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A New Look at the Reformation: Aristocratic Women and Nunneries, 1450–1540

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Barbara J. Harris
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Ever since the first flowering of scholarship on women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, convents have occupied a central place in historians' estimate of the position of women in medieval and early modern Europe. In 1910, Emily James Putnam, the future dean and president of Barnard College, wrote enthusiastically in The Lady, her path-breaking study of medieval and renaissance aristocratic women, “No institution in Europe has ever won for the lady the freedom of development that she enjoyed in the convent in the early days. The modern college for women only feebly reproduces it.” In equally pioneering works published in the same period, both Lena Eckenstein and Eileen Power recognized the significance of the nunnery in providing a socially acceptable place for independent single women.

Many contemporary historians share this positive view of convents. In Becoming Visible, one of the most widely read surveys of European women's history, for example, William Monter wrote approvingly of convents as “socially prestigious communities of unmarried women.” Similarly, Jane Douglass praised nunneries for their importance in providing women with the only “visible, official role” allotted to them in the church, while Merry Wiesner, sharing Eckenstein and Power's perspective, has observed that, unlike other women, nuns were “used to expressing themselves on religious matters and thinking of themselves as members of a spiritual group. In her recently published study of early modern Seville, to give a final example, Mary Perry criticized the assumption that nuns were oppressed by the patriarchal order that controlled their institutions; instead, she emphasized the ways in which religious women “empowered themselves through community, chastity, enclosure and mystical experiences.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , April 1993 , pp. 89 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1993

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References

1 Putnam, Emily James, The Lady, Studies of Certain Significant Phases of Her History (New York and London, 1910), p. 71Google Scholar.

2 Eckenstein, Lina, Women under Monasticism (Cambridge, 1936)Google Scholar; Power, Eileen, Medieval English Nunneries, 1275–1535 (Cambridge, 1922)Google Scholar.

3 Monter, William, “Protestant Wives, Catholic Saints, and the Devil's Handmaid: Women in the Age of Reformation,” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Bridenthal, Renate, Koonz, Claudia, and Sheard, Susan, 2d ed. (Boston, 1987), p. 206Google Scholar.

4 Douglass, Jane Dempsey, “Women and the Continental Reformation,” in Religion and Sexism, Images of Woman in Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Ruether, Rosemary Radford (New York, 1974), p. 306Google Scholar; Wiesner, Merry, “Nuns, Wives, and Mothers: Women and the Reformation in Germany,” Women in Reformation and Counter Reformation Europe: Private and Public Worlds, ed. Marshall, Sherrin (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), p. 26Google Scholar.

5 Perry, Mary Elizabeth, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton, N.J., 1990), p. 4Google Scholar.

6 Power, Eileen, Medieval Women, ed. Postan, M. M. (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 89, 99Google Scholar.

7 Monter, pp. 206–7.

8 Wiesner, p. 26.

9 Roper, Lyndal, The Holy Household, Women and Morals, in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford, 1989), p. 3Google Scholar for quotation.

10 See, e.g., Power, , Medieval English Nunneries, pp. 19–24Google Scholar, and Medieval Women, p. 89; Youings, Joyce, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (New York, 1971), p. 81Google Scholar.

11 Scarisbrick, J. J., The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar. Haigh, Christopher, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge, 1975)Google Scholar, and “The Recent Historiography of the English Reformation,” Historical Journal 25 (1982): 995–1007CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Bowker, Margaret, The Henrician Reform: The Diocese of Lincoln under John Longland, 1521–47 (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar.

12 Public Record Office (PRO), E315/234.

13 PRO, State Papers (SP) 5/4, fol. 132; British Library (BL), Additional Ms. 11,058, fol. 20d; Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, ed. Brewer, J. S., Gardner, James, and Brodie, R. H. (London, 1862–1920)Google Scholar (L&P), vol. 13 (2): no. 998; L&P, vol. 14 (1), nos. 312, 1355; L&P, vol. 14 (2), nos. 523, 681, 752; L&P, vol. 19 (1), no. 1036. The 978 names on these lists represent only a fraction of the nuns at the time of the dissolution. Eileen Power estimated the total population of the convents in 1534 at about 1,900 (Medieval Women, p. 89).

