The late medieval court of Chancery has often been held to be a court that was particularly accessible to women. Married women, for example, such as Elizabeth the wife of Joce Lamanva (quoted above), could bring cases to Chancery in their own right, rather than having to be represented by their husbands, as the restrictions of common law did not apply. Petitioners would ask the Chancellor to provide redress for problems that could not be resolved fairly in another legal jurisdiction. If accepted into the court, the Chancellor (usually a bishop or archbishop in this period) would judge cases according to ‘conscience’, some contemporary notion of what was fair, rather than strict rules of evidence, making Chancery an early ‘equity’ court. Cases were begun by a complaint, which could be made orally, although our main source for how this court operated are the written bills that were submitted to it by lawyers, on behalf of petitioners. As the court did not make decisions based on legal precedents it did not have to store its records.

Why Married Women?

As a number of our contributors comment, particularly those writing on premodern Britain, there has been a tendency in the historiography on women and the law to see married women as hidden from view, obscured by their husbands in the legal records. It is this tendency, which did not fit well with our own experiences of medieval legal material, that we were reacting against when we decided to put together this volume of essays. It is our intention that, by offering detailed studies of legal material from pre-modern England alongside those from other parts of northwest Europe (Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Ghent, Sweden, Norway and Germany), we will gain a better sense of how, when, and where the legal principle of coverture - which designated the husband as his wife's legal representative and in control of her property - was applied and what effect this had on the lives of married women. Key threads running through the book pertain to married women's rights regarding the possession of moveable and immovable property, marital property at the dissolution of marriage, married women's capacity to act as agents of their husbands and households in transacting business, and married women's interactions with the courts. In what follows, we will justify our focus on pre-modern northwest Europe with reference to existing scholarship, as well as highlighting some of the findings of this collection of essays.

Fitzherbert's picture of a woman buying and selling at market seems unremarkable. Craig Muldrew comments that, ‘In any print or painting of marketplaces in the early modern period, women are always present’, while Amy Erickson adds, ‘In all of the illustrations that I have seen women actually predominate in the market both as buyers and as sellers.’ But what if we imagine a situation in which the goods that a wife wants to buy cost more than the goods that she has sold? Would anyone extend credit to this married woman? If so, who would be liable for the debt if she did not honour it? Would it matter if she bought luxuries rather than necessities, or if the goods were for her own trade?

The estates lists that Patterson refers to have no doubt been crucial in sustaining the scholarly view that medieval society conceptualized medieval men and women differently. In a recent book on medieval women, Henrietta Leyser states that ‘Medieval women were classified according to their sexual status: men might be thought of collectively as knights, merchants, crusaders; women were virgins, wives or widows.’ The model offered is that men were defined by what they did, their occupation or function, whereas for women it was their marital, sexual or social status. Other scholars have pointed to similar categorizations in, for example, European law codes, sermons and tax returns. However, exceptions to such a general rule can always be found.

Texts classify people according to their own interests. In the records of infringements of the Statute of Labourers of 1351, for example, women are often categorized by occupation, an alternative model perhaps. Such models do not exist in isolation, though, but interact and conflict. This article will consider closely three late fourteenth century English texts which demonstrate such co-existence, interplay and competition. The contention is that not only was there an overlap between a woman’s marital/sexual/social statuses, as intimated in the quotations from Patterson and Leyser, but that occupational and economic statuses were also important to women’s identities, especially their work ones. However, the extent varies according to the specific textual and historical contexts.

The aftermath of the Black Death is an appropriate testing ground for thinking about the conceptualization of women in relation to work. First, it has been argued that the profound demographic and economic effects of successive plagues both speeded up changes in social ordering and led to moves to shore up ‘traditional society’.