Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-05T13:59:41.208Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Women, Legal Records, and the Problem of the Lawyer's Hand

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2019

Tim Stretton
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Court records provide invaluable evidence of the existence of laws and notional rights affecting women and how these were (or were not) enforced and exercised. Many documents provide tantalizing glimpses of female thinking and echoes of female voices, but these remain elusive because of the influence of the lawyers, scribes, and officials who helped shape and record them. This article examines the multiple difficulties that researchers face in distinguishing women's contributions from those of lawyers in legal records, and argues that the artificial nature of legal processes complicates conceptions of “authentic” female voices. It suggests ways to address methodological problems and concludes that focusing on multiple voices and processes of collaboration may bear more fruit than seeking to extract individual women's private thoughts and words.

Type
Original Manuscript
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 58 , Special Issue 4: Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Justice in Britain, 1300–1700 , October 2019 , pp. 684 - 700
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Hawkes, Emma, “‘[S]he Will … Protect and Defend her Rights Boldly by Law and Reason … ’: Women's Knowledge of Common Law and Equity Courts in Late Medieval England,” in Medieval Women and the Law, ed. James, Noël Menuge (Woodbridge, 2000), 145–61Google Scholar.

2 These are in addition to the gendered nature of law itself. Smart, Carol, “The Woman of Legal Discourse,” Social and Legal Studies 1, no. 1 (March 1992): 29–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Ginzburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms (London, 1980)Google Scholar; Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, Montaillou (New York, 1978)Google Scholar.

4 Davis, Natalie Zemon, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, 1990)Google Scholar.

5 Beattie, Cordelia, “Single Women, Work, and Family: The Chancery Dispute of Jane Wynde and Margaret Clerk,” in Voices from the Bench: The Narratives of Lesser Folk in Medieval Trials, ed. Goodich, Michael (New York, 2006), 177–202Google Scholar.

6 Chartier, Roger, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representation (Cambridge, 1988), 43Google Scholar.

7 Kane, Bronach and Williamson, Fiona, introduction to Women, Agency and the Law, 1300–1700, ed. Kane, and Williamson, (London, 2013), 1–16Google Scholar, at 2–3.

8 Kane and Williamson, introduction to Women, Agency and the Law, 1300–1700, 2.

9 Johnson, Tom, “The Preconstruction of Witness Testimony: Law and Social Discourse in England before the Reformation,” Law and History Review 32, no. 2 (February 2014): 127–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 127, 146.

10 Gertz, Genelle, Heresy Trials and English Women Writers, 1400–1670 (Cambridge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bodden, M. C., Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England: Speaking as a Woman (New York, 2011), 57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bodden, M. C., “Women, Legal Discourse, Interpretative Maneuvers and Negotiating Safety,” Imago Temporis, no. 8 (2014): 297–326Google Scholar.

11 Bailey, Joanne, “Voices in Court: Lawyers or Litigants,” Historical Research 74, no. 186 (November 2001): 392–408CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 393.

12 Dolan, Frances, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia, 2013), 2, 116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Dolan, True Relations, 18, 111–53.

14 Dolan, 153.

15 Shagan, Ethan, review of True Relations in Shakespeare Studies, no. 43 (2015): 290–94Google Scholar, at 291.

16 Stretton, Tim, “Social Historians and the Records of Litigation,” in Fact, Fiction and Forensic Evidence: The Potential of Judicial Sources for Historical Research in the Early Modern Period, ed. Sogner, Sølvi (Oslo, 1997), 15–34Google Scholar.

17 James, Susan E., Women's Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603: Authority, Influence and Material Culture (Burlington, 2015)Google Scholar.

18 Hannah Leah Crummé and Amanda Bevan, “Shakespeare's Daughters and Female Inheritance,” National Archives (blog), 11 March 2016, http://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/blog/shakespeares-daughters-female-inheritance/.

19 Bevan, Amanda and Foster, David, “Shakespeare's Original Will: A Re-Reading, and a Reflection on Interdisciplinary Research within Archives,” Archives: Journal of the British Records Association 51, nos. 132/33 (April 2016): 8–34Google Scholar.

20 Poole, Eric, “West's Symboleography: An Elizabethan Formulary,” in Law and Social Change in British History: Papers Presented to the Bristol Legal History Conference, 14–17 July 1981, ed. Guy, J. A. and Beale, H. G. (London, 1984), 97–106Google Scholar, at 102.

21 The National Archives (hereafter TNA), STAC 8/61/33, Bate v. Bate.

22 Churches, Christine, “‘The Most Unconvincing Testimony’: The Genesis and Historical Usefulness of the Country Depositions in Chancery,” Seventeenth Century 11, no. 2 (September 1996): 209–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Churches, Christine, “False Friends, Spiteful Enemies: A Community at Law in Early Modern England,” Historical Research 71, no. 174 (February 1998): 52–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bailey, “Voices in Court.”

23 Beattie, Cordelia, “A Piece of the Puzzle: Women and Law as Viewed from the Late Medieval Court Chancery,” Journal of British Studies 58, no. 4 (October 2019), 751–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Stretton, Tim, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1998), 113–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 TNA, REQ 1/11, 35–36; TNA, REQ 1/18, 405–6.

26 Astarita, Tommaso, Village Justice: Community, Family, and Popular Culture in Early Modern Italy (Baltimore, 1999), xiii–xxii at xxiGoogle Scholar.

27 Fortescue, John, A Learned Commendation of the Politique Lawes of England (London, 1567)Google Scholar, fols. 42v–46r; see also Churches, “Most Unconvincing Testimony,” 209, 218–19.

