Normal women, p.11
Normal Women, page 11
It is too simple, and too optimistic, to talk about a ‘golden age’ for women. But in the years after the plague had killed so many and women’s riots had broken down the feudal restrictions, equal opportunities were there to be had for the surviving men and women. Entrepreneurial women, married and single, seized their chances. Large numbers of them entered training, professions and business in London in 1400–25.65 But by 1450 the economy was deteriorating, markets were contracting and women were squeezed out of the jobs they had entered.66 If there ever was a ‘golden age’ for some women, in some trades, in some areas – for sure it didn’t last very long.
Pushback
Just a generation after the plague came a pushback against all workers, men and women, by landowners and by employers who introduced the first laws on labour, to force wages back down and create a pay gap between men and women workers. The 1388 Statute of Labour ruled that men were to be paid more than women: not an enormous pay gap – only a penny a month – but a sign of things to come.67 A ploughwoman’s wages were legally capped at 1 shilling a year less than those of a ploughman.68 Some other trades had their own sex differential written into law in order to underpay women. The landowning lawmakers saw they would reduce their wage bill by cutting women’s wages and that men would not protest.
New laws were passed to prevent labour mobility, to stop workers moving from their parishes to find work or better wages. Landowners were forbidden to accept new tenants and employers were forbidden to poach workers.
Single women found themselves specifically targeted by the new legislation. Women’s mowing, harvesting and sheep-shearing gangs were banned from travelling together and women forbidden to leave their villages unless they could show an address and work at another place.69 Parishes could refuse entry to poor single women or send them back home. With no escape from their home villages, women had to accept onerous leases and bad wages.
Respect towards women eroded as the memory of the plague years faded, and women now bore the brunt of community discipline, held to a higher standard of behaviour, summoned to church or manor courts for social and personal offences, under surveillance by the community – especially by other women. Women were named for sexual misconduct more often than men, and they were mostly accused by other women. Common insults against a woman accused her of promiscuity, while common insults to men accused them of bastardy – even when a man was being insulted, it was his mother’s reputation that was endangered. The insult ‘harlot’ was applied to men and women like the word ‘knave’ – but by the late fifteenth century it had come to mean only a sexually promiscuous woman.70 The crime of ‘scolding’ was a uniquely female offence.
In 1422, the men of Queenhythe, London, decided that a woman could not be trusted in a responsible position – the measuring of oysters – which was the job of John Ely, who had subcontracted his work to women ‘who know not how to do it; nor is it worship to this city that women should have such things in governance’.71
The failure of folk medicine to protect against the plague inspired a general doubt of the ability of practitioners, especially the women healers who worked in small communities where failures were particularly visible, deaths were grieved and blame was allocated swiftly. The religious reformation spreading from Europe into England named almost all traditional and folklore traditions – herbalism, spell-casting, predicting, fertility work, finding lost things and cunning work – as a heresy and a sin.72 As the status of traditional healing and cunning fell, it came to be seen as women’s work. Most of the accused witches in the 1300s had been men; but by the 1500s, 90 per cent of accused witches would be women.73 As suspicions and punishments grew more severe and the pay deteriorated, men deserted the craft, creating instead new guilds and professional associations of healers, herbalists and apothecaries with entry requirements that excluded women. A woman healer could not join the new men-only guilds: if she wanted to continue to practise, she had to take the risk of being named as a witch, without a professional association to defend her, as the new men-only associations boosted their reputations by slandering folklore remedies and women healers.
At the same time, increasing numbers of single women – initially without partners because of plague deaths, and now refusing to marry – became more visible in town and country. When financially successful in their own businesses, they were envied; when poor, they had to beg from increasingly unfriendly neighbours. Single women, especially those practising folklore traditions, begging and borrowing from their neighbours, quarrelling with their communities and threatening their enemies, became objects of suspicion, which from 1450 soured into a small ‘moral panic’ against women witches.
Marriage
For the upper classes, marriage remained a business contract, arranged by parents or guardians, the bride and bridegroom rarely consulted, though the church increasingly required their consent. Shared interests, respect, affection and even love might follow, but these were not the purpose of elite marriage. Union was an arrangement for family finances – even more necessary in the hard years after the plague, when an able unpaid woman manager was needed to run the business and produce an heir.
Wifely trustworthiness and ability might be rewarded by a husband’s affection. William de la Pole named his wife Alice Chaucer as the sole executor for his massive fortune on his death in 1450: ‘For above al the erthe my singular trust is moost in her’.74
Marriages for the children of tradesmen and artisans were also arranged by their parents for the benefit of the family fortune, often paired with fellow guildsmen to consolidate skills and fortunes, and to ensure that the incoming bride understood the business of which she would be a partner, might inherit as sole heir and must teach to her children.
