To the modern world it seems odd that Tudor women played such an active part in business life, given that they were expected to be humble and submissive and to centre their attention on their homes and families. In the sixteenth century work still revolved very much around the home, so that the split between work and family life was nowhere near as obvious as it is to us, and was sometimes non-existent. A woman might brew beer for use at home, but sell the surplus, just as her dairy might provide produce for both the home and the market-place. A wealthy merchant’s wife, who would expect to look after the family accounts, might well also do the accounts for her husband’s business. A few intrepid women even ran businesses in their own right and handled a great deal of money. A woman with a good head for business was certainly an asset to her family. There were also quite significant numbers of women who never married and therefore had no choice but to earn an independent living.
At the top of society there were some wealthy women who handled quite large amounts of trade. The most famous of these were the fifteenth-century silk women. In England the silk women did not weave silk cloth, but dealt in raw silk thread, and in the processes that went into making it up into a variety of products such as ribbons, laces and girdles. Silk laces were not what we would think of today as lace, but twisted silk cords which had a whole variety of uses from attaching seals to documents to decorating and holding together rich people’s clothing. They were also made into a variety of finished articles such as cauls for grand ladies to wear over their hair. The silk women also dealt in the finished goods.
In continental Europe, for example in Paris, the silk women even had their own special gild.1 In England, though there was no formal guild, the silk women were still a respected body. They were strongest in London, where the market for the luxury goods they sold was greatest, but they also existed in other towns. In 1482 the preamble of a petition they sent to the king talks of ‘the hole craft of Silkewerk of the Cite of London and all other Cities, Townes, Boroghes and Vilages of this Realme of England’.2
The silk women took apprentices, just as men did in other crafts, and the apprentices served under the same sort of terms as boy apprentices did. Two indentures survive in the Public Records Office,3 one for a Yorkshire girl and another for a girl from Lincolnshire, both of whom were bound apprentices in London. The indentures bind the girls to both the silk woman and her husband, but state that the girls are to learn the woman’s craft. The girls are to serve for seven years, to behave well, are not to waste their master and mistress’s goods and are to cherish their business. In return, the master and mistress promise to take charge of and instruct their apprentice in the wife’s craft, to chastise her in meet fashion and to give her food, clothing, footwear, a bed and all other necessities.
The master and mistress of an apprentice were not just employers, but very much took the place of the child’s parents, and took responsibility for its behaviour both during and outside working hours. As the parents could well have lived miles away there was really no option. As a result, the apprentice–master relationship was often fraught with difficulties as business and emotional matters became mixed up together.
Apprentices were not only taught a craft, but were also given training in how to run a business, with a view to them setting up on their own later on. Apprentices became very involved with their mistress’s businesses and even bought and sold goods on their mistress’s behalf. To make matters more confusing, apprentices were often allowed to do some trading on their own account. It was not surprising that disputes developed, and the silk women were no exception to this. An account of such a disagreement, between Joan Woulbarowe and her former mistress, survives. The two women got into dispute over what exactly had happened to some silk that Joan delivered for her mistress, and there were also claims that Joan had bought silk for herself rather than her mistress.4 The dispute evidently became quite bitter, with both women doubtless feeling that they had been taken advantage of by the other.
Managing the apprentices was only one of the problems the silk women faced. Some of them become involved in complicated large-scale transactions which many men must have envied. The raw silk thread was not produced here in England, but was bought from Italian merchants. Jane Langton, the widow of a saddler, became bound for payment for silk goods worth £300 15s to two Genoa merchants in the place of her daughter-in-law Agnes who died whilst away at Stourbridge fair. There is nothing to show whether Agnes was simply a middleman, or whether she was buying the silk for further working, but certainly the family were heavily involved in the silk business. Jane Langton herself is described as a silk woman in her will dated 1475, and Elizabeth, her son’s second wife, is likely to have been the silk woman who supplied £101 17s worth of goods to the royal family in 1503.5
The position of women in other prestigious trades is not quite so clear. Certainly they were not involved in the government of any of the guilds, which severely restricted their influence. Guilds were trade organizations which not only regulated working conditions, terms of apprenticeship and so forth, but also provided charitable support for members and their families who had fallen on hard times. The guilds were also very important social groups, and met several times a year for feasts. The most powerful London guilds, like the Fishmongers and the Goldsmiths, also played a large role in the running of the city so that guild membership was an important privilege.
