A Hard Day's Night: Medieval Women at Work

The roles played by medieval women in society were many and varied. Socially, they were defined by their marital status and ability to produce healthy children, but it appears that many were engaged in useful work of the type more associated in the modern mind with their male counterparts. It is well known that women were involved in assisting childbirth and running the home but beyond that, their activities encompassed a range of tasks from the physical to the intellectual. The types of work undertaken by the medieval woman has often been underestimated but studies made by the economic historian Elieen Power, at Cambridge in the 1920s, began to challenge such assumptions. As part of my ongoing research in this area, I wanted to share some of the images I have found which give a flavour of the types of employment women were engaged with, alongside men.

It is difficult to differentiate though, exactly what status this work afforded women. It is quite likely that much of it was undertaken on an informal basis, as seasons dictated or as part of a family business: how many were considered professionals or received a salary outside the home is unclear. Midwives were one distinct female role and other waged women were engaged in the businesses of brewing and hospitality. Most were widows or married women, whilst the unmarried were to be found engaged in tasks such as spinning, cooking or sweeping within the home, although this was also done by the majority of women. Widows could inherit businesses and apprentices, whom they often went on to marry, or else could remain financially independent, even entering a few of the London guilds. Social class obviously played a key role in their labour. Leisure was a luxury: upper-class women also performed tasks in the home as various contemporary images and manuals make clear but these were directed more towards the luxury end of production, such as the making of special dishes and medicines, as well as the overseeing of accounts and organisation of servants and hospitality. Poorer women had little choice but to roll up their sleeves and help with the harvest or in the workshop.

There was a clear division between those working professionally and those engaged in labour within their own home about daily tasks, often alone.

 

 

 

Other women clearly accompanied their men to work, or else worked in close proximity with them where workshops were established within the home. This was common for many urban businesses, where the front room or ground floor of a house was given over to trade and the back, or upstairs (or cellar) was the family's living space.

 

 

 



 

It appears that groups of women collected together to engage in tasks such as spinning and weaving. This was more likely to have been for the benefits of their family, charity and friends rather than a collectively owned female business, as the manuscript images depict almost exclusively upperlcass women in this way, suggesting it was more of a leisure activity.

 

 

 

Other upper-class leisure activities included music:

 



 

Poorer women feature most commonly in the images of work outside, particularly engaged in harvesting or tasks to do with the seasonal cycle. The necessity of their involvement is highlighted by the presence of the heavily pregnant woman in the second image.

 

 

 



The lowliest appear in images of the most physical work, perhaps earning money in areas their social superiors had rejected:

A few appear to have penetrated what could have been considered traditional male areas of work: here, teaching geometry, sculpture, medicine, portraiture and writing.

 

 

There are so many manuscript images of women engaged in work during the medieval period that it was clearly an everyday occurrence for women of all classes. What they did and where and why, were factors determined by their status and need, but employment was clearly desireable even when it was not necessary. The involvement of women in male industries is apparent, although less well represented: the polarisation of "men's" and "women's" work was not as clear cut in the medieval period as might have been assumed.

Naughty Tudors: The historical realities of sex outside marriage

 Mary Tudor and Charles Brandon, who displeased her brother, Henry VIII, by marrying for love in 1515.

A Tudor woman’s social status was defined by her performance as a mother and wife. Broadly, this meant being submissive and respectful towards her husband regardless of his behaviour; being industrious and resourceful in the house; moral and devout in character and bringing forth a number of healthy children, preferably male. The scandal of illegitimacy, therefore, was to be avoided at all costs. The strict Catholic line couldn’t have been clearer: fornication and adultery were against the law; intercourse within marriage was acceptable only for the procreation of children and the penalties were harsh and public. Children born out of wedlock could be baptised and even legitimised by subsequent marriage vows but the social stigma of bastardy and its legal implications could not be so easily shaken off. The ramifications of illegitimacy, especially within noble and royal families could be felt for decades or even generations later. Given that those united in dynastic marriages frequently sought love elsewhere and many middle and lower-class couples delayed marriage until a whole decade after the onset of sexual maturity, was the church was relying on an unrealistic sense of people’s self-control ?

