PEASANT WOMEN, AGENCY AND STATUS IN MID­ THIRTEENTH- TO LATE FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND: SOME RECONSIDERATIONS

Miriam Muller

There are many things we will never know about Agnes de Schonedon. We will never be able to find out how old she was when she first started to appear in manorial court rolls in December 1276.

At first glance, Agnes might appear to be unusual, and, considering her promi­nent visibility in the court records in her own name, almost certainly not married.

The case of Agnes highlights the potential problems and difficulties inherent in the interpretation of court roll data, on the one hand, as well as those of impos­ing the preconceptions and assumptions of the historian on the past, on the other hand. Considering our knowledge of the legal implications of coverture, whereby the husband was ultimately legally responsible for his wife’s activities, economic and otherwise, it has been readily assumed that a woman appearing in court re­cords in her own name was not married. This, however, assumes that the concept of coverture can not only be used to understand the position of women in medi­eval society, but also that women’s position in peasant society can be extrapolated from common law and used to explain the private jurisdiction of the manor, as expressed in manorial custom and the manor court.

The historiography of peasant women, on the one hand, reflects the sometimes contradictory and complex evidence of the status of women and their ability to ex­ercise agency in the manorial court. On the other hand, it provides a looking-glass reflecting the debates and concerns regarding the status of women in the societies of the historians writing about them. While there is a general agreement that women and men were far from equal in medieval society, much as there is inequality be­tween the sexes today, explanations as to why such inequalities exist or existed de­pend partially upon one’s conception of the past as well as one’s conceptualization of the future. A Whiggish approach to history, which tends to see a general narrative of progress, will stress the important advances in gender equality over time.

Peasant Women, Agency and Status in England

The concept of greater equality among the labouring class has been criticized by some historians, such as Judith Bennett, who has attacked it as an �?appealing image of a golden age, the proponents of which look back longingly to a pre­industrial world, before the relentless advance of capitalism which, along with its various other associated evils, could also be blamed for sexual inequality.⁸ Instead, Bennett has argued that the status of women in medieval villages was severely restricted in ways not too dissimilar to those affecting rich women.⁹ In reacting against what she regards as various hues of the golden age theory, Bennett has also stressed, more recently, the continuities evident in the oppression of women and their inequality in relation to men.¹⁰

Despite such very valid criticisms of the concept of a golden age of working women in pre-industrial society, it has proven difficult to discard class completely. No matter how unequal the sexes may have been, an aristocratic woman would never have been perceived as subordinate to a peasant man.¹¹ Even those who have argued for a conceptualization of women as a separate estate in medieval society, like Shulamith Shahar, still acknowledge that socio-economic status was important in the understanding and categorization of women.¹²

Aside from considerations of class, most commentators have argued that the status of women in medieval peasant communities was also greatly, if not cru­cially, dependent upon their marital status.¹³ While it is generally accepted that widows and other single women had a great deal of autonomy in peasant com­munities, upon marriage or re-marriage such freedoms vanished, as the woman's independence and indeed her ability to act as an autonomous being in her own right largely came to an end due to her legal identity being subsumed under that of her husband.¹⁴ Shahar went so far as to argue that a married woman �?partially reverted to the status of minor with restricted legal rights’.¹⁵

H.

J. M. Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside (Oxford, 1987), pp. 4-5. For a critique of the prevailing acceptance of the deterioration in female status and the restrictions early capi­talism placed on women's work, see C. Middleton, �?Women's Labour and the Transition to Pre­industrial Capitalism, Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England, ed. L. Charles and L. Duffin (London, 1985), pp. 181-206.

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Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside, p. 6.

J. M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia, 2006), pp. 84-6. On this theme see also 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. I am very grateful to Matthew Stevens for sharing this article with me prior to publication.

E.g. see K. M. Phillips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270-1540 (Manchester, 2003), p. 12; Goldberg, Medieval England, p. 3.

S. Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages, rev. edn (London, 1996), p. 2. Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside, p. 28; R. M. Smith, �?Women's Property Rights under Customary Law: Some Developments in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 36 (1986), 180.

E.g. see P. Skinner, �?Gender and Poverty in the Medieval Community', Medieval Women in their Communities, ed. D. Watt (Cardiff, 1997), p. 204.

Shahar, The Fourth Estate, p. 92.

The concept generally used to explain this legal phenomenon, which is also invariably blamed for an alleged low visibility of women in various legal records, including the records of the manorial court, is that of coverture. Under medieval common law, married women were theoretically disadvantaged as they were �?de­prived of a separate legal capacity' from their husbands.¹⁶ The married woman was not able to enter contracts or loan money, as all her chattels ultimately be­longed to her husband, with whom she became, effectively, one person under his guardianship.¹⁷ And yet, the concept of coverture itself is beset with problems.

The problems associated with the concept of coverture originate partly from the understandable desire of the historian to categorize and compartmentalize human behaviour and the laws applying to such various human interactions. One of the key questions here concerns the applicability of the legal concept, namely to what extent common law can be applied in the context of the private jurisdiction of the manor and manorial custom. To what extent did lordship itself play a form­ative role in determining female status or circumscribing female agency? How did the two interrelate, if at all? Such considerations have potential wide-ranging consequences. Has our assumption of the applicability of coverture blinded us to the real active agency of married women in village society by making us see single women where there were in fact married women?

This essay therefore also strives to move away from assertions of rough and ready equality between male and female villagers, legal coverture or indeed Whig- gish notions of progress. Instead it is an attempt to position an analysis of female status within the specifics of feudal modes of production more broadly, while call­ing for an examination of gender and the status of women in medieval rural soci­ety in relation to particular local or regional factors.

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A. Musson, Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal Consciousness from Magna Carta to the Peasants’ Revolt (Manchester, 2001), p. 87

Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside, p. 28; C. Briggs, �?Empowered or Marginal­ised? Rural Women and Credit in Later Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century England, Continuity and Change 19 (2004), 21; F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I (Cambridge, 1898), p. 485.

E.g. see Bennett's comments regarding Hilton's discovery of female officers in the manorial court: Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside, p. 5.

