This is Part 3 of a series I began ages ago and never finished.

Part 1 was about entails

Part 2 was about wills

In this part, I want to look at dowries, jointures, and dowers. (I’ve avoided the term portion, because it is used for both dowries and jointures.

Dowries and dowers

Women of the propertied classes expected to have a dowry — land, or at least a sum of cash. The theory was that the dowry a woman brought with her into marriage provided  the income for the cost of keeping her in the same comfort as she’d enjoyed before the marriage. The principal (or the land) was often part of the dowry paid when her daughters married. In theory at least, the woman had to be party to anything done with her dowry, and could claim the dowry back when her husband died. Of course, if the land had been sold or the money all spent, that wasn’t going to go down so well.

A dower was originally the wife’s right to a third of her husband’s estate when he died. From at least the 12th century, the right to ‘thirds’ or the ‘dower’ was common law, and that continued to be the practice when the man left no will. It wasn’t hers outright, but she had it for life or until she married again. By the 19th century, in the propertied classes, the remnant of this practice was land and buildings known as the dower property or dower house.

Jointures

In time, the payment of a jointure came to replace the dower. The couple made an agreement (a settlement) that exempted the estate from the dower in return for stating how much the woman would receive if she survived her husband, as well as what would go to the children. The jointure was usually anchored on the dowry, and was generally paid out by the heir as a yearly amount (or its cash value, if the dowry was in land). The heir would need to pay the yearly amount (typically 10% of the dowry) until the woman’s death, at which point the principal was divided up among her surviving children.

The arrangement was generally regarded as providing more security for all parties. The estate didn’t need to come up with a large sum of money all at once, which might be impossible. If the heir couldn’t pay, he might lose everything and so would the widow. On the other hand, if widow lived long enough, a dowry might run out, but the jointure would continue.

Marriage settlements

The settlements contained more that the financial details about providing for a widow. They specified what was to be done with the wife’s dowry, what her discretionary income (pin money) would be, and what part of her dowry would go to her children, as well as her income after her husband’s death. The law said a husband had to provide his wife with a home, clothing, and food. Pin money was meant to allow her a little extra she could spend on luxuries without answering to her husband.

The father might also settle funds on the children from his estate, and the settlement would state the total amount.

Settlements for the landed and wealthy could be very complex. At this higher level of society, the sum of money for the wife’s use was paid to a third party. Settlements among the simpler folk tended to be much simpler. Dr Amy Erikson found that up to 10% of probate accounts included marriage settlements, and a quarter of these were for less than thirteen pounds. The two types of settlement found in these less complex situations both specified lump sums; one to be paid to the woman if she survived the husband, and one to the children of a wife’s former marriage.

As an aside

I’ve found another research rabbit hole in investigating Dr Erikson. Here’s the abstract for an article I need to get hold of: Coverture and Capitalism.

Most capital in this period was both accumulated and transferred by means of marriage and inheritance, so it stands to reason that the laws governing marriage and inheritance played a role in structuring the economy. English property law was distinctive in two respects: first, married women under coverture were even more restricted than in the rest of Europe; second, single women enjoyed a position unique in Europe as legal individuals in their own right, with no requirement for a male guardian. I suggest these peculiarities had two consequences for the development of capitalism. First, the draconian nature of coverture necessitated the early development of complex private contracts and financial arrangements, accustoming people to complicated legal and financial concepts and establishing a climate in which the concept of legal security for notional concepts of property (the bedrock of capitalism) became commonplace. Second, without the inhibiting effect of legal guardianship, England had up to fifty per cent more people able to move capital purely because that market included the unmarried half of the female population in addition to the male population. [Erikson: 2005]