Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T07:31:43.141Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Demographic determinism and female agency: the remarrying widow reconsidered…again

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Barbara J. Todd
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Articles
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , December 1994 , pp. 421 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

ENDNOTES

1 ‘London widowhood revisited: the decline of female remarriage in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, Continuity and Change 5 (1990), 323–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 In conjunction with those of St James Duke Place, an important locale for clandestine marriages.

3 Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R., The population history of England, 1541–1871: a reconstruction (London, 1981), 258–9Google Scholar; Todd, Barbara J., ‘The remarrying widow: a stereotype reconsidered’, in Prior, M. ed., Women in English society, 1500–1800 (London, 1985), 54–92.Google Scholar

4 Brodsky, Vivien, ‘Widows in late Elizabethan London: remarriage, economic opportunity and family orientations’, in Bonfield, L., Smith, R. and Wrightson, K. eds., The world we have gained (Oxford, 1986), 122–54.Google Scholar

5 Nor, we might add, did wealth guarantee it (anecdotal evidence to the contrary), as is suggested by Nancy Adamson's finding (‘Urban families: the social context of the London elite, 1500–1603’ [unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1983], 188–90]Google Scholar, reported by Steven Rappaport (Worlds within worlds: structures of life in sixteenth-century London [Cambridge, 1989], 40)Google Scholar, that in the later sixteenth century some 58 per cent of aldermen's widows, surely the wealthiest and most eligible of partners, did not remarry.

6 See Grigg, Susan, ‘Toward a theory of remarriage: a case study of Newburyport at the beginning of the nineteenth century’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (1977), 183–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Boulton, , ‘London widowhood’, 341 and n. 71.Google Scholar

8 Wilson, Adrian, ‘Illegitimacy and its implications in mid-eighteenth-century London: the evidence of the Foundling Hospital’, Continuity and Change 4 (1989), 136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 ‘Household and kinship: Ryton in the late 16th and early 17th centuries’, History Workshop 10 (1980), 44.Google Scholar

10 Boulton, , ‘London widowhood’, 345.Google Scholar

11 Ibid. Austen's journal provides insight into a generational shift. Austen herself rejected remarriage as infringing her personal and economic independence as well as her honour, while at the same time acknowledging that her mother's remarriage to Alderman John Highlord in the early 1640s had been part of the basis for her own prosperity (British Library, Add. MS. 4454, fos. 79v, 93, 93v, 105).

12 The petition of the widows, in and about London and Westminster for a redress of their grievances, repr. Harleian Miscellany 10 (London, 1810), 170–5.Google Scholar

13 Others in the series are cited by Boulton, , ‘London widowhood’, 355, n. 96.Google Scholar

14 The genre on the English scene is discussed most extensively by Linda Woodbridge, in Women and the English Renaissance: literature and the nature of womankind, 1540–1620 (Urbana, 1986).Google Scholar

15 The text concludes ‘that we widowes may be restored to our former joyes by having plurality of suitors and daily hopes of obtaining good and lusty young husbands, to the solace of our bodies and rejoycing of our soules, for women (as we would have all the world know) desire to live and dye in the society of husbands’.

16 For other similar mock petitions published in this period and later, see Smith, H. and Cardinale, S., Women and the literature of the seventeenth century: an annotated bibliography (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

17 Nicholles, A., A discourse of marriage and wiving (1615)Google Scholar; Swetnam, J., The arraignment of …women, which includes a section on ‘The bear-baiting of the vanity of widows’ (1615)Google Scholar; Taylor, J., The Juniper Lectures (1639).Google Scholar

18 MacDonald, R. A., ‘The widow: a recurring figure in Jacobean and Caroline comedy’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of New Brunswick, 1978), 1, 75, 79.Google Scholar As I pointed out in ‘The remarrying widow’, the stage also provided some examples of widows who chose not to marry and resisted importunate suitors. Stage widows are universally rich, so that source provides little assistance for those speculating about the attitudes of the poor widow.

