“The Law of thy Mother”: Contesting Inheritance in Seventeenth-Century England

For scholars of literature and the law, early modern women’s life writing offers a rich but often overlooked opportunity to explore the lived experience of the law in early modern England. This essay turns to one such example of overlooked life writing: Mary Honywood’s “A Briefe Historicall Narration” (1635). In her tendentious narrative account, Honywood depicts a gentry family torn apart by inheritance disputes. As she describes her family’s infighting, she challenges patrilineal principles within English law by arguing for a more equitable distribution of her father’s estate. As this essay argues, early modern women were deeply involved in estate matters and litigation, regardless of whether or not they appear in the official legal records. Honywood details her many behind-the-scenes actions as well as those of her mother and sister-in-law as they attempted to sway the direction of their family’s land disputes. Thus, early modern life writing like “A Briefe Historicall Narration” is key to understanding the pervasiveness of the law in everyday life and the crucial but extra-legal means by which women attempted to intervene in legal disputes. [E.F.]