Land, Law, and Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300 to 1800.

Both these books make important contributions to our understanding of women and the law, in large part by problematizing those two categories. Especially considered together, these two books indicate how various factors, such as marital status, class and rank, and region, conjoined with gender to shape women's legal prospects, especially regarding property. They also demonstrate that there was no such thing as that monolithic category "the law," but, instead, many different kinds of law, overlapping, contradictory, and bewildering - common law, ecclesiastical law, Roman civil law, manorial or borough law, parliamentary statutes; women might fare better or worse in relation to different bodies of law. Both works also emphasize the disparity between what various kinds of law spelled out in theory and what might happen in practice. The two works focus on very different populations and bodies of law. Spring dwells on the logic of real property law, arguing that it worked systematically to exclude aristocratic women; she sees common law as more generous to heiresses than real property law, which, in her view, developed to countermand that generosity. Erickson focuses on how "ordinary" women, by which she means "everyone who was neither very rich nor very poor" (14), found ways around restrictions on their ability to control, inherit, and transmit property. While Erickson's narrative is considerably more complicated than Spring's, both authors challenge a celebratory approach to women's history as progress. Erickson suggests some losses for women in their relation to property, but, for the most part, she argues that "for ordinary women there are more radical continuities through the early modern period than there are peaks and troughs in their 'status'" (8). Spring, in contrast, casts her narrative as one of loss and decline. Yet both authors suggest that, when we bring women's relation to property to the center of our attention, the history of the family begins to look different. Whether families became more affectionate or marriages became more companionable, they do not seem to have become more economically egalitarian. On the one hand, men continued to control resources; some men, like the large landowners on whom Spring focuses, may have gained even greater control. On the other hand, male heads of families had long provided reasonably for their dependents; property law does not suggest that their responsibility to their dependents increased, or that they came to view their dependents as somehow entitled to financial independence. Rather, they offered maintenance in fulfillment of their responsibility or out of affection, not out of an "improved" respect for their wives or children as their equals.

For Erickson, "property offers an excellent means of comparing the theoretical ideal, in the form of the law, with actual practice, in terms of ordinary women's ownership" (4). Finding this "actual practice" in court records, Erickson charts "how property was distributed by men to daughters, wives, and widows, and how women protected property when they had control over it and distributed it at their death" (228). Through comparison, then, Erickson shows that women achieved more control over property, and more room to maneuver, than the most accessible sources - legal statutes, conduct literature, popular printed representations of women, etc. - might lead us to expect. Erickson begins with what many scholars think they know about gender and early modern laws regarding property: that it favors men primarily through primogeniture, which confers land on an eldest son, rather than dividing it equally among heirs, or granting it to the eldest child, even if female, and through coverture, which she defines in her glossary as "the common law fiction that a husband and wife were one person and that one was the husband; she being figuratively covered by him, she had independent legal identity at common law for purposes of civil, and to some extent criminal, suits" (237). While, at the level of theory, both principles were so rigorous and stringent as to be unique to early modern England, they were also, as Erickson shows in some detail, "unworkable in practice." Many women never married; pre-marital settlements enabled some wives to maintain control of property; the good will of fathers and husbands led them to make more generous arrangements for their children, wives, and widows, than the law strictly required; fathers and husbands died; widows lived long after their husbands. (Indeed, both of these books offer much valuable insight into the condition of early modern English widows.)

While Erickson employs an array of evidence, her most interesting material comes from the records of ecclesiastical probate courts, which record personal property transfers between ordinary men and women which were not contentious. Since, in Erickson's view, contention is always an exception, and therefore more widely documented yet less representative of most people's experience, this lack of controversy in probate documents makes them especially useful. Furthermore, although women were the minority of litigants in most courts, "approximately three quarters of all those who presented wills and inventories in court and filed accounts in court a year later were women" (15). Combined, the lack of contention and the preponderance of women before this court make probate accounts "the single most valuable document illustrating ordinary women's economic responsibilities and financial management" (34).

Erickson organizes her discussion by women's marital status, the most important factor after gender in shaping their relation to property (the amount of which at issue was, of course, determined by their economic and social standing). Each section challenges the assumption of exclusion and oppression. In her discussion of "maids" or unmarried women, Erickson argues that fathers spent about as much maintaining and raising daughters as they did on sons; they also left daughters an equal amount of parental property if personal property is taken into account as well as land. For "ordinary" people, such goods were a much more significant proportion of total resources than for the large landowners to whom Spring attends. In the section on wives, Erickson outlines the various ways women worked around coverture, not just by securing husbands' good will, which was a risky strategy, but by using settlements at the time of marriage to secure their property rights and thereby "avoid the more onerous aspects of coverture" (101). Interestingly, because of coverture, women could not make such arrangements as wives; they had to do so before marriage, or through someone else once they married. Especially in her discussion of married women, Erickson is admirably judicious, showing that settlements did not offer women autonomy, yet did mitigate the operations of coverture. In the third section of the book, Erickson makes an especially important contribution by bringing unmarried women into heightened visibility. Here she is at her very best, using new knowledge to challenge the assumptions that still inform historians' neglect and disparagement of this large segment of the population, whether women who never married or women who survived their husbands. Erickson points out that a larger percentage of early modern women remained unmarried than do contemporary British women; also, many who married lived many years as widows. Furthermore, she claims that more lone women than lone men headed their own households or lived alone. Since widowed men were more likely to marry and unmarried men more likely to hire a female servant than women to hire a male one, it seems clear that "men were at least as dependent on women's labour as the reverse" (195). She also asks whether the fact that many widows received about half of their husband's estates, rather than the third required by the common law, was the result of "generosity or justice," given that most women brought into marriage more than half of the property their husbands left. Both Erickson and Spring question some historians' assumption that there was widespread resentment toward widows for tying up property that "should" have proceeded to male heirs. Finally, Erickson's detailed discussion of women's wills is fascinating. She argues that women make wills for different reasons than men, giving to a broader range of kin, expressing personal preference for individuals and attachment to particular things, favoring female legatees, and compensating for imbalances in a husband's will.