Lower-class women were free to choose their partners. Parents or even the lord of the manor might insist on a wedding if a woman was pregnant, but most working women chose both their husband and the time of their wedding. After the Great Pestilence there was even less control over women who chose their husbands and saved their own dowries. Ramsey Abbey’s documents for the early 1400s show that a third of peasant women chose their own husband and paid their own fees for doing so, 22 per cent chose to marry a neighbour, but 28 per cent looked further afield and married townsmen.75
It was not possible for a working woman to get a bad marriage annulled and she could not divorce him. A minority ran away from husband, home, family and manor, to the towns that welcomed single women without enquiry. Some submitted to the ritual of ‘wife sale’, when a wife would be taken to market by her husband, sometimes with a halter around her neck or waist, and ‘sold’ by him. The most open sales saw the husband parade his wife around the market as he would show an animal and auction her to the highest bidder. More discreet sales took place with the wife holding a rope around her waist, perhaps partly hidden by her gown. The sale would be made by the passing of the rope for a coin or even a token to the new ‘husband’ and the agreement was sometimes sealed with a farewell drink. Some communities accepted this as a legal and valid end to the marriage, and some wives colluded in the ritual to end an unsatisfactory marriage. The ritual of the wife sale could also be used to demonstrate a second marriage, the husband performing the transfer of his wife to another man, perhaps to her choice of a future spouse.76 Some women were expelled from the marital home by an abusive husband. Wife sales date from 1073,77 are recorded in 1302,78 and become widely known, with increasingly disapproving comment, until the practice dies out in the nineteenth century.
Upper-class marriages could be ended at great expense by the church on very limited grounds. A few husbands managed to persuade and bribe the church to provide an annulment; very few wives were successful. Maud Clifford had her 1406 marriage to John Neville, Lord Latimer, annulled on the grounds of her husband’s impotence. In the eyes of the church law, an impotent man had not given his consent to marriage, since he could not consummate it.79
A more troubled family were the Cantilupes. Katherine Cantilupe (née Paynell), wife of Nicholas, won an annulment by claiming her husband had no male genitals at all. Nicholas imprisoned his wife and travelled to Avignon to appeal to the pope to reverse the decree of annulment. Katherine was released by her father, Sir Ralph Paynell of Casthorpe, and her husband died in Avignon, possibly poisoned by his own brother and heir, William. William inherited the title and estates after a royal inquiry but was himself later murdered, probably by his wife – who escaped charge.80
Many so-called abductions were runaway wives escaping with their lovers. About two-thirds of the women reported as kidnapped between 1100 and 1500 were probably escaping bad marriages.81 The courts recognised a distinction between genuine unwilling kidnap and an elopement – though the charge for both might be a ‘ravishing’. Defendants, the woman herself and jurors sometimes declared that the so-called abduction was, in fact, a consensual departure of a woman with her lover.
In January 1356, the prioress of Haliwell, in Middlesex, complained that Thomas Mott, a textile seller, along with three other drapers, a shearman and others unnamed, had broken into the priory, carried off Joan Coggeshale of London and arranged her marriage to her kidnapper, Mott. The young woman Joan had been placed with the nuns by her guardian, Henry le Galeys, after the prioress had agreed to protect his ward’s chastity. The loss of Joan Coggeshale meant the loss of her fees to the prioress and the loss of her inheritance to her guardian. When the case was heard at the court of the King’s Bench a few months later, only Thomas Mott was required to answer. Henry le Galeys claimed his ward had suffered ravishment and demanded £200 compensation for the damage to his charge. While the jury agreed that Mott was guilty – ‘Thomas abducted the same Joan with her assent and her permission . . . against the will of the same Henry’ – Joan’s readiness to leave with him diminished her value to her guardian. The jury judged that Thomas owed Henry 20 marks in compensation – two-thirds of the original claim.82
The abduction of Eleanor West from her mother’s care by an armed band led by Nicholas Clifton – her father Sir Thomas’s former friend, comrade and household retainer – was reported by Sir Thomas as a rape; but Eleanor may have been eloping with her chosen lover, with the consent of her mother. Sir Thomas’s interest is revealed in the new rape law that he demanded in 1382, which was not designed to free an abducted girl, nor return her to her parents, but only to ensure that she could not take her fortune to her husband. Eleanor’s outraged father was mainly concerned with her dowry.83 Her mother signalled her approval by leaving the young couple part of her fortune.84
The laws were designed to protect the parents of heiresses against the loss of their daughter’s fortune on her kidnap, to compensate them for the loss of her future value as a bride if she was restored to them, to compensate the woman herself for the loss of her virginity, and to prosecute a man for violently penetrating a woman without her consent, and set a punishment of maiming and death.85 A convicted rapist could escape the death sentence by pleading the benefit of clergy (that he was literate) or by marrying his victim if she consented to this compensation for the injury to her honour.86 Women who had been abducted or raped could also take a case for damages to the civil courts, which avoided a criminal trial for the rapist.87
There were about 1,198 ‘allegations of female seizure’ in the 400 years from 1100 to 1500, including abductions, elopements and rapes. Between 1334 and 1441, the crown pardoned 42 convicted rapists.88 Some rapists may have paid compensation privately.89 Women were well aware that it was almost impossible to make a correct complaint and get a prosecution and a verdict of guilt. They rarely made an official accusation.
