Women's property rights under customary law: Some developments in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

Volumn 36, Issue , 1986, Pages 165-194

  Smith, R M ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84972215141     PISSN: 00804401     EISSN: 14740648     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3679064     Document Type: Article

References (123)

1. See a series of articles by J. Goody, ‘Inheritance, property and marriage in Africa and Eurasia’, Sociology, iii (1969), 55–76.
2. ‘Bridewealth and dowry in Africa and Eurasia’, in J Goody and S.J. Tambiah, Bridewealth and Dowry (Cambridge, 1973), 1–58.
3. ‘Inheritance, property and women: some comparative considerations’, Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200–1800, ed. J. Goody, J. Thirsk and E. P. Thompson (Cambridge, 1976), 10–36.
4. R. M. Smith, ‘Some issues concerning families and their property in rural England 1250–1800’, in Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, ed. R. M. Smith (Cambridge, 1984), 40–6 developing estimates.
5. in E. A. Wrigley, ‘Fertility strategy for the individual and the group’, in Historical Studies of Changing Fertility, ed. C. Tilly (Princeton, N.J., 1978), 235–54 and.
6. J. Goody and G. A. Harrison, ‘Strategies of heirship’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, xv (1973), 3–21.
7. J. Goody, Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain (Cambridge, 1976), 10–36.
8. K. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (1979), 58–62.
9. S.F. Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, Marriage and the Cloister 500 to goo (Phi-ladelphia, 1981), 120–3.
10. G. Duby, Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France (1978).
11. G. Duby, Le Chevalier, La Femme et Le Prêtre (Paris, 1981; Eng. trans. 1983).
12. R. I. Moore, ‘Family, community and cult on the eve of the Gregorian Re-form’, ante, 5th ser., xxx (1980).
13. E. Searle, ‘Women and the legitimisation of succession at the Norman Conquest’, Proc. of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies, iii(1980), 159–70.
14. J. C. Holt, ‘Feudal society and the family in early medieval England: IV The heiress and the alien’, ante, 5th ser., xxxv (1985), 1–28.
15. E. Searle, ‘Seigneurial control of women's marriage; the antecedents and function of merchet in England’, Past & Present, lxxxii (1979), 3–43.
16. P. S. Gold, The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude and Experience in Twelfth-Century France (Chicago, 1985), 116–44.
17. One notable historically-minded anthropologist has taken this possibility of a centrifugal pull upon property still further and proposed a thesis that portrays the early medieval Christian Church as creating a doctrine and law of marriage that undermined the capacity both of lord and patrilineage to restrict the relative freedom of women to dispose of their property as they pleased and facilitated their marriage in ways that eventually maximized their freedom of individual choice in the matter so long as partners were sought outside rather than inside a strictly defined kin group. This interpretation, ultimately and ostensibly materialist in character, sees such a pattern as leading to a veritable haemorrhage of land, at least among the higher status groups, away from lineages and towards ecclesiastical ownership. From this argument developed in J. Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983), it should be obvious that ‘diverging devolution’ has come to constitute a set of foundations upon which quite elaborate, indeed grandiose, edifices are thought to rest.
18. E. Power wisely wrote of women that their ‘…position in theory and law is one thing, their practical position in every day life another’. See ‘The Position of Women’ in The Legacy of the Middle Ages, ed. C. G. Crump and E. F. Jacob (Oxford, 1926), 401.
19. D. M. Stenton, The English Woman in History (1957), 76–9.
20. F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1968), 399–436.
21. T. F. T. Plucknett, Legislation of Edward I (Oxford, 1949), 120–2.
22. The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of England Commonly Called Glanvill, ed. G. D. G. Hall (Nelson's Medieval Texts, 1965), chs. 6–7.
23. Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England ed. G. Woodbine trans., S. Thorne (4 vols., Cambridge Mass., 1968–77), fos., 17–24, 60–61b, 92–8, 296–317, 312–23, 438–9.
24. C. Donahue, ‘What causes fundamental legal ideas? Marital property in England and France in the thirteenth century’, Michigan Law Review, lxxix (1979), 64–67.