Peasant Women, Agency and Status in England

Problematizing the Public/Private Dichotomy: Lordship, Tenure and Married Women

The concept of the public/private dichotomy has been used to explain and analyse sexual inequalities both today and in past societies. A now classic text, exploring the issues of public and private spheres, is Rosaldo and Lampheres Women, Cul­ture and Society (1974).^[308] In this collection of anthropological essays the authors explored the nature of gendered roles relating to the public and private spheres, and the nature of women and men as actors within their designated spheres. These roles were reflected in a division of labour between men and women, whereby women were predominantly associated with caring and domestic roles and men with political and public roles. The division between the public and private, it was argued, itself contributes to and re-enforces gender inequality. If superimposed upon medieval peasant society it appears that peasant women were trapped in gendered divisions between the public and private, a trap which was, especially for married women, re-enforced by the common law of coverture, whereby mar­ried women were denied autonomy.^[309]

It has often been pointed out that the manorial court, the most public, political and, from the lord's point of view, economic hub of village life, was in the public sphere and very much a male domain.^[310] The jurors were exclusively male, and local officialdom was usually exclusively in male hands. Women were therefore, if we take our records at face value, barred from occupying positions of local im­portance. They could not be reeves, haywards or any other manorial official who did a great deal of the direct governing of local village affairs as the intermediaries between the demands of lordship and the peasant community.

The tithing system was also in male hands. This was the official system of lo­cal policing whereby all young men in the village were sworn into a tithing upon reaching the age of twelve. It was the duty of the tithing to report and, if necessary, to bring to court offenders against local custom and law. This encompassed a wide range of issues, stretching from seigniorial customs relating to the running of the manor, the breaking of boundaries, or destruction (wilful or otherwise) of the lord's property, to offences concerning breaches of the peace, such as bloodshed, violent assault and theft.

Such official structures, maintained by the private jurisdiction of the manor, do not tell us the whole story though. We know that the local homage, that is the

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tenants bound to attend the court of a manor, usually with notions of custom and law quite separate from lord and state, imprinted their own agenda on local court proceedings.^[311] Similarly, court rolls occasionally allow one to glimpse the local le­gal pathways which women, whether married or not, inhabited with full responsi­bility. While women were not sworn into tithings, they certainly had a role to play in the tithing system. This was because it was also the responsibility of women to report any offences to the tithing, through, for example, the raising of the hue and cry, a formal communal self-policing mechanism in which women played a full part.^[312] Courts also occasionally ordered inquiries to be conducted to resolve disputes, either between tenants or between the lord and tenants. These were often initiated by one of the affected parties. One may assume that women, as well as men, were questioned regarding the rights and wrongs of particular matters, since women were also able to call for inquiries. Those constituting the official inquiry were always sworn men, but they came to their conclusions by interviewing and questioning villagers and neighbours of the opposing parties, listening to gossip and hearsay, as well as looking for legal precedents, lodged in collective or indi­vidual village memories or noted down in previous court rolls.

In considering the visibility of women in court records, it is also important to remember who manorial court records were written for and what they represent­ed. While local peasants actively used the courts to their own ends in a variety of ways, first and foremost the courts were there for the benefit of the lord. For every case of debt, trespass and assault which appeared in the manor court, the lord re­ceived amercements. And seigniorial incomes from manorial court proceedings, alongside other incomes from the tenantry, could represent a substantial propor­tion of the overall income from individual manors. At the Glastonbury manor of Badbury in Wiltshire, according to manorial accounts between 1301 and 1334, seigniorial income from the tenantry ranged from 35 per cent of all sources of in­come from the manor in 1314-15 to as much as 78 per cent in 1301-2. At the Ely manor of Brandon in Suffolk, fourteenth-century accounts reveal lower, but still substantial, incomes from the peasantry, ranging from 25 per cent to 36 per cent of the total seigniorial incomes from the manor's various assets.^[313]

The visibility of women in the court records is partly dependent on what type of manorial court is being considered, partly on their position vis-a-vis lordship and partly on other locally specific factors. These factors could include the style of individual lordship and patterns of local customs, or regional peculiarities, which

Peasant Women, Agency and Status in England

were also influenced by the local peasantry.^[314] Married women who had commit­ted an offence against other tenants were usually held responsible for that offence in their own right in manorial courts. However, cases which impinged directly on the rights of the lord, such as labour services, where the lord tended to hold the male head of the household responsible for the failings of his co-householders, tend to hide women. This is quite logical, as it was the legal tenant who had to satisfy the lord for any services and customs demanded from the household oc­cupying a peasant holding.

For this reason, female agency may be found more frequently in leet courts rath­er than halimot courts in manors where such clear delineations exist.^[315] In leet courts female agency can be quite prominent. This is because the legal remit of leet courts was considerably wider than that of the typical halimot court. At leet courts cases including assaults, thefts, break-ins and brawls were presented. In leet courts, or courts including leet-type business, women emerge as peacekeepers among brawl­ing men, and they can be found suing other women and men for incidents such as thefts, various types of trespasses, assaults and defamation. The halimot courts, less concerned with the fractious behaviour of the local peasantry, reflected the more administrative manorial business concerning landholding and seigniorial demands. Therefore, in the space of the halimot court, female visibility and, to some degree, agency were circumscribed due to tenurial structures which ensured that men were more likely than women to be tenants, especially where the dominant mode of in­heritance was male primogeniture.^{[316] [317] [318] To see the manorial court, the public forum of local regulation and the enforcement of custom and seigniorial demands, as part of a public/male sphere is therefore difficult.}

The application of analytical frameworks like the public/private dichotomy to medieval society assumes that the public and private spheres carried the same or very similar connotations then, as those in modern or capitalist society do now. This involves, rather crucially, the assumption that the public sphere, meaning the political, cultural and economically productive sphere, is located outside of the domestic sphere, and is one from which women were mainly disassociated, hence cementing gendered inequalities. This form of presentism is, however, very problematic.

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The nature of pre-capitalist peasant production was centred around the house­hold. Crucially different from capitalist society in which the domestic is primarily associated with the reproduction of the workforce, that is, bringing up the next generation of workers, in feudal villages the household was not merely the core of reproduction, but also represented the cornerstone of the lord-tenant relation­ship through which lords collected rents and services.²⁸ This relationship made the peasant household the centre of productivity as far as the lord, the peasant family and the local community were concerned.

