Using material drawn from across eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, this chapter charts single, widowed and married women’s contribution to estate management.
Women like Jane Ashley, Amabel Hume-Campbell, Anna Maria Agar, Sarah Dawes and Mary Cotterel were all involved in pushing through parliamentary enclosure awards, while Elizabeth Prowse introduced wide-ranging agricultural improvements after the informal enclosure of the open fields at Wicken. The contributions of these women and others like them to a bundle of related practices – including pa…
There were two key legal doctrines affecting English women’s relationship with property of all kinds. The first was primogeniture, the feudal arrangement by which titles and real property were inherited by the eldest son