25. J. A. Raftis, Tenure and Mobility: Studies in the Social History of the Medieval Village (Toronto, 1964), 36–42.
26. R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), 97.
27. see too the particularly relevant discussion by Marline Segalen raising issues of significance for questions bearing upon female status in north-west European agricultural societies at all periods in her Mari et Femme dans la societf paysanne (Paris, 1980; Eng. trans., 1983), 73–111 and.
28. Judith M. Bennett, ‘Women in late medieval England’, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association (Dec., 1985).
29. Searle (1979), 42.
30. S. F. C. Milsom, The Legal Framework of English Feudalism (Cambridge, 1976), 40.
31. Searle (1979), 18–29.
32. The need for the lord's permission is readily evident in a dower plea cited by G. C. Homans from the abbot of St Albans, Herts, manor of Barnet in 1303 in which the wife's claim to dower, although it had been granted to her ad hostium ecclesiae, was nullified by the fact that it had not at that moment, through the payment of the license fee, gained the lord's approval, G. C. Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), 179–80.
33. See too, R. M. Smith, ‘Marriage processes in the English past: some continuities’, in The World We have Gained. Histories of Population and Social Structure, ed. L. Bonfield, R. Smith and Keith Wrightson (Oxford, 1986), 65–66.
34. Homans, 177–82.
35. Searle (1979), 38–9.
36. J. Z. Titow, ‘Some differences between manors and their effects on the condition of the peasantry’, Agricultural History Review, x (1962).
37. J. Ravensdale, ‘Population changes and the transfer of customary land on a Cambridgeshire manor in the fourteenth century’, in Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, ed. R. M. Smith (Cambridge, 1984), 197–225 and.
38. R. M. Smith, ‘Some thoughts on “hereditary” and “proprietary” rights in land under customary law in thirteenth and early fourteenth century England’, Law and History Review, i (1983), 123–6.
39. Searle, (1979), 35.
40. A view that has received a forceful challenge from J. Hatcher, ‘English serfdom and villeinage: towards a reassessment’, Past & Present, xc (1981), 3–39.
41. see too, P. D. A. Harvey, ‘Custom and lordship in the medieval English village’, Medieval Village Research Group Thirteenth Annual Report (1983), 36.
42. B. F. Harvey, Westminster Abbey and its Estates in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1977), 297.
43. H. S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor, 1150–1400 (Cambridge, 1937), 244–5.
44. A. E. Levett, Studies in Manorial History (Oxford, 1938), 236–7.
45. Homans, 187–9.
46. Searle (1979), 41.
47. The abbots of Ramsey, for instance, seem to have been particularly disposed to behave in this fashion; see The Court Rolls of The Abbey of Ramsay and the Honour of Clare, ed. W. O. Ault (New Haven, 1929), 207, 211, 270, 277 and.
48. Homans, 188.
49. On the Worcs. manor of Halesowen the annually recorded merchets constituted a marriage rate that rarely exceeded 5 per 1000, an implausibly low figure; see Z. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen 1270–1400 (Cambridge, 1980), 48, Table 8. For details of the calculations producing this estimate.
50. see L. R. Poos and R. M. Smith, ‘“Legal windows onto historical populations”? Recent research on demography and the manor court in medieval England’, Law and History Review, ii (1984), 145–6. In similar fashion, calculations based on 107 recorded merchets in the court proceedings of the two Essex manors of Great Waltham and High Easter, 1327–89, the 262 servile marriages on the abbot of Bury St Edmunds' Suff. manor of Redgrave, 1260–1319, the 440 marriage fines for 5 manors of the prior of Spalding in Lines., 1252–1300, and the 530 marriage fines paid 1297–1366 on the manors of Ivingho, East Meon and Adderbury, all in the estate of the bishop of Winchester, suggest marriage rates for customary females if based on recorded merchets, that never exceeded 7 per 1000 and were in fact much lower.
51. See L. R. Poos, ‘Population and Resources in Two Fourteenth Century Essex Communities: Great Waltham and High Easter, 1327–1389’ (unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Cambridge, 1984), 159–84 based upon PRO DL30/63/790-841, Essex Record Office D/Dtu M239, BL Cotton Ch. xiii. 5 and PRO DL 43/2/32; University of Chicago Libr. (hereafter UCL), Bacon MSS 1–15 and 805; Myntling Register: Spalding Gentlemen's Soc. Libr.
