The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

by Mortimer, Ian

  A woman cannot vote in a parliamentary or a mayoral election. She cannot be a JP, a lawyer, a mayor or an alderman. One of the very few official roles open to her is that of churchwarden – but that is an onerous, unpaid position and very few women seek it.80 The only professional role she may act in officially is that of a licensed surgeon – but it is exceptionally rare that a woman acquires such a licence. Mary Cornellys of Bodmin receives a licence to practise surgery throughout the diocese of Exeter in 1568, but she is the only female who does so for the whole reign.81 Women can and do obtain licences to practise midwifery, but this is as much a method of social control as enabling them to be recognised professionally, making sure babies are baptised into the Church of England.82 As for other trades, a woman is not freely able to do business in a town as she is barred from being a freeman; she has to start a trade in conjunction with her husband. If they set up a business together, and he is a freeman, she will be allowed to continue his trade after his death – but even this concession is made largely so that she can support her deceased husband’s children.

  Other than the above prohibitions, a woman may travel, pray, write and generally go about her affairs just as freely as a man – as long as she is not married.

  The legal implications of marriage provide a second layer of restrictions. Authority in any household is vested in the head of that household: where it is a man, his wife or daughter automatically falls under his authority. All property is vested in him, so a wife’s possessions are legally her husband’s property, not her own. If a woman owns or inherits freehold property in her own right, then the right to enjoy the income from it automatically transfers to her husband; he can keep taking the income even after her death (as long as she has given him children). If a married woman wishes to dispose of anything she owns, she has to ask her husband’s permission. A married woman is not allowed to enter a legal contract without her husband’s consent. She cannot do or say anything contrary to her husband’s interests. She cannot even draw up a last will and testament without her husband’s permission. She is not allowed to let anyone from outside the family into the home without his permission. She can be chastised or beaten with impunity by her husband as long as he does not actually kill her. It is said that a man may legally beat ‘an outlaw, a traitor, a pagan, his villein and his wife’ – and that list suggests the low status that a married woman occupies in the eyes of the law.83 And many men do beat their wives, whether because of a violent nature, a disagreement or an act of disobedience. In 1600, Simon Forman suspects that his wife is having an affair. He believes she has lied about her whereabouts and, when he confronts her, she shouts back ‘with howling and weeping’. He notes in his diary that she would not be quiet until he had hit her two or three times.84 Few Elizabethan men feel shame about striking their wives in such circumstances. When the reason is disobedience or adultery, other women may even approve of the beating.

  So why do women marry? After all, the legal situation is grim, you give up your property, you have to take on a load of chores – such as cleaning clothes, linen and bedding, which Elizabethan men never do – and run the risk of dying in childbirth. The question, of course, presupposes that you have a choice. Normally you don’t. You get married because it is what your father and mother want you to do and what is expected of you. Moreover, unless someone is prepared to look after you indefinitely, the alternative to marriage might be poverty and starvation.

  But think of marriage in a different way. You give up few or no rights if you move from the authority of your father to that of your husband. In fact you may gain considerably, for you are able to take advantage of your husband’s position in society, becoming his deputy. While you were a child in your father’s household, your mother or stepmother filled that role and commanded you and any servants; now you assume that position of authority yourself. As a married woman you organise the household, govern the behaviour of the servants and children and place the orders for supplies. Moreover, there are no rivals to your authority – Elizabethan households are all built around the single married couple and it is rare for them to contain a parent of one of the married partners or other in-laws; in fact, fewer than 10 per cent do.85 It is very much a nuclear family, with children, servants and apprentices revolving around husband and wife.86 Finally, the heavy legal bias in favour of men means that your husband is also legally responsible for all your debts. And if he throws you out he can be compelled to take you back again: a husband has responsibilities towards his wife that he can’t shirk or neglect without doing significant damage to his position in society. Thus a woman often gains from marriage, even though it places her in a role that is legally subservient to her husband.

  Marriage, then, is a weighty decision on which your future happiness depends. Most wealthy people’s marriages are carefully arranged between the families. The dowry – a payment from the father of the bride to the husband – is an important feature of betrothals. Where a bride comes with a few hundred acres, it may be the land that persuades the husband to go to the altar, not her feminine charms. For this reason, it can normally be expected that a man will not be faithful to his wife. Or as one contemporary puts it: ‘They that marry where they do not love will love where they do not marry.’87 For the less well-off, things may be just as businesslike: ‘Easy agreement followeth where women be married not for love but for good,’ says William Horman.88 Watch out for the man who will marry you for your dowry, spend it and then abandon you – like William Hacket at the start of this book. At the bottom end of the scale, marrying a man who might leave you, or cannot keep you, is very dangerous. It might lead to poverty and starvation as well as misery. Having said that, there are many marriages that prove to be long, faithful, rewarding and loving, and many more lives are enriched by marriage than are ruined by it.

