The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  As wife and mother, and as daughter, a woman continued to be regarded as subordinate to her husband, less among artisans, shopkeepers and labourers – where the woman was part of a working team – than among the gentry; but in all classes, to a greater or lesser extent. Lawrence Stone suggests that it is highly significant of popular attitudes towards women in the early seventeenth century that Joseph Swetman’s The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Frowardand Unconstant Women,

  a savage anti-feminist piece of polemic, went through no less than ten editions between its first publication in 1616 and 1634, although it also generated some fierce rebuttals … The theoretical and legal doctrines of the time were especially insistent upon the subordination of women to men in general, and to their husbands in particular … and many women accepted these ideas. Defoe’s Roxana (who declared that ‘the very nature of the marriage contract was … nothing but giving up liberty, estate, authority and everything to a man’) grimly reflected that ‘a wife is looked upon as but an upper servant’. The treatment of wives by their husbands naturally differed widely from individual to individual, but one gets the impression that the casual insouciance expressed in the diary of a small Lancashire gentleman, Nicholas Blundell, on 24 September 1706 was far from uncommon: ‘My wife felt the pains of labour coming on her. Captain Robert Fazakerley and I went a-coursing.’22

  It was commonly accepted that women were in general less intelligent than men and it was even supposed that the female brain was biologically different from the male. On her death the clever Duchess of Newcastle, who had borne no children, was described as an exception to the rest of ‘her frail sex … who have Fruitful Wombs but Barren Brains’.23 In fact, it was not that women were less intelligent but that most of them were less well educated and denied the opportunities enjoyed by men. In the spheres allotted to them, as Lady Antonia Fraser has shown in her study of women’s lot in seventeenth-century England, they performed their tasks with practised skill, and were frequently honoured accordingly. In the City a foreign traveller observed that at ‘all banquets and feasts’, wives were ‘shown the greatest honour’, being placed at the upper end of the table where they were served first. The same respect was shown to them in other towns where wives often kept their husbands’ apprentices under firm control. In the country, women trained servants, looked after poultry and pigs, took charge of the garden and orchard, managed the dairy, dealt with sales at market, kept farm accounts, were responsible for household management and the family medicines, cooked, made wine and cider, brewed ale, mended, made and embroidered clothes. And in times of danger they displayed as much courage and resource as their husbands and fathers. In the Civil War, both as chatelaines and as servants, they defended castles and strongholds with as much resource as their forebears had shown during the Wars of the Roses; they raised funds; they served as nurses and some fought as soldiers. At Basing House they turned lead into bullets; at Corfe Castle they bravely defended the upper ward; during the siege of Gloucester they laboured in the fortifications and earthworks with ‘cheerful readiness’. ‘Our maids and others,’ a pamphleteer recorded of this siege, ‘wrought daily without the works in little mead, in fetching in turf, in the very face of our enemy.’ In London also, led by the lady mayoress with her own entrenching tool, women helped to build the fortifications; while at Bristol 200 women evidently went up to the parliamentary commander to offer to stand in the mouth of the cannon to ward off the shot. At Nantwich women saved Dorford House by putting out the ‘terrible fire in the brushwood ricks’.24

  After the Civil War it began to be recognized that women were enjoying a new-found independence, and many men, and some women, too, deplored the fact. Lord Clarendon wrote with distaste of young women conversing ‘without circumspection and modesty’; and the Duchess of Newcastle complained of women ‘affecting a Masculinacy’ and imitating the behaviour of men: the recent fighting had led them ‘to Swagger, to Swear, to Game, to Drink, to Revell, to make Factions’. They even began to preach, which made Sir Ralph Verney – who strongly deprecated the practice of women taking notes in sermons – reflect that St Paul would have ‘fixed a Shame’ upon them. They preached at the General Baptist Church in Bell Alley in London; they preached in their houses; they preached in – Kent, in Cambridgeshire and Wiltshire. Mary Milbrowe, a bricklayer’s wife, preached from a high brick pulpit in her husband’s parlour.25

  In the next century, after political and philosophical theories had helped further to modify attitudes, women gained further measures of independence. Admittedly, it was still true in many cases, as John Shebbeare said in 1758, that in France woman was ‘the companion in the hours of reason and conversation’ while in England she was ‘the momentary toy of passion’. And there were still those who agreed with Thomas Gisborne, whose Enquiry into the duties of the female sex was published in 1797, that if education induced women to ape the salon leaders of Paris, then women would be better left uneducated. Indeed, in Derek Jarrett’s words, ‘the salons of the French revolutionary period shocked English public opinion even more than those of the ancien régime had done, so that more and more women were driven back into that unwholesome world of repressed domesticity which Jane Austen was to describe with telling precision’.26 Yet, if there were repeated demands that women should remain the ‘gentle guardians of domestic happiness’, there were increasing numbers of women who were becoming recognized as conversationalists more than able to hold their ground with men and as writers and scholars whose works commanded respect. Samuel Johnson expressed the belief that ‘a man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner on his table than when his wife talks Greek’. But he relished the company of intelligent women and held them in high esteem.