The reality of sexual relations and the family unit was far more complex. The majority of young people could not afford to marry until their late twenties, yet often lived and worked together in close proximity. Are we to understand then, that temptation never got the better of them ? At the risk of sounding overly romantic, are we to believe that they never fell hopelessly in love ? Are we really suggesting that human nature has changed so unrecognisably in the intervening centuries ? No; of course young unmarried people in Tudor times had sex, with or without the blessing of church or society, yet it was often the women who were left to deal with the consequential pregnancies. Servants shared rooms with masters, young people disappeared off into the bushes at fairs and adultery was overheard through key holes and windows. Even the most rudimentary forms of contraception were beyond the reach of the majority. “Quondams” appeared in the sixteenth century but would not have been widely available: the rhythm method and coitus interruptus were also notoriously unreliable; folklore offered various unhelpful mixtures of herbs and methods of stopping up the womb using hot wax ! Whilst Katherine Howard famously knew how to “meddle” with a man without getting with child, Tudor records are full of accusations and orders concerning the paternity and maintenance of bastards. In the absence of evidence and flight of those accused, the majority of illegitimate children ended up being cared for by the parish until the age of seven, which was not popular with the tithe payers. It was in a community’s financial interests to closely police their young people.

Inevitably, informal betrothals and alliances arose; temporary relationships were entered into in good faith and broken when the couple moved on or found alternative partners. A verbal promise of marriage or “hand-fasting,” could be enough to licence physical relations, as proved the downfall of Katherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth queen. Less than two years after her marriage, it was discovered that she had enjoyed two lovers in her youth, which she had omitted to mention to her new husband. With one Francis Dereham, she had exchanged promises, gifts and spent many nights together in a shared dormitory as husband and wife. Witnesses famously recalled how they had "hung together" by the belly "like two sparrows." Katherine might still have kept her head at this point but unfortunately for her, these enquiries led to the uncovering of her later adulterous affair and she went to the block in February 1542. Hand-fasting could even override later marriages in church, even if consummation had not taken place, as Henry tried to prove in the case of Anne Boleyn’s precontract to Henry Percy and successfully established to extract himself from an unwanted union with Anne of Cleves. Earlier, Anne Boleyn had conceived Elizabeth in December 1532, before her secret marriage to Henry took place in the new year. Promises could be made any time or any place: bedrooms, kitchens and fields witnessed secret agreements: it wasn’t until 1563 that the Council of Trent declared a marriage was void if not celebrated in front of a priest, although English law did not catch up until the eighteenth century.

 Legal marriages could take place anywhere, so long as the vows were properly made, enabling Catherine Grey and Edward Seymour to wed in secret in his bedroom in 1560 and immediately go on to consummate what became a doomed match. Edward’s sister, their only witness died soon after, Edward went overseas and Catherine found herself trying to conceal her pregnancy under Elizabeth’s watchful eye, unable to prove her marriage was legal. She had already been married once at the age of thirteen, which had been dissolved when it became politically expedient although this did not help her when the angry Queen committed her to the tower. Sometimes, agreements were consummated only for one of the parties to change their mind: in Rye in November 1571, the unmarried Joane Wilkinson found herself pregnant by Peter Greenaway of Hythe, who: “hath not only contracted himself in matrimony with the same Joane but also verie ungodlie hath mysused her bodie and therby gotten hir with child. Upon which complaynt the said Peter… denyed the same.” Pleading her case before the town council, she was aware that her fate lay in the testimony of others and “alleaged that there were divers credible witnesses residant within the town of Rye or near thereabouts that can depose of the same contract.” Justice for Joane would only rest on her ability to summon these witnesses and their willingness to testify and be believed.

