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.