The benefits and drawbacks of Femme Sole status in England, 1300-1630

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 44, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 410-438

  McIntosh, Marjorie K ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 38849180507     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/429708     Document Type: Review

References (64)

1. Mary Bateson, ed., "Borough Customs, Publications of the Seiden Society, vols. 18, 21 (London, 1904, 1906)
2. Annie Abram, "Women Traders in Medieval London," Economic Journal 26 (1916): 276-85
3. and Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Amy Louise Erickson (1919; London, 1992)
4. For a fuller discussion, see Marjorie K. McIntosh, Working Women in English Society, 1300-1620 (Cambridge, 2005), chap. 2b
5. Caroline M. Barron, "The 'Golden Age' ofWomen in Medieval London," Reading Medieval Studies 15 (1989): 35-58, esp. 40
6. and "Women in London: The 'Golden Age' Revisited" (an unpublished manuscript that Barron kindly shared with me); see more generally her London in the Late Middle Ages: Government and People, 1200-1500 (Oxford, 2004)
7. P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy (Oxford, 1992)
8. See, e.g., Kay E. Lacey, "Women and Work in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century London," in Women and Work in Pre-industrial England, ed. Lindsey Charles and Lorna Duffin (London, 1985), 24-82
9. Peter Fleming, Women in Late Medieval Bristol, Bristol Branch of the Historical Association Local History Pamphlets, Pub. 103 (Bristol, 2001)
10. Jane Laughton, "The Alewives of Later Medieval Chester," in Crown, Government, and People in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Rowena E. Archer (New York, 1999), 191-207
11. and Maryanne Kowaleski, "Women's Work in a Market Town: Exeter in the Late Fourteenth Century," in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt (Bloomington, IN, 1986), 145-64
12. Maryanne Kowaleski, "Women's Work in a Market Town"
13. Judith Bennett, "Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide," in Culture and History, 1350-1600, ed. David Aers (London, 1992), 147-75, "Theoretical Issues: Confronting Continuity," Journal of Women's History 9 (1997): 73-94
14. and Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 (New York, 1996)
15. See also Mavis E. Mate, Daughters, Wives and Widows after the Black Death (Woodbridge, UK, 1998)
16. and Women in Medieval English Society (Cambridge, 1999)
17. Bennett, "Medieval Women, Modern Women."
18. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998)
19. Anne Laurence, Women in England, 1500-1760 (New York, 1994)
20. and Jacqueline Eales, Women in Early Modern England, 1500-1700 (London, 1998)
21. For those used by women in the Court of Requests, see Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1998)
22. Mcintosh, Working Women in English Society, esp. chaps. 1-2
23. Fleming, Women in Late Medieval Bristol, 10
24. Clark, Working Life of Women, 152-53
25. Barron, "The 'Golden Age'"
26. Laughton, "The Alewives of Later Medieval Chester"
27. and Kowaleski, "Women's Work in a Market Town."
28. Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1986), 44-49
29. Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993), 31-32
30. Kathryn L. Reyerson, "Women in Business in Medieval Montpellier," in Hanawalt, Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, 117-44
31. cf. Reyerson, Business, Banking and Finance in Medieval Montpellier (Toronto, 1985)
32. Merry E. Wiesner, Working Women in Renaissance Germany (New Brunswick, NJ, 1986), esp. 26-31
33. Martha Howell has suggested that it might be the husband who initiated a request by his wife to separate her business assets from his; see Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago, 1986), 15-16
34. See A. H. Thomas's introduction to Calendar of Early Mayor's Court Rolls of London, 1298-1307 (CEMCRL; Cambridge, 1924), xxv-xxvii
35. William Kellaway, "John Carpenter's Liber Albus," Guildhall Studies in London History 3 (1978): 67-84
36. and L. T. Smith's introduction to The Maire of Bristowe Is Kalendar, by Robert Ricart, Camden Society, 2nd series, vol. 5 (London, 1872)
37. Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis: Liber Albus, Liber Custumarum et Liber Horn (MGL), ed. H. T. Riley, Rolls Series, bk. 3, pt. 1, 204-5 (London, 1859-62), using Barron's translation in "The 'Golden Age,'" 40
38. An older translation is by H. T. Riley, Liber Albus: The White Book of the City of London (London, 1861)
39. Calendar of Letter Books of the City of London, Book E, 1314-37, 200
40. as cited by Lacey, "Women and Work," n. 157
