LONDON’S MARRIED WOMEN, DEBT LITIGATION AND COVERTURE IN THE COURT OF COMMON PLEAS

Matthew Frank Stevens

Introduction: the Court of Common Pleas and the London Evidence

In the weeks after the feast of St Hilary (13 January) in 1403 a plea brought on a writ of debt, between plaintiffs Margaret le Toller of Smithfield, London, and her husband John le Toller, and defendant Richard Barbour of Wycombe, Buckingham­shire, was heard before the justices of the royal Court of Common Pleas at West- minster.^[373] In this case, Margaret and her husband claimed that nearly two decades before, on 8 August 1384, while Margaret was a single woman, an accounting was held between herself and Richard Barbour in the London parish of St Bride Fleet Street before two London tradesmen appointed by Margaret as auditors.

In the fifteenth century the Court of Common Pleas was the principal na­tional venue for civil litigation in the English realm, hearing several times as many cases as the realm's second busiest central common law court, the Court of King's Bench, which heard a mixture of civil and criminal pleas.^[375] Additional­ly, Chancery, which increasingly exercised jurisdiction in conscience (and even­tually equity) towards the close of the Middle Ages, later to be strongly associ­ated with disadvantaged female petitioners in the early modern period, handled only a small volume of business in the fifteenth century, probably less than two hundred cases per year, as opposed to the roughly four to nine thousand cases in progress at Common Pleas in any given law term.^[376] The Court of Common Pleas had four main sorts of jurisdiction: real actions, in land; personal actions, including actions of account, covenant and debt over 40s.; mixed real/personal actions such as ejection from lands held for a term of years; and trespass, both against an individual and in breach of a statute of the realm, which jurisdiction was shared with King's Bench.^[377]

The case of Toller and Toller v. Barbour is somewhat exceptional with respect to both the long interval between the initial accounting of 1384 and the dispute's pleading before the court, and, as suggested by the fifteen years between the ac­counting and the alleged joint arbitration of Margaret and her husband, Marga­ret's likely late age of marriage.^[378] But, in so far as it reflects a married couple's at­tempt to collect a debt owed to the bride from a time before her present marriage, it is wholly unremarkable among the records of Common Pleas. In fact, even a brief survey of cases involving female litigants before the fifteenth-century Court of Common Pleas makes it apparent that recently married, or re-married, women routinely came, or were summoned to come, before the court concerning disputes stemming from a time when they were single.

A systematic investigation of fifteenth-century Common Pleas cases either laid in London, that is revolving around disputed events alleged to have taken place in London, or involving a litigant described as �?of London', reveals that female liti­gants appeared in just under a fifth of cases reaching the stage of pleading before the king's justices. Further, roughly three-quarters of women's cases pleaded at Common Pleas were economically-orientated actions of debt, detinue or account, in 43 per cent of which a female co-plaintiff or co-defendant was a married wom­an (see Table 6.1).7 Put plainly, more than one in twenty London-related lawsuits pleaded before the fifteenth-century Court of Common Pleas involved a married woman as plaintiff or defendant in an economically-orientated dispute. This is despite the limitations of coverture, which severely curtailed the roles of women, and particularly of married women, in litigation in the king's common law courts.

Table 6.1. London-related Cases Before the Fifteenth-century Court of Common Pleas

Source: Mackman and Stevens, eds., Court of Common Pleas, years sampled, 1399-1409, 1420­1429, 1445-1450, 1460-1468, 1480 and 1500, all dates inclusive.

The Legal Context of Married Women at Law

Confusion over the frequency with which married women were party to legal actions, and particularly legal actions not involving real property, relates to the

Actions of debt, detinue and account have been grouped together as �?economically-orientated’ lawsuits for ease of expression, as these are actions most commonly arising from commercial or other economic contracts. Unlike actions seeking seisin of land or compensation for personal injury alone, these actions typically revolve around agreements, with clear economic elements or implications, which have gone wrong.

Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe persistent, but erroneous, suggestion that women would not naturally have been party to litigation in economically-orientated actions �?because... control over the chattels they brought to marriages passed to their husbands’.^[379] Critically, this view does not acknowledge the importance of unpaid debts and other outstanding obligations owed to, or owed by, women at the time of their marriage. A single woman, or femme sole, that is a woman recognized as representing her own legal affairs as a never-married woman of legal majority (roughly fourteen to twenty- one years of age) or as a widow, could bring any form of action at common law in her own right.^[380] Equally, a widowed or never-married woman in her legal majority named as an executor or administrator could initiate or respond, jointly or inde­pendently, to litigation regarding the debts or chattels of her testator or intestator. When a woman married, the common law principle of unity of person, or cover­ture, dictated that, as a married woman was under her husband’s coercion in all aspects of her life, in the words of Blackstone, �?all deeds executed, and acts done, by her, during her coverture, are void’ and �?if the wife be injured in her person or her property, she can bring no action for redress without her husband’s concur­rence, and in his name’.^[381] But, at one and the same time, �?if the wife be indebted before the marriage, the husband is bound afterwards to pay the debt; for he has adopted her and her circumstances together’.^[382]

Although Blackstone was writing in the early eighteenth century, the legal principle on which his latter commentary reflects is self-evident in a fifteenth­century tendency of recently married husbands to attempt to collect outstand­ing debts owed to their new wives, as demonstrated by the alleged arbitration in the case of Toller and Toller v.

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husbands, sued and were sued in a variety of economically-orientated disputes similar to those involving single women and men more generally (Table 6.1). Typical disputes revolved around the detention of chattels, unpaid bonds, un­paid purchases on credit and similar matters.

Legally and practically speaking, the same transfer of legal control was also true of the real property which women brought to marriage unions. Whether a woman had, upon marriage, a right to an unpaid debt or a right to real prop­erty, the process by which the couple, once married, brought disputes before the court concerning either debts outstanding or real estate of which they had been disseised (that is, wrongly dispossessed) was by means of a husband's claim in right of his wife, made via an original writ naming both husband and wife as co­litigants. A woman did retain some limited rights over lands which she brought into a marriage union, such as the right to veto attempts by her husband to alien­ate her dower lands, but these were, under most circumstances, unenforceable during the husband's lifetime and could not result in intra-domestic litigation as a married women and her husband were, in the eyes of the common law, one person.¹³ However, concerns over securing the rights to lands which might be subject to dower acted as a natural inducement to the laying of lawsuits by and against husband and wife as co-litigants.

Notable in Table 6.1 is the high proportion (60 per cent) of London-related disseisin cases involving female litigants, and in particular married women (71 per cent of such cases), which reached the stage of pleading in the fifteenth century. Women acted in about 15 to 20 per cent of pleaded cases, excepting in actions of disseisin, which actions contained a disproportionate concentra­tion of female litigants.¹⁵ Equally notable, however, in absolute numbers, is the roughly three economically-orientated London-related cases involving female litigants pleaded before Common Pleas for each disseisin or trespass case heard there. Among lawsuits brought under these forms of action, the economically- orientated actions of debt, detinue and account are the most common, amount-

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J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 3rd edn (London, 1990), pp. 550-7; for a broader European perspective see S. Bardsley, Womens Roles in the Middle Ages (London, 2007), pp. 147-54.

A. L. Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London, 1995), pp. 25-6. See also Hogrefe, �?Legal Rights of Tudor Women’.

The overall proportion of cases at Common Pleas involving women declined sharply from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century. M. F. Stevens, �?London Women, the Courts and the “Golden Age”: A Quantitative Analysis of Female Litigants in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, London Journal 37 (2012), 67-88, esp. p. 84. Also, see below.

Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe ing to 80 per cent of the London-related cases identified as the basis of this study and 75 per cent of cases involving female litigants, nearly half of whom were married.