This has consequences for our analysis of the position of peasant women, es­pecially married women, because the status of women was related both to the household's productive relationship to lordship and to production (and repro­duction) within the household itself. Because of the overlap between domestic and non-domestic production of a surplus, which was then forcibly extracted by lords, the concept of a dichotomized public-private sphere reflected in labour has only limited, if any, applicability.²⁹ In other words, due to the specific relations of production in feudal society, there was no clear division between the public and private spheres in the village, even if there were certain gendered associations at­tached to individual spaces such as fields or houses.³⁰

The people who were answerable to the lord for rendering various customary dues (for example, payments of rents in cash or kind), servile dues (such as in­voluntary labour services), and carrying services, were almost always the tenants of holdings, vetted and approved by the lord. As such, peasant households were answerable to the lord via the head of the household, the tenant, who was usu­ally, but not always, a man. This subordinated many women to their male head of household. However, in a similar way, the system also subordinated all other males residing in that household, such as sons, elderly retired relatives or servants, to the head of that household. Such subordinated men and women in a household similarly did not wield the authority of a tenant. The important relationship be­tween the household and the lord was therefore that between the lord and the ten­ant. Gender did play a role, particularly in the structures of inheritance customs which discriminated against women, but gender was not the only, and perhaps not even the main, factor. Therefore, in this particular relationship, it is not as men that communities of political influence were primarily forged, but as heads of households and tenants.

The nature of peasant production ensured that female labour, alongside male labour, was crucial both to the subsistence, and therefore the survival, of the household itself, and to the fulfilment of the various rent obligations to the lord.³¹

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See also C. Middleton, �?The Sexual Division of Labour in Feudal England, New Left Review 113­14 (1979), 1-9; and C. Middleton, �?Peasants, Patriarchy', esp. pp. 108-10.

Surplus, or surplus labour, is here understood in the Marxist sense, as what is forcibly extracted from the peasant holding by the lord. K. Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London, 1981), esp. pp. 925-7. See also Middleton, �?The Sexual Division, pp. 2, 4-5.

For gendered spaces see B. Hanawalt, �?Childrearing among the Lower Classes of Late Medieval England', Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (1977), 1-22.

Middleton, �?Peasants, Patriarchy, pp. 108-9.

Peasant Women, Agency and Status in England

This was the case both in free and unfree holdings, although in unfree holdings more was at stake for the lord as the rents due were higher and of much greater variety than those which fell on free holdings.

Some manorial customs implicitly recognized the integral role of female la­bour to the peasant holding. In the late thirteenth-century customs of the Glas­tonbury manors of Longbridge and Monkton Deverill, for example, virgaters (tenants holding about forty acres of land) had to render among other rents a �?churchscot’ to their lord. Three measures of this had to be brought to the hall of the lord, alternating between wheat one year and rye the next. This was to be rendered only if the tenant had �?a wife, [but] if he has none’ he was expected to pay only �?half the churchscot’.^[319] Other tenants, like Alvred the Miller, had to provide four chickens �?and if he has no wife he gives two chickens like his an­cestors’. The same principle held for women, in reverse. Hodeherne de la Srodd was told that �?if she has a husband’ she had to render four chickens, and if she had none, only two.^[320] Marriage was therefore recognized as a partnership which elevated the economic value of a peasant holding to which female labour was integral.

Occasionally individual cases in manorial court rolls also indicate an under­standing of the economic assets of the peasant holding to have belonged to both husband and wife. At the Norfolk manor of Heacham in 1280 the court ordered the distraint of half a quarter of barley from Ranulf Taliser and his wife in order to put them under pressure to appear before the next court, �?until they have come to answer Reginald Baker’ in his suit against them.^[321]

In assessing the ability of married women to exercise active agency, including resisting the demands of lordship, and to consider their status in the medieval village, it is important to appreciate the integral role female labour played on the peasant holding and to the lord’s income. The nature of female labour should be examined in order to assess the viability of a conceptualization of separate, gen­dered spheres, as an explanatory tool for female oppression. In order for the con­cept to be usefully applied it requires a degree of specialization of labour along gendered lines, alongside, as Middleton pointed out, a �?distinction between do­mestic and non-domestic labour’.^[322]

Ultimately, lords cared little about the sex of the tenant responsible for render­ing various dues and services, as long as they were duly delivered to a satisfac­tory standard. Manorial customs from the later thirteenth century onwards go to great lengths in detailing the nature of labour services and rents which could be demanded of tenants for particular holdings. These typically make it quite clear that there was no division of labour according to sex. At the manor of Laughton in Sussex in 1292, for example, Alice atte Hamme held a medium-sized holding con­taining a messuage, fourteen acres of land and some meadow. She was expected to

�?draw out dung with her cart', as well as to �?harrow with her horse for three days’. She was also expected to perform hoeing service for one day, together with one man, as well as to cart wood to the lord's hall. She could also be called on to carry hay and reap during the harvest for three days with one man, and to be fed by the lord for this service.³⁶ Four male tenants were recorded alongside her, holding land under identical conditions.

At the manor of Taunton, Hawis de Staplegrove held half a virgate of land in the later thirteenth century, and, alongside an annual cash rent of 5s., she was expected to perform various services including the heavy work of ploughing, namely �?one acre in winter and one acre in Lent’ She was also expected to sow, thresh and harrow those same acres. Additionally, if she was in possession of a full plough team, she was expected to �?plough for two days in Lent as plough­ing boonwork from morning until evening’ She was also called upon to har­row, to mow the meadow, to make hay, to �?reap and carry the corn, and to be a �?worker for one day every week of the year, except three at Christmas, Easter and Pentecost’³⁷

Customs never seem to have made allowances in the works demanded on the basis of sex, but they did make occasional allowances if the tenant was not mar­ried, again recognizing the economic value of peasant marriage. At the manor of Brandon in Suffolk a survey dating from 1251 set down that tenants described as �?toft tenants’ could be called upon to fulfil a long list of work obligations, which included the obligation to carry their lord, the bishop, if required, or the Sen­eschal if he visited the manor. Works included digging ditches, reaping, binding and stacking rye and wheat, and finding additional men to help out at the harvest boons. However, if the tenant was an unmarried widow, she only had to perform half the number of works demanded.³⁸