19 Dodsley, R., ed., A select collection of old plays, 4th ed., rev. by Hazlitt, W. C. (London, 1874), vol. 12, 130.Google Scholar

20 See for example [Bufford, S.], A discourse against unequal marriages (London, 1696)Google Scholar; Dunton's, JohnThe ladies dictionary (London, 1694)Google Scholar includes a lengthy discussion of widowhood (heavily drawing on earlier writings) presenting arguments against remarriage but generally merely urging caution and avoidance of unequal matches.

21 Discussed in Smith, H., Reason's disciples (Urbana, 1981).Google ScholarIn The world's olio (London, 1655, p. 85Google Scholar) Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, presents ideas critical of remarriage although they seem to be based more on inherited criticism than on feminist analysis.

22 (Miscellany, Constable ed., London, 1929), 182ff. and passim.Google Scholar

23 No. 118 (16 July 1711). Another interestingly ambivalent work is The wid. catechism: or, a dialogue between an old gentleman that kill' d two wives with kindness in one month, and an eminent widow that mourn' d three months for one husband (London, 1709).Google Scholar Throughout the piece the widow offers a variety of arguments against remarriage to her suitor, and in the end still refuses him. The widower nonetheless remains unconvinced: ‘Thus widows can dissemble and seem coy…but…They are but Shooing Horns to draw you on.’

24 Among many possible examples one might cite Becon, Thomas, The catechism of Thomas Becon (apparently first printed in an edition of his works published 1560–1564; Cambridge, 1844), 366Google Scholar; Topsell, Edward, The reward of religion (first published 1596; 4th ed., London, 1613), 48Google Scholar; Gouge, William, Of domesticall duties (London, 1622), 186–7Google Scholar; Rogers, Daniel, Matrimoniall honour (London, 1642), 69ff.Google Scholar; and S. Bufford's essay cited in no. 20 above.

25 ‘Old age, poverty, and disability in early modern Norwich: work, remarriage, and other expedients’, in Pelling, M. and Smith, R., eds., Life, death and the elderly (London, 1991), 92.Google Scholar She describes households recorded in the Norwich census of the poor in which not only were former widowers living with much younger wives, but in which also poor elderly women were living with youthful husbands; in these cases neither partner was entirely capable of self-support.

26 More than 300 almshouses were founded in 1480–1660 in just the ten counties studied by Jordan (Slack, , Poverty, 164).Google Scholar A preliminary survey of the reports of the Charity Commissioners published in the Parliamentary Papers in the early nineteenth century shows that this rate of foundation did not decline during the rest of the century, and may have increased. Work needs to be done on the extent to which these endowments provided for men or women, but my preliminary impression is that old women and old men were provided for about equally.

27 Although I know of no rules by which married couples were necessarily denied relief, it is certainly clear that a widow who remarried lessened her eligibility. In most cases she would have lost her opportunity for an almshouse place.

28 Boulton, , ‘London widowhood’, 344.Google Scholar

29 Todd, B., ‘Widowhood in a market town: Abingdon, 1540–1720’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Oxford, 1985), 283–95.Google Scholar

30 Relief of 2d. and 3d. a week was common before the civil war. In Abingdon in 1664, the lowest rate of 6d. a week was received by more widows than any other amount. Although some also received endowed bread charities (one loaf a week), and one or two had their rent paid, that amount could only have served as a supplemental sum. In comparison, the residents of the Long Alley almshouses received 2s. 6d. per week plus firewood and clothing, and of course they lived rent free. Cf. Richardson, Samuel, The cause of the poor pleaded (London, 1653, p. 10)Google Scholar: ‘It seems some think they provide well enough for the poor, when they allow some that are destitute 3d. a week to keep them; some have 4d. a week; I knew one of 80 years old wholy destitute, had 8d. a week for a sufficient allowance… but it is not sufficient to give something, unless they have sufficient for their need.’

31 She notes that of the older poor men in the 1570 survey of the poor, 40 per cent were unemployed, but almost none of the older women were without some work outside the domestic sphere (‘Old age’, 83). I know of no comparable study for the late seventeenth century, but see no reason to assume that this pattern would have changed so long as relief rates remained low. Two recent essays argue that in the last years of the old poor law rates of relief paid to the aged and to single parents were higher vis-à-vis average manual workers' salaries than in the late twentieth century, but they do not address the earlier period: Snell, K. and Millar, J., ‘Lone-parent families and the welfare state: past and present’, Continuity and Change 2 (1987), 387–422CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Thomson, D., ‘The decline of social security: falling state support for the elderly since early Victorian times’, Ageing and Society 4 (1984), 451–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 The argument is developed at greater length in my forthcoming essay, ‘The case of the impotent widow’.

