Marriage

  Early marriage arranged by parents was still common for upper-class women. Heiresses, especially, were placed into their future husband’s families while they were still children. Margaret Plumpton was sent away from her home to live with her future husband’s family when she was four years old in 1464.346 Katherine Willoughby’s guardian, Charles Brandon, 35 years her senior, ordered her marriage at the age of 14 – to himself. She wrote: ‘I cannot tell what more unkindness one of us might work more wickedly, than to bring our children into so miserable a state, not to choose by their own liking, such as they must profess so strait a bond and so great a love to forever.’347

  Consent of the bride was meaningless when she was a little girl under the command of her parents. Mary Boyle’s father Richard, the Earl of Cork, married all his daughters to his financial advantage before they were old enough to refuse. But Mary (1625–78) defied her father when she was only 14: ‘I still continued to have an aversion to maridge, liveing so much at my ease that I was unwilling to Change my Condition, and neaver could bring my selfe to close with any ofred match but still begd my Father to reafuse all the most advantageous profer, though I was by him much prest to settell my selfe.’348 She went on to marry for love and became Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick.

  Mary Rich was an exception. Most young brides could not refuse; it was the task of the minister to observe that the child-bride consented, as her father handed her to her husband. That was enough.

  Some young couples chose each other and married, even against their parents’ wishes. Sixteen-year-old Maria Audley met Thomas Thynne at a family party under the supervision of her mother Lucy, Lady Audley, and they were married the same evening, and were put to bed together, fully clothed, so that the marriage should be considered as consummated. It was a year before Thomas’s parents, Joan and John Thynne, found out that their son was married and they tried to declare the union invalid, even taking the case to court.349 The story of the wedding and the feud may have been the inspiration for Romeo and Juliet.

  Some pregnant lower-class brides were induced to marry to provide a father to their child; some may have seen the church wedding as the confirmation of a marriage already agreed, under folk traditions: 25 per cent of Tudor brides were pregnant on their wedding day.350 In Norwich in the 1600s, fathers ‘sold’ the bride in a traditional ‘wife sale’ to an agreed bridegroom.351

  The law was unclear as to how violent a husband might be when disciplining, punishing or abusing his wife. Hate-filled advice books recommended violence: a 1671 pamphlet recommended that a husband should ‘Teach her manners with a crabtree cudgel’.352 A popular saying of 1591 ‘Women and Hens are Lost by Gadding’ changed in thirty years to be:

  The honest Maid (is) better at home with a bone broken, than a-gadding,

  The woman and the Hen are lost with straggling.353

  A sixteenth-century London bye-law ruled that men might not beat their wives after 9 p.m. to avoid disturbing the neighbours.354 The execution of the king in 1649 made all male heads of households more nervous: rhetoric against rebellious women – despite their small numbers – increased, and advice books focused on containment and control of women.

  The emerging middling classes did not – in theory – approve of physical violence, especially in marriage, and ‘conduct books’ that offered tips on how to lead a respectable life advised against it.355 But the restraint did not filter up to the aristocracy, nor down to the labouring people, and when violent men were brought to a court, juries took a tolerant view.356 It was generally agreed that husbands should stop short of murder: no marital beating should cause injuries so serious that the wife died; but those few husbands who were charged with wife murder could easily turn such a charge into a confession of an accidental death after ‘reasonable’ violence. Juries were reluctant to bring a guilty verdict in for a wife murderer when the punishment was hanging and disembowelling. The all-male juries preferred to find men guilty of accidentally killing their wives. Men were the principal domestic murderers: an average of three-quarters of marital killings were husbands killing their wives.357

  The crime of a woman killing her husband, though rarer, was seen as far more serious, since she was attacking the head of the family: the God-appointed master.358 Husband-killing was called ‘petty treason’, as the murder of a king was high treason. The punishment was death by being burned alive but this happened rarely until the 1400s, when Parliament introduced burning alive as a standard punishment for heretics.359 Margery Mills was burned to death for poisoning her husband at Charlwood in Surrey in September 1599.360

  Some women may have reacted to the increasing oppression by men. One woman, wife of a Yorkshire yeoman, refused to give him access to the property she brought to the marriage, which was his – by law and custom. On 1 January 1648, he recorded in his journal: ‘This morn, I used some words of persuasion to my wife to forbear to tell me of what is past, and promised her to become a good husband to her for the time to come, and she promised me likewise she would do what I wished her in anything, save in setting her hand to papers; and I promised her never to wish her there unto.’361

  Before the Reformation, there was no divorce – only annulment of marriage on very limited grounds by the pope himself. Once Henry VIII had granted his own divorces, his subjects could apply at great cost for a specific Act of Parliament to end their marriage on very limited grounds. Adultery by a wife could be cited as grounds for a divorce, but a husband’s adultery was legally allowed. A study of the wills of aristocratic men of 1450–1550 showed that of 763 noblemen, 51 left bequests to mistresses or illegitimate children. If the wives did not know about these infidelities before, they knew on their husbands’ death, when the widow – as executor in most cases – had to pay an inheritance to mistresses and bastards.362 It must have taken the edge off deep grief.