Isabella Gronowessone and her two daughters took the law into their own hands in Shropshire in 1405 when they ambushed their rapist, Roger de Pulesdon, stole his horse, tied a cord around his neck and cut off his testicles. They were pardoned for the assault – which suggests that that they were attacking a known rapist, inflicting the traditional punishment of castration. It seems that the court accepted they had the right to take the law into their own hands.90
Single Women
Widowed, fatherless and in some cases made homeless by the Great Pestilence, the numbers of single women grew: both those expecting to marry in the future and those reluctant to marry or remarry. Almost a third of English women were single, far more than in Europe (where the figure was 10–20 per cent).91 Many of these women had no surviving families to support and were free to compete with male workers for jobs, training and education away from home.
For local authorities – the city fathers, village elders and lords of the manor – such single women could be a mixed blessing: a force for change and development but, away from the control of the lord of the manor and without a father or husband at home, potentially unruly. Female ability and female energy made single women a fearsome competition for men returning to work. New ideas from courtly love about women’s frigidity, and the rise of the cult of Mary, suggested that women could be seen as people with an independent will who might refuse male advances and choose their own futures. It became clear that if women were not held back by a sense of deference, held down by laws, held up to shame for boldness and held at home by a controlling husband, they might seize the new opportunities of the post-plague years.
Town authorities began to regulate all single women under the city codes for prostitutes, a move they justified by the overlap between single women and prostitutes. Neither answered to a resident man, often neither had a registered legal identity. Many single women exchanged sex for cash or food.92 A London priest paid a woman known as ‘Prone Joan, who lives with Spanish Nell’ four pence for sex at their first meeting, but the second time he only gave her cake and beer.93 By registering all single women as prostitutes, the town authorities could set them specific rules, including identifying dress codes, and could inspect them and their homes, register them, and charge them fees and taxes. Men, alarmed by independent-minded skilled women competing for work, explained their success by attributing it to sexual manipulation, linked single women to prostitutes and welcomed legislation against single women competition.
Prostitution
The Great Pestilence increased suspicion of prostitutes as vectors for disease. In England and Europe, urban zones were created for municipal brothels, supervised by town officials, for the profit of the town, the convenience of male clients and to isolate prostitutes from ordinary civic life. In their desire to create controlled sex areas, local authorities ignored how and when women offered sex. The local laws created an artificial divide between women whose chastity was supervised and those who were not. Amid ‘growing concern that prostitutes could corrupt good women’, the sisterhood of wives, widows, single women, daughters and prostitutes meeting in the sewing circle, the church guild and the parish charities was ended.94
New regulations to manage prostitutes made it illegal to beat prostitutes from the 1400s, or for brothel owners to make them do extra housework in the bath-house brothels. Women could not be held there against their will, and officials of the Bishop of London himself were licensed to inspect brothels.95 It was widely believed that single men needed prostitutes to serve their appetites for sex. English church guidance for priests instructed: ‘There are many that commit fornication with strumpets because they have no wives.’96
One Westminster brothel in 1409 was run by two women in partnership – Elizabeth Warren, the wife of a skinner, and her partner, Stephen Essex’s wife – and specialised in servicing the ‘monks, priests and others’. A poll of 1381 recorded seven married couples in Southwark working as ‘stewmongers’ – professional full-time brothel-keepers.97 In York, Margaret Philips was accused of procuring sex for five priests, and in 1424 Elizabeth Frewe and Joan Scryvener were both summoned for providing prostitutes for priests.98 One York woman, 40-year-old Isabella Wakefield, was repeatedly charged with prostitution, procuring and brothel-keeping. She was said to be in a long-term relationship with a priest, Peter Bryde, and it may be this relationship that caused her to be singled out for accusation.99 She was charged nine times with prostitution but always managed to find respectable citizens to speak for her and win her discharge: defended by a community.100
Women Loving Women
A rare medieval example of the recognition and celebration of a loving partnership between two women can be seen in the Church of St Nicholas and St Mary at Etchingham in East Sussex. This memorial brass plate shows two women together, standing as a married couple would be portrayed, facing each other, holding their hands as in prayer. Both have uncovered heads – a sign that they were unmarried. They are turned towards each other, looking into each other’s eyes in a far more intimate and warm pose than the usual marital brass memorials.101
The woman portrayed as very small, Elizabeth Etchingham, died first, in 1452, nearly 30 years before her friend Agnes Oxenbridge, who died in 1480. The brass memorial was made in a London workshop commissioned by the women’s brothers, who must have agreed that they be buried together in Elizabeth’s parish church. It may have been Agnes who said that she wanted to be buried beside her friend and memorialised with her, but the heirs to both women and the church authorities agreed. Clearly there was a bond, still profoundly felt nearly three decades after they had been parted by death, and respect for their love – both from their families and the local church – and no anxiety that this love had been carnal. Intimate touching between women was still defined as a sin, but the greatest concern was reserved for a woman who was assertively sexual. A contemporary poet described the sin: ‘Women who exercise their lust on other women and pursue them like men.’ In 1400, another theorist recommended that an ‘active’ or so-called ‘male’ partner in a female couple should be tried and condemned to death.102 But these were European complaints. In England, no such complaint was heard, and there are no records of women being executed for same-sex love.