Cohabitation was particularly frowned upon. Just how many of couples “living in sin” had been through some sort of hand-fasting or pledge is unclear: again, secrecy appears to lie at the root of the problem, although court records are full of the judgements made by neighbours, based on what they had seen. One Surrey ruling of 1569 decided that to establish paternity, it was “sufficient proof” that the mother and the accused had been discovered together in “suspicious” circumstances by a credible witness. At Midsummer 1589, William Pennocke, a maltman of Elstree in Hertfordshire, was charged with “living incontinently” with Mary Brooke, alias Thayer of Great Baddow, as a result of which she was pregnant. John Saunder, a clothier of Coggeshall, had been previously called to answer a case of adultery when he was resummoned for refusing to honour an order for maintenance of a child born to a Mary Webbe, of which he was also the reputed father. The Canterbury sessions heard in 1601 that one Mary Lawnder of Sittingbourne had lived an “incontinent” life, having born five or six illegitimate children, for which she was committed to a house of correction in Canterbury. 

Provision for illegitimate children, especially those born to the poor, homeless or servants, could be a drain on the parish, into whose care they were frequently entrusted. In Easter 1575, the general sessions at Chelmsford passed an ordinance for the relief of the poor and vagabonds:

“If any woman has a bastard child and any person can be proved or vehemently suspected by reasonable presumptions to be guilty of begetting the child or of incontinency, the justices shall take order with the man and woman for keeping the said child; and they shall take order with the mother to keep and nourish the child without charging the inhabitants and if they forsake the child and refuse to keep and same, they shall find her out and take order with her and if the man suspected to be guilty of begetting the child shall be conveyed away or concealed by his parents or other persons counselled by them to depart the country or his place of abode so he cannot be forthcoming to answer the charges against him, then the justices shall charge the parents and counsellors with the keeping of the said child until the party appear; and the justices shall take order by bond with the begetter of the child, and if he refuse to enter into bond, then they shall commit him to gaol.”

The assize courts took a dim view of those fathers who had failed to maintain their offspring, employing fines and imprisonment to ensure payment. Mariner John Brooke of Burnham had failed to support his daughter by Agnes Nicoll in April 1579 and was ordered by the local court to pay 8d a week to the parish for the keep of the child. At Easter 1591, Robert Barnard of Little Totham was also remanded in custody at Colchester gaol until he was able to support the child he had fathered with single woman Mary Turner of Southminster. In October 1586, John Poole was imprisoned for refusing to pay 8d a week for the upkeep of a child born to Mary Warde, currently maintained by the church wardens of West Hanningfield. Social class was no barrier to reprimand: Robert Noble of Thundersley was summoned in January 1591 for failing to maintain an order, meaning provision, for a child fathered by him on Margaret Nevell, who had been his servant and in March 1603, Elizabeth Bright, the servant of Nicholas Clarke, a painter of Beuchamp Roding bore his child. Marriage was no bar to desertion either: John Curtes of Shopland, husbandman, was to be apprehended in midsummer 1592, for having deserted his pregnant wife, who had passed her child on to the parish for care.  Sometimes costs were split between the parents. Edmund Cheveley of Stock was to contribute 6d weekly and Susan Dates 4d weekly for the maintenance of their child in 1579 but sometimes both parents absconded, like Alice Romboll and Arthur Machin, named and shamed by the constable of Writtle in 1576. In 1602, it was Anne Seayne of Billericay who had “unnaturally” absconded and left her child in the care of the parish and in 1591, Bridget Hammond at the Chelmsford Assize who had left with the consent of the father of her child.

