MARRIED WOMEN, CRIME ANDTHE COURTS IN LATE MEDIEVAL WALES

Lizabeth Johnson

For the pre-conquest period of medieval Welsh history, historians interested in the activities of married women - their rights within marriage, their respon­sibilities within the household, or the work they performed - are severely limited by a lack of sources.

After the English conquest of Wales in 1282-3, however, the historian sud­denly finds him or herself with court roll evidence that sheds light on the issues of marriage, property ownership and work. Court rolls survive from various Welsh courts, both from the principality of Wales and from the Marcher lord­ships. The entries on these court rolls, although often brief in their wording, provide indicative information regarding the activities of women in Welsh com­munities, describing marital practices and domestic relations, as well as wom­en's occupations. In addition, the court rolls provide information on women's involvement in legal disputes, whether civil or criminal, and - even more im­portantly - the legal status of women in courts of law, namely, whether women represented themselves at court or were represented by male relatives, as was often the case in other medieval societies.^[237] In all, court rolls from the post-con­quest period of Welsh society are an extremely valuable resource for the study of women's history because they provide practical information about the lives of women and because they reveal the various legal actions women were involved in as both plaintiffs and defendants.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the scope of married women’s involve­ment in litigation regarding abduction, assault and defamation in the post-con­quest Marcher lordship of Dyffryn Clwyd, with respect to the legal doctrine of coverture, that is, a wife’s legal subordination to her husband. The Marcher lord­ships comprised territory in Wales that had been conquered in the centuries af­ter the Normans arrived in England in 1066. Marcher lordships were under the direct rule of various Anglo-Norman families, rather than the king, and this rule extended to the court system in each individual lordship. The reason for focus­ing on Dyffryn Clwyd in particular is the large number of post-conquest court rolls which survive from the lordship. Additionally, the Dyffryn Clwyd court rolls were the subject of a preservation, transcription and translation project in the mid-1990s, which resulted in the Dyffryn Clwyd Court Roll Database, a collec­tion of more than 100,000 court roll entries from that lordship during the period 1294-1422.³ This resource makes it possible to reconstruct the lives of married women in the lordship of Dyffryn Clwyd.

With regard to the Dyffryn Clwyd evidence, this essay will highlight married women’s legal activities in cases involving abduction, assault and defamation. Ab­duction was a crime in which married women, unmarried women and even men might all appear as victims. However, married women sometimes exhibited a de­gree of agency in abduction cases. And the convention of coverture was evident in the claims husbands made regarding property taken in conjunction with the abduction of their wives. Likewise, assault and defamation cases involved mar­ried women, unmarried women, and men as both plaintiffs and defendants, and can provide further evidence regarding the operation of coverture in fourteenth­century Dyffryn Clwyd. By examining married women’s roles as plaintiffs and de­fendants in these cases, particularly when compared to their unmarried and male

Roberts and S.

³ The Dyffryn Clwyd Court Rolls are deposited in The National Archives (TNA) SC 2/215/64 to SC 2/226/16. They were calendared in a computerized database at the University of Wales, Aberyst­wyth with Economic and Social Research Council support (ESRC award numbers R000234070 and R000232548) as R. R. Davies and Ll. B. Smith, eds, The Dyffryn Clwyd Court Roll Database, 1294-1422, electronic resource (Aberystwyth, 1995), hereafter Dyffryn Clwyd Database. A user’s guide for the database has been published as A. D. M. Barrell, The Dyffryn Clwyd Court Roll Database, 1294-1422: A Manual for Users (Colchester, 1997). The database and user’s guide are available in digital format from the Economic and Social Data Service, http://www.esds.ac.uk/ (accessed 28 June 2012). I owe Dr Frederick Suppe and the History Department of Ball State University a debt of gratitude for making a licensed copy of the database available to me. A recent study of these court rolls is Stevens, Urban Assimilation. counterparts, it can be shown that although married women were occasionally represented at court by their husbands, they also actively engaged in court cases - both civil and criminal - on their own behalf. Thus the practice of coverture, seen in many medieval northwest European cultures, was not consistently observed in medieval Dyffryn Clwyd. Instead, married women in Wales were often active in pursuing their own legal interests.

The court rolls from Dyffryn Clwyd provide glimpses of the lives of many women from the period 1294-1422, allowing scholars to gain a general sense of the legal activities of married women in the lordship.

The lordship’s officials oversaw two Great Courts, one representing the borough of Ruthin and the other representing Dyffryn Clwyd as a whole; three commotal (or hundred) courts, held for the commotes of Llannerch, Colion and Dogfeiling; the lesser borough court of Ruthin; and proceedings of gaol delivery, fines and bails. The Great Courts were each held twice yearly, at Easter and Michaelmas, and the lesser borough court and commotal courts were held roughly fifteen times a year.^[238] This essay draws on the surviving and legible court roll entries regard­ing cases of abduction, assault and defamation from these courts.^[239] Evidence from abduction and defamation cases, which appear in the court records relatively in­frequently, has been gathered from all records calendared in the Dyffryn Clwyd Database for the period 1294-1422, while evidence from much more frequently occurring cases of assault has been gathered from two calendared sample periods, 1340-52 and 1390-9. The detail of these court roll entries is normally limited to the names of plaintiffs and defendants, the type of lawsuit or infraction of local

Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe regulation concerned, and whether or not the court's involvement resulted in a judgment or amercement.

