Chapter One

Let us journey to a place far away and a time long ago. This would be an era several centuries ago when the rule of men over the women of their households was never in question. The females of that world accepted that if they were to exercise power, it was to be covertly. Anything but the most servile of deference to the males that dominated their environment could quite legally be corporally punished. In fact, a man who exercised the ‘rule of thumb’ in his domain was considered to be more than usually enlightened. This dictum specified that women, animals, and other chattel should not be beaten with sticks of greater diameter than their Master’s thumb. There was, of course, no penalty for a man who rejected this rule as over-lenient. In fact, he might be regarded approvingly by his neighbors as properly strict in his exercise of the discipline universally regarded as necessary to the maintenance of a well-regulated home and estate.

The locale in which our tale is set is also of particular importance. It was a region of southern England well off the beaten path, consisting of rich coastal farmlands that were well-watered and well-drained and had been producing bumper crops for millennia. Those fortunate enough to own land in this area hardly had to struggle with a Mother Nature who showed her kindest of faces the vast majority of the time. The local gentry lived well as long as they exercised good judgment and hewed to the conservative values that tended to dominate Great Britain of that era, especially outside of the more cosmopolitan environs of London and the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge. Inalienable human rights were a concept that most of the local inhabitants had not heard of. And even among the few educated denizens, deference was paid only to the true spirit of the Magna Carta, which was solely intended to protect the rights of the nobility against kingly overreach.

In this setting, an unusually bright female, especially if she were cursed with an unquenchable curiosity and a spirited temperament, would encounter all manner of difficulties. These would persist or worsen until she mastered the subtle arts of displaying her wit only to those who would not feel threatened by it. If such a person was born into the peasantry, a possible future could be found as a wise woman conversant in herb lore and midwifery. This pathway would involve being identified by and taken under the wing of a crone established in such arts. Of course, such women pursued their cryptic medical careers in constant danger of being denounced by the superstitious populace as witches. Only a fiery end was in store for anyone so unfortunate as to stumble onto that pathway. So the so-called wise women who survived to