Guardianship over women in medieval Flanders: a reappraisal

Journal of Social History, Summer, 1998 by Ellen E. Kittell

While property held in feudal tenure was typically described with reference to the person who protected and managed it, it is the principal possessor - the one who paid the taxes - who served as the customary point of reference for identifying other types of property. In such cases, after all, the essential issue was not the property's safe protection or management, but rather its revenue-producing properties. For the same reason, this would also be the most logical means of identifying a piece of property that was subject to transference. It was also common practice to identify a property with reference to owners of surrounding holdings.(63)

Property was identified as belonging to women in a number of records. Seven of the forty-seven people described as principal possessors in a 1249 assessment within the parish of St. Martin's of Ypres, for example, were women.(64) Alena, wife of John Custodis, is listed, for example, as responsible for the six measures of land she holds of St. Martin's in Ypres. It is quite possible, to be sure, that her husband was actually managing the property, even though she was the principal possessor. There is no evidence that he did not, but equally, there is no evidence that he did. As far as the scribe or clerk was concerned, it was her holding and her responsibility. Alena is the only woman clearly described as married. Other women in the record, then, may have been responsible for their property because they had never married or had been widowed. Curiously, however, only one is described as the daughter of some man, suggesting that she had not married up to this point; there also appears to have been only one widow-the widow of Andre Comitis.(65) Yet another woman appears simply as muller Lisa (the woman Lisa). The remaining three lack descriptive titles or defining appositives. This lack suggests that associating women with male relatives was neither invariable nor routine. For all we can tell, any one of these three may have been married, single or widowed. For some reason, the scribe saw no need to note down such information. It is possible that what the clerk wrote down depended not on convention but rather on how each person identified him or herself to him or on his own familiarity with them.(66)

Ypres was not the only community where land was identified with reference to those who held it, and where women were recorded as the holders. The Ghent aldermen described a piece of property being transferred, for example, as being located between the property of Jan van Waes and that of Katheline Aex, daughter of Sir Boidin Aex.(67) The heritable rent that Willem and Wivine Uten Hove sold to Jacop Zaterdag is described as lying in part upon the property on which the house of the widow of Henry Suuwelaern stood.(68) Hugh den Plougher is noted as leasing a portion of a house sitting between the house of the late Boudin Clauwaerts and that of Lisbet van Latem to his daughter, Lisbet Plougher.(69) In 1292, Robert Li Vodins of Douai contracted a debt to Evrart al le Take, a citizen of Tournai, pledging as collateral his lands bordering the tenement of William Pautonnier and of Wistasse Kaviole on the one hand and that sitting at the Pont de Pierre and joining the tenement of Jeanne d'Auby on the other.(70) The tenement of dame Ysabel le Blonde marked the boundary of one of the properties in Douai that Jeanne Galip, widow of William Boin Siecle, sold to her daughter-in-law Margot.(71)