|
Thus, under Common Law the married woman was her husband's property, as were her own goods and chattels. Freehold land she had held as a spinster passed into her husband's hands, although she continued to own it in theory and could sue for its return if she survived her husband. As well, a married woman could not enter into a binding contract on her own account, although she could do so as her husband's agent. If she committed a civil wrong, she had to be sued jointly with her husband.
A woman could not plead benefit of clergy to escape civil punishment for a crime. The result in this case was that the courts tended to mitigate the punishments of women who committed crimes in league with their husbands, on the assumption that married women acted under duress.9.
One of the major reasons for the legal inferiority of English and European women generally had to do with the nature of land tenure, which was the major thread binding Frankish social institutions. The generally familiar outlines of the system of land tenure known as feudalism militated against women's legal standing. Holding of land from a lord by right of military service obviously omitted women from the English legal picture during the period 1066 to about 1200.
However, throughout this period, women did play a part in the system, and increasingly so, because knights' land often passed on to female heirs. Women could not personally provide military service, so they had to find a man to serve in their stead, and in addition they remained responsible for finding the extra men and equipment that was part of their fief. In the late twelfth century Henry Plantagenet was forced to regularise the chaos that ensued, which he did by substituting scutage for personal service, that is the paying of a sum of money instead of personal attendance as a warrior. The result was that the whole concept of military service began to change from a personal to a financial transaction, and women were allowed to become part of the landholding system in a more permanent way, allowing for constraints to do with a husband's superior rights.10
However, a real development in women's legal rights should not be confused with the way certain powerful and privileged groups tended to regard those rights in beliefs embodied in literature and in practice.
Aristocratic views of women in the eleventh century - still yet to be tempered by a concept of courtliness - continued to be largely willing to see woman as a chattel. The Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry contains the famous illustrative story of the quarrelsome wife who is beaten down by her noble husband, and whose face is kicked in and permanently disfigured for her trouble.11
Women could inherit estates and titles, they could become baronesses, but not sit in parliament. They had no real testamentary freedom. The Commons in Parliament in 1344 successfully complained about serfs and women being allowed to make wills, "which is against reason..."
Common law ruled that women's testimony could not be admitted in proof by law courts "because of their frailty."12
Individual gentlewomen continued to be bartered like items on the stock market floor under the system of wardship and marriage attendant on the feudal system. When a girl was left without parents, her next of kin usually acted as her guardian. These guardians, from the king down to local squires, often abused their rights, selling off capital items or sequestering rents, which they could legally do until the heiress was of marriageable age - 14. And even when she was of age, the heiress had to sue for the return of the property and pay half a year's profit from the land to her ward.
As well, by the twelfth century, the guardian had the right to choose a husband for his female ward. Furthermore, a father with no sons had to obtain his lord's permission for any marriage of his daughters. Eventually, this abuse was translated into a further abuse of power, the selling of marriages to the highest bidder by the lord who had the right of agreeing to the marriage.13
These were not the only impediments placed on female life by the laws of various European countries.
The law of petty treason also impinged on women, severely in theory if infrequently in practice. Originally, any plot, but later any killing of one's lord, i.e. husband, was punishable by death: in Germany by burial alive.14
Women could not become licensed physicians, and were frequently forbidden to trade, and some crafts excluded women, usually because their wages undercut men's.
On the other hand, in many towns, statutes allowed guildsman's widows to continue their husband's businesses. In some places, such as fifteenth century Coventry, all single women of able body and under the age of fifty were compelled into domestic service until they married.15
Nevertheless, the traffic of rights was not all one way. It was during the twelfth century as trade and towns developed as a direct result of the Crusades that slightly less hierarchical views of the upper levels of the urban middle classes made themselves increasingly heard.
Town law had to take into account women active in trade, most particularly where married women carried on trade of their own as femmes soles.16
Thus, women of the middle class fabliaus are depicted in a context, containing implicit complaints of how women suffered theoretical subjection to the men, but at the same time enjoyed practical equality. The works of Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, not to mention the Romance of the Rose contain countless anecdotes pointing to a conscious and lively conflict between men and women, with the men asserting Biblical rights to superiority and women asserting a real life equality in the shops, streets, fields and bedrooms of medieval Europe.
Says the Wife of Bath in Chaucer's tale:
"He gave me all the bridle into my hand,
To have the government of house and land,
And of his tongue, and of his hand also,
And (I) made him burn his book at once, too,
And when I had taken unto me,
By mastery, all the sovereignty,
Thus he said: 'My own true wife,
Do as you wish for the rest of your life,
Keep your honour and keep my estate.'
After that, we had no more debate."
|
|