5 - Domestic Violence and Networks of Female Support in Seventeenth-Century England

Summary

Abstract: Using judicial records, particularly depositions by non-elite women, this article examines the vital role of female kin and neighbors in defending and supporting abused and neglected wives in early modern England. These networks depended on popular understandings and uses of the law as well as plebeian women's authority to regulate their communities, especially in matters relating to the domestic sphere, morality, and other women. Women worked to support their allies both through verbal means such as gossip, shaming, and depositions, and material ones, including physical intervention and the provision of food and temporary or longer-term shelter. This essay further demonstrates that emotions, as well as self-interest, motivated female kin and neighbors in their efforts to contain spousal violence.

Keywords: England, alliances, female networks, kinship, neighbors, violence against women

In 1663, Cecily Bradley sued for divorce at the Court of Arches in London, citing spousal cruelty. Her efforts lasted thirteen years and involved fortyfive deponents, twenty-four of which were women. They included Cecily's sister and a cousin, five neighbors, four servants, a wet nurse, a nurse, a constable's wife, and ten other women with varying connections to the litigating spouses. Cecily Bradley's supporters testified that, while Cecily was a woman of good repute and an obedient wife, her husband, John Bradley, was a barbarous, inhumane, and choleric man who cruelly misused her. They claimed that he beat his wife, refused to keep her properly, called her base names, and committed adultery with several servants, whom he sent away pregnant. The women also described their various efforts to support Cecily over the preceding years. They visited her, provided shelter, and intervened to halt or prevent John's attacks. Several of them nearly paid the ultimate price for siding with Cecily when John attempted to frame his wife and several of her female allies for robbery—a capital offense that could have ended in their deaths. The case of Cecily Bradley demonstrates the vital and complicated roles which non-elite women played in confronting spousal violence in seventeenth-century England.

Informal networks formed and nurtured by ordinary women among themselves and sometimes with their superiors were a crucial social resource for engaging with the difficulties of being female in this period.