Only five out of the five hundred guilds in England excluded women and references to apprentices suggest that girls as well as boys served their time in various trades. A statute of 1406, for example, states that no man or woman worth under 20 shillings a year could apprentice his son or daughter to any craft within any city or borough.6 The mention of daughters was not just academic. In 1423, for example, Agnes Snell of Hoo, Kent, was bound apprentice to Agnes Haunsarde for ten years.7 However, by the sixteenth century there were very few girls apprenticed to the skilled and prestigious trades. Women who became guild members usually did so through marriage. If their husband died and they remarried, the new husband could also become a full guild member. This was a very useful asset but the woman still only belonged to the guild because of her husband’s trade rather than due to any skills of her own. If her new husband was of another trade to the previous husband the woman had to leave the guild.
It is sometimes difficult to tell exactly what women’s involvement in the guilds was. They were certainly involved in the social life, and, considering that knowing the right people was even more important in the sixteenth century than it is today, this was no small matter. The Drapers, for example, had a hall for the ladies’ use where they sometimes held dinners separately from the men, although they usually dined in the hall with their husbands.8 No doubt some women used these occasions to talk business with the right people and to further their husbands’ businesses if they got the opportunity, but equally others must just have enjoyed these events as social occasions.
The guilds also find themselves remembered in rich widows’ wills. Joyce Williamson left £100 to the Clothworkers’ Company in the late sixteenth century, suggesting that she must have been an active member. Joyce also had an apprentice, her goddaughter, to whom she left £1,000, so she obviously had a personal business involvement with the company too.9 A woman’s involvement in a guild must have depended very much on her personality and on her relationship with her husband.
Extending guild membership to women through their husbands was generally far more than a social courtesy. Widows were permitted to carry on their husbands’ businesses after his death, and even to take over the training of apprentices. Some took over just for a short period, of about a year or so, in order to wind the business up, but others carried on for several years. Out of the seventy widows who were left print shops in the period 1553–1640 as many as fifty got rid of the shops within four years, but others carried on their businesses for much longer. Widows represented a tenth of all publishers in the period.10 The widows of nearly a third of aldermen of the City of London carried on some kind of trading after their husbands’ death.11
Some widows were obviously very efficient businesswomen and carried on large-scale trade for some years. Dionisia Holme of Beverley in Yorkshire continued large-scale export of wool and wool fells (sheepskins with the wool still attached) between her husband’s death in 1471 and her own in 1485. In their letters the Johnsons mention a variety of widows who had large-scale businesses. Jane Rawe is one such woman, who ran a private exchange business, travelling between Hazebrouck, London, Antwerp and Calais as the need arose. Another is Mrs Baynham who traded in wool, wine and herrings, besides running a boarding house in Calais for her stapler friends and also running hundreds of acres of farmland.12
Most widows were not as fortunate as these wealthy and privileged women. The circumstances in London were by no means typical of the country as a whole, London being so much larger and wealthier than the other cities of England at the time. The merchants of the Staple in Calais, like the Johnsons, were also too wealthy a section of the population to be considered typical. A study of the conditions for widows in the rather smaller town of Salisbury gives an idea of what it was like to live in provincial England at the time.13
Salisbury had been very wealthy in the fifteenth century, but in the sixteenth century it went into a decline. Evidence from Salisbury shows how very difficult it seems to have been for less wealthy widows to maintain their husbands’ businesses. To keep the business going a widow would need tools, a workshop, a labour force and experience of running a business herself. In the parish of St Thomas, one of the wealthier areas, about half of the widows had moved away from the marital home (and therefore away from the workshop too) in under a year after the spouse’s death. Many more had moved away, often to remarry, after only a year of independence. Of course not all of these women’s husbands had their own businesses, so this is a rather rough statistic, but even in cases where the women remained in the old marital home a male relative often took charge of the shop. Only a minority of widows, it seems, would have had their husband’s workshop at their disposal.
