Abstract
Decades of research on women in Norman and Angevin England challenge both the McNamara and Wemple thesis on declining female power in the Central Middle Ages and the prevailing political narrative for that kingdom. Elite women were empowered by their status and claims to property and wealth. If widowed or divorced, they had control of their dowry and dower. Their claims to inherit from their natal families increased with the adoption of parceny. The rise of administrative kingship and legal and judicial innovations limited some options for elite women to exercise power but enhanced or safeguarded others. The policies of individual kings varied. Evidence is presented to argue against absolute royal control over the remarriage of elite widows, although Kings Richard I and John may have exerted greater pressure on them to marry royal nominees or purchase their marriage rights.
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Notes
- 1.
Jo Ann McNamara, “Women and Power through the Family Revisited,” in Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. M. Kowaleski and M. Erler (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 19.
- 2.
McNamara, “Women and Power Revisited,” 20.
- 3.
McNamara, “Women and Power Revisited,” 21. One of their underlying premises is that the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw a major shift from horizontal to vertical kinship structures, restricting acquisition of wealth for females of the kindred. McNamara noted that subsequent research has “called into question” the weight and importance for women’s power they had placed on that shift in inheritance structure.
- 4.
Maryanne Kowaleski and Mary Erler, “Introduction,” in Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 2.
- 5.
McNamara, “Women and Power Revisited,” 21.
- 6.
McNamara, 25.
- 7.
McNamara, 22–23.
- 8.
I refer throughout this paper to the period 1066–1216, the reigns of the Norman and Angevin monarchs, as the twelfth century.
- 9.
Pauline Stafford, “Women in Domesday,” in Medieval Women in Southern England, ed. Keith Bate et al. (Reading, UK: Reading Medieval Studies, 1989), 89.
- 10.
Stafford, 77.
- 11.
Early English Laws, “Henry I’s Coronation Charter,” http://www.earlyenglishlaws.ac.uk/laws/texts/hn-cor/view/#edition/translation-3.
- 12.
Pipe Roll of 31 Henry I, ed. Judith Green. Historians have assumed that Henry I had reneged on his coronation promise.
- 13.
See, for example, W. L. Warren, Henry II (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973), 385; Cecily Clark and Elizabeth Williams, “After 1066: The Factual Evidence,” in Women inAnglo-SaxonEngland and the Impact of 1066 (London: British Museum Publications, 1984), 149; James C. Holt, “Presidential Address: Feudal Society and the Family in Early Medieval England: IV. The Heiress and the Alien,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 35 (1985): 21; and John Walmsley, ed., Widows, Heirs, and Heiresses in the Late Twelfth Century: The Rotuli de Dominabus et Pueris et Puellis (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), xi–xii.
- 14.
See, for example, Janet S. Loengard, “What Did Magna Carta Mean for Widows?” in Magna Carta and the England of King John, ed. Janet S. Loengard (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2010), 134–136; Susan Johns, Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm (New York and Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 165–193.
- 15.
The approximate number is due to the variation of naming. Women may be identified one way in one Rotuli entry and another elsewhere. An example is Ysoud, wife of Stephen de Beauchamp, who also appears as the unnamed wife of Stephen de Beauchamp. There are 118 widows appearing on the rolls, but only four unnamed women can be positively identified.
- 16.
Ages are given for about seventy percent of the widows, but rarely are precise ages given for women over thirty. Estimates vary by as much as twenty years; Alice of Essex, for example, is listed as sixty in one entry, eighty in another. My own calculation is that she was a few years over seventy; Widows, Heirs, and Heiresses, 46 and 112–114.
- 17.
Columbia University’s Earth Institute has produced annual maps of precipitation from tree-ring data for Europe covering two millennia. Columbia University, Earth Institute, Old World Drought Atlas, http://kage.ldeo.columbia.edu:81/TRL/OWDA/. Click on the map to access the interactive map; set the Time as the year 1184. I set the north/south coordinates as 58°N and 42°N, the west/east coordinates as 11°W and 10°E to zoom in on the British Isles and northwest Europe. To make out greater detail of precipitation amounts in regions with heavy rainfall, set the scale of the Palmer Drought Severity Index to 7.8 in the lower left box and 1.8 in the lower right box.
- 18.
See, for example, Pipe Roll 32 Henry II (London: The Saint Catherine’s Press, 1914), instances of instauramenti on 186–187 and 201.
- 19.
