This will be a work-in-progress paper on the connections between women’s wealth and family relationships in early-modern Lincolnshire. The paper will report on the first year’s findings of a research project that has as its focus women’s inheritance of land and capital wealth. Two areas of interest will be covered:
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(Show more)This will be a work-in-progress paper on the connections between women’s wealth and family relationships in early-modern Lincolnshire. The paper will report on the first year’s findings of a research project that has as its focus women’s inheritance of land and capital wealth. Two areas of interest will be covered:
Demographic failure of the male line - the paper will present early findings on the frequency of failures of the male line and the implications for female inheritance;
The culture of property - my research will be covering questions such as ‘did increasing use of marriage settlements lead to a feminisation of the concept of the portion?’ and ‘did use of the strict settlement lead to masculinisation of the idea of land ownership?’.
The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the interactive nature of legal and social change. I wish to re-visit models of social change in the family that emphasise affective relationships, shape and order to suggest that the early-modern family was ‘transactional’. The exemplary material will largely be drawn from the Ancaster, Yarborough, Brownlow, Heneage and Monson MSS, covering the main landed families of Lincolnshire.
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