Within the context of debates about law and the family, this brief study helps to show how two or three generations of Temples interacted with existing and changing rules of inheritance. Lloyd Bonfield, Maria Lynn Cioni, Amy Erickson, Elaine Spring and Tim Stretton have all, from differing viewpoints, discussed the ways in which these rules were made manifest in marriage settlements, and afforded or did not afford women protection. Cioni, Stretton and Erickson have discussed the extent to which the church courts and the equity courts offered women quarter when the Common Law courts denied it. Their emphasis has been upon women of the middling sort. Elaine Spring's argument is that ultimately the rules were changed in favour of entailing an estate and replacing the old dower rights with the provision of a less generous jointure in order to protect male primogeniture and to limit the resources diverted to support widows and younger children from the entailed estate. The movement away from common law rights of widows to a dower, amounting to a third of her husband's land and chattels, to a system of jointure acted to the detriment of married and widowed women. Her work suffers, however, from being almost entirely based upon close reading of legislation, and heavy reliance upon the mass data collected by previous historians.

Much of this book indirectly considers the position and roles of women within the family. The ensuing brief study considers how the large Temple family generally treated its womenfolk under the very law of inheritance studied by Spring and Erickson. This provides context for the discussion in Part Two of the way in which Lady Hester Temple sought to protect herself in the changing environment of her growing family, as her sons married and new provision was made for them and their wives. Typically Temple marriage agreements are represented in the archive by indented deeds purchasing jointures in the names of husband, wife and eldest son, after the son's marriage, and of books of entail drawn up after a marriage. John Temple joined with not only his wife Susan but also with his son and heir Thomas to purchase various lands; Susan was to enjoy these during her widowhood but the remainder went to her eldest son Thomas.