Women and Chancery: the Debates

Scholarship on women and Chancery has debated two interconnected questions: whether equity law was better for women than common law and whether women brought suits to equity courts in higher numbers than they did to the other central courts. While there has been a certain amount of discussion pertaining to these matters for the late medieval court of Chancery, the historiographical debate originally focused on later periods and particularly as it concerned married women's ability to hold property.Footnote ¹⁶ The key study on women and the English court of Chancery was carried out by Maria Cioni and relates to the better-documented Tudor period.Footnote ¹⁷ Cioni argues that women regularly sued in Chancery because it recognized their property rights when common law would not—for example, because of coverture or lack of documentation. Chancery influenced the development of particular equitable devices such as uses or trusts, which might form part of a woman's family or marriage settlement.Footnote ¹⁸ Amy Erickson discusses the court for the period 1558–1714 in the context of an argument that “the primary purpose of a marriage settlement in early modern England was to preserve the wife's property rights” and that Chancery was the court that would uphold such settlements.Footnote ¹⁹ She then offers a more nuanced view of women's use of this court in her longer study of women and property in early modern England: “While the number of women plaintiffs [in Chancery] illustrates the extent of women's involvement with matters of property and business, the women themselves were not necessarily pleased to be exercising their right to appear before the court,” which was forced on them by being sued in a common law court.Footnote ²⁰

The scholarship on women and the late medieval court of Chancery is still at a preliminary stage but has used some of these debates as springboards. For example, Eileen Spring, discussing the period 1300–1800, has argued that courts like Chancery were used by the aristocracy to defeat common law rules that were advantageous to potential heiresses (for example, strict settlements might be used to bypass daughters in favor of uncles or other collateral males), but did not demonstrate this empirically.Footnote ²¹ In terms of numbers, Emma Hawkes has claimed that women were three times more likely to petition Chancery than to take a case to another central court. This finding was based on a very limited sample of cases from Yorkshire in the period 1461–1515.Footnote ²² However, Timothy Haskett's Early Court of Chancery in England Project (ECCE), 1417–1532, which sampled 6,850 cases of approximately 61,000 available in C 1, found that 21 percent of petitioners to Chancery in his sample were female, which does lend some support to Hawkes's finding.Footnote ²³

Matthew Stevens has recently pointed out that the percentages hide the higher number of litigants who used courts like the Court of Common Pleas: “While women formed a larger proportion of petitioners to Chancery than they did litigants at Common Pleas (15 percent as opposed to 5 percent, respectively), the fifteenth-century Court of Common Pleas processed twenty to forty-five lawsuits for each one petition to Chancery”; Stevens's figures for Chancery are from Hawkes for the proportion of women but from Haskett for the number of cases heard per year.Footnote ²⁴ However, a study of the surviving Chancery writs indicates that the number of Chancery cases per year might have been much higher than that suggested by Haskett and others. For example, Penny Tucker found over nine hundred writs for 1441–42, a period for which Nicholas Pronay earlier posited an average of 136 bills. Writs were issued by the court of Chancery during the course of a case so the number of surviving writs suggests that the vast majority of bills have not survived, although Tucker does moot that the survival rate of bills might have improved by the last quarter of the fifteenth century.Footnote ²⁵

Haskett's ECCE project also reports that women only made up 7 percent of respondents in Chancery, which suggests that when women are found in the court's records, it is likely because they chose to take the case there, lending support to Hawkes's argument.Footnote ²⁶ Haskett further found that from the 1430s to the 1510s the proportion of female petitioners to female respondents shifted from 80:20 to 52:48, which might “reflect increasing participation in matters of property and inheritance or a more vulnerable state as executors or heirs … [and] some diminished capacity to act at law.”Footnote ²⁷ However, as we have seen, there are problems with quantitative exercises and the surviving Chancery material. In this article I build on some of these debates, but instead of offering another quantitative approach, I suggest that a different approach to the same material might offer fruitful rewards to those studying women's use of the law. Hawkes was primarily interested in women's knowledge of the law, and, I contend, the Chancery bills themselves can give some qualitative evidence about women's legal knowledge and their experience of multiple and competing legal jurisdictions.

