ABSTRACT
The widow’s and children’s right to reasonable parts was abolished in the rest of England and Wales by several statutes between 1692 and 1725. The ordinary bond form of marriage settlement appears only in probate accounts, and even there it is only by inference: the widow deducts the amount for which she had contracted before marriage out of her husband’s estate. On a popular level, widows’ immediate material well-being - in terms of their inheritance from husbands anyway - may not have changed. The rapidly declining number of widows named executrix following the statutory limitations of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century reflects the limitation of widows’ power intended by those statutes, adopted by ordinary men. From the late seventeenth century Parliament and the judiciary steadily eliminated widows’ property rights, after a long period of relative stasis. It was in probate law that some of the most important changes affecting ordinary people occurred.
