CHAPTER II

Feudal Law and the Feudal Lady 1066–1660

Through the six hundred years that lie between the Norman Conquest and the Restoration of Charles II noble English ladies lived in a world governed by feudal law. As a conqueror William I could change ancient English practices of inheritance to suit the rules of law under which he and his followers had been born and bred. The rule of primogeniture aimed at preserving the integrity of an estate held of the king and thus enabling its holder to perform the service due from it to the crown. Daughters and younger sons were therefore dependent on their father’s bounty. Their portions caused many family quarrels. When sons failed the inheritance was divided among the daughters. It was regarded as ‘less than lawful and more than just’ when the earldom of Gloucester was carried intact by one of three sisters to her husband, John, brother of Richard I¹. The feudal world was essentially a masculine world. Its society was organized for war in which women were expected to take no part. In this lies the essential difference between the Anglo-Saxon and the Anglo-Norman outlook. Even in the eleventh century Englishmen preferred the arts of peace to those of war, whereas war had created the Norman state.

The large number of charters recording grants of land by women in the early feudal age might at first sight suggest that women still occupied in Anglo-Norman society much the place that they had held in Saxon days. It is, indeed, true that they could hold land in their own right. They could inherit it from their ancestors. They could sell it or give it in reward to their servants. They could give land to a religious house. They could plead and be impleaded for their land in the courts of law. Nevertheless, in a military society it was inevitable that those who could not fight should take a second place to those who fought. The superiority of men over women became part of the unchallengeable order of ideas. The influence of the Church, with its unquestioning acceptance of the Pauline view of women’s place, made in the same direction. The great ladies of the Anglo-Norman world had no public duties. They were summoned neither to the army nor to the king’s council. They could not be jurors¹ or judges. There seems to have been no legal basis for the idea of the perpetual guardianship of women², but the minor was in the guardianship of her father or lord and the wife in the guardianship of her husband. A woman generally passed from father or lord to husband long before she reached the age of twenty-one. Not until she became a widow was an heiress likely to be out of guardianship.

Again and again the legal records of the age use words or phrases implying the absolute subjection of the wife to her husband. She was ‘under the rod’ or ‘under the power’ of her husband. She ‘could not gainsay’ her husband even when he was selling land which she had inherited from her father. She could not plead in court without her husband. She could make no will without her husband’s consent. ‘It is adjudged’, said the justices who were hearing pleas at Northampton in 1202, ‘that since the wife in her husband’s lifetime has nothing of her own nor can she make any purchase with her own money, let Peter and Maud have their seisin of that land which Gerard, whose heir Maud is, bought with his own money’. The jurors had been so rash, or so foolish, as to say that they did not know whether Gerard bought the land at stake ‘with his own money or the money of his wife’³.

It is true that occasionally the wife’s subordination to her husband could turn to her advantage. The great lawyer, Henry of Bracton, who wrote an account of the practice of the royal courts of justice in the middle of the thirteenth century, was interested in a case he found in a roll compiled in 1226. A Yorkshire man and his wife had brought an action to recover land in their lord’s court. The first writ they brought seems to have been genuine, but another was needed and they forged it. When this writ was brought into court it was at once apparent that it had been forged, for the work was badly done. There was no particular reason for forging the writ, except to save a journey to Westminster to get it. The writ was a common form writ, issued as a matter of course, but it had to be fetched by the litigant himself. His unwillingness to take the journey cost him his life, for he was hanged for forging the king’s seal. ‘But his wife was freed, whether cognizant of the crime or not’, said Bracton, ‘because she was under the rod of her husband’¹.

Nevertheless, although law and custom put the wife under her husband’s power and gave her land, goods and money to him there are signs of an uneasy social conscience on this point. Many twelfth-century charters record the gift or sale of land which had come to the grantor by marriage. The purchaser of such land often gave the wife of the seller some personal gift, a ring or brooch, or a sum of money. The fact of the wife’s consent to a sale of land is often noted in the charter. The buyer was less concerned with abstract justice than with the possibility that his bargain might be questioned when the seller himself had died. It is significant that the judges, who at the end of the twelfth century were fashioning the common law, had given some thought to the position of the wife whose husband wished to sell her land. If a husband made a final concord before the king’s judges by which any of his wife’s land passed to another person she was examined separately as to whether she agreed to the terms and her name was included with her husband’s in the record of the transaction. The judges also made it possible for a woman in her widowhood to bring an action against the buyer and recover the land. She had to say that it was sold by her husband ‘whom in his lifetime she could not gainsay’. King John was even ready to allow a married woman to plead on her own behalf because she satisfied him that her husband, in collusion with the plaintiff, intended to lose her land by default. The clerk who recorded the case said that the king was ‘moved by pity’. It was not until 1285 that a woman was given statutory right to intervene in a plea when her husband deliberately defaulted so that she was in danger of losing her inheritance². This was seventy-five years after King John’s decision.

The question whether a married woman was allowed to make a valid will is of some interest in view of the medieval belief that to die without making a will was not only unwise, but positively sinful. A detailed description of the last illness and death of Archbishop Hubert Walter in 1205 has been preserved because he had been accused of this last crime, intestate death. The wills which could be made at this period did not touch land, as in Anglo-Saxon times, for all land was held of some lord to whom it reverted on the holder’s death without heirs. The heir to land should be known, for as one law writer says ‘only God can make an heir’. The heir could expect to receive his father’s land only after he had paid a sum of money to his lord called a relief. Men could make wills of their chattels, money, household goods, clothes, jewels, stock, and farm implements. Many of them were probably verbal wills made on the death-bed where the priest’s presence secured the fulfilment of the dying man’s will. Women must naturally have wished to enjoy the sense of security which the making of a will gave to the death-bed.

Few early wills survive, but incidental references show that great ladies were in the habit of making them. In 1184 the king’s justiciar authorized the payment of money from a husband’s estate to his widow’s executors in order that they might carry out her will¹. No one doubts, however, that a widow could make her will. It was felt in the twelfth century that a married woman should be able to make a valid will of such things as she had made her own by use, her jewels and clothes, and also of the share of her husband’s goods which would be hers on his death. A man’s goods were generally held to fall into three parts at his death, the wife’s part, the children’s part, and the dead’s part, that is, the share which was given to religious purposes for the good of the dead man’s soul. The Great Charter of 1215 recognized that it was for the Church to supervise the division of the dead man’s goods by his executors. Bracton declared that ‘for decency’s sake’² a woman should not make her will in her husband’s lifetime without his consent, but it is unlikely that a woman who felt herself on the point of death would not make at least a verbal disposition of her goods. Among the wills preserved at Lincoln is a will of a widow made in 1283. It is discussed in a later chapter³.

A number of early documents survive which show women near to death trying to provide for their souls’ health. ‘I, Avice daughter of Randulf the sheriff, with the spontaneous consent of Lettice my eldest daughter and of R. de Novo foro her husband and of their heirs, and of Mabel my second daughter and her heirs, and of Aubreye my third daughter and R. de Sancto Quintino her husband and their heirs, have given and granted to the church of St. Mary of Blyth and the monks serving God there William son of Geoffrey of Markham and his heirs and one bovate of land rendering 6 shillings yearly to the said monks, that bovate, namely, which this W. held of me, for the safety of my soul and the souls of all my predecessors, in perpetual alms, quietly, peaceably, and free from all secular service, in wood, in field, in pastures and in feedings and in all liberties belonging to the said land, saving the service of the lord king. And so I have assigned this alms for the refreshment of the monks on the anniversary of my burial so that through their intercession my spirit may be refreshed in the skies with celestial food and drink’¹. Randulf son of Ingleram had been sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in 1155 and Avice was his heir. She in turn was succeeded by three daughters, whose consent, with that of their husbands and heirs, she sought before making this provision. The husband of her second daughter, Mabel, was evidently dead before his mother-in-law came to make her final gifts for her soul’s health. This is not a will. Nothing is said of chattels, debts or executors. Its effect must have been to transfer the rent due from William son of Geoffrey of Markham to religious ends. The monks of Blyth must render the service due to the crown from this land, but the rent of 6 shillings a year was free for their refreshment on the anniversary of Avice’s funeral. She must have made her disposition before the end of the twelfth century.

A document similar in intention, but more carefully drawn and bearing a date, was issued by Amicia of Croft in Leicestershire. Her deed was addressed ‘to all seeing or hearing these letters’, and informed them that ‘with the consent and will of William Basset my son and heir, I have given and granted with my body and confirmed by this present charter, for the safety of my soul and of my children, and for the safety of the souls of my predecessors and successors to God and the church of blessed Mary of Eaton [Nuneaton, Warwickshire] and the nuns of the order of Fontévrault there serving God half my mill of Sapcote with all its appurtenances in pure and perpetual alms, save two shillings which ought to be paid to the church of Sapcote in tithes…. I will also that they have and hold the aforesaid half of the aforesaid mill freely and quietly and peaceably in pure and perpetual alms with all appurtenances and liberties of me and my heirs for ever. I will also that this my gift, which in my last and spontaneous will I have made at Sapcote on the Friday next before the Nativity of blessed Mary in the eighteenth year of the reign of King John, shall remain firm and stable for ever, so that if 1 shall ever make any other gift with my body it shall be held for nothing and as broken; and for the greater security I have set my seal to the present writing’¹. This grant, made on 8 September 1216, again lacks the characteristic signs of the last will. There are no executors appointed, no legacies indicated, nor does the grantor direct that her debts shall be paid. But she calls the document her ‘last and spontaneous will’. Gifts of this kind had long been recognized by the king’s court, which had ruled under Henry II that a gift made in a last will should stand if it were made with the heir’s consent².

Neither Avice, daughter of Randulf the sheriff, nor Amicia of Croft, mentioned her husband in her deed, and it may be presumed that they were both widows when the gifts were made. Later it would have been a matter of course for a widow making such a deed to say that she was living in her ‘free widowhood’. The common law defined precisely what both widows and widowers might expect from the possessions of their deceased partner. It was more generous to the husband than to the wife. If a wife had borne her husband a child and died before him, all the land which the couple had held during the marriage in right of the wife remained to her husband for his life. The custom by which he thus profited was known as ‘the courtesy of England’. Even if the child did not survive infancy the husband held ‘by the courtesy’ and excluded his wife’s heirs from the land. Most lawyers held that the child must have ‘given forth some voice or cry arguing life and natural humanity’ for the husband to enjoy his courtesy. An Elizabethan writer says that ‘if it bellowed, bleated, brayed, grunted, rored, or howled, there accrued no courtesie by getting such an uncivill urchin’. Many law suits came of this rule³.

A wife who survived her husband could expect to receive in dower a third part of her husband’s estate. Sometimes she was dowered with specific lands at the church door on her wedding day. In this case she could enter those lands immediately on her husband’s death. Such a settlement at the church door in the sight of the congregation was not, however, necessary to secure for the widow a third of all lands her husband had held at any time during the marriage. But if dower had not been formally assigned in this way the widow had to wait for her dower until she received it from her husband’s heir. Sometimes he was slow to give her dower and the widow could then bring an action in the royal courts to secure it. From an early date the king had himself provided a remedy in his own court for widows unable to obtain their dower¹. The widow’s ‘thirds’ as they came to be called were often a heavy burden on an estate out of which provision had also to be made for younger sons and daughters before what was left of the inheritance went to the eldest son. It was not unusual for an estate to be maintaining the widows of more than one generation at the same time.

The widow’s dower was accepted as a fixed charge throughout the feudal age. But the growing practice of making settlements at the time of marriage lessened the uncertainty which the traditional dower created. It became the law that dower was not due on lands held jointly by husband and wife. In the highest ranks of society the widow by the end of the Middle Ages usually talked of her jointure rather than her dower.² The elaborate and carefully drawn marriage settlements which secured the wife’s future made her no less desirable to a second husband than the simple ‘thirds’ of earlier generations. Widows were always eagerly sought in marriage. The provision made by their father which had helped to make them desirable to their first husbands had been increased by what their first marriage had earned them. In the days before the Great Charter the widows of the king’s tenants in chief were a source of considerable profit to him. He could extort money from them for permission to live unmarried or to marry a second or third husband of their own choice. He could give their marriage as a reward to one of his servants.

