ABSTRACT
The death of a married woman in early modern Scotland sparked the division of her and her husband’s movable estate, with her husband, children, and kinship network all staking a claim to her share of marital goods. Marital property arrangements and testamentary practices in Scotland were closely aligned with procedures found in other civil legal traditions on the Continent. Unlike women under the English common law doctrine of coverture, married women in Scotland were entitled to bequeath a customary share of marital property before death. The amount depended on whether they had any children with their husbands. Even when a married woman died without leaving a written testament, her husband was not automatically granted the right to retain control and ownership of all marital goods and assets. This chapter will show how married women of middling to lower status in seventeenth-century Glasgow asserted ownership of particular movable goods and assets when faced with the prospect of death and will investigate the kinds of goods married women bequeathed in testaments in Glasgow’s commissary (reformed church) court across the seventeenth century. It will also investigate the effects of intestacy on the marital household and will explain why husbands and wives often treated household goods as jointly owned in their testaments. In doing so, this chapter adds a valuable contribution to our understanding of gender relations, household strategies, and marital property arrangements in an urban settlement in early modern Scotland.