  There was, as a whole, less agreement with Milton’s view that ‘woman was created for man’, that he was ‘for God only, she for God in him’. It was still theoretically the case, as William Blackstone, the eighteenth-century jurist, put it, that the husband and wife were one, and that the husband was that one, or, as The Lawes Resolutions maintained: ‘that which the husband hath is his own … That which the wife hath is the husband’s.’ By law her children still belonged to their father and she had no rights over them, even were she to become a widow, unless she were specifically named as their guardian in his will. By law, also, she could still not take anything with her if she was provoked beyond endurance to leave her husband, and he could force her to go back to him. Should he then murder her he might be hanged, but if she murdered him, she was liable to the penalty of being burned alive – a woman who killed her husband was, in fact, burned at Tybürn in 1725. Yet, although a husband acquired by marriage complete control of his wife’s property, she was now much more likely to have a decisive influence over its disposal, as well as a personal allowance provided for her by the marriage contract. She was also more likely to be able to arrange a separation from her husband should she wish to do so.

  Separations were, however, much more easily arranged by the rich and by the poor than they were by those in between. Since the Reformation the annulment of a marriage could be obtained only if a prior contract to another person could be proved, if husband or wife bore certain family relationships to each other, if the husband had shown himself impotent over a period of three years, or if either husband or wife had left home and had not since been seen for seven years. And only in cases where a marriage had been annulled for these reasons, could either party legally remarry, adultery and cruelty notwithstanding. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, it had become possible, though extremely expensive, to obtain a divorce by private Act of Parliament. It was also possible to divorce a wife who agreed to take part in the ancient custom known as wife-sale in which she was taken to market with a halter round her neck and sold to the highest bidder, usually a purchaser who had already agreed to buy her. This was a custom which, both illegal and constantly condemned as immoral, continued until at least 1887.27 In The Mayor of Casterbridge, written in the 1880s
and set in the 1840s, Thomas Hardy described such a wife-sale at a fair in Weydon-Priors in Upper Wessex, basing his description on accounts of actual sales in the Dorset County Chronicle:

  ‘Will anybody buy her?’ said the man.

  ‘I wish somebody would,’ said she firmly. ‘Her present owner is not at all to her liking.’

  ‘So we are agreed about that. Gentlemen, do you hear? It’s an agreement to part …’

  ‘Now who’s auctioneer?’

  ‘I be,’ promptly answered a short man, with a nose resembling a copper knob, a damp voice, and eyes like button-holes. ‘Who’ll make an offer for this lady?’

  ‘Five shillings,’ said someone, at which there was a laugh …

  ‘I’ll tell you what – I won’t sell her for less than five guineas,’ said the husband … ‘I’ll sell her for five guineas to any man that will pay me the money, and treat her well; and he shall have her for ever, and never hear aught o’ me. But she shan’t go for less. Now then – five guineas – and she’s yours. Susan, you agree?’

  She bowed her head with absolute indifference.

  ‘Five guineas,’ said the auctioneer, ‘or she’ll be withdrawn. Do anybody give it. The last time. Yes or no?’

  ‘Yes,’ said a loud voice from the doorway.28

  Wife-sales were not, however, considered a possible way out of an unendurable marriage for most people in England who, at the same time, could not afford the parliamentary route followed by the rich. The case of Elizabeth Oxinden is characteristic of that of a wronged middle-class wife. She had been married when she was fourteen to Tom Oxinden whose family had been attracted to her by her money. But Oxinden soon fell in love with another man’s wife with whom he ran away. The passion cooled; and when Mrs Oxinden next heard of her husband he had become a highwayman. He was soon apprehended and sentenced to imprisonment. Although deserted by a man now in gaol, Elizabeth Oxinden still felt bound to him; and it was not until she heard that he had died in prison that she was free to marry again.29

  Marriages arranged without reference to the feelings of the bride and bridegroom – and with sole regard to the increase of family fortunes – were, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, becoming less and less common. In the upper classes, when large sums of money and extensive estates were involved, there were still such marriages as that contracted in the 1780s for a daughter of Lord Spencer who said, ‘I had not the least guess about it till the day papa told me … I wish I could have known him a little better first.’30 Also stories were still told of parents locking up and beating recalcitrant daughters, as Elizabeth Paston had beaten her stubborn child, Agnes; but such treatment was now almost universally frowned upon and, as Professor Stone has observed, it would be hard to find a more convincing demonstration of the new attitude towards parental control over marriage among provincial townspeople and country gentry than the story of a Banbury attorney named Aplin, and of his daughter who helped her father in his office. Also working in his office as an articled clerk was Richard Bignell, an enterprising young man of humble birth, who fell in love with Miss Aplin and, when he was Qualified as an attorney himself, asked her father for permission to marry her. The request was rejected ‘with the utmost scorn’. And when Mr Aplin discovered that his daughter had married despite his prohibition, he threw her out of his house, declaring that he wanted nothing more to do with her. Strongly disapproving of his harsh conduct, his clients one by one withdrew their business from his charge and transferred it to his pleasant and industrious former young clerk who had in the meantime set up on his own.31

