When Jack Goody put more than a thousand years into the few hundred pages of his Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, he could be allowed a little judgmental rhetoric. The documentation from early medieval Europe, unevenly distributed across very diverse situations, may indeed yield fewer examples of female than male predation, and perhaps more examples of female than male benefaction. But, since Goody wrote, historians have been increasingly alerted to complex relationships among individuals, property, and the church, which may extend far beyond the scope of individual documents, across several generations. Goody's female “givers” take on a new complexion in an environment in which donations can be more apparent than real, where a land transfer may prove no more than a social gesture. In such circumstances, identifying the originators of grants, let alone separating male and female action, becomes a delicate process. In the following article, female involvement is considered in the context of pre-Conquest wills, a body of documents that could be interpreted as classic evidence that female “givers” literally as well as morally stood in credit with the church.

The prominence of women in pre-Conquest wills has long been noted.

In May 1648 a group of Cornishmen who had rebelled against Parliament in the name of Charles I met with comprehensive defeat at “the Gear,” near Helford, and were then pursued back across the Lizard peninsula to the seacoast beyond. Surrender seemed inevitable, yet a number of the fugitives refused to submit. Instead they “joyned hand-in-hand” and hurled themselves bodily into the water: “a desperate expedient on that rocky coast,” as one later writer remarked. What can have driven them to such despair? No convincing answer can be given by looking at the events of 1648 alone. The rebels' despairing plunge can be understood only if it is seen as the final act in a long-running drama, a story of repeated popular protest in West Cornwall that spanned over 150 years. It is a story that has gone largely unrecognized by previous historians, most of whom have portrayed the Cornish revolts of 1497, 1548, 1549, 1642, and 1648 as isolated events rather than as part of a continuum. Yet it is a story that deserves to be told, not only because it provides a dramatic new explanation for many of the most important rebellions of the Tudor and Stuart periods, but also because it serves as an enduring monument to a forgotten people and their struggle to preserve a separate identity for themselves in the face of overwhelming odds.

A fierce sense of distinctiveness has always characterized the inhabitants of Cornwall.

Early one Sunday morning, in August 1839, “a very authoritative knock" on the door awoke the young Chartist William Aitken and his family. After a thorough search of his house for “revolutionary and seditious documents,” the chief constable and his men placed Aitken under arrest and marched him through the silent streets of Ashton-under-Lyne. Recalling his sense of distress and anguish some thirty years later, Aitken tried to find solace in the ultimate triumph of his principles, in his conviction that “the cause of liberty is eternal, and that the principles of democracy, which are now becoming universal, must be right and must in the end prevail.” This optimistic reaffirmation of his life's struggle for “bread and liberty” appeared in the fifth installment of his autobiography in the Ashton News, a Liberal newspaper. Unfortunately, the tone of quiet confidence and hope that pervaded his autobiography apparently masked a growing sense of private despair and ever deepening bouts of depression. Some two weeks before the publication of this installment, his wife, Mary, had found Aitken lying on the bedroom floor, “with a fearful gash in his throat.”

That many thousands of working men and women “thronged the streets” on the day of his funeral was hardly surprising. The son of a Scottish cordwainer and later sergeant-major, Aitken came from, as the Ashton News put it, “the people” and “knew intimately their feelings and their wishes, and could express what the many felt with fullness and point.” His own identification with the working class came through clearly in the title of his autobiography, “Remembrances and Struggles of A Working Man for Bread and Liberty.”