Women Negotiating Multiple Jurisdictions

The Chancery bill of Johane, widow of John Baten, gives us an insight into not only her action in Chancery in the early 1480s but also how she handled her husband's legal affairs and then her own, both in a church court and two civic arenas.Footnote ²⁸ Johane Baten was being sued in the sheriffs’ court of London by John Storke for one of her late husband's debts and was seeking a writ of certiorari to have the case moved to Chancery. The bill contains the standard claims that would ensure it fitted the scope of the chancellor's jurisdiction: Johane Baten was poor and not well acquainted in London, unlike her opponent, who had connections, and therefore she would not get a fair trial. The bill, presumably in a bid to back up her argument that she was being unfairly pursued, as well as to evoke sympathy, also offers further contextual information on her legal activities dating back to her husband's death.

John Baten had been resident in Bristol. According to the Chancery bill, he had named his wife as executor of his testament, as was common, but Johane Baten refused to take on this legal responsibility as she knew that he had more debts outstanding than his goods were worth.Footnote ²⁹ She also secured a certificate to this effect, under the seals of the commissary and the mayoralty of Bristol. Although the church had jurisdiction over probate matters, some civic governments also required wills that affected their jurisdiction (for example, burgage tenure, the protection of orphans) be enrolled before them, too, as was clearly the case in Bristol.Footnote ³⁰ The wills entered in the city's Great Orphan Book from 1382 to 1492 nearly all contain a note that they had been proved before ecclesiastical authorities before being proved before the mayor and his officials.Footnote ³¹ Johane Baten must have appeared before both the commissary court and the mayor's court in order to get these certificates.

According to the bill, once Johane Baten had refused to be the executor of her husband's testament, his goods were sequestered by the commissioner of the deanery of Bristol for the bishop of Worcester, in whose diocese they lived. She left the house where her husband died, “takyng with her no erthly goods but oonly the smok and the kyrtill” she was wearing.Footnote ³² While this statement has the hallmarks of a legal trope,Footnote ³³ it perhaps also suggests knowledge that until her husband's estate was settled, Johane Baten had a legal right only to her “paraphernalia.” This term is most commonly understood to mean a wife's clothes and jewelry; the early thirteenth-century common law treatise known as Bracton referred to “robes and jewels, which may be said to be her own.”Footnote ³⁴ To give a contemporary example, justices in the Court of Common Pleas in 1454 debated whether a widow had effectively taken on liability for her deceased husband's estate when she accepted delivery of certain goods, including her own clothing. Two justices argued that the widow should not receive her apparel nor any other goods until the question of administration had been settled; another argued that she could have what apparel canon law stipulated; and two others maintained that she could have suitable (convenient) but not excessive (excesse) apparel.Footnote ³⁵ Johane Baten's act of leaving most goods behind, like her refusal to be her husband's executor, suggests some prior knowledge of the law.

The bill ends with Johane Baten appealing to the chancellor as “a power [poor] widowe.”Footnote ³⁶ Yet this position seems at odds with the incidental reference that she had gone “to the cite of London for certeyn besynes which she had ther to doo.”Footnote ³⁷ That a Bristol widow had business to conduct in London also suggests that she owned more than a smock and kirtle. It is possible that she had her own business and property separate from her husband's, as Bristol allowed women to register as a “femme sole,” which allowed them to enter into contracts independently of their husbands.Footnote ³⁸ It was also while Johane Baten was in London that John Storke affirmed a plaint of debt against her in the sheriffs’ court for £8 22d., a debt that was actually her husband's.Footnote ³⁹

While we do not know the chancellor's ruling, the bill does give us an insight into Johane Baten's actions, particularly her legal ones prior to the Chancery case. Rather than bemoan the fact that we do not know how this case progressed in Chancery, we can approach the Chancery bill as one step in a more complex social and legal dispute and consider what light it sheds on this woman's knowledge and experience of the law. Johane Baten shows knowledge of the rules regarding the administration of probate, and she appeared before both ecclesiastical and civic officials to get the relevant paperwork. Her own work brought her into contact with the courts in another city, and it is there that she was forced to appeal to a higher court because she was not as well connected in London as her male opponent. Appealing to Chancery was a defensive measure and not the start of her legal battle, which was triggered by her husband's dying while effectively bankrupt.

