Women in Early Modern Britain, 1450-1640

Christine Peters

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781350317291
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Although in its infancy, the history of women in Wales and Scotland before and during the Reformation is now thriving. A longer tradition of historical studies has shed light on many areas of women's experience in England. Drawing on this historiography, Christine Peters examines the significance of contrasting social, economic and religious conditions in shaping the lives of women in Britain.
Gender assumptions were broadly similar in England, Wales and Scotland, but female experience varied widely. Women in Early Modern Britain, 1450-1640 explores how this was influenced by various factors, including changes in clanship and inheritance, the employment of single women, the punishment of pregnant brides and scolds, the introduction of Protestantism, and the fusion of fairy beliefs with ideas of demonological witchcraft.
Peters' text is the first comparative survey and analysis of the diversity of women's lives in Britain during the early modern period.

Chapter 1:Marriage, Kinship and Inheritance

In early modern England the family was seen as the microcosm of the state. Following an Aristotelian tradition, the authority of the king depended on a corresponding recognition of the authority of the husband in the household. Monarchy, hierarchy and patriarchy, it was assumed, would stand and fall together. It was this analogy that determined that the murder of a husband would be viewed as more heinous than the murder of a wife. The former counted as petty treason, whilst the latter carried a lesser penalty as murder but both offences were considered to be offences against the king. In Scotland, and to a much lesser extent in Wales by this period, such acts were offences not against the king but against the kin. Where kin structures prevailed and bloodshed was dealt with according to the rules of feud, the idea of the family as a petty monarchy could have much less resonance, and wives retained much stronger ties with their natal kin. Scottish and Welsh women kept their family names upon marriage not as a gesture of independence, but as an indication of their less than complete absorption into the kindred, or ‘surname’, of their spouse.

As these contrasts suggest, the distinctive nature of the family and marriage in the various parts of Britain in this period was shaped by the competing claims of the kin and the state. The gradual advance of the state at the expense of the kin, manifested primarily in policies of anglicisation or lowlandisation, had important repercussions for gender as well as for governance. Women’s experiences in England, Scotland and Wales in this period were far from unvaried or unchanging, but it is important to note that practice did not converge inexorably towards an English model, even when acts of state prescribed it: the Welsh ‘Act of Union’ (1536) theoretically replaced native Welsh law with the law of England, but social pressures meant that marriage practices and property rights were less affected than the lawmakers intended.

The Church also had less ability to impose its practices on lay society in this period than one might expect. In many areas of Britain, especially at the beginning of our period, the practice of solemnised church wedding could not be taken for granted. In Scotland trial marriages may have been the norm in Highland areas and not unknown elsewhere. The easy dissolution of unions and the relative respectability of concubinage was a characteristic feature of Welsh society and extended to the clergy, many of whom kept concubines openly. In England, the situation was ostensibly more under ecclesiastical control, despite Lollard criticisms of liturgical rites, but the practice of spousals, which could make a valid marriage outside the Church, and the need for a godly campaign to discourage bridal pregnancy, suggests that the influence of the Church was incomplete.

Given this diversity in marriage formation, it is hardly surprising that there was similar variety in the freedom involved in choosing a marriage partner, even if in this case social status may have been more important than geography. It seems likely that strategies of marriage alliance amongst the elite of Scottish clans would have more in common with those deployed by the nobility and gentry elsewhere in Britain for whom concerns for the ‘house’ were similarly predominant than with those of the lower social orders.

However, historians of Scotland maintain that in a clan society characterised by feuding and the making of bonds of manrent, marriage was in fact the weakest form of alliance. More generally, differences in landholding would seem to affect the importance of women as family pawns in a marriage market. Most obviously, the fact that Welshwomen’s fortunes were in goods, not land, meant that they would not be sought after as attractive landed heiresses. The commercialisation of Scottish clanship may have, perhaps paradoxically if this is seen as modernisation, increased the importance of marriage alliances. At the lower social level, attempts by local authorities to prevent pauper marriage had greater resonance in England where the poor law system was more developed.

Similar contrasts can be suggested in the possibility in this period of women actually choosing not to marry at all. Estimates of the proportion remaining single in Scotland and Wales are not available, but by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as much as one-fifth of the population of England did not marry. In explaining these patterns, economic structures must be important, especially the availability of work in service or the rare possibility of lucrative female employment, but these need to be balanced against the strong opinion that the single woman, even if not a whore, damaged the economic well-being of honest married couples and their children.

Finally, for those who did marry, legal structures, the possibility of their circumvention, and social expectations, shaped women’s experience. They determined whether a wife could be expected to make a will disposing of those goods that would come to her on her husband’s death whilst still under couverture, whether it was socially acceptable for a Welsh woman to pursue a claim for English dower in addition to her traditional share of the marriage goods, and whether wives had an effective right to their paraphernalia, their personal clothing and jewellery. Although, as the author of The Law’s Resolution of Women’s Rights (1632) maintained, all women could be considered as either married or to be married, the experience of what it meant for women to be married differed greatly in the various parts of Britain and was moulded by economic, legal and attitudinal developments during the two centuries under consideration here.

