Female Merchants: Optimistic Cherry-Picking?

In 1916, Annie Abram published a groundbreaking article in the Economic Journal, “Women Traders in Medieval London.”Footnote ¹ In it she recorded the large number of occupations undertaken by London women in the Middle Ages, both as artisans and as traders. She also identified—and was among the first to do so—that women, beyond being engaged in small-scale, domestic commerce and manufacturing, were also “engaged in some of the most important and remunerative trades,” notably that of “merchant.”Footnote ² She presented a number of intriguing examples, such as Mariota Ferars and Dyonisia la Rowere, who supplied the king with a range of merchandise.Footnote ³ Other influential scholars followed Abram's lead. Eileen Power collected a large amount of material on medieval women, published posthumously in 1975.Footnote ⁴ Here again, Power—in very positive terms—highlighted the wide range of economic opportunities available to medieval women, pointing out that the trades “carried on by widows ranged from that of merchants on a large scale, trafficking in ships and dealing with the crown, to that of small craftsmen.”Footnote ⁵ She pointed out, quite rightly, that a great deal of business acumen was required to manage large commercial ventures and that examples of widows practicing large-scale, international mercantile trades “abound in our sources.”Footnote ⁶ Like Abram, she provided tantalizing examples. In the mid-1980s and early ’90s, the focus shifted to tell the story of English women as the mistresses of their households, belabored with maternal duties yet simultaneously capable of producing all manner of industrial goods or selling small items as hucksters and still able to brew enough ale to satisfy the consumption needs of an entire parish.Footnote ⁷ However, most scholars, notably Kay Lacey, Maryanne Kowaleski, and P. J. P. Goldberg, agree that a small proportion of women, commonly the wealthy widows of merchant husbands, were engaged in international or wholesale trade.Footnote ⁸ Earlier historians unexpectedly discovered female mercantile agency in medieval records, but might these examples be interpreted as an overenthusiastic reading of the later medieval evidence?

Much of the historiography suggests that female merchants, those engaged in wholesale, long-distance, or international trade, were a rare breed. When discussing women's employment in the manufacturing or craft sectors of the medieval English economy, Goldberg argues that wives were expected to work alongside their husbands and sell their merchandise. In the absence of adult male heirs, Yorkshire craftsmen often bequeathed their tools and stock to their widows in order that the family business might be administered until a son could take over.Footnote ⁹ Thus one model that might explain the paucity of examples of female merchants might be that these women were not actually engaged in commercial enterprise on their own behalf but rather were merely assisting or representing their husbands while they were away, selling their merchandise on their behalf, or fulfilling their outstanding business obligations after they had died.Footnote ¹⁰ These tasks in themselves were significant undertakings requiring considerable energy and deft expertise.

No one disputes that medieval women played a central role in the retail of goods, especially victuals, from shops and in markets within a local setting.Footnote ¹¹ However, there is a considerable gulf between selling inexpensive, home-produced goods from a market stall and managing, and particularly funding, a highly capitalized international trading venture. Yet such ventures were supposedly undertaken by exceptional women like Rose de Burford and Margery Russell within a commercial environment in which women not only suffered from a more limited access to capital to invest in ventures such as these but also were generally considered to be more suited to supportive (and domestic) roles.Footnote ¹² Later medieval female merchants need to be considered within these rather more demanding and onerous economic and social circumstances. It is argued here that due to an interaction of commercial and patriarchal factors, women in the late Middle Ages made up only a minority of English merchants.

There was certainly no injunction against female traders in the Middle Ages. They were regularly described as “mercatrix,” “mulier mercartix,” “woman sole marchaunt,” or “ele soit tenuz pur marchaunt (she be taken as [in the sense of “reputed to be] a merchant)” in borough customs that regulated women traders in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.Footnote ¹³ Women like Isabel Torrington of Bristol, Margaret Godmanston of Wiltshire, and Margaret Beauchamp and Agnes Wylmot of Middlesex certainly all described themselves as “merchants” (mercatrix) in staple debt transactions of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁴ These women clearly considered themselves—or were considered to be by the clerks who enrolled their credit agreements—merchants who were engaged in mercantile activities.Footnote ¹⁵

What is required, therefore, is a systematic investigation into records that pertain to wholesale, long-distance, or international trade. This article seeks, for the first time, to quantify more precisely what Abram discovered a century ago about female merchants. It strives in particular to assess systematically the extent to which female merchants penetrated English wholesale markets. Furthermore, it seeks to refine our understanding of the intricate and often indistinct realities of women's contribution to medieval commerce in order to add new perspectives to our understanding of women and trade in the Middle Ages. In doing so, it poses important questions about medieval women and wholesale trade and the ways that their actions fitted within mercantile activity more broadly. For example, to what extent did wives act as equal economic partners in commonplace joint transactions with their husbands (as theorized by Barbara Hanawalt for later medieval peasant women and by Shennan Hutton for businesswomen in fourteenth-century Ghent) rather than acting merely as their deputies or substitutes?Footnote ¹⁶ In essence, this article asks whether female merchants operated in the same way as the male majority, or whether female mercantile activity was in some way distinctive. It has also been argued that women's participation in commercial debt transactions declined in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and that this is explained by economic factors rather than the oppressive burden of what Judith Bennett has described as the “patriarchal equilibrium,” a system by which women have traditionally been both excluded and disadvantaged.Footnote ¹⁷ To what extent was women's economic potential or agency in wholesale trade shaped, or indeed constrained, by economic rather than patriarchal forces?

The period under investigation here is a long one, stretching over two and a half centuries between the mid-thirteenth century and the early sixteenth century. Clearly this was not a uniform period of unchanging economic circumstances, but the sources used in this study do exhibit remarkably similar characteristics over time while the commercial world they recorded changed dramatically. This pattern is seen not least in the period bisected by the demographic collapse occasioned by the Black Death of 1348–1350 and its subsequent outbreaks during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This long time frame is therefore divided into three, more manageable, periods: period one (1250–1349), period two (1350–1449), and period three (1450–1540).