One of the greatest ladies in twelfth-century Anglo-Norman society was Hawisa, Countess of Aumale in her own right. Her marriage to the Earl of Essex at Pleshey, Essex, in 1180 was the great social event of the year, and was described in his chronicle by Ralf de Diceto, Dean of St. Paul’s. It seemed to him a presage of their future happiness that the wedding took place on the day of St. Felix, 14 January¹. The earl died at Rouen on 12 December 1189, leaving no heir. A lady in possession of the great Aumale inheritance in Normandy, the Aumale estates in England which included the greater part of Holderness, and a third of the lands of the earldom of Essex, was a rich prize. Richard I gave her in marriage to William de Forz of Oleron, a Poitevin, who was one of the commanders of his crusading fleet. Such a husband was far beneath the countess in rank and she was forced into compliance by the seizure and sale of the stock on her manors on behalf of the crown². A contemporary monastic chronicler, in recording this marriage, described Hawisa as ‘a woman almost a man to whom nothing masculine is lacking save virility’³. It may be that this great lady resented and was known to resent the subordinate position to which even the richest woman in her own right must submit. Her household was organized on almost royal lines. As early as 1181 she granted a large estate at Eastwell to Garendon Abbey, Leicestershire, by charter witnessed not only by a group of men, but also by the lady Aanor of Walden, Mabel de Oseville, Beatrice de Gueres, Avice, Beatrice de Berneres, and Maud of Hastings, who were clearly her maids in waiting⁴. Hawisa’s third and last husband, Baldwin de Béthune, died in October 1212. The king at once forced her to offer him 5,000 marks for ‘her inheritance and her dowers and that she be not distrained to marry’. She had paid £1,000 of this enormous sum before the end of the financial year⁵. Before she herself died on 11 March 1214 she confirmed her earlier gift to Garendon. She described herself in this charter as ‘established in liege power after the death of my lord Baldwin de Béthune and after I have made fine with the lord king touching my right and inheritance’. This charter, again, is witnessed by the men about her, two abbots, a chaplain, the sheriff, and three others and again the witness list concludes with the names of ladies: ‘Alice de Fountains, Richenda, and Clemency my maidens’⁶. No other lady of her age and rank speaks so clearly to us across the centuries.

Despite the new feudal subservience forced upon the greatest ladies of the land after the Norman Conquest it was still possible for individual women to make enough impression on their world for their names to be remembered. William I, Henry I, and Henry II each allowed his queen to act as regent in his absence. Henry I’s daughter, Matilda, wife and then widow of the Emperor Henry V of Germany, was married to the heir of Anjou by her father in the hope that she might secure the union of Normandy and Anjou as well as succeed to the throne of England. She came within measurable distance of winning the crown, and lost all chance of it because of her own proud and haughty temper. Like the wife of her rival, King Stephen, she herself took part in the struggles for power. It is clear that women could ride as well as men, plan campaigns, and direct the defences of a castle. In 1075 Emma, wife of the rebel Earl of Norfolk, was left in her husband’s castle of Norwich while he escaped oversea. She held the castle until she was given a safe-conduct to leave the country. Twenty years later the wife of the rebel Earl of Northumbria only surrendered Bamburgh Castle to William II because he threatened to blind her husband, whom he had captured. Nichola de la Haia, the wife of Gerard de Camville, Sheriff of Lincoln, had brought to her husband the hereditary office of constable of Lincoln Castle. With him she was besieged in Lincoln in 1191, and twenty-five years later, as a widow, she herself held the castle against the king’s rebels.

The greatest of all these ladies was Eleanor, duchess in her own right of Aquitaine, divorced wife of Louis VII of France and wife of Henry II. She had more influence on the course of history than any other great lady of her time. Her intrigue with Raymond of Antioch while she was on crusade with her first husband encouraged him to seek a divorce, for though she had brought Aquitaine to the crown of France she had borne no son to inherit the kingdom. The Church gave Louis VII a divorce on the grounds of consanguinity. Eleanor’s subsequent marriage to Henry, Duke of Normandy, carried Aquitaine to the English royal house and made inevitable the long history of war between France and England. To Henry II Eleanor bore son after son whom she supported in their rebellions against their father. Her husband could only control her by keeping her in prison. On his death she at once recovered her liberty and ‘set out holding her royal court from city to city and castle to castle as it pleased her. And having sent messengers through all the counties of England she commanded all captives to be released from captivity, since she knew from experience that captivity was grievous to man and that it was a joyous refreshment of the spirit to emerge from it’¹. Without doubt she had learned wisdom in captivity for until her deaths in 1204 she did much to secure her sons in their hereditary possessions.

In the twelfth century the king and his officers classed widows with the heirs and heiresses in the king’s wardship as profitable sources of wealth on which the king must be kept fully informed. In 1185 Henry II sent a company of judges round the land to enquire into ‘ladies, boys, and girls’ who should be in the king’s hands. Some part of the returns compiled before these judges has survived. The careful particularity which notes down the age of each widow and heir, the value of the holding and all information about it which might interest a prospective purchaser reflects a harsh age. There is nothing romantic about a society which produced such entries as the three following which relate to the Rutland ladies at the moment in the king’s hand and available for re-marriage:

‘Roheis de Bussey, who was the daughter of Baldwin fitz Gilbert, is in the gift of the lord king and is aged sixty. Her land in Essendine is worth £10 with this stock, namely three ploughs and a hundred sheep, but the sheep are lacking. She has two daughters as heirs. One is the wife of Hugh Wake and the other of John de Builli.

‘Alice de Bidun, sister of William Mauduit, is in the gift of the lord king, and is aged fifty. Her land in Morcott with appurtenances is worth £10 a year with one plough which is there. She has four daughters; the eldest Hugh of Glympton has through the gift of the lord king, the second Miles de Beauchamp, the third Richard de Beauchamp, the fourth Geoffrey son of Geoffrey. In addition to the rent she has taken from the land since her husband’s death 24 shillings in aid.

‘Alice de Beaufow, widow of Thomas de Beaufow, is in the gift of the lord king. She was the daughter of Waleran de Oiri and niece of Nigel son of Alexander. She is twenty and has one son as heir, who is two. Her land in Seaton is worth £5:6:8 with this stock, namely two ploughs, a hundred sheep, two draught animals, five sows, one boar, and four cows. In the first year in which the land has been in her hand she has received in rent 36 shillings and 10 pence and two pounds of pepper, and apart from the rent her tenants have given her 4 shillings and three loads of oats’¹.

Boys and girls who would inherit land were generally married as children, but the Church recognized that a marriage between two children below the age of consent might be broken when they were old enough to consummate the marriage. The age of consent for boys was held to be fourteen, and for girls, twelve². In Edward I’s reign it was established that a girl’s father could not take an aid from his tenants to help pay the expenses of her wedding until she was seven years old. Such financial help could only be taken for the marriage of an eldest daughter, and for her marriage it could be taken once only. This rule remained in force until feudal tenures were abolished in 1660 and even at the end of the feudal period it was not unusual for a girl to be married in her middle ’teens.

The roll of ladies, boys, and girls gives a glimpse of many twelfth-century families. A simple example is the family of La Veile. Roger, son of Richard La Veile, was six and was the heir of an estate at Erpingham, Norfolk, worth £50 a year. He was in the custody of his mother and ‘paternal uncles’. His mother was aged thirty and had two other sons and five daughters³. A more elaborate nexus of family relationship surrounded Eugenia Picot, daughter and co-heiress of Ralf Picot of Milton, Kent. She had married first William Malet, a household officer of King Henry II. In 1170 he died, leaving her dowered with lands in Cambridgeshire. She was then married to another royal servant, Thomas fitz Bernard, the king’s chief forester⁴, who died not long before the roll was made up in 1185. ‘She had three sons by Thomas fitz Bernard and one daughter; the eldest son is ten, the middle eight, and the third three’. The king had given Eugenia’s daughter, Maud, in marriage to the infant heir of John de Bidun, but in 1185 her husband was already dead, leaving her a widow of ten in the custody of her mother, who was holding her land. Eugenia’s eldest son was, at ten, already married to an heiress of five, who with her land, an Essex manor, was in the charge of her mother-in-law. Eugenia herself, twice married and twice widowed, was thirty. Her daughter Maud, already a widow in 1185, is known to have lived until 1255 when she died at the age of eighty¹.

It will be noticed how careful the Justices were to record the family to which these ladies belonged. When a man chose his wife he allied himself to her kindred. Sometimes when the lady was not daughter or sister of someone whom everybody knew the clerks were content to say, as they did of ‘the wife of Peter de Peleville’, that she ‘is born of knights’²; or, as they said of Mary, widow of Guy Lestrange, that ‘she is born of knights and barons’³. Mary herself was said to be forty and to have had three lords, that is, to have been married three times. ‘Her dowers and marriage portion lie in divers counties’. The unnamed wife of Peter de Peleville was said to be forty-six, which, if accurate, is remarkable, for she was said to have a son not yet a year old⁴. Peter had left an elder son aged twenty-four, who was a leper in the king’s wardship, and two marriageable daughters, one fourteen and the other five. Precision in the matter of ages was difficult to secure. Roheis de Bussey, whom the Rutland jurors thought was sixty, was described as only fifty in Lincolnshire. The jurors tried to be as precise as possible in recording the ages of the younger women, but they seem content to describe an elderly lady as fifty or sixty and an old lady as sixty or seventy or even eighty. It was of importance to the intending purchaser of a widow’s marriage to have some guide to the length of time for which he might expect to enjoy the lady’s dower from her former husbands. All the evidence goes to show that women in the twelfth century, if they escaped the perils of childhood and childbirth, could live as long as many women do today.

Many old ladies of the Middle Ages looked to religious houses to provide comfort for their latter days. An elaborate arrangement made by Maud de Mundeville survives to illustrate the sort of bargain which a great lady could make with a religious house of men. Maud was the daughter and heiress of Nigel de Mundeville and had been given in marriage to Rualon d’Avranches by Henry I⁵. She gave to St. Andrew’s Priory, Northampton, the village of Sywell with all its appurtenances, as well in wood as in plain, and the church, granting it to them absolutely, except for four virgates and a half which she gave with her daughter to the church of Elstow’. She stipulated also that ‘Hamo the chaplain shall have the church of Sywell and shall hold it freely and quietly. On such condition and agreement’, the record continues, ‘that when the lady Maud shall wish to come to the religious habit she shall receive the habit of religion in the same house, and she shall have with her one nun, whom she shall choose, and likewise four servants whom she shall choose. She and the lady whom she has with her shall have suitable food, namely they shall receive the food of two monks and their four servants the same as four of the prior’s household servants. If the lady she chooses shall die before her, in accordance with her judgment and will she shall have another with her whom she shall choose. If the lady Maud shall die first the monks shall grant her lady suitable food so long as they see that her life is worthy’. The monks promised that if any other lady should retire to their house she should not live in Maud’s lodgings contrary to her will. They also promised that if Maud should fall ill so that she could not come to the monastery ‘one of the brethren should go to her and do for her the service due to a sister’. With the consent of the prior and all the brethren Maud retained five marks a year from the village of Sywell for her own use to be paid in two annual instalments, stipulating that if the estate did not bring in five marks the monks ‘will make up the amount from their own table of St. Andrew’. Finally Maud granted to the priory the services which she had from two men, Gerard and William, providing that the men shall be free and quit by doing those services, as they had been in her own day. Maud’s son and heir, as the only loser by this transaction, confirmed his mother’s agreement in a formal deed dated ‘in this year of the incarnation, 1147, King Stephen reigning in England, in the times of Eugenius the Pope’¹.

The religious life or marriage were the only alternatives considered by a gentleman in the feudal age as provision for his daughters. If he wished to find husbands of their own rank for them he must provide each with an adequate marriage portion. Surviving legal instruments by which such settlements were secured show that fathers found this a heavy drain on their resources. Occasionally a great man was forced to marry a daughter to one of his own tenants, reducing the service which had previously been done by the tenant to himself². It was inevitable that fathers should look to nunneries for relief. At the beginning of the feudal age there were only nine fully established nunneries in England. The feudal baronage added many more to this number as the Middle Ages went on. There was a curious mixture of genuine religious fervour with a strong sense of the advantage of having a family nunnery in many of these foundations. The old Saxon houses, like Shaftesbury or Wilton, were more richly endowed than any of the post-Conquest nunneries, although a few houses, like Godstow, Oxfordshire, or Elstow, Bedfordshire, were better off than most of the other recent foundations. The nuns of Godstow earned the especial patronage of Henry II because they gave shelter to the corpse of his mistress, Fair Rosamund Clifford¹. At the end of the Middle Ages the richest house was Syon Abbey, founded in the fifteenth century near London, where the court could visit it by water.