It is harder to trace what happened to a man’s stock and equipment after he died. There is often no mention at all of these items in wills. Some men did leave their tools for their wife’s use, such as Nicholas Atkinson who, although he left all the tools of his trade as professional embroiderer to his son, nevertheless added, ‘I will my wife shall keepe and use [the tools] as long as she doth use my trade.’14 Tools were also sometimes left to children or apprentices. Clearly the widow could not expect them as a matter of course.
Some women did have the workforce they needed to keep a business going. Taking the information for the years 1585, 1593 and 1594, about 9 per cent of households which were run by a woman rather than a man had apprentices. Some women even had several apprentices. In 1625 a census was taken to allow the authorities to find out how many paupers there were in the now rather impoverished town. The poor children were to be taught a trade, and details of the people to whom they were apprenticed survive. The names include a number of women who only had one apprentice each, and so presumably were only in business in a small way. However, some ran larger concerns. The wife of Launcelot Russel took no fewer than six children and Alice Swift had not only six apprentices working for her, but also three servants.15
Business experience is obviously difficult to judge, as it is not the kind of thing that was recorded, but certainly it was not lacking in some women. The list of free citizens for Salisbury in 1612 includes women trading alone as well as merchants, tanners, butchers, pewterers and people running inns. The Salisbury Corporation Archives also have evidence of women tailors, glovers and maltsters in other records.16 Even in a provincial town there were, then, women who managed their own businesses of various kinds, although continuing your husband’s business after his death was by no means automatic. The women who were able to do this were, as in London, from the more prosperous end of society. What of the women at the other end of the scale?
The only apprenticeship most girls could expect was that of learning ‘huswyfrye’ as a domestic servant. Sometimes this was done through a formal apprenticeship, sometimes not, but often the girls were also taught some kind of craft. One girl was apprenticed in January 1612 to Elizabeth Deacon, wife of a tailor, to learn both this craft and ‘flaxdressing’ whilst two months later Mary Gunter was apprenticed to learn both domestic skills and knitting.17 These extra skills could be well worth learning. The 1570 census of the poor in Norwich includes an entry for a fourteen-year-old girl who was providing the ‘chief living’ for her father’s family by knitting great hose.18
Certainly the most common job for young unmarried girls was that of domestic servant. In Ealing in Middlesex in 1599 58 per cent of girls aged 20 to 24 were in service.19 Despite this fact it was far more prestigious to employ men than women at the time, and grand households, like the royal household, employed men rather than women in this capacity. A few women were employed to do the washing, and the woman of the house might well have a female attendant, but that was all. In Henry VIII’s household, apart from the washerwoman, there was only one woman working as a domestic servant, and she was a confectioner. Unfortunately we do not even know her name, nor how she came to be offered the job in the first place.
Less magnificent households had always employed maidservants, and by the end of the sixteenth century when inflation was eating into the incomes of even the well-off, the grander households began to employ more women too. Certainly the wealthy Grace Sherrington employed maidservants20 at the end of the sixteenth century.
Domestic service was not necessarily an unpleasant option. The girls would be fed, housed and clothed by their employers and for many of them their years in service would be the most prosperous of their lives. There was also a great deal of opportunity to move around different employers if the present situation did not suit them. In Salisbury in the later sixteenth century over half of the domestic servants stayed in their jobs for over a year, but very few for over four years. Most stayed for between one and two years. However, even if a girl worked for good employers and was well fed and clothed, she was still hardly trained with a view to becoming an independent worker, in the way apprentices were in the craft guilds.