Reassessing the Historiography of Married Women and the Common Law

The frequency with which London's married women appeared as co-litigants with husbands in economically-orientated disputes before the court of Common Pleas is counterintuitive in light of the current historiography of Englishwomen and the law. This historiography is strongly influenced by the persistent, if in­correct, assumption that married women subject to coverture normally could have no legal interest in economically-orientated lawsuits. On the one hand, great emphasis has been placed on the relative independence of women who were femme sole. For medievalists, the legal rights and experiences of unmar­ried women, especially when related to real estate, upon entering into or exiting from marital unions, or long after such unions, have received a disproportionate amount of attention;^[384] while, on the other hand, equally great emphasis has been placed by pre-modern jurists and modern historians alike on the pervasive na­ture of the pre-modern doctrine of coverture, and the theoretical limits it placed on married women. In legal history, married women have been viewed largely as a conduit through which men disputed land rights gained through mar- riage.^[385] And so the experiences of married women, their relationship with the law - especially in non-land disputes - and the practical realities of life covert de baron have remained largely unexplored. A tacit, if inaccurate, understand­ing persists that the near-universal application of coverture in most courts has rendered medieval married Englishwomen all but invisible to modern legal his­torians. Moreover, within this historiographical framework false expectations are raised: that we might expect to see women most often in land disputes, and for those female litigants in non-land disputes to be unmarried. However, as is shown in Table 6.1, women in London-related lawsuits were involved in some twenty times more economically-orientated cases than land disputes, and 43 per cent of the women in those actions of debt, detinue and account were married, as exemplified by the case of Toller and Toller v. Barbour.

This divergence between the historiography of married women at common law and the experiences of women in pleaded cases relating to fifteenth-century London may not come as a surprise to historians who have looked at the records of manorial and borough courts where coverture was often simply not observed, even to the extent of allowing married women to initiate and answer litigation independently.^[386] Moreover, John Baker long ago noted that even where coverture was strictly observed, as in the king's common law courts, �?the husband could... [sue or] be sued for ante-nuptial debts' by way of claims made in right of a wife.^[387] This essay maintains that married women's debt litigation in London-related cases - and doubtless litigation in other localities - is far in excess of all women's land litigation; and yet women's debt litigation at Common Pleas relating to London and elsewhere has not been subject to careful research. The reasons for the cur­rent underestimate of married women's economic interests under coverture are twofold. First, the records of the national common law courts are still virtually unexplored. Secondly, and of equal importance, a series of narrowly informed observations drawn from the records of the Court of Common Pleas have sup­ported the erroneous conclusion that, as a result of coverture, women at common law were involved overwhelmingly in land disputes.

In reconsidering these assertions, it is necessary to consider, first, why there has not been more research on the records of the Court of Common Pleas, given that the records of this principal and busiest national court survive en masse from the late thirteenth century onwards. The evidence of London-related cases suggests that English legal records, and particularly court records, contain an abundance rather than a paucity of information regarding married women. In­deed, Ruth Kittel, in 1979, pointed out that �?legal records may be one of the best sources for studying medieval women... with whole classes of documents virtually untouched'.^[388]

The main impediments to the collection and interpretation of evidence from court records, now as in the past, are the large volume of material which the his­torian must examine in order to collect sufficient evidence on which to build an understanding of married women's activities, and the need to apply at least basic quantitative methods. Charles Donahue, in 1993, employed quantitative meth­ods to analyse litigation before the medieval York Consistory Court, commenting �?that legal history... has traditionally avoided even the simplest forms of statis­tics’.^[389] Since the appearance of Donahue's essay, the use of quantitative methods to explore married women's legal actions has remained sporadic. But a growing interest in women's economic activities as well as a sustained interest in real-prop­erty litigation has produced a small but important body of quantitative research, which this present volume complements.^[390]

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What remains problematic is the challenge of accessing sufficiently robust se­ries of legal documents in a location or form that makes feasible their systematic investigation and quantitative analysis. As Kittel lamented in 1979, despite the po­tential of legal records for the writing of medieval women's history, �?only two per­cent’ of the common law records of the thirteenth century had been published.^[391] Likewise, substantially less than 2 per cent of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century common law records, including only a handful of records from the Court of Com­mon Pleas, had been published. This is now rapidly changing.