Historians have normally relied upon one preferred type of evidence when studying women and work. The following sections, however, examine these questions over a long chronology using these two complementary forms of evidence that have not previously been used to study women and trade. The evidence studied here comes in two principal forms. The first is records of debt and credit; credit, the deferred part-payment for goods sold or advances for future delivery of goods, was ubiquitous in later medieval society and central to all medieval business. The second category is customs accounts and brokage books; used here as an adjunct to the debt evidence, these records, when studied systematically, provide a huge amount of supplementary information that eloquently contextualizes the debt evidence. Examining women's participation in commercial ventures using these two connected elements of wholesale trade allows for a far more rounded, and comparative, understanding of women's involvement in that trade to be achieved.

Female Merchants and Debt

In the first period, between 1276 and 1312, debts could be enrolled in London in the form of recognisances before the chamberlain at the Guildhall; they were recorded in the city's Letter Books.Footnote ¹⁸ These recognisances clearly demonstrate the role of Londoners in the marketing of goods that Gascon and Spanish merchants imported into (and occasionally exported from) the Port of London, particularly wine and leather. The 1,851 recognisances recorded during this thirty-six-year period in the Letter Books surveyed here were used to secure the deferred payment of goods bought and sold on credit in London.

By the mid-fourteenth century, high-value debts were commonly enrolled in statute merchant or statute staple courts. The statute staple was the successor to the Statute of Acton Burnel (1283) and the Statue of Merchants (1285).Footnote ¹⁹ The statute staple was a royally sanctioned debt-registration system primarily for merchants, which provided a kingdom-wide system for the efficient recovery of defaulted debts during the second and third periods, between 1353 and 1532. Unlike the local provisions found in London's Guildhall court, debts were registered in a number of mercantile courts sited in towns and especially ports of commercial importance, such as Boston, Bristol, Exeter, Hull, Newcastle, Salisbury, and Westminster.Footnote ²⁰ The staple certificates that were part of the process of debt recovery survive in large numbers. This study draws upon 9,989 staple debt certificates registered between 1353 and 1532. The certificates were a second stage of the process (once a debtor had defaulted) that followed the enrolling of a recognisance. In this study the certificates used (excluding those from Yorkshire)Footnote ²¹ are copies of defaulted recognisances that were sent to Chancery to allow the sheriff to imprison the defaulting debtors, impound their lands and goods, and deliver these to the creditors in order to repay the outstanding amount of the debt.Footnote ²²

Furthermore, a rare survival of the 604 debt recognisances—identical in form to those registered in London's Guildhall—enrolled at Coventry's statute merchant court between 1392 and 1456 and 1521 and 1535 allows for a more exhaustive and precise picture to be drawn of male and female lending and borrowing at this time.Footnote ²³ This is because the debts recorded on the Coventry rolls, like the earlier London recognisances, comprise all of the debt transactions enrolled at that court rather than just those certificates of defaulted debts that were part of the debt-recovery process. All of these are directly comparable not only because the workings of the staple system was largely unchanged throughout all three periods but also because recognisances and certificates were two stages within the same judicial process. Litigants enrolling recognisances in London in the late thirteenth century were exactly the same types of business people as those suing for the return of their money using certificates in the late fifteenth century and beyond. This system provided the facilities by which England's trading community was able to lend and borrow confidently and securely. Sums transacted in the staple courts at this period were large, averaging £85, and this credit was generally used to buy and sell merchandise within the English domestic economy, including imported goods redistributed throughout the kingdom.Footnote ²⁴

Importantly in the context of female merchants, the statute staple courts operated under a system of law known as Lex Mercatoria, or “Law Merchant.” This was an internationally acknowledged body of customs used by merchants that recognized that those engaged in commerce were often itinerant and required speedy resolution of commercial disputes, particularly those involving broken debt and credit agreements. It recognized that merchandise could be perishable and needed to be delivered, frequently by the merchants themselves, to distant, often overseas, markets.Footnote ²⁵ Unlike common law, in which the legal rights of married women were subsumed under the doctrine of coverture by those of her husband, this very practical system of dispute resolution seems not to have explicitly impeded or excluded women, married or otherwise, from presenting their debt plaints to staple courts.Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, under the statute staple, the common law courts were prohibited from hearing disputes arising within the staple franchise.Footnote ²⁷ The usual impediments encountered by women who might have been subject to the imposition of common law in this period are thus absent from these transactions. The Law Merchant system, then, permits a clearer view—one not encumbered by coverture—of female mercantile action in the medieval past.

The workings of this system of debt registration, and the use to which the credit was put, are best demonstrated by an example. On 2 June 1286, Cecelia, widow of John de Stebenhethe, entered into an agreement with Peter Bertram and William Baras in which she purchased 100s. worth of wine, probably imported from Gascony, from the two merchants on credit.Footnote ²⁸ This deferred payment for the wine was to be repaid in two installments, 50s. at Michaelmas (29 September 1286) and 50s. at Christmas (25 December 1286), giving Cecelia seven and a quarter months to sell the wine and pay the money back to the merchants, possibly on their next visit to the port. While the transaction may have been informally negotiated at either the merchants’ or the widow's home or place of work, it was later formally registered and enrolled, complete with the transaction dates and all the relevant installment dates, at the Guildhall before the chamberlain. Cecelia, as the recognisance states, acknowledged that she was “bound” (tenere) to the two merchants in the sum of 100s, allowing the court to sequestrate her goods or property should she default on the debt.Footnote ²⁹

