‘My name of a trewe man’: Gender, Vernacularity, and Treasonous Speech in Late Medieval England

The years around 1400 witnessed an important change in the treatment of political speech in England, as the state began to punish verbal and textual expressions of dissent as treason. To date, this change has been studied through the lens of conventional legal history, but placing treason law into its broader sociocultural context affords an alternative perspective. A conjunction of gender, vernacular speech, and agency created the justification for men’s words to be punished as treasonous deeds, but also generated new means by which the accused could assert resistant identities as loyal subjects and ‘trewe men’.