Marriage as an institution seems to have been weakest in Scotland, although historians, such as Anton, have argued that the assertion that trial marriages of a year and a day prevailed in Scotland and that husbands were able to put their wives away at will is a slur on Scottish practice. In his view, this misinterpretation arises from a modern misunderstanding of the practice of handfasting (a form of betrothal) common throughout Britain.¹ However, although it is possible that such practices may subsequently have encouraged a strong tradition of handfast marriage, the practice of trial marriage is not simply a figment of the modern historian’s lazy imagination. Martin Martin in his ‘Description of the Western Isles of Scotland’ (c.1695) maintained that

It was an ancient custom in the islands that a man should take a maid to his wife, and keep her the space of a year without marrying her; and if she pleased him all the while, he married her at the end of the year, and legitimised these children; but if he did not love her, he returned her to her parents and her portion (i.e. tocher) also; and if there happened to be any children they were kept by the father: but this unreasonable custom was long ago brought into disuse.²

The accuracy of this description, at least for parts of the Highlands, in the early seventeenth century, and presumably before this, is supported by a clause in the ‘Statutes of Iona’, which were agreed between the Crown and Highland chieftains in 1609. The first article declared that ‘marriages contracted for a certain number of years’ should be ‘proscribed and the offenders should be considered, reputed and punished as fornicators’.³ It is unlikely that this provision had much immediate impact, and even after the reissue and amplification of the ‘Statutes’ in 1616 it may have remained a dead letter, but it is of greater interest as a description of prevailing practice than of effective reform. However, since the ‘Statutes’ mainly aspired to bring the Highland areas of Scotland more into line with the Lowlands, it is possible that by this date the practice of temporary marriage was no longer widespread in the Lowlands. Although mediaeval and early modern historians alike have correctly warned against assuming the existence of a sharp Highland/Lowland division, awareness of such differences was increasing, especially after the Union of Crowns (1603). There was also a realisation of diversity within the Highlands. As James VI recognised in his Basilikon Doron, and in his agreement of the ‘Statutes of Iona’ with chieftains from the Western Isles, the Isles and the western seaboard were more tenacious in maintaining traditional practices.⁴

The continued adherence to such marriage practices was due to the strength of Gaelic traditions and their compatibility with the clan system, but it was also assisted by the weakness of the Church in some areas, even in the early seventeenth century. When the Rev. Farquhar Macrae was invited to preach the gospel in Lewis by Kenneth Mackenzie, Lord Kintail in 1610, he found that many of the inhabitants were ignorant of religion and that he had to baptise everyone under 40 years of age, and to marry ‘a vast number who lived there together as man and wife, thereby to legitimate their children, and to abolish the barbarous custom that prevailed, of putting away their wives upon the least discord’.⁵ Yet it would be mistaken to portray the Highlands, or even the Isles, as being outside the purview of official religion whether catholic or protestant. Rather, a pragmatic attitude to religion and marriage was adopted. Cornelius Ward, one of the Franciscan missionaries working in Kintyre in 1624–25, told his superiors that the success of the catholic mission depended on his being able to dispense from matrimonial impediments. Faced with a situation in which the local minister granted divorces for adultery and allowed such couples to enter new marriages, catholic missionaries could not compete on equal terms.⁶

Pragmatism had also been the feature of marriage alliances in an earlier period before such decisions were complicated by the existence of rival religions each claiming to declare the word of God. Marriages performed as part of the settlement of feuds or to enhance the power of a clan frequently involved a breach of the rules of the Church on consanguinity or affinity. Such political desires did not, though, cause members of the fine (clan elite) to disregard the Church completely. Dispensations were sought from Rome, but it was recognised that the need to consolidate a political alliance might require the establishment of the marriage before papal authorisation arrived. The contract drawn up for the marriage of Donald Ewin Allanson with Agnes Grant, daughter of John the Grant, specified that the couple were to be married in the face of holy kirk, but, if the dispensation had not arrived by 15 days after Martinmas, Agnes’s father was ‘bound and obliged to cause his daughter Agnes Grant and the said Donald to be handfast and put together for marriage to be completed’.⁷ Such solutions were politically understandable, especially considering the lengthy delays that could arise in gaining an answer from Rome, and the expectation that most requests would eventually be answered favourably. Apart from the question of the marriage being within the prohibited degrees, the replacement handfasting ceremony created a marriage that was valid in the eyes of the Church, even if no cleric was present: a valid marriage only required the exchange of words of consent in the present tense by the couple; and consent expressed in the future tense could be turned into a valid marriage by subsequent sexual intercourse. It was this position that rendered the attempts of the Church to bring all marriages within an ecclesiastical framework intrinsically weak.

