In 1517, in the small borough of Fordwich in Kent, the jury at the mayor's court ipresented an exceptionally quarrelsome man, William Clark, as a scold. But the clerk whose job was to keep a record of the proceedings in Latin made a mistake: instead of garrulator, one of the Latin words for a male scold, he wrote garrulatrix, the feminine form, and a word which would have been more familiar to him. For this man, the English word ‘scold’ was connected with femininity. The discovery of this clerical error aroused my interest in prosecutions for misdemeanour and the light they might shed on gender relations. Were there other gendered offences, and did local courts like this one treat men and women differently when they were accused of gender-neutral offences? Were there any discernible changes in the pattern of prosecutions of men and women for minor crime over a period of a century or so, and did prosecutions in the church courts resemble or differ from those in secular jurisdictions? What factors apart from gender influenced who was prosecuted and for what? How did these local courts function to control disorderly behaviour in men and women, and were they instruments of patriarchal control over women?

This introductory chapter considers first the behaviour that was expected of late medieval and early modern men and women. Since this book is concerned with the activities of ‘ordinary’ people, mainly the townspeople of late medieval Kent, the discussion focuses on the gender roles allocated to the men and women who in the sixteenth century would have been described as the ‘middling’ and ‘lesser’ sorts, ranging from wealthy merchants to poor labourers and their families. The second section of the chapter outlines the conclusions of other studies on gender and crime, and is followed by a discussion of sources and methodology. The chapter concludes with a brief description of Kent, an account of its political, religious and economic history in this period and a consideration of how far these developments may have influenced prosecutions for misconduct.

Gender roles, identities and expectations

Recent work on medieval and early modern gender has emphasised how gendered identity was learned through the socialisation of the young and reinforced in adults by social interaction. A pioneering historian of masculinity suggested that the basic constituents of medieval manhood consisted of impregnating women, protecting dependants and serving as provider to one's family.