Clara Judd, a Confederate spy whose imprisonment for treason led to a change in legal theory about women as automatically non-combatants is one key figure in the Stephanie McCurry’s Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War.

Although from the New Books Network podcast interview, what really stuck with me was the account of the individual stories of the unwinding of slavery, the abusive sexual relationships that it entailed and the fight many of those abuse victims had to rights for themselves and their children – issues that in small towns would rumble on for generations.

p. 36 Quicklime for the mortar came from a furnace by the river run by a redoubtable widow, Dona Guizas. Into her courtyard came the peasants from the high plateux, fathers with sons, brothers together, their cards piled high with springing bundles of broom that went to feed the furnace. These bundles were often all the cop their poor fields could produce. Once the lime was burned, ox-carts took it slowly up to town, where it was stored in the basement kitchen of the consuls’ old meeting house… Sometimes the start of a call was attended with grand ceremonial, drinks all round and tops for the builders, as the consuls got their robes muddy laying the first stone; sometimes it was all rushed, grim and businesslike, because the English were expected. …all the time the work was interrupted by the need to deal with suppliers, bickering and thirsty, sweat soaking their hair (the drinks they had to be given were factored into the wall accounts), and by the consuls, whose chief prerogative was to keep chaning their minds.”

p. 37 “At least there was no shortage of labour. In the mornings del Cayro would arrive to find the workers waiting: 14 or 15 regulars from town and, hanging back slightly, countrymen who had walked for miles, or refugees, with bowls and bundled blankets, driven by the mercenaries. In the evenings he would see the pay handed out, sometimes in coin, sometimes in pieces of bacon, to these still nameless folk, while the paymaster flapped and panicked. (“Paid to Master Guilhelm Vigorous, 10 sous, which he gave to the people who worked on the ditch at Bullieyra: which 10 sous are not accounted for, because he got mised up and does not know who he paid them to”.)

p. 52 “Little Elm Tree Square, off the main square of the Bourg. Hectic commerce was going on all round them. Stalls and trader covered almost every inch of ground: butchers, cloth-sellers, cheesemongers, pasty-cooks. … Jugglers and dice-players squatted under the small, battered elm tree that shaded the centre of the square. ..Women wandered about: some with trays of venetables from those steep little plots on the hillside, others, showing an ankle or a shoulder, with better kinds of fruit to sell. Marot and Barbier, perhaps half-naked as they worked, might have shouted some encouragement. But Gasc was middle-aged, with a reputation to sustain; and besides, as a City man, he knew that the low-life on show in the Bourg square was one of the main reasons why the City was nobler, and why he was lucky to live there.”

p. 56 “One had discovered a man on top of a woman as he was crossing the square one night, going through the butchers’ quater. “I don’t know who they were,” he said, “but I think they were committing adultery.” Peyre Massabuou, too, remembered being part of a drinking party, with Guilhem Gaffuer and Johann Ebrart the apothecracy, who bantered with a girl called Guilberta and her friend at La Cadena, in the square, after suppor on the Thursday after Christmas. It cannot have been loitering weather, up in those cold hills, and Peyre’s opening gambit was direct. “Shall we do it with you, or will you do it with us?” “You can’t we’re cousins,” Guilberta told him. Peyre then seized her and, according to Gaffuerm “hugged” her on top of one of the work benches, “but I didn’t see whether he did anything else to her.” Guilberta certainly thought he had.”

p. 89 “The count also policed and organised the town’s join fairs, held every year at the end of November and the end of June. … At the ende of the fairground the meadow was left uncut, full of ox-eye daisies and feathery seedling grass that ran into the old abandoned vines. Respectable merchants… avoided this part, for this was where the prostitutes set up shop. Every so often the count’s officers would drag them out, confiscating their veils and the pouches, hoods, belts and knives of their customers; sometimes th officers would go after pickpockets, or charlatans playing “country games to cheat fairgoers”.

p. 96 “The difference is certainly as clear as day in the tax registers. The City’s balance of payments was in the black continuously between 1350 and 1380, and the Bourg showed only two financial years when it was not in the red. But very few people saw, and nobody would have had the chance to compare, the figures. Perhaps the worsy that the citizens knew of the count in 1370 was that “his people” had unaccountably left a dead mule in the cathedral building office, bloated, stiff and staring, which cost 2 sous 6 deniers (or a workman’s daily wages) to drag out and dispose of.

