Suits alleging defamation of character, mostly concerning slanders of a sexual nature, formed one of the most prominent classes of litigation handled by the church courts in this period, in Wiltshire as in the rest of England. Such suits were part of a wider development: slander business was booming in the secular courts too, and the rush to take legal action to clear sullied reputations has been called ‘a phenomenon of the age’. Yet some previous historians of the church courts have been either puzzled by the abundance of defamation causes or dismissive of them. Brian Woodcock, writing of slander suits in the diocese of Canterbury in the fifteenth century, commented that ‘in some cases it is not really clear why the plaintiff should have taken exception to such a degree as to bring a suit’ while Ronald Marchant, though emphasising that the church courts offered a legally more sophisticated remedy for slander than the secular tribunals, implies that many of the cases actually dealt with in the diocese of York in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were hardly worth the trouble of litigation. But in terms of contemporary mentalities and social structures the phenomenon is, in fact, readily comprehensible. Slander suits in the church courts sprang from a society in which sexual reputation, ‘credit’ or ‘honesty’ was of considerable and probably growing practical importance and a major touchstone of respectability. Equally they reflected the small-scale tensions and rivalries characteristic of local communities in this period – tensions which were relieved if not resolved by legal action.