Unfortunately, this is a posthumous publication, the last work we will have from Mark Ormrod. He was a preeminent historian of fourteenth-century England, with his magisterial Edward III (2011) in the Yale English Monarchs series as a crowning achievement. He was also an active and innovative organizer, a co-editor, an inspiring team leader and a teacher, all roles manifested in his participation in such collective projects as the reprinting of the Rolls of Parliament (2005), Immigrant England 1300-1500 (2019), and Early Common Petitions in the English Parliament, c. 1290-c. 1420(2017).
This volume is an analysis of the petitions presented to parliament by different classes or categories of women; who they were, what moved them to follow this course of action, and--in those cases where we can track the result--their mixed level of success. It is very much the kind of book one writes by saving notes on the relevant references whenever they pop up and until the primary sources (mainly Chancery records and SC 8--Special Collections: Ancient Petitions in the National Archives at Kew) have been combed, and there are now, finally, enough note cards to merit a synthetic treatment and to see what conclusions can be drawn.
From a total of 7910 private petitions to parliament between the long reign of Edward I and the early sixteenth century, no fewer (or no more?) than 921 (or 12%) are from women. A few are from queens but mostly we see women petitioning in their own right (femmes soles) with 150 petitions, from women petitioning jointly with a husband for 263 petitions, and women as widows (again classified as femmes soles as they moved through the life cycle) with 354 petitions. Ormrod works his way down the social scale; queens and noblewomen first, then the gentry and then various categories of free women of lesser status, and then on to two trials of petitioners actually held before parliament (those of Alice Perrers, Edward III’s late-in-life special friend and that of Eleanor Cobham, wife of Humphrey duke of Gloucester). There is a look at women who presented collective petitions, like the London silk workers, complaining of unauthorized Lombard competition. For the later chapters, it is the substance of the petition rather than the personnel presenting it in petitions touching dower claims and controversies, rape in its various definitions (as the law lumped sexual assault together with a wide view of abduction and even runaway marriage), and “the public sphere” by which Ormrod means women’s work and public finances (taxation). The concluding chapter sounds a strong feminist call, a good note on which to end a study that points to so many cases that either went against the petitioner or cannot be followed to their conclusion.
A woman would turn to petitioning parliament when the common law was less likely to be of help: too slow, too cumbersome, and, for cases touching some aspects of marriage, too close to the domain of canon law--whereas a petition to the Commons (or the Lords) could be heard with dispatch if the men who ran the show decided to move quickly (which was probably not that often). And since much of parliament’s business was always devoted to dealing with private petitions from men and corporations as well as from these women--as witnessed by Ormrod’s overall number of 7910 of these--those coming from women and almost always presented in the customary way by a proctor or proxy--did not stand out as distinct or anomalous. That so many of these petitions were concerned with property and dower issues and came jointly from husband and wife puts them into a familiar and oft-treated setting. And that roughly one in eight of all the petitions laid before parliament in over two centuries came from a woman--whether acting on her own or jointly with a man--indicates that she too could be seen to be a subject of the king, though admittedly a second class one. She might have an individual identity and even, in some instances, a voice.
Almost always, these petitions came from a petitioner who was in trouble or who was pressing a serious grievance of some sort. With the exception perhaps of Queen Anne of Bohemia, in her role of “intercessor for royal mercy,” this lugubrious generalization even covers the petitions of Joan of Navarre, Henry IV’s queen, losing her dower settlement when a mean-minded Henry V decided that what had been settled on her could be diverted to help subsidize his French war. Many of the noble women who petitioned, particularly in the fraught decade of the 1320s, were partners or widows of men now declared to be traitors, some killed in battle or executed, and others merely suffering through some semblance of a judicial process that had stripped them of their property. Were these women to be denied access to their estates and it revenues, they asked, especially as in some cases it was land that she had brought to the marriage? In terms of numbers, the rough balance between petitions brought by a woman in conjunction with a man and those she brought on her own seems to argue that in “real life” she had a status that was well up the social and political ladder. And when her individual status did not reach that level, there was that possibility of collective petition, a clever tactic, whatever its success against those Lombard silk merchants. It was also used by the nuns of Walton, coming to parliament with the support of the masters and priors of the Gilbertine order, or by the nuns of Godstow looking to claim their ancient rights as a royal foundation.
Toward the end of the book Ormrod turns to a variety of what we can see as women’s issues. Though, once again, the thirty-three petitions about rape and abduction did not invariably wind up inher favor, they helped raise a general repugnance against men accused in such matters and contributed to the growth of “a strong sense of revulsion” (105). The Crown was moved to become “a model of patriarchal response to the female sex” (107), even if not all cases went the petitioner’s way and if a royal pardon of the guilty party was sometimes the end of the matter. Other issues were then-as-now: women petitioned with little success about being paid less than men for doing the same job.
This is an offbeat book with a rather novel contribution to both women’s history and the history of parliament. It sheds light on the complications and woes that could befall one and it also shows that there were routes one could choose to follow, with or without help, that might lead to a remedy. It is a worthy entry in the “New Middle Ages” series and it is a reminder of our loss in the untimely death of its author.