Abduction

Although abduction and rape were crimes that affected both married and un­married women - and occasionally men - in medieval society, related issues that arose with regard to married women were their agency in such abductions and the operation of coverture, evidenced by husbands' claims to property taken by or with their wives.^[241] The majority of the cases describing the abduction of mar­ried women also describe the property that disappeared with them, along with the value of that property. The cases involving unmarried women and men, on the other hand, typically do not include such information. Additionally, those cases describing the abduction of unmarried women often describe the rape of the woman in question, a situation that does not occur as commonly in cases involving married women.^[242] For these reasons, litigation over abduction and rape operated differently depending on whether the victim was a married woman, an unmarried woman or a man.

Married Women, Crime and the Courts in Wales pursued by husbands or other male relatives. Relatively few of these cases involved women representing themselves.

The earliest records of abduction involving married women speak to both the issue of women's agency and the issue of coverture. Out of twenty-two cases of ab­duction of married women appearing in the calendared Dyffryn Clwyd materials between 1294 and 1422, fourteen of them also involved the abduction of property. One entry from 1296 describes a husband’s plaint that his wife was abducted and that the abductor lived with her after the crime had been committed.^[243] In a second case, from 1313, the husband of the abducted woman claimed that the perpetra­tor had �seduced’ her by night, taking both the plaintiff’s wife and his goods.^[244] A third entry, from 1329, states that a married woman had been abducted �by the free wish of the said woman, again with the husband’s goods.^[245] In two of these cases, those from 1296 and 1329, the women in question left their husbands of their own volition. The wife’s agency in the 1313 case is suggested by the fact that the husband was found guilty of making a false claim and fined. In fact, out of the twenty-two cases from the Dyffryn Clwyd court rolls, only two state that the abduction was against the woman’s wishes.^[246] That these women, and no doubt others, chose to leave their husbands should not be surprising, as scholars, such as Sara Butler, have demonstrated a variety of reasons why a medieval wife - despite the legal complications that could ensue - might choose to leave her husband (including abuse, the husband’s impotence or her own general dissatisfaction with the marriage).^[247] Additionally, until the English conquest of 1282-3, divorce had been allowed under native Welsh law, and Welsh women may have continued to embrace that custom despite subsequent changes to the legal system in the early post-conquest period.^[248]

In those cases involving the taking of property together with the abduction of a married woman, it is often unclear whether it was the wife who took the property with her or her abductor, or whether the wife felt the goods to be her own. Regard­less, the property is always stated as belonging to the husband, although this can be interpreted as either the husband’s claim or the court’s assumption based on the legal concept of coverture. In one such case, from 1296, a husband came to court to report the abduction of his wife and �7s. 6d. in money and corn’, a case which was later resolved through concord.^[249] In a 1341 case, which was lodged both in the Great Court of Ruthin and in the Great Court of Dyffryn Clwyd, a priest was ac­cused of having abducted a woman and her husband’s goods, valued at 10s., only to deliver both to the house of yet another man, where the woman remained for a

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month.^[250] Another case, from 1396, describes a married woman, whose abductor had â€?bodily violated her against [the] wish of [her husband]', giving her husband's goods to the man who had abducted her, including a pair of shoes and a brooch, all together valuing 8½d.^[251]7 An even clearer example of abduction of a husband's goods, along with his wife, appears in a case from 1395, in which a woman and one of her female associates took goods from the woman's husband against his wishes. Compounding this crime was the fact that two clerics assisted the woman in leaving the lordship with her husband's goods, taking a horse from the prior of Ruthin in order to help the woman flee to Chester. The assistance that this woman and the one described in the example above from 1341 received from clerics may indicate that these women were trapped in abusive marriages and the members of the local clergy saw it as their duty to help them escape those marriages. Marital advice manuals written by clerics in the late medieval period urged husbands to be firm but not excessively violent toward their wives, but this was not always the reality of medieval marriages.^[252] Alternatively, in the 1395 instance, the woman may have sought sanctuary in Ruthin priory and received assistance because of a sense of social and spiritual responsibility on the part of the clerics. The court rolls indicate that the woman was outlawed, but later pardoned by the lord of Dyffryn Clwyd.^[253] Cases such as these, where the husband's goods were reported as taken or given willingly by the wife into the hands of her abductor, provide evidence of the interpretation of coverture in Dyffryn Clwyd. Because coverture legally placed a woman and the goods that she brought into the marriage, or subsequently pro­duced during her time in the household, in her husband's hands, if a woman left her husband and took goods from the home without his consent the husband had the right to regain that property in court. As Butler notes, even in cases where a woman took refuge with family members to escape a marriage, those family members could be brought to court for the seizure of the husband's property.^[254] This typically English system of assessing property ownership as resting strictly with the husband, as is evident in the court rolls of post-conquest Dyffryn Clwyd, is contrary to native Welsh law, which allowed wives to separate from their hus­bands and to take some property with them.^[255]