33 ‘Common law versus common practice: the use of marriage settlements in early modern England’, Economic History Review 2nd ser., 43 (1990), 21–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Much of what Erickson describes as married women's separate property was, in fact, the consequence of devices for protecting the estates of the children of widows. That does not, however, negate the importance of those devices.

34 Todd, , ‘The remarrying widow’, 77.Google Scholar

35 Cf. Goldberg's, P. J. P. more wide-ranging development of this theme in Women, work and life cycle in a medieval economy: women in York and Yorkshire, c. 1300–1520 (Oxford, 1992), chapter 8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 Boulton, , ‘London widowhood’, 341, n. 70Google Scholar, quoting Earle, Peter, ‘The female labour market in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, Economic History Review 42 (1989), 342.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 De vidua Christiana (1529)Google Scholar, trans. Roberts, J. T., Collected works of Erasmus, vol. 66 (Toronto, 1988), 252.Google Scholar

38 Boulton, J., Neighbourhood and society: a London suburb in the seventeenth century (Cambridge, 1987), 82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 ‘London widowhood’, 352, n. 70Google Scholar, citing Earle, , ‘Female labour market’, 337.Google Scholar

40 ‘London widowhood’, 326.Google Scholar

42 ‘Free widowhood’ is used in manorial customs regarding freebench, for example. While the liberty of widowhood was sometimes used positively in the literature (see for example the speech of the Duchess of Milan in Middleton's More dissemblers besides women, Act 1, sc. 3: ‘My Fame, my praise, my liberty, my peace/Chang'd for a restless passion’ [cited in MacDonald, , ‘The widow’, 69]Google Scholar), the more common usage was negative criticism of the freedom of widows, the ‘ill libertie’ that leads to unwise second marriages (R. Armin's Two maids of More-clacke, Act 1; cited ibid., 72), or entirely illusory: as Vives observes, ‘a shippe is not at libertie that lacketh a governour’ (The instruction of a christen woman trans Hyrd, R. [1577[Google Scholar). Works abound discussing the liberty that widows have to choose whether or not to marry and to whom, usually drawing language from I Cor. 7, verse 39. For example see Kingsmill, Andrew, A view of mans estate… whereunto is annexed a goalie advise… touchynge marriage (London, 1580), unpaginatedGoogle Scholar; Perkins, William, Christian oeconomie, in his Works (Cambridge, 1608–1609), vol. 3, 692Google Scholar; Topsell, , Reward, 47Google Scholar; Gouge, , Domesticall, 185–6Google Scholar; Bernard, Richard, Ruths recompence: or a commentarie upon the Booke of Ruth (London, 1628), 65.Google Scholar

42 For example, a merchant's widow solicited by Sir John Eliot resolved ‘to keepe her selfe free’ (cited in MacDonald, , ‘The widow’, 94Google Scholar; from The letter book of Sir John Eliot [London, 1882], 23).Google Scholar

43 See for example William Page's, ‘The widdowe indeed’, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Bodl. 115, a manuscript treatise written for his mother c. 1620), in which he built on the ancient traditions of St Jerome and others to develop this theme of the peculiar opportunities of widowhood. Vives' Instruction a century earlier did recommend remarriage as the final protection of a widow's honour, but Erasmus’ De vidua and Fusco's, HoratioLa vedova (1570)Google Scholar provide other examples of works which emphasize the peculiar opportunities widowhood gave to women to demonstrate their virtues.

44 I Timothy 5: 3; see for example Erasmus, , De vidua, 207.Google Scholar William Page's treatise, ‘The widdowe indeed’ provides the most sustained use of the phrase.