Debt transactions using recognisances like this to register high-value credit agreements were the backbone of wholesale trade. Women lent and borrowed in roughly equal proportions over the whole period studied here. Roughly 47 percent of women using the London court in period one (1250–1349) and the kingdom-wide staple courts, in period two (1350–1449) and period three (1350–1540) were debtors and approximately (in all periods) 52 percent were creditors. However, women made up only a small proportion of lenders and borrowers in these courts when compared to men. In London, in period one, between 1276 and 1312, 11.9 percent of those who enrolled their recognisances in the Guildhall were women (163 transactions). While there were many other places where merchants might register high-value debts—not least, from 1283, at statute merchant courts around the kingdom—this proportion of female participation in high-value debt traffic in the London court is at the very least suggestive of wider trends. However, after the high point of female debt enrollment in London in the closing years of the thirteenth century (at 37.2 percent), the proportion of women registering debts at this court fell to a mean of 8.7 percent during the first decade of the fourteenth century. After 1305, in particular, this percentage—part of a declining trend—rarely rose above 6 percent. When this early proportion of women enrolling debt agreements is compared with women's access to trade finance in periods two and three, it can be stated that 379 of the 9,989 statute staple certificates (3.8 percent) between 1353 and 1532 show women as active participants in the staple credit process either as lenders or borrowers. A similarly small proportion (2.6 percent) is found in the recognisances enrolled at Coventry's statute merchant court in period two between 1392 and 1456, and in period three between 1521 and 1535, demonstrating that women played a relatively minor, and declining, role in wholesale trade finance in the later Middle Ages.Footnote ³⁰ This low proportion of female involvement in staple debt transactions, particularly after the Black Death, reinforces the impression advanced by Kowaleski, Goldberg, and others that female merchants were atypical of the broader, largely male, English merchant community. A very similar proportional decline in female debt pleas between the early fourteenth century and the mid-fifteenth century has been noted by Stevens for both the London sheriff's court and the king's court of common pleas.Footnote ³¹

It has been argued that the severe mid-fifteenth-century decline in debt transactions involving women was not a product of patriarchal exclusion but rather of trends in female debt enrollment that closely follow the chronology of economic growth and decline in the period as a whole. The greatest number of female debt transactions took place during the post-plague economic “boom” of the 1370s and 1390s, followed by a significant drop in transactions during the first half of the fifteenth-century economic “crisis,” a limited and faltering recovery in women's staple enrollment in the later fifteenth century, and a sustained rise in credit transactions involving women in the first three decades of the sixteenth century. This pattern seems to have exactly followed the movements in lending and borrowing by both men and women as a whole.Footnote ³² According to this evidence, therefore, women seem to have been subject to the same economic pressures that male merchants experienced.

The long chronology studied here allows this hypothesis to be further scrutinized. To what extent were economic forces or patriarchy responsible for constraining women's commercial potential during this time? If women's engagement with high-value credit is examined over all three periods, it would appear that the early fourteenth century witnessed something of a strengthening of the patriarchal influence upon women and finance. While sterile commercial conditions in the early fourteenth century (a period associated with acute famine and animal murrain) might have resulted in women being forced out of wholesale trade or excluded somehow from the capital acquisition required to finance it (a decline from above 30 percent to about 6 percent), this ratio of women to men did not change or improve when commercial circumstances recovered in the later fourteenth century. Rather, in the latter two periods, this ratio remained fairly constant at about 3–4 percent. This important change, sometime in the early fourteenth century, might have been the result of a hardening of general attitudes toward coverture and an intensification of patriarchy from the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that, as some historians have argued, was linked to the growing imposition of common law at this time.Footnote ³³ Despite staple courts not officially using common law, a backdrop of these increasingly pervasive values might well have discouraged female entry into the wholesale market.

Despite the low proportion of female debts, the recognisances and later certificates tell us much about trading activity by English women. Women were actively involved in domestic trade. For example, Emma, the wife of Bernard de Fylers, bought 100s. worth of wheat, barley, and oats from an English merchant in 1278.Footnote ³⁴ In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, women seem to have been more actively involved in the selling of imported goods, buying directly from foreign, often Gascon and Genoese, merchants in the Port of London. In 1298, John le Murager and his wife, Felicia, were extended 53s. worth of credit by Elyas Scarlet, merchant of Gascony, indicating the deferred payment on credit for Gascon goods, probably wine, to be sold in London by the husband and wife partnership.Footnote ³⁵ The couple was again extended credit (40s.) by another Gascon merchant, Bydean de Beaulu, seven years later in 1305, suggesting a thriving family importing business.Footnote ³⁶ John le Murager was regularly extended credit in this period, commonly by foreign merchants, both solely and in syndicates of merchants (one of which included another woman, Juliana, the wife of Robert le Skot).Footnote ³⁷

The relatively high proportion of debt transactions involving women in later thirteenth-century London is unlikely to reflect a particularly liberal understanding of women's roles in general, and female merchants in particular, at that time. As is discussed below, the “London effect” may well have played a role. However, this particular period is also well known as one of commercial growth. A rapid population growth, particularly between 1270 and 1290 when urban populations were at their medieval apex, combined with a period of (relatively) high real wages, resulted in an increase in demand for goods and services of all kinds.Footnote ³⁸ It has been estimated that the total output of goods and services grew by about three times in the period 1050–1300 and that the value of English overseas trade tripled in real terms during the thirteenth century. It was a period in which new towns, new markets, and novel commercial institutions such as merchant and staple courts proliferated. In the decades around 1300, the volume of English commerce and the quantity of money in circulation were also at their medieval peaks.Footnote ³⁹ One way of interpreting these data—as John Langdon has when discussing women working on royal building sites—is to suggest that when commercial opportunities arose within an expanding and dynamic market, like that of later thirteenth-century London, women with sufficient capital resources seized these opportunities and enthusiastically participated in these commercial ventures.Footnote ⁴⁰ Beyond the normative or “background” patriarchal understanding of appropriate roles for women in medieval society placing them within a minority, there seems to have been little beyond that (albeit important) hindrance that particularly debarred women from participating in and investing in this expanding trade.