Cases of abduction involving unmarried women and men, on the other hand, do not as commonly indicate volition on the part of the abductees. Nor do these cases typically entail litigation to recover lost property. Additionally, as noted above, many of the cases involving the abduction of unmarried women also involved the rape of those women. Of the forty-three cases of abduction involving unmarried women identified for this essay, eighteen specifically mention that the women were raped, sometimes violently. In one such case, the perpetrator was granted a pardon by the lord of Ruthin, Reginald de Grey, for the crime of �ravishing’ Gladys, daughter of Ednyfed le Cook. The court scribe wrote that the defendant was �not to be molested or annoyed, but [was] to give surety for his good behaviour toward Gladys and all others in Ruthin’.^[256] In some cases, the perpetrators went even further than abduction and physical violation, as in the case of one unnamed woman who was abducted and then sold to another man for 10s. in 1349.^[257] Only one case out of forty-three involving unmarried women specified goods taken along with the woman, a clear contrast to the fourteen out of twenty-two cases involving married women which specified goods taken.^[258] However, unlike those cases involving married women, there are two cases in which unmarried women represented themselves at court against their abductors, who they claimed had raped them. In both cases, the accu­sations were found to be false, and the women were imprisoned briefly and fined.^[259] These cases, affirming that unmarried women might represent themselves at court in cases of abduction and rape, may stand as testament to the difficulty of prosecut­ing such accusations in late medieval society. But, alternatively, if these were false accusations, they could hint that single women too may sometimes have left their homes willingly but contrary to social convention, later feeling the need to cover up their agency in such actions.^[260] Nevertheless, in either case, unmarried women were less likely than married women to abscond with goods from their homes, whether familial or otherwise.

There are eleven cases recorded in the Dyffryn Clwyd material in which the ab­ducted party was a man, including several bondsmen and servants, in some cases along with goods, as well as one young male heir abducted from the household of the man who had paid relief for his lands.^[261] In these cases, it is difficult to assess whether the men left willingly due to difficult conditions they faced as servants, bondsmen or wards, or whether they were truly victims. But it is entirely possible that they sought the same kind of escape that married women sought from life covert de baron and, because of the nature of their service, condition or wardship, they were viewed in a very similar manner by the court.

Assault

The evidence from Dyffryn Clwyd’s courts concerning assault indicates that what determined whether married women were regarded as legally culpable individ­uals in such cases was whether the case appeared in court as an interpersonal lawsuit or as a criminal presentment. In interpersonal suits of assault, married women most commonly appeared alongside their husbands. In contrast, in crimi­nal presentments for assault, married women most commonly appeared indepen­dently in court. Consequently, records of assault demonstrate different patterns with regard to coverture, with interpersonal suits adhering more consistently to the practice of coverture than criminal presentments.²⁸

Interpersonal suits of assault were brought in response to incidences of per­sonal harm which amounted to â€?battery’ under English common law.²⁹ These pleas were, most likely, initiated orally, following which the named defendant was re­quired to appear to answer the charge. A plea of battery could be brought by and against men, married or unmarried women, and married couples jointly. When the altercation was mutual, the Welsh phrase brwdyr gyfaddef (to â€?confess battle’) occasionally appears in the court record.³⁰ In interpersonal suits of assault brought before the courts of Dyffryn Clwyd in two sample periods, 1340-52 and 1390-9, unmarried women and men represented themselves before the court individually and, where liability was determined, the responsibility for fines or amercements did not extend to a litigant’s wider family or the community (even in the case of never-married women). Married women, however, typically appeared alongside their husbands in these suits, even when the women themselves were responsible for the assault. In fact, in both 1340-52 and the 1390s, the majority of lawsuits involving married women named both the women and their husbands as either plaintiffs or defendants, in 91 per cent and 76 per cent of suits respectively (see Table 4.1). That married women rarely appeared without their husbands indicates that these women were not normally regarded as legally liable individuals in inter­personal suits of assault, and that coverture was observed in this litigation.