In 2006 the National Archives of the United Kingdom licensed the University of Houston, O’Quinn Law Library, to preserve digitally, publish online and dis­tribute freely digital facsimiles of the records of the common law courts, 1272­1650.^[392] Additionally, between 2006 and 2010, two major research projects were undertaken at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, survey­ing London-related lawsuits at Common Pleas which reached the stage of plead­ing: that is, the stage at which the plaintiff(s) and defendant(s) appeared before the justices, in their own persons or by attorneys, to argue their case.^[393] These two latter projects have resulted in the publication of an English language calendar of fifteenth-century pleaded cases, either laid in London or involving a London litigant, prosecuted at the Court of Common Pleas.^[394] It is this calendar which contains details of the 6,321 pleaded cases analysed for this essay, drawn from the years 1399-1409, 1420-9, 1445-50, 1460-8, 1480 and 1500 (all dates inclusive).^[395] It enables quantitative analysis, for the first time, of a substantial body of the re­cords of later medieval England’s principal and busiest court for interpersonal, or �?civil’, litigation. The greater accessibility of these and similar records of the royal common law courts has the potential to prompt a reconsideration of current as­sumptions regarding the interactions of married women and the common law.

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The second reason why the present historiography of women's experiences at common law neglects women's economically-orientated litigation arises from a misconception: namely, that women's litigation at common law �?was mostly con­cerned with claims to land' and, further, that �?women were even more likely than men to be involved in cases concerned with land’.^[396] These views reflect the gen­eral legal doctrine and belief that all of a woman's chattels were transferred to the control of her husband immediately upon marriage, and they overlook the reality that women were often creditors or debtors at the time of marriage. Single women both actively extended and received credit before marriage, as exemplified by the already noted cases of Toller and Toller v. Barbour and Yorke v. Bedell and Bedell (alias Power), respectively.^[397] Moreover, women often acted as executors or admin­istrators of others, especially prior husbands. About 53 per cent of men's wills enrolled in the London Husting Court before 1500 mention a surviving wife who was to receive chattels (and/or real property), while a sample of sixteenth-century London wills has indicated that 89 per cent of male testators named their wife as sole or joint executor, and usually as sole recipient of the residue of the estate.^[398] Also, as many as 57 per cent of young London widows re-married, often while still owed or owing debts contracted during a prior marital union by husbands for whom they were executors or administrators.^[399] For example, in about 60 per cent (212 of 352) of the London-related debt, detinue and account cases involving a married female litigant sampled for this study (Table 6.1), the married woman was litigating as an executor or administrator of a prior husband.

These realities could lead women to be directly or indirectly - as an executor or administrator - in credit or indebted at the time of marriage. Additionally, the misconception that women litigated at Common Pleas overwhelmingly in actions relating to claims to lands, which formed only a small part of the court's business (see Table 6.1 and below), has the effect of redirecting the focus of historians of me-

Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe dieval women to the much less voluminous records of the court of Chancery if they wish to study female litigants. For example, Sara Butler's discussion of recourse to law in marital disputes advises readers that �?women were significantly more likely to participate in legal activities in equity than in common law courts’.^[400] Yet this state­ment does not make clear that while women formed a larger proportion of petition­ers to Chancery than they did as litigants at Common Pleas (15 per cent as opposed to 5 per cent, respectively), the fifteenth-century Court of Common Pleas processed twenty to forty-five lawsuits for each one petition to Chancery.^[401]

This is the historiographical context in which the present essay, using the Lon­don-related data discussed above, seeks to interpret common law actions involving female co-litigants, be they plaintiffs or defendants, as an indicator of the economic standing and wealth of medieval women during at least their first years of marital union, irrespective of the application of coverture. It is essential, consequently, to establish as precisely as possible the frequency with which women were involved in �?land’, as opposed to �?non-land’, legal actions. That, in turn, entails an evaluation of the evidence for the prevailing view that women were involved mostly in land disputes. More specifically, does that evidence suggest that the litigation patterns of London women were in any way anomalous in a national context?

