reviewed for H-Net/H-Law by Dana Y. Rabin, U of Michigan
Dana.Rabin@UM.CC.UMICH.EDU
_Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England_. Edited by Jenny
Kermode and Garthine Walker (Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1994) 216 pages.
This collection of articles edited by Jenny Kermode and Garthine
Walker is the first historical study dedicated exclusively to the
subject of women and the law in early modern England. The book is a
welcome and overdue addition to the literature on the history of law and
crime in England as it has developed in the past twenty years. The
essays challenge the assumptions of traditional legal scholarship that
excluded women from most legal history. This historiography
accepted at face value the prescriptions of the common law which restricted
female participation in the legal system. The articles in _Women, Crime
and the Courts in Early Modern England_ explore the involvement of women
in a broad range of legal situations revealing the extensive presence of
women in the legal system. The book fulfills the editors' promise to
"expand our perceptions of the legal process, of women's engagement with
it, and of the gendered attitudes of early modern England." (p. 8)
In their introduction Walker and Kermode attempt to place the study of
women and crime within the historiographical traditions of social
history, women's history, and legal history. Recent work on crime has
stressed the integral part played by law in English culture. According
to John Brewer and John Syles "it was a shibboleth that English law was the
birthright of every citizen who, unlike many of his European counterparts,
was subject not to the whim of a capricious individual but to a set of
prescriptions that bound all members of the polity."1) Until now, the
absence of a study which focused on women and their attitudes toward the
law, their relationship to it, and their participation in the legal
system certainly gave pause. In light of the neglect of half of
England's population, could the thesis still stand? _Women, Crime and
the Courts_ begins the re-evaluation of the place of the law in English
culture by examining the significance of the law in the lives of
English women and the influence of the presence of women on the legal system.
The essays can be grouped into four categories. Laura Gowing
("Language, power and the law: women's slander litigation in early
modern London") and Martin Ingram ("Scolding women cucked or washed": a
crisis in gender relations in early modern England?) explore the place of
'language litigation' in community relations. Using consistory court
records Gowing convincingly demonstrates how slander litigation was used
by women to fulfil their gendered role in the community as the negotiators
of aspects of reputation and honor. Ingram's study of legal action
against scolds offers a critique of David Underdown's contention that
scolding legislation reflected a contemporary obsession with scolds and
a crisis in gender relations.2) Ingram argues instead that the prosecution
of scolds was highly selective; he tries to explain those prosecutions
that did occur as manifestations of personal incompatibility and social
tension. In light of the volume's attention to issues of gender, this latter
argument is not as convincing as the rest of the article.
Garthine Walker's essay ("Women, theft and the world of stolen goods")
illustrates the differences between male and female patterns of crime.
Walker's research qualifies generalizations about women's involvement in
crime by explaining women's criminal activity in relation to the economic
and social realities of women's lives. Walker's contribution is the only
article in the volume that analyzes women's participation in felonious
crime other than witchcraft. Her careful reading of the sources points to
the need for further work on this subject which has been marginalized in
much of the crime literature.
The next two essays in the volume concern witchcraft accusations and
trials. In his contribution, ("Women, witchcraft and the legal process")
Jim Sharpe shows that although the vast majority of defendants in
witchcraft trials were women, women were also actively involved in the
processes of accusation and prosecution. Malcolm Gaskill's essay
("Witchcraft and power in early modern England: the case of Margaret
Moore") attempts to assess the witchcraft trials within the context of
early modern popular beliefs and mentalities. These articles are based
on careful scholarship and they raise very important questions about the
relationship between witchcraft and women; but neither explains why it
was women who were so involved in every aspect of the trials.
In the last two essays in the book Geoffrey Hudson and Tim Stretton
analyze less familiar aspects of women's participation in the legal
system. Using quarter sessions records Hudson ("Negotiating for blood
money: war widows and the courts in seventeenth-century England") examines
the strategies employed by war widows to secure the payment of their
state pensions. Stretton ("Women, custom and equity in the court of
requests") uses the records of the Court of Requests to reveal the shifting
definitions of women's, and especially widows', property rights. These
articles approach their sources with a sensitivity to women and gender
and yield correspondingly fruitful results.
The essays as a group are based on solid historical research combined
with a creative use of legal administrative sources. They reveal women's
knowledge of the law as well as their practical legal experience. The
authors employ an interesting and readable methodology which combines case
studies with more traditional social historical analysis. These essays
represent the beginning of the study of women and the law: there are
still more contexts and situations through which women experienced the
legal system and developed their attitudes to the law.
Dana Y. Rabin
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Contents
Notes on contributors vii
Acknowledgments viii
1. Introduction 1
Garthine Walker and Jenny Kermode
2. Language, power, and the law: women's slander litigation in early modern
London 26
Laura Gowing
3. "Scolding women cucked or washed": a crisis in gender relations in early
modern England? 48
Martin Ingram
4. Women, theft and the world of stolen goods 81
Garthine Walker
5. Women, witchcraft and the legal process 106
Jim Sharpe
6. Witchcraft and power in early modern England: the case of Margaret Moore
125
Malcolm Gaskill
7. Negotiating for blood money: war widows and the courts in
seventeenth-century England 146
Geoffrey L. Hudson
8. Women, custom and equity in the court of requests 170
Tim Stretton
Glossary 191
Bibliography 193
Subject Index 213
1)John Brewer and John Styles eds., An Ungovernable People: The English and
Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. (London, 1980), p. 14.
2)Underdown makes this argument in his article "The Taming of the Scold: the
Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England," in Order and
Disorder in Early Modern England, Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson eds.,
(Cambridge, 1985): 116-136.
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