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Karen Jones has argued that the late medieval Kent courts prosecuted some married women in­dependently of their husbands in criminal cases involving property but that it is unclear whether this principle was upheld in all criminal cases involving married women, making any effort to compare married women’s legal position to that of men �highly problematic’. See K. Jones, Gender and Petty Crime in Late Medieval England: The Local Courts in Kent, 1460-1560 (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 37-8. According to Barbara Hanawalt, medieval officials were reluctant to arrest wom­en or to indict them for crimes, making a study of women’s criminal behaviour difficult. See B. A. Hanawalt, �The Female Felon in Fourteenth-Century England’, Viator 5 (1974), 253-68, at p. 256. On the use of pleas of battery in English courts, see J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 4th edn (London, 2002), pp. 403-5. On pleading in native Welsh law, see R. Chapman Stacey, �Learning to Plead in Medieval Welsh Law’, Studia Celtica 38 (2004), 107-23; and S. E. Roberts, �Plaints in Mediaeval Welsh law’, The Journal of Celtic Studies 4 (2004), 219-61.

For a discussion of brwdyr gyfaddef, see Barrell, Dyffryn Clwyd: A Manual, p. 86.

Table 4.1. Interpersonal Suits of Assault

Source: Dyffryn Clwyd Database; TNA, SC 2/217/6 to SC 2/220/10.

Examples of interpersonal suits for assault involving married women amply dem­onstrate the application of coverture in the courts of Dyffryn Clwyd. In one suit, from 1342, the plaintiff, Madog ap Gruffudd, stated that the married female de­fendant, Lleucu wife of Cyn ap Einion, had �unjustly assaulted him' and �in breach of the peace beat him'; both Lleucu and her husband denied the charges.^[262] In an­other suit, from 1346, Iorwerth ap Ieuan ap Heilyn and his unnamed wife ap­peared in court as defendants for assaulting Madog ap Gronwy Bach, although the court record indicates that it was Iorwerths wife who had drawn blood from Ma- dog and not the husband.^[263] A suit from 1389 demonstrates the same pattern, when Dafydd ap Madog ap Llywelyn and his wife Lleucu were ordered to appear as de­fendants against Margaret ferch (Welsh, �daughter of') Dafydd.^[264] Married women appeared without their husbands in only a few instances, whether as plaintiffs or as defendants, such as in a 1342 lawsuit in which Alice wife of Richard son of William le Tailor appeared alone as a plaintiff against Hugh le Mon, who did not appear but was to be forced to do so at the next court.^[265] In suits such as this one, no indication is given as to why the husband was absent from the court. Similarly, no indication is given regarding whether the independent prosecution of lawsuits by married women was viewed as unusual or inappropriate behaviour. However, the fact that married women most commonly appeared with their husbands suggests that they had only limited legal independence in interpersonal suits of assault, regardless of whether they were plaintiffs or defendants, as coverture was usu­ally - if not strictly - observed. Even in those instances where the wife was very clearly indicated as the victim of the violence, rather than her husband, both were normally named in such suits.^[266]

Options for resolving interpersonal lawsuits for assault included the plaintiff or defendant requesting concord (licence to settle out of court), for which a small fine was paid, the plaintiff withdrawing the accusation and paying a more substantial fine, the court's decision that the suit was an unjust plaint (a �false claim'), similarly resulting in a fine, or - where the defendant was found liable - a fine and an order that compensation be paid.^[267] The settlements listed in the court rolls further reaffirm that coverture was usually observed in interpersonal suits for assault. The major­ity of the settlements in lawsuits involving married women name both spouses as responsible for any fines or compensation arising, regardless of whether the wife alone was responsible for the dispute. In the 1346 lawsuit discussed above, for exam­ple, Iorwerth ap Ieuan ap Heilyn and his wife were originally ordered to pay 6d. for concord, which amount was later raised to 12d. when it was discovered that the wife had drawn blood from the plaintiff. In two instances, however, a wife who appeared as the sole plaintiff or defendant paid the fine herself. In one of these instances, from 1344, the married woman, Gwenllian wife of Iorwerth ap Gronwy, paid a fine of 6d. for concord with an unmarried woman, Elen ferch Gronwy.^[268] In the other in­stance, from 1345, the married woman, Gladys wife of Madog Myn, was fined 40d. for withdrawing a lawsuit; no defendant was listed.^[269] It may be worth speculating that in the first of these cases at least (and possibly the second as well) coverture was not enforced as the dispute was between two women. Two additional lawsuits also stand out as unusual. In the first of these lawsuits, from 1341, the fine was levied against Isabel wife of John le Plommer alone, although both she and her husband were named as co-defendants.^[270] In the second, from 1344, both Einion Crach and his wife Gwenllian appeared as defendants, but only Einion was fined.^[271] The fine recorded for Isabel alone cannot readily be explained, as no clear indication is given as to why Isabel was fined independently of her husband. The suit against Einion and Gwenllian is less surprising, in that the doctrine of coverture would dictate that Einion, as husband and head of the household, ought to pay the fine even if his wife had incurred it. That husbands and wives were, in the majority of lawsuits, listed as paying for concords or making other fines jointly, indicates a general, but neverthe­less incomplete, application of coverture in interpersonal cases of assault.