Nunneries were in general small. At the time of the dissolution a considerable number had fewer than ten inmates. The fashionable Syon, which far outnumbered any other house, had only fifty-one. Although numbers had fallen in all English nunneries towards the end of their history, there is no evidence that they were ever high². After the monasteries had been long dissolved people looked back to them regretfully when they wondered how to educate and provide for their daughters³. The misery of a young girl placed in a nunnery because her father could not afford to buy her a husband had been long forgotten. Even now it must not be overstressed. Children, both boys and girls, often received part of their earliest education from nuns, so that the life of the cloister was familiar from early youth. Parents were glad to leave young children in the safe custody of nuns for weeks or even months together. Nuns were driven to accept the charge for purely financial reasons. Their endowments were often insufficient for the needs of the house, nor were nuns always good managers of their resources. It was little that the average nun could teach, beyond perhaps the alphabet and manners. Bishops disliked nuns taking children into their house, particularly as there was often nowhere but the nuns’ own chamber for them to sleep⁴.

It would be possible to collect from medieval wills and from charters granting land ‘in free marriage’ with a daughter the terms of many marriage settlements. In 1383 Sir William Fraunk, who held a number of Lincolnshire manors, provided that if his son died without issue his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, should be married to a gentleman who would take her father’s arms and receive his lands. His other daughters were to be made nuns in houses of good repute or married in accordance with their degree, the expenses of these operations being born by the estate. Each daughter who became a nun was to enjoy during her life forty shillings a year towards her maintenance and clothing¹. William Copuldike, of Harrington, Lincolnshire, willed in 1504 that his daughter Elizabeth should have a hundred marks for her marriage portion, but ‘if she be disposed to be a woman of religion I will she have twenty marks or more as it should be thought reasonable by the discretion of myne executors’. If Elizabeth died before marriage or became a nun her sister Cecily was to have fifty marks of the money which would have been Elizabeth’s marriage portion². It was cheaper to place a girl in a nunnery than to get her married, but there is little suggestion that parents often tried to force girls into religion against their will.

A case in which the plaintiff alleged that this had been done came before the king’s court of justice in 1207. A certain Alice Clement sued her sister’s son for a considerable estate in Wroxton and South Newington, Oxfordshire, which she asserted was her own share of her father’s inheritance. Her nephew and his father, Alice’s brother-in-law, replied that Alice had no right to the land because she was a nun and had been excommunicated for leaving her nunnery of Ankerwyke after being a nun there for fifteen years. They even produced letters of excommunication issued by the judges appointed to hear the case by the Pope, and letters from two Popes confirming her excommunication. Alice replied that these documents should not dispose of her claim because when she was five years old her sister’s husband and her sister herself placed her with the nuns of Ankerwyke ‘and she was there three years. Then, as she was taught, she asked to be made a nun, but afterwards, when she came to years of discretion, she abandoned the habit’. She married Alan of Woodcote and appealed to Pope Innocent III, who appointed judges delegate to try the case. They ‘absolved her from the petition of the nuns of Ankerwyke’ by the authority of the Pope, who confirmed their action by his letters. The end of the action is not recorded, for King John summoned it to be heard before himself³. But that Alice was enabled to secure at least a portion of her inheritance is shown by the final concord made between her and her nephew in 1224¹.

Occasionally cases heard before the king’s judges seem to suggest that women were indifferent as to whether they entered a nunnery or married, provided they did one or the other. At York in 1219 the jurors found it hard to say whether a man had been dispossessed ‘unjustly and without judgment’ of a free tenement in the city because the land in question was the inheritance of a certain Agnes who gave it to him on condition that he either found her a good husband within three years or put her in some religious house. If he did this he should keep the land, but if not it should return to Agnes. She lived in his house for three years and more and he neither arranged a marriage for her nor put her into religion. After she had lived there for fully fifteen years she returned to her own land². Since the property lay in York it seems very likely that Agnes was the daughter of a York citizen, who might well have been content from the social point of view for his daughter to mingle with the daughters of the feudal aristocracy in a religious house. In the early years of the thirteenth century it might not have been so easy to put a citizen’s daughter into a nunnery or marry her into a county family as it would have been at the end of the Middle Ages.

In an age when child marriage was part of the accepted social habit the personal choice of the child partners could hardly be consulted. The marriage of an heiress was felt to be the lord’s concern since he must needs take the homage of her husband. No lord should be asked to take the homage ‘of an enemy or of a person unsuitable in some other way’³. One of the judicial scandals of the twelfth century was made possible because of this rule that the lord’s consent was required for the marriage of an heiress. A contemporary Yorkshire chronicler preserved the story of the young Yorkshireman, Gilbert of Plumpton, whom he describes as ‘of noble stock’. In 1184 Gilbert was deprived of his land and taken to Worcester where he was condemned to death because he had carried off and married an heiress in the king’s wardship whom the Chief Justiciar had intended to give in marriage to his own steward. Gilbert was saved from death on the gallows at the last moment by the intervention of the Bishop of Worcester encouraged by ‘a great crowd of men and women crying out that Gilbert was a just man and the innocent ought not to suffer these things’. The matter came to the king’s ears and Gilbert was reprieved, but he was imprisoned until after Henry II’s death in 1189, for he had broken feudal law and accepted custom by marrying one of the king’s wards without permission¹. The story ended happily, for Gilbert’s brother purchased from Richard I both his brother’s freedom and permission for him to have his wife again with the land².

The outcry against the treatment of Gilbert of Plumpton and the bishop’s success in preventing his judicial murder suggests that such scandals were unusual. But it is rare to find evidence in this age that anything which can be called romance went with the hard practical business of making a marriage contract. Between the greedy desire of lords and parents to make marriage a means of increasing an estate in land and the prurient attitude of the medieval Church towards love between man and woman romance had little chance. The law of marriage all over medieval Europe was the law of the Roman Church, not the law of any individual state. The unnatural admiration of virginity professed by medieval ecclesiastics had very ill effects. To represent marriage as valuable only as a means of avoiding sin for those too weak to remain virgin inevitably lowered the esteem of the married state. The failure of the Church to declare that only public marriage in the face of the congregation by an ordained priest was lawful marriage meant the encouragement of secret marriages. Although the practice of publishing the banns of marriage was laid down by the Church at the end of the twelfth century and gave opportunity for the exposure of any previous engagement by either party, secret marriages were still lawful, and were still made. Moreover, the Church’s rules on the subject of consanguinity were a frequent cause of stumbling, partly because of their grotesque elaboration and partly because the Church insisted that the physical union of a man and woman, irrespective of any ceremony, created a blood relationship. ‘When we weigh’, wrote F. W. Maitland, ‘the merits of the medieval Church and have remembered all her good deeds, we have to put into the other scale as a weighty counterpoise the incalculable harm done by a marriage law which was a maze of flighty fancies and misapplied logic’³. It is a testimony to the essential sanity of the medieval English people that respect for honest marriage was not killed before the end of the Middle Ages.

Broken marriages are by no means a modern phenomenon. It is indeed possible that they were more frequent in an age of child marriages than in modern times. A noble lady, whose name appears only as M., appealed for help to Pope Alexander III in the ’seventies of the twelfth century. She belonged to the Lincoln diocese. Her story was that when she was a little girl she was given in marriage to R., who was a knight, but she remained in her parents’ home. After three or four years the relations of both parties began to say that the marriage ought to be dissolved for consanguinity. Disturbed by this her husband fetched her by force from her parents’ home and kept her like a prisoner for three years. Then she escaped back to her own home. She was now pregnant. Her relatives brought a plea touching the validity of the marriage in the court of the Bishop of Lincoln. The husband appealed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, as papal legate, asking for the restitution of his wife. The archbishop enjoined that the husband should provide for his wife who should be put in some nunnery or other suitable place for the birth of her child. The husband would not agree, but with drawn sword pursued his wife into the church of St. Margaret, Lincoln, where she had taken refuge and forced her to agree to settle their differences by the advice of two men chosen by him and two by her, rather than pursue the plea in the ecclesiastical court. The Pope instructed the Bishop of St. Asaph to enquire carefully into the truth of the story. If the husband had thus forced his wife to agree to abide by the judgment of four friends, she should be absolved from her promise. The case of consanguinity should then be heard and settled. Since the woman seemed to be afraid of her husband, the bishop should prevent the husband seeking out his wife before the case was heard¹. The end of the story is not preserved.

It was not difficult to get a marriage annulled in the Middle Ages, if the expense of going to the Church courts could be met². Precontract was frequently alleged as a reason for divorce. Nor was it difficult to find that a marriage between people of position was within the prohibited degrees if one of the parties wished to bring it to an end. The marriages of William de Roumara, grandson of the first Earl of Lincoln, were considered by Pope Celestine III in 1191–2. William married first a lady called Alice, whose parentage is unknown. This marriage was annulled for consanguinity, and William married Philippa, daughter of the Count of Alençon. The case came before the Pope because William secretly confessed to the Bishop of Lincoln that his conscience pricked him because, at the suggestion of his first wife, he had allowed the marriage to be dissolved on the grounds of kinship although he knew that there was no such tie of blood between them. The Pope declared that, although William was troubled in mind, he must not desert his second wife. The bishop must impose penance on him for agreeing to the separation against his conscience, and as an additional penalty William must not deny conjugal rights to his second wife, but must regard himself as having lost the right to demand them of her¹.

Despite the efforts of the Church to uphold the sanctity of marriage and punish adultery it was common for men to maintain mistresses. In the twelfth century the kings set a bad example. Both Henry I and Henry II had more mistresses than one and Henry I recognized an amazing number of illegitimate children. Like Charles II in a later generation he had no scruples about raising them to high position in the land. Two of his sons were created earls and the rest were well provided for². One of the daughters married the King of Scots and one became an abbess. To have been the mistress of Henry I was no impediment to a good marriage. Sybil Corbet, mother of the Queen of Scots and the Earl of Cornwall, married the son and heir of the king’s chamberlain. Isabella, daughter of the Count of Meulan, married the first Earl of Pembroke. Edith, daughter of the Lord of Greystoke, Cumberland, married Robert d’Oilli, one of the king’s constables and a leading tenant in chief in Oxfordshire. Pride in illegitimate royal birth reaches its height when Geoffrey, Archbishop of York, bastard son of Henry II, called himself ‘son of the king’ upon his archiepiscopal seal³.

Chance has preserved evidence of the care of several medieval barons for their mistresses or the children they had borne them. Thomas son of Richard, lord of Cuckney, Nottinghamshire, when about to set out on crusade in the middle of the twelfth century gave ‘to Ailiva and her younger daughter by me the land of her father which he held for the service of one bovate, and Reginald, her own brother, with his land which he also held for the service of one bovate’. Ailiva was to hold this gift of the Hospital of Jerusalem by the rent of 12 pence a year until Thomas’s return from the Holy Land, and if he did not return she was to hold it for ever by the rent of 2 shillings for the grantor’s soul and the souls of his father and mother¹. A Norman lord can here be seen providing for his English mistress and their children by the gift of her father’s villein land and her own brother with his holding. Later in the century Amalric son of Ralf, in one of the earliest known post-Conquest wills, left ten marks of silver to his children born of a mistress. Henry II confirmed his will in 1180². In the middle of the thirteenth century Philip son of Roger Pantulf gave to Denise of Warwick and the children begotten by himself on her ‘three half virgates of land in Long Lawford, Warwickshire, with the men sitting on that land and all their issue and all their chattels’. Denise and her children were to hold by the rent of a pair of white gloves worth a halfpenny or one halfpenny at Easter³.

No case reveals more clearly the medieval baron’s attitude to marriage than one which came before the court of Edward I in 1302. William Painel and Margaret his wife claimed Margaret’s dower from the heir of her former husband John de Camoys. Less than twenty years before, Parliament had laid down that a woman who eloped from her husband and stayed with her adulterer should have no dower unless her husband was reconciled with her⁴. To William Painel’s claim it was therefore objected that Margaret had eloped with him. In reply William and Margaret produced a solemn charter by which John de Camoys quitclaimed to William Painel Margaret his wife with all her goods and chattels. John de Camoys had died in 1298 and William Painel had thereafter married Margaret. William and Margaret also produced in court certificates from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Chichester bearing witness that the couple had been charged with adultery in Court Christian and had proved their innocence by compurgation. Margaret’s oath-helpers had been a number of ladies, married and unmarried, among them a prioress. William and Margaret also offered to put themselves on a jury as to whether they had committed adultery or not. Maitland printed in full in his History of English Law the judgment of the king’s court delivered in this case. The measured dignity with which the judges set aside the plaintiffs’ claim rebukes alike the greedy and shameless plaintiffs and the incompetent archaism of the ecclesiastical courts¹.