  It was by now generally agreed that before marriage was contracted, there should ideally be some mutual affection on both sides, even if only as a precaution against immediate adultery. ‘The greatest pleasure I can feel is to know that you are happy,’ Lord Pembroke told his son who had asked his father for an additional allowance so that he could marry a poor girl whom he loved rather than a rich one for whom he did not care. ‘If you are happy, my dear George, I must be so … It would have been lucky for us had you found a thirty thousand pounder as agreeable to you as Elizabeth … [But] n’en parlons plus.’32

  Also, by the eighteenth century there were far more opportunities than there had formerly been for young men and women of the wealthier classes to meet each other. They did so not only at private parties, receptions and balls, but also at fairs and race-meetings, at smart watering-places and assembly rooms, and above all, during the London season, already established by 1705 as a period during which the fashionable élite gathered together in the metropolis. ‘The English have much more opportunity of getting to know each other before marriage, for young people are in society from an early age; they go with their parents everywhere,’ remarked the duc de La Rochefoucauld. ‘Young girls mix with the company and talk and enjoy themselves with as much freedom as if they were married.’33

  Although it was Samuel Johnson’s contention that all marriages would be better arranged by the Lord Chancellor than by the parties concerned – and although many arranged marriages certainly did turn out very well – it was generally felt by foreign observers that the opportunities offered by English society for young people to meet others of their class, and consequently to choose partners for themselves, did lead to more companionable marriages than were readily encountered on the Continent.

  Husband and wife are always together and share the same society [the due de La Rochefoucauld continued]. It is the rarest thing to meet the one without the other. The very richest people do not keep more than four or six carriage-horses, since they pay all their visits together. It would be more ridiculous to do otherwise in England than it would to go everywhere with your wife in Paris. They always give the appearance of perfect harmony, and the wife in particular has an air of contentment which always gives me pleasure.34

  Attitudes towards the upbringing of children were also changing. In the past parents had been advised to keep their children in deferential awe of them at all times; and, because of the high rate of infant mortality, had learned to bear the loss of their offspring, as Montaigne confessed to doing, ‘not without regret, but without great sorrow’. Wealthier parents, indeed, saw little of them. As babies they were given over to the care of wet-nurses – in whose charge they were twice as likely to die as they were if fed at home – and on their return would be cared for by nursemaids and governesses until it was time for them to go to school or be placed in the charge of tutors. When away from home they were likely to receive few visits from their parents and few letters. William Blundell, a Lancashire gentleman, told his girls they must not expect to hear from their parents more than about once a year. He had not wanted daughters, anyway. ‘My wife has much disappointed my hopes in bringing forth a daughter, which, finding herself not so welcome in this world as a son, hath made already a discreet choice of a better,’ he wrote heartlessly after the death of his sixth female child. Having despatched two of her surviving sisters to foreign nunneries, he replied to their complaint that they hardly ever heard from home, ‘When business requires no more, your mother or I do commonly write to our children once (and seldom oftener) in little less than a year. We hope they will be pleased with this.’35

  For children living with their parents discipline was strict. Once released from the physical restraints of their swaddling clothes – which were, until about the middle of the eighteenth century considered essential if the child were not to do some injury to itself or were not to suffer from some deformity of the limbs – the girls might well, for the sake of their figure and deportment, be forced into some such iron bodice as caused the death of Elizabeth Evelyn at the age of two. Thereafter, both boys and girls were frequently subjected to a regime intended to crush their natural stubbornness and wilful independence. If schoolmasters were liable to wield their birches with frequent intemperance, so were parents, even if mothers and fathers were not, as John Aubrey claimed they were in the days of his youth, given to beating their children as severe
ly as masters of the House of Correction whipped their charges. Certainly Lady Abergavenny whipped her daughter so savagely for so long that her husband was drawn into the room of punishment by the child’s shrieks, whereupon the mother threw the girl to the ground with such force that she broke her skull and killed her.36

  Whether or not taught to be subservient by physical intimidation, the seventeenth-century child was expected to show respect to parents by kneeling in their presence to seek their blessing every morning. In many families the sons, even when grown up, would not presume to keep their hats on or even to sit down uninvited in their parents’ presence, while daughters would remain kneeling until bade to stand up. ‘Gentlemen of thirty and forty years old,’ wrote John Aubrey, ‘were to stand like mutes and fools bareheaded before their parents; and the daughters (grown women) were to stand at the cupboard-side during the whole time of their proud mother’s visit, unless (as the fashion was) leave was desired, forsooth, that a cushion should be given to them to kneel upon … after they had done sufficient penance in standing.’37