In contrast, assault lawsuits involving unmarried women and men show liti­gants of each sex appearing on their own behalf, as plaintiffs and defendants, with lawsuits involving only men accounting for well over half of those cases exam­ined here, from both 1340-52 and the 1390s. Typical of lawsuits involving single women, in 1342, Gwenhwyfar ferch Iorwerth appeared in court alone - without a male relative to represent her - accused of assault by Elias de Holond and his wife, who ultimately chose not to prosecute her.^[272] In a suit from 1395, Gwenllian ferch Madog appeared alone as a plaintiff, and successfully prosecuted a suit against Maredudd ap Ieuan ap Dafydd ap Ieuan.^[273] Hence, unmarried women, even when identified by reference to their fathers - that is, �X ferch Y', or the English equiva­lent - seem to have initiated and responded to litigation with similar legal in­dependence to men. Likewise, when found liable in suits of assault, unmarried women were recorded as responsible for paying their own fines or compensation. And the records of some of these suits list pledges for payment, who were not normally related to the liable party. For example, one such suit from 1347 states that Tege ferch Iorwerth was involved in mutual assault, or brwdyr gyfaddef, with a man simply named Llywelyn and his wife Malkin, for which she was fined 6d., and her pledge for payment was an apparently unrelated man.^[274] This suggests a relatively broad and consistent recognition of the legal autonomy of unmarried women in interpersonal suits of assault.

When taken all together, the majority of the evidence of interpersonal litiga­tion concerning assault depicts wives as dependent on the legal presence of their husbands in these lawsuits, in accordance with the doctrine of coverture. Never­theless, in a small minority of lawsuits married women do seem to have appeared on their own behalf, and to have paid their own fines, contrary to the strict ap­plication of coverture.

Criminal presentments for assault differed from interpersonal lawsuits in that they were not usually initiated by an individual entering a plea. Instead, a com­munity jury - appointed either for a fixed period of time (six months, for the Great Courts of Ruthin and Dyffryn Clwyd) or to hold an inquest regarding a single in­cident (in the commotal courts and lesser borough court of Ruthin) - presented evidence of criminal assaults, normally those occurring since the previous sitting of the court, and determined the penalty to be levied against the person or per­sons responsible.^[275] Such presentments commonly named the wronged party - who presumably had had some agency in bringing the incident to the jury's attention - and the defendant, who was fined. Either party could be a married woman, an un­married woman, a man, or a married couple. In certain occasional circumstances, such as when a defendant in an interpersonal suit of assault denied all wrongdoing and requested a decision by inquest jury, a related criminal presentment for assault might later appear in the court rolls. Unlike in strictly interpersonal suits for assault, however, in criminal presentments for assault, married women - like unmarried women and men - were usually recorded in the court rolls as individually liable for fines. In both 1340-52 and the 1390s, the majority of presentments involving mar­ried women fined those women alone, without their husbands: 75 per cent and 65 per cent of presentments respectively (see Table 4.2).

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Table 4.2 Criminal Presentments for Assault

Source: Dyffryn Clwyd Database; TNA, SC 2/217/6 to SC 2/220/10.

Criminal presentments for assault that named married women alone, as victims or defendants, emphasize the greater independent legal standing of women in criminal presentments, relative to interpersonal litigation. Examples from both 1340-52 and the 1390s serve to illustrate this point. For instance, in a present­ment of 1341, Alice the wife of Adam le Muleward was fined for having commit­ted �hamesucken’ (that is, home invasion) and assault on Emma the daughter of Alice de Newton, while Alice’s husband Adam was not himself cited to pay any fine.^[276] The fact that Alice alone was fined does not seem to have been related to her victim’s sex because, in 1341, it was presented that Felicia wife of Richard de Pres assaulted William Lloyd and �tore his hood’ and Felicia too was fined for her actions independently of her husband.^[277] Similarly, in a presentment from 1395, Tangwystl wife of Ieuan Goch Saer was presented and fined, without any recorded mention of her husband, for an assault on Iorwerth ap Ieuan ap Llywelyn, during which she �took him violently by [the] neck’.^[278] Criminal presentments for assault in which married women were the victims, and not the perpetrators, also adhere to this pattern. For example, in 1340, Hwfa ap William ap Ithel de Yale was pre­sented, and later incarcerated, for having beaten Gladys wife of Gronwy ap Ithel in her home, with no mention of any wrong done directly or indirectly to Gladys’s husband, for example, as householder or owner of the goods in his wife’s keep­ing.^[279] Presentments from the 1390s similarly fail to note the interests of husbands, as in 1399, when it was presented that Beatrice daughter of John Fairchild had beaten Joan the wife of John Bach, making no direct mention of Joan’s husband.^[280] In all of these presentments, married women were recorded as either assailants or victims independently, which, in any local �court of record’, would seem to suggest that coverture was not observed in these criminal presentments as it was in the majority of married women’s interpersonal lawsuits.

