The thirteenth volume in ‘The Early Modern Englishwoman 1500–1750 Contemporary Editions’ series is the first to publish the words of women who were largely illiterate. It is also the last in the series: Ashgate judges that the need for original texts is now better served electronically.

Paula Humfrey presents two types of documents – court depositions (1667–1735) and settlement examinations (1718–1735) – sampling all of the testimony in these sources given by female servants. The depositions are from 23 cases in the Court of Arches, a higher ecclesiastical court that heard largely matrimonial litigation, in which servants might be expected to prove relevant witnesses. These cases are very complicated, and their protagonists exceptionally wealthy. Many are appeal cases or countersuits, filed in reaction to a previous suit in this or another court, making it difficult to grasp what is alleged to have happened. Since the only depositions presented are those of female servants (not other witnesses), and only the witness's answers were recorded (not the court's question), references to unknown people and incidents easily confuse. So in Cross v. Cross in 1726, Margaret Anderson after four pages of testimony suddenly asserts that she ‘never saw Mary Culcup in man's apparel at any place whatsoever’. The significance of Mary's attire or the incident referred to – Mary herself later testifies that she never dressed in men's clothing or was ‘ever called by the appellation of Sir when she was drank to’ (p. 131) – remains a mystery. We can infer that someone else has testified to the contrary, when Margaret Anderson continues that she ‘never threatened [the plaintiff] or cursed her, or called her a bitch, or declared that if she did not behave herself more civilly she would blow her up, or to any such effect’ (p. 126).

The 139 settlement examinations, from the parish of St Margaret Westminster, are less colourful and more formulaic, recording the examinant's age (sometimes), birthplace, parentage, marriage, children, payment of rent or parish rates, and annual service of at least one year (with employer's address and wage), since these points carried settlement rights. The Justice of the Peace could examine any resident suspected of becoming a burden on parish poor relief, so examination was an indication of indigence. If an examinant was entitled to settlement then she could stay. So in 1729, Sarah Love stated that her husband died 15 years earlier, and since then she had spent two years as a servant in St Margaret's, so she stayed (p. 187). But Christian Lee's husband had been dead more than 30 years, and her subsequent yearly hired service amounted to one year in St Clement Dane's, to which parish she was escorted the following morning (p.190). Almost all these women relied on service to support their settlement, the remainder claiming birth or rate-paying. Although a married woman's settlement followed her husband, the widows and deserted wives here denied knowledge of their husbands' settlement rights, possibly because these were in places that the women did not want to be removed to. Examinations, like the depositions, were strategic presentations.

These sources appeal to Humfrey because they are as close to verbatim statements as we will ever get from the servants themselves. She observes that the way in which London servants move in and out of service, interspersed (or overlapping with) with marriage and childbearing should make us re-examine the idea of service as a life-cycle stage for women, at least in the metropolis. For Humfrey, ‘servants’ mobility and independence in the metropolis … are central to understanding not only gender history but also labor, economic, and social history more broadly' (p. 25).

Despite the fact that up to three-quarters of metropolitan households employed at least one ‘servant’ (p. 16), the examinations suggest that annual service was not a significant proportion of London women's working lives. How did Sarah Love and Christian Lee maintain themselves during the 13 years and 29 years, respectively, that they were widowed and not in yearly service? Their cases are not unusual: many other women claimed settlement on the basis of annual service 10, 20 and even 30 years previous. If they were not examined by the parish in that period, then presumably they were sufficiently self-reliant that they were not considered a threat to the parish coffers. These women could have been employed on a weekly or piecework basis, or they could have been living from hand to mouth by day labour, but subsisting. Many might have echoed the deponent who ‘hath not anything to depend upon for a livelihood but the hard labour of herself’ (p. 127).

Humfrey used microfilm copies of both sources.Footnote 1 There are ample further Arches depositions and St Margaret's examinations available for research in earlier and later periods, and of course hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, in other courts and parishes. For the neighbouring parish of St Martin in the Fields, 10,000 settlement examinations for the period 1725–1793 are online at London Lives (www.londonlives.org/static/SMDSSET.jsp). St Martin's examined between 800 and 900 people a year in this period, with a population somewhere between 22,000 and 27,000. St Margaret's population was between 15,000 and 17,000.Footnote 2 If we conservatively call St Margaret's population half of St Martin's, we might expect around 400 examinations per year there. In this collection there are an average of eight per year. That discrepancy tells us that: (a) women who had been annual servants were unlikely to be examined on their settlement; or (b) service was increasingly a contract of less than one year; or (c) service was not a significant part of most women's employment. Each is an interesting possibility requiring further investigation. Humfrey presents the material in order for students, to pose questions, and many possible exercises suggest themselves: analysing the annual wages paid in the two sources, not only by street, as Humfrey has done (p. 22), but also by status of employer or status of servant, by servant's literacy, and by year; comparing the literacy and marriage rates of examinants and Arches deponents; looking at the length of time that servants spent in one employment; mapping servant mobility; and establishing the gender ratio of examinations and the methods people used to claim settlement. These questions should become easier to explore as more collections come online.