Women, land and family in early modern North Yorkshire

"This paper will aim to establish women’s economic and social agency through land ownership (and, to a much smaller extent, rental) in early-modern England through the example of North Yorkshire. The central question that the paper will seek to answer is ‘what did land mean to women?’ Through the use of strict settlement and family strategies that rendered daughters and younger sons cash-rich and eldest sons the owners of land, land came to have strong patronymic associations that might be thought to exclude women both discursively and practically in terms of their ownership. This paper seeks to challenge this version of landed property ownership in the past through presenting those examples of women who did come into land ownership, arguing that they were an important minority. Land, whether in the hands of a man or a woman, was estate which in and of itself (legally) had perpetual succession. In this sense, both male and female owners held only a bundle of temporary rights and were bearers only from one generation to the next of something ‘perpetual’. It was something of a myth that land was linked in perpetuity to a [male] name (and ‘blood’) and the study of women, land and family is one way of laying historical reality against contemporary gender construction and social expectation. The paper will analyse women’s attachment to land to answer questions about whether or not they, like the men of their families, thought of land as a ‘masculine’ form of property. It will do this through discussion of the family strategies that women adopted to perpetuate family name or subvert patrilineage. The paper will discuss examples of particular women - who they were, how they came by and managed their land and which family and kin members they favoured in their wills. Did they follow the male example of leaving land to men and capital to women? Recent research by Anne Laurence, Pamela Sharpe and Judith Spicksley has all pointed to the importance of what David Green and Alastair Owens (2003) have called ‘gentlewomanly capitalism’ or the investment by single women in particular in businesses, stocks and shares and the very personalised money-lending and banking of the early-modern period. But for women land was an integral part of the asset transactions that took place in the family at critical life stages for them such as at marriage, remarriage and widowhood. It is therefore worth asking if they made the same clear distinction between land and capital as modern historians if both were linked, for example through jointure, in the transactional exchanges that took place within families to create and artificially perpetuate male name. Land was a legal title with complex meanings; discovering how those meanings interacted with early-modern ‘femininity’ lies at the heart of this research and its first findings to be presented in this paper."