Abstract
The history of Parliament is almost always written as the history of men, and especially for the Middle Ages when women were so often excluded, formally or informally, from political institutions. Yet there was a long history during the later medieval period of women (like men) petitioning the Crown in Parliament for the redress of grievances. The best evidence for this comes from the first 7910 petitions in the National Archives series SC 8, whose parliamentary provenance is well established. Some 12% of this sample comprises petitions by women, acting either as femme sole (that is, independently) or in conjunction with husbands, as well as smaller numbers of petitions from female collectives (mainly houses of nuns). This book offers a sustained analysis of this material, set within a number of modern theoretical positions on medieval women, especially the question of women’s power and agency.
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Notes
- 1.
Richardson, ‘Parliament as Viewed through a Woman’s Eyes’.
- 2.
Maddicott, Origins of the English Parliament. For what follows, see also McKisack, Parliamentary Representation of the English Boroughs; Powell and Wallis, House of Lords; Fryde and Miller, eds, Historical Studies; Harriss, King, Parliament and Public Finance; Edwards, Second Century; Roskell, Clark and Rawcliffe, House of Commons; Dodd, Justice and Grace; and Bradford and McHardy, eds, Proctors for Parliament.
- 3.
See below, 10.
- 4.
Wilkinson, ‘Women in English Local Government’.
- 5.
A starting point is provided by Cooper and Gaunt, ‘Architecture and Politics’.
- 6.
Wedgwood, History of Parliament, 273.
- 7.
SC 8/105/5244.
- 8.
Rowena E. Archer, ‘“How ladies … who live on their manors ought to manage their households and estates”’. For coverture, see, most recently, Beattie, ‘Married Women, Contracts and Coverture’; Butler, ‘Discourse on the Nature of Coverture’; and Phipps, ‘Coverture and the Marital Partnership’.
- 9.
For the composition of local courts and their relationship to the parliamentary franchise, see Cam, Law-Finders and Law-Makers; Maddicott, ‘County Community’; and Maddicott, ‘Parliament and the Constituencies’.
- 10.
SC 8/9/421. For the resulting action see CCR, 1302–7, 305–6. See also another iteration of the point by the same petitioner in SC 8/328/E890.
- 11.
C 65/86, m. 3, printed in RP, IV, 270, and in PROME, X, 222. For Margaret Marshal, see Archer, ‘Estates and Finances of Margaret of Brotherton’.
- 12.
See, for example, Edwards, Second Century. For the ways in which parliament dealt with ‘common’ and ‘private’ petitions, see the extensive literature summarised in Dodd, Justice and Grace; and Ormrod, Killick and Bradford, eds, Early Common Petitions.
- 13.
Pronay and Taylor, eds, Parliamentary Texts, 88. There remains a debate as to the dating of the Modus, with some scholars still preferring the idea of composition in the late fourteenth century: see Pronay and Taylor, eds, Parliamentary Texts, 22–31; and Kerby-Fulton and Justice, ‘Reformist Intellectual Culture’.
- 14.
Musson, Medieval Law in Context, 207.
- 15.
Ormrod, Killick and Bradford, eds, Early Common Petitions, 209–12. For a further example, see the naming of three individuals (including one female) set to be advantaged by the statute De natis ultra mare of 1351: SR, I, 310.
- 16.
Myers, ‘Parliamentary Petitions’; Myers, ‘Observations’; and Dodd, Justice and Grace, 156–96.
- 17.
Dodd, Justice and Grace, 211–15; and Payling, ‘Women and Parliament’. Paul Brand has made two major analyses of private petitions in the reign of Edward I, but approaches the subject in a gender-neutral manner: Brand, ‘Petitions and Parliament’; and Brand, ‘Understanding Early Petitions’.
- 18.
SC 8/1/1-SC8/156/7768, and SC 8/314/E107-SC 8/316/E248. The second sub-set listed here comprises an original file of petitions submitted in Parliament in 1302. For the series in general, see Index of Ancient Petitions, 2–11. We must be cautious about assuming that absolutely every petition in this sequence has a parliamentary provenance. See, for example, SC 8/243/12118, which records the submission by Isabel Abel of Tamworth of a total of seven ‘bills’ to Edward III on 18 February, 26 March and 2 April [1342]. Six of these petitions survive, four of them in the ‘Parliamentary Petitions’ section of the Ancient Petitions: SC 8/88/4380; SC 8/88/4381; SC 8/88/4382; SC 8/88/4383; SC 8/247/12344; and SC 8/247/12345. The petitions are datable to 1342 on the basis that at least some of them were enclosed with C 81/283/14706, dated 7 May 1342. No Parliament was held in 1342, though a Great Council was summoned on 25 February for 8 April, and then prorogued on 15 March: Fryde, Greenway, Porter and Roy, eds, Handbook of British Chronology, 560. It should also be noted that the ‘Parliamentary Petitions’ section of the Ancient Petitions, like other sections in the series, includes some documents that are not petitions (usually supporting documentation provided at the time of submission or gathered by the Crown when the petition was under consideration) and occasionally has more than one petition in a sub-set of a single entry, the sub-set using an alphabetical sequence after the main petition number. All of this means that 7910 is a close estimate, rather than the actual number, of the petitions in the ‘Parliamentary Petitions’ section.
- 19.