14 A number of people have asked about the percentage that noble and knightly families (or women) constituted of the entire population (or entire female population) in order to evaluate these figures. That is not, however, a relevant question since the requirement of a dowry meant that only a small portion of the female population were potential nuns. There is no way of figuring out the size of that group, which includes women from all the gentle classes, the urban and town elites, the professional elites, and (perhaps) women from families moving into or just beneath these groups. However, the conclusions reached in this paper do not depend on knowing those numbers, since my central point is not whether the number of aristocratic nuns was representative of their proportion in the relevant segment of the population but, rather, that whatever their representativeness, their absolute numbers were so small that they had little impact on the attitudes or behavior of members of their class.

15 Oliva, Marilyn, “Aristocracy or Meritocracy? Office Holding Patterns in Late Medieval English Nunneries,” Studies in Church History 27 (1990): 197–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Ibid., p. 198.

17 Ibid., pp. 199–201. In her presidential address to the Church History Society, Claire Cross emphasized the origins of sixteenth-century Yorkshire nuns in the gentry. But she has not distinguished between upper and parish gentry as Oliva and I have. Most of the nuns she mentioned were not from families included in my definition of the aristocracy (see above); Cross, Claire, “The Religious Life of Women in Sixteenth-Century Yorkshire,” Studies in Church History 27 (1990): 310CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Karant-Nunn, Susan C., “Continuity and Change: Some Effects of the Reformation on the Women of Zwickau,” Sixteenth Century Journal 12, no. 2 (1982): 22Google Scholar, makes a similar point.

19 For this study I have used all the aristocratic women's and men's wills from the period 1450–1534 in the following archives or printed collections: Prerogative Court of Canterbury, PRO, Probate (PROB) 11; Registry at York, Testamenta Eboracensia, vols. 5–6, ed. Raine, J. Jr.Google Scholar, vol. 6, ed. J. W. Clay, Surtees Society, vols. 53, 79, 106 (1868, 1884, 1902); Wills and Inventories from the Registry of the Archdeaconry of Richmond, ed. Raine, James Jr., Surtees Society, vol. 26 (1853)Google Scholar; North Country Wills, 1338–1558, ed. Clay, J. W., Surtees Society, vol. 116 (1908)Google Scholar; Bedfordshire Wills and Administrations proved at Lambeth Palace and the Archdeaconry of Huntingdon, ed. Turner, F. A. Page, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, vol. 2 (1914)Google Scholar; Bedfordshire Wills Proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, 1385–1548, ed. McGregor, Margaret, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, vol. 58 (1979)Google Scholar; Bedfordshire Wills, 1480–1519, ed. Bell, Patricia, Bedford Historical Record Society, vol. 45 (1966)Google Scholar; “Early Berkshire Wills”, ed. Sherwood, George F. Tudor, The Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Archaeological Journal 1 (1895): 51–52, 89–90, 3:80, 5:49, 6:25Google Scholar; Wills and Inventories from the Registry at Durham, pt. 1, Surtees Society, vol. 2 (1835)Google Scholar; A Collection of Lancashire and Cheshire Wills, ed. Irvine, William F., Lancashire and Cheshire Record Society, vol. 30 (1896)Google Scholar; Lancashire and Cheshire Wills and Inventories at Cheshire, ed. Earwaker, J. P., Chetham Society, n.s., vol. 3 (1884)Google Scholar; Lincoln Wills Registered in the District Probate Registry at Lincoln, ed. Foster, C. W., vols. 1–3, Lincoln Record Society, vols. 5, 10, 24 (1914, 1918, 1930)Google Scholar; Early Lincoln Wills: An Abstract of All the Wills and Administrations Recorded in the Episcopal Registers of the Old Diocese of Lincoln, 1280–1547, ed. Gibbons, Alfred (Lincoln, 1888)Google Scholar; Maddison, A. R., ed., Lincolnshire Wills, 1500–1600 (Lincoln, 1888)Google Scholar; London Consistory Wills, 1492–1547, ed. Darlington, Ida, London Record Society, vol. 3 (1967)Google Scholar; Wills and Administrations from the Knaresborough Court Rolls, ed. Collins, F., vol. 1, Surtees Society, vol. 104 (1902)Google Scholar; Some Oxfordshire Wills Proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, 1393–1510, ed. Weaver, J. R. H. and Beardwood, A., Oxfordshire Record Society, vol. 39 (1958)Google Scholar; Sede Vacante Wills: A Calendar of Wills Proved before the Commissary of the Prior and Chapter of Christ Church Canterbury …, ed. Woodruff, C. Eveleigh, Kent Archaeological Society, Records Branch, Kent Records, vol. 3 (1914)Google Scholar; Somerset Medieval Wills, 1383–1500, ed. Weaver, F. W., Somerset Record Society, vol. 16 (1901)Google Scholar; Somerset Medieval Wills, 1501–1530, ed. Weaver, F. W., Somerset Record Society, vol. 19 (1903)Google Scholar; Somerset Medieval Wills, 1531–1559, ed. Weaver, F. W., Somerset Record Society, vol. 21 (1905)Google Scholar; Some Surrey Wills in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, ed. Hooper, Hilda J., in Surrey Archaeological Collections, vol. 51 (1949), pp. 82–96Google Scholar; vol. 52 (1950–51), pp. 32–49.