A marriage which was probably arranged by the woman herself under unusual circumstances lies behind the otherwise commonplace record of a grant of land to Leicester Abbey in the early thirteenth century. Wigan de la Mara confirmed to the abbey ‘for the safety of my soul and the soul of Maud Trussel my wife and the souls of all our ancestors and successors, in pure, free, and perpetual alms, one carucate of land in the village of Theddingworth, which the aforesaid Maud gave me for my homage and service when I deraigned her inheritance for her by the duel’². The plea to which this charter refers was brought against Maud Trussel by two men and two women for a knight’s fee in Theddingworth. It was ended in 1201 by a final concord which gave the knight’s fee to Maud Trussel after the judicial duel had been ‘pledged, armed and fought’³. These two documents are of special interest as the only known evidence for the marriage of a woman of rank to a man of rank who had acted as her champion in a trial by battle.

The power of kings and other lords to arrange the marriages of women in their gift was limited by a social convention that neither a man nor a woman should thus be given to a partner of lower rank. Such a marriage was regarded as ‘disparagement’. Like all conventions of this kind it was often broken in practice. Its breach was one of the grievances for which the barons tried to get a remedy in the Great Charter in 1215. They demanded that heirs shall be so married that they shall not be disparaged, and that by the counsel of their next of kin⁴. When at last the king was brought to grant the Charter he conceded that ‘heirs shall be married without disparagement, so that before the marriage is contracted the heir’s next of kin shall be informed’⁵. The slight change in wording between the barons’ demand and the king’s concession shows that not all the barons had hoped for had been won. But at least they had secured a general promise that heirs in the king’s wardship shall not in future be disparaged. They had also pledged themselves to the same concession in regard to the marriages of heirs who held land of them.

The king’s control over the heirs and heiresses of his tenants in chief continued until feudal tenures were swept away in 1660. They were then an anachronism. In Tudor times the court of wards had been established to ensure that the crown made full profit from its care of young heirs and heiresses and its right to arrange their marriages. In these last generations of feudalism the king’s right to the wardship and marriage of heirs was a cause of anxiety to parents, as the will of Sir Simonds D’Ewes of Stow Langtoft, Suffolk, bears witness. Sir Simonds was one of that eminent company of antiquaries who illumine the seventeenth century. He made his will in 1639 and in it entreated and desired his beloved wife ‘that she would purchase of the King or his officers the wardship of our children, whether I leave a male or female heir at the time of my decease under age, which, that it may be compassed without borrowing upon usury, let money be raised by the sale of my household-stuff and goods, … or else let some farms be let out for some terms of years, for a fine paid down and a small rent reserved; so that she buy the said wardship to the only use and benefit of our heirs successively, one after another, and that she take especial care to provide for their security before she enter into treaty for her second marriage’¹.

Widows were more fortunate than children in 1215. The king then promised that the widow on her husband’s death ‘shall immediately and without difficulty have her marriage portion and her inheritance, nor shall she give anything for her dower or her marriage portion or her inheritance which she and her husband held on the day of his death, and let her remain in her husband’s house forty days after his death, within which let her dower be assigned to her’². This was an important promise which carried with it the admission that the land the wife had brought to her husband remained her right, a right that was in no wise broken by the fact that her husband had held that land as his own during their marriage. In 1215 the king was forced into agreeing that widows should no longer fall completely into the king’s power on their husbands’ death. ‘No widow’, the king promised, ‘shall be distrained to marry while she wishes to live without a husband, provided that she will give security that she will not marry without our consent, if she holds of us, or without the assent of the lord of whom she holds, if she holds of another’¹. These promises mark a tentative beginning of the emancipation of English women from the legal subservience which had followed the Norman conquest.

Ladies who had purchased freedom to live as widows from King John and ladies whom he had sold to a second or third husband must wryly have said that the king’s charter had come too late for them. As recently as 1214 he had married off his own first wife, whose marriage to him had been annulled in 1200, to the young Earl of Essex in return for the promise of a large sum of money which the earl did not live to pay². It was left, a burden on his estate, to be settled in time by his successors. The earl was killed in a tournament in 1216 and his widow and her lands were put into the custody of Hubert de Burgh, the Justiciar, who promptly married her himself, though seemingly the marriage was secret. The countess died shortly afterwards. Even after the issue of the charter in 1215, the king could not refrain from disposing of a young widow as a reward to the mercenary captain, Faukes de Breauté. Margaret, daughter and coheiress of Warin fitz Gerold, the king’s chamberlain, had been married as a child to Baldwin the heir of the Earl of Devon. Baldwin died before his father on I September 1216, when he was certainly no more than sixteen and may have been less. Margaret had borne him a son, who in due course became Earl of Devon³. She bitterly resented her forced marriage to Faukes de Breauté, and when he rebelled and was exiled in 1224 she obtained an annulment of the marriage from the Pope. She survived, a widow, until 1252. In recording her death in that year Matthew Paris took the opportunity of preserving a verse made on the marriage:

‘Law joined them, love and the concord of the bed.

But what sort of law? What sort of Love? What sort of concord?

Law which was no law. Love which was hate. Concord which was discord’⁴.

The records of the first half of the thirteenth century do not suggest that many noble widows at once took advantage of the king’s promise that they could live unmarried if they so wished. To control a great inheritance consisting of estates which might be scattered over many shires was not easy. Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, wrote a little tract on the way to manage a great estate for the benefit of a noble widow, Margaret, Countess of Lincoln, whose first husband, John de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, died on 22 July 1240¹. He advised her to begin by finding out exactly what lands of hers were let and the terms of the leases. She should find out the exact acreage of all her manors and whether they were adequately stocked. At harvest great care must be exercised over loading and storing the corn and deciding what must be kept for bread and beer through the year and what, if any, can be sold. The lady herself must keep control of her granges. She must at Michaelmas plan out her year’s movements, so that she could live economically on the produce of her estates, but not impoverish any manor by staying in it too long. Those things which must be bought, such as wine, wax, and clothes, could be best bought at the fairs; for the manors in the eastern counties, Boston fair; for the Winchester lands, Southampton fair, and for the west country estates, Bristol fair; for cloth, St. Ives was best. The lady must control her household servants, make them courteous to her guests, clean and tidy in her presence, and well behaved at meals. She should herself see to the disposal of the food given in alms. The lady should sit in the middle of the high table where she can best keep watch on the service of both food and drink. She should aim at inspiring fear and reverence in her household. It is perhaps not surprising that the countess did not long remain a widow, bearing alone this burden of responsibility. Before April 1242 she had married the Earl of Pembroke, who died in 1245. Before June 1252 she had married a certain Richard of Wiltshire as her third husband. She died during March 1266².

If a great lady wished to live unmarried in the first half of the thirteenth century she either took the veil and entered a nunnery or became an anchoress, retiring completely from the world. The most famous anchoress of the thirteenth century was Loretta, widow of the Earl of Leicester, who died in 1204. Loretta was one of the three daughters of William de Braiose, lord of the honour of Bramber in Sussex and of an important lordship on the Welsh marches. Her father, after being one of King John’s intimate friends and counsellors, fell into disgrace and at last died in exile. Her mother and elder brother disappeared under mysterious circumstances in one of the royal castles where they were imprisoned. At the end of 1207 Loretta made an agreement with the king that she would neither marry nor enter the religious life for a year from St. Andrew’s day, 30 November. Later she seems to have fled from England for her lands were in the king’s hands. Her sister Margaret probably also fled to France with her husband. Her sister Annora was put in prison. Loretta returned to England before King John died, but she did not retire from the world to her cell at Hackington, Kent, until about 1220. Annora, who married a lord on the Welsh marches, also became an anchoress after her husband’s death in 1227. Her refuge was at Iffley near Oxford. These ladies were able to live a simple life in a modest two- or three-roomed house, attended by a couple of servants, with a manservant to look after their business. They disposed of their property and were fed by the alms of people of position. Although an anchoress had left the world and could not go out into it again, she could talk to visitors through her window. Loretta died at Hackington on 4 March in 1266 or one of the following years. She had lived through the barons’ war and had been consulted not long before she died about the rights and liberties which belonged to the Earl of Leicester as steward of England. She was described as the ‘recluse of Hackington’, but it was well remembered that she also was ‘formerly Countess of Leicester’¹.

Ela, Countess of Salisbury, a contemporary of Annora and Loretta, also retired from the world after the death of her husband. She was the daughter and heiress of the Earl of Salisbury and had carried the title and lands to her husband, William Longsword, an illegitimate son of Henry II. She was married to him in 1198, when she was about twelve years old. Her husband died in 1226 after Ela had borne him four sons and four daughters. The earl had joined the crusaders at Damietta early in Henry Ill’s reign. Rumours of his death while returning home brought his wife an unwelcome offer of marriage from the nephew of Hubert de Burgh, the king’s Justiciar. The countess refused him with scorn for she had already heard that the rumours of her husband’s death were false. On his return the earl, whose health had been broken by his experiences, complained to the king of the low fellow who had tried to marry his wife adulterously. The Justiciar was forced to buy his favour by giving him precious horses and rich gifts. When they had come to terms the Justiciar entertained the earl to dinner, at which it was suspected the earl was given poison, for he died soon afterwards¹. In 1232 his widow built a house for Augustinian nuns at Lacock in Wiltshire, where she took the veil in 1238. In the following year she became abbess and held that office until 1257 when ill health obliged her to retire. She died and was buried at Lacock in 1261². A woman of this type was admirably placed as the head of a religious community. Although no longer in the world she was of it, able through her connections with the society she had left to further the interests of her house.

As the thirteenth century wore on and the privileges won by the Great Charter were again and again confirmed the crown could no longer bring the weapon of distraint into play against a widow who would not take a husband at the royal suggestion, as Richard I had done against the Countess of Aumale. The king could still sell or give away the marriage of a widow and the fine which would be due from her if she married without the consent of her overlord, but if she chose to live as a widow neither king nor suitor could stop her doing so. Family pressure, however, probably caused many widows to marry again. Moreover, in war-time a man who had bought a widow’s marriage from the king might try to make his bargain effective by force. Isabella de Forz³ complained of being pursued about the country with horses and arms on this account, so that she had to take refuge in Wales, but for all that she preserved her widowed estate⁴. There are signs that widows were beginning to realize the independence of their position. Matthew Paris describes how another Isabella, the widowed Countess of Arundel, bearded the king ‘in his chamber’ to complain that the heir of one of her tenants had been taken into the king’s wardship because he held a little land of the crown. When she approached him the king at first showed her an agreeable countenance, but afterwards, blaming her with rather bitter words, he gave her nothing of what she asked. ‘Wherefore she, although a woman, answered fearlessly, not like a woman, “Oh, my lord king, wherefore do you turn your face from justice? In your court now that which is just cannot be obtained.… You set yourself between God and us, but neither yourself nor us do you rule well.…”.’ The king, sneering and grinning, called out in a high voice and asked the countess if the barons of England had made a charter with her and made her their advocate because of her eloquence. The countess, ‘although she was young, yet not in a childish way’, reminded the king of the charter which his father had made and he himself had granted and confirmed¹. The Earl of Arundel had married Isabella when he was about nineteen in 1234. He died without issue in 1243. His widow survived him for nearly forty years. She died in 1282.

The way in which a widow could come into control of a vast complex of estates by the operation of the laws of inheritance and dower is well illustrated by the life of Isabella de Forz, Countess of Aumale. She was born in 1237 and married the Count of Aumale in 1249 at the age of twelve. She was widowed in 1260, and for the rest of her life held in dower a third of the great Aumale inheritance. In 1262 she inherited from her brother the earldom of Devon which carried with it, as it had throughout the Norman and Angevin period, the lordship of the Isle of Wight. Thereupon Isabella assumed the title of’Countess of Aumale and Devon and Lady of the Island’². She had acquired a territorial position which the crown, stronger under Edward I than it had ever been before, could only regard as too great for a subject. The Isle of Wight, in particular, both Henry III and, after him, Edward I had desired. Isabella’s son and heir died at the age of sixteen in 1269. Her only surviving child, a daughter, was married at ten to the king’s younger son, but she died at fifteen in 1274. Edward I then tried to buy Isabella’s inheritance from her, but not until she was on her death-bed in November 1293 did the bargain go through. Even then the sale was confined to the Isle of Wight which was at last separated from the earldom of Devon. A remote kinsman, for whose interests Isabella had little care, acquired the other lands of the earldom and with them the title of earl³.