  Most marriages were ended more simply by separation or desertion, and many of the households headed by single women were caused by husbands running away. A husband deserting a wealthy wife could take their children and all her family money. A separating wife had to leave her children in her husband’s care; she could not remarry and had no right to any payment from the family fortune.363 Lower-class marriages could still be ended by agreement in folk rituals such as ‘wife sale’, often to her lover, to signify the end of their union and the start of a new one.

  A new Adultery Act was passed in 1650, under the moralistic Cromwell Parliament. The short-lived law ‘for suppressing the detestable sins of Incest, Adultery and Fornication’ punished acts of incest and adultery, but only by wives and their lovers, male seducers and ‘bawds’ – as well as women soliciting for sex and sexually active women. Three women were hanged for adultery before the act was repealed on the return of the notoriously promiscuous Charles II.

  Parliament made another change to the wording of the marriage service. The promise of sexual willingness and warmth by a wife was now omitted. The public endorsement of sexual arousal of a wife with her husband disappeared. So too went the promise of female happiness: ‘Bonoure and buxom in bed and at borde’. The new Directory for the Public Worship of God of 1645 ruled for very short and simple marriage vows in church. Now the husband had to promise ‘to be a loving and faithful Husband unto thee until God shall separate us by Death’. And the bride promised the same love and fidelity – but also obedience: ‘To be a loving faithful and obedient Wife unto thee until God shall separate us by Death’.364

  These promises were fulfilled in some marriages. Journals kept by literate women (only upper-class women, and not many of them) showed that of 21 marriages, happy marriages outnumbered unhappy ones by 15 to 6.365 Tombstones, memorials, poems and letters for husbands and wives refer to companionable and loving marriages till death. Lady Anne Harcourt makes it clear what a lucky find a good husband was for a seventeenth-century wife: ‘I had much mercy in my marriage with him, he being th’ answer to my prayer, he being a religious, prudent and loving husband.’366

  Widows

  The treatment of widows deteriorated in the seventeenth century from their prominence as heads of 10 per cent of early medieval English households,367 surviving their husbands in 69 per cent of aristocratic and gentry marriages,368 and position in the London property market. Widows had been widely trusted by their first husbands in the 1500s: 89 per cent of widows in Abingdon were named as executors of their husband’s will and their inheritance was not conditional on them remaining single.369 But from the 1600s widows were impoverished by their husbands’ wills, which started to rule that a widow would lose her inheritance on remarriage. Husbands developed a new idea: creating an ‘entail’ on property, to make the disinheritance of all women compulsory. An entail turned ‘patrimony’ from the Norman tradition to a legal obligation on a family forever,370 bequeathing the estate away from the widow or female descendants to a male heir – however distant. Entail became increasingly popular in the 1600s, reducing the inheritance of widows and daughters, and making their work for the family to the benefit only of the oldest male heir. Male heirs were well aware of the advantage of inheriting property with a built-in experienced manager. A friend of the heir to Caus Castle told him to work with his mother in her project of lead mining in the Mendip Hills: ‘during her own life she can benefit therein, but you and yours may receive a commodity thereof forever; you should be contented to allow her the better share (two thirds), one third to you [if] you contribute one third of the charge when finished.’371 Entail impoverished women for centuries – Jane Austen’s novels (200 years later, in the early nineteenth century) show fictional women’s anxiety about the future hardship for widows and their daughters from entail.

  A study of women in Abingdon, Berkshire, between 1540 and 1720 suggests that from the early 1600s, widows increasingly chose not to remarry. The only widows who did marry for the second time were those with young children. This change to the traditional ways in Abingdon was probably reflected in the rest of the country. It seems that for much of the sixteenth century an Abingdon widow was a true heir – the person to inherit her husband’s fortune. But after about 1570, the wills provided for her only if she did not remarry. In the 1600s, the concern became that sons should inherit, but their mother, the widow, was apparently not trusted to guard their inheritance. After 1660, trust in widows as executors of their husbands’ wills declined: only 74 per cent of widows were named as executors.372

  Some Abingdon widows were left fortunes and some demonstrated entrepreneurial skills by improving on their late husbands’ work. Isabel Pophley inherited her second husband’s brewery and went on to buy and run a number of inns. She died a wealthy woman, owning several properties, diamond jewellery and investments.373

  Single Women

  The loss of the nunneries, convents and abbeys meant the loss of a career path with high social status for single women after 1536. There was no work outside the family home or business for aristocratic single women, except that of serving as companions for wealthy relatives or patrons, or – for very few – at court.