The settlements in criminal presentments also differ slightly from those in interpersonal suits in that the settlements were determined by juries - either standing presentment juries or special inquest juries - which simply rendered a presentment of an individual’s guilt (or occasionally, in the case of inquest juries, innocence) and set a fine, ordered an arrest, or both a fine and arrest. Some presentments were never acted upon because the defendants simply could not be found.^[281] However, the presentments recorded in the court rolls demon­strate that married women could both expect to be awarded damages and to pay fines for criminal behaviour, independently of their husbands, reaffirming that coverture was not enforced in these presentments. For example, in 1341, it was presented that Efa wife of Carwed ap Moylagan had been beaten by Ma- dog Purkas, for which he was fined and she - without mention of her husband - was to receive 6d. in damages.^[282] Another presentment, from 1348, indicates that defendant Alice wife of Dafydd ap Hopkin, named alone, was to pay com­pensation to Alice daughter of Richard Agas, whom she had beaten.^[283] Similarly, a presentment from 1393 lists Angharad wife of Griffri le Werkmon as having assaulted and drawn blood from Gladys daughter of Ednyfed le Cook, for which Angharad, again cited alone, was to be fined.^[284] These examples, in which mar­ried women either were awarded damages or were fined independently of their husbands, demonstrate that marriage, as observed in Dyffryn Clwyd, neither removed all of a married women's rights to compensation nor shielded her from all legal liability. Instead, in making criminal presentments and awarding com­pensation for assaults, the courts treated married women overwhelmingly as independent victims or perpetrators.

There is little in the court records of presentments for assault that indicates un­married women and men were dealt with any differently, either from one another or from married women. However, it is noteworthy that assaults perpetrated by women, whether married or unmarried, differed from those perpetrated by men in so far as they tended not to involve weapons other than the women's hands or fists.^[285] Whereas presentments involving men, which represent close to half the examples from 1340-52 and well over half those examined from the 1390s, of­ten involved weapons, such as swords or staffs, or damage to physical property, including one case in which a man was said to have broken down a mill door.^[286] It is perhaps worth speculating, in the absence of evidence of wives perpetrating such significant property damage or considerable physical injury, how great a fine the lordship's courts might have issued a married woman, or even an adolescent daughter, before invoking the doctrine of coverture to ensure a husband's or fa­ther's assistance in paying that fine. Given the eagerness of the husbands of at least some �abducted' wives to assert claims to property in their wives' keeping, which was taken in conjunction with those abductions, the regular absence of husbands in the recording of criminal presentments and fines for assault, no doubt to be paid from the household purse, is conspicuous.

While the court rolls do not provide a clear indication why married women were treated as independent when they had been the perpetrators or victims of assaults, it is probable that the courts viewed married women as subject to direct legal oversight - beyond the competence of a husband - when they were involved in a crime. Civil or interpersonal suits might still fall within the realm of the hus­band, as the head of the family and legal representative of his wife, but criminal

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Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe presentments clearly fell within the realm of the lord of Dyffryn Clwyd, whose peace had been violated during the assault. As a subject of that lord, the married female perpetrator had to answer for her actions directly to the lord's legal repre­sentatives. Similarly, as a subject of the lord, the married female victim could look to the lord's courts for the protection and compensation that neither she nor her husband could obtain on their own.

Defamation

Cases of defamation in the Dyffryn Clwyd court rolls, from across the period 1294 to 1422, demonstrate a mixture of interpersonal and criminal legal aspects. In the early part of the fourteenth century, defamation was most commonly presented at court as an interpersonal suit. By the early fifteenth century defamation appeared less frequently in the secular courts of Dyffryn Clwyd, and when records of defa­mation do appear they were prosecuted as criminal presentments. Sandy Bardsley has demonstrated that this transition from interpersonal lawsuits to criminal pre­sentments in defamation litigation also occurred in English manorial courts after the Black Death, in parallel to which early fourteenth-century ecclesiastical courts increasingly prosecuted defamation, leading to its gradual removal from the secu­lar courts.^[287] Furthermore, Bardsley has argued that while men accounted for the majority of defendants in defamation cases in pre-plague manorial courts, women - both married and unmarried - were the most common defendants when defa­mation litigation shifted from secular to ecclesiastical courts. Bardsley states that this transition resulted from church authorities coming to view women's speech as increasingly problematic from the mid-fourteenth century onward.^[288]