Dodd, ‘Parliamentary Petitions?’. There is no particular reason to believe that the limited sequence primarily employed in the present analysis is not typical of women’s parliamentary petitions more generally, except perhaps in that the number of instances from Gascon petitioners appears unusually small. This may be because, at least on some occasions, Gascon petitions were determined as a separate group left for further consideration at the end of a parliamentary assembly and were then subject to separate filing: see PROME, IV, 276, 324. More generally for Gascon petitions, see Guilhem Pépin, ‘Petitions from Gascony’; and Dodd, ‘Petitions from the King’s Dominions’. With regard to the English Crown’s lordship of Ireland, Linda Mitchell has recently pointed out that women resident in England with landed property in Ireland actively used petitions to the king in the English Parliament as a means of advancing their causes in Ireland: Mitchell, ‘Land(ladies) from a Distance’, 240.
- 20.
For the likelihood that women were more numerous than men at least in urban areas during the late Middle Ages, see Goldberg, ‘Urban Identity’.
- 21.
The question of women’s agency and how it can be deconstructed from legal records is developed further below, 129–132. See the recent overview of the debate by Stretton, ‘Women’.
- 22.
For the rest of this paragraph, see Dodd, Justice and Grace; Dodd, ‘Writing Wrongs’; Dodd and Petit-Renaud, ‘Grace and Favour’; and Killick, ‘Treason, Felony and Lollardy’.
- 23.
For the growth of the jurisdiction of the Chancery, see Tucker, ‘Early History of the Court of Chancery’; Haskett, ‘Conscience, Justice and Authority’; Klinck, Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery; and Makowski, ‘Deus est procurator fatuorum’.
- 24.
Beattie, Medieval Single Women, 24–31, 124–43.
- 25.
See the case of Princess Isabella, daughter of Edward III, in 1378 (56); and that of Alice Perrers, as referred to by her second husband, William Windsor, in the same Parliament (57).
- 26.
Among a large literature, see Barron and Sutton, eds, Medieval London Widows; Mate, Daughters, Wives and Widows; Friedrichs, ‘The Remarriage of Elite Widows in the Later Middle Ages’, Florilegium 23 (2006): 69–83; Loengard, ‘“Which may be said to be her own”’; Archer, ‘War Widows’; and Mitchell, ‘Joan de Valence’. The Index of Ancient Petitions is deceptive on the marital status of women, in many cases rendering ‘widow of’ as ‘wife of’. In such cases I have checked the originals in order to establish to which category the relevant petition really belongs. In a few cases, in fact, it emerges that a woman might describe herself as ‘wife of’ a named man, whereas the substance of the petition makes it clear that the husband was, indeed, dead: see, for example, SC 8/34/1677; SC 8/69/3432; and SC 8/114/5700.
- 27.
See, for example, Butler, ‘Law as a Weapon’; Makowski, ‘Deus est procurator fatuorum’; Beattie, ‘“Your Oratrice”’; and Beattie, ‘Married Women, Contracts and Coverture’.
- 28.
Haskett, ‘Medieval English Court of Chancery’.
- 29.
Hawkes, ‘“[S]he will … protect and defend her rights boldly by law and reason …”’, 153.
- 30.
Beattie, ‘Piece of the Puzzle’.
- 31.
Dodd, Justice and Grace, 52–60, 164–9, 232–41.
- 32.
For the volume and significance of private petitions submitted to Parliament after the mid-fourteenth century, see Dodd, ‘Hidden Presence’; and Dodd, Justice and Grace, 116–24, 211–15. For women seeking direct access to the king’s person via petitions, see Lacey, ‘Petitioners for Royal Pardon’, 59–60.
- 33.
Benz St John, Three Medieval Queens, 9, drawing especially on Maurer, Margaret of Anjou, 5. See also, in general, Capp, ‘Separate Domains?’; Coss, The Lady in Medieval England; Wheeler and Parsons, eds, Eleanor of Aquitaine; and Laynesmith, Last Medieval Queens. For a useful study of widows and the law set within theoretical approaches to power and status, see Mitchell, ‘The Lady is a Lord’.
- 34.
Goldberg, ‘Fiction in the Archives’; Collette, Performing Polity; Miriam Müller, ‘Peasant Women, Agency and Status’; Goldberg, ‘Echoes, Whispers, Ventriloquisms’; and Kane, ‘Women, Memory and Agency’.
- 35.
Kaeuper, War, Justice, and Public Order, 134–83, 244, 264.
- 36.
Crawford, Letters of Medieval Women; Watt, ed., The Paston Women; Richardson, ‘“A masterful woman”’; Daybell, Women Letter-Writers; Daybell, ‘Letters’; and Daybell and Gordon, eds, Women and Epistolary.
- 37.
See, for example, among an extensive literature, Goldberg, ‘The Public and the Private’.
- 38.
McNamara and Wemple, ‘Medieval Women’.
- 39.
Erler and Kowaleski, eds, Women and Power in the Middle Ages; and Erler and Kowaleski, eds, Gendering the Master Narrative.
- 40.
Erler and Kowaleski, ‘Introduction’ (quote at 2).
- 41.
Carpenter and MacLean, eds, Power of the Weak.
- 42.
Bennett, History Matters (quotes at 2, 3). For a more recent contribution to theoretical gender studies of the Middle Ages, see Skinner, Studying Gender.
- 43.
Tanner, ed., Medieval Elite Women.
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Ormrod, W.M. (2020). Introduction: Debates and Sources. In: Women and Parliament in Later Medieval England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45220-9_1
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