The Chancery bill of Alice Parkyns can be used similarly to look beyond a woman's approach to this particular court and gain a broader sense of her interactions with a number of different legal jurisdictions about a related matter.Footnote ⁴⁰ The case that Parkyns sought to have moved to Chancery was again one for debt linked to her late husband's dealings, although this time from the bishop of Winchester's court in Southwark, which he ran as a manor.Footnote ⁴¹ Parkyns had been sued by brewer John Gould for 40s., which she claimed was a malicious action. In order to demonstrate the need to get the case heard in Chancery, the bill rehearses Parkyns's dealings with an ecclesiastical jurisdiction (her husband died intestate) and a civic court (Gould first sued her in the city of London) before it turns to the case in the bishop's manorial court in Southwark.

According to Alice Parkyns's bill, Roger Parkyns had paid his debt of 47s. to John Gould, but in an effort to avoid other creditors, he took sanctuary in Westminster. A number of religious houses in late medieval England used their status as royally chartered liberties to offer permanent sanctuary to debtors as well as accused criminals.Footnote ⁴² Roger Parkyns was there only for three weeks before he died. As he died intestate, Alice Parkyns decided to pay for the cost of his burial, which suggests she had some money at her own disposal or she was considered good for credit. Roger Parkyns's goods, though, were sequestered by the archdeacon of Westminster for the abbot of Westminster, presumably so they could be used to pay back his creditors.Footnote ⁴³ Alice Parkyns's bill relates that she was not allowed “to come within her doors … under the seale of the archdeacon,” as she was willing to show the chancellor.Footnote ⁴⁴ This suggests that a widow did not automatically get her share of her husband's property in such bankruptcy cases.Footnote ⁴⁵ The bill then turns to the actions of John Gould. He first took an action of debt against Alice Parkyns in the City of London but did not see it through as he knew he would not get remedy there.Footnote ⁴⁶ According to Alice Parkyns's bill, Gould then started an action of debt in the neighboring area of Southwark, where he, unlike Alice Parkyns, had important friends, and so he was more likely to be successful there; hence her request for a writ of certiorari to get the case moved. The bill's endorsement reveals that the request was accepted.

Again we have a woman who was appealing to Chancery for help in a dispute prompted by the death of her debtor husband. The bill positions her as a victim in need of help, but it also reveals a woman who had attempted to handle the situation in a variety of ways before this appeal. After her husband's death, Alice Parkyns was refused access to their shared house because of his debts, but she used this official decision as a defense against her husband's creditors, who tried to make her liable for the debts. She was confident of victory in a London court, and it was only when John Gould brought a claim in Southwark, where she lacked his connections, that she sought to move the case to Chancery. Gould pursued Alice Parkyns serially in neighboring jurisdictions, just as her husband had made use of a neighboring jurisdiction to avoid his creditors.Footnote ⁴⁷ This issue was not one confined to London: we also saw how Alice Smyth from Much Wenlock was pursued in Bridgnorth, both in Shropshire. In all these examples, the women made a decision to petition Chancery, but they were responding to actions initiated by male opponents in other courts. This was not always the case: women might have initiated the original lawsuits or the opponent might also have been female, as is exemplified below.

Did Women Favor Chancery?

As discussed, Haskett's ECCE project suggested that women were more likely to appear in Chancery as petitioners than as respondents. This pattern perhaps indicates that women favored this jurisdiction, although the project also found that the proportions evened up over the course of the fifteenth century. If we take a qualitative approach, though, the question of whether women “chose” Chancery becomes more complicated, in that we must also factor in earlier decision-making. The detail of Chancery bills makes clear that they were the next stage in a dispute, which was often at issue in another court, so the choice was not so much between the central courts as between seeing the case through in a local court or trying to get it moved to Chancery. Also, even when we have a bill in a woman's name, it need not mean that the initial choice of taking a dispute to Chancery was hers—what we might have is a countersuit in response to a man petitioning the court.

The bill of Alice, wife of John SeintJohn, for example, relates how she had long been seeking compensation from one John Goldesburgh for a leg injury that had prevented her from working: she had tried arbitration and love days, then an action of trespass in the sheriffs’ court of London. It was at this point that Goldesburgh tried to change the jurisdiction: first to the mayor's court (it was sent back down to the sheriffs’ court, where a jury found against him). Then he petitioned Chancery for a writ of corpus cum causa, which stopped the sheriffs’ court enacting the jury verdict. Alice SeintJohn was therefore counterpetitioning Chancery to get a procedendo, which would send the case back down to the sheriffs’ court so that judgment could be given on her compensation.Footnote ⁴⁸ Thus while Alice SeintJohn did petition Chancery, and would feature in Haskett's statistics as doing so, the jurisdiction that she preferred for her action was the sheriffs’ court, which had already found in her favor.