It is true that customs only tell us about works and dues which could theoreti­cally be demanded, and not all of these had to be rendered by each tenant every year. And it is feasible to assume that some tenants, both men and women, actu­ally hired others to perform some of these works. However, since female tenants were theoretically as liable to render such works as men, it would be wrong to assume that such customs were in practice never demanded of women, or that women never performed them, and we have no evidence to the contrary. This has led some historians to comment that divisions of labour, where they did ex­ist, were neither very advanced nor consistent, as it has been frequently observed that women appear to have participated in all manner of agricultural tasks, even if there is increasing evidence that women were paid less than men where they participated in waged labour.³⁹ However, some have still found it difficult to be-

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A. E. Wilson, ed., Custumals of the Manors of Laughton, Willingdon and Goring, Sussex Record Society, vol. 60 (1961), p. 11.

T. J. Hunt, ed., The Medieval Customs of the Manors of Taunton and Bradford on Tone, Somerset Record Society, vol. 66 (1962), pp. 65-6.

MS 485/489 Gonville & Caius fols 354-5.

Middleton, �?The Sexual Division’, esp. pp. 4-5; Hilton, �?Women in the Village’, p. 102; S. V. Smith, �?Women and Power in the Late Medieval Village: A Reconsideration, Womens History Review 16

Peasant Women, Agency and Status in England

lieve that women were actually capable of doing all these tasks. It has therefore occasionally been asserted that it is doubtful that women were actually asked to perform such backbreaking tasks as ploughing.⁴⁰

Most recently, in attempting to explain the lower wages women received for the same work as men, it has been argued that differences in pay may have been due to the lower productivity of female as against male labour.⁴¹ Such lower pro­ductivity could be explained by, so Hatcher contends, greater strength and physi­cal stature which �?are attributes possessed in greater abundance by men’.⁴² An­thropological research indicates, however, that the amount of difference between the physiques of men and women is at least in part culturally determined.⁴³ It is therefore problematic to extrapolate either divisions of labour or other gendered patterns of work from our own gendered culture, which, in discouraging physical activity in girls, while encouraging it in boys, may well contribute to women being generally physically weaker than men. It is certainly doubtful that the otherwise rather canny abbot of Glastonbury, with a shrewd eye on profit, would have made the mistake of hiring an unprofitable or slow worker when he hired Alienor la Gauntes to be one of his three full-time �?ploughmen’ in the manor of Longbridge Deverill in 1328.⁴⁴

Women’s economic activities in town and countryside were wide-ranging and typically encompassed various by-industries, such as brewing, baking or making malt.⁴⁵ Legislation recognized the breadth and the flexibility of female economic activities. The Statute of Labourers of 1351 forbade individuals from practising more than one craft, in order to help lock workers into individual contracts, in an attempt to stem the tide of socio-economic change resulting from the drastically changed land-labour ratio after the Black Death. However, an explicit exception was made for women. In 1363 it was announced that it was the �?intent of the king and his council’, while bearing in mind the decree that workers were to hold to merely �?one mystery, �?that women, that is to say, brewers, bakers, carders, spinners and workers as well of wool, as of Linen cloth, and of Silk, brawdsters and breakers

(2007), esp. 312-13. For female wages see S. Bardsley, �?Women’s Work Reconsidered: Gender and Wage Differentiation in Late Medieval England’, Past and Present 165 (1999), 3-29; Bennett, His­tory Matters, pp. 82-3.

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See, e.g., E. Power, Medieval Women (Cambridge, 1975), p. 71.

J. Hatcher, �?Debate: Women’s Work Reconsidered: Gender and Wage Differentiation in Late Me­dieval England’, Past and Present 173 (2001), 193. He was replying to the article by Bardsley, �?Women’s Work Reconsidered’.

⁴² Hatcher, �?Debate’, p. 193.

⁴³ A. Oakley, Sex, Gender and Society (London, 1972), pp. 27-8.

⁴⁴ Glastonbury Abbey Document at Longleat, hereafter GADL MS 8085 Skin no. 3v.

⁴⁵ This has been commented on quite frequently: see Power, Medieval Women, pp. 61-71; Hilton, �?Women in the Village’, pp. 102-5; H. Graham, �?“A Woman’s Work...”: Labour and Gender in the Late Medieval Countryside, Woman is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society c. 1200-1500, ed. P. J. P. Goldberg (Stroud, 1992), pp. 136-44; P. J. P. Goldberg, ed., Women in England c. 1275­1525 (Manchester, 1995), pp. 24-5; R. Goddard, �?Female Apprenticeship in the West Midlands in the Later Middle Ages’, Midlands History Zl (2002), esp. 168-70; M. K. McIntosh, Working Women in English Society, 1300-1620 (Cambridge, 2005) - her discussions are extensive: see esp. Parts II and III.

Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe of wool, and all other that do use and work all handy works, may freely use and work as they have done before without any impeachment, or being restrained by the Ordinance’.^[323]

Women still fell afoul of the Statute of Labourers, however, and while there is still lively debate regarding the remuneration of women vis-a-vis men, women did try to gain from the changed economic climate after the first arrival of the Black Death.^[324] Women can be found engaged in all sorts of works, some single, some married and some alongside their husbands. The Assize Rolls of Wiltshire deal­ing with offenders against the Statute of Labourers in 1349 often recorded mar­ried female offenders alongside their husbands. So, for example: �?Walter Cook of Thornhull (fine 2s.) and Agnes his wife, Thomas Averil of the same (fine 12d.) and Alice his wife, and John London of the same (fine 12d.) and Agnes his wife took excessively from divers men for reaping corn in the autumn last past.’^[325]

Such insights into female engagement in physical labour can be more difficult to locate in manor court records. As lords only held the head of the household re­sponsible for failings which impinged on his customary rights, including the perfor­mance of labour services, married women - as well as any other dependants in the household - under such circumstances are hidden from the view of the historian. In such cases it was often the husband who was held responsible for the failure to perform certain duties pertaining to the customary holding. However, this absence of their names from the records should not be taken to imply that their labour was not expected to be performed. Also, it does not make the agency of these women less important to the lord, or indeed her household; but it makes their agency wholly or partly invisible to us. This is an important distinction to make.

