Women at Work: The Hidden Economy of Medieval London

The Legal Position: Femme Sole and Femme Covert

Before we can understand women's work, we need to understand women's legal status. And that status was, by modern standards, severely limited—but not as limited as you might think.

Under English common law, a married woman was legally 'covered' by her husband—femme covert in the Norman French that lawyers used. She couldn't own property in her own name. She couldn't make contracts. She couldn't sue or be sued. In law, she essentially didn't exist as a separate person; she was absorbed into her husband's legal identity.

This sounds oppressive, and in many ways it was. But medieval London—like other English trading towns—developed a workaround: the femme sole.

A femme sole (sole woman) was a woman who traded in her own right, as if she were single. Married women could register as femme sole for purposes of trade, making them legally responsible for their own business debts and contracts. Their husbands were not liable for their business dealings.

This was partly a protection for husbands—a man didn't want to be ruined if his wife's business failed—but it was also an empowerment for wives. A woman who registered as femme sole could buy and sell goods, take on apprentices, sue customers who didn't pay, and be sued by creditors. She was, for business purposes, her own person.

— Legal Analysis

Widows were in an even better position. A widow was legally independent—free to own property, make contracts, and conduct business without any male oversight. Many London widows continued their late husbands' businesses, and some built them into substantial enterprises.

The Ale-Wives: London's Favourite Drink

If there was one trade that was dominated by women in medieval London, it was brewing.

Ale was the basic drink of medieval England. Everyone drank it—men, women, children. It was safer than water (which might be contaminated), more available than wine (which was expensive and imported), and nutritious in its own right (liquid bread, essentially). An adult might consume a gallon or more per day. And most of that ale was brewed by women.

Why women? Brewing was traditionally household work—an extension of cooking and food preparation. Every medieval household that could afford it brewed its own ale. When households began brewing for sale as well as for home consumption, it was women who did the work.

The Brewing Process

1. Malting: Barley was soaked, allowed to germinate, then dried to stop germination
2. Mashing: The malt was crushed and mixed with hot water, creating a sweet liquid called wort
3. Boiling: The wort was boiled (originally without hops—hopped beer was a later continental introduction)
4. Fermenting: Yeast was added, and fermentation converted the sugars to alcohol
5. Serving: Medieval ale didn't keep well, so it was brewed in small batches and sold quickly

A woman who brewed for sale was called a 'brewster' or 'ale-wife.' She would hang out an 'ale-stake'—a pole or branch—to indicate that she had ale ready. Customers would come to her house, drink on the premises or take ale away in their own containers.

The ale trade was heavily regulated. The Assize of Ale (first enacted in 1266) set prices and quality standards. Ale-conners—official tasters—would visit brewsters to check that their ale met the legal requirements. Fines for brewing bad ale or selling at above-legal prices were common.

• In 1419-20, of 290 people cited for brewing offences in one London ward, 287 were women
• The names in brewing records are overwhelmingly female: Agnes, Alice, Joan, Margery, Emma, Isabella
• Some brewsters appear repeatedly in the records, suggesting established, ongoing businesses

The Silk-Women: Luxury and Skill

At the opposite end of the economic scale from the ale-wives were London's silk-women—a specialised group of female artisans who controlled one of the city's most prestigious luxury trades.

Silk was the ultimate medieval luxury. It came from far away (China, originally, though silk cultivation had spread to the Mediterranean by the medieval period). It was ferociously expensive. It was beautiful—light, lustrous, capable of taking brilliant dyes. And in London, the trade in silk goods—ribbons, laces, cauls (hair nets), and other accessories—was largely in the hands of women.

The silk-women weren't spinners or weavers of raw silk—that was done elsewhere. They were finishers and retailers, taking imported silk thread and transforming it into the elaborate accessories that wealthy Londoners demanded.

• Silk ribbons for trimming garments
• Silk laces for fastening clothes (buttons weren't yet common)
• Cauls and hair nets for fashionable headdresses
• Embroidered accessories and ornamental pieces
• Silk tassels, fringes, and cords

The skill involved was considerable. Silk is delicate and demanding to work with. The patterns were intricate. The customers were wealthy and exacting. A silk-woman needed years of training—typically through formal apprenticeship—before she could work independently.

In 1368, a group of London silk-women petitioned the king about a dispute with a Lombard merchant who was selling imported silk goods in competition with their handmade products. The petition names no fewer than nineteen women—seventeen of them identified as silk-women. This is collective action, economic organisation, political lobbying—all the things guilds did, done by a group of women who weren't supposed to have that kind of power.

— 1368 Petition to the Crown

The Market Women: Hucksters, Regrators, and Retailers

Between the ale-wives and the silk-women stood a vast middle ground of female traders—the women who bought and sold in London's markets, hawked goods through the streets, and kept small shops that served their neighbourhoods.

Medieval vocabulary had specific terms for these women:

Hucksters were retail sellers, typically of food and drink. They bought goods wholesale and sold them in small quantities to consumers. A huckster might buy a barrel of fish at Billingsgate and sell individual fish from a stall or a basket.

Regrators were resellers—people who bought goods and sold them again at higher prices, without adding value through labour or processing. The term was often used negatively (we'd call it 'scalping' today), and regrating was frequently restricted or prohibited.