Severe, public punishments for fornication and adultery were intended as deterrents and many many villagers actively denounced each other for transgression. Cases from the Essex assize courts suggest communities were jealously protective of their codes of moral conduct, reluctant to see their neighbours get away with unlawful behaviour. An intolerance of rule-breaking and the financial implication for the parish seem to recur in many statements and letters of complaint: the “whistle-blowing” culture cannot have helped neighbourly feeling, as seen in the swathe of orders made to keep the peace and the high number of physical and verbal clashes that required legal mediation. Denunciations could be supported by oaths of in excess of ten people, travelling to the local court to give witness, who would then provied an audience for the implementation of whippings and other shaming penalties. These were often carried out in market places or outside churches, at the busiest times of day. Yet society could not override biology. In spite of the social stigma and range of deterrents, the Tudors continued to have sex outside marriage and produce illegitimate children. It wasn’t the norm; the average per parish was around 10-12 from 1538 when records began, until the end of the dynasty in March 1603 and the lives of those involved could be very difficult as a result. It must have been very difficult for young people: the social and economic circumstances of their lives was often in direct competition with the rulings of their culture and church. Another four centuries before the stigma would finally be shaken off.

 

Anne Boleyn: A New Truth

  A woman who dared to rule a King.

Anne Boleyn has been selling books again. The story of her intense, passionate hold over England’s King and subsequent, dramatic fall has captivated historians and public alike in the intervening centuries. She has been portrayed in literature and on screen as a temptress and whore, a scheming politician and reluctant romantic heroine, whose heart had already been bestowed elsewhere. No other Tudor woman has elicited so much devotion among her followers or spawned so many books. Publications of 2011 alone, included a kindle edition of Henry and Anne’s love letters (March), Norton’s “Anne Boleyn in her own words” (March) the paperback edition of Philippa Gregory’s “The Boleyn Inheritance,” (May), David Loades’ study of the family’s fortunes (Sept) and a cluster of other novels. Yet Boleyn is never a straightforward character and the dramatic events of her short reign will always elicit a variety of interpretations.

But new truths still remain to be told. Whilst accounts rightly focus on Anne’s personal appeal and volatile relations with the King and her centrality to Tudor factional politics, one key aspect of her life has largely been neglected. Anne Boleyn was the casualty of Tudor gender politics. A casualty, as opposed to a victim, although she was undoubtedly the victim of a miscarriage of justice, engineered by the Machiavellian dealings of court politicians. For all its speed and disingenuousness, Anne’s fate was partly of her own making. She was a classic over-reacher of the Shakespearian kind; an over-mighty subject who played for high stakes and lost. Yet her greatest crime, in the eyes of her patriarchal contemporaries, was to transgress social boundaries and exploit her femininity to usurp the position of an anointed Queen and master the will of England’s most wilful King.

Sources disagree about Anne’s birth date; 1501 and 1507 are usually suggested, with modern scholarship tending towards the earlier year. Raised in the refined court of Margaret of Savoy, in the Netherlands, then as maid to the unfortunate Queen Claude of France, she acquired a polish that set her aside from her English counterparts, despite not conforming to contemporary standards of beauty. By the time she caught Henry’s eye in around 1526, he had already been married seventeen years and had possibly fathered two children by her more infamous sister. Anne’s policy of refusal, either by accident or design, put all the power into her hands. Women did not usually turn down the king’s advances but his romantic “enslavement” meant their roles were inverted, with Henry as the subject and Anne approaching some sort of rule over him. In personal terms, she held all the cards. Yet it was a misleading power, as it always came with the King’s permission; he allowed her dominance as part of his devotion. His favoured identity as “Sir Loyal Heart” and employment of the motifs of chivalry were genuine enough. In spite of his marital history, Henry retained a belief in true love and romance: he wanted to woo Anne; he was in love with the idea of the pursuit and the ideal. In the period of their courtship, spanning 1526 to early 1533, he allowed Anne a license which she exploited to the full. Yet once she became his wife, he expected her to conform to contemporary notions of submissive womanhood. He had allowed her to “win;” now the proper power balance must be restored.

Yet Anne was not a typical submissive female. Henry had fallen in love with the wrong woman, if he expected her to sit silently by and tolerate his opinions and peccadillos. Anne’s appeal to the modern reader lies in exactly this defiance; the insistence on an equality that was anachronistic in the Tudor court. She was opinionated and prepared to argue with him and did not show the deference he expected from a wife; ideally, he should have chosen a younger, more fertile model of Catherine of Aragon. In this, Anne was merely continuing the pattern of their pre-marital relationship in the belief that in this lay the “truth” of their union. Her “power” over the king before 1533 was so assured that she had assumed it would outlast their vows. Yet she failed to recognise that even when professing himself most in love, Henry’s submission had been a form of permission. As he later warned her, he could bring her as low as he had once raised her. Once she made the transition to Queen, her power began to dissolve. She was no longer the unattainable figure of romance but an obstinate woman who dared to try and rule her husband, such as were ridiculed and “tamed” in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. As such, she can be seen in the tradition of other females who were punished for attempting to defy their status, such as the prophetess Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, executed in 1534 for her resistance to the Reformation and Boleyn marriage.

Widespread misogyny was common during the Sixteenth century. Female inferiority was transported between discourses, from the law courts to medicine, familial relations to lyrics, jokes and sayings, so their low status was “overdetermined” by male society. Their subordination and otherness from men permeated mass-market culture, through sermons, manuals, treaties, popular literature, proverbs, folklore, charms, rhymes, song, ballads, anecdotes, jokes, superstition, seasonal crafts and customs, festivities, religious iconography, medicinal and herbal practices, emblem books, woodcuts for ballads and broadsheets, engravings and illustrations. Women were considered to have a particular talent for being subversive: feminine intelligence was often presented proverbially as cunning: “women in mischief are wiser than men,” they were “necessary evils” and were “made perfect by men”, a woman was “the weaker vessel”, “the woe of man” and “a man of straw was worth a woman of gold.” Popular culture identified them with noisy, silly geese, deceitful and insatiable cats, slippery eels, angry wasps and inflexible swine.

One common joke told how a Tudor man was asked why he had married a tiny woman and replied: “because of evils, the least was to be chosen.” Some pamphlets and chapbooks showed emblems of women lacking heads, in the sense of flawed intelligence but also decapitation as a symbol of the loss of power, the seat of wisdom, an inversion of patriarchal and therefore political power.  Disobedience to a husband was small-scale treason, almost as threatening to society as uncontrolled sexuality: one pamphlet’s caption reads “a headless maid is the worst of all monsters,” punning on the unsanctioned loss of virginity and sexual appetite that conflicted with the notion of female submission. Assuming Anne’s trump card during her courtship was her virginity, later slanders of sexual lasciviousness highlight just how fragile and short-lived her main bargaining tool had been. Her appeal for Henry had partly lain in her denial and abstinence; as she refused to conform, she was redefined in the terms of a sexual predator. The fear of female disobedience to male authority was apparent in popular maxims: “a woman does that which is forbidden her,” “women are always desirous of sovereignty” and “all women are ambitious naturally:” the new Queen represented the epitome of Tudor men’s most deep-rooted fears. Set within this context, the terminology of Anne Boleyn’s fall, with all its sexual and moral slurs, underlines a new truth about her condemnation.

Anne’s delivery of a daughter is often considered a factor in the failure of her marriage. Certainly, the much needed son and heir might have bought her more time, even assured her position by removing a key source of conflict but even before Elizabeth’s birth, the cracks had begun to show. Imperial Ambassador Eustace Chapuys noticed the strain between the couple in the weeks leading to Anne’s confinement, which meant they were barely on speaking terms; violent arguments, flirtations and rumours undermined their remaining three years. As Henry’s romantic vision of Anne rapidly crumbled, she and her faction became vulnerable. Her accusers attacked her as a woman; sexually and morally: adultery, incest and witchcraft were classic weapons used by men to demarcate a female who had transgressed; they formed part of a recognisable social code that signalled a viable target, in which even other women and the King himself, participated. Without Henry’s protection, the already unpopular Anne became a scapegoat for social and gender venom, heaped with the abuse usually reserved for upstarts like her previous adversary Thomas Wolsey. When she miscarried her final child, early in 1536, those about her could see her days were numbered.