As for the bishops, these drove citizens mad in a different way. They were not avaricious … and they were not, as the counts could be, consistently careless or cruel; but they were even more consistently absent, and their heads were often in the clouds. Bishop Peyre de Plenacassanha had a library with 130 books in it .. Bishop Bernard d’Albi, in the 1330s, wrote poetry: he could turn out more than 300 lines in an hour, a feat which moved Petrarch (no less!) to tell him that if he carried on at that rate, he would certainly make progress.”

p. 157 “A reputation was a delicate thing. .. there might even be something disreputable about standing still. Country women, for example, stood for hours in the Bourg square holding out smal trays of what they had been able to grow or bake: leeks, apples, cabbages, fresh loaves of brad… But they ran the gamut of people’s suspicions. “I’m not sure whether they’re honest or not,” Johna Monmato had said once. After all, prostitutes (putanas) lingered too, with their wares on display: skirts up round their shins, showing their underskirts, and skimpy veils perched on too much hair.”

p. 158″But when a girl called Vivas and her shoemaker friend went all the way in the church of St Amans, she was the one… who went to the pillory for it. In the same way, when Marguarida, a priest’s servant, “made Father Johan a baby”, it was she who paid the fine – 10 sous – and bore all the disgrace. Possibly something similar had lain behind the case of Galherdeta, handed on the stinking trees for the death of a child.”

p. 181 “Alhunbords… it was the wife who spent money from day to day and had to see that the children were presentable. In this at least she seemed to succeed: nieighbours commented that the children… looked well fed, with proper shoes and tidily combed hair, and that Alhumbords herself managed to keep a good table with salt meat and wine and that enviable sign of sufficiency, “two sorts of bread”, coarse black and white… fresh meat was a luxury. The salt version, with a thick brown rind and a stripe of lean between two laters of flat, was called baco, a word the men of Rodex had borrowed from the English … fruit was costly… a full basket, nicely arranged, took a day’s wages for a skilled man. A tray of eggs cost a third as much; soft cheese, young cantal that could almost be spread like butter, was an expensive present. Rye bread, hard cheese, bacon and greens were what filled most people’s plates”.

p. 182 “there was a royal wholesale tax, a gabelle, on luxury goods… included figs, raisins, almonds, large wax candles, eau-de-vie, pepper and spices… green was the fashion shade of the moment, always mentioned in inventories, and to lose a green coat or a green good was plainly thought worse than losing one of any other colour”.

p. 195 “One court case of 1337 opens a small window … Berengaria (she was not given the courtesy of a surname, being too poor) was once a priest’s servant, doing the cooking and cleaning for the chaplain-curate of St Amans, in the Bourg… Berengaria butted in “He isn’t a good man and he never was. He shut me up one time and locked the door and had laid me.” Astruga told this to the court; her evidence went no further, and it s abruptness suggests a shocked silence greeted the remark… For Berengaria, a priest was a man like any other; and men wanted only one thing.”

p. 197 “The line between priests and laymen was, in fact, very thin, in some ways. Some tonsured clerks were mere children: one, ten years old, was accused of the accidental death of another boy “in a childish game out in the fields, playing darts”. Curates of smaller chirches … had only the flimsiest knowledge of reading, Latin or how to sing the Office; they subsisted on the small offerings for gabbled Masses, and frequently went into partnerships in trade to try to make ends meet”.

p. 70

An analysis of the two dozen original Icelandic chivalric sagas reveals that, on the issue of consent at any rate, the authors pictured Europe as divided into two large sections, a northern area stretching roughly halfway down the European continent and including England and Ireland, and a southern area surrounding the Mediterranean’s northern and southern coastlines and also encompassing distant places such as India, which likewise was considered to be Christian. In the north the marriage of a woman was most often decided by her male kin, whereas in the south women were almost always asked about and frequently given full choice of their marriage partners. In the north women demurely accepted their male relatives’ decisions and only occasionally murmured about the suitor being too old or exhibited fear of their fathers.

p. 80

The most unexpected aspect of divorce in the sagas is the latitude given to personal incompatibility, a justification that accorded with the bishop’s permission to grant divorces in similar cases in the law. The discord can be described in vague terms (“they were not alike in temperament;” ) or caused by specific problems (“because of their disagreement”; “their relationship was not good). The blame is occasionally placed on both partners, but more often the husband is at fault. The wife leaves on her own, or is sent back to her father. Sometimes a wife has a sexual complaint, such as Unnr’s famous case of lack of consummation. In other cases no reasons are offered: the reader remains in the dark, for instance, as to why Rannveig left her husband. She adds insult to injury, throwing his clothes into the cesspool, forcing him, girded only in bedclothes, to seek help from a neighbor.