While Erickson insists that historians cannot make generalizations about women's history unless they "ask the women themselves" (19), she also concedes that even in the probate documents she so values "women's voices are muted not because they did not speak at the time, but because the probate court in which those documents were created was operated entirely by men" (223). So even here, we are not exactly getting unmediated access to "the women themselves," we are not hearing their authentic voices or learning what really happened, although we may be getting as close as possible. I share Erickson's fascination with disparities between different registers of evidence, but I am less confident that one register, say, court records, as here, is so much more "accurate" than another. Perhaps the disparities are interesting in themselves, and each kind of evidence offers its own kind of accuracy. If, as Erickson argues, "cultural misogyny" does not have its basis in the economic, then how else shall we understand it? Where else should we look, since what people felt, thought, and feared must then be as relevant as what they did, or had, or bequeathed? If daughters have equal economic value to fathers as sons do, then why have they "lower ideological value"? (97) While her emphasis is elsewhere, Erickson acknowledges "that undercurrent of restraint" (128) on women's behavior, that cultural misogyny. Throughout her exploration of how women outwitted or mitigated coverture, she stresses how big a difference it still made. Reminding readers that financial arrangements for widows were at the discretion of husbands or ecclesiastical courts, she stresses that both therefore carried "a big stick," regardless of whether they used it. She stresses that the 1670 Act for the Better Settling of Intestates' Estates, by undermining women's legal position in theory, made a "real" difference. Legal fictions and representations do shape lived life, even if they do not always describe or reflect it.

To a certain extent, Spring begins with this assumption. Concentrating on aristocratic rather than "ordinary" women, Spring tells the story of significant changes in legal theory, making this story new by concentrating on how these changes effected aristocratic heiresses. How are the histories of the family and of property law connected (as both of these books convincingly argue they are)? What was "the family logic inherent in various legal devices"? (3) Whose interests did they serve? Sometimes this approach leads her to assign intention and agency to large landowners as a group, speculating about what "desires" motivated various legal and social changes. But Spring can be quite provocative in her contention that what these large landowners desired was to "overcome the common law rights of daughters" (35). By putting the heiress at the center of her account, she depicts "the history of inheritance among large landowners" as "the story of the elimination of rights that females enjoyed at common law" (112) which she also calls "putting down the heiress-at-law" (that is, the heiress whom the common law would have allowed to inherit but who often, in practice, did not). Although the primary evidence Spring summons has all been assembled by other historians, her focus on the heiress-at-law enables her to interpret that evidence in new ways, to read histories of the period wittily and revealingly, comparing them as rival narratives that privilege different main characters, ignore and create different dramas.

As part of telling the story of how the heiress-at-law was put down, Spring reevaluates the strict settlement in terms of how it participated in the history of the family. Not to be confused with the marriage settlements that Erickson discusses, which ordinary women might contract before their marriages to preserve some control over property, the strict settlement was an instrument by which aristocratic "estate and family affairs could be arranged in all details at the marriage of the heir male" (33). Spring argues that the arrangements made through strict settlement worked to lessen the position of the "heiress-at-law," to whom common law suggested that 20% of estates would go, and to re-direct many estates to male heirs. By means of the strict settlement, the English aristocracy became patrilineal rather than lineal, favoring collateral males over lineal females. For Spring, this "device to restrain parental generosity" (33) was unnatural - "a flying in the face of nature" (19) - because it encouraged fathers to prefer nephews to daughters, and to make provisions for anticipated children rather than "known and loved" ones (161). I find Spring's insistence on natural, ahistorical parental feelings and conduct at odds with her scrupulous delineation of the history of the family, and, especially, the legal instruments which emerged to intervene in and alter paternal conduct, filial prospects, and the transmission of property. Spring's strongest chapters are the first two, in which she makes her case that the heiress-at-law and the widow lost ground from 1300 to 1800. The book then loses force, becoming increasingly repetitious and derivative.

Both Erickson's Women and Property and Spring's Land, Law, and Family make contributions to the ongoing inquiry into early modern English women's relations to property and the law(s). For me, Erickson's is the fresher, more exciting and substantial book: it provides more new knowledge from original and extensive archival research; it turns its attention to those women about whom we know least, the ordinary and the unmarried; and it offers subtler analyses. Erickson's book would also be more helpful in the classroom, since it is available in paperback, and includes an excellent index, a glossary of legal terms, a bibliography, and helpful summaries of each of the book's three major sections. But we need both Spring's and Erickson's approaches and emphases. There are many important terrains for future exploration - court archives, law in theory, historiography, visual and verbal representations of all kinds. Considered together, these two books suggest that we should not disparage or ignore any of them, and should consider each in relation to the others.

FRANCES E. DOLAN Miami University