Abstract
AbstractThis article explores the distribution of women witnesses in a selection of English church courts between the mid-sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries, in order to assess the extent to which women's participation as witnesses in these jurisdictions might be characterized as a form of legal agency. It shows that women's participation was highly contingent on their marital status and between places and over time and was shaped by the matters in dispute as well as the gender of the litigants for whom they testified. Although poverty did not exclude women witnesses (higher proportions of female witnesses than male claimed to be poor or of limited means), women were more vulnerable than were men to discrediting strategies that cast doubt on their authority in court. Such findings show that the incorporative dimensions of state formation did not deliver new forms of agency to women but depended heavily upon patriarchal norms and constraints.
Highlights
In recent decades, historians of early modern England have constructed a relatively optimistic account of popular legal agency, emphasizing easy access to civil litigation and broad-based participation in the implementation of the criminal law
Rather than an index of acute antagonism, the unparalleled litigiousness that was a feature of the early modern period has been recast as a constructive and consensual means to maintain community harmony, as well as an “incorporative force” fostering state formation from the bottom up.[2]
This essay was drafted as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Justice: Britain and Ireland c. 1100–c. 1750 (AH/L013568/1). She is grateful to Garthine Walker and other members of the project team, and participants at the Berkshire Conference for Women Historians, for their comments on earlier drafts. She is very grateful for the generosity of Tim Stretton, who prepared the essay for publication while its author faced overwhelming personal circumstances
Summary
Men’s greater reliance on claims to “worth” couched in financial terms is demonstrated in table 3. When the monetary estimates of worth provided by female and male servants are compared, with the exception of the first quarter (1550–1574), the women were worse off than the men according to every measure, with a narrower range of sums cited and lower mean and median worth. Amy Louise Erickson, “Coverture and Capitalism,” History Workshop Journal 59, no. 1 (Spring 2005), 1–16, at 3–4
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