Constructing Families

Abstract

a twenty-nine year old London lawyer from a good family with a promising career and financial prospects. In every way this appeared to be an ideal marriage for the seventeen year The contrasting fortunes of the women who made up this household in 1656 provide a useful useful evidence on how marriage could benefit or disable a woman and shows that the single state was not necessarily disabling nor isolating. This exploration of the Hampson women also reveals that even within a single family the opportunities for women could differ significantly.By examining evidence provided by wills and related documents the importance of a network of relationships to a woman's well-being and prosperity becomes apparant, while also revealing the the devasting effect the breakdown of this network could have on a woman.The first years of Mary Wingfield Hampson's marriage in the Holborn house with her sisters-in-law appear to have been peaceful with her first child, Elizabeth, born a little more than nine months after the marriage, and a son born thirteen months after the birth of his sister.However, this apparently content household was built on shifting sands. Robert Hampson 2 owed money to his sisters Katherine and Margaret and two younger brothers. Shortly after the birth of Robert's son, his siblings were unwilling to wait any longer for their money. MaryHampson describes the scene that broke out one evening in her autobiographical pamphlet.This pamphlet, published in 1684 presents a harrowing story of the decades of abuse she was to suffer, and which began that night in 1658:He brought me up to London, to his house in Holbourn. Two of his sisters were with him some time ... His sisters were so civil as not to trouble him for their monys, untill I was brought to bed, and up again. Then the dispute betweext Mr.Hampson and his sisters was so hot in his study one night, that the out-cry came to me. Then Mr. Hampson told me he had no way to keep himself out of prison, and that he was ruined if I did not consent to the sale of my joynture. to spread bequests wider than the nuclear family in contrast to male testators. 16 An examination of Katherine Hampson's will supports this contention that never married women were often part of a large network of relationships as will be discussed below.Wills by women make up about 20% of surviving wills from 1550-1750 and thus asRonald Bedford and Philippa Kelly suggest "can be regarded as one of the main genres in which women wrote, or dictated, during the period." As such they claim, "as authors of wills, early modern women of diverse social levels inscribe and exercise agency." 17 Froide also identifies these aspects of agency in the wills of never married women:Single women in early modern England most definitely used their wills as a means to define their social relationships and their place in the extended kin group. A nevermarried woman's last will and testament can be read as an autobiographical text that explains how she wanted to present her life (at the moment of her death), how she...