The Magna Carta – the 1215 agreement forced on a reluctant King John by the leading lords of the land – accidentally gave women new rights. In promising that there should be no arbitrary arrest and guaranteeing a trial by jury for freemen, the charter also gave rights to women who had the freedom of a town or city. Covered by Magna Carta under the status of freemen, they assumed a new legal existence.

  Two clauses of the Magna Carta benefited widows. The lords wanted to free their own families from the control of the king so that a wealthy widow’s lands could be managed by her family – not sold by the king to the highest bidder or given to a favourite. This proved a win for the widows who, as acting heads of families, might now control their dower lands. In addition, Clause 8 of Magna Carta ruled that ‘No widow is to be distrained to marry while she wishes to live without a husband, as long as she gives security that she will not marry without our [royal] consent.’78

  For the first time since the arrival of the Normans, a widow could refuse a second husband; no one – not the king, not her family – could force her to the altar. This was a huge real-life gain for many individuals, since about a third of all women were widowed – now they could suit themselves. For all, it offered the possibility of a future state of freedom.

  Common women assumed authority too, appointed by town and church councils to be the principal inquirers into crimes like false paternity claims, abortion or witchcraft. In almost every market, it was women who were appointed to inspect food and ale production and women officials who approved licences. Often women led the hue and cry – pursuing named individuals or suspected criminals, policing the community before there was an official force. It was the duty of all to chase after the criminal. In the village of Warboys, there were 124 hues from 1290 to 1353 – 33 of them raised by women.79

  Without legal status, women seldom served as reeves or constables – legal officers – and were only rarely called as witnesses at the manor criminal courts.80

  In 1195, under Richard I, some knights were sworn to keep the peace on their lands, and by 1344 an Act required ‘two or three of the best reputation in the counties’ to be assigned keepers of the peace by the King’s Commission – there was no specific request that the keepers be men. In 1361, an Act entitled ‘What sort of persons shall be Justices of the Peace; and what authority they shall have’ specified that ‘one lord and with him three or four of the most worthy in the county with some learned in the law’ should become justices of the peace, able to arrest, hear and punish.81 Again, no sex is specified and ladies would deputise for their lords as justices. Manor courts would be judged by the lady of the manor in the absence of the lord.

  Many women represented themselves in the civil courts. In 1344, Idonea de Hukestere successfully sued William Simond for butchering her sow. Isabella de Worstede, a house owner, took builder William Grene to court for poor work on her chimney.82 In 1328, Alianore Wormenhal represented herself before the councillors of Oxford to ban her husband’s heir from tenement buildings that she had bought jointly with her spouse and now claimed as exclusively hers. Despite the explicit law that a wife’s property belonged to her husband or his heirs, and that she had no rights, the Oxford council listened to Alianore Wormenhal and consulted London councillors. They reported that in London a woman could hold land – and buildings – in her own right. Oxford decided to follow suit and Wormenhal, representing herself, won her case, kept her property and set a precedent.83 There were even women attorneys practising law in London in the thirteenth century, one of whom was Avice de Gardebois, an attorney at law who pursued her husband’s debtors.

  Women were complainants in nearly half the cases of slander in the church courts, often representing themselves, to insist on their virtue as wives or daughters, or their reliability and honesty as businesswomen.84 A woman’s ‘good name’ not only affected her status in the community and her marriage prospects – her business depended on it. While officially she had no legal existence – her name on a contract meant nothing – in real life she could run a business if her word was known to be completely reliable. A ‘good name’ was not just a woman’s dowry, it was her capital.

  Women’s Work

  Many women worked in the business of credit – lending money in small amounts to each other, and pawning clothes and household goods for cash to redeem later.

  Specialist moneylenders were always Jewish: a woman’s name as good as that of a man, licensed equally by the church to undertake the so-called sin of usury, offering large credit and international banking businesses. Jewish bankers took bonds – promises to pay – and issued tokens to be redeemed by other Jewish moneylenders, backed by their own gold reserves and guaranteed by their word. Bankers were so badly needed for national and international trade that they were specifically protected by the monarchs in all the European countries.

  A Jewish woman, Licoricia, lent money on her own account and in partnership with other lenders in the 1230s. The death of her first husband, Abraham, made Licoricia one of the richest women of Winchester as she consolidated his business with hers. The estate of her second husband, David of Oxford, held such great debts that they had to be sealed and taken to the Jewish Exchequer in London, and Licoricia was imprisoned until the assessment was complete. After the debts had been calculated, she was offered the chance to buy his debt book at a price of 5,000 marks – the equivalent of £3.8 million in 2022.85 Licoricia bought back her husband’s debt book with her own money, to become one of the country’s greatest financiers, meeting with King Henry on his visits to Winchester, using royal support against her bad debtors, and liaising with king, court and other Jewish moneylenders to manage royal and even international loans.

