Welsh Journals

WIDOWHOOD, CUSTOM AND PROPERTY IN EARLY MODERN NORTHWALES UNEXPLORED by social historians of early modern Wales, and omitted in studies of women in early modem England, the experience of Welsh women is largely unknown; whether their lives differed from or ran parallel to the lives of English women has yet to be determined. 1 Yet like the women of all early modern societies, many Welsh women spent part of their lives as widows and, as widows, were more likely to become visible in the historical record. One of the appeals to historians of this common life stage is that it seems to offer the clearest glimpse of how early modern women saw themselves.2 Paradoxically, the study of widowhood is complicated by the fact that the social rank, cultural background, circumstances and membership of widows in a family, as well as their gender, moulded their expectations and constrained their choices. But a consideration of their relation to property is indis- pensable even to a preliminary survey of early modern women's lives, and has been the subject of important recent scholarship.3 As the basis of a widow's security, financial provision for widowhood and the My thanks to Paul Seaver, Douglas Klusmeyer, Kenneth Ledford, Susan Hartmann, A.D. Carr and Geraint Jenkins for valuable criticism of earlier drafts of this article. 1 This is true even of excellent studies such as Philip Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class: the Glamorgan Gentry, 1640-1790 (Cambridge, 1983). See the extensive bibliography in J. Gwynfor Jones, Early Modern Wales, c. 1525-1640 (New York, 1994). 2 Joel Rosenthal, Patriarchy and Families of Privilege in Fifteenth-Century England (University of Pennsylvania, 1991), p. 177. For recent work on widowhood, though not in history journals, see Ida Blom, 'The history of widowhood: a bibliographic overview', Journal of Family History, 16 (1991), 191-210. 3 Susan Staves, Married Wbmen's Separate Property in England, 1660-1833 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); Amy Louise Erickson, Vfomen and Property in Early Modern England (London, 1993); Eileen Spring, Law, Land and Family (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1993).