There is ample evidence in legal records that the great ladies of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were as interested as their husbands and sons in preserving or increasing the estates which had come to them by inheritance or marriage. Earls and barons and their ladies rarely appeared in person in court to prosecute or defend their actions for land. Attorneys answered on their behalf and the earliest members of the legal profession gained profit and experience in the give and take of the interminable law-suits brought as readily by noble ladies as by their husbands. If the land at issue were claimed as a wife’s inheritance she, as well as her husband, must be represented in court. Like their husbands, ladies had their own seals to authenticate their letters and grants of land.

At this time it was usual for a seal to bear a representation of its owner. A great man of the period generally appeared in full armour riding a spirited horse, with his arms well displayed on shield and horse cloth. The great lady was generally shown standing, sometimes facing front, sometimes turning to right or left. Her seal was therefore not round but oval. It is never possible to tell whether the lady portrayed on a seal were beautiful or not, but something of her style of dress and something also of her interests can be seen. Margaret, Countess of Lincoln and Pembroke, is shown wearing a long dress, a fur cloak, and a flat head-dress. Ela, Countess of Salisbury, is wearing a long dress girt at the waist, and a fur cloak¹. The Countess Hawisa of Aumale is wearing a long dress without cloak or head-dress. The dresses sometimes look almost moulded to the figure, with a straight long skirt. Sometimes the skirt flared at the feet. At the end of the twelfth century the tight sleeves were stressed by a long floating piece of drapery hanging from the wrists. Ladies all through this period enjoyed the sport of hawking and many appear on their seals holding a hawk or falcon on one hand or the other. The Countess Hawisa holds one on her left hand. Occasionally, like Maud, widow of Sir William of Hartshill, ladies have small dogs shown on their seals. Maud is standing with a small dog at her feet and another in her arms². The interest in heraldry, which was growing in strength all through and long after this period, is reflected in ladies’ seals, as in those of their husbands. Sometimes the lady is shown holding up shields of arms³. Sometimes heraldic devices invade even her clothes and are shown as ornaments on her dress⁴. Occasionally a lady allowed herself to appear on horseback on her seal. Mabel of Gatton in the thirteenth century is shown riding sideways in a long dress with a hawk on her left hand⁵.

As the Middle Ages went on, comfort and privacy increased. The hall ceased to be the centre of the life of a great household, for rooms with large open fireplaces and chimneys to carry off the smoke added to the attraction of life indoors and of such indoor occupations as reading and writing. Long before the Middle Ages were over most people of position could write a good letter, though their spelling was generally erratic. By the fifteenth century individual great men were collecting books and making libraries. They were patrons of learning, responsive to the stirrings of thought and feeling which preceded the full renaissance. Their ladies shared their tastes and sometimes shared the education which trained them, but no great lady of the last generations of the true Middle Ages has left anything that comes near literature behind her¹. They lived through a civil war which destroyed the heads of many noble families, for it degenerated ito a series of family feuds rather than war. It bred treachery and insecurity, which itself bred treason trials and executions.

The reign of Henry VII (1485–1509) marks the beginning of a new age in English history. He drew whatever hereditary right he possessed to the crown through his mother, Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, to whom the Lancastrian claim to the throne and the Lancastrian wealth descended. She was content that the right should pass through her to her son. ‘My oune suet and most deere Kynge and all my worldly joy’ as she addressed him in a letter which she signed as ‘your faythfull trewe bedewoman and humble modyr, Margaret R.’ (that is, Richmond)². Her austere and delicate features can be seen in those of her son and again in the face of her great-grandchild, Queen Elizabeth.

The women of Tudor England were still very near the Middle Ages. The new learning which many of them professed could not at once change the fundamental outlook of all women. For all that some women could turn Greek into Latin and both of them into English and back again the real interest of most women remained, as it always had been, their land and household. The law they lived under was still feudal. Among all the frail and fashionable young scholars of the age a woman like Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury, stands like a rock of medieval common sense, as strong as Queen Elizabeth herself³. To all later generations Elizabeth Talbot, wife of Gilbert, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, has remained Bess of Hardwick, who brought the Cavendishes to Derbyshire and was the mother of two sons who founded respectively the dukedoms of Devonshire and Newcastle. She was the fourth daughter and coheiress of John Hardwick, whose ancestors for five generations had been lords of the manor of Hardwick, near Tibshelf, Derbyshire. On both sides she came of Derbyshire country stock. She was born in 1518 and at the age of fourteen married Robert Barlow, of Barlow in Dronfield, in that county. This excellent, if undistinguished, marriage made her fortune, for her marriage settlement secured her husband’s lands to herself and her heirs. Robert Barlow died within a year of the marriage, so that his widow at fifteen came into control of his estate. It is a pity that ‘this beautiful and discreet woman’¹ Elizabeth Barlow has left no account of her thoughts during the sixteen years she remained a widow, for it must have been then that her character was formed.

In 1549 at Bradgate, Leicestershire, ‘at two o’clock after midnight’, she married Sir William Cavendish, who came of a Suffolk family, but sold his lands in the south and purchased lands in Derbyshire so that his wife might live among her own people. He is the only one of all her husbands by whom she had children. Three sons and three daughters of hers by him lived to grow up. Sir William began to build Chatsworth, but died in 1557 leaving it for his widow to finish. She soon married again, and again made sure that her settlement secured her husband’s lands to her own heirs, if she had no issue by him. Her third husband was Sir William St. Loe of Tadmarton, Oxfordshire, who was captain of the guard to Queen Elizabeth. When not in attendance at court he lived in Derbyshire and when he died his whole estate passed to his widow to the exclusion of daughters by a former marriage. The widowed ‘Lady St. Low had not survived her Charms of Wit and Beauty’². Her successive marriages had enriched her so much that she was a valuable matrimonial prize. She accepted the addresses of the Earl of Shrewsbury, but only after she had secured the marriages of her own eldest son to the earl’s daughter and her own youngest daughter Mary, aged twelve, to the earl’s second son, Gilbert, his eldest son being already married. Queen Elizabeth welcomed the marriage and soon found a way of using some of the earl’s wealth. Before the end of 1568 she had determined that Mary Queen of Scots should be put into his custody. He could entertain the queen and her attendants without expecting full reimbursement of his expenses from the crown. His recent marriage to a lady known for her beauty, her wit, and the resolution of her character would protect him from falling under the influence of his prisoner.

For sixteen years the Queen of Scots remained in the custody of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Long before the end of this time he had quarrelled bitterly with his wife. In 1574 she endangered her husband’s standing with the queen by securing a marriage between her daughter, Elizabeth Cavendish, and Charles, Earl of Lennox, brother-in-law of Mary Queen of Scots. The Countess of Lennox and her son had been entertained for five days by the Countess of Shrewsbury at Rufford on their way north, and in that time the marriage was made. It was indeed flying high, for the countess’s new son-in-law was a grandson of Margaret Tudor, Queen Elizabeth’s aunt. The queen sent the Countess of Shrewsbury to prison in the Tower of London for three months and the earl had some difficulty in explaining how he had come to allow his wife to make the match. He had no scruple in blaming her for the affair. The only issue of the marriage was the Lady Arabella Stuart, who was left an orphan when she was four years old. The Countess of Shrewsbury took charge of the infant, ‘my dearest juyll Arabella’, as she described her when writing to the queen’s ministers to ask for a larger allowance for her maintenance¹. But the early affection waned and the Lady Arabella was cut out of her grandmother’s will.

Bess of Hardwick was not an easy woman to live with. Her early widowhood and her success in her marriage treaties induced in her a tyrannical spirit which grew stronger with the years. Her last husband’s early affection for her had gone long before his death. She pestered him to remove with his charge to her house at Chatsworth and left him to settle there herself in 1583. She even told Queen Elizabeth that the earl was too friendly with the Queen of Scots. Bitter recriminations passed between husband and wife, so that at last the queen intervened to patch up a reconciliation between them. But it was too late. The earl had fallen under the domination of one of his female servants, a certain Eleanor Britton. The countess spent large sums of money building houses in her own country-side. At Chatsworth, Oldcoates, Worksop, and Bolsover she had been at work in her fourth husband’s lifetime. After his death in January 1591 she built a splendid mansion at Hardwick, completed in 1597. There she spent her fourth widowhood and there she died¹. Historians have uttered bitter words about this strong-minded woman: ‘She was a woman of a masculine understanding and conduct; proud, furious, selfish, and unfeeling. She was a builder, a buyer and seller of estates, a money lender, a farmer, a merchant of lead, coals, and timber: when disengaged from these employments, she intrigued alternately with Elizabeth and Mary, always to the prejudice and terror of her husband. She lived to a great old age, continually flattered, but seldom deceived, and died in 1607, immensely rich without a friend’². Edmund Lodge, who wrote these words in 1791, had made full use of the papers of the Talbot family and based his judgment on them. But a man who could use the phrase ‘of masculine understanding’ as a term of reproach to a woman could never appreciate Bess of Hardwick. The key to her character and career lies in her sixteen years of widowhood, beginning when she was only fifteen. She then tasted liberty and she was strong enough never to relinquish it again. She kept her second and third husbands’ affection. For her fourth husband she was altogether too strong.

Something of Bess of Hardwick’s quality may well have been inherited by her granddaughter, Elizabeth, Countess of Kent, who was the daughter of Mary Cavendish, wife of Gilbert, Earl of Shrewsbury. A woman who could win the respect and affection of John Selden deserves attention. He had been the legal adviser of the Earl of Kent and habitually spent his vacations at the earl’s seat at Wrest, Bedfordshire, where he could peacefully pursue his studies. After the earl’s death without issue in 1639, Selden was reputed to have married his widow, though such a marriage was never admitted by either party. John Aubrey, who delighted in scandal, is the authority always quoted for this marriage. He describes how John Selden lived with the countess, whose servants were at his disposal³. When she died in December 1651 she bequeathed most of her property to Selden, who was her executor. Lady Kent was ‘a lady of uncommon virtue and piety’⁴ and Selden was an eminent scholar who had enjoyed the friendship and trust of the earl and countess for many years. A man and woman of such quality could afford to be indifferent to the gossip which floated round the town. Lady Kent appears in the Dictionary of National Biography as an author because after her death a collection of medical recipes was published in her name¹.

It is unlikely that Elizabeth’s reign passed without many women reflecting that it was unreasonable to subject women to the rule of their husbands while the queen was proving the capacity of a woman to govern a kingdom. Even among the conservative lawyers of the time there was sympathy with their position. In 1632 there was published a book entitled The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights or The Lawes provision for Women. It purports to be ‘a methodicall collection of such Statutes and Customes, with the Cases, Opinions, Arguments and points of Learning in the Law as doe properly concerne Women’². The book was written a good many years before publication, almost certainly during the last years of Elizabeth. The lawyer who saw it through the press speaks of its author as dead. He quotes no later law than one of 39 Elizabeth and describes himself as ‘having sailed between the capes of Magna Charta and Quadragesima of Queen Elizabeth’³. He undertook the work, he says, as ‘A publique Advantage and peculiar service to that Sexe generally beloved, and by the Author had in venerable estimation’⁴. Despite all the writer’s efforts to encourage his feminine readers by little stories and jests, the work remains stiff reading. If the generality of ladies could cope with it successfully in the seventeenth century there is no doubt that they were a well-educated and able generation.