45 This is suggested, for example, in defamation suits: see for example cases discussed by Gowing, Laura, ‘Gender and the language of insult in early modern London’, History Workshop Journal 35 (1993), 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46 Of those widows studied by Brodsky for whom the interval between the death of the husband and remarriage is known, 67 per cent married within a year; the median interval was nine months (Brodsky, , ‘Widows’, 133–4).Google Scholar

47 Boulton, , ‘London widowhood’, 342–3.Google Scholar

48 In the two parishes (Beccles and Landbeach) for which Wrigley and Schofield report remarriage figures (Population history, 258, n. 101Google Scholar) the proportion of remarriages did rise somewhat in the course of the seventeenth century, but mainly because of a rise in the proportion of widower remarriages (Boulton, , ‘London widowhood’, 324–5Google Scholar); nonetheless even there the overall pattern is downward. The few studies of eighteenth-century remarriage show lower proportions remarrying than sixteenth-century evidence suggests. See for example S. J. Wright's study discussed in n. 56 below, and Smith, J., ‘Widowhood and ageing in traditional English society’, Ageing and Society 4 (1984), 434–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where he reports that the proportions of widowers amongst the grooms marrying by licence in Sussex in 1755–1759 and 1795–1799 was 13.7 per cent and, of widowed brides, 10.4 per cent.

49 At least one other local study does seem to support Boulton's argument by showing a coincidence of low male population and low marriage and remarriage rates. Pamela Sharpe's work on Colyton (‘Literally spinsters: a new interpretation of local economy and demography in Colyton in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Economic History Review 44 (1991), 46–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar) shows the complex interaction of sex ratios, employment and conjugality there. Burial registers show low sex ratios in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, apparently a result of poor prospects for male employment but strong opportunities for women in lace making in particular. As in London, low sex ratios were paralleled by low marriage and extremely low remarriage rates. However Sharpe is ambivalent as to whether it was not also strong employment prospects that discouraged women from marrying or emigrating to seek mates. At some points she stresses the independence acquired by women's work; at other points she stresses the dependency of women on the availability of local suitors. She does not comment on one ironic instance: in 1675 when the sex ratio was around 70 men to 100 women, women were continuing to move to Colyton, but one poor widower (a tailor) applied for licence to leave the town because of being unable to provide for and attend to his two daughters (p. 51). Apparently remarriage was not an option for him, even though the sex ratio was heavily in his favour. The independence acquired even in low-paying work seems to have limited the ‘natural’ eagerness of women to seek the security of marriage to at least this man.

50 ‘London apprentices in the seventeenth century: some problems’, Local Population Studies 38 (1987), 18–22Google Scholar, cited by Boulton, in ‘London widowhood’ (p. 342).Google Scholar Schwartz based his estimate on a recalculation of figures abstracted by R. Finlay from the work of V. B. Elliott and D. V. Glass.

51 Rappaport, , Worlds, 311.Google Scholar

52 Boulton, , ‘London widowhood’, Table 6, 342.Google Scholar Amongst those buried between the ages of 30 and 49 in 1600–1619 the mean sex ratio as calculated from Boulton's table was 122 men to 100 women, and in 1680–1699, 104; in the two decades following 1700 the sex ratio of persons buried at these ages dropped further to 87.

53 Table 1 is based on the experience of three samples of widows: (1) all Abingdon widows whose husbands' estates were proved in 1540–1599 and 1660–1719 in the Berkshire Archdeaconry Court and in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (a handful of estates proved in the Consistory Court of the Bishop of Salisbury are omitted); (2) widows surviving from two cohorts of couples whose weddings were recorded in the register of St Helen's Abingdon 1541–1550, 1571–1580 and 1691–1710; and (3) a group of widows derived from the unusual form of burial registration used by the St Helen's clerk between 1688 and 1709 who recorded the burials of men as ‘husband of…’. The samples derived from the registers have been used to give context to the more economically exclusive group of probate widows.

54 About two – thirds of each sample can be traced to either remarriage or burial. As I also showed previously, there is no reason to assume that the untraced behaved differently, or that their behaviour might have changed over time, nor is there evidence to suggest that they married elsewhere in large numbers (‘The remarrying widow’, 85–7).Google Scholar

55 As I showed in my earlier essay, remarriage declined amongst all social and economic groups with the exception of widows whose previous marriage had been brief and who were presumably younger than average.