Not all domestic servants lived in their master’s house. There were several examples of ‘charmaids’ who came in daily. The authorities generally disliked servants being employed in this way, as they felt that they might easily become unemployed and so be a burden on the parish. This didn’t stop the employment of charmaids, or of the washerwomen that so many households relied on. Like so much other women’s work, it was unfortunately neither prestigious nor well paid.
A study of other industries suggests that the pattern of giving women the less well-paid work was repeated all too often. The wool trade, in both raw wool and finished cloth, was second in importance only to agriculture in the sixteenth century. Spinning was considered women’s work to the extent that ‘spinster’ still means single woman even today. At the time it was as much a trade for married women as for single. Many families fitted their textile work around running their own smallholding, and many women were spinning more for home use than for sale. They would only sell their work when the rates of pay were highest, just as husbandmen only worked for farmers at harvest time, when wages were best. The work was best paid if women bought their own wool and then sold the thread on, but poorer women who could not afford to do this worked on piece rates, spinning wool provided for them by the middleman and being paid by the pound of wool spun. In Edward VI’s time in Norwich the spinsters were having trouble buying wool wholesale as the middlemen were buying it all up.21
In the Middle Ages women also wove cloth alongside the men, but in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when trade was bad, there were a number of attempts to force them out of the commercial trade. The Norwich weavers, for example, excluded women in 1511 saying ‘thei bee not of sufficient powre to werke the said worsteddes as thei owte to be wrought.’22 As the women had no say in the government of the guilds they had no way of defending themselves against such legislation.
The woollen industry was so important that there was even some attempt to set up a factory system for weaving woollen cloth. John Leland in his Itinerary, written between 1535 and 1543, describes the workshop of a weaver which was set up in a church at Malmesbury. Several looms had been moved into the church, but it was still not on the scale of John Winchcombe’s household which is described as having two hundred looms in it, with two hundred men weaving, a hundred women carding and two hundred ‘maidens’ working at other processes.23 These experiments were not continued as it was felt that having workers assembled in large numbers encouraged them to disobey their master. The government also felt that it made wage-earners too dependent on the clothier, and therefore rather insecure financially. At this time the authorities generally preferred workers to have some sort of smallholding of their own, and not to become over-dependent on one master. After all, if a large-scale employer went bankrupt large numbers of people could then find themselves looking to the parish for support. The factory experiment might also have failed for economic reasons. The clothiers found that they could pay lower wages to the women working at home.
Another source of employment for women was the retail trade. At the higher end of society, rich merchants’ wives might well work in their husbands’ shops, and even lower down the scale a woman might keep a small shop and might even have served an apprenticeship as a shopkeeper. Far more women were employed in the lower end of the retail trade, as pedlars, who sold haberdashery and other bits and pieces, or regraters, who dealt in perishable goods. In the sixteenth century many people were happy to pay a little more for goods if they were brought to the door, although it was certainly a hard way to earn a living.
Single women, and the poorer widows who did not remarry, found making ends meet particularly hard. The economic odds were certainly stacked against lone women. If a man had a low opinion of his wife, even after his death he could make life difficult for her by virtually excluding her from his will. Thomas Field, a cordwainer of the parish of St Brides, Fleet Street in London did just this. The executorship of his will and the residue of his goods went to three men friends ‘in hope and truste yt they will kepe, maintaine, find and relive Constance Field my widow with all things necesssary for this life so far as the goods extend during her natural life.’ After Constance’s death goods were willed to go to his daughter-in-law, and the apprentice was also relieved of the remainder of his apprenticeship. Even Constance’s feather bed was left to a servant.24
This was unusual. As the section on marriage shows, most marriage settlements were carefully negotiated so as to ensure that a widow would be left well provided for, and in any case, most men seem to have a better opinion of their wives than Thomas Field had. It was far more likely that a woman would be appointed at least one of the executors of her husband’s will, and to be left at least the goods she had brought to the marriage as her dowry. Many men were happy to acknowledge their wife’s contribution to the family income. The will of Robert Sydall, clothier of Holbech in Yorkshire, is far more typical, leaving ‘to Elizabeth my wife, such vessels and furniture as belongeth to her brewinge and all that stock of money which she hath eyotten by her bakinge and brewinge’.25 Even so, a woman very much relied on the good will of her husband in this respect. A woman in Constance Field’s position was virtually powerless, however unfair the will.