The author of this book seems to have felt assurance that women would read him. He wrote, as he says, ‘not regarding so much to satisfie the deeplearned or searchers for subtility, as woman kind, to whom I am a thankfull debter by nature’⁵. After reaching back to the creation of man and woman he proceeds in his first book to show how a woman may inherit land, when she can come out of wardship, and how she should make a partition of land with a sister. After this he thinks that ‘she should long to be married:… And I did not meane when I began to produce any vestall virgin, Nunne, or new Saint Brigid’⁶. Having set out a clear and concise account of betrothal, marriage, and divorce, the writer goes on to describe the provision made by the girl’s father which he calls ‘the condiments of love’. ‘Good meats are the better for good sauce; venison craveth wine, and Wedlock hath certaine Condiments, which come best in season at the wooing time’¹. After he has described the law relating to land given by the woman’s father in free marriage and the law touching wife’s dower from her husband he concludes: ‘I have held young maides now indeed somewhat long in the old endowments … for my desire is that they should be able to have when they are widdowes a coach, or at least an ambler, and some money in their purses’². His next book deals with the results of man and wife being made one person. ‘The wife must take the name of her husband, Alice Greene becommeth Alice Musgraue; She that in the morning was Faire weather, is at night, perhaps Rainebow or Goodwife Foule; Sweet heart going to church, and Hoistbrick comming home’. She must take her second husband’s rank in society even though her first husband had a title and her second had not, for ‘the dignitie hangeth meerely on the male side carrying the sceptre of Wedlocke’³.

‘If a Seignioresse of a manor marry her bond-man, he is made free, and where before hee was her footstoole, he is now her head and Seignior’⁴. A man may beat ‘an outlaw, a traitor, a Pagan, his villein, or his wife because by the Law Common these persons can have no action: God send Gentle-women better sport or better companie’. Nevertheless, he points out, there is a writ which a woman may sue out of Chancery if she ‘is threatened by her husband to bee beaten, mischieved, or slaine … to compell him to finde surety of honest behaviour towards her and that he shall neither doe nor procure to be done to her (marke I pray you) any bodily damage, otherwise than appertaines to the office of a husband for lawfull and reasonable correction’. He suggests, however, that perhaps the wife might not be so badly off after all since there is no action which a husband can bring if his wife beats him⁵. But he goes on to point out that ‘That which the husband hath is his owne’ and ‘That which the wife hath is the husband’s’. A brief chapter on each of these texts drives home the lesson further expounded through many pages of detailed exposition illustrated by cases from old collections of law reports.

The author explains to his readers that femme sole means a woman of full age, unmarried or a widow, and femme couert means a married woman. He tells them what each may do in law. He warns the married woman that she must ‘take heed of elopement’ because ‘a woman that leaves her husband, goeth away and abides with her adulterer, if she be convicted thereof, loseth for ever her command of dower etc’. He instanced the famous Camoys case which has already been quoted¹. Dower was sought ‘by R. H. and Anne his wife’ and ‘it was pleaded that the said Anne in the life of Lord Powes

Frankly of her owne accord,

Left her Husband and her Lord,

And from Bednall Greene she ran

With Mathew Rochlei Gentleman

to the parish of Saint Clements Danes, where she lived in adultery, all the life long of Lord Powes’². The plaintiffs pleaded that Lady Powis had been reconciled to her husband, but this plea was rejected. ‘But’, says the author, ‘me thinkes here wanteth equality in the law. Women go downe stile, and many graines allowance will not make the ballance hang euen: A poore woman shall have but the third foote of her Husbands lands when he is dead, for all the service she did him during the accouplement (perhaps a long time and a tedious) and if she be extravagant with a friend this is elopement and forfeiture etc. But as the saying is, men are happy by the masse, they may goe where they list I warrant yee, and because they are enforced to travell in the world, they will pay deare abroad for that which they esteeme of no value at home. Their adultrous soiournings is not discerned, they may lope over ditch and Dale, a thousand out-ridings and out-biddings is no forfeiture, but as soone as the good wife is gone, the badman will have her land, not the third, but euery foote of it’. There is no doubt here of the writer’s sympathy with women. He continues: ‘Have patience (my Schollers) take not your opportunitie of revenge, rather move for redresse by Parliament and in the meane season be perswaded that liberty or impunity in doing evil is no freedome or happines’³. Here at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is the first appearance of the idea that Parliament was the only authority strong enough to right the wrongs of women.

It is unnecessary to follow all the argument of the learned author by which he tries to forewarn a woman of the various ways in which her husband may dispose of her land and dower and she may circumvent him. He himself declared that to go farther in ‘the streame of fines and recoverie’ would require ‘a cunning swimmer’¹. He was scornful of the old way of protecting the wife’s interest when a husband wished to make a final concord touching land which is of her right. He warns her that she would lose all possibility of action at law if a fine has been lawfully levied by man and wife, ‘where (forsooth) because a woman is examined by a Justice … and acknowledgeth her free consent and agreement, what cannot men get their wiues to do if they list, she shall be barred and foreuer excluded from a great many acres of ground, for a few kisses and a gay gowne. That is a fine final concord for till it be done and dispatcht, the poore woman can haue no quiet, her husband keepes such a iawling’². But the author praised jointures, which he treated as a more up-to-date means of providing for a wife than dower. ‘All husbands are not so unkinde or untrusty as to endamage their wiues by alienation of their lands: but contrariwise the greatest part of honest, wise and sober men are of themselves careful to purchase somewhat for their wiues, if they be not yet they stand sometimes bound by the woman’s parents to make their wiues some joynture’. Very many English women, he went on to say, have wisdom enough of their own to see how much better a jointure is than dower. Lands purchased by husband and wife jointly for the wife can be enjoyed at once. Dower ‘must be tarried for till the husband be dead: It must be demanded, sometimes sued for, sometime neither with suit or demand obtained’³.

It is clear that women in Elizabeth’s day were still as much ‘under the rod’ of their husbands, sometimes to their own advantage, as they had been when Bracton wrote⁴. ‘If a man and wife commit felonie jointly, it seemeth that the wife is no felon, but it shall be wholley judged the husband’s fact’. If a husband finds his wife committing felony, however, he must abandon her and his own house in order to avoid being treated as an accessory. But if a man commit felony ‘his wife not ignorant of it may keep his company still notwithstanding … for a woman cannot bee accessory to her husband inasmuch as she is forbidden by the Law of God to bewray him’¹.

The conception that a husband is the ‘lord’ of his wife which coloured the feudal aspect of their relationship was far more than a literary commonplace. It brought the woman who plotted against the life of her husband under the law of treason, and subjected her to the death penalty in its severest form. A woman convicted of murdering her husband was held guilty of ‘petty treason’ and therefore burned alive. The last English woman to suffer in this way for this crime was Catherine Hayes, executed at Tyburn in 1726. The author of The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights feels himself obliged to warn women of the words of the Act of Treasons of 25 Edward III cap. 2: ‘that if any servant kill his master, any woman kill her husband, or any man secular or religious person kill his Prelate to whom he owes obedience, this is treason.… The Statute is but the declaration of the common law’. He rubs home the lesson by quoting a case of Edward II’s time: ‘A woman compasseth with her adulterer the death of her husband, they assailed him riding on the highway, beating, wounding, leaving him for dead, and then they fled: The husband got up, levied hue and cry, came before the Justices, they sent after the offenders, which were gotten, arraigned, and the matter found by verdict, the adulterer was hanged, the woman burned to death, the husband living, the will shall be reputed as the deed, 15 Edward 2’. The author goes on to quote the case of a woman servant bringing into her mistress’s house and ‘to her bed-side where the mistress lay asleep a stranger who killed her mistress, the servant silent, nothing doing but holding the candle’, and is clearly uncertain whether the servant has committed petty treason, since the Act does not include the word mistress as well as master. He points out that if a wife conspires with a servant, who kills his master in the wife’s absence, yet she is guilty of treason, but if she conspires with a man not his servant who likewise kills her husband in her absence she is ‘but barely hanged as accessorie, because the principal was but a murderer’². There is nothing new in this severity. A case from King John’s reign which ended in the burning of a woman for her husband’s murder is only noticed in the records because her land was bought from the chief lord of the fee by one of the king’s clerks³.

In the sixteenth as in the thirteenth century the widow had the right of making an appeal against her husband’s murderer. In The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights the process follows a long account of the reasons which may lead a widow to marry for a second time. Naturally, though not necessarily, the author takes for his example an appeal begun by a woman who was following up the murder of her second husband. His account is severely technical, but it is introduced by a paragraph of almost incongruous vivacity. He begins by describing how the widow ‘married againe to her owne great liking, though not with the applause of most friends and acquaintance. But alas what would they have her to have done, she was faire, young, rich, gracious in her carriage, and so well became her mourning apparell, that when she went to church on Sundayes, the casements opened of their owne accord on both sides the streets, that bachelours and widdowers might behold her.… Her man at home kissed her pantables and serued diligently, her late husband’s physitian came and visited often; the Lawyer to whom she went for counsell tooke opportunity to aduise for himself. If shee went to any feast there was always one guest, sometimes two or three, the more for her sake; If she were at home the suitors ouertooke one another.… All day she was troubled with answering petitions’. In the end she married ‘one not of the long robe, not a man macerate and dryed up with study, but a gallant gulberd lad; that might well be worthy of her had he been as thrifty as kind hearted, or half so wise as hardy and adventurous’. The end of it was that he wasted her money, was challenged to a duel and ‘there my new married man was slaine; Now his wife will bring her appeale’¹. The law which governed it need not be discussed here².

Even in the seventeenth century husbands and wives were living within the framework of a law which in all essentials was medieval. How should it be otherwise when the feudal incidents of wardship and marriage still prevailed? Many of the marriages arranged by parents or guardians for financial reasons doubtless turned out well enough, but much unhappiness came of others. The life-story of Frances Coke shows the penalties which a woman might suffer if she broke away from an impossible marriage. She was the younger daughter of Sir Edward Coke, the champion and exponent of the common law, by his second wife, Lady Elizabeth Hatton. This marriage had not been a success and Lady Elizabeth lived apart from her husband. She tried in vain to prevent Coke arranging a marriage between her daughter Frances and Sir John Villiers, the eldest brother of the king’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham wanted to find a rich wife for his brother and asked for the hand of Frances Coke, who was only fourteen and might well have expected a better match. Sir Edward Coke agreed to the marriage because he needed the support of Buckingham. Lady Elizabeth tried to find a different husband for her daughter and carried her off to a cousin’s house, but Coke, aided by his sons by his first wife, seized Frances by force. Her mother took the case to the Star Chamber and was vocal in her complaints against her husband, both about the marriage and his treatment of her own property, but she could do nothing. Indeed, she was put into the custody of one of the aldermen of London and could not attend her daughter’s wedding, which took place on Michaelmas Day, 1617.

To satisfy Buckingham the king made Sir John Villiers a viscount and he took the title of Purbeck from the property he hoped to come by through his wife. Lord Purbeck was of poor intelligence, sometimes falling into insanity. His wife became intimate with one of the sons of the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Robert Howard, who made no secret of his feeling for her. When she gave birth to a child in 1624 it was generally accepted that Howard was its father. Both Lady Purbeck and Howard were cited to appear before the court of High Commission on a charge of adultery. Lady Purbeck was sentenced to a heavy fine, imprisonment during pleasure, and penance barefoot and in a white sheet. She escaped, without doing penance, whether to Shropshire with Sir Robert Howard, as was later alleged, or to France, is now no matter. She undoubtedly eloped from her husband and suffered the penalties described by the anonymous writer of the lawbook for women’s use. Her own money remained with her husband and his family. In 1635 she and Sir Robert Howard returned to London and were both taken again, but again she escaped, this time certainly to France. When war broke out she returned to England and died at Oxford in 1645. She was fortunate in that she had friends to help her and that Sir Robert Howard was faithful to her as long as she lived¹.

The penalties of unfaithfulness were harsh but they were balanced by the independence allowed by the common law of England to every widow. The Duchess of Newcastle, who wrote a brief autobiography in order that after ages might be able to distinguish between herself and the duke’s first wife¹, described in it her upbringing at St. John’s near Colchester. Her mother, Lady Lucas, was left a widow soon after the duchess, her youngest child, was born. Although her husband’s estate was divided between herself and her sons, and a sum of money was appointed as portions for her daughters ‘yet by reason she and her children agreed with a mutual consent, all their affairs were managed so well as she lived not in a much lower condition than when my father lived. ’Tis true, my mother might have increased her daughters’ portions by a thrifty sparing, yet she chose to bestow it on our breeding, honest pleasures and harmless delights’, feeling that ‘if she bred us with needy necessity’ it might create in her children ‘mean thoughts and base actions’². Her mother would often complain that her family was ‘too great for her weak management’, and often pressed her eldest son to take it upon him, ‘yet I observed she took a pleasure, and some little pride in the governing thereof. She was very skilful in leases and setting of lands, and court keeping, ordering of stewards and the like affairs. Also I observed that my mother, nor my brothers, before these wars had never any lawsuits, but what an attorney despatched in a term with small cost’³.

