Hello everyone and welcome to the History of England episode 153, the medieval working woman.

Gosh by Goli and by Ech. It feels odd not to have our Henry around. Glorious victories, God's favour, all that sort of thing.

And now we're on to a rather long and rather different run of English history or at least heading in the direction.

And so I think it's time to pause, gentle listener, to pause. Draw the wrath. Think of something else for a little while

before returning to the relentless turn of the political wheel.

Now you might remember that we had something of a run of episodes on women in history, some of it

ex-rated to my embarrassment. And I thought I'd better do one more, just one more before claiming

that I'd completed the task of at least bringing us up to date a bit about women before we start

on the reign of Henry VI. So this week I thought it might not be a bad idea to do something about

the working lives of women in the late Middle Ages. Now I may need to apologise in advance.

One of my problems with this kind of timeless, thematic stuff is I'd just lose track of what I've

said and haven't said. And throughout the writing of this episode I had this overpowering feel that

I'd covered everything that I'd said before. But I looked at my previous scripts, couldn't see it,

so look, if I have covered all this before, please forgive me. Don't shout at me. Maybe gently

remind me where I've done it before if you feel so inclined. Let's start with the rural peasant,

given of course, that this would be far under way the most numerous section of society.

And let's start with the bald fact that marriage is far under way the norm for women, only something

like 4% of peasant women remained unmarried. Now I have to say, I don't have the corresponding

figure for men, but the point is that if we're thinking about the working life of peasant women,

the vast majority of their working life is within the context of marriage.

For young women before marriage, it's by no means impossible that you would have had some

provision made for you land-wise. Despite all that stuff about premature, and the practice of

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