ABSTRACT
An eighteenth-century treatise on law relating to women spotted what appeared to be an oddity in this area, noting that ‘Our old laws and customs relating to women are many of them very merry, though the makers of them might possibly be grave men’. Chronology of the common law’s involvement in the lives of, and interest in, women is not necessarily the same as its attention to and accommodation of men and their interests. A series of contradictions seem to lie at the heart of the common law in this area, with women placed between poles of unity and division; responsibility and irresponsibility; capacity and incapacity; visibility and invisibility; audibility and inaudibility. While some rules relating to women in the medieval common law were quite settled by the later twelfth century, elsewhere, ‘the law’ might be indistinct, contested or in flux, and might not have reached a clearly defined shape before the end of the medieval period.
