1. Kenny (1879) p. 13. [BACK]

2. Defoe (1724) (2) p. 148. [BACK]

3. Quoted by Stone (1977) p. 331. There is a huge literature on the common law status of married women; for valuable studies, see Kenny (1879) and Holdsworth (1903-72) iii, 520-33. See also the contemporary legal texts, e.g. Baron & Feme (1719) and Treatise (1732). For a general book, see Reiss (1934). [BACK]

4. Treatise (1732) p. 91. [BACK]

5. Quoted by Kenny (1879) p. 100. On the doctrine of separate estate and the associated 'equity to a settlement', see Kenny (1879) pp. 98-115; Holdsworth (1903-72) v, 310-14; vi, 644-6, xii, 275-6; Okin (1983). [BACK]

6. For the custom and legal decisions relating to it, see Holdsworth (1903-72) ii, 387; iii, 323; Bohun (1702) pp. 124-5; Baron & Feme (1719) p. 304; Treatise (1732) pp. 91, 104; Laws (1765) p. 111. For the feme sole in later medieval London, see Lacey (1985) pp. 42-5. [BACK]

8. Defoe loc. cit; Advice (1678), see advertisement in Vernon (1678). [BACK]

9. Literacy rates show a remarkable rise during our period. See Cressy (1980) p. 144, Table 7.2, which shows a fall in female illiteracy in London and Middlesex from 80-90 per cent of a sample drawn from the period 1580-1640 to under 50 per cent in the early eighteenth century. See also Earle (1989) for the literacy of London women and, in general, on the female labour market in the London of our period. [BACK]

10. Campbell (1747) p. 189. [BACK]

11. Clark (1919). [BACK]

12. Defoe (1726-7) i, 355; Clark (1919) pp. 35-6; Stone (1977) pp. 350-1. break [BACK]

13. Mandeville (1709) p. 128; Child (1694) pp. 4-5. [BACK]

14. Defoe (1724) (2) pp. 148-9; social comment on idle women can be found scattered through the pages of the Tatler and Spectator. Some of the most savage invective came from the pen of Swift, e.g. The Progress of Marriage (1722); The Journal of a Modern Lady (1729). [BACK]

15. MCI. [BACK]

16. Alice Clark claimed that one indication of a decline in the role of wives in business was a growing reluctance of husbands to appoint them as sole executrixes (Clark (1919) p. 39). She gave no evidence for this assertion but it was tested against our sample. From 164 wills (excluding those of widowers), it was found that 21 per cent of men appointed their widow as sole executrix with no overseers, 57 per cent appointed the widow asjoint-executrix or sole executrix with (normally male) overseers to assist her and 22 per cent did not name the widow as executrix at all. However, when the figures are broken down for those who died before and after 1690, there was an increase in widows as sole executrixes from 12.5 to 36.7 per cent and a decrease in widows not named at all from 25 to 16.6 per cent, the opposite trend to that posited by Alice Clark. [BACK]

17. Gregory King estimated that there were 98,000 husbands, 10,600 widowers and 37,100 widows in late seventeenth-century London, making widows about a quarter of the combined total (Thirsk & Cooper (1972) p. 773)). In David Glass's analysis of the 1692 Poll Tax, he found that widows were just over 10 per cent of the total of the above three categories (Glass (1969)). Female heads of households should lie somewhere between these two figures, since many of King's widows would be dependants, while many female householders would be too poor to pay the Poll Tax. Many of these widows were probably not heads of households for very long since, contrary to rural English experience, London widows of the middle station were quick to re-marry (Brodsky (1986) pp. 122-34). [BACK]

18. PRO B4/1-2. See Appendix C for more on these records. Since writing this chapter, I have done much more work on the women's labour market in London. See Earle (1989). [BACK]

19. Glass (1969) p. 580, Table 5 (52 women and 622 men). [BACK]

20. This sample was drawn from GHMS 11936/23-29 (1726-29); 281 (89 per cent) of the policies were held by a woman on her own, 16 (5 per cent) by two women and 20 (6 per cent) by a woman together with a man. [BACK]

21. This assumption does not ignore the possibility that women in the second group also had wages or paper securities and that women in the third group lived off all the various types of income. [BACK]

22. Sun 39146, 40120. [BACK]

23. These inventories are in PRO PROB 4/1/1-1300. Since there are about 25,000 inventories in the whole series, this is probably about a 5 per cent sample of all inventories of London widows in this series. [BACK]

24. PRO PROB 4/1/107 and 171. [BACK]

25. CLRO Orphans 1049; cf. 331 for another pawnbroker and 414, 473, 492, 516, 639, 664, 699, 706, 788, 933, 940, 960, 1037, 1281, 1428, 1631, 1962, 2041, 2055, 2130, 2746, 2826 for other businesses run by women. break [BACK]

26. For the later period, see Johnson (1985). [BACK]

27. CLRO Orphans 1032, 1086, 964. Cf. 347B, 451, 713, 1026, 1151, 1278, 1293, 1351, 1894 for other widows living on rentier investments. [BACK]

28. The bargain was not all on one side. Vivien Brodsky has recently shown that the literary emphasis on the lusty remarrying widow who very often married a younger man was by no means the fiction that some historians have suggested (Brodsky (1986)). [BACK]