28 Taylor, Hillary, “The Price of the Poor's Words: Social Relations and the Economics of Deposing for One's ‘Betters’ in Early Modern England,” Economic History Review 72, no. 3 (August 2019): 828–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Falvey, Heather, “Relating Early Modern Depositions,” in Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500: Memory, Materiality and the Landscape, ed. Griffin, Carl J. and McDonagh, Briony (London, 2018), 81–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 95.

30 Daniel Lord Smail, “Witness Programs in Medieval Marseilles,” in Goodich, Voices from the Bench, 227–50, at 229.

31 Butler, Sara, The Language of Abuse: Marital Violence in Later Medieval England (Leiden, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 136; Churches, “Most Unconvincing Testimony,” 212–14.

32 Butler, Language of Abuse, 142.

33 Jeremy Goldberg, “Echoes, Whispers, Ventriloquisms: On Recovering Women's Voices from the Court of York in the Later Middle Ages,” in Kane and Williamson, Women, Agency and the Law, 1300–1700, 31–41, 169–71, at 36–37, 39.

34 Goldberg, “Echoes, Whispers, Ventriloquisms,” 34–35.

35 TNA, REQ 2/132/29, mm. 1, 2, 4, Smith v. Smith.

36 Jones, W. J., The Elizabethan Court of Chancery (Oxford, 1967), 242–44Google Scholar.

37 Falvey, “Relating Early Modern Depositions,” 99; Goldberg, “Echoes, Whispers, Ventriloquisms,” 37.

38 Bronach Kane, “Women, Memory and Agency in the Medieval English Church Courts,” in Kane and Williamson, Women, Agency and the Law, 43–44; Goldberg, “Echoes, Whispers, Ventriloquisms” 40.

39 Bailey, “Voices in Court,” 394–406; Churches, “Most Unconvincing Testimony.”

40 Bailey, “Voices in Court,” 406–7.

41 Beattie, “Single Women, Work, and Family” 18.

42 Smail, “Witness Programs in Medieval Marseilles,” 240–46.

43 Smail, Daniel Lord, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264–1423 (Ithaca, 2003)Google Scholar.

44 Shepard, Alexandra, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Hubbard, Eleanor, “Reading, Writing, and Initialing: Female Literacy in Early Modern London,” Journal of British Studies 54, no. 3 (July 2015): 553–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 Fox, Adam, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar; Fox, “Oral and Literate Culture in Early Modern England: Case Studies from Legal Records,” in Sogner, Fact, Fiction and Forensic Evidence, 35–52.

47 Wood, Andy, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Cordelia Beattie, “Your Oratrice: Women's Petitions to the Late Medieval Court of Chancery,” in Kane and Williamson, Women, Agency and the Law, 1300–1700, 17–30, at 22.

49 Bailey, “Voices in Court,” 407.

50 Michael Goodich, introduction to Goodich, Voices from the Bench, 3.

51 Dolan, True Relations, 120.

52 See, for example, Kamali, Elizabeth Papp, “Law and Equity in a Medieval English Manor Court,” in Texts and Contexts in Legal History: Essays in Honor of Charles Donahue, ed. Witte, John Jr., McDougall, Sara, and di Robilant, Anna (Berkeley, 2016), 257–75Google Scholar.

53 Beattie, for example, provides transcriptions of the case she analyzes in “Your Oratrice,” 157.

54 Gowing, Laura, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996), 232–62Google Scholar.

55 Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England, 178–215; see also Meyer, Liam J., “‘Humblewise’: Deference and Complaint in the Court of Requests,” Journal of Early Modern Studies, no. 4 (2015): 261–85Google Scholar.

56 Dolan, True Relations, 145–48.

57 Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 3–4.

58 Shepard, Accounting for Oneself.

59 Ingram, Martin, “Law, Litigants and the Construction of ‘Honour’: Slander Suits in Early Modern England,” in The Moral World of the Law, ed. Coss, Peter (Cambridge, 2000), 134–60Google Scholar; Shepard, Alexandra, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003)Google Scholar; Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England, 192–94.

60 Bailey, Merridee, “Most Hevynesse and Sorowe: The Presence of Emotion the Late Medieval and Early Modern English Court of Chancery,” Law and History Review 37, no. 1 (February 2019): 1–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 TNA, C33/171, fols. 91v–92; Richard Cust, ed., The Papers of Sir Richard Grosvenor, 1st Bart. (1585–1645) (Stroud, 1996), ix–xxxiii at xi, xiii, xix.

62 Hunt, Arnold, “Recovering Speech Acts,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Hadfield, Andrew, Dimmock, Matthew, and Shinn, Abigail (Farnham, 2014), 13–30Google Scholar.

63 Goldberg, “Echoes, Whispers, Ventriloquisms” 40.

64 Dolan, True Relations, 118.

65 Smail, “Witness Programs in Medieval Marseilles,” 230.

66 Smail, 248.

67 TNA, REQ 2/234/61, m.1, Lloyd v. Lloyd; on the editing and amending of depositions, see Falvey, “Relating Early Modern Depositions,” 96–98.

68 Shapiro, Barbara J., A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (London, 2000)Google Scholar; Hutson, Lorna, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Gaskill, Malcolm, “Witchcraft and Evidence in Early Modern England,” Past and Present, no. 198 (February 2008): 33–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Bennett, Lyn, Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth, and Lanyer (Pittsburgh, 2004)Google Scholar.

71 Suzuki, Mihoku, “Daughters of Coke: Women's Legal Discourse in England, 1642–1689,” in Challenging Orthodoxies: The Social and Cultural Worlds of Early Modern Women, ed. Haude, Sigrun and Zook, Melinda S. (Farnham, 2014), 165–92Google Scholar.

72 Kane, “Women, Memory and Agency,” 45.

73 Anglo-American Legal Tradition, 2015, http://aalt.law.uh.edu.