  As anxiety about single women increased in the late 1500s, few escaped suspicion and surveillance by the authorities.374 Only the single women whose means were established and who owned their own houses, older women who might be trusted not to corrupt anyone’s morals or have a bastard child at the cost of the parish and those who had been living with a parent who had recently died, avoided censure. All single women were regarded with less tolerance than that afforded widows, who could inherit houses and sometimes workshops and membership of guilds or townsman status. A single woman, Ann Faulkner, and her widowed sister Mary Stokes jointly inherited their mother’s trading business, but were recorded in the Southampton city records as one trader – the widow. As a single woman, Ann was assumed to be dependent on her sister Mary – the widow – although they had inherited equally.375

  In the seventeenth century, the single women population peaked at about 30 per cent of the country – an unusually high proportion.376 Single labouring women supported themselves by their own earnings or joined households as servants for their bed and board and wages, or lived with their families contributing to the household with their work or earnings.

  Women Loving Women

  Anxiety about sexual practices in same-sex relationships was prevalent throughout Europe, but only male sexual intimacy with men was both banned by the church and illegal.377 The laws explicitly described acts that were banned for men, but since there were no criminal laws against women’s sexual practices with women, there were no official descriptions of women’s sexual practices with women. Women lovers could believe that their affection and actions were both without sin and outside the law.

  Women had routinely lived intimately together: sleeping in the same bed at night, spending all day in each other’s company – sometimes choosing to live together rather than with their families or with a husband – but it was rarely recorded that they found sexual pleasure with each other. There are two records of bishop visitations to convents before the Reformation where women were discovered sleeping together. In Littlemore – a priory reported as having several financial and discipline problems – the prioress was accused of sleeping at night with one of the nuns in her bed. No mention was made of any sexual relationship, but the inspecting Bishop Alnwick ruled that the women must sleep apart. In Flamstead Priory in 1530, one of the nuns, Johanna Mason, said that she slept with another nun so that they could wake each other up for matins. The inspecting bishop – John Longland – said that this must stop.378

  Some women’s love for another woman was till death: Kateryn Parr, last queen of Henry VIII, was deeply loved by a number of her ladies who risked their safety to stay with her. Her friend and fellow church reformer Anne Askew chose torture and death by burning rather than incriminate her. It is hard to imagine a greater love than this.

  Part 5

  1660–1764

  Locked Out and Locked In

  Land Grab

  Therefore be content with lowly degree

  And (God) will provide for thy children and thee.1

  So advised the Poor Man’s Counsel (or, The Marryed Man’s Guide) – not a ballad written by the people rooted in their experience, but a nastier thing by far: a ballad written by a wealthy aristocratic writer to persuade the poor that they were lucky to be where they were and to be content with their lot, and never – ever! – to rebel again.

  Not that the revolution had served the poor. Although radicals in the civil wars demanded that the land enclosures be returned and the poor restored to the land, the Commonwealth government failed to live up to its promises or its name. Nor did the return of the monarchy with Charles II, in 1660, mark a return to ‘good lordship’. The pace of enclosures increased, driving women from the land, as the pleasure-loving leisured court preached a work ethic for labourers.

  In just 40 years, about a quarter of the entire area of England was taken into private ownership: wasteland, forest, upland and floodlands were declared as private property, enclosed with walls and hedges or brought under the plough, in as many as 1,700 separate Acts by the landowners’ parliament.2 The beautiful landscapes that are the setting for the great eighteenth-century country houses were rolled out over emptied villages and ruined lives. The tracks made by people who had lived on the land for generations were blocked; the common lands where they collected fuel and grazed their animals were hedged and gated. No more could people turn out animals to graze, set out their beehives, gather berries, mushrooms and nuts, collect firewood and freely hunt game. No longer could a country family live off the land. It was an extraordinary theft by the elite – especially from a people who had already lost so much common land to enclosures. Villages that used to work collectively suddenly found that the richest few families had engrossed all the land, and villagers became employees of their former neighbours; more efficient farming methods and increased production followed. The impact upon the poor working country people was severe, and regretted even by some of the elite: Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Oliver Goldsmith’s poem The Deserted Village (1770) more than two centuries later both lamented the ruin of country life. The working people wrote their own ballads – not of nostalgia but of anger:

  The law locks up the man or woman

  Who steals the goose off the common

  But leaves the greater villain loose

  Who steals the common from the goose.

  The law demands that we atone

  When we take things we do not own

  But leaves the lords and ladies fine

  Who takes things that are yours and mine.

  The poor and wretched don’t escape

  If they conspire the law to break;

  This must be so; but they endure

  Those who conspire to make the law.

  The law locks up the man or woman

  Who steals the goose from off the common

  And geese will still a common lack

  Till they go and steal it back.3

  Even those communities that managed to keep common land lost their traditional rights. Game – venison from deer, hare, rabbits, pheasants, partridge, grouse – all now belonged to the landlord, and shooting for sport developed into a craze for the wealthy. In 1671, new laws declared it illegal for a tenant to take game, even on her own land.4 Once fox-hunting became a sport – almost an obsession – for the elite, working people might not kill foxes preying on their hens. Even the fish in the river and ponds were off-limits under the newly invented fishing ‘rights’. In 1723, the notorious ‘Black Act’ created more than 200 new offences, which were expanded over the subsequent years, each punishable by hanging – all of them aimed at country people trying to live off their former lands. Anyone poaching game, stealing crops, burning hayricks or breaking down the hated fences could be sentenced to death.