p. 83

After menopause, bereft of reproductive capabilities and perhaps losing sexual attractiveness, older women did not remarry—and often enjoyed their greatest independence as widows. Saga women were frequently admired for qualities normally associated with men. This “gender blurring” was most often expressed by the author, but women themselves also articulated such ideals. Words with a masculine semantic range—“valiant” (drengr) and “forceful” (sk?rungr), for example—characterized numerous men and a few admired women, mostly middle-aged or beyond. Older women no longer inspired fear and jealousy in men, but even the most impressive among these manly and forceful women exercised their authority best in the absence of their husbands. Thus, Þorbjqrg, described as “very forceful” (sk?rungr mikill), “was in charge of the district and made all the decisions when Vermundr [her husband] was not at home”

p. 84

Best known is Auðr/Unnr Ketilsdóttir, the daughter of a Norwegian chieftain and wife of a Norse king in Dublin. Little is known about her until both her husband and son were killed and she became responsible for a large household, including several granddaughters and a grandson. At that moment “she had a ship built secretly in a forest, and when it was completed she loaded it with valuables and prepared for a voyage. She took all her surviving kinsfolk with her. It is generallyagreed that it would be hard to find another example of a woman (kvennmaðr) escaping from such hazards with so much wealth and such a large retinue. From this it can be seen what a paragon amongst women she was.

p. 106

Tacitus praised Germanic mothers for nursing their babies (Germania, chap. 20), and until the advent of modern technology, it was the norm in all traditional societies for children to receive their first nourishment from lactating women. At some point during the late Middle Ages, however, Icelandic mothers came to regard their own milk as inferior. Rather than nursing their children, they gave them cows’ milk and even cream. Even more destructive of their health, children were fed meat and fish, prechewed and thinned with melted butter, from their third or fourth month. The results were disastrous, and Iceland suffered from unusually high infant mortality even by the standards of the seventeenth century, when foreign travelers first brought attention to the problem and identified malnutrition as the cause.

p. 114

According to Landndmab6k, the first generation of named settlers contained nearly six times as many men as women. Given this imbalance, it is remarkable that almost three-quarters of the men in this first cohort managed to establish families. Nearly two-thirds of these, however, were identified only by the name of the father and his children with no indication of whether he was a widower or of the children’s legal status. Who were these unknown women who produced the first generation of native Icelanders? One intriguing proposition is that they were Irish slaves whose names were suppressed because their ancestry was not worthy of comment and added little luster to the family. These Celtic women may have contributed their distinct genes to the Icelandic melting pot, with important biological consequences.

p. 130

Men used their leisure time—grouped according to an ascending scale of social importance—to be bored or lazy, to sleep while others worked, to engage in sports and games, to tell stories, to drink and jest, to indulge their grief by composing poetry or luxuriating in bed, and to participate in the politics of the island. Women shared only few of these activities and are often depicted as working while men played. Women are rarely seen socializing among themselves without working at the same time, and Þórðr’s statement likely did not hold true for society as a whole. Women, in fact, worked longer and harder than men, although because women were not central to the sagas’ focus on feuding and politics, the authors regularly diminished the role and status of females

p. 132

Although women spent less time in bed, they also slept more lightly and fretfully, awakening at the slightest provocation and frequently becoming aware of troubles before men. When a man comes secretly to a farm late at night and steals embers from the fire, only a woman is alert. When a hostile party quietly arrives during the night, a woman is the first to notice. As a wealthy widow, it is not proper for Þórelfr to go to the door herself when someone knocks late at night, but she is the first to hear. Asking a male servant to respond, she, characteristically, has trouble rousing him.

p. 157

Work was conditioned by the social status of both genders. The lower a woman’s position, the harder her work, which doubtless included, male tasks. It is perhaps no accident that the only recorded case of odor from perspiration due to physical work came from a female slave (Gí 6.27:85). In the everyday world of the sagas women were, in fact, involved in practically all outdoor tasks, including animal husbandry. Except for milking, animals were normally tended by men; cattle and sheep may have been relatively small in Iceland, but they could be strong and dangerous. Male shepherds were therefore normally in charge of the pastures, but an occasional shepherdess can be found. A very young girl (meystelpa) in charge of cattle belonging to two brothers, for example, was bullied by their neighbor. Women and young girls also helped men drive animals and herd them into pens. A woman supervised the task of channeling a stream under the house. The law specified as male tasks the pulling ashore (skipsdráttr) and launching (framdráttr) of a boat. All farmers from the neighborhood were to appear with their workmen (húskarlar), but one saga episode shows women from the shipowner’s farm pulling with the men.

p. 159

Saturday was variously referred to as “bath day” (laugardagr) or “laundry day” (þváttdagr). Hot water made it possible to wash clothes year round, thus facilitating the apparent custom of a wife presenting her husband and sons with clean shirts on Sunday morning. As suggested by this detail and confirmed by episodes depicting women washing linen out of doors, washing was a female task

p. 163 Until the middle of the fourteenth century, when a new fashion, perhaps inspired from men’s plate armor, created the inserted sleeve and replaced the older T-shaped style, sleeves were wide, and since they were rarely buttoned, they needed to be sewn close to the wrists to provide maximum warmth and freedom to work. This task was performed by women morning and night.

