ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relations between women, land, property and the law. It outlines single, widowed and married women's legal position as property owners, paying particular attention to the doctrines of primogeniture and coverture and their impact on women's property rights. The chapter also explores the circumstances by which women most commonly became landowners, outlining the four main routes namely: inheritance, widowhood, separate estate, purchase and litigation, to landownership for women, as well as the practices by which married women were sometimes able to circumvent the restrictions of coverture. It assesses the significance of women as a class of landowners in Georgian England, quantifying the scale of women's landholding in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries using a large sample of data drawn from the parliamentary enclosure awards. Yet, if women rarely made up more than one-fifth of landowners, that is not to suggest they were an insignificant presence in the medieval, early modern and modern landscape or economy.