20 According to J. P. Cooper, the minimal dowry for the daughter of a nobleman entering a convent was £100 in the early sixteenth century; the average marriage portion was between 1,000 marks and £1,000; Cooper, J. P., “Inheritance and Settlement by Great Landowners,” in Family and Inheritance, Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200–1800, ed. Goody, Jack, Thirsk, Joan, and Thompson, E. P. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 306, 308Google Scholar, note d. My sample of sixty-four noble dowries shows the same median marriage portion; see below. Thomas West, Lord de la Warre, reduced his daughter Mary's portion from 500 to 100 marks if she became a nun (PRO, PROB 11/22/2, 1504). Sir Edmund Denny left his daughters the same portion whether they married or became nuns (PRO, PROB 11/19/30, 1519), while Sir Piers Newton left his daughter only five marks toward her profession (PRO, PROB 11/21/3, 1524).

21 PRO, PROB 11/46 (Brandon); PRO, PROB 11/17/21 (Bridges); McNamara, F. N., Memorials of the Danvers Family (London: Hardy & Page, 1895), pp. 271Google Scholar; PRO, PROB 11/17/32 (Grenville); PRO, PROB 11/13/7 (Dorset); Testamenta Vetusta, ed. Nicolas, Nicholas H. (London, 1826) 1:286Google Scholar (Salisbury); PRO, PROB 11/21/11 (Vaux); PRO, PROB 11/37/12 (West). Other examples: Sir Richard Harcourt (1486; PRO, PROB 11/7/27), five of seven; Sir Ralph Hastings (1495; PRO, PROB 11/10/27), five of six; Thomas, second duke of Norfolk (1524; PRO, PROB 11/21/23), six of six who survived infancy and childhood; George, fourth Lord Bergavenny (1535; PRO, PROB 11/25/35), seven of nine.

22 Chojnacki, Stanley, “‘Servir a Dio’: Choice, Coercion, and Chastity in Renaissance Venetian Convents” (paper delivered at the eighth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Douglass College/Rutgers University, June 1990)Google Scholar; Trexler, Richard, “Le celibat a la fin du Moyen Age: Les religieuses de Florence,” Annales: Economies, societies, civilisations 27 (1972): 1329–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Strochhia, Sharon T., “Nuns, Neighbors and Kinsmen: The Transformation of Benedictine Patronage in Renaissance Florence” (paper delivered at the American Historical Association annual meeting, San Francisco, December 1989)Google Scholar; Brucker, Gene A., “Monasteries, Friaries, and Nunneries in Quattrocento Florence,” in Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, ed. Verdon, Timothy and Henderson, John (Syracuse, N.Y., 1990), pp. 41–62Google Scholar.

23 Oral communication by Stanley Chojnacki.

24 When I divided this period into three periods of twenty-one years each, the median remained the same for all three.

25 When I divided this period into two equal periods of twenty-one years, the median remained the same for both.

26 The most common dowry in this group was 1,000 marks.

27 Bean, J. M. W., The Estates of the Percy Family, 1416–1537 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958). pp. 48, 67–68Google Scholar; Bernard, George, The Power of the Early Tudor Nobility: A Study of the Fourth and Fifth Earls of Shrewsbury (Totowa, N.J., 1985), p. 144Google Scholar; Blanchard, Ian, “Population Change, Enclosure, and the Early Tudor Economy,” Economic History Review, 2d ser., 23, no. 3 (December 1970): 434–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dyer, Christopher, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: The Estates of the Bishop of Worcester, 680–1540 (Cambridge, 1980)Google Scholar, chap. 13; Kerridge, Eric, “Movement of Rent, 1540–1640,” Economic History Review, 2d ser., 6 (1953–1954): 16–34Google Scholar; Outhwaite, R. B., Inflation in Tudor and Early Stuart England (London, 1969)Google Scholar; Ramsey, Peter H., The Price Revolution in Sixteenth-Century England (London, 1971), p. 4Google Scholar.