In the latter two periods (1350–1449 and 1450–1540) following the Black Death, the certificate evidence demonstrates that domestic trade again predominated among the women who used the staple.Footnote ⁴¹ Only four certificates can be located in which women bought imported goods on credit directly from aliens from Florence, Sienna, and Genoa. For example, in 1367, two Florentine merchants, Roger Thomas and Thomas Blanchard, came to the staple court at Lincoln and sold £160 worth of goods to a partnership of a merchant, William Palmer of Caistor (Lincolnshire), and Agnes, the widow of William Fitz-Simon, also of Caistor, to be repaid twenty days later.Footnote ⁴² Although the certificates do not reveal such details, what likely happened here is that the goods sold on credit by the Florentines were imports brought in on Italian ships and sold to English merchants for redistribution in Lincolnshire. The business partnership of Palmer and Fitz-Simon bought these imports on credit from the Florentines and then attempted to sell them, presumably in their home market of Caistor and its hinterland. Unfortunately, they failed to repay the Italians on time—perhaps because they were unsuccessful in selling all of the imported merchandise—and were consequently sued in the Lincoln court by the aliens Thomas and Blanchard only four days after the debt had fallen due.Footnote ⁴³

Thus, the debt evidence suggests that women were engaged, in a limited way at least, in wholesale trade between late thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Tables 1 to 3 indicate that this engagement was often in partnership with their husbands, sons, or other men.Footnote ⁴⁴

Table 1

Period 1: Female recognisances in London, 1286–1312 (N = 110), Sharpe, Letter-Books A and B

Table 2

Period 2: Female staple certificates in England, 1353–1449 (N = 226), TNA C 241

Table 3

Period 3: Female staple certificates in England, 1450–1532 (N = 150), TNA C 241 and C152/65

Following the conventions of the recognisances and the certificates themselves, those women who enrolled high-value debt agreements are analyzed here and in tables 1 to 3 according to their recorded statuses as wives, mothers, or independent operators. Widows, another common designation in these documents, are discussed in more detail below. Women often enrolled debts jointly with their husbands or, less frequently, with other men. Examples such as John and Felicia le Murager's transaction with Gascon merchants have been discussed above, but other similar joint husband-and-wife transactions can be found within the London recognisances. In 1309, William de la Sale, mason, was extended £4 13s. 4d. worth of credit by William de Wyttone, skinner, and his wife, Roysia.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, husband-and-wife transactions were less common in the earlier period than in the post–Black Death periods, featuring in under a quarter in the earlier recognisance sample (table 1). Husband-and-wife partnerships were much more common in the later certificates, representing over one-third of the female statute staple debts (tables 2 and 3). For example, in 1360 John de Newborough and his wife, Joan, described in the certificate as “merchants of Dorset,” extended £100 worth of credit “for diverse merchandise” to a fellow Dorset merchant, William de Stupelton.Footnote ⁴⁶

The fact that large numbers of wives and husbands, particularly in the two latter periods, enrolled debts together, effectively creating a legally binding business partnership, validates the idea that medieval business was a family affair, with all the opportunities for capital acquisition that marriage could bring. London's inheritance laws in particular allowed wives to contribute the capital crucial to trading ventures. Indeed, as Hanawalt and Anne Sutton argue, these legal advantages helped London women engage in high-value trading activities while also helping them to sidestep some of the barriers of patriarchy.Footnote ⁴⁷ From this evidence alone, it is difficult to be certain whether these were full and equal trading partnerships with husbands, as Hutton has persuasively argued for Ghent.Footnote ⁴⁸ Being named in contracts along with their husband might well have been a customary identifying rubric for many women actively engaged in trade in what might be perceived, from the fourteenth century, as an increasingly patriarchal trading milieu—albeit transacted in a court that was not subject to the limitations of coverture—and it was one that positioned them appropriately within the medieval world view encapsulated in English common law.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, it also had the benefit of establishing a solid reputation and at the same time alluding to the capital reserves (belonging to her husband) that lay behind the venture. Furthermore, naming the husband and wife in the agreement might well have added further security to a transaction for an uncertain creditor; if one of the two named debtors died before the money was repaid, the agreement would remain valid with the surviving (named) spouse remaining contractually bound for the debt. These were confidence-building guarantees, particularly in the fifteenth century in times of more challenging commercial conditions. As Kowaleski has argued for Exeter, these women were often wives of leading merchants, trained in the mercantile arts in the family business.Footnote ⁵⁰ There would have been little point in adding a wife's name to a contract unless it served some collateral, surety, or reputational benefit to her husband. More likely, these contracts reflect genuine commercial partnerships between husbands and wives in situations in which wives played an active role the transaction or the business.Footnote ⁵¹

Indeed, it is likely that the records underrepresent the proportion of women directly involved in high-value debt transactions at this time, as wives may have been unnamed or silent partners in many of the remaining 9,632 staple agreements that cited only men. Other women, often widows, enrolled debts with men to whom they do not seem to have been related (tables 1 to 3). In 1440, for example, Alice Code, of Milcombe (Oxfordshire), and Thomas Eburton, of the same place, went into business together to extend £26 13s. 6d. in credit to two members of the Oxfordshire gentry.Footnote ⁵² Beyond living in the same village, there seems to have been no familial or spousal connection between them. Might the increasing proportion of these women-and-partner transactions, along with increasing husband-and-wife partnerships, particularly in period three (table 3), suggest a tightening patriarchal grip upon unfettered female trading? Perhaps in this later period of economic dislocation—particularly in the mid-fifteenth century—it was felt that women's credit transactions required the added security of a male co-signee.

Table 4 demonstrates that widows, both singly and jointly with male business partners, were an important constituent of female credit.Footnote ⁵³ For example, Eva, the widow of Eustace de Derteford, was granted 28s. worth of credit from London blade-smith (blader) John de Canterbury in 1285.Footnote ⁵⁴ Widows used trade finance in all periods. Nearly a quarter of all female debts in period one were enrolled by widows. However, widows became increasingly prominent in periods two and three, contributing to three-fifths of female staple certificates after 1450. The reasons for this change may relate to increasing scribal precision following the Statute of Additions (1413), perhaps combined with a hardening of the prevailing patriarchal ethos.Footnote ⁵⁵ Many women listed in the staple certificates as widows enrolled their debts with other men. For example, in two separate transactions in 1402 and 1407, the London widow Joan Wight extended a total of £36 worth of credit to a London tailor, Thomas Awdele (or Audley). In both transactions, she acted in partnership with a London vintner, Alexander Sprot. Like the debtor, Joan Wright's late husband had been a tailor, suggesting perhaps a continuation of the family business.Footnote ⁵⁶ In terms of the availability of mercantile capital for staple widows, many of these women's late husbands had been merchants or members of London livery companies that specialized in wholesale trade, such as the Mercers or Grocers.Footnote ⁵⁷ Their widows’ use of the staple suggests that these men bequeathed sufficient assets or movable goods to allow their widows to effectively continue their mercantile pursuits in partnership with other men.