The first steps toward determining women’s overall participation in legal ac­tions at the royal common law courts were taken in 2000 by Emma Hawkes, in an article assessing women’s knowledge of the law across the central judicial forums, including Common Pleas, King’s Bench and the jurisdiction in conscience of the Court of Chancery.^[402] In this article Hawkes sampled Court of Common Pleas �?ac­tions brought by Yorkshire and Lincolnshire litigants [that is, laid in these coun­ties] in [progress during] Trinity [terms] 1479, 1500 and 1520’ and at any stage of pleading.^[403] This influential article suggests that the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire evidence indicates that women’s litigation at common law �?was mostly concerned with claims to land’, and further that �?women were even more likely than men to be involved in cases concerned with land’^[404] These findings, based on around 170 Yorkshire and Lincolnshire lawsuits involving female litigants, are in stark contrast to the evidence from three-quarters of the 1,083 London-related cases in­volving female litigants which were brought on economically-orientated actions, as identified in Table 6.1. At first glance, this difference might be dismissed as regional variation, but a close reading of Hawkes’s article suggests that her inter­pretation of the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire evidence has been distracted by older and narrower case studies focused especially on the records of the gentry.

Hawkes’s assessment of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire litigants cites, as context, Susan Wright’s survey of the fifteenth-century Derbyshire gentry and Charles Moreton’s work on a Norfolk gentry family, the Townshends. The suggestion that

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women's litigation at common law �?was mostly concerned with claims to land’ is followed by a citation of Wright’s work on law and order, in which she states that �?ambitious men busily acquiring land... generated disputes’, that �?quarrels over family, marriage settlements and inheritances... were a regular part of the pattern of litigation’ and that �?the [Derbyshire] gentry were much preoccupied with [this] litigation’.^[405] These lines, at the beginning of Wright’s discussion of law and order in Derbyshire, are taken by Hawkes to imply that litigation involving women over­whelmingly concerned disputes over land. But the body of Wright’s work makes no specific reference to the Court of Common Pleas, and a survey of Wright’s notation suggests that her research made no use of the Common Plea rolls. The context for interpreting the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire evidence, that �?women were even more likely than men to be involved in cases concerned with land’, is followed by a citation of Moreton.^[406] This seems to be based on Moreton’s discus­sion of the Townshends’ five major land disputes of the later fifteenth century, four of which involved a woman as a litigant or petitioner to Chancery.^[407] However, Moreton’s work, while based on a few dozen lawsuits, stresses both the success of the Townshends in avoiding land disputes and their tendency to �?use the Com­mon Pleas as a debt-collecting agency’.^[408] Moreton further emphasizes the manner in which Eleanor Townshend �?used the law on a regular basis against debtors’, with at least eighteen debt suits in progress in the last year of her life.^[409]

The misconception that women most commonly litigated over land, and the notion that they were even more likely to do so than men, arises from a reality manifest in Moreton’s work and illustrated in Table 6.1 above. The misconception arises from the much higher proportion of lawsuits concerning land, particularly actions of disseisin, which involved female litigants compared with other types of lawsuits (for example, in 60 per cent of disseisin cases a female litigant was involved). However, in absolute numbers - if not in relative terms - women in London-related lawsuits, like men, were much more frequently involved in the economically-orientated actions of debt, detinue and account; and in all actions, they were less likely than men to appear as litigants.^[410]