Lady Fanshawe, who wrote her memoirs after her husband’s death in 1668, acknowledged with thankfulness ‘God’s bounty’ to her husband’s family in bestowing ‘most excellent wives on most of them, both in person and fortune’. She spoke of her own mother-in-law with particular appreciation. She was ‘left a widow at thirty-nine years of age, handsome, with a full fortune, all her children provided for’, but instead of marrying again, she ‘kept herself a widow, and out of her jointure and revenue purchased six hundred pounds a year for the younger children of her eldest son; besides she added five hundred pounds apiece to the portions of her younger children, having nine’⁴. It was clearly regarded as a sign of peculiar virtue in a handsome young widow if she refrained from marrying again but devoted herself to the welfare of her children. For despite the independence and authority enjoyed by widows it is interesting to see how often they tempted fortune again by taking another husband.

No account of the position of women in the feudal world would be satisfactory which omitted to notice the life of Anne, Countess of Pembroke (1590–1676). It is impossible to stay long in Westmorland today without hearing of the Lady Anne, for her memory still lives among the Westmorland people, many of whom bear the same surnames as those who served her in the seventeenth century. The country itself is not greatly changed. She was the sole surviving child of George Clifford, third Earl of Cumberland, and could look back on a noble pedigree stretching in the male line as far as the Norman Conquest. To the main line of the Cliffords the land of the Viponts and Vescys had come, acquisitions which had drawn them from the Welsh border to the north. Lady Anne’s grandmother was a daughter of Lord Dacre of the north and was remarkable among the nobility of the day in that she had never been to London or the south in her life. Her husband had made over to her as her jointure all his Westmorland lands. Her son succeeded to the earldom at the age of eleven and was brought up by his guardian, Francis Russel, second Earl of Bedford. At nineteen he married one of his guardian’s daughters, Margaret, to whom he had been betrothed in childhood. She was seventeen at the time of the marriage. Their two sons died in infancy and the Earl of Cumberland left his lands by will to his brother, to revert to his daughter the Lady Anne, if the male line failed.

From this will came trouble and litigation. Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, whose effigy survives in Appleby church, was a woman of great strength of character. She had her daughter carefully educated for the position she was to fill. The poet and historian, Samuel Daniel, was her tutor, but her father would not allow her to learn a foreign language. When the Lady Anne was fifteen in 1605 her father died. She recorded that a little before his death he expressed ‘a great Beliefe that hee had his Brother’s sonne would dye without issue male, and therby all his Landes would come to be myne’¹. The Countess of Cumberland was determined that her daughter should inherit her father’s estates and in 1607 she took the Lady Anne to Westmorland and began to collect the evidences necessary to substantiate her claim. All her life the Lady Anne was a keeper of diaries, a collector of evidences about the history of her family, a builder of memorials to all with whom she had connections—even to Samuel Daniel because he was her teacher, to Spenser because she loved his work. She read and re-read her diaries and annotated them. She employed clerks to copy them out and help her with her compilations. The long and fruitless litigation begun by her mother in the court of wards and continued by the Lady Anne herself stimulated her pride of family and love of Westmorland. She was married in 1609 to Richard Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, who two days after the wedding succeeded to the earldom of Dorset. The marriage took her to Kent and to Knole. Her chief jointure house was Bollbroke in Sussex, but Westmorland was ever in her thoughts. In the retrospect her marriage was happy enough, though her husband was not faithful to her. ‘Sometimes I had fair words from him, and sometimes foul, but 1 took all patiently, and did strive to give him as much content and assurance of my love as I could possibly, yet I told him that I would never part with Westmoreland upon any condition whatever’¹.

The death of the Countess of Cumberland in 1616 made no difference to her daughter’s determination to win her lands. The Earl of Dorset was ready to compound for them and the king himself intervened to try to force the Lady Anne to drop her claim. The suit was of such importance that it came, as it would have come in the twelfth century, before the king himself. James I was unsuccessful, for the Lady Anne constantly declared, even in the king’s presence, that she would ‘never give up Westmoreland’. The king therefore awarded the land to the Earl of Cumberland in return for the payment of a substantial sum to the Earl of Dorset. After her husband’s death in 1624 the countess remained a widow for six years, but in 1630, to most people’s surprise, she married Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery. He was the son of the learned Countess of Pembroke², but if royalist propaganda is to be believed was a foul-mouthed creature with no interests beyond sport. That he was handsome seems certain. He was also a lover of fine buildings as Wilton itself bears witness. His readiness to support his wife in her claim to Westmorland, and his great position which made his support valuable, would have been enough to make her wish for the marriage. In December 1643 her cousin, the last Earl of Cumberland, died, and she entered quietly into possession under her father’s will. She was then fifty-three, but she did not hurry off to Westmorland. When she went north at last in 1649 she parted from the south for ever and stepped back into the Middle Ages.

The Lady Anne was born at Skipton Castle in Craven and she visited it on her way north in 1649. The wars had meant considerable damage, but a castle so strongly built as Skipton could not be altogether ruinous. By 1663 the work of repair was completed and the Lady Anne resided in the castle for five months in 1666. From Skipton she then went on to her other castle in Craven, Barden Tower, a fortified house rather than a castle. Today Barden is again a ruin, but the Lady Anne’s inscription over the entrance greets the visitor. While the property had been in the hands of her uncle he had been able to make an arrangement with the crown so that if the land reverted to the Lady Anne for lack of male heirs Barden manor and castle should remain with his female line. But the Lady Anne kept Barden as long as she lived.

In an age when for several generations noble households had been accommodated in mansions of varying degrees of comfort, the Lady Anne chose like her medieval ancestors to live in castles. Her favourite castles were Appleby, from old days the head of the Westmorland property, and Brougham, where her father was born, her mother had died, and where she died herself. After her mother’s death Brougham passed to the Earl of Cumberland, who in 1617 entertained King James I there. During the civil war many castles were destroyed and none escaped damage, but some had fallen out of use before the end of the Middle Ages. The Lady Anne found Brougham ‘ruinous and desolate’ and Appleby in not much better state, but it was possible to live in them while the extensive repairs and rebuildings were carried out. Brough Castle was far more decayed than Brougham or Appleby, for it had been burned down in 1521 and since then neglected. She began work there in 1649. In 1661 she was able ‘to lye there’ three nights and in 1666 she kept Christmas there, which, as she proudly noted, none of her ancestors had done since 1521. The fourth of the Westmorland castles, Pendragon, had also lain ruinous for more than a hundred years when the Lady Anne inherited her ancestral lands. Today its ruins look not very different from what they must have been in 1649. The valley of Mallerstang has changed little through the centuries and remains desolate and wild. Pendragon Castle had been built to prevent the Scots passing south by way of the Eden valley, and it never had a town or village beside it. The castle was called Pendragon at least as early as the fourteenth century¹. Even as a girl the Lady Anne had thought of making it habitable again. By 1660 the work was done and she was able to ‘lye there three nights together’ in 1661. Thereafter she often stayed there on her way to and from her Yorkshire lands. She rebuilt Mallerstang chapel to serve the people of the valley.

By virtue of King John’s charter to Robert de Vipont his successor in title was Sheriff of Westmorland. The Lady Anne appointed Thomas Gabetis her under-sheriff and always described him as ‘my sheriff’. But when the judges came to Westmorland she met them herself, escorted them to Appleby, and entertained them in the castle. She gathered about her a number of ‘chief officers’, as she describes them, trusty servants who conducted her affairs under direction. Much of what she wrote in these days in Westmorland has been destroyed, but the monuments she put up, the memorial tablets she inserted in the walls of her castles, the churches and chapels she rebuilt, the almshouses she endowed, remain today. The most remarkable survival is the Countess’s Pillar beside the highroad south of Brougham. The inscription upon it records that it was put up in January 1654 by ‘ye right honorable Anne countess dowager of Pembroke etc.… for a memorial of her last parting in this place with her good and pious mother, ye right honorable Margaret, countess dowager of Cumberland, ye 2nd of April 1616 in memorial whereof she also left an annuity of four pounds to be distributed to ye poor within the parish of Brougham, every 2nd day of April for ever, upon ye stone table here hard by. Laus Deo’. In 1616 the Lady Anne, for it is easier to call her by the name by which she is remembered in her own country, had visited her mother at Brougham to consult her about the claim to Westmorland and her mother had come a little way with her as she journeyed south again. The annual distribution of alms has doubtless helped to preserve the Pillar, which is still a landmark today.

The most valuable source of evidence for the life of the Lady Anne was compiled under her own direction². She caused three sets to be prepared of what she describes as ‘my 3 great written Handbooks’. One set survived at Appleby Castle, a second at Skipton and a third at Bill Hill, Berkshire. In them are set out, after the familiar pattern of the best seventeenth-century antiquarian research, the descent of each of the noble families to which the Lady Anne belonged, with the documents copied out and their seals carefully drawn. All the records had been collected, she recorded, ‘by the great and painfull industry’ of her mother. Into these books an account of the lives of her parents was entered and ‘a summary memorial’ of the Lady Anne’s own life. There is no doubt that she kept a daily diary during the years in Westmorland, but the greater part of it has been lost. ‘The summary memorial’ preserves a record of all her important visitors, the places through which they passed in coming and going, the rooms they slept in, the people and places they visited while they were her guests. There has also survived a copy of part of the last diary which she ever kept. It is a touching and intimate record of the last days of a long life. Almost every day’s entry ends with the sentence ‘I went not out of my house or out of my chamber today’. Each day, with her old diaries before her, she lived again the happenings of sixty years ago. Almost every day people came to see her and she notes that she kissed the women, took the men by the hand, gave them some present, and they went away. If they came from any distance these visitors dined in her house. She records where they ate. It was generally ‘with my folks in the Painted Room’, while their servants ‘dined below in the hall’. The last entry she made was on 21 March 1676, ‘I went not out all this day’¹. The next day she died.

Until her death the widowed countess kept up a feudal state in the north, moving in state from one to another of her castles attended by her household and many Westmorland gentlemen. She was the last of a great family and her ancestors and successors were ever in her thoughts. Long before her death she prepared her memorial in Appleby church. It is in character that she chose to be remembered there not by an effigy, but by a black marble slab on which were shown the arms of all the families connected with the Cliffords. But her mind was not always turned upon the past. She kept up a close correspondence with her daughters, the Countesses of Thanet and Northampton, and welcomed them and their husbands and children to Westmorland. Her younger daughter, Lady Northampton, died at the age of thirty-nine in 1661. She had borne three sons, who died as children. Her only child who survived to grow up was Lady Alethea Compton, who at the age of nine in 1670 visited her grandmother at Pendragon Castle and again stayed for a week at Appleby a few months before the Lady Anne’s death. The Countess of Thanet was more fortunate, for eleven of her children lived to grow up. She herself died in the same year as the Lady Anne.

The Lady Anne, who died on 22 March 1675, was buried on 14 April, and Edward Rainbowe, Bishop of Carlisle, her friend and neighbour, preached her funeral sermon, taking as his text, ‘Every wise woman buildeth her house’. He set out the list of the ‘material houses’ which the Lady Anne had built, ‘six Castles, seven Churches or Chappels, besides two Almshouses and other inferiour subservient Buildings, which she made, or made useful’. He reminded his hearers of the Countess’s Pillar, where ‘as Jacob did, she poured oyl upon this pillar, the oyl of Charity … to be as a precious ointment to perfume her pious Mother’s Memory’. To illustrate the Lady Anne’s humility, the bishop described how ‘you might have sometimes seen her sitting in the almshouse which she built among her twelve Sisters (as she called them) and as if they had been her sisters indeed, or her children, she would sometimes eat her dinner with them, at their Almshouse; but you might often find them dining with her (at her Table) some of them every Week, all of them once a Month; and after meat, as freely and familiarly conversing with them in her Chamber, as if they had been her greatest Guests’. In this sermon is preserved the famous phrase of Dr. Donne: ‘That she knew well how to discourse of all things, from Predestination, to Slea-silk’. From this sermon, too, comes the story that to General Harrison, who commanded the soldiers quartered in her castle during the Commonwealth, she ‘boldly asserted, that she did love the King, that she would live and die in her Loyal thoughts to the King’. The bishop is also the authority for her remark that if she were to go to the Restoration court she would have ‘to be used as they do ill-sighted or unruly horses, have Spectacles (or Blinkers) put before mine eyes, lest I should see and censure what I cannot competently judge of’. The bishop was describing a great lady to a congregation who had known her. To read his sermon¹ today is to bring her back to life.

