Philippa Russell and the Wills of London's Late Medieval Singlewomen

Bennett, Judith M.; Whittick, Christopher

doi:10.1179/174963207x227569

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 5 publications

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“…66 The number of surviving wills left by single, never-married women is low across Britain and the material from Wales does little to add to the total. 67 No Welsh testament explicitly records a 'single woman'; the status can only be presumed through the absence of any mention of husband or children, and potential identifiers such as the presence of strong links to the natal family. 68 Using this criteria we have three possible examples.…”

Section: Women's Willsmentioning

confidence: 99%

'At HIR Owne Discrecion': Women and Will-Making In Late Medieval and Early Tudor Wales*

Youngs¹

2019

wel. his. rev.

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support/ 'At hir owne discrecion': Women and will-making in late medieval Wales The position of women in the native law of medieval Wales has received a good deal of scholarly attention, most clearly in the collection of essays that comprise The Welsh Law of Women. 1 Yet far less is known about how women in Wales experienced the laws operating within the country, their involvement in the production and administration of legal documents, and how they negotiated their way through medieval Britain's complex network of courts. This cannot be blamed on a lack of sources because even the most traditional of documents remain insufficiently interrogated. A case in point is the testamentary evidence for Wales, which is woefully under-used and in some areas, such as gender history, rarely consulted. 2 This is unfortunate given both the important role of the executrix, and the potential for the will to offer women, in the words of Katherine Lewis, 'a rare opportunity for deliberate, "official" textual self-representation'. 3 A belief that early Welsh wills are rare survivals may be partially to blame, and it is true that numbers cannot compare to testamentary evidence for English counties like Somerset and Norfolk, or the cities of London and York. Nevertheless, over 600 'Welsh' wills survive for the period before 1550, and among them are fiftynine women's wills, which deserve far greater scrutiny for what they tell us about their lived experiences, familial strategies and social networks. The purpose of this article is twofold. Firstly, it will deploy testamentary material to examine the role Welsh women played in the production of these legal documents. It will then focus on the fifty-nine wills to identify the women who produced them, why they might have done so, and what they tell us about women's capacity for decisionmaking and legal action at the end of the Middle Ages. The records The selection of wills under study here require some explanation. First, it is worth mentioning the archives in which they now deposited. By the fourteenth century a full probate system had developed in Wales, much the same as it had in England, and the granting of probate 1 Morfydd E. Owen and Dafydd Jenkins (eds) The Welsh law of women (Cardiff, 1980). 2 The major analytical work on medieval wills in Wales remains Helen Chandler, 'The will in medieval Wales to 1540' (unpublished MPhil thesis, Aberystwyth University, 1991), which includes a useful calendar of Welsh wills to 1540: pp. 235-74. A number of local studies are available in print, mainly drawing attention to particular archives, e.g. David H Williams, 'Medieval Monmouthshire wills in the National Library of Wales' Monmouthshire Antiquary, 19 (2003), 113-128 (and see fn. 5 below). Studies on Welsh women and wills are slight, but include the articles by Roger Turvey: 'Until death do us part: the last wills and testaments of a husband and wife in early sixteenth-century Pembrokeshire',

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Section: Women's Willsmentioning

confidence: 99%

'At HIR Owne Discrecion': Women and Will-Making In Late Medieval and Early Tudor Wales*

Youngs¹

2019

wel. his. rev.

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Formalizing Latin: An Example of Medieval Latin Wills

Mijić

Bartulović

2021

Communications in Computer and Information Science

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Coverture and the Marital Partnership in Late Medieval Nottingham: Women's Litigation at the Borough Court, ca. 1300–ca.1500

Phipps¹

2019

J. Br. Stud.

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Women engaged in litigation in Nottingham's borough court as both plaintiffs and defendants for a variety of reasons relating to trade, household provisioning, misbehavior and interpersonal disputes. This article examines how women's litigation was determined by the doctrine of coverture and the way that women's marital status shaped and defined their experience of the law. In doing so, it explores how these pleas reveal the workings of the marital partnership within a late medieval English town. In order to contextualize the experiences of women “under coverture,” the article first traces the ways in which all manner of female marital and household identities were documented in the court records, analyzing the descriptors that court scribes attached to individual women's names. The article highlights inconsistency in the way that women's identities were recorded and in the way that the marital partnership was represented through the litigation of spouses in the borough court. The dual focus of this article not only adds new evidence to ongoing discussions of the nature of medieval coverture but also interrogates how we identify coverture and women's marital statuses based on the evidence of court records.

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Philippa Russell and the Wills of London's Late Medieval Singlewomen

Cited by 6 publications

References 5 publications

'At HIR Owne Discrecion': Women and Will-Making In Late Medieval and Early Tudor Wales*

'At HIR Owne Discrecion': Women and Will-Making In Late Medieval and Early Tudor Wales*

Formalizing Latin: An Example of Medieval Latin Wills

Coverture and the Marital Partnership in Late Medieval Nottingham: Women's Litigation at the Borough Court, ca. 1300–ca.1500

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