In the courts of Dyffryn Clwyd, litigation for defamation, whether involving married women, unmarried women or men, is most commonly denoted by one or more of the following terms: vilificare (to abuse), litigare (to quarrel), dispersonare (to insult), and defamare (to defame). In those instances where an individual re­peatedly used abusive language against others, that individual appeared in the court rolls as a litigator (male, common quarreller), litigatrix (female, scold), obi- urgatrix (female, shrew), or garrulatrix (female, gossip).^[289] That three of these four common terms have feminine endings may be indicative of the perception that women's verbal abuse took more diverse forms than did men's. As the terms sug­gest, men who engaged in defamation were perceived to be quarrelsome. Women, however, were not only accused of quarrelsome behaviour, but also of rebuking or scolding others and simply talking too much. While the majority of litigation for defamation in Dyffryn Clwyd from the period 1294 to 1422 involved men as lone defendants or perpetrators, litigation involving married women likewise

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most commonly resulted in wives being held personally responsible for their ver­bal violence; married women appeared alone in 79 per cent (23 of 29) of their defamation cases (see Table 4.3). Married women thus stand out as independently liable in defamation cases, as only their names appear next to the fines indicated in the court rolls, suggesting that coverture did not protect married women who engaged in verbally abusive behaviour.

Table 4.3 Interpersonal Suits and Criminal Presentments for Defamation

Source: Dyffryn Clwyd Database; TNA, SC 2/215/64 to SC 2/221/11.

Of the twenty-three instances of defamation that list married women as acting without their husbands, nine indicate that the women had committed verbal abuse but the women are not specifically labelled �scolds' or �shrews'. In the other fourteen instances, the women are called either �scolds' or �shrews'. The earliest example of defamation involving a married woman in the calendared Dyffryn Clwyd materials, from 1307, states that Elen wife of Richard sutor, and Thomas pelliparius, had each slandered (maledixit) the other.^[290] Elen's husband was not himself fined in the case, and while both Elen and Thomas were fined and com­pelled to secure pledges for payment, Elen's husband was not her pledge. From the language used, it is unclear whether the litigation was begun as an interpersonal suit or as a criminal presentment, but it is significant that Elen's husband did not make an appearance on behalf of his wife. The first clear example of criminal pre­sentment for defamation involving a married woman found in the calendared Dyffryn Clwyd materials was recorded in 1311, when Christine wife of John le Tailor was convicted, by inquisition, of having defamed Henry le Messager.^[291] As in the case from 1307, the wife appeared without her husband. After 1341, the terms �scold' and �shrew' appeared increasingly in the court rolls, for example in the 1394 case of Efa wife of Gruffudd Fawr, who was described as �a common shrew and disturber of the peace [obiurgatrix et pacis perturbatrix] within... [Ruthin] town at times for a long time past'.^[292] This entry suggests that Efa's behaviour had been considered problematic for some time. The court roll entry suggests that she ap­peared on her own in court, and she alone was fined, with neither her husband nor another pledge for payment recorded. Further presentments also suggest the fining of persistent defamers who were, it would seem, beyond the control of their husbands. An entry from 1419 describes Emery wife of Richard Dogyn as �a com­mon scold [Iitigatrix] and gossip [garrilatrix] between neighbours [who] will not be corrected’.^[293] In 1420, Emery appeared in court again for abusing people of the town with �insulting words’.^[294] Emery’s husband did not appear either time his wife was called to court and, in both incidences, Emery alone seems to have been fined. Hence, as was the case with criminal presentments for assault, married women were usually treated as independently liable for their defamatory speech and any consequent fines; coverture did not play a significant role.

Regarding settlements, the majority of both defamation lawsuits and present­ments ended with a fine levied on the perpetrator of the verbal abuse. Many court roll entries also record damages awarded to the plaintiff or victim. While the re­cords of most litigation involving married women name the wives alone, followed by fines for their own actions, many such court roll entries also list male pledges for those fines. However, only two entries name a woman’s husband as either pay­ing the fine or acting as a pledge. In 1352, Henry Libyn was named as the pledge for his wife, who was fined after being presented as a �common scold’^[295] And, in 1359, Ieuan ap Ithel paid the fine for his wife Gladys, similarly presented as a �common scold’^[296] In just one instance in which a married woman was a victim of verbal abuse, in 1314, was a woman’s husband specified as the individual who should receive damages, rather than the woman herself, suggesting a strict ap­plication of coverture.^[297] In this case, an inquest jury presented that Richard Pecok was to receive damages for the defamation made against his wife by Emma la Walker. These three instances, in which husbands either paid - or pledged to se­cure payment of - their wives’ fines, or received damages for injuries sustained by their wives, were unusual among cases which came before the courts of Dyffryn Clwyd. Instead, married women were usually treated as individually liable in cases of defamation. For women like Emery wife of Richard Dogyn, who appeared in the courts twice in the space of a year and a half, and paid the fine herself each time, an inability or refusal to keep the peace verbally must have had a high per­sonal cost.