52. H. E. Hallam, ‘Some thirteenth-century censuses’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., x (1958), 340–61 and.
53. idem, ‘Age at first marriage and age at death in the Lincolnshire Fenland, 1252–1478’, Population Studies, xxxix (1985), 55–70.
54. J. P. Williams, ‘Marriage among the Customary Tenants of the Bishops of Winchester, 1297–1366’ (unpublished Fellowship dissertation, Trinity Coll., Cambridge, 1984), 12–14.
55. Based on evidence from Great Waltham and High Easter (Essex) where the mean holding size of families with daughters paying merchet was nearly double that of the average holding and Redgrave (Suff.) where only 50% of the tenants listed on an extent in 1289 had daughters paying merchet in the manorial court but held over 80% of the customary land area; see Poos and Smith (1984), 147–148.
56. Williams ‘Marriage’, 18–20.
57. It should, however, be noted that Rosamond Faith using the evidence in the court book of Park, a manor of St Albans, has taken issue with this view on finding what are certainly higher proportions of the customary tenantry paying for license to marry. However, almost 40% of tenants (a high figure even when allowance is made for the fact that not all men would have had daughters born or surviving to marry) appear not to have left evidence of marriage fines for daughters which she seems unable to explain. R. Faith, ‘Debate: Seigneurial control of women's marriage’, Past & Present, xcix (1983), 144. Nonetheless it is perhaps too easy to see this monitoring of marriage and the property transfer associated with it as encouraging endogamous marriage between the villeins of an individual manor in so far as it might be thought that a bride's or heiress's land could all too easily slip into the possession of a free tenant or under the control of another lord. It has been suggested that marrying out or to a foreigner was a privilege that had to be purchased indeed a liberty paid for with large sums of money. On the 3 Cambs, manors of the abbot of Crowland, 1324–39, 66% of first marriages described as providing the merchet payer with permission to marry extra homagium or ubicumque voluerit. The merchet sums do not suggest that the abbot was preoccupied with imposing fiscal disincentives for women marrying exogamously, for although the average sum paid for brides marrying infra homagium was approximately 2s that paid by out-marriers was only marginally larger at 2s 8d and those distinguished as marrying ubicumque voluerit paid amounts that were generally below 2s od. (See Cambridge University Libr. (hereafter CUL), Queens' Coll. Box 3.
58. e siecles’, Annales. Economies, Societes, Civilisations, xxxviii (1983), 55–56.) On the Winchester manors of East Meon, Nails borne, Ivingho and Adderbury the differences between the fines paid for marriages within and outside the fee were not particularly large. 93% of recorded manorially endogamous marriages from a total of 225 were fined at 2s od or less and 83% of 253 exogamous marriages were for similar amounts. Furthermore sums were not evidently larger when the groom was classified as being a freeman.
59. (See Williams, ‘Marriage’, 31–3.)
60. For example, Redgrave courts of 24 July 1261, 1 Nov. and 21 Nov. 1264 (UCL, Bacon MS 1), 27 Feb. 1281 (MS 4), 31 Dec. 1300 (MS 8) and 28 Feb. 1308 (MS 11); Wakefield court 9 Feb. 1333, The Court Roils of the Manor of Wakefield from October 1331 to September 1333, ed. S. S. Walker (Yorks. Archeol. Soc., 1983), xii, 109.
61. Select Pleas in Manorial and Other Seigneurial Courts ed. F. W. Maitland (Selden Soc., 1888), 105, 107, 108, 112–20, 122, 128.
62. I am grateful to Dr Hyams for allowing me to read his stimulating paper, ‘What did English villagers mean by Law’. See too J. S. Beckerman, ‘Customary Law in English Manorial Courts in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1972), 59.
63. Smith, ‘Some thoughts’, 98–107 and.
64. Beckerman, ‘Customary Law’, 30–111.
65. Smith, ‘Some thoughts’, 107–11.
66. P. R. Hyams, Kings, Lords and Peasants in Medieval England. The Common Law of Villeinage in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Oxford, 1980), 267–8.