p. 164

Scarcity of grain meant that in Iceland, unlike in continental Europe, bread never became a staple. It was in fact so rare that people dreamt about it, and one man received the nickname “Butter-Ring” (sm j?rhringr) from his favorite food of bread and butter. Scarcity of grain and ovens made fiat bread the preferred form in most of the north, but even in this form it never became important in the Icelandic diet. Grain was instead diluted in gruel and porridge

p. 166  Heavily salted, butter could be kept for decades; large stores were accumulated, like gold, by wealthy landowners. By the time of the Reformation the bishopric in Hólar possessed a mountain of butter calculated to weigh twenty-five tons.

p. 167

Cooking followed techniques and employed utensils that changed little over time. A comparison between the kitchen equipment buried with the woman entombed in the Oseberg burial in Norway in August or September 834 and the house-hold recommendations of 1585 by the Swedish Count Per Brahe for his wife shows remarkable little change over a span of seven centuries.

p. 174

The female role in Icelandic material culture is highlighted by the importance and ubiquitous presence of homespun (vaðmdl) produced from sheep’s fleece. Clothing the entire population from cradle to grave and even occasionally protecting sick animals, homespun was also used for bedding, sails, wall-hangings, packs, and sacks of all kinds. Most impressive, it replaced silver as the standard commodity against which other products were evaluated within Iceland. As the country’s exclusive export, it procured necessities and luxuries only available abroad. The result, the unique system of “the homespun standard,” governed Icelandic economic life for centuries.

p. 183  One of the less apparent but important products was sails. Women’s role in supplying this fundamental prerequisite for the viking expeditions is vouchsafed by Óttarr the Black (svarti), an eleventh-century Icelandic skald who refers to “sails…spun by women.” A more tangible illustration is the “good long-ship sail” (langskipssegl gott) that Þórólfr brings the Norwegian king as a present from his father Skalla-Grímr. The Norwegian Speculum Regale recommends, as a matter of course, that large amounts of homespun (vaðmál) be stored on ships together with needles and thread for the reparation of sails. The spectacular Norwegian ship burials confirm these literary references to woolen sails.

p. 209

in a general medieval context, the Norse world was profoundly patriarchal. As my analysis of widows indicated, the human ideal that was most admired and to which both men and women aspired was more masculine than feminine. Carol Clover has suggested that the social binary of nordic society was not male/female, but a different sort of polarity: on one hand, a group of people consisting of most able-bodied men and a few outstanding women known for their exceptional mental strength and overpowering personalities, and, on the other, a kind of “rainbow coalition” of the rest of humanity, including most of the women, children, slaves, the old and disabled, and disenfranchised men. The few women found in the first group were identified in terms normally associated with men. Most of them were older women who had gained in material and social assets what they had lost in sexual attractiveness. Whereas the debility of old age might disqualify a man from the admired category, women were never expected to fight and age did not therefore affect their worth. Moreover, since exceptionality was measured in male terms, a capable woman was obviously most advantageously placed to demonstrate her worth in the absence of a husband. It is therefore not surprising that the narratives reveal a number of imposing women in the permanent stage of widowhood, between marriages, or in control of authority while their husbands were away.

p. 213

Tacitus was impressed by the dignity and equality ordinary women derived from Germanic marriage (Germania, chap. 18–19). His brief description of the sharing of property, brought as gifts by the bride and the groom from their respective families, provides the first glimpse into the commercial foundations of the Germanic marriage. His version corresponds well with the reports of Continental laws in the second half of the  first millennium and with the numerous details culled from Icelandic and Norwegian laws dating from the beginning of the next.

p. 216

The silent pagan bride, transferred  like property from father to husband, was replaced by the articulate Christian woman who by her own “yes-word” (jáyrði) was allowed to affirm her willingness to share her life with a man who already had consulted her, not just her father. Fathers of daughters may have appreciated this new female freedom, but it was not necessarily received with favor by the groom or his kinsmen, who were more preoccupied with the economic and political advantages offered by the bride and her family than with personal relations. One may further speculate that affective marriages—that is, marriages containing mutual marital affection—were encouraged when a woman had given her consent.

p. 217

With a weekly day of rest and numerous feast days, the Christian calendar clearly afforded more respite from work than the few seasonal celebrations of the pagan year. The medieval woman, nevertheless, worked as hard as her ancient sister, and she, too, went to bed exhausted by her labors. Her satisfaction, however, may have been less. Whereas the housewife in the ancient setting worked with the resources available on her farm to feed and clothe her family, the economic success of the new system of wool export entailed increased management, which most certainly fell under male control.