• Fishwives at Billingsgate, buying fish from the boats and selling them in the streets
• Poultresses selling chickens, eggs, and other poultry
• Regrators of bread, buying from bakers and reselling
• Hucksters of ale, selling small quantities from established breweries
• Fruiters selling apples, pears, and other produce
• Herb wives selling herbs and vegetables

These women worked in public—in markets, in streets, at their doors. They were visible, audible (hawking your wares required a good loud voice), and sometimes controversial. Authorities worried about women's commercial activity.

Yet the work continued, because the work was necessary. Medieval London couldn't function without its market women. They were the distribution network, the last link in the supply chain, the people who got food from the wholesalers to the consumers. Without them, the city would have starved.

— Economic Analysis

Women in the Guilds

The guilds—the craft and trade organisations that controlled London's economy—were dominated by men. But they weren't entirely closed to women.

The extent of female participation varied by guild and by period. Some guilds admitted women as full members. Some admitted them in subordinate roles. Some excluded them entirely. The rules changed over time, usually (but not always) in the direction of greater exclusion.

• The Drapers' Company admitted women, probably as widows continuing their husbands' businesses
• The Mercers' Company had female members—again, mostly widows
• The Brewers' Company necessarily included women, since brewing was predominantly female work
• The Barber-Surgeons admitted a few women, probably widows practising their husbands' trade

The most common route for women into guilds was widowhood. A guild member's widow had the right to continue his business after his death—she inherited not just his property but his guild privileges. She could keep the shop open, employ his apprentices, and trade under the guild's protection.

But the overall trend from the 14th century onwards was towards exclusion. Guilds increasingly restricted female membership. They prohibited women from taking apprentices. They required guild members to be men. By 1500, women's guild participation was much more limited than it had been in 1300.

Service and Domestic Work

The largest category of working women isn't glamorous, but it's essential to understand: domestic service.

A substantial proportion of medieval London's female workforce—perhaps a third or more of adult women at any given time—worked as servants in other people's households. They were maids, cooks, laundresses, nursemaids, kitchen help. They were paid (usually low wages), housed, fed, and worked extremely hard.

Service was typically a life-stage occupation. Girls in their teens and early twenties would go into service, work for a few years, save what they could, and then leave to get married.

Medical Care: Midwives and Healers

One area where women had acknowledged expertise was in matters of birth and health—particularly women's health.

Midwives were essential to medieval society. Childbirth happened at home, attended by women, with male physicians rarely if ever present. The midwife managed the delivery, cared for mother and child afterwards, and—in emergency cases—made life-or-death decisions.

Good midwives were valued professionals. They were paid for their services (often well, by the standards of women's work). They were called as expert witnesses in court cases involving childbirth, pregnancy, or paternity. They had specialised knowledge that was passed down through apprenticeship and experience.

Midwives also had religious duties. If a baby was dying, the midwife could perform emergency baptism—one of the only sacraments a layperson (let alone a woman) was authorised to administer.

Why This History Was Forgotten

Why didn't we know about medieval working women? Why did this history have to be rediscovered? Several factors combined to hide women's economic history:

• Male-focused sources: Medieval chroniclers, almost all male, wrote about what interested them—politics, wars, religion, great men's deeds
• Legal invisibility: Because married women were legally 'covered' by their husbands, their economic activity often doesn't appear in records
• Later assumptions: Victorian and early modern historians assumed that women had always been confined to the home
• Selective survival: The records that survive are biased towards wealth, power, and formal institutions—all areas where men predominated
• Changing norms: From the late medieval period onwards, women's economic roles genuinely did contract

The recovery of women's economic history began in the late 20th century, as feminist historians started asking new questions and looking in new places. They found women in court records and tax rolls, in guild regulations and business correspondence, in the margins and footnotes of sources that male historians had used for other purposes.

Visiting Medieval Women's London

You can't visit a museum of medieval women's work—no such museum exists. But you can visit places where working women lived and traded, and imagine their presence:

• Cheapside: The great medieval market was full of women traders. Walk along Cheapside and picture the medieval scene
• Smithfield: Before the Victorian meat market, Smithfield was an open market where women sold vegetables, poultry, and other goods
• Southwark: The south bank was outside City jurisdiction, and many activities employed women
• The Churchyards: Many medieval women sold goods in churchyards—the open space around parish churches
• Museum of London: Look for objects of daily life—cooking pots, distaffs for spinning, brewing equipment

A Final Thought

Medieval London was built by men—in the sense that men held formal power, controlled official institutions, and made the decisions that show up in historical records.

But medieval London was also sustained by women. Women brewed the ale that kept the workforce going. Women sold the food that fed the population. Women made the goods that wealthy customers demanded. Women raised the children who became the next generation of workers. Women nursed the sick, attended the dying, and laid out the dead.

This work was not equally valued. Women were paid less than men for comparable work. They were excluded from guilds, denied legal rights, and restricted in their opportunities. The medieval economy exploited women's labour whilst denying them recognition. But the work was real, and it mattered.

— Historical Reflection

History has begun to remember these women. Their names are emerging from the records: Agnes and Alice and Joan and Margery, real people who lived and worked and left traces that patient scholars have learnt to read. They deserve to be remembered—not as exceptions, but as the hidden half of a great city's history.