The legal position of women could also hamper their business affairs unless they had their husband’s support. Under the law husband and wife were one person. This did not mean that both had equal rights, but that the wife was seen legally as being an extension of her husband. She could not make contracts or even buy goods without her husband’s prior consent. A wife could act as her husband’s agent and make contracts provided these were previously authorized by him and approved by him afterwards. A woman was a minor under the law, unable to take full responsibility for her actions.26 A sixteenth-century commentator put it this way:
A married woman cannot make a contract to her husband’s loss or prejudice but can if it is to his profit. Thus I can give a married woman a gift and the husband agree to it, but if a married woman make a contract to buy something in the market, this is not valid since the cost may be a burden to her husband. But my wife can buy something for her own use and I can ratify the purchase. If I order my wife to buy necessities and she buys them, I shall be held responsible because of the general authorisation given to her. But if my wife buys things for my household like bread etc without my knowledge, I shall not be held responsible for it even if it was consumed in my household.27
As a result, it was impossible for a married woman to get involved in business without her husband’s support. There was a way out, at least in towns, for a man who was happy to see his wife have a business, but who did not wish to become involved with any debts she might incur. This was to have the woman declared a ‘femme sole’, or single woman, at least as far as her business was concerned. This allowed her to plead as if she were a single woman, should her affairs ever bring her in contact with the law; so her husband’s goods could not be touched to pay for any debts she incurred.
Women were not above using this legal tangle to their own advantage. On several occasions the silk women’s creditors were not able to maintain court actions for debt against them because they had thought that the women were trading as ‘femme sole’, responsible for their own debts. The women were later discovered to have never been officially registered as ‘femme sole’ and so were able to escape responsibility for the debts when the creditors began to demand repayment.28
A woman who never married would find it impossible to set up any large-scale business because she would have no capital to do it with. Any heiress would find herself married off by her parents or guardians. The women who were left single and had to make their own way in the world had neither the money nor the connections to do very much more than make a living.
There is room for a great deal of study in the area of sixteenth-century women’s work, but it does seem that the majority of women were employed in lower-paid work than their male counterparts. As the sixteenth century progressed, opportunities for women in any case decreased, for rich and poor alike. The exact reason for this is not clear, but certainly the position of women in society generally was changing. By the middle of the seventeenth century women were actually formally excluded from many areas, even those in which women had proved themselves competent. The stationers, for example, excluded women in 1640. By the end of the seventeenth century it was considered unusual for a woman to have a thorough knowledge of her husband’s business. Pepys had a conversation with a very well-informed merchant’s wife and was so surprised by her understanding of business that he records their meeting in his diary.
Another example of this decline is the brewing industry, which had been dominated by women in the Middle Ages, to the extent that the female form of brewer, ‘brewster’, was used as a blanket term. These women would brew in their own homes. By the early seventeenth century it had become a large-scale business carried out in purpose-built breweries and was dominated by men.29
Women in the sixteenth century were still brought up to have an understanding of business, accounts and so on, and even to play a large part in running the family estates, as the chapter on education demonstrates. They were certainly not excluded from business affairs, and many did have an opportunity to show just have capable they could be in this area. However, women’s efforts were very much part of their contribution to the family economy and were often a by-product of housekeeping in any case – such as when they sold excess beer, cheese or eggs. They used their skills either to help their husbands’ businesses, or to maintain the family interests if they were left alone as widows. Single women could and did make a living independently, but the opportunities open to them were limited. A single woman could not hope to become rich if she was neither born to wealth nor married into it.