Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England

An examination of different aspects of women's activities in litigation in sixteenth-century England.

Tim Stretton (Author)

9780521023252, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 November 2005

292 pages, 2 maps
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.436 kg

'… solid and well-researched … a fine book which will be of considerable interest to both legal and social historians.' H-Net Book Review

This book investigates the surprisingly large number of women who participated in the vast expansion of litigation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Making use of legal sources, literary texts, and the neglected records of the Court of Requests, it describes women's rights under different jurisdictions, considers attitudes to women going to court, and reveals how female litigants used the law, as well as fell victim to it. In the central courts of Westminster, maidservants sued their masters, widows sued their creditors, and in defiance of a barrage of theoretical prohibitions, wives sued their husbands. The law was undoubtedly discriminatory, but certain women pursued actively such rights as they possessed. Some appeared as angry plaintiffs, while others played upon their poverty and vulnerability. A special feature of this study is the attention it pays to the different language and tactics that distinguish women's pleadings from men's pleadings within a national equity court.

1. Introduction
2. Women, legal rights and law courts
3. Female litigants and the culture of litigation
4. The court of requests
5. Unmarried women and widows
6. Married women
7. Freebench, custom and equity
8. Pleading strategies in requests
9. Women waging law.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], British & Irish history [HBJD1]