| Περίληψη: | This chapter explores the relations between women, land, property and the law.
The first part of the chapter outlines single, widowed and married women’s legal
position as property owners, paying particular attention to the doctrines of primogeniture
and coverture and their impact on women’s property rights. It explores
the circumstances by which women most commonly became landowners, outlining
the four main routes to landownership for women, as well as the practices
by which married women were sometimes able to circumvent the restrictions of
coverture. As a corollary to this, it also explores the impact of various changes
to the early modern legal system – including the shift from dower to jointure
arrangements, the emergence of strict settlement and the declining power of the
ecclesiastical courts – on women’s property rights.
The second half of the chapter sets out to assess the significance of women
as a class of landowners in Georgian England, quantifying the scale of women’s
landholding in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries using a large sample
of data drawn from the parliamentary enclosure awards. In doing so, it responds
to considerable uncertainty about the scale of women’s property ownership.
Little quantitative information is available on the proportion of land owned by
women, although a handful of studies have used rentals and leases to examine
female landholding – as opposed to landownership – within small groups of
manors. The results of the sampled enclosure awards are presented below, comparisons
between this data and the earlier, smaller studies explored, and the new
data used to throw light on four key issues: the legal and marital status of female
landowners, the scale of individual female landowners’ holdings, the geography
of female landownership and the thorny issue of change over time.
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