Such misconceptions that exaggerate women’s participation in pleas regard­ing land, though inconsistent with the data of London-related cases, are perhaps understandable in the absence of an overview of the records of Common Pleas. More importantly, they are evident in Hawkes’s assessment of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire cases of Trinity terms 1479, 1500 and 1520. For example, when noting that less than a quarter of all lawsuits in progress in Trinity term 1479 involved either actions of disseisin or other actions likely to relate to land dis- putes, Hawkes commented that in �?the figures for 1479... [t]he numbers of fe­male claims to land were out of line' with figures from 1500 and 1520, which better fitted her proposed pattern of women being involved primarily in land disputes.^[411] Also significant is Hawkes's methodology in determining the num­ber of �?claims to lands' involving female litigants, whereby she grouped together actions of disseisin and actions of trespass for illegal entry vi et armis (that is, by force and arms), and waste (that is, damages to properties, or the value of properties, held for a term of life or years). Inclusion of trespass actions claim­ing illegal entry is entirely appropriate as property disputes were, in the fifteenth century, increasingly brought before the court in this manner in order to con­vert the tortuous real action of disseisin into a potentially more efficient per­sonal action.^[412] Less clear-cut is Hawkes's inclusion of actions of waste as �?claims to lands'. Plaintiffs in actions of waste sought compensation, awardable as treble damages, for the devaluation of estates in which they had a vested interest, and which were held by the defendant for a term of years or for life.^[413] In instances of deliberate waste as determined by a jury, the plaintiff could recover seisin (that is, lawful possession), but normally seisin only of the specific part(s) of the property which had been wasted (for example, as little as a single house or a secondary messuage on a manor).^[414] Within a judicial framework where lawsuits were rarely prosecuted to their conclusion and the usual mode of termination was an extra-curial arrangement, the exceptional leverage and potential mon­etary reward of treble damages offered plaintiffs with a viable claim of waste strong economic inducements to sue, and offered defendants a good reason to settle. By comparison, a partial recovery of seisin could well have been incon­venient, and potentially unworkable, from the point of view of both parties. This is to say that actions of waste were, if not plainly economic disputes, then at least not always lawsuits brought with the intent of recovering seisin. Nevertheless, for the purpose of comparing the London-related data to that of other locali­ties, even if all of London-related trespass cases recorded in Table 6.1 concerned land - whereas in fact they relate to a variety of dispute types - trespass and dis­seisin cases involving female litigants would only have amounted to a quarter of all London-related cases (259 of 1,083) with a female litigant. In the context of London-related cases, Hawkes's conclusion that a quarter of Yorkshire and Lin­colnshire cases on the Trinity plea roll of 1479 concerned disseisin or trespass, accounting for only a minority of lawsuits involving female litigants, would not be �?out of line'.^[415]

Table 6.2. Women's Lawsuits Involving Land (London, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire)

Source: as in Table 6.1 and TNA, CP 40/953.

A more detailed reappraisal of the evidence for Trinity term 1500, regarding York­shire and Lincolnshire, for comparison with the data of London-related pleaded cases, is also fruitful (Table 6.2); it undermines the notion that most actions in­volving female litigants concerned claims to land.^[416] Surveying all Yorkshire and Lincolnshire lawsuits recorded on the Trinity 1500 plea roll and including both mesne process (that is, records of efforts to secure a defendant’s initial appearance before the court) and pleaded cases, it is calculated that 16 per cent (40 of 252) of these lawsuits involved female litigants; this is comparable to the 17 per cent of London-related pleaded cases which involved female litigants.^[417] Excluding one action of waste, eleven of the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire cases were land disputes brought on writs of disseisin, directly disputing land ownership. A further six Yorkshire and Lincolnshire cases noted on the Trinity term 1500 plea roll were brought on writs of trespass with force and arms alleging forced entry, and are likely to indicate underlying real property disputes. In total, these land disputes, brought on writs of disseisin or trespass, account for 43 per cent (17 of 40) of cases involving female litigants, and reflect the activities of 48 per cent (21 of 44) of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire female litigants.^[418]