  Licoricia ran a successful business of moneylending for thirty years, financing the royal family, the aristocracy and even the church, travelling from her home in Winchester all around England. Her name, and that of her son, was often recorded in the Calendar of the Rolls of the Jewish Exchequer over disputes when she pursued bad debts. She died in 1277, murdered with her maid, Alice of Bicton, apparently during a robbery at her house, and was probably buried at the Jewish cemetery in Winchester.86

  Licoricia’s success in supporting the national finances, like other Jewish businessmen and women in England and Europe, caused envy and suspicion. Individual lords who owed more than they could afford to moneylenders encouraged outbreaks of antisemitic hatred by their tenants to rip up debt books and cancel debts. An English Benedictine monk, Thomas of Monmouth (1149–72), accused the Jewish people of Norwich of murdering a Christian boy, inventing the ‘blood libel’ against them, in order to create a profitable shrine for the boy, adding a fake legend to the increasing antisemitism.

  The Second Crusade against non-Christians in Europe and Muslims in the Middle East, the taxes and the debt to finance the crusade, all stoked feelings against Jewish people. When Jewish representatives attended the coronation of the new crusader king, Richard I (the ‘Lionheart’) in 1189, it caused antisemitic riots at the ceremony and in other English towns. Two York moneylenders, Benedict and Joceus, were attacked on their journey home and Benedict was killed. Months later, a mob broke into his house, killing everyone and looting his papers, including his debt book. Joceus led the Jewish people of York to royal protection in the king’s tower in York Castle, but royal troops left their posts to join the mob in a siege of the tower. A few Jewish families who accepted safe passage and baptism into Christianity left the refuge and were killed. Those still inside – about 150 men, women and children – took the decision to die. The men killed their wives and children, and set fire to their possessions, before killing themselves. The mob then raided York Minster and destroyed the Jewish debt books that were kept there.

  While York was the most notorious of massacres, attacks also took place in London, Norwich and King’s Lynn. A papal decree requiring Jews to wear a white or yellow badge came into force in England, where it was ordained that ‘every Jew shall wear on the front of his dress tablets or patches of cloth four inches long by two inches wide, of some colour other than that of the rest of his garment’.87

  Richard’s successor, King John, desperate for money, imposed crushing taxes on English Jews and imprisoned families and communities – men, women and children – when they could not pay. In 1275, Jewish people were even forbidden to lend money.88 The royal debts, and finance for the corn and wool trade, were taken over by Italian bankers authorised by the pope.89 In 1290, Edward I, urged on by his wife Eleanor of Castile and his mother Eleanor of Provence, executed 300 Jewish heads of household and expelled Jewish families from the kingdom. It was estimated at the time that more than 16,000 families went into exile, perhaps as many as 8,000 women refugees. Those families who professed Christianity and remained in England struggled to survive.90 Many converted, denied their religion or hid their identity by changing their names, a decision that fell especially hard on Jewish women, who traditionally passed down their religion to their children. While Italian bankers controlled the profitable areas of moneylending and finance, further down the social scale the poorer debts came to be serviced by English people – often women – who concealed the crime of ‘usury’ by not charging interest but adding a ‘gift’ to the repayment.

  Women’s work in the country remained a necessity: ‘A household will survive without the husbandman; but not without the goodwife.’91 So declared a peasant proverb, recognising that the labour of a woman proved indispensable: her husband’s was not. Everything that a man did, his wife would do alongside him, in their shared family business, and she would give birth, plant, harvest, cook, feed and raise the family as well.

  A woman was so essential that few men entered into the rental of a cottage and land until they were married. Sometimes a bachelor tenant would resign his tenancy to renew jointly with his wife, acknowledging the equality of their partnership.92 In the village of Cuxham in Oxfordshire, a man marrying a bride with her own land would take her name. When Joan Chyld wed her husband, he shared her inheritance and took her name to became Henry Chyld at Chertsey.93 Cristina Penifader’s father gave her grants of land from 1313 until her marriage in 1317 in the village of Brigstock, in Northamptonshire, where up to a quarter of land was inherited by daughters.94

  Women trapping rabbits with a ferret in the Queen Mary Psalter, c.1316–21

  Women trapping rabbits from the Queen Mary Psalter, c.1316–21 (British Library Board/Bridgeman Images)

  A woman could pay her own feudal entry fee for the right to inherit the cottage and the land and, at her death, she could leave the cottage and fortune to her heirs.95 Widowers tended to ignore the church’s traditional mourning period of a year, to remarry a new wife at once.96 But a widow would be expected to observe mourning and run her house and business alone for a year; many continued to do so – avoiding a second marriage. Despite the Norman laws that ruled that a man leave everything to his son, widows inherited. From the 1200s, a peasant couple tended to own land ‘in jointure’ so that when the husband died it passed automatically to his equal partner: his wife.97 Agnes Kateline, a widow, was a tenant in her own right when she was fined for not keeping her ditches properly dug in Broughton village in 1309. Her son was also a tenant in the village, but he did not represent his mother, who answered for herself to the manor court as an independent landowner.98 In most areas of the country, widows of tenant farmers took over their husband’s tenancy as a right, paying a fee only if the man had been a villein.99

  The oldest son might be named as sole heir in order to keep the landholding together, but daughters were traditionally given an inheritance, and if there was no surplus land or money to be divided, daughters usually had the right to live on the family tenement, a resident partner in the family home and business.100 Sometimes women were gifted land in return for caring for their elderly parents; some villages allocated land to single women or widows in return for their care of elderly members of the community.