56 The later proportions may be compared with widowed persons traced in Ludlow by Susan Wright. She finds that between 1700 and 1749 one in ten widows remarried and one-fifth of widowers (using the most conservative criteria). Widows remarried in an average of slightly less than three years, while widowers took slightly longer on average – about 40 months. In comparison she notes that in Salisbury between 1570 and 1599, between two-fifths and two-thirds of widowers remarried, as compared with one-third of widows, and while the widowers remarried in less than a year on average, widows took about 18 month. Wright, S. J., ‘The elderly and the bereaved in eighteenth-century Ludlow’, in Pelling, M. and Smith, R. eds., Life, death and the elderly (London, 1991), 106–9.Google Scholar

57 It would, of course, be absurd to expect in other areas the same kind of roller-coaster sex ratios as have been proposed for London. If anything, we should expect trends in sex ratios to be reversed elsewhere, particularly in areas contributing heavily to migration to London.

58 The proportion identified as ‘son of’ or ‘daughter of’ remained generally consistent throughout the decades used here at between 30 and 37 per cent of all burials. Comparison with the Princeton life tables suggests that this group represents children up to the age of 15, depending on estimates about the rate of growth in the Abingdon population. The years used here avoid periods of the highest plague mortality (especially 1625), although I am not sure that it would have been problematic to include such data, since it now seems clear that the impact of plague could weigh heavily on either sex. In any case, the issue with these burial statistics is not to measure mortality but to get a sense of the living population regardless of the circumstances in which they died.

59 See for example Slack, Paul, Poverty and policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), 44.Google Scholar

60 Population history, 219–28.Google Scholar

61 This assertion is based on the following figures. Wrigley and Schofield calculate that between 1541 and 1600 a total of 287,383 persons emigrated or otherwise disappeared (based on ibid. 219, Table 7.11), or 4,790 per year. If as they estimate, one-quarter of emigrants were female (ibid., 225) only half of the total of those emigrating would have been ‘unmatched’ men, or 2,395 unmatched men per year. Estimating a national population of about 3.5 million in the late sixteenth century, in a town like Abingdon with a population estimated conservatively at 1,200 one would expect that 0.8 men per year would have left, or over the sixty-year period 1540–1599 a total of 48 men. In the period 1641–1720 (to include the decades with highest levels of emigration) by the same calculation (based on 472,601 estimated emigrants out of a national population estimated as 5 million) a town like Abingdon with a population of about 1800 would lose 1.06 men per year. Over the sixty years 1660–1719 this would have totalled 64 men. If half of these men would have married widows that would mean that without emigration 24 more widows would have married in the sixteenth century, and 32 more in the later seventeenth century. Assuming for the sake of argument that these men would all have married widows of men whose estates entered probate this would mean that 74 probate widows would have remarried in the sixteenth century (cf. Table 1), 50 percent of the whole group or 74 percent of those traced, while in the period 1660–1719 63 widows would have remarried, 31 per cent of the whole group, or 48 per cent of those traced. Even assuming the most extreme case, the proportion of probate widows remarrying would still have fallen by more than one-third. Increased emigration is not in itself sufficient to explain the change in Abingdon. In fact, since most of those emigrating or disappearing were probably bachelors of whom about one-fifth seem to have married widows (as is suggested by Boulton, , ‘London widowhood’, 331, Figure 2Google Scholar) the scale of change would have been less, although proportionally the decline would have been the same. As the reconstruction of Abingdon sex ratios on the basis of burials shows (see Table 2 and related discussion), there was indeed a slight decline in the proportion of males, a decline of approximately the magnitude that could reflect emigration at this rate, balanced in part by movement of women to London, for example.

62 Although other evidence does confirm a few cases of emigration (most notably the departure of Christopher Branch to Virginia about 1620 [see Cabell, J. B., Branch of Abingdon (Richmond, Va., 1911)Google Scholar; Walne, P., ‘Branch of Abingdon: a revision’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (01 1959)Google Scholar; and Carter, J. and Smith, J., Inns and alehouses of Abingdon, 1550–1978 (Abingdon, 1978), 20–1Google Scholar], there is no sign in the Abingdon records of particularly large numbers of departures for the New World, Ireland or elsewhere out of England. The extent of loss of men at sea and otherwise is not measurable except by the sex ratios already discussed.