The bill of Johane Martok, a widow in Bristol, reveals that she was also the original initiator of legal action but not of the Chancery phase. Martok had successfully sued one Thomas Walssh and been awarded 51s. 8d. “by processe of the lawe and after the custume of the Towne of Bristowe.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Walssh delayed the execution of this decision by securing a writ of certiorari from Chancery. He then took an action of debt against Martok in one of Bristol's courts for 43s., claiming that her late husband owed him this amount and that she was the administrator of his goods.Footnote ⁵⁰ At this point Martok's recourse was to Chancery, claiming she was “of none power to hold ple[a]” with him, asking for a procedendo so that the result of her initial case could be enacted, and a certiorari so that Walssh's action of debt could be moved to Chancery. While Martok had clearly had legal advice in putting together this bill, it nevertheless is revealing of how a fifteenth-century woman might have to negotiate a legal action and Chancery's role in this. In this case, it was not just a simple matter of suing a man in Bristol: Martok then had to deal with a countersuit of debt in one of Bristol's courts and had to use Chancery as a higher court, as had her opponent. Martok was not the first one in this dispute to involve Chancery, but her petition was a necessary next step. Even then, the bill shows awareness of which jurisdiction was better for which action in that it asked for one legal action to be sent back to the court in Bristol (so that Martok could receive her 51s. 8d.) and the other to be decided in Chancery (so that Walssh's debt claim could be quashed).

The bill of one Johan Detton, likely from 1471, reveals that the origin of her Chancery dispute was that she had similarly been “successful” in her initial legal action. She had brought an action of debt in the bishop of Winchester's court in Southwark against one John Vernon, and he was told to pay her 35s.Footnote ⁵¹ However, her victory was pyrrhic. There were deliberate delays in getting the written condemnation delivered to Detton, which she blamed on the bailiff of the court. Then one John Neuland, who was one of Vernon's sureties in the case, brought a feigned action of debt (40s.) against her and caused her to be arrested. Neuland wanted to have his suit settled before “a court of pepouders.” Piepowder courts were special courts convened to deal quickly with disputes that arose during public fairs, as many of the participants were visitors rather than residents; these courts should not have been used for disputes between locals.Footnote ⁵² The bill alleges that John Neuland had already arranged Detton's condemnation with the intention that she would be forced to drop her claim to the outstanding 35s. in return for his dropping his for 40s. Detton was in prison, fearing a guilty verdict on a false charge, and her petition was for a corpus cum causa writ to get her and her case moved to the court of Chancery. Her bill gives us insight not only into a woman successfully suing for debt in a manor court, something we can see in surviving court records, but also into the potential ramifications of such an action—here an allegedly false accusation of debt by her opponent's friend, leading to imprisonment, which forced her to turn to Chancery for redress. The bill's endorsement reveals that she was successful in securing the writ.

An unrelated bill supports Johan Detton's claims in that it also attests to John Neuland's undue influence in Southwark's courts. Agnes Johnson was being sued by Neuland (here spelled Newlond) for debt and trespass while her husband was “out of country” and was petitioning from prison.Footnote ⁵³ The bill does not appeal to coverture as a defense, which perhaps did not apply in this manorial court, but claims that she feared she would lose as Neuland was wealthy and, more significantly, was brother-in-law to the bailiff of the court and “hath such rule in that courte” that the jury always sided with him.Footnote ⁵⁴ Johnson was also successful in securing a corpus cum causa writ.

The bills of SeintJohn, Martok, and Detton all show that women petitioned Chancery for a variety of reasons. In contrast to the cases discussed earlier, the bills do not position the female petitioners simply as victims of corrupt practices in local courts, although that is one feature of Johan Detton's bill. In all three cases the women had been successful in their initial legal actions at a local level; in two of the cases, the women were petitioning to get their cases returned to that jurisdiction because that would be their best chance of getting full recompense. A qualitative approach to Chancery bills, then, complicates the picture about why women might petition the court and how it functioned as part of a broader strategy of negotiating justice.

Gendered Justice?