The 43 per cent of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire lawsuits (Table 6.2) which in­volved female litigants in claims to land in 1500 is markedly higher than the 8 per cent of London-related lawsuits which might have concerned female litigants in similar disputes across the fifteenth century. The reasons for this disparity are more complex than the rural and urban concerns of non-London and London liti­gants - although the mercantile pre-eminence of London must not be wholly dis­counted.⁵¹ While Yorkshire and Lincolnshire were large rural counties, the urban centres of York and Lincoln (whose cases are included here) were significant hubs of commercial activity. Likewise, the London-related pleaded cases considered include disputes arising from Londoners’ diverse landed interests beyond the city, as well as non-Londoners’ disputes arising from property transactions which took place in the city and so required lawsuits laid in London. The smaller proportion of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire lawsuits which involved women in debt disputes, relative to London-related cases, is likely due in part to the less intense use of the Court of Common Pleas by Yorkshire and Lincolnshire litigants. Across the fif­teenth century, more than four times as many lawsuits were brought in Common Pleas by Londoners as by Yorkshire or Lincolnshire litigants, per head of popula­tion, due in part at least to the frequency with which Londoners traded with non­Londoners, and so litigated against them in England’s national judicial tribunals.⁵² At the same time, the smaller proportion of London-related cases which involved women in land disputes, relative to the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire cases, is likely to be due in large part to the London custom which reserved disputes between citizens to the city’s own courts.⁵³

Nevertheless, despite the differing litigation patterns of disputants in London- related lawsuits as opposed to those in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire lawsuits, there is no reason to believe that legal actions from either locality demonstrate other than that only a minority of lawsuits involving women were land disputes. Con­trary to Hawkes’s assessment of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire lawsuits in Trinity term 1500, women were not most frequently litigants at the Court of Common Pleas in land disputes. As with the London-related lawsuits, the most common single type of action to involve female Yorkshire and Lincolnshire litigants in 1500 was - in fifteen instances - an action of debt.⁵⁴ Neither this sample of non-Lon- don cases from 1500, nor the London-related evidence presented in Table 6.1, can speak for all parts of fifteenth-century England; much more extensive research is needed to explore regional patterns in the use of the central law courts. But the

tesy of England'; such lawsuits are also likely to have been economic in nature. Even were claims of waste counted as �?land' disputes, women's cases involving land would still be in the minority.

⁵¹ See D. Keene, �?Medieval London and Its Region, London Journal 14 (1989), 99-111.

⁵² Stevens, �?Londoners and the Court of Common Pleas’, pp. 224-7, table 12.2.

⁵³ P. Tucker, �?Relationships between London's Courts and the Westminster Courts in the Reign of Edward IV', Courts, Counties and the Capital in the Later Middle Ages, ed. D. E. S. Dunn (Stroud, 1996), p. 117. Small numbers of London citizens did choose to break the city's prohibition by employing the Court of Common Pleas against one another in the fifteenth century, but they did so overwhelmingly in personal actions: Stevens, �?Londoners and the Court of Common Pleas', pp. 231-2.

⁵⁴ See n. 50 above.

data strongly indicate that the economic standing and wealth of later medieval women, both in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire c. 1500 and in fifteenth-century Lon­don, were most commonly tested at the Court of Common Pleas in actions of debt. In London in particular, women - whether married or unmarried - were by a wide margin most commonly involved in economically-orientated suits of debt, detinue and account (Table 6.1).

Conclusion: Women in London-related Cases, New Directions for Study

Having sought to dispel the myth that as a by-product of coverture women were most likely to be litigants at Common Pleas in claims to land, it is appropriate to ask how the participation of so many single and, in particular, married women in economically-orientated pleas can inform the historian about the economic standing and wealth of medieval women. Medieval women have long been viewed, with respect to their roles in land disputes, as little more than conduits through which men might lay claim to lands. Does challenging the misconception that women were mostly involved in land disputes do anything more than suggest that women were conduits through which men might lay claims to debts? In short, can records of married women's debts tell us more about female agency and activities than land disputes?

