No abstract

This article addresses the boundaries of female power within early modern aristocratic families. It asks the question: could a woman's influence and authority with her husband and kin, and over matters of inheritance and succession, expand or contract through her abilityor notto have children? The focus of the article is the family arrangements of Lord Emmanuel Scroop whose marriage to Elizabeth Manners was childless. The research set out to uncover Lord Scroop's relationship with their servant, Martha Janes, the birth of four illegitimate children by this relationship, and the property litigation pursued by both wife and mistress after Lord Scroop left the family estates to these children. The article argues that the case of Janes and her children sheds light on the hidden histories of bastardy and property within aristocratic families. It investigates how Janes and her children ultimately played a central role in the inheritance and succession strategies of Lord Scroop, and examines how much importance aristocratic men attached to the concept of a legitimate male bloodline. The objective is to shine a light on economic and legal relationships in aristocratic families and reveal the relativeand relationalpower an unmarried woman could gain through maternity.

In his recent book on the pursuit of fulfilment through friendship, sociability, honour, and reputation, Keith Thomas has commented that in early-modern England 'harmony was prized, whereas lawsuits, which set neighbour against neighbour, were [...] widely deplored as un-Christian breaches of charity'. 1 Bernard Capp, Craig Muldrew and Steve Hindle have all arrived at the same conclusion. 2 Steve Hindle put it this way: 'the ethos of community was one of charity, neighbourliness and reciprocal obligation'. 3 However, there are hints that despite all prescription and rhetoric in early-modern society, harmony, while desired, was not always achieved. 4 This article explores the role of rumouror the hearsay and gossip that circulated in a communityin eroding or maintaining reputations within and across families.To achieve this, it considers the nature of gossip, including the way it carried gender connotations, and the social dynamics involved in the passage of rumour from local community to the central law courts. Early-modern people regularly entered into bitter disputes over wills, money and inheritance, title to land, boundaries, animal thefts, and a 1 Thomas, The Ends of Life, p. 189. 2 See, Capp, When Gossips Meet; Muldrew, 'The Culture of Reconciliation'; Hindle, 'A Sense of Place?' 3 Hindle, 'A Sense of Place?', p. 108. 4 Capp, When Gossips Meet, p. 185. 'How the "gossip" became a woman'; Schofield, 'Peasants and the Manor Court: Gossip and Litigation in a Suffolk Village at the Close of the Thirteenth Century', pp. 3-42 (especially pp. 6-9) citing Bonfield, 'The Nature of Customary Law in the Manor Courts of Medieval England' and Beckerman, 'Towards a Theory of Medieval Manorial Adjudication: the Nature of Communal Judgements in a System of Customary Law'.3 the construction of the social identities of groups. That people gossiped and spread rumours is not under question here. In 1591 John Florio remarked that the question 'what news?' was the first asked by any Englishman. 6 Although Florio gendered this as a masculine trait, 'what news?' was exactly the question that Agnes Filer asked Edward Loxton when he walked into a tavern in 1539, only to be astonished when he replied that there might be war. 7 Gossip took place in the fields and woods, across hedges, by the hearth, in the streets and in front of church authorities. Indeed, it took place increasingly in newspapers and, from the 1690s, in the 'secret histories' that acted to circulate gossip in and around the royal court of the later Stuarts. 8 Tale-tellers and their listeners made a clear distinction between the potentially seditious news, like Loxton's, and the news that indicated trouble within families. Spreading rumours that the monarch was dead was dangerous and deeply shocking, but news that led to disorder in family life also was seen to threaten the stability of households and ultimately, therefore, the commonweal. 'Sins of the tongue' -or the 'boneless member' as the tongue was sometimes calledwere committed by those troublesome people in...

No abstract

It has been observed that contemporary divisions of the stages of life were predicated on the male body and life cycle as the norm, deploying traditional numerical divisions which were not necessarily co-terminous with women's lives and bodies. This organisation tended to universalise ageing from male experiences, significant milestones in men's lives, and changes to male bodies. 1 Some studies of renaissance and early modern women have therefore moved away from this traditional division of life stages, relating 'age norms for women, based on medical, legal, and social discourses' to 'the key social and legal markers in a woman's life: namely, the phases of maidenhood, motherhood, and widowhood.' 2 However, as many studies of widowhood have pointed out, this stage of life did not neatly align with older age for a woman. Even very young, newly married wives, potentially including those in their late teens and early twenties, might be widowed. 3 Widowhood was also something that a woman might experience more than once if she remarried as 'Death and its disruptions formed a regular part of married life.' 4 In practice, then, widowhood was not necessarily the third and final stage of a woman's life as the experience of loss of a maritaland hence sexualpartner was something that might occur at any age after marriage; and neither did all women marry nor all married women out-live a husband to experience widowhood. This division also assumes that maidenhood was the first stage of life from which a woman inevitably moved on to marry and produce children as this was the expected trajectory for the female life-course. In practice, many women, possibly up to twenty-five per cent of the female population, at least in England in the seventeenth century, never married, although some of these would have experienced motherhood as unmarried mothers, even if