Words as Weapons: Speech, Violence, and Gender in Late Medieval Ireland

In 1312 the Justiciary court in Clonmel found that Adam, son of John de Midia, had dealt a mortal wound to William Drak, for which he was jailed and later paid a substantial fine.² Physically violent acts such as this were commonly recorded throughout medieval Irish communities and many occurred during the skirmishes and battles that characterized so much of this "land of war."³ Yet there was also significant interpersonal violence that was not directly associated with warfare. In common with findings from other medieval societies, much of the interpersonal violence that was recorded in medieval Ireland was between men who used readily available weapons, such as knives and axes, to settle disputes in the taverns, homes, and streets of these small communities.⁴ Recent research into medieval violence has emphasized the need to analyze not only its incidence, but also how medieval societies interpreted violence.⁵ One method of analyzing more than quantitative data on violent crimes is to step back from the bare verdicts and concentrate on the scene in which the violence occurred, when that is recoverable from the surviving records. By allowing our historical gaze to encompass a wider area than that of attacker and attacked we can begin to understand the ways in which physical violence was understood within communities and also the way this understanding was gendered. What emerges is a large cast of characters, their roles in the action including those of instigators of violence, audience, monitors of violence, and enforcers of peace. What is clear from this larger scene is that women become more visible, even in crimes that appear to involve only men, and that male roles in violent acts are more varied than simply those of victims or offenders.

The murder of William Drak can thus be understood at one level as an act of violence perpetrated by a man against another man. By examining the context, however, a larger cast of participants and arguably perpetrators emerges. William Drak and the wife of Adam, son of John of Midia, had got into a serious argument at the tavern, during which the woman called William's brother an apostate. The scene immediately explodes with people and confused actions that are almost too chaotic for the surviving court record to disentangle. The provoking action, though, was uttering words. Words delivered by a woman had the power to plunge a group of men into violence and led to the death of one of them. She was not prosecuted for any crime, and indeed did not commit a crime; however, her words were integral to the act of violence that ensued.

Medieval and early modern societies considered words to be a form of action that had just as serious consequences as physical violence, "tongues being worse than swords" as one proverb stated.⁶ People not only were injured through physical assaults, but the words themselves wounded and hurt.⁷ In order to understand how violence was conceptualized and understood as well as acted out in medieval and early modern communities in Ireland, the role of insults and words is crucial.

Research into violent words has tended to concentrate on the legal cases that were specifically concerned with words—slander and defamation. Initially such cases could be brought in either civil or church courts, but by the sixteenth century they had become part of the ecclesiastical court remit, and it is there that large numbers of suits for defamation were brought by women and men against each other.⁸ In the secular courts of the late medieval English judicial system, defamation was no longer usually prosecuted unless money damages were sought. In his study of these defamation cases Helmholz argues that this was due to a perception that money damages were more appropriate for physical injury than for injury to reputation. Injury to reputation was therefore seen as a spiritual matter and so more appropriate for the ecclesiastical courts.⁹ Modern scholarship on medieval and early modern violence has tended to follow this separation, and so damaging or hurtful speech and criminal...