Women who were tenants in their own right were of course held responsible for failures to perform certain services. For example, Agnes Qualm of Walsham le Willows was, in 1390, accused of having withheld one and a half day’s work from the lord at harvest time.^[326] Rarely, however, do cases presented in the mano­rial court indicate that wives could at least sometimes be expected to work on the lord’s lands as part of a holding’s labour obligations. In 1353, John Spilman of Walsham le Willows was amerced 3d. �?because he withheld Christina Springold from reaping service in the autumn’. Despite their separate surnames, Christina and John were married. In the same court it had been presented previously that Christina had given birth to an illegitimate child by John, for which she had had to pay a childwyte of 32d. to the lord. The lord had further ordered John �?not to cohabit with Christina in the future, under penalty of 40s.’. Instead, the couple had decided to get married and Christina had paid a hefty marriage licence of 10s.^[327]

Peasant Women, Agency and Status in England

The fact that lords at least sometimes expected the wives of their male tenants to perform labour services further indicates that the fields of the manorial com­munity were not purely a male preserve. Women also occasionally refused to per­form labour services: in Walsham le Willows, in 1353, five out of ten individuals who were presented for labour refusals were women. Some women, like Alice Ga- lyon and Christina Lene, had been employed by the lord to work during the har­vest for cash wages but refused to do so, with Alice at least having gone to �?reap for other men' instead, thus breaking the law as set out in the Statute of Labourers.^[328]

If certain duties only fell on the head of the household, such as the annual payments of cash rents, a wife's ability to participate in the resistance to rendering those duties was limited to background support, away from the direct gaze of the lord and, at least in some cases, the manorial court. Therefore, while female mem­bers of the household might have actively participated, or colluded with others, in the withholding of rents, services or certain dues, it is often only the husband's agency which becomes visible to us through the court, which need not imply an absence of female agency.

Female Peasants in their Communities: Agency, the Manor Court and Locality

Under the private jurisdiction of manorial custom, which encompassed jurisdic­tional parameters over free as well as unfree individuals, common law rules often appear to have fallen by the wayside, and coverture - as a legal concept to explain or categorize the position of married women - becomes far less useful. A close, comparative investigation of the activities of peasant women in manorial commu­nities highlights some important local differences which can only be explained by different styles of lordship and regional socio-economic factors.

The manor of Longbridge Deverill in Wiltshire was held by the abbots of Glas­tonbury. The predominant tenure on the numerous Glastonbury manors was cus­tomary tenure, which was servile in nature. In the records of a single hundred court held at Longbridge Deverill in 1301 a total of fifty-six cases are recorded, reflecting various offences committed by individual tenants. In these cases, eleven women are mentioned as having been involved in offences in one way or another, representing nearly 20 per cent of the total number of presented cases.^[329] While the representation of women in these courts is thus less than that of men, it is sizeable enough for us to question the idea of the relative absence of women from such courts. At a halimot court of the same manor in 1301 the representation of women in court business is lower: of sixty-one presented cases only seven concerned a woman, representing just over 11 per cent of all cases.^[330] At the neighbouring Glas­tonbury manor of Monkton Deverill a similar picture emerges when, in a Halimot court in 1301, only about 4 per cent of those involved in court proceedings were

Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe female.^[331] By contrast, in a typical Monkton Deverill hundred-type court held in 1328, female involvement in the court was again higher, at 19 per cent, due to the wider range of jurisdictional issues encompassed by the court.^[332]

Differences were not only due to the type of business recorded in the courts. If we compare the relatively low direct visibility of women at such typical Glas­tonbury manor courts to female participation in the perhaps less conservative manor of Heacham in Norfolk, some interesting differences emerge. Here, in a typical court recorded in January 1278, a total of 38 per cent of presented cases involved women, including the purchase of marriage licences, a case of debt, cases of trespass, a case of broken contract, sales of land and a dispute over dower land.^[333] In the previous January, in 1277, the participation of women in the manor court had been even higher, at 40 per cent, while in a court held on 16 March 1280 female participation was lower, but still substantial, at 33 per cent.^[334] Heachams very detailed Leet court records added the names of brew­ers and bakers, which were predominantly female, but as the boundary beaters were also recorded, who were all men, female involvement in these courts is comparable to the �?other’ courts. In a Leet court held in September 1277, for example, 116 men are recorded, including fifty-one boundary beaters and five other officials, alongside forty-six women representing only 28 per cent of the total number of individuals appearing in this court.^[335] If, however, the essentially administrative lists of court officials and boundary beaters are taken out of the total, then female involvement in the remaining court affairs stands again at a very high level of 43 per cent of the total.

A key problem when examining manorial court roll evidence is the correct identification of female status. Following the logic of coverture, it has sometimes been assumed that named women without the adage of �?wife of’ to identify them as married must be understood as single.^[336] However, such assumptions cannot be made without serious risk of misidentifying the status of individuals.^[337] We have already met the brewer and money-lender Agnes de Schonedon from the Norfolk manor of Heacham, whose example illustrated the problem of identifying indi­vidual status by taking scribal habits at face value. Agnes’s example is by no means unusual.

Peasant Women, Agency and Status in England

At the manor of Brandon in Suffolk, held by the bishop of Ely, female brew­ers, for example, were presented in one of three ways in the fourteenth century. They were presented in their own name, they remained anonymous while only being noted by their marital status as �?the wife of' a man, or they were identi­fied by their first name and their marital status, such as �?Isabella, wife of Ranulf Smith’. The latter two options made it clear that the woman concerned was in fact married. However, there were also a number of instances in which women brewers were presented in their own right, under their own names, but where it is possible to establish through family reconstructions or otherwise that they were in fact married.

