Tim Stretton

Common law rules made litigation between husband and wife impossible in the 16/17th century, except in ecclesiastical courts. In practice, however, a few wives and husbands sued their spouses in courts of equity. This volume reproduces twenty such suits from the Court of Requests – 'the poor man's Chancery' – during the final century of its operation. These extraordinary cases involving separated couples provide a fascinating and often surprising view of the limits of married people's rights and options at a time when divorce in the modern sense was unavailable. The court's decrees and orders show how Masters, or judges, of Requests dealt with the question of married women's legal status and with claims for alimony (by men as well as women). Historians and literary scholars will appreciate the richness of detail of the written pleadings and depositions that document the variety of human failings that parties alleged had devastated their marriages.

This book investigates the surprisingly large number of women who participated in the vast expansion of litigation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Making use of legal sources, literary texts, and the neglected records of the Court of Requests, it describes women's rights under different jurisdictions, considers attitudes to women going to court, and reveals how female litigants used the law, as well as fell victim to it. In the central courts of Westminster, maidservants sued their masters, widows sued their creditors, and in defiance of a barrage of theoretical prohibitions, wives sued their husbands. The law was undoubtedly discriminatory, but certain women pursued actively such rights as they possessed. Some appeared as angry plaintiffs, while others played upon their poverty and vulnerability. A special feature of this study is the attention it pays to the different language and tactics that distinguish women's pleadings from men's pleadings within a national equity

This book investigates the surprisingly large number of women who participated in the vast expansion of litigation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Making use of legal sources, literary texts, and the neglected records of the Court of Requests, it describes women's rights under different jurisdictions, considers attitudes to women going to court, and reveals how female litigants used the law, as well as fell victim to it. In the central courts of Westminster, maidservants sued their masters, widows sued their creditors, and in defiance of a barrage of theoretical prohibitions, wives sued their husbands. The law was undoubtedly discriminatory, but certain women pursued actively such rights as they possessed. Some appeared as angry plaintiffs, while others played upon their poverty and vulnerability. A special feature of this study is the attention it pays to the different language and tactics that distinguish women's pleadings from men's pleadings within a national equity

Explaining the curious legal doctrine of "coverture," William Blackstone famously declared that "by marriage, husband and wife are one person at law." This "covering" of a wife's legal identity by her