28 I owe this point to Judith Bennett.

29 Chojnacki, pp. 12–15.

30 The earl of Suffolk (died 1504) at the Minories in London and Sir Thomas de la Mere at Syon (will probated 1493).

31 Four wanted to be buried with their fathers; one with both her parents; another with her sister; another with an uncle (she was his heir); and one with ancestors that were not specified.

32 The six are Katherine Lady Berkeley (died 1526), Jane Fowler (died 1505), Dame Elizabeth Tailbois Greystock (died 1509), Elizabeth Mowbray, duchess of Norfolk (died 1507), Dame Joan Pilkington (died 1499), and Dame Jane Talbot (died 1515).

33 Ten chose churches belonging to monastic communities; six churches belonging, to friars.

34 Eight (23.5 percent) of these donors had female relatives in the convents which they were benefiting.

35 Eighteen of these legacies went to monasteries; twenty-four to friars.

36 Seventeen (27.86 percent) had daughters or other female relatives in the houses they benefited.

37 It is interesting that the will of one of them. Dame Elizabeth Baynham (PRO, PROB 11/22/26, 1527), explicitly stated that she had already disposed of her temporal goods, “money only excepted,” before making her will. It is thus quite possible that she had already made the religious gifts that usually appear in wills. Scarisbrick found a similar percentage of testators who made no religious bequests in the approximately 2,500 wills he read from the first four decades of the sixteenth century (Scarisbrick [n. 11 above], pp. 3n., 6).

38 Sixty-six of the ninety-six wills listed the recipients of these bequests to purchase prayers for the testators' souls; forty-nine, or 74.2 percent, went to the churches where the testators expected to be buried or to priests whom they specifically named.

39 Two of them apparently cofounded their chantries with their sons; one acted with her husband.

40 The masses and prayers said one month after one's death.

41 Rosenthal, Joel T.. Purchase of Paradise, Gift Giving and the Aristocracy, 1307–1485 (Toronto, 1972), p. 103Google Scholar.

42 In fact, a statute of parliament permitted Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII's mother, to dispose of her property as if she were a femme sole even before the death of her third husband, Thomas, first earl of Derby; Cooper, C. H., Memoir of Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge, 1874), p. 30Google Scholar (referring to Roll of Parliament, VI, p. 284).

43 Hicks, Michael, “Chantries, Obits and Almshouses: The Hungerford Foundations, 1325–1478,” in The Church in Pre-Reformation Society: Essays in Honour of F. R. H. Du Boulay, ed. Barron, Caroline M. and Harper-Bill, Christopher (Dover, N.H., 1985), p. 133Google Scholar.

44 Hicks, M. A., “The Piety of Margaret, Lady Hungerford (d. 1478),” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 38, no. 1 (January 1987): passim but esp. 23, 26, 31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Ibid., p. 22; Hicks, , “Chantries, Obits and Almshouses,” p. 133Google Scholar. An obit is an office, usually a Mass, performed for the benefit of the soul of a deceased person on the annual anniversity of her/his death.

46 Rev. Dr.Bennett, , “The College of St. John the Evangelist of Rushworth, co. Norfolk,” Norfolk Archaeology 10 (1888): 277–380Google Scholar; Testamenta Eboracensia (n. 19 above), 4, no. 75:151Google Scholar.

47 Nichols, John, ed., A Collection of All the Wills, Now Known to be Extant, of the Kings and Queens of England (London, 1780), p. 369Google Scholar.

48 Underwood, Malcolm G., “Politics and Piety in the Household of Lady Margaret Beaufort,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 38, no. 1 (January 1987): 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Ibid., pp. 380–81; Fisher, John, A Mornynge Remembraunce, Had at the Moneth Mynde of … Margaret, Countess of Rychemonde (London, 1906), p. 37Google Scholar; Underwood, p. 41.