Unmarried women and men were also liable for their verbal abuses. While more men than unmarried women were fined as perpetrators of verbal abuse (Table 4.3), only two court roll entries name men as �common quarrellers’^[298] In contrast, while entries recording fines for unmarried women were fewer in num-

Married Women, Crime and the Courts in Wales ber than those citing men, unmarried women - like their married counterparts - were more commonly labelled as �scolds' or �shrews’, suggesting perceived per­sistent wrongdoing, in eleven of nineteen instances.^[299] Settlements in defamation cases involving unmarried women and male defendants, like those of married women, resulted in fines, and sometimes damages to be paid by the guilty party alone - without formal familial assistance.^[300]

Overall, the prosecution of defamation in Dyffryn Clwyd, whether involving married women, unmarried women or men as defendants, followed the same pat­terns identified by Bardsley. The number of defamation cases decreased over time, such that this study identified only seven cases (out of ninety, 1294-1422; Table 4.3) prosecuted in the fifty-two year period from 1370 to 1422, while a dispropor­tionate six of these seven post-1370 cases name married women as defendants. This latter statistic, in particular, correlates with Bardsley's argument that women's speech was increasingly viewed as problematic by late medieval authorities, lead­ing more women to be punished for that speech. Similarly, the evidence from Dyffryn Clwyd lists twenty-five �scolds' or �shrews' versus just two �common quar- rellers', with more than half of those �scolds' or �shrews' being married women. This again indicates that women were more likely to be penalized for outspoken or insulting language than were men. It is difficult to discern how tenants and local officials in the lordship reconciled the courts' increasing tendency to make pre­sentments and levy fines against married women for defamation, independently of their husbands, with prevailing concepts of coverture and male domestic au­thority. The cases against the wives of Henry Libyn and Ieuan ap Ithel discussed above, in which the husbands pledged for and paid their fines respectively, suggest that not all men in the community were comfortable with this. As was the case with the presentment of wives for assault, it is probable that the lordship's courts viewed married women as subject to their direct legal oversight where those women had broken the lord's peace, due at least in part to the husband's inability to manage his wife's activities.

Conclusions

Several conclusions regarding the position of married women in the late medieval Welsh March emerge from the evidence presented in this essay. Perhaps the most important of these conclusions is that coverture was applied in Dyffryn Clwyd only in certain situations. Married women were typically regarded as personally

liable in criminal presentments for assault and defamation in the lordship’s courts. Contrary to coverture, they were expected to pay the fines and damages set by the court in these cases, and could be called upon to find pledges to ensure that they did so. In only a few cases of assault or defamation were married women repre­sented by their husbands at court. For the purposes of criminal presentments, then, married women were treated much the same as their male and unmarried female counterparts. Coverture did not protect married women who had commit­ted physical or verbal wrongs in late medieval Dyffryn Clwyd from responsibility for paying the courts’ pecuniary judgments against them. But also coverture did not restrict the right of those married women who had been victims of physical or verbal crimes to bring such events to the attention of the courts, independently of their husbands.

In litigation for abduction and interpersonal suits for assault it was much more common for husbands to represent their wives at court. The records of such cases demonstrate that the concept of coverture was often applied in the courts of Dyffryn Clwyd when a crime had been committed against a married woman, but especially if it was to her husband’s material loss. In litigation for abduction, even in those instances where married women exhibited agency by choosing to leave their husbands, a husband still had the right to go to court to seek the return of - or compensation for - goods that had been taken when his wife had been abducted. Records of abduction involving unmarried women and men do not tend to describe the property taken with the victim. Thus, although any abducted man or woman was viewed as a victim from the perspective of the court, spouse or victim’s family, only the records of those cases involving mar­ried women focused closely on the issue of property. In interpersonal lawsuits for assault, where married women could be either plaintiffs or defendants, wives were most commonly accompanied at court by their husbands. In this type of litigation, husbands and wives were held jointly responsible for the behaviour, even if the wife had actually committed the assault, and husbands normally paid the fines and the damages to those individuals whom either they and their wives, or their wives alone, had injured.

The evidence from the courts of late medieval Dyffryn Clwyd indicates that coverture was observed in some legal cases but that the point at which coverture ceased to protect married women, or to restrict their independence, was when their actions were regarded as criminal. In criminal presentments, married wom­en were normally recorded alone, both as victims awarded compensation and as perpetrators who were issued fines and orders to make compensation, for which they alone were ultimately responsible. This distinctive treatment seems to arise from the premise that married women involved in civil suits were still under the jurisdiction of their husbands, who both represented them as plaintiffs and were responsible for them as defendants in court. In criminal presentments, however, it was the lord’s law that had been violated, and - as subjects of the lord - married women could expect both the lord’s protection and to be held personally liable for the consequences of their actions. In this way, the lord’s authority - as exercised by the courts - may have superseded that of the husband, as dictated by coverture, offering wives a certain type of legal equality with unmarried women and men in

criminal presentments. Therefore, in the process of resolving complaints of as­sault and defamation, which were sometimes prosecuted as interpersonal litiga­tion in the early fourteenth century but increasingly as presentments thereafter, the limits of coverture are highly visible.