67. For examples see Charters and Custumals of the Abbey of Holy Trinity, Caen, ed. M. Chibnall (British Academy Records of Social and Economic History, new ser., v, 1982).
68. See too the discussion in P. D. A. Harvey, Manorial Records (1984).
69. E. King, Peterborough Abbey, 1086–1310: A Study in the Land Market (Cambridge, 1973), 103–4 and.
70. J. M. W. Bean, The Decline of English Feudalism (Manchester, 1968), 79–126.
71. The classic view is to be found in P. Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England (Oxford, 1892), 70.
72. Bracton's Note Book, ed. F. W. Maitland (1887) 24, 170, 194b.
73. P. R. Hyams, ‘The origins of a peasant land market in England’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., xxiii (1970), 24–25.
74. In the Cashio court 28 June 1238 Robert son of William ‘cepit x acras terre in hereditate de dono patris sui defuncti…' BL, Add. MS 40626, fo.ir and at Park in 1237’ Galfridus Bruman cepit terram Willelmi Gosewell in feodum et in hereditatem et dat de gersuma xijd’ BL, Add. MS 40625, fo.ir. For earlier developments in the meaning of the phrase in feodo et hereditate see J. C. Holt, ‘Feudal society and the family in early medieval England: II. Notions of patrimony’, ante, xxxiii (1983), 210–18.
75. For instance at a Bramfield court of 27 June 1299 ‘Mariota Partrich reddidit sursum in manu domini viij acras terre. Et Radulphus de Chelse dat domino dimidiam marcam pro dicta terra tenenda sibi et suis in villenagio faciendo inde servicia debita et consueta et dabit tallagium et merchettum ad voluntatem domini, Herts. RO, 40702, fo. 13V. In entries such as these, rather than saying that the grantee was seised, the transfer makes it very clear that he or she held in villeinage at the lord's will. It is therefore possible to identify three phases in the development of formulae used to record land transactions on the estates of the abbot of St Albans. For example, at Cashio, 1238–60 approximately 60% of the permanent transfers were made sibi et suis, but in the following period, to 1300, approximately 5% were so designated. After 1300 the transfer is made sibi et suis in almost 99% of cases. BL, Add. MS 40626, fos.1-68. A similar chronology is to be found at Barnet where 65% of permanent transfers 1245–54 were sibi et suis, 1272–81 none and 1300–09 91%. BL, Add. MS 40167, fos. 1r–5r, 14r–18r, 26r–36v. At Park the phrase sibi et heredibus suis appears in 54.1% of permanent transfers, 1237–49, in 9.5% 1250–99 and in 94.3% 1300-49; at Codicote the comparable percentages are 56.2, 7.1 and 98.6. See L. A. Slota, ‘The Village Land Market on the St. Albans Manors of Park and Codicote 1237–1399’ (unpublished University of Michigan Ph.D. 1984), 104.
76. The East Anglian court rolls of the abbot of Bury St Edmunds, beginning mostly in the early 1260s, while showing from that date occasional evidence of land surrendered to the use of another do not seem to have designated that land as held sibi et heredibus suis until the 1280s. At Redgrave in 1284, for instance, an effort seems to have been made to employ a standard form for inter vivos transfers incorporating both elements. See, Smith ‘Some thoughts’, 108–9. Similar developments are detectable in the early 1280s on the prior of Norwich's Norfolk manors of Sedgeford, Newton and Hindringham.
77. See J. Williamson, ‘Norfolk: thirteenth century’ in The Peasant Land Market in Medieval England, ed. P. D. A. Harvey (Oxford, 1984), 58 and.
78. J. Williamson, ‘Peasant Holdings in Medieval Norfolk Villages in the Thirteenth Century’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Reading, 1976), 113.
79. for the arrival of these forms in the 1290s in Great Waltham and High Easter see the court held 11 June 1295, PRO, DL 30/62/772, and in the early 14th century on the Cambs. manors of the abbot of Crowland, see F. M. Page, The Estates of Crowland Abbey, A Study in Manorial Organisation (Cambridge, 1934), 336, 346.