These questions are too broad-ranging to be adequately explored here, but they may be answered tentatively in the affirmative. As discussed above, a married woman could appear in a debt case with her husband when the debt concerned had been owed to, or owed by, the wife from a time before her most recent mar­riage. The form of the lawsuits in the rolls of Common Pleas consistently notes if, and to whom, the woman may previously have been married since the debt was contracted. For example, in the debt suit of Toller and Toller v. Barbour, the plaintiffs' pleading expressly stated that, �?although often requested’, the £10 arrears in question had not been paid by Richard Barbour, neither �?to Margaret while a single woman, nor to John le Toller and Margaret since their marriage'.^[419] In this way, the debt disputes of married women - particularly when they were not acting as an executor or administrator to a prior husband or other deceased party - offer a window onto the lives of unmarried women, a sense of their financial fortunes on entering marriage and an indication of how marriage affected their use of the court. Referring again to the case of Toller and Toller v. Barbour, it is evident that Margaret had lent Richard Barbour the significant sum of £10 when she was a sin­gle woman, some nineteen years before and while likely quite young; the wording of the lawsuit suggests that she had not been married prior to her union with John le Toller.^[420] It also suggests that she had only attempted to resolve the debt through an alleged arbitration after her marriage, some fifteen years subsequent to the ac­counting by which the arrears were determined. Lawsuits involving London wives who were creditors were frequently brought by married couples shortly after their nuptials (Table 6.3).^[421] The historian might fruitfully speculate that Margaret Tol­ler’s marriage, far from debilitating her through the application of coverture, of­fered her the assistance she needed, in a patriarchal world, to attempt to recover the debt.

Table 6.3. Sample of Debts of Married Women (Neither Executors Nor Administrators) in Pleaded London-related Cases, 1399-1500, Median and Mode Values.

Source: as in Table 6.1.

* This column reflects only debts, most often secured by bonds,

In a similar vein, quantitative analysis of the debts of married women who appeared before Common Pleas as litigants has the potential to shed light on the participation of women in the credit market and offers insights into the ways in which female indebtedness affected the credit market. Again, this is particularly relevant when the married woman was not acting as an executor or administrator to a prior husband, but instead when the woman herself contracted the debts in question as a single woman. For example, Table 6.3 shows the median and mode values of debts owed to and by female creditors and debtors, and the duration of time those debts had been in arrears at the time of pleading, in London-related cases involving a wife as a co-litigant, where that wife was acting as neither an executor nor an administrator.^[422]

The data in Table 6.3, regarding debts owed to or by wives from a time before their marriage, suggest that unmarried women, as creditors, were likely to extend substantially more credit to individual debtors than they themselves were likely to receive as debtors. More speculatively, if the period of time during which a debt was in arrears before a case was pleaded at Common Pleas is used as a rough in­dicator of how long a female creditor or debtor remained unmarried, the data in Table 6.3 suggest that creditors married more quickly than debtors. Could this be because female creditors were subject to the attentions of grasping suitors, wish­ing to use coverture as a means by which to attain their unrealized assets? Or, in light of the prominence of coverture, could single female creditors have felt that they needed male assistance to use the courts effectively to recover outstanding debts, making difficulty in pursuing debts and recalcitrant debtors motivations to marry? Considering these data, it is perhaps worth recalling Blackstone’s words that, in the eyes of the law, when a man took a bride he �?adopted her and her circumstances together’.^[423] Nearly twenty years ago, Barbara Hanawalt’s study, �?Re­marriage as an Option for Urban and Rural Widows in Late Medieval England’, pointed out that �?crass economic factors may have motivated new husbands’; there is little reason to believe that similar factors would not have motivated new wives as well.^[424]

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Little more can be done here than to point the way for future investigations of the experiences of medieval women as reflected in the Court of Common Pleas and other common law courts. The convention of coverture left ample scope for married women to appear before the court as party to litigation of an overtly eco­nomic nature, not directly related to claims to land. The evidence of women in London-related cases pleaded before the fifteenth-century court is dominated by female litigants’ economically-orientated actions of debt, detinue and account. While the present orthodoxy about married women and the law, based on nar­rowly conceived studies, suggests that women were mostly named in common law actions where a husband claimed lands in right of his wife, there is in truth little evidence to sustain this argument. A thorough, comparative re-evaluation of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire cases from Trinity term 1500 suggests that land dis­putes may have been more common among female litigants’ lawsuits from non­London localities. However, the notion that women at common law were involved predominantly in land disputes, based on the belief that coverture overwhelm­ingly precluded married women from participating in economically-orientated lawsuits, may prove to be no more than a myth.