  At what age should you marry? On the whole, girls are not considered old enough for cohabitation until they reach sixteen, although in certain circumstances they can be married at a younger age. In Romeo and Juliet, Capulet declares of Juliet, ‘my child is yet a stranger in the world – she hath not seen the change of fourteen years; let two more summers wither in their pride ere we may think her ripe to be a bride’.89 And this sense of ‘ripeness’ is echoed in the arrangements for a child bride, Margaret, Lady Rowecliffe, and her husband ‘not to lie together til she came to the age of sixteen years’.90 Even this is still very young for a bride to be led to the altar. On average, men are twenty-eight and women twenty-six when they marry – although the wealthier your parents are, the earlier these things are arranged.91 Those marrying with a licence from the bishop (rather than by banns) tend either to be people from more prosperous families or couples marrying for reasons of urgency (such as bridal pregnancy); they marry on average at the age of twenty-six and twenty-three respectively. Noblemen and noblewomen marry younger still, at twenty-four and nineteen.92 The notion is that they need to marry and produce a rightful heir as quickly as possible to provide a political alliance between two families.

  Given all this, you will be surprised to see that many brides and bridegrooms are much older, in their thirties and forties or beyond. The reason for the discrepancy is that the ages given above are for first marriages. When life is so precarious, many women find themselves widowed in their twenties. And the chances of dying in childbirth mean there are many young widowers too. Where a man has children by his dead wife, he needs to remarry quickly – not just to satisfy his sexual needs but to help with the care of his children. The same goes for a widowed mother: whatever ages her children are, it is difficult for a woman to earn enough money by herself to provide food for a family. Thus remarriage becomes an important survival strategy – another reason why people ‘marry for good, not for love’. In all, 25–30 per cent of all marriages are remarriages.93 When food is scarce and expensive, older people marry in greater numbers, to pool their resources. This leads some people to marry in their sixties and seventies; they may also take younger spo
uses who are in need of food, but more able. In Norwich, there are seven men with wives thirty to thirty-nine years younger, and six with wives more than forty years younger. For similar reasons, older women marry younger men: twenty-one poor women in Norwich in 1570 have husbands ten to nineteen years younger, fifteen have husbands twenty to twenty-nine years younger, and two have husbands more than thirty years younger (one husband being more than forty years younger).94 Thus marriage, in all its degrees and purposes, is far too serious a matter to be left to the vagaries of affection, for both men and women. If you are a woman with no income and no family to keep you, or if you are disabled or have children who need feeding, then giving up your legal rights to a husband is a small price to pay.

  On a positive note, foreign visitors often remark that in England women have more freedom than anywhere else in Europe. This is what the Swiss Thomas Platter writes about Englishwomen in 1599:

  Now the women-folk of England, who have mostly blue-grey eyes and are fair and pretty, have far more liberty than in other lands, and know just how to make good use of it for they often stroll out or drive by coach in very gorgeous clothes, and the men must put up with such ways, and may not punish them for it, indeed the good wives often beat their men, and if this is discovered, the nearest neighbour is placed on a cart and paraded through the whole town as a laughing-stock for the victim, as a punishment – he is informed – for not having come to his neighbour’s assistance when his wife was beating him … And there is a proverb about England, which runs: England is a paradise for women, a prison for servants and a hell for horses.95

  Platter is partly quoting (and thus agreeing with) the duke of Württemberg’s secretary, who visits England in 1592 and writes that ‘the women have much more liberty than perhaps in any other place’.96 The Venetian Alessandro Magno provides a Mediterranean perspective on this unusual liberty in his comment that

  Englishwomen have great freedom to go out of the home without menfolk … Many of the young women gather outside Moorgate and play with young lads, even though they do not know them. Often during these games the women are thrown to the ground by the young men who only allow them to get up after they have kissed them. They kiss each other a lot.97

  Emanuel van Meteren likewise declares in 1575:

  Although the women there are entirely in the power of their husbands, except for their lives, yet they are not kept as strictly as they are in Spain or elsewhere. Nor are they shut up but have the free management of the house or housekeeping, after the fashion of those of the Netherlands and other neighbouring countries. They go to market to buy what they like best to eat. They are well-dressed, fond of taking it easy, and commonly leave the care of household matters and drudgery to their servants. They sit before their doors decked out in fine clothes in order to see and be seen by the passers-by. In all banquets and feasts they are shown the greatest honour; they are placed at the upper end of the table where they are served first; at the lower end they help the men. All the rest of their time they employ in walking and riding, in playing at cards or otherwise, in visiting their friends and keeping company, conversing with their equals (whom they term ‘gossips’) and their neighbours, and making merry with them at childbirths, christenings, churchings and funerals; and all this with the permission and knowledge of their husbands, as such is the custom. Although the husbands often recommend to them the pains, industry and care of the German or Dutch women, who do what men ought to do both in the house and in the shops, for which services in England men are employed, nevertheless the women usually persist in retaining their customs. This is why England is called ‘The Paradise of Married Women’. The girls who are not yet married are kept much more rigorously and strictly than in the Low Countries.98