In 1353 Agnes Smith was presented as having broken the assize of ale, appar­ently as a single woman.^[338] But, in 1355, an �?Agnes wife of Robert le Smith’ was likewise presented, and the fact that this was the same Agnes as in the previous presentment can be confirmed by the pattern of the presentment of Robert Smith, her husband.^[339] Robert was a regular brewer, and was presented early in 1353 for breaking the assize of ale. In the following court Agnes Smith was presented for the same offence without mention of her marital status. The next year Robert Smith was again presented, while it was the turn of �?Agnes wife of Robert le Smith’ in 1355.^[340]

Family reconstruction reveals similar patterns in the records of the Glaston­bury Abbey manor of Longbridge Deverill in Wiltshire. For example, Alice Palm­er was married to Henry Palmer, who died and left her a widow at some point in the year 1332: Alice is noted as a widow of Henry le Palmer for the first time in November of that year.^[341] However, in December 1331, Alice Palmer had been recorded by her own name and amerced 12d. for breaking the assize of ale, while her still very much alive husband was amerced 3d. in the same court for having broken a boundary.^[342] And in August 1331 Henry le Palmer, instead of his wife, had been recorded for having broken the assize of ale and amerced 12d.^[343] In some instances it may indeed have been the case that the wife was recorded for brew­ing offences if her husband was not in court, as has been suggested by Helena Graham, but this does not account for cases where wives were recorded by their own names while their husbands were also in court.^[344] It may have been the case that such recording was considerably more ad hoc than we would like to believe.^[345]

Recording conventions appear to have been at least in part due to local custom, and some variation can be observed. At the manor of Badbury, also held by Glas-

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tonbury Abbey and located in Wiltshire, it seems that only unattached women were presented for breaking the assize of ale, and most of these were widows, in the fourteenth century. Thus, tracing the brewing activities of women over a number of years, it seems that they ceased to brew commercially upon marriage. In fact, their husbands had quite literally taken over the responsibility to the court for these brewing activities from their wives. So, for example, Edith Wynsom, who was the younger of two sisters at the manor, was presented for her brewing activi­ties in 1348. She then married and thereafter it was her husband's name which appeared in the court rolls for breaking the assize of ale.^{[346] [347]}

Problems of correctly identifying marital status can also be encountered when attempting to identify whether women recorded in court records were widows or not. At the Norfolk manor of Heacham in the later years of the thirteenth century, Matilda Herre was a widow, usually referred to in her own name. But she had previously been married to Adam Herre, as was noted in a case presented to the manor court in November 1277.70 Matilda Thorp was similarly a widow, and quite active in a number of different lawsuits in the manorial court rolls of Heacham throughout the 1270s, but she was only recorded once, in March of 1277, as �?Ma­tilda, widow of William de Thorp’.^[348] Therefore, the shorthand assumption of the applicability of coverture to the records of manorial court proceedings can lead to methodological problems, which in turn can mislead the historian concerning the true extent of female agency in the medieval village.

Women only rarely acted as pledges in the manorial court, but it is not at all clear why they sometimes did and mostly did not. Margery Puttock of Heacham must have possessed sufficient economic and social clout in the village to have been accepted to act as a pledge on at least two occasions. The first such occa­sion was in a land transaction, which involved both her and a tenant called God­frey Wydie, in April 1277; the second occasion was in a deal concerning the sale of land from Alex Holiday to Margery, when she acted as his pledge in January 1278.^[349] While the court's insistence on pledges in some cases was to the advantage of tenants, it should be stressed that it was usually the lord or his agents - rather than other tenants - who demanded the application of pledges to act as sure­ties for various amercements or licence payments to be rendered to the lord. In the case of the land transaction between Margery and Alex, Margery pledged as surety that Alex would pay 8d. he owed to the lord as a licence to allow him to sell the land in question to Margery. It is therefore difficult to assess why women acted as pledges so rarely, that is, whether the stimulus for keeping the pledging system mainly in male hands came from the lord, from the tenantry, or from both.

While a woman's access to and ability to affect any agency in court were cur­tailed under common law, such restrictions did not apply to manorial courts in the same way. Wives were often held accountable for their own actions in the court. In December of 1331, Christina, the wife of Henry Spylman, of the manor

Peasant Women, Agency and Status in England

of Monkton Deverill in Wiltshire, was amerced 6d. because she took a cow from the lord's pinfold.^[350] In the same court Robert Popedy was amerced 6d. because he trespassed in some unspecified way against the very same Christina Spylman, although in this instance her name appeared without the adage of �?wife of', who was then awarded damages of 5s. by the court.^[351] In other words, the injury of the trespass was perceived to have been committed against Christina, not against her husband or even against Christina with her husband, and damages were specifi­cally awarded to her alone.

A similar case can be found in the manor court rolls of Longbridge Deverill, the neighbouring village to Monkton Deverill under the same lordship of Glas­tonbury Abbey. Here, in 1329, John Horloc came to court and gave �?Alice wife of Stephen' 12d., again, �?for a trespass made against the same'.^[352] Once more, the dam­ages were awarded to the wife, not to the husband or to the wife with her husband, which one might expect had they been perceived by the court to constitute one legal entity.

I have argued elsewhere that women played an integral role in communal po­licing by, for example, raising the hue and cry against an offender, whereupon it was up to the tithing to investigate the matter. Accordingly, a hue and cry was always presented in court as having either been raised justly or unjustly against the alleged offender.^[353] At Longbridge Deverill, typically, such an entry would read: �?Christina wife of John le Man justly raised the hue against William Popedy..Th^[354] Christina took the initiative in this example and drew attention to whatever mis­demeanour William had been involved in. It was Christina's actions which were investigated as either justified or unjustified, and the fact that she was married seems to have been added to the entry to identify her rather than to draw atten­tion to any legal or extralegal dependence on her husband. Conversely, if the hue had been found to have been raised unjustly, as in the case of Alice, wife of Ste­phen Jurdon, who raised the hue against John Horlock of Longbridge Deverill in 1329, it was she who had raised the hue who was held responsible for �?the injury' done to �?the same John', and she was placed in mercy and amerced 3d.^[355]

