Women, Attorneys, and Credit in Late Medieval England

Abstract

This article is a path-breaking attempt to assess systematically women's use of attorneys in English royal common law courts c.1400-c.1500, comprising a case study of women's litigation before the king's national Court of Common Pleas, at Westminster. It focuses on credit-and debt-litigation, the most common type of litigation before the court. First, it assesses the availability of lawyers to women. Second, it establishes which women (that is, by condition or marital status) employed attorneys in credit-and debt-related lawsuits as plaintiffs or defendants, and explores the extent to which records of women's use of attorneys can serve as a proxy measure of women's confidence in their ability to interact with the legal system. Third, it examines the attorneys who served women, asking if lawyers either specialized in representing women or discriminated against them, and whether they typically had geographical associations with the women they represented. It is concluded that women capitalized on the wide availability of lawyers, whose representation would have bolstered their confidence in using the courts and thereby helped to keep them engaged in lending and borrowing irrespective of the perceived declining social position of women at the close of the Middle Ages. 2 cent of pleaded 'London-related' litigation, 1399-1500 (see below). 3 Likewise, in manor courts, peasant debt litigation was often the main form of interpersonal litigation. 4 Debtrelated lawsuits were so much more numerous than lawsuits over land that, even though women were involved in a smaller proportion of debt lawsuits than land lawsuits, the largest number lawsuits involving women were credit-and debt-related. The dominance of credit-and debt-related pleas among women's litigation is amply demonstrated by the records of England's royal Court of Common Pleas. In the fifteenth century the Court of Common Pleas, which sat at Westminster, just west of London, was the principal national venue for civil litigation in the English realm. At any given time, there were four to nine thousand cases in progress at Common Pleas. This was several hundred times as many cases as the realm's second busiest central common law court, the Court of King's Bench, which heard a mixture of civil and criminal pleas. 5 Additionally, Chancery, which increasingly exercised jurisdiction in conscience (and eventually equity) towards the close of the Middle Ages, later to be associated with disadvantaged female petitioners in the early modern period, handled only a small volume of business in the fifteenth century, probably less than two hundred cases per year. 6 It is important to remember, however, that few lawsuits brought before any of these courts were pursued to the point of receiving a judgement before the courts. Like litigation today, medieval litigation was as likely intended to encourage an out-of-court settlement or simply to harry an adversary as it was to extract a final judgement. Considerably less than one fifth of lawsuits initiated at Common Pleas were ever...