The Surprising Property Rights of Anglo-Saxon Women
Ask most people when English women lost a great many of their rights, and 1066 probably isn’t the first date that comes to mind. But the Norman Conquest was a real turning point for women — and not a good one.
Before 1066, Anglo-Saxon women could be wealthy and powerful in their own right. One noblewoman, Eadgifu “the Fair”, is known to have held some 27,000 acres in eastern England in the 1060s. More than a quarter of the Anglo-Saxon wills that survive were made by women. On marriage, a wife received a morgengifu (“morning gift”) from her husband, usually in the form of land, which belonged to her: she could sell it or give it away as she chose, and many did. Grants of land made jointly to husbands and wives show couples holding estates together, rather than wives owning nothing of their own. Women had access to the courts and could seek redress for wrongs done to them, and unmarried noblewomen could use the leadership of an abbey as a power base. A law of 1008 even gave widows the right to remain unmarried for a year, after which they could choose their own husband, with at least part of their property protected from his control.
All this changed sharply for the worse after the Conquest. The Norman feudal system granted land in return for military service, which women could not provide, and did little to encourage female landholding. Changes in Church and marriage law eroded women’s legal position further. Within a century of the Conquest, a married woman could no longer make a will without her husband’s permission, and he controlled most of the land she brought to the marriage — restrictions with no precedent in Anglo-Saxon law.
It’s a useful reminder that the Middle Ages were not one uniform period in which women’s lives grew steadily worse century by century. There were times and places when women fared considerably better than we might assume — and 10th- and 11th-century England was one of them.
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