Married Women in the Rural Credit Economy of Early Modern England, 1500–1700

This article explores the potential of depositions to illuminate women’s credit networks in the rural credit economy of early modern England. It focuses on the role of married women managing the small-scale credits that sustained quotidian buying and selling. The article begins with a broad analysis of gendered roles in the credit economy extracting evidence from a large corpus of depositions from rural pastoral economies in the period 1500–1700. It also investigates the nature of women’s credit networks. Women’s credit was for smaller sums drawn through localized networks and was closely bound to their consumption, whereas men’s near monopoly on droving livestock to market granted greater access to wider credit networks. We also see marked differences in the nature of women’s credit with alewives particularly well placed to facilitate credit through pawn and the secondhand market. The narratives presented in the depositions reflect largely the credit activities of married women. This article argues that marriage, rather than precluding women from credit networks, granted greater access to a tactile knowledge of the domestic household goods against which credit was contracted.