80. Hyams, King, 44 n.33.
81. R. M. Smith, ‘Families and their land in an area of partible inheritance: Red-grave, Suffolk 1260–1320’, in Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, 151–9.
82. Smith, ‘Some thoughts’, 115–18.
83. B. M. S. Campbell, ‘Population pressure, inheritance and the land market in a fourteenth-century peasant community’ in Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, 107–27.
84. C. Clarke, ‘Peasant Society and Land Transactions in Chesterton, Cambridgeshire, 1277–1325’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1985), 92–5.
85. Slota, ‘Village Land Market’, 68, 146–50.
86. ‘Alditha le Colesmyth et Ricardus filius reddiderunt sursum in manu domini j messuagium et x acras terre in le Uppehende … Et Celleraria posuit in seisinam Beatriciam filiam suam et dat domino ijs per plegium Rogeri Prepositi’, court held 18 July 1291, BL, Stowe MS 849, fo.2ov.
87. For example, in the curia regis rolls of 9–10 Hen. III, nearly 200 entries, or about 20%, of the business related to disputed dower and they very frequently concerned land alienated by husbands to which the wife's dower right was attached. See G. D. G. Hall's review of Curia Regis Rolls of the Reign of Henry III, 9–10 Henry III, in English Historical Review, lxxiv 1959), 108.
88. Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law, ii. 413 and.
89. J. S. Loengard, ‘“Of the gift of her husband”: English dower and its consequences in the year 1200’, in Women of the Medieval Worlds, ed. J. Kirshner and S. F. Wemple (Oxford, 1985), 223–4.
90. ‘Cecilia Walshegge venit et petit versus Philipum Sellic dotem suam de uno parvo messuagio cum dimidiam acram terre et dictus Philipus venit et defendit et dicit quod non debet habere inde dotem eo quod etc. et postea concordatum sunt. Ita quod predicta Cecilia venit et reddidit sursum ad opus dicti Philipi totum jus et clameum quod habuit in demando dicte dotis pro xijd quos dedit eidem Cecilie et domino vjd per plegium Willelmi le White’, Barnet court held 24 Oct. 1259, BL, Add. MS 40167, fo.12v.
91. Loengard, ‘Of the gift’, 224–7 for the conditions under which this would have applied in the case of free land.
92. Beckerman, ‘Customary Law’, 170, citing Sidney Sussex Coll., Abbots Langley court book, fo.5v.
93. In the Bury estates the terminology of the transfer is amended slightly such that A & B, uxor euis examinata invariably appear as joint vendors or grantors of customary property. Terminology of a similar kind was in fairly widespread use on the St Albans estate by the third decade of the 14th century. For instance, in the decade preceding the Black Death, of the 18 recorded alienations by conjugal pairs on the manors of Codicote and Park, 12 indicate that the wife was formally examined and consented. In one instance where no examination is noted the land reverted to the couple for their lives and in another a grant in fee tail was made to a daughter with reversion in the event of the daughter dying without direct heirs of her own. See BL, Stowe MS 849, fos. 64r–74v and. BL, Add. MS 40625, fos. 72r-92v.
94. Court held at Norton 8 June 1289, Herts. RO, 65500, fo.10v. See too A. E. Levett, Studies in Manorial History (Oxford, 1938), 335.
95. Slota, ‘Village Land Market’, 109.
96. Clarke, ‘Peasant Society’, 183.
97. Smith, ‘Families and their land’, 187.
98. Slota, ‘Village Land Market’, 11.
99. Smith, ‘Families and their land’, 187. At Redgrave 1260–94 62% of conjoint transactions were ‘sales’ while in the following quarter-century 72% of transactions show husbands and wives as grantors rather than grantees.
100. Clarke, ‘Peasant Society’, 183.
101. Slota, ‘Village Land Market’, no; figures for Bramfield are based upon transactions involving married couples in the court book, Herts. RO, 40702, fos. 14–25 and 40703, fos. 1–12.
102. Developments of this kind were as relevant for women who held freely as well as by customary tenure. See Loengard, ‘Of the gift’, 218.
103. R. Palmer, ‘Contexts of marriage in medieval England: evidence from the king's court circa 1300’, Speculum, lix (1984), 51–56 and.