41. See the examples in Secs. II and III. For what is probably an early attempt by a female merchant to claim the benefits previously assigned only to femme sole traders, see Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls of London (CPMRL), 1437-1457, 35-36
42. Journal [of the Common Council] XI, 367, as cited by Abram, "Women Traders in Medieval London," 280. For the Bankruptcy Act, see Sec. III
43. William Bohun, Privilegia Londini; Or, the Laws, Customs, and Privileges of London (London, 1702), 124-25
44. as cited by Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 330
45. Alexander Pulling, A Practical Treatise on the Laws, Customs, and Regulations of the City and Port of London (London, 1842), 178-79, 484-85
46. For example, all the cases from the Mayor's Court of London mentioned in the next few paragraphs were indexed under femme sole in the printed calendars, intermingled with those that refer more technically to femme sole status for married women
47. For use of this strategy in pleadings before the Court of Requests, see Stretton, Women Waging Law
48. See, for an early example, Corporation of London Record Office (CLRO), Miscellaneous Roll CC, m. 12d, from 1320; CPMRL, 1413-1437, 144
49. Fleming, Women in Late Medieval Bristol, 7, 12
50. P. J. P. Goldberg, ed., Women in England, c. 1275-1525 (Manchester, 1995), 189
51. Anne F. Sutton, "Alice Claver, Silkwoman (d. 1489)," in Medieval London Widows, 1300-1500, ed. C. M. Barron and A. F. Sutton (London, 1994), 130. Barron says that one had to pay to register anything in the city's records in this period (personal communication)
52. cf. Kay Lacey, "Lhe Production of 'Narrow Ware' by Silkwomen in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century England," Textile History 18 (1987): 187-204
53. Penny Tucker, "London's Courts of Law in the Fifteenth Century: The Litigants' Perspective," in Communities and Courts in Britain, 1150-1900, ed. Christopher Brooks and Michael Lobban (London, 1997), 25-42
54. and "Relationships between London's Courts and the Westminster Courts in the Reign of Edward IV," in Courts, Counties and the Capital in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Diana E. S. Dunn (New York, 1996), 117-38
55. For Chancery, see, e.g., Penny Tucker, "The Early History of the Court of Chancery: A Comparative Study," English Historical Review 115 (2000): 791-811
56. The question of whose goods were being pleaded against was likewise at the core of a case heard initially in the Sheriffs' Court but then removed into the Mayor's Court in February, 1409. In this suit, William Yrby and John Corner, merchants, pleaded against John Frenssh, goldsmith, and his wife Katherine for a debt of £42 12s. stemming from the sale of unspecified goods. Katherine was described as "trading sole as a merchant." A haberdasher said that the goods in question were his property, not either John's or Katherine's: he had owned them while a servant to John Frenssh; see CPMRL, 1381-1412, 297
57. The English Reports 79:661-62. Emily Allen-Shaw kindly drew this case to my attention. The case was eventually settled and compounded, with no judgment given
58. J. H. Baker, ed., Reports from the Lost Notebooks of Sir James Dyer, Publications of the Seiden Society (London, 1994), 2:466
59. and Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class (Berkeley, 1989), esp. chap. 6. The history of femme sole after around 1600 needs further research
60. Statutes of the Realm, 4:539-41
61. For a different interpretation of the act, see Emily Allen, "Bankruptcy, Law, and the Economics of Gender: The Act against Bankrupts of 1571" (unpublished MA thesis, Utah State University, 1999)
62. This account draws heavily on the information generously provided by Penny Tucker (personal communication) and her "London's Courts of Law" and "Relationships between London's Courts and the Westminster Courts." During the late medieval period, the commissary court of the bishop of London also heard some debt cases, prosecuted as breaches of faith but seldom involving pleas of 40s. or more. This jurisdiction had died out by around 1520, replaced by London's more efficacious secular courts; see Richard M. Wunderli, London Church Courts and Society on the Eve of the Reformation (Cambridge, MA, 1981), 104-8
63. Such activity is consistent with other evidence that widows in medieval London freely used the courts to pursue claims to dower property. See Barbara Hanawalt, "The Widow's Mite: Provisions for Medieval London Widows," in Upon My Husband's Death, ed. Louise Mirrer (Ann Arbor, MI, 1992), 21-45
64. and her "The Dilemma of the Widow of Property in Late Medieval London," in The Medieval Marriage Scene: Prudence, Passion, and Policy, ed. Cristelle Baskins and Sherry Roush (forthcoming)