Women in London's Court of Orphans, 1660-1720

This thesis examines the role of women in the City of London’s Court of Orphans between 1660 and 1720. The Court of Orphans has been significantly overlooked by scholars of early modern London, and where the Court’s records have been used, they have often been extracted from their administrative context. Little attention has been paid to the women who interacted with the Court, or their role in its administrative and financial procedures. As such, this thesis is the first substantive work to place women at the centre of investigations into the early modern Court, looking beyond the way it worked, to focus on the women who were actively involved in the Court’s proceedings. By using a methodology that interrogates the relationship between administrative process and record creation, and which uses the Court’s records holistically, this thesis contends that women had key roles as executors, guardians, recognitors, and financial managers. Chapter one explains how the Court’s records and administrative process developed from the medieval to early modern period. Chapters two to five each use a record collection produced by the Court, and they argue that women had important administrative, financial, and social roles in the Court’s complex administrative process. The last chapter departs from this structure to focus on the City’s financial crisis between 1683 and 1694, arguing that women’s roles as petitioners and lobbyists in the crisis has so far been unacknowledged. This thesis concludes that the Court of Orphans nuances our understanding of women’s social and economic lives in the City and offers a new way to study women’s interactions with civic and corporate life.