The balances of power: peasant women’s agency and status in mid-thirteenth to later fourteenth century Norton

Abstract

The historiography of late medieval peasant women is fraught with contradictory images of muted mothers and feisty females. This thesis argues that historians' preoccupation with the restricted nature of medieval women's public authority and status has led them to neglect the nature of women's agency. The surviving thirteenth and fourteenth-century court books of the Hertfordshire manor of Norton, which was under the jurisdiction of the Abbey of St Albans, are used to consider the social and economic status of peasant women. This research evaluates the participation of peasant women within the differing forms of resistance in the build up to 1381, whilst also considering women's agency in the face of the many other power relations within the village.