From Homer to Jane Austen, storytellers have entertained their
audiences with tales of women in disputes, as parties and
peacemakers. This is our attempt to write their history, relying as
far as possible on primary sources, documents which have survived
by chance, never intended for our eyes by those who created and
preserved them. In 534AD, the Roman emperor Justinian expressly
forbade women to act as arbitrators. In the thirteenth century
Saint Thomas Aquinas stated that 'woman is naturally subject to
man, because in man the discretion of reason predominates'. Many
have assumed that what was laid down as law or proclaimed as
authority represented the reality. But women do not always do what
men tell them they should. We have set out to find what has
happened in practice over four thousand years, at least in Europe,
beginning in the Bible and Ancient Greece and Rome, but thereafter
concentrating on England, with regular references to the Continent.
A chapter on Anglo-Saxon England shows the inextricable ties with
the Continent among women of the highest rank, as do two of the
four chapters that follow on the Middle Ages. Those women often
mediated and arbitrated, but they also resolved disputes by a
number of other ways. Then we show how common it was for titled
women in England to resolve disputes. A chapter on 'untitled women'
provides plenty of evidence of the regular resolution of their
disputes. There is a digression then to Malta, to the records of a
fifteenth-century notary, which tell the stories of women of every
station and their disputes. England's greatest monarch, Elizabeth I
supported women with free legal aid and her own personal
intervention, in ways never since matched. The practice of
submitting women's disputes to mediation and arbitration survived
through the seventeenth century, dispite revolution, regicide, fire
and plague. A tailpiece tells how a dispute concerning the will of
Temperance Flowerdew, one of the earliest European settlers in the
'New World', was resolved by the English Privy Council. A chapter
on the eighteenth century emphasises the English government's
encouragement of mediation and arbitration. ending with how Mary
Musgrove's mediation helped to establish the colony of Georgia, and
two sections on France, one Pre-Revolutionary, one Revolutionary.
They challenge others to explore developments in the North American
colonies and France. The Conclusion widens that challenge. Lady
Anne Clifford, a woman of infinite strength of will, has demanded
the last word. She simply refused a royal command to submit to an
arbitration which would have robbed her of the vast landholdings
she held in her own right.
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