ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a sampling of records from the fifteenth-century Court of Common Pleas, as well as some fifteenth-century Court of Chancery petitions. It addresses Chancery petitions, which emanated from roughly the same grouping of individuals as Common Bench, were more detailed in nature and are thus useful to illustrate some of the larger issues. The chapter explains how singlewomen survived in a world that failed to acknowledge their existence. English singlewomen experienced marginality chiefly in terms of an absence of conceptual space rather than a geographic divide. The marginality of singlewomen is evidenced best in the difficulty of finding them in the records of the medieval courts. The participation of singlewomen in a credit economy defies traditional scholarly assumptions that the financial vulnerability of singlewomen propelled them into marriage. Pawning was probably also a popular option among singlewomen.