50 Underwood, p. 48.

51 Cooper, , “Memoir of Margaret Beaufort,” pp. 130–34Google Scholar; Nichols, ed., pp. 358–88, passim.

52 Rosenthal (n. 41 above), esp. introduction, chaps. 1, 2. For more recent studies making a similar point, see also Saul, N., “The Religious Sympathies of the Gentry in Gloucestershire, 1200–1500,” Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society Transactions 98 (1980): 101Google Scholar; Carpenter, Christine, “The Religion of the Gentry in the Fifteenth Century,” in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxdon Symposium, ed. Williams, Daniel (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1987), pp. 54, 58–59Google Scholar.

53 Scarisbrick (n. 11 above), pp. 3n., 4–5.

54 Burgess, Clive, “Late Medieval Wills and Pious Convention: Testamentary Evidence Reconsidered,” in Profit, Piety and the Professions in Later Medieval England, ed. Hicks, Michael A. (Wolfeboro, N.H., 1990), p. 16Google Scholar; Pollard, A. J., North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses: Lay Society, War, and Politics, 1450–1500 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 174–75Google Scholar.

55 Rosenthal, p. 57; M. G. A. Vale explicitly agreed with Rosenthal in his study of Yorkshire gentry wills, female and male, 1370–1480, “Piety, Charity and Literacy among the Yorkshire Gentry, 1370–1480,” Borthwick Papers, no. 50 (York: University of York, Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, 1976), pp. 7, 28Google Scholar.

56 Scarisbrick, pp. 5, 20. Although I have not studied aristocratic women's membership in religious guilds systematically, they certainly did join them, particularly guilds like Corpus Christi in York that had very exclusive memberships. See Register of the Guild of Corpus Christi in the City of York, ed. Scaife, Robert H., Surtees Society, vol. 57 (1872)Google Scholar, passim. Pollard (p. 189) says that women and men from fifty-five noble and gentry families in Yorkshire belonged to Corpus Christi between 1440 and 1490. Lady Margaret Beaufort belonged to St. Katherine's guild in Stanford and Corpus Christi in Boston (Cooper, , Memoir [n. 42 above], p. 86Google Scholar); Sir John Gresley (died 1487) and his wife Anne were elected to St. Mary's guild at Litchfield (Maddan, Falconer, “ The Early Gresleys,” in Historical Collections of Staffordshire, Staffordshire Record Society, n.s., vol. 1 [1898], p. 59)Google Scholar; Sir William Dennys and his wife Anne actually founded a guild in their parish church at Dirham, Gloucestershire (Rudder, Samuel, A New History of Gloucestershire [Gloucester, 1986], p. 428n.Google Scholar); Dame Margaret Sutton persumably belonged to St. Anne's guild in Lincoln, which she left her best hood and mantle (Lincoln Wills Registered in the District Probate Registry of Lincoln [n. 19 above], p. 18).

57 Nichols, ed. (n. 47 above), p. 556 (Margaret Beaufort's will). Even the wording of this phrase varied from testator to testator. For example, Dame Elizabeth Bourchier, opened her will, “First, I bequeath and recommend my soul to Almighty God my maker and saviour, and to his glorious mother and blessed lady Saint Mary, and to all the whole company of heaven” (PRO, PROB 11/11/32, 1499). Vale, who studied Yorkshire gentry women and men's wills, 1376–1482, believed even the preambles could be used as evidence of individual religious belief and noted that after 1450 they became wordier, more explicit, talked more about doctrine, and expressed more personal feeling (Vale, pp. 6, 14–15).

58 See, e.g., Dame Jane Barre (PRO, PROB 11/7/16; 1499), Boynton, Dame Margaret (Testamenta Eboracensia [n. 19 above], VI, no. 31; 1533)Google Scholar, and Strangeways, Dame Jane (Testamenta Eboracensia, IV, no. 97; 1500)Google Scholar. Vale has also commented on the laity's knowledge of the liturgy in the second half of the fifteenth century (Vale, pp. 15, 18); Hicks's account of Margaret, Lady Hungerford's originality in creating the ordinances for her chantry at Salisbury cathedral emphasizes the depth of her liturgical knowledge throughout (Hicks, , “Piety of Margaret, Lady Hungerford” [n. 44 above], passim., but esp. pp. 23. 26, 31Google Scholar).