Husbands and their wives could be held answerable together for certain wrongs done if they were both implicated in the offence. At Heacham, Joscelyn Rus and his wife Christina were together amerced 6d., �?because they directed in­sulting words against Elvina Christmass', before proceeding to make off with her manure.^[356] As both husband and wife insulted Elvina and carried off her manure, they were both held responsible for their actions, but only one amercement was entered. It is difficult to ascertain why this was. The typical amercement for single people for such offences was either 3d. or 6d. Therefore it is possible that

the court felt that they should either be amerced 3d. each or 6d. together, as one legal or economic unit. Alternatively, it is possible that the scribe simply did not wish to note down 3d. twice and, saving himself some time, merely entered 6d. Wives were also sometimes called to court to answer certain charges in their own right. This happened in June 1277 when the wife of Thomas Loellebulle, whose name was not recorded, was called to the court of Heacham for an unre­corded reason, and she refused to attend. Her default made her liable to pay an amercement of 6d.⁸0

Land represented the cornerstone of medieval village life. It cemented the vil­lagers' residence in the manor, rooted them within the village community and defined their relationship to lordship. Land determined, to a degree, a person's wealth or poverty, social status in the community and status as a tenant of the lord. The land determined the type of tenure the peasant enjoyed, whether it was free or of unfree status and required the rendering of survives and other servile dues. It is not surprising, therefore, that it is through an investigation of the relationship of women with land that some interesting patterns and regional variations emerge.

At the Wiltshire manor of Badbury an interesting custom can be found, which implicitly acknowledged propertied women. At this manor, upon marriage to a propertied bride, a husband often adopted her surname. Joan Jones, for instance, was a propertied widow when she married Richard Austin in 1358. Thereafter her new husband was referred to as Richard Jones.^{[357] [358] Thus, while at this manor hus­bands took over the legal responsibilities for their household's brewing activities, as we saw earlier, it was the landed status of wives which was acknowledged in the surname conventions of the manor. The implication is that the propertied bride had a high social status, in some cases higher than that of the husband, which was implicitly recognized in his change of surname. This also suggests that legal status should not always be equated automatically with social status.}

Apart from such local conventions, the nature of the local peasant land market and tenurial structure had the potential to impact significantly upon a woman's status and agency both in her community and vis-a-vis her lord. It is interesting, therefore, to compare the participation of women in the peasant land market at manors of different locations, lordships and varying socio-economic structures. At manors located in East Anglia very active land markets have been observed. The region was defined by a high degree of commercialization, high population density alongside rather fragmented holdings, and a sizeable free population.

A snapshot of the land market at the manor of Heacham, between Septem­ber 1276 and September 1280, confirms this picture of busy courts dominated by transfers of often only tiny pieces of land. Across this short period, no fewer than 263 land transfers were recorded at the manor, and, of those, 41 per cent involved women in some way. Women were active here in almost all aspects of land exchange, be it inheritance, gifts of land or surrenders to the lord - usually for the benefit of another tenant - and 25 per cent of purchases of land involved

Peasant Women, Agency and Status in England women. Women were also active litigants over land at the manor; no less than 76 per cent of presented cases of litigation over land involved women. Some of these disputes over land involved women attempting to reclaim dowers after the deaths of their husbands, but these concerned only 17 per cent of the disputes recorded in that period.^[359]

An important aspect of the widespread involvement of women in Heachams land market was joint tenure, whereby both husband and wife held their land jointly.^[360] The system bestowed considerable rights on married women, whose hus­bands were not allowed to alienate land - at least in theory - without their wives' approval. However, at Heacham wives also traded separately from their husbands in land, acting in their own name. In 1280, Alice, �?the wife of Radulf de Brecham', for example, went to the manor court seeking a licence from the lord to purchase some land together with a house from Radulf Carleton and his wife Christina. She was granted the licence by the lord for 6d.^[361]

Another interesting case involves a surrender of land by Myriel, who in 1278 surrendered one rood of land with a house to Luke, son of Reymond Lex. Moreo­ver, she explicitly rescinded all her right in the land which she had inherited after the death of her father Peter. In the following entry of the same court it is noted that �?the same Luke and Myriel' paid the lord 18d. �?for a licence to marry’.^[362] Quite in contrast to common law, Luke clearly would not have enjoyed an automatic right over Myriel's inheritance, and the land transfer looks like a pre-nuptial gift from Myriel to Luke. Similarly, in 1278 Alan Grile paid the lord 12d. for a licence to marry Elena Hot and to �?enter two and a half acres of land as a gift from Elena his wife’^[363] Strictly speaking, gifts between husband and wife were not valid under common law, according to Bracton, and such a gift should not have been neces­sary if the husband really did have automatic rights over his wife's real property.^[364]

In May 1280, Alice, the wife of Richard Hammond, was involved in a land dispute with Alex Chaunceler. Alice, so it was claimed, had been Alex's guardian until he reached maturity and was alleged to be in possession of charters leading to the deforcement of lands which, so Alex claimed, rightfully belonged to him. Alice replied to the court that she was �?not able to answer without Richard her husband’^[365] A number of months later the court took up the case again, this time asking Richard Hammond, Alice's husband, to defend himself against a charge by Alex Chaunceler that he had deforced Alex of half an acre of land for a total of sixteen years. Richard's reply was that the land came to him through his wife Alice, who was rightfully essoined from the court, �?and that he is not able nor al-

Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe lowed to answer without his wife’.^[366] The court accepted Richard's reply. We might sympathize with Alex’s frustration over the delaying tactics of his opponents, but it is also clear that it was acknowledged that Richard had no right to answer for his wife concerning the land, and that although she was married, she had been expected to attend the court and was essoined.^[367] It was similarly accepted that she was not able to answer without her husband, and, at least in theory, both parties would have to answer the case together.