104. L. Bonfield, Marriage Settlements 1601–1740, ch. 1.
105. On the problematic nature of ‘custom’ as a concept, see Smith ‘Some thoughts’, 123–26.
106. See, Smith, ‘Some thoughts’, 111 n.71; for other early examples see Coldicote court held 30 Mar. 1266, BL, Stowe MS 849, fo.9v; court held at Barnet 4 Aug. 1262, BL, Add. MS 40167, fo.8v; Bramfield court held 9 Oct. 1248, Herts. RO, 40702, fo.4r.
107. In theory maritagium under Common Law had emerged as a means of providing by gift from the wife's father for the children of the marriage and was ‘not merely an estate for life, but estate of inheritance’, Plucknett, Legislation, 129. If it so happened that the marriage was childless it was specified that the land should revert to the donor. For that reason the gift could in no way be made to the donee ‘and their heirs’ for it could descend to collateral heirs in the absence of issue, transforming it to a fee simple freely alienable without restriction and quite clearly contrary to the donor's wishes.
108. for the background to the procedures allowing the donor's wishes to be thwarted see Plucknett, Legislation, 130–131 and his
109. A Concise History of the Common Law (5th edn., 1956), 549–51.
110. Plucknett, Concise History, 551–2 and.
111. Legislation, 131–5. 81.
112. Maitland, Select Pleas, 40.
113. Slota, ‘Village Land Market’, 121. Similar patterns are to be found at Cashio where no entails are specifically recorded before 1293 whereas 26 out of 171 permanent grants recorded in the following years to 1348 contained them, BL Add. MS 40626, fos. 1–68. In Bramfield an almost identical chronology can be detected with no entails before 1293 but 28 out of 182 in the period leading to 1348 entailed, Herts. RO, 40702, fos. 1–25; in the court book of the large Bucks, manor of Winslow where no records have survived of land transactions during the reigns of Edward I and II, 95 out of 487 permanent grants 1327–48 contained entails, CUL, MS Dd.7.22, fos.1-49.
114. This is the view of Bonfield, Marriage Settlements, 17. Clearley a much more detailed assessment of their durability on customary land is needed than is attempted here where only those that were or were claimed to have been broken come to our attention as the object of a plaint in the manor court.
115. The transfer to Robert Donne was registered in a court of 5 May 1329 and the critical entail upon which Alice's claim was based is to be found in the court of 9 June 1315, BL, Stowe MS 849, fos.37r, 52r.
116. K. B. Macfarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1978), 65.
117. Court of 28 May 1342, CUL, MS Dd.7.22, fo.28v. See too a jointure of Geoffrey Kyde and Alveline his wife, involving a messuage, 1 acre of arable and ½ an acre of meadow to be held by them and ‘heredes et assignatis eorumdem’, Winslow court held 3 Nov. 1343, (fo-31v).
118. Poos, ‘Population and Resources’, 232–3. The extent of such practices is not widely known but, new ser, A tenancy for two lives however not involving husband and wife did not avoid a liability for heriot on the death of one of the two lives on the manors of the abbot of St Albans. For instance, at Barnet when in 1336 Robert Mulleward surrendered a cottage, curtilage and their appurtenances to Margery, wife of John atte Mulle and William, Margaret and Marjorie her children and the children's heirs ‘utraque eorum dabit heriettam quotiens accident etc’, BL, Add. MS 40167, fo.63r
119. Macfarlane, Nobility, 69.
120. Clarke, ‘Peasant Society’, 100–3, citing a case from a court of 1312/13 whereby a husband quite evidently was able to favour his wife at the expense of his son.
121. Hilton writes of the growth of jointure and ‘the extra security to widows’ it entailed, ‘analogous to freehold jointure’ in his regional study of the west midlands, referring however, to developments that appear to have taken place in the last third of the 14th century rather than the first third which have been the focus of our discussion. See English Peasantry, 100–1.
122. These developments are furthermore seen in the context of a transformation of tenancies-at-will to tenures for two or more lives, cf. R. Faith, ‘Peasant families and inheritance custom in medieval England’, Agricultural Review, xiv (1966), 91–2.
123. Harvey, Westminster Abbey, 277–98.