Welsh Journals

THE social and legal handicaps under which women laboured in early modern society in England and Wales for many centuries, and which they were expected to bear in exchange for patriarchal protection and succour, are so well-known as to be too often taken for granted. An integral part of the relationship was the dowering of a daughter 'in preferment of her marriage', as the phrase went. A daughter was the economic responsibility of her father until marriage, and in addition a husband expected his future father-in-law's economic assistance in exchange for assuming responsibility for his new wife. So a father provided a dowry for his daughter; his daughter expected it. A young woman's arena of choice of husband depended to a considerable degree on her family's. economic status, since a husband expected a dowry to help, along with a bride's domestic and craft skills, in establishing the new economic unit of their family. Addition- ally, wealthy families might negotiate not only a dowry, but a jointure to ensure an income for the wife in case she were widowed. All in all, marriage was not only a legal but an economic transaction. 1 Although the dowry was beneficial to the new family, its implications could be complex. As Lawrence Stone has suggested, the need for dowry gave a father power over his daughters, but it also meant a heavy economic responsi- bility. In some cases the bride's father (who negotiated with the groom and the groom's father) might pay the dowry to the groom's father, with diverse impli- cations. Among the wealthy, the groom's father would make the arrangements for the jointure. The size of her dowry determined a daughter's potential in the marriage market, while the expense of dowries could bear heavily on family resources. Therefore, the bigger the dowry, the better for the daughter and the worse for her family, though cash dowries may not always have been paid over straight away, but used as a source of credit. Evidence for the dowries of rich men's daughters survives in marriage agreements.2 Lawrence Stone has shown that these dowries increased well beyond the rate of inflation during the seventeenth century.3 But it was not only the rich who dowered their daughters to what may seem prodigal levels; the humblest testators with daughters would do what they could to enable their daughters to find husbands, and much of the evidence survives in wills. These See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London, 1979), pp. 72-73: Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals (London, 1984), pp. 63-64. For women and their property, see Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London, 1993); I owe thanks to Dr. Llinos Beverley Smith for this reference. 2 See, for example, National Library of Wales [N.L.W.]. Crosswood Deeds I, 147 (1601), 226 (1624), 369 (1665). 3 Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1967), p. 290.