I have discussed a number of cases in which women alleged that they were unable to get justice in a customary court because their opponents had powerful friends. Allegations of corrupt practices in local courts are not atypical in Chancery bills, as the claim is one that would help get the matter moved to Chancery.Footnote ⁵⁵ For example, the bill of widow Alcyn Jane alleges that Robert Crueys, who was suing her in Exeter's mayor's court for breach of contract and theft, was brother to one of the bailiffs of the court, who had put together a jury with the intention of finding against her.Footnote ⁵⁶ Elizabeth, the wife of William Thornton, petitioned from prison that she would not get a fair trial in Coventry as her opponent, William Rowley, was motivated by “malice” and was one of the twenty-four worshipful men of the city.Footnote ⁵⁷ While male petitioners could and did make similar claims, it is worth reflecting that the people with the power to influence decisions in the courts were all male, and so women were structurally disadvantaged by their more limited access to patronage networks that might sway rulings in local courts. This point is perhaps most clearly demonstrated with reference to Chancery cases in which the petitioner had a female opponent who was accused of taking part in corrupt practices.

The bill of widow Petronill Rothirford relates how she had had various malicious actions brought against her in the sheriffs’ court of London by a former landlady, Thomasyn Berkeley, who generally let them fall non-sued.Footnote ⁵⁸ Rothirford had lodged with Berkeley but left because the house was not of good governance.Footnote ⁵⁹ The bill claims that the most recent action of trespass brought by the landlady was likely to be successful due to “the help and mayntenance of certayn officers and yong wyld men that dayly drawith” to Berkeley's house, who had ensured that people of their affinity were empanelled on the jury.Footnote ⁶⁰ As a result, the widow was refused bail even though she had offered sufficient sureties, and therefore Rothirford's bill requested a corpus cum causa writ. In this case, the opponent—as in other examples we have seen—allegedly sought help from better-connected people. However, while the male opponent in Alice Smyth's case worked for a bailiff and the male opponent in Alcyn Jane's case was the brother of one, Thomasyn Berkely allegedly called on customers at her disorderly lodging house, who used their more official networks. Another London bill, that of Anne, wife of John Davell, goes further and claims that the action of trespass brought against her by Christine Baxster, singlewoman, was on the advice of Baxster's master, an attorney in the court of the Guild Hall, who would also be able to get the jury to find against Anne Davell.Footnote ⁶¹ While this claim does have the hallmarks of a trope, of a more powerful man pulling the strings, such tropes existed because they had the ring of truth in a world in which only men could be court officials, jurors, or professional attorneys.

One female plaintiff apparently used a fictional man to help her case. The bill of Cecile, late the wife of John Burnard, claims that Maude Tylard vexatiously took out a joint plaint of debt against her and one John Bowhill in the mayor's court of Exeter, “where of trouth ther is no suche man knowen by the name of John Bowhill.”Footnote ⁶² Cecile Burnard was arrested, but the mayor and bailiffs refused to hear her plea until she brought this John Bowhill, too. Cecile Burnard's bill alleges that Tylard's intention was to weary Burnard through imprisonment until she admitted the feigned debt. This case has shades of the story told in Johan Detton's bill about John Neuland's contrived action of debt in Southwark and shows that women could be the agents of corruption as well as the victims. As argued from the outset, women did not negotiate the legal system as a coherent subordinate group, with a shared mode of resistance. Nevertheless, they are still worthy of attention as an entity given that the courts were entirely run by men and, as a result, women faced structural disadvantages in accessing justice.

What Happened next?

I have discussed why some women sought justice in the court of Chancery and why others petitioned Chancery to get cases sent back to another jurisdiction. Although often only the initial bill of complaint survived, I now consider some cases in which further documentation is extant or in which the bill makes evident that it was not the petitioner's first petition to Chancery. The survival of further documents—or the need for subsequent bills—attests to how contested Chancery cases could be and demonstrates that the path toward securing justice was beset with troubles even after this stage had been reached. These documents also reveal more about the process of seeking redress in Chancery, and how sometimes it continued to intersect with other jurisdictions.