1 Historia Rerum Anglicarum Willelmi parvi… de Newburgh, ed. H. C. Hamilton, London, 1856, vol. ii, p. 8.

1 Save when a question of pregnancy was raised in court. Then a jury of matrons was appointed to examine the woman who claimed to be with child.

2 F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, History of English Law, 2nd ed., 1898, vol. ii, p. 437.

3 The Earliest Northamptonshire Assize Rolls, ed. D. M. Stenton, Northamptonshire Record Society, vol. v, 1930, Case no. 450, p. 57.

1 Bracton’s Note-Book, ed. F. W. Maitland, Cambridge, 1887, Case no. 1847, vol. iii, p. 646. Bracton, f. 414.

2 By the second statute of Westminster, c. 3. The wife could ‘pray to be received to defend her right’. T. F. T. Plucknett, Legislation of Edward I, Oxford, 1949, p. 123.

1 ad faciendam divisam ipsius, Pipe Roll 30 Henry II, p. 134.

2 f. 60b, propter honestatem.

3 Pp. 86–7.

1 British Museum, Harl. MS. 3759, f. 80b.

1 British Museum, Add. Chart. 47615.

2 Glanvill, De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Angliœ, ed. Woodbine, Yale, 1932, p. 97.

3 The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights, London, 1632, p. 88.

1 Glanvill, Book vi.

2 It was still possible in the seventeenth century for a widow to ‘sue out her thirds’ if no settlement had been made. Lady Anne Clifford noted in her diary in May 1617: ‘This time my Lord’s Mother did first of all sue out her thirds which was an increase of trouble and discontent to my Lord’. The Diary of the Lady Anne Clifford, ed. V. Sackville-West, London, 1923, p. 68.

1 The Historical Works of Master Ralf de Diceto, ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Series, 1876, vol. ii, p. 3.

2 Pipe Roll 6 Richard I, p. 163.

3 Chronicon Ricardi Divisiensis, ed. J. Stevenson, London, 1838, p. 11.

4 Hist. MSS. Commission, Rutland Report, vol. iv, p. 6.

5 Pipe Roll 14 John, p. 37.

6 Sir Christopher Hatton’s Book of Seals, ed. Lewis C. Loyd and D. M. Stenton, Oxford, 1950, no. 444. Only occasionally were women’s charters witnessed by women. The Rievaulx cartulary preserves the record of a confirmation to the abbey by a Yorkshire woman of a hide of land which was part of her dower. She swore to observe the terms of the charter in the hand of Bertha, wife of Rannulf de Glanville, then sheriff. The charter was witnessed by Rannulf himself, his clerk, and five other men as well as by ‘Bertha vice comitissa, Maud her daughter, Maud, daughter of Tockeman, Eda wife of Brian the clerk, Helewisa their daughter and Othild wife of Godwin Givenout’, Rievaulx Cartulary, Surtees Society, vol. 83, 1889, p. 62.

1 Gesta Regis Henrici secundi Benedicti abbatis (Howden), ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Series, 1867, vol. ii, p. 74.

1 Rotuli de Dominabus, Pipe Roll Society, 1st series, vol. xxxv, 1913, p. 45.

2 F. W. Maitland, History of English Law, vol. ii, p. 390.

3 Rotuli de Dominabus, pp. 54, 56.

4 Magister forestarius et justiciarius per totam Angliam, Benedict, vol. i, p. 323.

1 Rotuli de Dominabus, pp. xxxvii, 55, 87.

2 Ibid., p. 53.

3 Loc. cit.

4 Ibid., p. 52.

5 The Domesday Monachorum of Christchurch, Canterbury, ed. David C. Douglas, London, 1944, pp. 42–3.

1 These two documents were copied into the cartulary of St. Andrew’s Priory, B.M. Cott. Vesp. E xvii, f. 199 and dorse.

2 Book of Seals, no. 298 and n, p. 205.

1 Benedict, vol. ii, pp. 231–2.

2 The large numbers attributed to the houses of the Gilbertine Order at the end of the twelfth century were due essentially to the reputation of the founder and cannot long have survived him.

3 See below, pp. 183–4.

4 All these points are discussed by Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries, Cambridge, 1922.

1 Book of Seals, no. 486, p. 336.

2 Lincoln Wills, vol. i, ed. C. W. Foster, Lincoln Record Society, vol. v, 1914, pp. 20–2.

3 Curia Regis Rolls, ed. C. T. Flower, vol. v, pp. 79–80.

1 The Feet of Fines for Oxfordshire, ed. H. E. Salter, Oxfordshire Record Society, vol. xii, pp. 60, 61.

2 Rolls of the Justices in Eyre, Yorkshire, ed. D. M. Stenton, Selden Society, vol. 56, pp. 78–9.

3 Glanvill, pp. 109–10.

1 Benedict, vol. i, pp. 314–16.

2 Pipe Roll 2 Richard I, p. 66.

3 History of English Law, vol. ii, p. 389.

1 Papal Decretals relating to the diocese of Lincoln, ed. W. Holtzmann and E. W. Kemp, Lincoln Record Society, vol. xlvii, 1954, pp. 44–7.

2 The famous Anesty case was made possible by the annulment of a marriage about the year 1143, ‘English Society in the Early Middle Ages’, Pelican History of England, vol. iii, pp. 36–8.

1 Lincoln Decretals, pp. 56–7.

2 Complete Peerage, 2nd ed., vol. xi, Appendix D, ‘Henry I’s Illegitimate Children’, pp. 105–21.

3 Hist. MSS. Com., Hastings Report, vol. i, p. 121.

1 Bodleian Library, Nottinghamshire Charters, 2.

2 B. M. Egerton MS. 3031, f. 38 and 38b.

3 Book of Seals, no. 269, p. 188.

4 The Statute of Westminster II, 1285.

1 History of English Law, vol. ii, pp. 395–6.

2 Public Record Office, Aug. Off. Misc. Books 43, no. 187.

3 P.R.O. Feet of Fines, Leicestershire, 121/3/63.

4 Articles of the Barons, cl. 3.

5 Magna Carta, cl. 6.

1 The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, ed. J. O. Halliwell, London, 1845, vol. ii, pp. 153–4.

2 Magna Carta, cl. 7.

1 Magna Carta, cl. 8.

2 Memoriale Fratris Walteri de Coventria, ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Series, 1873, vol. ii, p. 225.

3 Complete Peerage, 2nd ed., vol. iv, pp. 316, 318.

4 Matthew Paris Chronica Majora, ed. H. R. Luard, Rolls Series, 1880, vol. v, p. 323.

1 Walter of Henley’s Husbandry, together with an anonymous husbandry, seneschaucie and Robert Grosseteste’s Rules, ed. E. Lamond, Introduction by W. Cunningham, London, 1890, pp. xlii and 122 ff.

2 Complete Peerage, 2nd ed., vol. vii, pp. 679–80.

1 F. M. Powicke, ‘Loretta, Countess of Leicester’, in Historical Essays in Honour of James Tait, Manchester, 1933, pp. 247–72.

1 Roger of Wendover, ed. H. O. Coxe, London, 1842, vol. iv, pp. 113–14 and 116–17.

2 Complete Peerage, 2nd ed., vol. xi, pp. 381–2.

3 Widow of the Count of Aumale, who was grandson of the Countess Hawisa, see pp. 35–6 above and p. 55 below.

4 F. M. Powicke, Henry III and the Lord Edward, Oxford, 1947, vol. ii, pp. 707–8.

1 Matthew Paris Chronica Majora, vol. v, pp. 336–7.

2 Complete Peerage, 2nd ed., vol. iv, p. 322 n.

3 F. M. Powicke, Henry III and the Lord Edward, pp. 707–9.

1 Catalogue of Seals in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, 1892, vol. ii, nos. 6676, 6678.

2 Ibid., no. 6658.

3 Ibid., no. 6573.

4 Ibid., no. 6695.

5 Ibid., no. 6648.

1 There is no other evidence for the existence of Juliana Berners, said to be Prioress of Sopwell, than the Explicit, which closes the treatise on hunting in the Boke of St. Albans ‘Explicit dame Julyans Barnes in her boke of huntyng’. Wynkyn de Worde’s version runs ‘Explicit dame Julyans Bernes doctryne in her boke of huntynge’. For a careful discussion of this lady and the value of the statements about her see The Boke of St. Albans by Dame Juliana Berners, London, 1905. Introduction by William Blades, pp. 7–13.

2 Original Letters Illustrative of English History, ed. Henry Ellis, London, 1824, vol. i, pp. 46–8.

3 Information here given is derived from J. Hunter, Hallamshire (1811), pp. 62–96; E. Lodge, Illustrations of British History, vol. ii.

1 White Kennet, A Sermon preach’d at the Funeral of the Right Noble William Duke of Devonshire … with some Memoirs of the Family of Cavendish, London, 1708, p. 65.

2 Ibid., p. 67.

1 Ellis, Original Letters, 2nd series, vol. iii, p. 65.

1 On 13 February 1608, D.N.B.

2 Illustrations of British History, vol. 1, p. xvii.

3 Quoted by Wood from Aubrey’s manuscript, Athenœ Oxonienses, ed. Bliss, vol. iii, p. 378.

4 Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, vol. viii, p. 510.

1 A choice Manuall, or Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chyrurgery Collected and practised by the … Countesse of Kent, late deceased, 2nd ed., London, 1653.

2 Description on the title-page, London, 1632.

3 Ibid., p. 403. The author speaks of ‘the late Queene Elizabeth’ on p. 402.

4 Ibid., Preface signed I. L. but unpaged.

5 Ibid., p. 3.

6 Ibid., p. 51.

1 Lawes Resolutions, p. 72.

2 Ibid., p. 115.

3 Ibid., pp. 125–6. The author quoted the case of a writ brought by ‘The Lady Anne Powes and her husband Randolph Hayward, Esquire’ touching part of the inheritance of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, against the then Duke of Suffolk and his wife. The plaintiffs were forced to obtain another writ in the name of ‘Randolph Hayward and his wife, late the wife of Lord Powes’.

4 Ibid., p. 128.

5 Ibid., pp. 128–9.

1 See above, p. 48.

2 The case was brought by Ralf Haworth, Esq., and the Lady Anne Powis his wife against John Herbert and his wife. Dyer’s Reports, ed. John Vaillant, London, 1794, vol. ii, p. 106. Lady Powis was a daughter of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, by Anne Browne, born before the marriage of her parents. Complete Peerage, 2nd ed., vol. xii, pp. 458 n. and 462 n.

3 Lawes Resolutions, pp. 144–6.

1 Lawes Resolutions, p. 182.

2 Ibid., pp. 179–80.

3 Ibid., pp. 182–3.

4 See above, p. 30.

1 Lawes Resolutions, p. 206.

2 Ibid., pp. 208–9.

3 Pipe Roll 3 John, pp. xv–xvi, 32.

1 Lawes Resolutions, pp. 331–2.

2 It should be noted that every woman had the right to appeal anyone she suspected of her husband’s death. The author was anxious to get in his account of the popular and beautiful rich widow.

1 The story of Frances Coke was worked out from the original documents by Laura Norsworthy, The Lady of Bleeding Heart Yard, London, 1935.

1 Memoirs of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, ed. C. H. Firth, London, 1905, p. 178.

2 Ibid., p. 156–7.

3 Ibid., p. 165.

4 The Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe, London, 1907, p. 16.

1 G. C. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, Kendal, 1922, p. 22.

1 The Diary of the Lady Anne Clifford, ed. V. Sackville-West, London, 1923, p. 62, under date 5 April 1617.

2

‘Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother,

Death; ’ere thou hast slain another,

Wise and fair and good as she,

Time shall throw a dart at Thee’.

—From an epitaph on her ascribed to Ben Jonson.

1 It so appears on the Gough map drawn in the fourteenth century and preserved in the Bodleian Library; see the Ordnance Survey reproduction.

2 The ‘great picture’ at Appleby Castle displaying the Lady Anne with her parents, brothers, husbands, and teachers is a representation of her life and was also used by Dr. Williamson in writing his book Lady Anne Clifford.

1 This diary is printed by Dr. Williamson, pp. 265–80.

1 Printed for R. Royston, London, 1677.