63 See ‘Freebench and free enterprise: widows and their property in two Berkshire villages’ in Chartres, J. and Hey, D. eds., English rural society, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1990), 179–80.Google Scholar

64 For information on economic and social aspects of widowhood in Sutton Courtenay see ibid.

65 Periods chosen because of apparent completeness of registration.

66 Tracing cohorts of widowers is at least as difficult as tracing widows. Because remarried widowers' names did not change, sometimes only the circumstantial evidence of baptisms of additional children or the burial of the later wife indicates a second marriage. Widows' remarriages in the same circumstances are often lost because of the change of the woman's name. I have counted widowers' presumptive remarriages in determining the proportion of men remarrying, but have obviously not been able to use these cases in calculating remarriage intervals. However, there is no particular reason to assume that the proportion of such presumptive widower marriages changed over time, so while comparisons with contemporary widows' remarriage rates may be problematic, the trends of widower behaviour over time should be relatively dependable. Nor have I attempted to determine how many men were buried as widowers, again because of the possibility of an unrecorded marriage. As may be seen, the proportions of various samples of Abingdon widowers who can be traced to remarriage were almost the same in the sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries.

67 This includes both those whose weddings were registered in Abingdon and those whose weddings elsewhere are known on the basis of later baptisms of children or burial of a wife.

68 Provided that the fact that the proportion of the traceable marriages in the wedding cohorts which ended in the death of the wife seem to have increased marginally from 15 to 24 per cent applies to the population generally, widowers may even have been slightly more ‘available’.

69 Schofield, R. and Wrigley, E. A., ‘Remarriage intervals and the effect of marriage order on fertility’, in Dupâquier, J. et al. eds., Marriage and remarriage in populations of the past (London, 1981).Google Scholar

70 Brodsky, , ‘Widows’, 132.Google Scholar

71 The number of cases for which the marriage interval is known is unfortunately small due mainly to lack of precise information as to the date of the first husband's death.

72 Wealth and poverty were factors which, along with age, were likely to affect ease of remarriage. Young widows seem to have been the one group with a strong and continuing propensity to remarry; they were also the one group regularly excepted from criticism for remarrying. But as I showed in my earlier essay on remarriage in Abingdon, the likelihood of remarriage declined in tandem for both wealthy and poor widows, that is those whose husbands' inventories totalled values in the highest and lowest quartiles (Todd, , ‘The remarrying widow’, 66–9Google Scholar). Thus while wealth may have affected eligibility, it does not seem to have determined whether or not an Abingdon widow would marry. Intervals to remarriage may be a more sensitive barometer of difficulty in finding a partner but testing that hypothesis more precisely by looking at the record of women known from their husbands' inventories to have been rich or poor has proved impossible because intervals could be determined only for a handful of cases, particularly in the later period. These few cases do suggest that remarriage intervals were lengthening for both wealthy and poor widows. Those widows whose husbands' estates fell in the lowest quartile of inventory values remarried in a mean of 40 months in the sixteenth century (N = 10), while wealthy widows, whose husbands' estates were in the top quartile of inventory values, married on average in 9 months (N = 8). When fewer widows in both categories were remarrying in the late seventeenth century, however, both groups were apparently having ‘more difficulty’, since amongst the poor widows the mean remarriage interval rose to 50 months (N = 6) and that of the wealthier women to 26 months (N = 5). If we are to believe literary evidence that wealthy widows continued to be besieged by suitors even in late-seventeenth-century London, then this evidence would suggest that it was the widow's hesitation, not lack of partners, that induced delay.

73 For a brief survey of the economic history of Abingdon in this period see Todd, , ‘Widowhood in a market town’, chapter 1.Google Scholar The population of Abingdon was also growing in the late seventeenth century, but I do not know enough about the economic and social profile of any immigrants to be able to comment on their impact on remarriage patterns.

74 Boulton, , ‘London widowhood’, 331, Figure 2.Google Scholar St James was one of the most popular venues for Londoners marrying clandestinely outside their home parish (more than half of London weddings occurred there).

75 In the 1680–1683 period, however, rather fewer bachelor grooms (18.7 per cent) took widowed brides.

76 Boulton, , ‘London widowhood’, 331, Figure 2.Google Scholar