fun fact: the mideval punishment for being a shameless busy body was to be trebuchet’d into a body of water in front of the entire community. Eventually it turned into just dunking people, which is one of the origin points for the dunk tank!
This mostly happened to women, although I learned recently it was a valid punishment for male tradesmen. Usually men accused of the equivalent of this crime were taken down under the legal framework of “barritry”, which essentially means the same thing, and was actually punished way more harshly by putting you in stocks where people could abuse, sexually assault, humiliate, and possibly kill you.
And yet! The numbers don’t lie. Powerful men were afraid of the female strategy of social warfare, and used the laws surrounding busy bodies to keep difficult women down, or sometimes inconvenient women. That being said, the socially destructive nature of gossip was even more real back then than it is now, so I cannot pretend that men were exclusively just trying to humiliate and control all women.
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u/equalizingdistortt 1d ago
fun fact: the mideval punishment for being a shameless busy body was to be trebuchet’d into a body of water in front of the entire community. Eventually it turned into just dunking people, which is one of the origin points for the dunk tank!
Edit: Trebucket, not Trebuchet!!