Table 4

Recognisances and staple certificates of English widows, 1286–1532, Sharpe, Letter-Books A and B; TNA C 241 and C 152/65

Likewise, widows in all three periods commonly enrolled their debt agreements without a male business partner (table 4). A typical example is Alice de Wympler, widow of Henry Wympler, who in 1281 bought 60s. worth of yarn on credit from Andrew de Castro Suris, merchant of Spain, and then bought more goods from a London merchant one month later.Footnote ⁵⁸ In periods two and three, widows were the largest group to transact debt agreements individually. In the latter periods, widows acting alone comprised just under 60 percent of female certificates (table 4). For example, in 1375, Agnes, the widow of John de Rodys of Lincoln, lent £10 to a Lincoln saddler.Footnote ⁵⁹ In the final period, Elizabeth Yarford, a London widow, gave £32 13s. 4d. worth of credit in 1527 to a mercer and merchant of the Calais staple, John Pais, a transaction that clearly indicates the widow's mercantile credentials.Footnote ⁶⁰ London widows were entitled to a third of their late husband's goods and chattels. In mercantile households, where assets were often in the form of movable goods, this provision must have helped widows to continue in business.Footnote ⁶¹ Mercantile widows’ inheritance of viable assets must have played a decisive role in female independent participation in London's wholesale trade. The cloth trader Alice Bokerel, discussed below, was the executrix of her husband's will, placing her in an ideal position to use the capital inherited from him to further her own trading interests, in this case, the purchase of imported French cloth.Footnote ⁶² Widows could also use their inheritances to extend credit or lend money on their own account. Mabel, widow and executrix of Roger Retonsoris of Bread Street (Bredstrate) in London, lent seven marks to fellow Londoner John Mareschal of Walbrook (Walebrock), her inheritance of Roger's estate and goods, allowing her to invest in trade finance and thus become integrated into powerful financial networks.Footnote ⁶³ This access to capital goes some way to explain the high proportion of widows enrolling recognisances in London at this time (table 4).Footnote ⁶⁴

While married couples and widows were central features of the wholesale trade throughout the period, the extent of female participation in wholesale markets can be accessed more clearly by examining those recognisances and certificates that were enrolled by women, including widows, acting on their own. As can be seen in table 1, in the first period this group is the largest in the sample, at over 60 percent of women lenders and borrowers. In 1291, William Trente, merchant of Bergerac (Brigerack) in the Dordogne, France, extended Sabina Malemeyns 40s. worth of credit for (unnamed) goods, presumably merchandise that Trente imported into London by ship from the Dordogne.Footnote ⁶⁵ Sabina was the wife (possibly widow by 1291) of Richard Malemeyns (or Malemeins), a wool merchant.Footnote ⁶⁶ Earlier in 1286, they had transacted a 60s. deal together—the scribe noted in the margin that Sabina had registered the recognisance with her husband (nota quod uxor fecit recognicionem cum viro)—with another foreign merchant.Footnote ⁶⁷ It seems as though Sabina, dealing both on her own and with her husband, was often at the helm of this particular enterprise. In another example of 1284, Alice Bokerel (or Bukerel) was granted 26s. 8d. worth of credit by Peter Viger, a Bordeaux wine merchant, indicating her participation in the domestic resale of imported wine.Footnote ⁶⁸ Alice's first husband, William Buckerel, had been a draper who loaned money, employed apprentices, and dealt with merchants from Brabant in Flanders in the late 1270s.Footnote ⁶⁹ He died ca.1278, but his widow, Alice, and her daughter (or William's sister) Dyonisia continued his drapery business by importing large amounts of cloth (worth £20 9s. 4d.) from a partnership of merchants from Cahors (Cauz) in France and selling goods (probably cloth) on credit to customers in London.Footnote ⁷⁰ Six years later, Alice had remarried, this time to a taverner called John de Branchesle.Footnote ⁷¹ This second marriage, to a man who must have sold wine in his tavern, might well explain her later diversification into the wine trade.

However, in periods two and three, women operating on their own make up a lower proportion of the sample, averaging about 45 percent of the certificates enrolled by women (tables 2 and 3). Thus, women operating on their own without husbands, business partners, or their sons—but who are not described as widows in these documents—falls from about 60 percent in the first period to about 40 percent in the latter two periods. This drop might again be the ramifications of a hardening patriarchal standpoint concerning women trading by themselves from the fourteenth century. Equally it might also reflect a reduction in commercial opportunities for everybody, regardless of gender, particularly during the long periods of contracting demand during the Great Slump of the fifteenth century. However, some women continued to trade on their own. For example, Isabel de Claregge, who extended 92 marks to a Suffolk merchant named John Prycke in 1362, represents one of the few women who enrolled certificates on their own in the later period.Footnote ⁷²

Yet those recognisances and certificates enrolled by women alone (the “single” category in tables 1 to 3) do not tell the whole story. In period one, roughly 60 percent of the women who, like Alice Bokerel, enrolled their recognisances individually were in fact married.Footnote ⁷³ Many, like Katherine de Lyncoln, who in June 1298, sold £17 10s. worth of cloth on credit to merchant and mayor of London, Henry le Galeys, described themselves as “wife of (uxor)”—in this case, John de Lyncoln—within the recognizance, despite their husbands playing no part in the transaction itself.Footnote ⁷⁴ Katherine's mercantile credentials are confirmed by the fact that the debt was to be repaid at Saint Botolph's fair two months later, suggesting that she would be selling her wares at this important commercial gathering for wholesale merchants. Many of the “single” women in the latter two periods (tables 2 and 3) were gentlewomen, such as Lady Juliana de Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, and Alice Giffard, lady of Twyford (Berkshire).Footnote ⁷⁵ These women had access to the landed resources that allowed them to engage in the credit market on their own. Similarly, in the latter periods, some of these women, like Joan Whaplode mentioned above, were married, but their husbands were not cited in the debt certificates.Footnote ⁷⁶ However, unlike in period one, in the latter periods this was comparatively rare. In 1518, Angela John, a newly remarried widow, entered into a debt agreement without her new husband.Footnote ⁷⁷ It is possible that this decline in “single” women's debt enrollment was the product of a change in scribal or curial practice, particularly after 1413, possibly in conjunction with a toughening-up of society's conception of coverture. This hardening might have been particularly acute when demand contracted in the fifteenth century and the market for credit contracted as well. Despite these impediments, the debt evidence suggests that women, generally in partnership with a man—usually their husband—remained a small but important component of wholesale commerce in the later Middle Ages.

