My purpose in writing this book has been to display the place women have
held and the influence they have exerted within the changing pattern of
English society from the earliest down to modern times. This book,
therefore, can only begin with the famous description of the women of the
Germanic tribes written by the Roman historian Tacitus. It ends, save for
an occasional excursion, with the publication of The Subjection of Women
by John Stuart Mill in 1869. The evidence for more recent generations is so
voluminous, and so many studies of individual women of this age have
appeared that to carry my survey farther would have thrown the book
out of focus. The material from which I have drawn my evidence is
contemporary with the people of whom I write in the successive chapters
of this book. Contemporary narrative history, the early laws, charters,
and wills throw sometimes surprising light on the women of the early
period of our history. The records of courts of justice, both the royal
courts and those of the manor, grants of land, and wills are invaluable
for the Middle Ages, and before they have ended the stream of correspon-
dence has begun. The Paston letters have been a quarry for generations of
historians. They are an astonishingly rich and lively source, and for their
date they stand almost alone. Nevertheless, as the years pass the material
soon becomes embarrassingly ample, and I have been able to use diaries,
memoirs, and letters, sermons, and tracts dealing directly or incidentally
with my subject.

All the women the reader will meet in these pages were real people
who lived and worked in the England of their day. In my search for
material I have deliberately avoided the romantic literature of the Middle
Ages, coloured as it is throughout by an artificial embellishment of life.
Nor have I used the novels of a later period. The active imagination of
the novelist produces creatures' who seem for a moment to live more
vividly than the real people of history, for they are tailored to fit a story,
and the inconsistences and contradictions of real life are ironed out. The
comments of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, quoted in this book, upon
her contemporary, Samuel Richardson, and his famous Pamela should be
read by every historian who is tempted to drive home a point by quoting

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