J. Horace Round may have been partially correct when he asserted that the “primary object” of the survey “was to ascertain the rights of the crown over widows [and] minors…and whether they had been infringed.” J. H. Round, Rotuli de Dominabus et Pueri et Puelli de XII Comitatibus, Pipe Roll Society 35 (London: 1913), xxv. For examples of critical information on guardians, see Widows, Heirs, and Heiresses, 4–6, 10, 14, 16–18, 30, 34, 44, 50, 68, 96.
- 20.
Pipe Roll 8 Henry II (London: Pipe Roll Society, 1885), 69.
- 21.
For cases flagged in the Rotuli, the marriage of Margaret Engaine and Geoffrey Brito and the possible marriage of Alice de Billingay and William Talun, see Widows, Heirs, and Heiresses, 36–37; Pipe Roll 32 Henry II, xxii and 9; Pipe Roll 34 Henry II (London: Pipe Roll Society, 1925), 131–132. Geoffrey was fined only twenty marcs when he was found to have married fifty-year-old Margaret without a license.
- 22.
Widows, Heirs, and Heiresses, 56: “vixerunt [ii] vidue vix de exitibus predicte terre.”
- 23.
William de Newburgh, “History of England,” in English Historical Documents II, ed. David C. Douglas and George Greenaway, 2nd ed. (London: Eyre Methuen and New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 403.
- 24.
G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage (London: The Saint Catherine’s Press, 1910–1959), 6:639–640.
- 25.
Richard Barber, “Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Media,” in The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine, ed. Marcus Bull and Catherine Léglu (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2005), 21.
- 26.
Pipe Roll 6 Richard I, ed. Doris Mary Stenton (London: Pipe Roll Society, 1928), 163, includes an entry stating that in the first year of Richard’s reign, Hugh Bardolf had seized the livestock of Hawise, countess of Aumale (and Essex), apparently on royal orders, and sold them for £115 16d. Strangely, he did not account for the transaction for five years. The entry indicates that it was done quia ipsa noluit nubere Willelmo de Forz.
- 27.
Loengard accepts the standard view of royal oppression of widows: Henry I’s pipe roll shows that he failed to keep his coronation charter promises to widows. “Henry II’s pipe rolls tell the same story…. Richard [I] brought the use and abuse of widowhood to a new high.” Loengard, “What Did Magna,” 134–135.
- 28.
McNamara, “Women and Power Revisited,” 21.
- 29.
For Geoffrey’s holding of his first wife’s dower (five knights’ fees of the Honor of Eudo dapifer), Cockayne, Complete Peerage, 10:113, Appendix J, note ‘k’; R. W. Eyton, Antiquities of Shropshire (London: J. R. Smith, 1859), 7:161.
- 30.
“Henry I’s Coronation Charter.”
- 31.
Dowry was less likely to be disputed, but if there were no written arrangements and the wife’s family estate had gone through several holders, marriage portions were challenged.
- 32.
Curia Regis Rolls of the Reigns of Richard I and John (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1922), 7:312.
- 33.
“Henry I’s Coronation Charter.”
- 34.
See, for example, Scott Waugh, “Women’s Inheritance and the Growth of Bureaucratic Monarchy in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century England,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 34 (1990): 71; “Potentially harmful to families and lords alike, women’s inheritance had to be closely monitored…. The law of women’s inheritance was thus worked out between about 1100 and 1250, initially as a political effort to quell some of the dangers it posed and only later through judicial and administrative action…. [T]he transformation from feudal to bureaucratic kingship did not occur in England by assaulting tenants-in-chief, but rather by collaborating with them to create a stable framework for inheritance.”
- 35.
British Library Cotton MSS. Claudius D. xii. f. 49 and Appendix, no. 5; F. M. Stenton, First Century of English Feudalism, 1066–1166, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 38–41.
- 36.
Holt, “The Heiress and the Alien,” 10; Judith Green, The Aristocracy of Norman England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 378–380.
- 37.
The most significant disadvantage was the division of small tenancies into smaller holdings, which could result in fractions of a knight’s fee if parceny occurred over multiple successions. The same division would of course divide larger estates but the marriage strategies of magnates tended to counter the divisiveness of the practice over time. Dower was also a potential financial drain on baronies, particularly if there were multiple dowagers reducing the income of an heir. For advantages, see Holt, “The Heiress and the Alien,” 19–20.
- 38.
Louise J. Wilkinson, Women in Thirteenth-Century Lincolnshire (London: Royal Historical Society and Boydell Press, 2007), 18–24. She mistakenly asserts that Nicholaa secured “possession of her inheritance as a femme sole” (p. 18). Femme sole was a legal claim that applied only to urban women doing business as sole business proprietors.
- 39.