Not every manor entertained such liberal policies regarding the land market or female involvement in it. In stark contrast to Heacham, the manors under the conservative lordship of Glastonbury Abbey saw very little activity in the land market and joint tenure was rare. This had a profound effect on the ability of women to actively participate in court proceedings and may well have impacted on their status in their communities. At Longbridge and Monkton Deverill the land market between 1276 and 1329 was decidedly flat with only thirty-six trans­fers of land recorded across the period. Women were involved in a very large proportion of these, that is, just over 52 per cent. But this figure becomes less impressive if the types of land transfers are looked at in more detail. There were no purchases, leases, exchanges or even disputes over land recorded at all, and 78 per cent of transfers of land concerned inheritance and widows taking over the holdings of their deceased husbands. At the Glastonbury manor of Badbury a similar picture emerges. Here only ninety transfers of land were recorded across the whole period between 1307 and 1403, over 83 per cent of which concerned whole tenements containing half a virgate of land or more, which usually moved straightforwardly from one tenant to the next, typically due to inheritance, sur­render for another’s benefit or sale. Due to the lord’s intolerance of sublets, they were virtually non-existent, with only one licit sublet recorded across the period.^[368] Women primarily surfaced in the land market in the absence of male heirs, when they took over their husband’s holdings upon his death.

In his hostility to inter-peasant land transfers and peasant subletting, the fourteenth-century abbot of Glastonbury also put his tenants under pressure to marry and to re-marry quickly when widowed. Widows have often been noted as active in the leasing market, as they were likely to be in a position where they might wish to shrink their arable acreages due to want of labour power, especially when younger children were as yet unable to contribute sufficiently to tilling the land, and yet unwilling to alienate their land permanently.^[369] Unless they could find informal ways to cohabit with others in a similar position, barred from sub­letting, widows and widowers would have had few options open to them for farm­ing larger acreages other than to re-marry so as to reconstitute a viable economic

Peasant Women, Agency and Status in England

unit. From the lord's point of view, the maintenance of large single-unit holdings was integral to the preservation of the rendering of labour services and other rents from these holdings. He wanted his tenements preserved in such a way as to avoid his rights over them being jeopardized.

This carefully exercised control over his assets impacted profoundly, therefore, on the ability of women, and to some degree men, to exercise full agency over the land they held from the Abbey. It also led to a policy, not seen for example at the manor of Heacham, whereby propertied women surrendered their land into the hands of the lord upon their marriage, who then proceeded to hand the land over to the woman's husband. For example, in 1328, Elena la Gauntes of Longbridge Deverill returned one messuage and one ferdell of land to the lord, and in the same entry it was noted that John Judon took it for the term of his life, and paid the lord a fine of 40s. for the land and to take Elena as his wife.^[370] In this way the previously propertied wife was effectively dispossessed.

It was not only in such indirect ways that lords could encourage marriage and re-marriage among their propertied tenants and exercise their control over land. Sometimes the abbot put tenants under direct pressure to marry. That this was not always welcome is shown in a rare example at Longbridge Deverill in 1329, where a tenant, Edward Skylk, paid the lord 40d. in order to have �?neither the lands of Matilda Uppehulle nor to have Matilda Uppehulle in marriage'.^[371]

Differences in styles of individual lordship were therefore important to the status of women in their communities, and access to land and the ability to par­ticipate in an open land market considerably widened the scope of female involve­ment in village affairs and participation in the public forum of the manorial court. However, it was not only style of lordship which affected such female public en­gagement. If we turn our attention back to manorial customs, there seems to be a correlation between the number of female tenants and the prominence of freehold at individual manors.

On all Glastonbury Abbey manors freehold was a rare luxury, and according to the thirteenth-century customs, so were tenements in female hands. By compari­son, if we examine manors with a sizeable proportion of freeholders, like the Suf­folk manor of Brandon held by the bishopric of Ely, the ancient demesne manor of Laughton in Sussex, or the archbishop of Canterbury's manor of Loventon, also in Sussex, a slightly different picture emerges (see Table 5.1). It seems to be the case that a greater degree of personal freedom fostered a larger number of female tenants holding land in their own right. The reality that female free tenants were completely absent from the selected Glastonbury manors, even if an element of free tenure was present, is interesting, but considering the very low numbers of free tenants involved (five at High Ham, two at Winterbourne, six at Damerham, four at Badbury, and four at East Pennard), the free tenantry was statistically in­significant. It is also striking that, at Brandon and Laughton at least, female ten­ants were still rarer among the unfree population than among the free population.

Table 5.1. Free and Unfree Tenants at Selected Manors, in the Later Thirteenth Century.

Sources: C. J. Elton ed., Rentalia et Customaria Michaelis de Ambresbury, 1235-1252 et Rogeri de Ford, 1252-1261, Somerset Record Society, vol. 5 (1891); Custumals of the Manors of Laughton, Sussex Record Society, pp. 1-22; B.C. Redwood and A.E. Wilson, eds, Custumals of the Sus­sex Manors of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sussex Record Society, vol. 57 (1958), pp. 16-20; Gonville and Caius, MS 485/489.

* Only two female tenants were recorded at Grittleton, one was a widow.

Again it is notable that an apparent relationship between freedom and a concomi­tant ability of women to effect agency in the local village sits uneasily with cov­erture. This is because, if we believe legal commentators of this period, coverture should have applied to free women, who therefore should have been less visible in court records than their unfree counterparts.^[372]

Some Conclusions

Female peasant status was complex and multifaceted, and dependent upon a number of interrelated factors. Styles of individual lordship could have profound effects on the ability of women to hold on to their land and thereby exercise agen­cy in their communities. Regional differences to do with factors such as the level of local commercialization and the proportion of personal freedom also seem to have affected the status of women, and require a great deal more investigation to help us understand these dynamics more fully.

In light of these complexities, concepts such as the public/private dichotomy or the legal concept of coverture are inadequate and unhelpful in our attempts to

Peasant Women, Agency and Status in England

explain gender relationships and female subordination to men in the medieval countryside. Instead, the question of female status needs to be explored within the context of the feudal mode of production. We need to try to understand the likes of women such as Agnes de Schonedon in their own contexts, in their own world, with respect to the restrictions and opportunities offered them by the peasant community, by lordship and by the way production was organized in the country­side. Thus, taking account of seigniorial demands and jurisdiction over the local tenantry, we need to be less wedded to our understanding of medieval common law and we need to try to understand gendered relationships within their specific local and manorial contexts, which in turn varied considerably across the country. To acknowledge that the nature of the subjection of women in medieval peasant society was different from that experienced in other societies, including capitalist society, does not imply that pre-industrial peasant women experienced a golden age. But it does mean that the structures underpinning oppression and inequali­ties change, and it is these structures which need to be understood.