  In the gardens outside the cottages, tenants grew vegetables and fruit, and grazed hens or a pig or a cow, mostly in the care of the women.101 Dairy produce, ‘puddings’, fruit, grains and vegetables were women’s speciality: ‘housewifely made’ meant it was of high quality.102 No real distinction was made between food production for the family table and food production for barter or cash. They were the work of women and self-evidently valuable. Women found time for recreation as well, wrestling, running and playing ball games such as ‘stool ball’, which traditionally used three-legged milkmaid stools as bats.

  In the early 1300s, men and women in labouring jobs seem to have earned about 3d a day: equal pay for equal work, and a set rate for the task, with employers paying for the skill, not for the sex of the worker.103 Casual work – hired by the day or for the task – paid better than contracted work; urgent, seasonal and temporary work was the best paid.104 This proved a huge advantage for women workers who could fit highly paid short seasons of intense work around their usual work of farming, producing and maintaining the home. The value of a woman’s daily work in her own fields set the rate for seasonal work outside the home: any cash offered by an outside employer had to be worth more than her domestic work or pay more than the value of her home produce, for a woman to take the job.

  Some countrywomen chose to leave their gardens and fields to become wage labourers: as live-in servants in a gentry household in town or country. Service was not demeaning; servants were often family friends, or children from a neighbour’s household. Upper-class families sent sons and sometimes daughters to stay in other households to learn manners and management of land and home. Apprentices might be put by their parents with a family friend to work alongside the employer’s children. Wards, godchildren and friends might be first employed and then married into employers’ families. Servants were described as ‘family’ and often remembered with affection in employers’ wills.105 Some servants even left their savings to their employers as a recognition of a loving long-term bond.

  Most countrywomen preferred casual work, picking up seasonal jobs, like sheep-shearing in spring or reaping or gleaning in a gang in summer to supplement the money they earned working in their homes.106 In the towns, women gangs would work on big buildings or on repairing roads and bridges. Sometimes they were engaged on large projects like drainage or enclosures. Gangs of women dominated the charcoal business: going into the forests to cut or gather firewood, turning it into charcoal by controlled burning, working in day and night shifts over the smoking heaps of smouldering wood, before selling it to the industries that needed high heat: the metal forges and glass-making workshops, and the saucepans in the kitchens of the great houses.

  The business of textiles, especially wool production, was done by women in their own homes and workshops in city, town and country. Women were shepherdesses, managing the flock; all-women shearing gangs travelled around the country in early summer; and almost every woman spun as she went about her working day, her spindle twisting as she walked, her distaff stuck in her belt. Women dyed wool – sometimes employing their little children to trample the fabric in the dye tub – and some set the thread for their husband’s loom or wove on their own looms in their homes. Women in nunneries and abbeys had textile departments, spinning, dyeing, weaving, finishing and embroidering. Finished fabric would go on sale in England, while unfinished fleeces became the biggest English export to Europe. Women also spun flax for linen, hemp for ropes and strong thread, and dominated the luxury textiles.

  The rich silk trade was almost wholly owned, managed and staffed by women, and the women masters represented themselves in appeals to the aldermen of London and to the king to block the import of cheap finished silks that threatened English production and trade. The craftswomen imported raw silk and silk thread and spun and wove a heavy silk yarn.107 The work they did was so superior that Queen Matilda, wife of William I, bought religious vestments made in Winchester by Helisenda, the wife of Alderet, and presented them to the cathedral at Caen. Helisenda, famous as the best orfrey worker in England – a specialist sewing technique that blended colours and complex patterns – was poached by Queen Maud of Scotland.108 English women textile artists invented the Opus Anglicanum, which overlaid threads of silver and gold with embroidery incorporating precious stones. In 1239, Mabel of Bury St Edmunds made a chasuble and altar veil that so impressed Henry III that he commissioned an embroidered standard for Westminster Abbey. Roesia Burford made a cope with coral for Queen Isabella in the 1300s.109

  All medieval clothing was designed to be re-made: women’s gowns’ sleeves, skirts and bodices were detached and laced together in different combinations. No stigma attached to something being ‘second hand’: the royal wardrobe maintained and supplied clothes for successive monarchs, and a queen could wear a gown created for her predecessor. Gifts of used clothing between equals signalled favour; clothing was left in wills and given to servants as a benefit. Items of clothing circulated as trade goods, while the mending, redesigning, cleaning and reselling of clothes was a profitable and legitimate women’s occupation, one that overlapped with the market in stolen goods. Women became lenders and pawnbrokers, swapping goods or paying cash against an item of clothing or household equipment, and also dominating the business of ‘fencing’ – buying and reselling stolen goods.