges, quarrels, conspiracies’, to ‘assaults, batteries, riots, routs, unlawful assemblies, forces, and forcible entries … forgeries, perjuries, and oppressions’, and to ‘most other tragical and turbulent stratagems’, including ‘mayhems, manslaughters and murders’.

To some extent, modern opinion also places violent deeds and words on a continuum. Historians have nonetheless tended not to conceptualise physical and non-physical violence like this, approaching them instead as distinct and separate activities. Further dichotomies are frequently mapped onto those of deeds and words: violent/non-violent, active/passive, serious/trivial, masculine/feminine. Explicitly or by implication, men's aggressive behaviour is characterised as physical, active and potentially serious; women's as verbal, non-‘active’ and trivial.