59 Rosenthal, pp. 12, 49; Carpenter, pp. 55, 63; Richmond, Colin, “Religion and the Fifteenth-Century English Gentleman,” in The Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Dobson, R. B. (New York, 1984), pp. 198–99, 202Google Scholar, make similar observations about lay piety among the fifteenth-century nobility and gentry. In recent years, a number of historians have questioned the value of wills as evidence of testators' religious beliefs and aspirations. They emphasize the influence of scribes, most frequently clerics, who physically wrote down most of the extant wills and assume that they influenced the wills' phraseology and provisions, particularly because wills were frequently written when the testator was ill or dying. See, e.g., Burgess, p. 15; Bowker (n. 11 above), p. 48; and Pollard, pp. 173–75. Reading hundreds of aristocratic Yorkist and early Tudor wills (740 men's and 243 women's wills ca. 1450–ca. 1550) has convinced me that these historians are wrong, at least in the case of the aristocracy, whose wills exhibit enormous variety in both their wording and choice of bequests and little that is formulaic.

60 Wiesner excludes that possibility (see Wiesner [n. 4 above], p. 26).

61 Saul, pp. 104–5; Carpenter, p. 66; Vale, p. 10.

62 See, e.g., Lady Lucy Brown (died 1531; PRO, PROB 11/25/15); Elizabeth, Lady Latimer (died 1480; PRO, PROB 11/Testamenta Vetusta [n. 21 above], 1:357Google Scholar); Elizabeth, Lady Say (died 1464; PRO, PROB 11/6/8); Jane Stanley, Lady Le Strange (died 1513; PRO, PROB 11/17/32); and Maud, Lady Willoughby (died 1497; PRO, PROB 11/11/17).

63 Her father was Sir Robert Harlyng (died 1435); her three husbands, Sir William Chamberlain (died 1462), Sir Robert Wingfield (died 1481), and John Lord Scrope of Bolton (died 1498); she had no children (Testamenta Eboracensia, IV, no. 75, p. 149Google Scholar).

64 Historical Manuscripts Commission (HMC), Manuscripts of the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir (London, 1905), 4:269–75Google Scholar; Victoria History of the Counties of England (VCH), Middlesex, 1:177Google Scholar.

65 HMC, p. 83; Wriothesley, Charles, A Chronicle of England, ed. Hamilton, W. D., Camden Society, n.s., vol. 11 (1875), p. 50Google Scholar. On this occasion, the countess's eldest son and her husband's heir married the earl of Westmorland's daughter Margaret; her daughter Anne married Westmorland's heir. The earl of Oxford's heir married Westmorland's eldest daughter Dorothy at the same time.

66 HMC, Rutland Manuscripts, 1:36, 42, 44Google Scholar; Gibbs, V., Doubleday, H. A., et al., eds., The Complete Peerage, 13 vols. (London, 1910–1940; hereafter known as GEC), 11:255Google Scholar. The Manners family continued to lease Haliwell after the Dissolution.

67 GEC, 11:255. Her son, the second earl of Rutland, was also buried at Bottsford (ibid., p. 257).

68 Stow, John, Survey of London, Everyman, ed. (New York: Dutton, 1912), pp. 377–79Google Scholar. Other members of the family buried there were the countess's daughter-in-law Margaret, wife of her son Henry, the second earl of Rutland (died 1559); Margaret's mother Katherine, daughter of the third duke of Buckingham and wife of Ralph, fourth earl of Westmorland (died 1555); Katherine, the countess's granddaughter, daughter of the countess's daughter Anne and Henry, fifth earl of Westmorland, and wife of Sir John Constable of Holderness; another daughter Anne; and her sons Thomas and Oliver. Both her daughter-in-law Margaret and Margaret's mother, the widowed countess of Westmorland, lived at Haliwell in the 1540s and 1550s (GEC, 11:256–57; 12, pt. 2:554.

69 Aristocratic executrices occasionally became involved in lawsuits against convents or nuns, but records of these suits do not cast light on the issues under consideration here; see, e.g., PRO, Chancery (C) 1/202/6.