The widow Fyne Popyngeay of Bishop's Lynn (now King's Lynn) in Norfolk petitioned Chancery at least three times, and one of these bills notes that the action had been ongoing for two years.Footnote ⁶³ It is clear that not all the documentation associated with this case has survived, but it seems that Popyngeay's claim is that she and her late husband, Robert, had purchased 8s. of quit rent (rental payments from land) and forty acres of land in West Lynn from one Edmund Bray for forty marks, but the land had ended up in one Simon Grene's hands. The first bill to allege this was clearly not the first time Chancery had heard of the dispute, as it refers to a commission that the chancellor had ordered to look into the matter; such commissions could examine witnesses and draw up written depositions as well as take a defendant's answer in the county.Footnote ⁶⁴ While we lack responses from any of the men concerned, one was clearly made by Edmund Bray, as we have a replication from Popyngeay responding to it. Edmund had clearly tried to get her bill rejected by Chancery as her replication asserts that the matter contained in the bill was sufficient in law and that she would not receive remedy at common law.Footnote ⁶⁵ What seems to be the latest of three extant bills from Fyne Popyngeay claims that the action against Edmund Bray—and Simon Grene—had been ongoing in Chancery for two years. It states that both men had now appeared before the court, suggesting that this was probably one of the causes of the delay, and Popyngeay was seeking judgment. She seemed to anticipate that the court would find in her favor as she also requested that the two men pay a surety to keep the peace so that she could take up the lost property without fearing for her life.Footnote ⁶⁶ The request also suggests that she suspected that succeeding in Chancery would not be the end of the dispute.

Eleanor Cotton, wife of Thomas Cotton, had to re-petition Chancery, even though her first bill had been successful.Footnote ⁶⁷ Eleanor Cotton's bill alleges that Richard Lovell had taken a feigned action of trespass against her in London, leading to her arrest. She had successfully gained a corpus cum causa writ from Chancery and was granted bail.Footnote ⁶⁸ However, the bill claims that Lovell had Cotton arrested for the same cause while she was out on bail, leading to her being returned to prison in London. She again requested a corpus cum causa writ. The comparatively well-documented case between Katherine Bee and her late husband's cousin Robert Bee also demonstrates how securing a favorable judgment in Chancery might not put an end to related litigation in lower courts, particularly because parties often launched multiple suits in one or more courts. In 1477–78, Katherine Bee petitioned Chancery about a long list of her goods, including some silverware, which she claimed she had entrusted to Robert Bee for her own use (she had been lodging with him), but he had sold some goods and was withholding others.Footnote ⁶⁹ The dorse of the bill notes that the court found in her favor on 5 February 1478. However, another bill from Katherine Bee reveals that this was not the end of her legal wrangling with Robert Bee. It alleges that on 9 February her suit (presumably another one) was still hanging in Chancery and that when she was returning home from Chancery that day, she was arrested in London “in contempt of the seid courte.”Footnote ⁷⁰ This arrest was the result of Robert Bee's taking an action of trespass against her in the “counter of Bredstrete”—also known as Bread Street Compter, a court and prison run by a sheriff.Footnote ⁷¹ The bill asserts that Katherine Bee was “credibly enformed” that Robert Bee had also taken a plaint of trespass against her in the city's Mayor's Court. It argues that these vexatious actions were intended to make her drop “hir sutes” (plural) against him. This example illustrates that, with multiple suits in play, a verdict on a single suit in one court would not settle the dispute.

The bill of Margaret Couper suggests that it was not just defendants who might ignore Chancery's decisions. The bill relates how Couper had been imprisoned in one of the London's counters after Rose Wymbyssh, who allegedly had a grudge against her, complained to the mayor. Couper, with the aid of a friend, petitioned the chancellor and was successful in getting a corpus cum causa writ. However, the mayor delayed returning the writ so that he missed the specified deadline and then, the day after the deadline, moved Couper to Newgate, a purpose-built prison that housed those who had committed more serious crimes.Footnote ⁷² The surviving bill therefore asks for another corpus cum causa writ with a time limit. The endorsement on the bill reveals that Couper successfully achieved the second writ, but we do not know how the mayor responded on that occasion. Margaret Avery commented that “the difficulty of securing obedience to … writs ordering attachments is shown by the frequency with which commissions of arrest were issued,” although she was optimistic that such abuses were not the norm.Footnote ⁷³ For our purposes, though, it reveals another dimension to the interplay between Chancery and other legal jurisdictions. Female petitioners might be successful in acquiring what they sought from Chancery, be it a writ or a judgment, but this might not lead to them securing justice in the underlying dispute.