The Widow

Widows received a bad press in early modern England.

Think of Isaac Cruikshank’s MY GRANDMOTHER: alias the Jersey Jig: alias the RIVAL WIDOWS (26 August 1794), a satire on the sexual triumvirate of George Prince of Wales, Lady Jersey (who was in fact married) and Maria Fitzherbert (there is also a parody in here of Elizabeth Cooper’s 1735 work The Rival Widows). Or of George Cruikshank’s bizarre THE WIDOW WADDLE OF CHICHABIDDY LANE (12 October 1807), after a song by Joseph Grimaldi, which plays on the stereotype of the remarried widow as a masculine husband beater.

More common were droll satires such as Isaac Cruikshank’s, The Disagreeable Intrusion, or Irish Fortune Hunter Detected (4 September 1795). Here a widow, seduced by an attractive Irish fortune hunter, consents to their marriage only to have her wishes thwarted by the arrest, presumably for polygamy, of her lover. Contrasted with a classical nude portrait, Cruikshank satirises her willing ignorance towards this calculated, charming and affectatious male exploiting the foibles of English elite institutions. He is a criminal and a bigamist, yet 'The Disagreeable Intrusion' will only briefly rob him of his liberty and delay his enrichment. He is thus not the fool. That honour is taken by the widow, who, shocked by the 'intrusion' rather than appalled at her deception, would willingly marry a rogue rather than not marry at all.

Allowances for satiric exaggeration aside this is the classic early modern view of the widow - she is desperate, violent, and scheming. Yet if we replace a negative (scheming) with a positive (clever) we might be able to start breaking away from this caricature. For once again, my work on the account books of the Rochester Bridge Trust, has rendered such gender constructions problematic (see my previous post here).

In 1594 at the RBT managed property of East Tilbury, Essex, Alice Gestlyng took on with her son Isaac the estate of her late husband Richard, which they held jointly until 1601. In 1660 Ann Aynsworth, a ‘widow’, took the same property, now replete ‘with barn, buildings, demeasne lands, meadows, pastures, marshes except timber rights’, before it passed to her son Rowland in 1676. One Elizabeth Unton held this lease from 1752 until 1765, and in 1795 Mary Benson took charge of what is by now described as the ‘Manor of Tilbury’. Mary held the lease until 1814 when it passed into the hands of her son, Samuel Benson, who himself continued at the property until 1823.

These names, dates, and descriptions found in the RBT records tell us little beyond what was formally required to be on such official documents (leases et al). Nonetheless the patterns present are of interest. As was the case for High Halstow (Kent) it is notable how female possession of a property was in the early modern period a means by which families could retain ownership of that property. It is also of note how, once again, female ownership at this Essex estate ceases from sometime in the early-nineteenth century.

Perhaps the increased frequency of businesses, as opposed to individuals, taking ownership as leases can explain this trend. Land in both Essex and Kent, as the City and Region project explores, came across the period 1577 to 1914 under increasing pressure from the (masculine) industrialising march of London. Men and leases then could quite possibly have started seeming more natural partners. However these fragmentary insights might also suggest that part of the rationale for virulent anti-widow satires can be located in the power widows of the eighteenth and early-ninteenth centuries could exert over property and hence, as was remarkably clear in the case of Maria Fitzherbert, over men.

I’d be pleased to hear if any recent work on the early modern widow has explored such territory.