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The Landed Woman in Early Modern England' Amanda L. Capern i The current duke of Westminster owes his vast wealth to an early modem woman. In 1677 his London estates entered the Grosvenor family through the marriage ofa member ofthe Grosvenor family to Mary Davies, a twelve-year old heiress. Davies' father had died of plague when she was a baby. Her ownership of property made her desirable as marriage property because she was potentially available for transmission ofher inheritance to a man. However, there was a catch. As a minor she was not in a position to settle her property and when she came ofage she proved reluctant to give up ownership ofher real estate. Mary Davies was not the only under age heiress in the seventeenth century to refuse to part i An earlier draft of this paper was read to the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group Conference in August 2000. I am grateful to the committee for an invitation to the Conference. The questions and comments of participants of the Conference helped me to rethink this essay. I count myself especially indebted to Patricia Crawford, Andrew Lynch, Philippa Maddern, Pam Sharpe and Chris Wortham. M y thanks are also due to A m y Erickson and one anonymous reader, both of w h o m read this essay and offered very constructive comment. Acting on this has greatly strengthened the 2 result and errors remaining in this final version are m y own. Barbara English and John Saville, Strict Settlement: A Guide for Historians (Hull University of Hull Press, 1983), p. 60 citing C. T. Gatty, Mary Davies and the Manor ofEbury(2 vols. 1921), pp. 188-9. 186 Amanda L. Capern with her property after marriage. W e will meet another one later in this essay. I open with this example simply to make the point that some w o m e n did inherit considerable real estate in early modern England. Property can mean personal estate (chattel) such as jewellery, Bibles or valuable linens and household crockery, and it can mean real estate such as land, buildings and the legalrightsthat attach to them, includingrightsof public office. For the purposes ofthis essay I will be talking mostly about w o m e n who owned, drew the rents from or had considerable control over real estate. The essay examines women's legal rights, though I want also to suggest that property ownership for w o m e n went beyond a changing package ofrights.Ownership involved a relationship to and with property, as well as a conceptualisation of property as a component of female identity. Property had topographical boundaries but equally it had imagined and discursive boundaries. John Brewer and Susan Staves have said that ownership of property did not simply imply autonomy. Property is relational in the sense that if one person owns property, 3 another person does not. Early modern England was a patriarchal society. Consequently the relational aspect of property was complicated by gender women who owned property were viewed as transgressing therightsof men and some legal shifts reflected efforts to alter property ownership in favour ofmen. The historiography of the subject of w o m e n and property has two thrusts that can be difficult to reconcile. First, there is the point made by A m y Erickson that 'ordinary' w o m e n owned a surprising amount of property. Male testators divided their personal estate fairly evenly between sons and daughters and fathers could and did arrange for their daughters to own 'separate estate' over which they had rights even after they were married. M e n also left their widows well provided for and widows who remarried frequently arranged 'separate estate' provision for themselves as well. This set of findings has been supported by Christine Churches who has found in Whitehaven that sometimes men left real John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds, Early Modern Conceptions of Property (Lon and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1-3. For the best discussions of women's propertyrightsunder the law see A m y Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Earl Modern England (London and N e w York: Routledge, 1993) and...

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