Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England

Abstract

This book investigates the surprisingly large number of women who participated in the vast expansion of litigation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Making use of legal sources, literary texts, and the neglected records of the Court of Requests, it describes women's rights under different jurisdictions, considers attitudes to women going to court, and reveals how female litigants used the law, as well as fell victim to it. In the central courts of Westminster, maidservants sued their masters, widows sued their creditors, and in defiance of a barrage of theoretical prohibitions, wives sued their husbands. The law was undoubtedly discriminatory, but certain women pursued actively such rights as they possessed. Some appeared as angry plaintiffs, while others played upon their poverty and vulnerability. A special feature of this study is the attention it pays to the different language and tactics that distinguish women's pleadings from men's pleadings within a national equity court.

Women, ‘Usury’ and Credit in Early Modern England: The Case of the Maiden Investor

“…That this reluctance is noteworthy is clear from the fact that Stretton himself stressed 'the extent of single women's under-representation in the court', causing him to argue that the scarcity of single women's records 'obviously resulted from something more than jurisdictional boundaries'. 116 Indeed the position was very different for that other class of feme sole litigants, the widows. For while single women were 'underrepresented in Requests and other courts, widows more than held their own'; in other words they were the only female group whose share of litigation corresponded closely with their numbers in society.…”

“…114 Their low level of engagement, when set alongside that of their bachelor counterparts, was not restricted to the area of debt recovery: unmarried women were also more reluctant 'to litigate business matters [or] to dispute purchases or sales of goods'. 115 What is noticeable, though, is that single women rarely appear to have been suing over debts. Although technically marriage contracts and inheritance lay beyond the remit of Requests, most of the litigation involving single women revolved around issues of inheritance, with some servants attempting to recover 'unpaid wages or to protect investments'.…”

“…Erickson too noted a 'threefold increase in widows' appearing before Chancery between 1558-1603 and 1613-1714, although she believed this was likely to be a function of their 'absorption from other courts'. 117 The implication must then be that spinsters either did not feel able, or were unwilling, to resort to legal action to pursue their outstanding debts. This is not to suggest that single women as a group were naïve in their approach to lending.…”

“…Some may indeed have been in thrall to their families, but if this were so, then we would expect to find more cases in which the family initiated a suit on behalf of their daughters. 120 That single women were not always able to access the same power structures as their male counterparts is nevertheless suggested by the documentary sources in which there are numerous examples of overdue debts with little or no hope of resolution. 121 Sadly, for some single women the decision to lend proved little short of disastrous.…”

Women, Marriage, Property and Law: Contextualizing <i>The Witch of Edmonton</i>

“…In 1601 a woman named Katherine Willoughby sued two former husbands, claiming ignorance that under canon law this situation should have been impossible. 20 That same year a lawsuit in Star Chamber accused Hercules Foljambe of having three living wives, a fact he readily admitted, arguing that eminent church leaders had told him that the church permitted remarriage after a church-sanctioned separation on the ground of adultery even though this 'fact' had never been the law. All this confusion came to a head in the years either side of 1600, culminating in the passing of the 1604 act 'to restrain all persons from marriage until their former wives and former husbands be dead' that turned the sin of bigamy into a felony and moved its jurisdiction from church to state.…”