Female Merchants and International Trade

Throughout the period covered by the Exeter accounts, jointly importing with other merchants, generally male, was for most of the women common practice. The edited customs accounts and brokage books of six ports between the mid-thirteenth century and the mid-sixteenth century are evaluated here: Boston, Bristol, Chester, Exeter, London, and Southampton, along with the customs records and other documents pertaining to a number of smaller ports, such Lynn (now King's Lynn) in Norfolk and the ports of Cornwall.Footnote ⁷⁸ The customs accounts, compiled by royal customs officials, record ships’ arrival and leaving dates (usually the dates at which the goods were loaded or unloaded), the names of the merchants whose goods were on board, the nature and value of these goods that were liable to custom or subsidy, and the amount of custom or duty levied on these. In some cases, the accounts also record the ship's name, its home port, and its master.Footnote ⁷⁹ Some, for example, Chester and Exeter, record palatinate or local customs rather than overseas royal customs. This additional perspective is important because local customs covered coastal trade, which required less capital and international connections than overseas trade—factors that probably gave women easier access to the wholesale market than to overseas trade, which required higher capital investment. For example, listed in the Chester custom's accounts is Alicia Dymmok, the widow of John Dymmok, who imported, presumably from another English port, eighteen tons of iron with three men on the Mary Grace of Chester that anchored at Burton (Cheshire) in June of 1529.Footnote ⁸⁰

The Southampton brokage books recorded the tolls charged on goods—generally imports—leaving the port on carts as they passed through Southampton's Bargate during the final period, between 1430 and 1540. These goods were transported by road to merchants, generally in southern England, to sell to customers inland. These invaluable records document the quantity of goods carried in each cart, the name of the carters who conveyed the goods, the people who owned them, and their destination.Footnote ⁸¹

To reveal the extent of medieval women's participation in international trade—a direct involvement in importing or exporting goods—an analysis of edited English customs records is required. Immediately, the level of female participation in foreign trade is shown to be negligible. In period one in Exeter, between 1266 and 1321, only fifteen female merchants out of 1,071 importers can be located in the customs accounts of the Port of Exeter, representing just over 1 percent of the active traders working in coastal trade at that time.Footnote ⁸² These women, generally residents of Exeter or its outport, Topsham, were all importers either of fish or, more commonly, wine. The male importers of Exeter trafficked the same types of goods but in larger quantities. For example, in March 1301, Joan Busse (or Bosse), the wife of Nicholas Busse, of Exeter, imported one tun of wine in partnership with Master John Dyrewyn (probably the ship's master).Footnote ⁸³ The ship, La Blythe of Yarmouth, when it docked at Topsham was carrying eighty-six tuns and ten pipes of wine, divided among twenty-eight importers; Joan's cargo was one of the smallest on board. Her husband, Nicholas Busse—a major Exeter importer—was also importing wine on the ship. His consignment totaled four tuns, one of which, like his wife's cargo, was imported in partnership with another merchant. Women generally imported goods in partnership with other merchants throughout the period covered by the Exeter accounts.

Seven of these women were regular importers of wine or fish. For example, Edith Girard of Topsham imported a total of 8½ tuns of wine on four ships between 1316 and 1318, indicating a regular participation in the coastal trade.Footnote ⁸⁴ Two of these ships, La Langbord and La Margarete, both of Exmouth (Devon), docked only nine days after each other, suggesting that they were part of the same convoy. Edith Girard seems to have been splitting her cargo between ships within the convoy, perhaps for increased security, a common practice among international traders.Footnote ⁸⁵ Occasionally a number of women imported wine on the same ship. Edith Girard and Richalda (or Rychabella) de Irelond imported wine twice together on the same ship, once with their goods being listed beneath each other.Footnote ⁸⁶ On one of these voyages—aboard La Margarete in 1316—their cargoes were joined by those of a third female merchant, Joan Smalecomb.Footnote ⁸⁷ Bearing in mind the infrequency of women participating in trading activities, the fact that three women imported the same product on the same ship at the same time suggests some sort of relationship based around shared interests, but one that fell short (as far as we know) of entering into business partnerships together.

While most of these women might be described as occasional merchants (when compared to most of their male counterparts who regularly imported goods into Exeter), importing small quantities of goods only once or twice, one Exeter woman, Joan de Smalecomb, did so on a more significant scale. Between November 1315 and December 1317, she imported a total of fifty tuns and one pipe of wine, with her cargoes being brought in on between three and four ships each year.Footnote ⁸⁸ On some occasions, she brought in the largest cargoes of all the merchants importing goods aboard ship, such as the thirteen tuns she imported with the smaller cargoes of the other twenty-five merchants on Le cog Seynt Gile in 1315.Footnote ⁸⁹ Following patterns identified above in the debt evidence, it seems likely that Joan was widow of John de Smalecomb, who had been a major importer and member of the mercantile élite of the town, serving as both receiver and steward in the port in 1312–13.Footnote ⁹⁰ John's brother William and another relation, Adam, also regularly imported goods into Exeter. Another female importer, Cecila de Smalecomb, possibly Joan's daughter, continued to import wine for several years after Joan quit the business (or died) in late 1317.Footnote ⁹¹ The importance of family enterprise, combined with the available capital of a well-connected and successful (and deceased) merchant husband, allowed Joan de Smalecomb to continue his business at an unusually prominent level.Footnote ⁹²