Pipe Roll 5 Henry II (London: Pipe Roll Society, 1884), 50 and 56 for the first entries mentioning the vicecomitissa, Pipe Roll 11 Henry II (London: Pipe Roll Society, 1887), 45 for the last.
- 40.
Pipe Roll 8 Henry II, 73.
- 41.
Hubert Hall, ed., Red Book of the Exchequer, part 1 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1896), 187–311.
- 42.
Jennifer Ward, Women in England in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2006), 106–108.
- 43.
Jeffrey A. Bowman, private e-mail, February 12, 2018, concerning “Elite Women and Lordly Power in Catalonia in the High Middle Ages,” presented at Beyond ExceptionalismConference (September 2015).
- 44.
Pipe Roll 31 Henry I, 87: ut possit tenere rectum in curia sua inter homines suos. 100 marcs was just over £66.
- 45.
Curia Regis Rolls of the Reigns of Richard I and John, 1:186.
- 46.
RāGena C. DeAragon, “The Growth of Secure Inheritance in Anglo-Norman England,” Journal of Medieval History 8 (1982): 382–383.
- 47.
Green, Aristocracy of Norman England, 376.
- 48.
See, for example, I. J. Sanders, English Baronies: A Study of Their Origin and Descent, 1086–1327 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960).
- 49.
Pipe Roll 12 Henry II, 21, 85, 95, 97, 118, 132.
- 50.
An example of one British medievalist who has taken that mandate to heart is Judith Green. In 2011, she wrote, “[V]aluable insight into power in medieval Europe between the tenth and thirteen centuries have been gained through the study of women” in ways that “have deepened our understanding of the circumstances in which high-status women could access power and influence.” “Duchesses of Normandy in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in Normandy and Its Neighbors, 900–1250: Essays for David Bates, eds. D. Crouch and K. Thompson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 43. In Forging the Kingdom, Green speaks of “the most immediate, coercive forms [of power] to indirect methods such as influence or persuasion, consumption, display, and ritual designed both to impress and involve.” Forging the Kingdom: Power in English Society, 973–1189 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 1.
- 51.
Erler and Kowaleski, Women and Power in the Middle Ages, 2.
- 52.
For example, Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), viii–ix, where he states that twelfth-century sources speak “not so much [about] what power looked like as what it felt like.” His definition of power is of the “hard” variety.
- 53.
Nicholas Vincent, comment on the back cover of J. A. Green, Forging the Kingdom.
- 54.
See Loengard, “What Did Magna,” 134–150, particularly 134–135. On administrative kingship, see C. Warren Hollister and John Baldwin, “The Rise of Administrative Kingship: Henry I and Philip Augustus,” American Historical Review 83:4 (Oct. 1978): 867–905.
- 55.
Christine Fell, Cecily Clark, and Elizabeth Williams, Women inAnglo-SaxonWomen and the Impact of 1066 (London: British Museum Publications, 1984).
- 56.
Pauline Stafford, “Women and the Norman Conquest,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 4 (1995): 241–242.
- 57.
Stafford, “Women and the Norman Conquest,” 321.
- 58.
The panel in June 2015 was co-sponsored by the National Archives and the Pipe Roll Society. The sessions at the 2015 International Medieval Congress at Leeds involved well-known historians, experts on England in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The male historians routinely ignored or downplayed women of this period, while the female historians who focused on women presented them as lacking in power or agency.
- 59.
George Beech, “Prosopography,” in Medieval Studies: An Introduction, ed. James Powell, 2nd ed. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 185.
- 60.
Christiane Klapish-Zuber, “The Medievalist: Women and the Serial Approach,” in Writing Women’s History, ed. Michelle Perrot (Oxford: Blackwell’s, 1992), 28.
- 61.
Prosopography was the method I employed for my study of fifty-eight widowed countesses; RāGena C. DeAragon, “Dowager Countesses, 1069–c.1230,” Anglo-Norman Studies 17 (1995): 87–100.
- 62.
Philadelphia Ricketts, High-Ranking Widows in Medieval Iceland and Yorkshire: Property, Power, Marriage and Identity in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
- 63.
Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum 1100–1135, ed. Charles Johnson and H. A. Cronne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 119, no. 1458; 207, no. 1495.
- 64.
Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum 1135–1154, ed. H. A. Cronne and R. H. C. Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 32, nos. 82 and 83.
- 65.
Historical Manuscripts Commission, Manuscripts of the Dukes of Rutland (London: 1905), 4:158.
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DeAragon, R.C. (2019). Power and Agency in Post-Conquest England: Elite Women and the Transformations of the Twelfth Century. In: Tanner, H.J. (eds) Medieval Elite Women and the Exercise of Power, 1100–1400. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01346-2_2
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