Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Lists of maps and figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- Notes on the text
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Women, legal rights and law courts
- 3 Female litigants and the culture of litigation
- 4 The Court of Requests
- 5 Unmarried women and widows
- 6 Married women in Requests
- 7 Freebench, custom and equity
- 8 Pleading strategies in Requests
- 9 Women waging law
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History
8 - Pleading strategies in Requests
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Lists of maps and figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- Notes on the text
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Women, legal rights and law courts
- 3 Female litigants and the culture of litigation
- 4 The Court of Requests
- 5 Unmarried women and widows
- 6 Married women in Requests
- 7 Freebench, custom and equity
- 8 Pleading strategies in Requests
- 9 Women waging law
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History
Summary
A Lawyer hath both authority and law to tell any lye, that his Clyent will informe
Barnabe Rich, My Ladies Looking Glasse (1616)In his 1975 study of the equity side of Exchequer, W.H. Bryson wrote in glowing terms about the advantages of using court records as an historical source: ‘The records are free from ignorances, negligences, prejudices, opinions, and historians' purposes. They were made and kept for reasons other than to aid the uses to which they shall now be put; this assures their impartiality as sources of historical description.’ Bryson's words may have relevance for institutional historians, but from the perspective of social and feminist historians it seems clear that litigant pleadings from central equity courts are not free from, but rather brim full of, ‘ignorances, negligences, prejudices and opinions’. The incomplete survival of records, and the fact that so many cases never proceeded beyond the initial stages of pleading, make it difficult to accurately determine even simple facts about the numbers of litigants who used different courts, the background of those litigants and the subjects of their actions. Yet even if archives were complete – if every case in a court had proceeded to a final decision and every document survived – historians interested in social relationships and attitudes would still face problems of interpretation: how best, for example, to classify cases when the grievances that set parties at odds could differ from the causes they brought to court?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England , pp. 178 - 215Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998