The early fourteenth-century evidence from the vibrant ports of London and Southampton also identifies female import and export merchants. Joan, wife rather than widow, and therefore probably business partner of Admar’ de Lile—likely an alien merchant—imported wine into London in 1303.Footnote ⁹³ She was just one out of fifty-four merchants paying customs in London in that year. Even as the plague tore through London in 1349, Isabella de Preston, a denizen merchant, exported English cloth to the Continent on a ship with two other export merchants, one of whom was an alien.Footnote ⁹⁴ Isabella's export venture represented just under 3 percent of all the merchants exporting from London in that grim plague year. In Southampton two female merchants, Joan de Collier and Joan Chamberlayn, can be seen exporting English wool from the port in 1331, composing, again unusually, 14 percent of the Southampton wool-exporting merchants in that year.Footnote ⁹⁵

In the smaller ports of Cornwall in period one, only one woman, Sarra, widow of Roger Ylg’, can be found during a sixty-nine-year period (1287–1356) paying customs duties for exporting hides.Footnote ⁹⁶ But merchants in Cornwall at this time were not a numerically sizable group. Thus Sarra's two cargoes leaving Cornwall represent about 4 percent of the merchant cargoes in the two-year period in which she is recorded (1285–87). In Lynn (Norfolk) between the late thirteenth and the mid-fifteenth centuries, evidence can be found of women possibly dealing in imported French goods and holding shops in the port.Footnote ⁹⁷ However, there is no evidence of English women being involved in foreign trade—one alien woman is discussed below—from this small port.

In period two, the comprehensive accounts from the port of Boston in the later fourteenth century during the reign of Richard II (1377–1399) provide an exhaustive picture of the region's import-export trade.Footnote ⁹⁸ As at Exeter, the hundreds of merchants and their cargoes that entered and left the harbor are listed in the customs accounts. However, none of these merchants was a woman. There is little evidence of declining commercial activity at the port at this time, so the explanation must lie elsewhere.Footnote ⁹⁹ Perhaps the level of female participation was partly the result of a more vigorous blanket implementation of patriarchy but was also dependent upon the size of the market. The number and distribution of customers is of importance here, because the more active or vibrant the commercial environment, the greater ability it had to absorb female participation in trade, as is seen above in Cornwall and Norfolk. If we (somewhat unfairly) compare London and Boston in the period following the Black Death, then the capital's many thousands of often wealthy customers galvanized a dynamic economy with very large numbers of merchants attempting to satisfy that demand.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Where there were more merchants, as in London between 1480 and 1481 (described below), we also find higher female participation in trade. This was not the case in Boston. Therefore, the lack of female merchants in Boston is unlikely to be solely the result of a particularly rigid local embargo on female operators—indeed, it is likely that women were extensively integrated into Boston's lower-value local economy—but rather a function of the generally limited commercial opportunities available in the post–Black Death provincial port.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In period three, in London in the early fifteenth century, 1.2 percent of the cargoes arriving or leaving this busy port contained merchandise carried by female merchants. In 1420–21, most of these were alien female merchants.Footnote ¹⁰² Very few of these merchant women were English. One, Matilda Tekyll’, was a denizen merchant who on 29 April 1421 exported medium quantities of ungrained cloth on a ship also carrying the cargoes of three men; but she appears to have been something of an exception.Footnote ¹⁰³ Of the aliens, Christina Combemaker was the most active, exporting cloth from London on three separate ships in that one year.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ She, as did many merchants exporting from London at this time, specialized in a product known as thrums (thrommez). These were the unwoven woolen threads that remained on the loom once the web had been removed. These waste products of the weaving process were collected together and then exported and made into fine cloth in Flanders in an attempt to avoid paying the English customs duties.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ All of Christina's cargoes were, as was usual, loaded onto the ships with those of male merchants (aliens and denizens exporting cloth and metals), but on two of the voyages the ships’ manifests included the cargoes of other female merchants.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ One of these was Elisa Heyden, who was exporting a parrot (papaga) worth 20s. On another ship, Christina Combemaker imported household goods into London, including comb-heads, perhaps merchandise from a family comb-making business.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This import of household goods and subsequent export of cloth from London clearly demonstrates the normal patterns of trade pursued by all merchants, male and female, at this time.

The evidence of the brokage books from the port of Southampton between 1430 and 1540 reveals English women marketing foreign imports from that port to markets inland. Carts filled with goods were sent to the markets where the merchants who had purchased them then redistributed them. Two of the principal destinations for these goods, Salisbury (Wiltshire) and Winchester (Hampshire), are surveyed here. Out of the 1,502 Salisbury merchants who received carts from Southampton, eleven were women (0.7 percent). These women's goods included wine and fish, but others, such as Margery Hill, imported oil and woad (raw materials for the local cloth industry), and Madeline Ravenell imported canvas.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ These women are not described in terms of their marital status, but it is known that some, such as Isobel Ailward and Margaret Bele, were related or married to merchants. Isobel Ailward's father, Robert, imported wine, dyes, cloth, and metalware, and Margaret Bele's husband, Richard, imported fish, hides, soap, and tar (used in the dyeing process)—instances that reinforce the importance of family capital in mercantile ventures.

In Winchester, 1,173 merchants were in receipt of carts from Southampton; twenty-one of these (1.8 percent) were women. Here again the demand from the local cloth-manufacturing industries meant that many merchants redistributed imported dyestuffs. Nine of the twenty-one female merchants from Winchester, such as Johanna Reson and Alice Dyer, dealt in imported woad, madder, dyes, and oils for the cloth industry.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Another of these was Isobel Ailward, who, as seen above, sold wine in Salisbury but sold woad in Winchester in 1461. Clearly this woman was acting as a merchant—albeit on a small scale, with very few carts leaving Southampton—but nonetheless she seems to have reacted to the assorted demands of different customers or markets. Four of these women sold imported wine, and three, including Isobel Grante (or Graunte) and Mabel Yonge, sold imported miscellaneous or household goods.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Compared to their male peers, however, these women played a relatively minor role in the long-distance (from Southampton to Salisbury and Winchester) wholesale import distribution trade.

