ABSTRACT
A recent work devoted to landmark moments in the relationship between women and the law declared that ‘Legal history scholarship in the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland largely ignores women’. Some of the best-known visual representations of the medieval English common law at work are to be found in the four images, now held by the Inner Temple, of the central courts at Westminster, in the mid-fifteenth century. A partial justification for a lack of general discussion of women and the law in classical legal history has been the idea that, during the formative medieval period and for centuries thereafter, there was no coherent common law treatment of the position of women. This may require a certain amount of speculation, tentatively filling in some of the gaps in the record, but speculation has been admitted in some other areas of legal historical scholarship.
