ABSTRACT
For much of the legal practice of early modern England this outline was an accurate one. In particular, while contemporaries observed increased levels of litigation, women’s access to this kind of participation in the law was restricted. Technically, married women could not sue cases at the common law: their desires, and their legal authority, were “subject to their husband”. But among those who could “shift it well enough”must surely have been the women who fought cases at the church courts. There, married, single and widowed women sued cases in their own names over disputed wills, tithes, and, most often, sex and marriage. In the most popular type of litigation, suits alleging sexual slander, they brought cases up to five times more often than men did. A typical case in London in 1628 involved Magdalen Lewis and Mary Record, neighbours from near Bridewell. The two had fallen out after Magdalen’s husband persuaded Mary’s lodgers not to go to her wedding feast. Mary interpreted this as a slur on her premarital conduct and, in return, launched an attack on Magdalen’s honesty, calling her “a pore sorry thinge a common thinge and one that was familiar with every hattmakers boy”, adding “that she had had a bastard by a hattmakers boy before she was married”. The slander stuck. Six months later a witness testified that as Magdalen went about her business “people thereabouts do mocke at her and say that she must goe into poules to try her honesty”. Magdalen followed their advice to “goe into poules”, bringing a suit against
Mary at London’s principal church court, the consistory court held in St Pauls.2