Alison Weir’s recent analysis of Anne’s fall posits a sudden, desperate attempt by Thomas Cromwell to save his own skin, with the reluctant co-operation of a monarch surprised by the nature of his wife’s charges. Yet Henry’s resentment had been brewing since at least the end of 1533 and found a welcome outlet in his servant’s case, which struck a chord with his wounded pride. His basis for divorce, reform and remarriage had lain in the inadmissibility of his first match to Catherine of Aragon: he had broken with Rome in the hope of a son who had not materialised. Anne had promised him the earth, or rather, he had romantically imagined the earth he allowed her to project. Now, her outspokenness and failure to produce an heir left him in no stronger position than in a decade before, although now he was the subject of humour and gossip throughout the whole of Europe. The reality of his dream became a source of humiliation and emasculation in a man defined by his pride and sense of prowess. Henry was not Cromwell’s instrument in Anne’s fall; rather, it was a savage retaliation of a male ego. By recategorising his wife’s early appeal as a form of witchcraft and enchantment, by pandering to the stereotypes of beauty and disfigurement and permitting her disingenuous condemnation as an incestuous, insatiable adulteress, in the knowledge that the supposed dates of her crimes tallied with times of her confinements, he colluded in the exploitation of contemporary misogyny to slur a woman he wished to be rid of. Anne’s shameful trial, in May 1536, as well as that of her co-accused; her brother George, Norris, Weston, Brereton and the musician Mark Smeaton marks an unforgettable low point in the  King’s reign and explains the fascination of subsequent generations with this miscarriage of justice.

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Bequeathing her Worldly Goods

 Domestic recycling in the wills of Tudor and Stuart women.

Wills are often controversial, regardless of their historical moment.  As death approached, Tudor and Stuart women took stock of their goods and went about dividing them up among their relatives and friends. Some of their bequests can seem surprising today; not many people in the twenty-first century would think of passing on their bed, pillows or sheets, but considering that for many, this would have been the most expensive item in the house, this act of generosity gains considerable significance. Whole books have been spun out of Shakespeare’s legacy to his wife of his second best bed, playing on the emotional connotations of being “second-best” rather than simply reflecting the accessibility, ownership and disposability of the item.

Women’s wills of the late Sixteenth and early Seventeenth centuries continued a long standing tradition of passing down the tools of their trades; those household items that helped structure the day for the vast majority were used and used again. In a patriarchal world where the main viable social status for women was achieved through marriage, a “career” for the Tudor and Stuart housewife largely meant washing, cooking and childrearing. Household objects such as cooking utensils, cutlery, bed linen and clothing were not as readily available or disposable as they are today but they were often more durable. Many women’s homes were filled with inherited items and the “life” of a solid pewter saucepan might span many generations.

Following the usual arrangements for burial and the payment of debts, beds were the most common first item on a woman’s list. Composing her will in February 1629, Joane Nickoll, widow of a Shoemaker in Essex left her “joined (double) bedstead” with the “featherbed thereon,” two bolsters, one pillow, one blanket and one covering to her married daughter, Mary Barnes. One can only imagine the subsequent reshuffle in the Barnes household, as the various beds were reassigned, in the light of this good fortune. Joane also had furniture to give, which was rare for the time; she left two cupboards, three chests, one box, one table and a number of stools; from her mother’s kitchen, Mary received two pots, one gridiron, one spit and three kettles.