In Bristol in the later fifteenth century, women likewise had a share, again a small one, of the import-export market. Of the cargoes paying customs duties at this major port, 1.6 percent belonged to women. Between March and September 1461, one woman (in fact the only woman in that period), Margaret Holbroke imported wine, woad, and resin (rosin, used in the dyeing process) into the city.Footnote ¹¹¹ Like other merchants, she divided these cargoes among four ships, three arriving on 20 May 1461 and the fourth arriving six days later, presumably as part of the same convoy. Margaret may well have been a widow, as a Richard Holbroke of Bristol is known to have died in 1457.Footnote ¹¹² She may have worked with her husband in his business or was continuing it after his death. Eighteen years later in the same port, fourteen (1.2 percent) of the 1,197 import/export cargoes were recorded as belonging to women.Footnote ¹¹³ Many of them are listed several times in the customs records, suggesting ongoing business ventures. Three were particularly active between 29 September 1479 and 3 July 1480: Alice Hutton, Margaret Rowley, and Agnes Vale. Agnes Vale imported fish from Ireland and oil and vinegar on two separate ships;Footnote ¹¹⁴ Margaret Rowley imported wine, often very large consignments, from Bordeaux and madder (a dye) from Flanders in three ships, again in larger quantities than those of the men on board the same ship (one consignment being valued at £82).Footnote ¹¹⁵ Margaret Rowley had a merchant daughter or sister named Joan who imported sugar, oil, wax, and Spanish wine from Hondarribia in Northern Spain on three separate ships, again suggesting the possibility of a family-run trading business.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Alice Hutton imported wax and sugar from Spain and woad from Bordeaux on three separate ships.Footnote ¹¹⁷ On two of the ships from Spain her cargoes were joined by those of other female merchants, on one ship by Joan Rowley and on another by what amounts to a (virtual) sorority of Bristol businesswomen, Agnes Vale, Joan Rowley (whose goods were listed directly beneath Vale's), Agnes Harding, and Alice Brown.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Alice Hutton's trading activities in this year reveal much about husband-and-wife trading partnerships. Aboard the Trinite of Bristol, landing in March 1480, Alice Hutton imported two hundredweight of sugar from Lisbon along with ninety-four other shippers.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Her cargo is listed below that of her husband, John, whose cargo included large quantities of wine, oil, and wax. Clearly the couple was working separately, or at least paying the customs individually, while carrying their goods together on the same ship. The fact that their cargoes are listed beneath each other might suggest that their goods were positioned adjacent to one another on the deck and were thus disembarked and assessed by the harborside customs official one after the other. This suggests perhaps a marital partnership whereby each specialized in different commodities within the family trading business.

From among the 439 ships listed in the customs accounts of the port of London for 1480–81, only the cargoes from thirteen of those ships included goods belonging to seven women, representing just under 3 percent of those ships that berthed and unloaded goods at the port in that year.Footnote ¹²⁰ None of these women were English. These alien women merchants generally imported goods, including cloth, household goods, and fish, into London. Of these, Margaret Claysson was the most active. She imported flax, yarn, and cloth (twenty-two pieces of Brabant cloth of three hundred ells in size) on two different ships that arrived in London on the same day (7 March 1481), presumably part of the same convoy. She also exported nine days later two barrels containing 276 candles on a ship bound for Bergen-op-Zoom in Flanders.Footnote ¹²¹ Like most import-export merchants, Margaret imported goods to sell in London and then bought English goods to export on outgoing ships to Flanders. This example fits well with our understanding of the female merchants of later medieval Ghent and Cologne. Many of the female merchants of Ghent were considerably less active than their male counterparts; those of Cologne often specialized in discrete sectors of the import trade, particularly spices, while being entirely absent from other sectors. The female merchants generally dealt in smaller quantities than the mercantile elite of both cities. Continental women traders also seem to have concentrated upon the redistribution of these imports in their home markets.Footnote ¹²²

The women who imported goods into London in the late fifteenth century also seem to have been specialists, concentrating in household items. Antonia Jamys (or James) was an alien importer whose goods were landed in London from two Flemish ships in July 1481. Her cargoes included old feather beds, pillows, bolsters, distaffs and spindles, flax, red laces, cushion covers, old sheets, table cloths, diaper towels, chafing dishes, candlesticks, pots, and kettles.Footnote ¹²³ Alice Johnson, another alien merchant, imported a similar cargo on a different ship from the same port on the same day as Antonia Jamys.Footnote ¹²⁴ The other female merchants, Isabella Bronell and Dorothea Selk, likewise imported household goods, including two thousand pins, three dozen hats, pillows, and pieces of a rich striped silk, originally from Alexandria (bord Alexander).Footnote ¹²⁵ Only one woman, Elizabeth Wolf, imported barrels of Pimpernel eels (a broad-nosed variety of common eel), and even these might have been destined for household consumption.Footnote ¹²⁶

Might this pattern, similar to that of the female merchants of Cologne and London in the 1420s (above), be interpreted as a specialization in products for female customers, such as distaffs and spindles, or merchandise for women managing their households, such as beds, sheets, cloths, pillows, and chafing dishes? The only female merchant from the records of Lynn, the alien Margaret Durdreght’, likewise imported explicitly household-related goods, including in 1396 a barrel of spectacles and haberdashery worth £7.Footnote ¹²⁷ This certainly represents a potentially stimulating area for future research into English female trade, one that makes perfect sense in a patriarchal environment where women might be expected to cater to the various and specific demands of those who managed households.

Among the hundreds of men recorded as importing or exporting goods through the Port of Chester between 1301 and 1566, only three women, Anna Beeke, Alicia Dymmok, and Katheryn Fleming (of Drogheda, Ireland), can be located (that is, three female merchants in 265 years), all operating in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries.Footnote ¹²⁸ They imported wine, iron, and cloth in small quantities, and their cargoes were carried aboard ships among the cargoes of other (male) merchants. For example, in the early sixteenth century, Katheryn Fleming imported one pack and one fardel of yarn (a measure of canvas or cloth, sometimes known as a “bundle”) on the Bartholomew of Liverpool. On the same ship were the cargoes of nineteen male importers.Footnote ¹²⁹ Women seem to have rarely broken into Chester's coastal trade; Chester, like Boston and other smaller ports, may have lacked sufficient demand or commercial dynamism to encourage widespread female participation in the wholesale distributive trades.