70 PRO, C 24/2, second bundle on case of Harvey v. Wanton, membrane 1; see also PRO, C 1/924/23.

71 PRO, C 1/918/17.

72 PRO, C 1/1199/29; PRO, C 24/23.

73 Crawford, Anne, “Victims of Attainder: The Howard and De Vere Women in the Late Fifteenth Century,” Medieval Women in Southern England, Reading Medieval Studies, vol. 15 (Reading, 1989), p. 63Google Scholar.

74 Hicks, M. A., “The Last Days of the Countess of Oxford,” English Historical Review 103 (1988): 81Google Scholar.

75 Hicks, M. A., “Cutting the Cost of War: The Moleyns Ransom and the Hungerford Land-Sales, 1453–98,” Southern History Society 8 (1986): 15–16Google Scholar, and “Piety of Margaret, Lady Hungerford (n. 44 above), pp. 25–26.

76 Hicks, , “Piety of Margaret, Lady Hungerford,” p. 31Google Scholar.

77 Crawford, p. 71.

78 PRO, SP 1/141, fol. 212 (1538; L&P [n. 13 above], vol. 13 [2], app. 6).

79 PRO, SP 1/102, fols. 134–35.

80 PRO, SP 1/154, fol. 142 (1539); SirEllis, Henry, Original Letters Illustrative of English History, 1st ser. (London, 1824), 2:124Google Scholar, for Lord De La Warre's letter (L&P, vol. 14 (2), no. 547). Lord Thomas probably obtained the manor they were surrendering through his wife, daughter and co-heir of Sir John Bon vile of Halnaker, Sussex.

81 PRO, SP 1/117, fol. 39(1537); PRO, SP 1/102, fol. 68(1536).

82 Rosenthal (n. 41 above), p. 32.

83 Ibid., p. 56.

84 Saul (n. 52 above), pp. 105–7.

85 Carpenter (n. 52 above), pp. 65–67.

86 Richmond (n. 59 above), pp. 193–203.

87 Carpenter, pp. 65, 67; Rosenthal's position on the meaning of late medieval religious individualism is less clear. On one hand, he observes, like Carpenter, that beneath this individualism, the nobility tended to follow the orthodox and fashionable. On the other hand, he explicitly expresses agreement with Wood-Legh that this religious individualism helped prepare the way for the religious changes of the sixteenth century (Rosenthal, pp. 13, 51; Wood-Legh, K. L., Perpetual Chantries in Britain [Cambridge, 1965]Google Scholar).

88 Carpenter, pp. 67, 73.

89 Scarisbrick (n. 11 above), pp. 56, 61.

90 For example, PRO, SP 1/192, fol. 133 (Catesby); PRO, SP 1/139, fol. 191, BL, Cleopatra, E. IV, fol. 270 (Godstow); BL, Cleopatra E. VI, vol. 329 (Legborne); PRO, SP 1/242, fol. 65 (Mailing); PRO, SP 1/120, fol. 2 (Polsloe); PRO, SP 1/140, fol. 128 (Shaftesbury); BL, Cleopatra, E. IV, fol. 309 (Styxwold); L&P, vol. 12 (1), no. 311, (Cannonleigh, Lacock, Pollesworth, Polsloe, Studley, Burneham) L&P, vol. 13 (2), no. 457 (Winchester, Lacock, Brusyard, Pollesworth).

91 It was, of course, possible for aristocratic women to remain single and be sexually active, either inside or outside of convents. Examples of both exist in the Yorkist and early Tudor periods. However, these were not licit choices in the period and were neither socially nor morally acceptable. Given the high marriage rate (93.78 percent; see above), the small numbers recorded as dying young and/or unmarried (3.74 percent), and the tiny numbers of nuns guilty of sexual infractions, few aristocratic women apparently either made this choice or found themselves in this situation.

92 PRO, C 1/546/6; Anne Pynchbeck was a servant to Elizabeth, the last Mowbray duchess of Norfolk, who died in 1507; PRO, PROB 11/15/25.

93 Of the 2,139 whose early death or adult status I was able to trace, only 3.74 percent were recorded as dying young and/or unmarried; unfortunately, there is no way of knowing the age of the women listed as unmarried or dying unmarried. My guess is that most of them died relatively young. Certainly, very few unmarried adult aristocratic women appear in the extant sources on the Yorkist and early Tudor periods.

94 Thus far I have found only twelve such cases in the group I am studying.

95 PRO, C 1/494/15, 17.