In 1621, the widow Christian Lamberd of Prittlewell left her “joined bed that standeth in the new loft” to her married son, along with a featherbed, two bolsters, two pillows, blankets and a coverlet but to his wife, she left money in order to have a ring made. In 1622, it was Alice Bird’s grandchild Frances Parker who received the featherbed currently from her parlour “upon the trundle” and the one in her kitchen, which were probably pull-out beds used for servants as well as her joined bed from over the brewhouse, also a “blew birded coverlet” (probably embroidered), fine white sheets and a casting sheet, which had been left in the hands of another local widow to pass on. A similarly lengthy and generous bequeath went to her other married grandchild also named Alice Bird.

The handing down of household objects is indicative of the tradition of mutual support that thrived among some women through mutual necessity. The female subculture of domesticity was not any form of proto-Feminism but rather a shared sympathy for the similarities in their lives. Women supported each other practically and emotionally at key moments such as childbirth, illness, death, marriage and conflict. Court Assize records state how they took each other in during times of dearth and loss, helped in delivering the babies of strangers, sheltered abandoned and mistreated wives and even physically intervened in cases of domestic violence. They would have shared a common culture of recipes, remedies, advice, support, medicinal herbs and the artefacts of their existence: small wonder that their wills are vehicles for recycling those pots and pans that, far from being trivial, marked the cornerstones of their lives.

In 1603, Thomasin Deysey left her sister Agnes Cock four pewter platters but it was her servant Thomas Munt to whom she gave a flockbed with cover and bolster. Thomasin’s stepdaughter Grace received three pewter platters whilst the rest of her worldly goods were left to be sold in order to pay her debts.  Alice Bird of Chelmsford endowed her grandchildren with an array of kitchen items, including a great cauldron with iron hinges, the newest of the two lesser brass pots, two brass possets, a pair of pewter candlesticks, a pewter chamber pot, plates and pans. To the daughters of her son-in-law, Joan Raven of Little Waltham gave one pair of candlesticks, two platters and two platters in 1591; such gifts might contribute to a young woman’s ability to marry and set up a household of her own.

Clothing might seem a strangely intimate thing to bequeath to friends or neighbours. Obviously hand-me-downs in families were common and special items might be given as gifts but the majority of legacies in wills are for regular, daily clothing, that the recipient may well have seen the owner wearing. There were no mass-produced garments at the time; new clothes were cut and sewn by hand, woven or knitted by those intending to wear them but this would not have been frequent. The average “wardrobe” (as a collective noun, rather than piece of furniture,) of four hundred years ago would have been tiny in comparisons with today. Clothes were expensive and time-consuming to produce; costly fabrics and dyes were accessible by a small elite but even those at the top found it hard to keep up. Elizabeth’s favourite, Robert Dudley often found himself deep in debt through keeping up the appearances necessary to his rank, until he was given the Earldom of Leicester, on this day, 29 September, in 1564.

In 1578, Margaret Rand of Ashden left her two daughters “all her best apparel,” presumably for them to fight over between themselves; similarly in 1570, Agnes Rothe of Wix left her four daughter her “raiment” as well as a pewter platter and saucer each. The widow Trott of Tilbury left to her daughter Sara one “red stuffe petticoat” and one Holland smock and her daughter Mary “one cloth gown and one clothe petticoat, to make her apparell withal.” To her sister-in-law Agnes she left one “handkercher stitched without” and to her brother and brother-in-law, she gave money to buy a pair of gloves as a remembrance of her. In 1603, Thomasin Deysey left Jude Wilbure her “first gown” and Elizabeth Irelande a red petticoat and white cotton waistcoat.

Clearly, these examples barely touch the surface of a wide culture of domestic bequests that indicate an understanding of the cyclical nature of life; women passed on the metaphorical baton to the next generation of wives and mothers by endowing them with the apparatus of the bedroom and kitchen. Inscribed in the nicks and dents of each saucepan, in the tears and mending of petticoats, were the experiences of a marginal and largely illiterate group, whose stories were barely otherwise told.