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Hello and welcome to God Medieval. I'm Dr Cat Jarman. If you were a woman in the middle ages,

what would happen to you if you started screaming and shouting in a public place or if someone

committed some kind of crime towards you, or what if you assaulted someone, were they or you

be brought to justice? And how were women represented in the legal system?

Now as it happens, legal records in English towns can tell us an awful lot about the roles of women

and their involvement, not just in what you or I might think of as crime, but also tell us some

surprising facts about their roles and involvement in trade. To find out more about this topic,

I've invited Dr Teresa Fipps to the podcast today. She is from Swansea University and she's

written a book called Medieval Women and Urban Justice, Commerce, Crime and Community in England,

1300 to 1500. Teresa, thank you so much for joining us here today. Thanks Cat. It's really great

to be here and looking forward to talking to you. So this is such an interesting subject and it's

one that I don't know anything about really at all. I didn't know but until I started looking

into it and I think a lot of people don't have a lot of knowledge of the legal system in this time

period, sort of 14th to 16th century, which is your focus of your book. And I think we tend to think

of it as quite simple and quite basic, perhaps. But I wanted to sort of see if we could just start

with some of the basics, this legal system, which is really where you're getting all your information

...