The Church could live reasonably comfortably with marriages that anticipated the arrival of a dispensation, but trial or temporary marriage presented far greater doctrinal problems. Catholics, and to a lesser extent protestants, took from scripture the view that marriages created by God could not be pulled asunder by men on the excuse of incompatibility. However, the voicing of such concern is hard to detect. This silence might suggest that the practice was, in fact, rare, but, as we have seen, this involves accusing Martin Martin of indulging in fantasy and fiction. It is more likely that the practice was too integral a part of Gaelic custom for a challenge to it to seem very worthwhile.

A comparison with Wales tends to lend support to this conclusion. Oddly perhaps, considering the more lasting vitality of clan structures there, Scotland lacks the detailed legal prescription of traditional practices concerning such fundamental matters as marriage and settlement of the feud, which survives for Wales. Classic Welsh law exists in thirteenth-century compilations, and thus only partly reflects Welsh practice in the period under discussion, but it was not completely abolished until the ‘Acts of Union’ in the reign of Henry VIII, and may have continued to shape expectations and practice after this date.

Welsh law does not offer a clear case of year and a day trial marriage as described by Martin, but it does draw a clear distinction between the status of the wife in the first seven years of marriage and that thereafter, and suggests that marriages could be dissolved easily. For the first seven years the wife was not considered to be fully married, and had no equal stake in her husband’s moveable goods. If the marriage came to an end during the first seven years through no fault of the wife, she was entitled to agweddi, a payment calculated according to the status of her father, not of her husband. Interpreted by some as a security for the wife against desertion,⁸ this arrangement is, perhaps more accurately, seen as a means of forcing the woman to live honestly and to avoid all suspicion of unchastity, whilst giving the husband the possibility of renouncing his wife at whim, even if at a small cost. After seven years, the woman was considered to be ‘married’ and to have her own share of the marital property. Separation thereafter cost the husband half of his moveable goods whatever the cause. Thus, although the Welsh system was not strictly one of trial marriage, it could come quite close to it. In later mediaeval marriage contracts marital separation with the division of goods in the usual way (modo debito) was envisaged as a distinct possibility.⁹ The flexibility of Welsh marriage practice was also strengthened by a highly tolerant attitude towards illegitimacy, which was given legal force by the custom of cynnwys which allowed sons born out of wedlock to be legitimised by their fathers and to inherit.

Scottish practice is unlikely to have corresponded to these Welsh provisions exactly, any more than it did to those in Gaelic Ireland, an area with which there were closer economic and cultural contacts.¹⁰ But in all three areas, recognition of illegitimate succession went hand in hand with a system that was more favourable towards marital separation than was the case in England. Moreover, this system not only incorporated the illegitimate son into the family, it could also render the distinction between wife and concubine almost imperceptible. When Lewis David ap Ieuan Lloyd of Llanfihangel Genau’r Glyn in West Wales made his will in 1612, he bequeathed to ‘Catherine verch Gruffyth ap Ieuan Bedo my concubine a third of all my goods and chattels, and likewise the third part of all my household stuff’. In doing so, he ensured that his concubine was to be treated exactly as Welsh law would have prescribed if she had been his wife. Lewis David also left other legacies to his legitimate and illegitimate children, making it clear that he had previously been married but had seen no need to ask his concubine, Catherine, to become his wife.¹¹ However, men whose wives were still alive could be less content with such solutions and be prepared to risk ecclesiastical censure for bigamy in order to have their concubine publicly recognised as their wife. In 1447, for example, Ieuan ap Gwilym Goch of New Radnor, a married man, was presented for the clandestine marriage he contracted with his mistress Duthegy in Weobley church.¹²

In Wales pressures to remain unmarried were, according to an anonymous writer at the end of the sixteenth century, at least partly economic. He bemoaned the fact that it was customary for every man and woman to pay a tenth of their goods to the curate performing their marriage ceremony, or to come to some other settlement, but a fine of only 2s per year was demanded of adulterers and cohabiters. The conclusion seemed obvious: this disparity ‘causes matrimony to be little set by and much refused’.¹³ Like the fines and ‘cradle crowns’ paid by Welsh clerics for their concubines and children, the Church was effectively licensing what it was supposed to define as fornication. However, to view such decisions as merely the outcome of a fine economic calculation is probably misleading. The paradox in Wales was that, alongside a tolera...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Marriage, Kinship and Inheritance
• Chapter 2: Work and the Household Economy
• Chapter 3: Disorderly Women
• Chapter 4: Witchcraft, the Devil and the Elfin Queen
• Chapter 5: Female Piety and Religious Change
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Glossary
• Index