  If you look in the London taverns and alehouses, you will see women there – sometimes in greater numbers than the men. Women help their husbands run such establishments, acting as ‘ale-wives’ and brewsters, and if they are widowed they will often run them single-handedly. It is unusual to see a woman in a tavern or alehouse by herself (unless she is an ale-wife), and lone female customers in such premises will be assumed to be either drunkards or immoral, or both; but groups of women, and women with their husbands, form a significant proportion of any tavern’s clientele.99

  The one area in which some women can claim a degree of parity is in literature. The educated ladies of Elizabethan England are making their biggest impression through translations, for noble and gentry families choose to educate their daughters in languages and music above all other things. The daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke are foremost among these. The formidable Anne, who marries Sir Nicholas Bacon, publishes a translation from the Latin of no less a work than John Jewel’s Apologie of the Church of England in 1564. Her sister, Mildred, the wife of Sir William Cecil, can speak Greek as fluently as English and translates several works. Another of Sir Anthony’s daughters, Elizabeth, Lady Russell, publishes her translation from the French of A Way of Reconciliation touching the true nature and substance of the body and blood of Christ in the Sacrament; and a fourth daughter, Katherine, is renowned for her ability to translate from the Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Other families also produce female scholars. Mary Bassett, granddaughter of Sir Thomas More, is well-versed in the classics and translates works by Eusebius, Socrates and several other ancient writers, not to mention a book by her grandfather. Jane, Lady Lumley, publishes a translation of Euripides. Margaret Tyler publishes The Mirror of Princely deeds and Knighthood (1578), translated from the Spanish. And so on. The educated ladies of Elizabethan England are far freer to reveal the fruits of their intellect than their mothers and grandmothers.

  Alongside translation you will come across published volumes of original writings by Elizabethan women. In 1582 Thomas Bentley brings out two volumes called The Monument of Matrones, an anthology of religious writing by women for women. It is an extraordinary publication: religion, of all things, is an area in which men presume dominance. Yet many women confidently put forward original lines of theological thinking in this work. Dorcas Martin, the wife of the lord mayor, writes a piece in which a woman is catechising her daughter, even though this is normally the role of a clergyman. Frances Neville, Lady Bergavenny, composes her ‘Praiers in prose and verse’ for the same volume. Anne Wheathill and Elizabeth Grymeston are examples of less aristocratic ladies who write of their faith. In 1584 Anne publishes A Handful of Wholesome (though Homely) Herbs, being a collection of forty-nine prayers; Elizabeth dies just before her Miscelanea: Meditations, Memoratives (1604) appears in print. Most remarkable of all these pioneering female religious writers is Anne Locke. Just before the start of the reign she leaves her husband in London and sets off with two infant children to Geneva to translate the sermons of the French Protestant theologian, Jean Calvin; two books of translations follow. In a telling line from the preface to her second book she reasons that, because she is a woman, great things are denied her; yet that makes it all the more important for her to accomplish what little she is permitted to do.100

  The fullest exposition of this new female freedom to write and publish is to be found in poetry. The first published volume of verse by an Englishwoman is Isabella Whitney’s The Copy of a Letter lately written by a gentlewoman in metre to her unconstant lover (1566–7). This is followed by her A sweet Nosegay, or pleasant posie, containing a hundred and ten philosophical flowers (1573). Remarkably, Isabella is not actually of gentle birth, but a Cheshire lass who comes to London, works as a servant and teaches herself to write. Her wit is straightforward and honest, and thus all the more powerful. Consider her ‘philosophical flower’ no. 65:

  The lover’s tears will soon appease

  His lady’s angry mood

  But men will not be pacified

  If women weep a flood.

  Better still is the title poem from The Copy of a Letter, in which she lambasts her lover for taking another woman as his wife:

  And if you cannot be content

&nbs
p; To lead a single life

  (although the same right quiet be)

  Then take me to your wife;

  So shall the promises be kept

  That you so firmly made:

  Now, choose whether thou will be true,

  Or be of Sinon’s trade

  Whose trade if that you long shall use,

  It shall your kindred stain:

  Example: take by many a one

  Whose falsehood now is plain.

  As by Aeneas first of all,

  Who did poor Dido leave

  Causing the queen by his untruth

  With sword her heart to cleave.

  Also I find that Theseus did

  His faithful love forsake:

  Stealing away within the night

  Before she did awake.

  Jason that came of noble race

  Two ladies did beguile

  I muse how he durst show his face

  To them that knew his wile.

  For when he by Medea’s art

  Had got the fleece of gold

  And also had of her that time

  All kind of things he would

  He took his ship and slid away

  Regarding not the vows

  That he did make so faithfully

  Unto his loving spouse.

  As a poet, Isabella is followed by Anne Dowriche, whose The French History: that is, a lamentable discourse of three bloody broils in France for the Gospel of Jesus Christ (1589) is a long and complex historical poem. The third published female poet is Elizabeth Melville, who brings out A Godly Dream in 1603; and the fourth the remarkable Emilia Lanier, who is hard at work on Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, which will eventually appear in 1611. Clearly written for a female readership, and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, this collection argues forcefully in favour of women: