The study of women’s history is generally hampered by a lack of data, particularly in official documents relating to trade crafts and town governance, but the development of searchable databases has given the potential for analysing large amounts of material, with the potential to make women’s lives more visible. Cheryl will use the examples of the lives of three Southampton women of ‘the middling sort’ to illustrate what can be discovered about the lived experience of sixteenth century women based on the Southampton Tudor People Project which created a searchable and freely accessible database of every person known to have lived in Southampton between the years 1485 and 1603. This has become a way of testing assumptions about the lives of people in early modern people Southampton and to reflect whether the Southampton model could provide wider evidence of experiences in the country as a whole.

Jackie will use the casebooks of Winchester Consistory Court for a comparative approach across the three administrative divisions of Hampshire between 1560 and 1610 suggesting that the decline of patriarchy and the emergence of the middling sort did not happen concurrently. Instead, that pre-industrial urban areas developed faster than either a market town and its environs, or an island environment that retained late medieval practices even longer. As the sixteenth century progressed women became increasingly confident in bringing matrimonial and defamation cases to court, during a period when ecclesiastical management was patchy at best and manorial control in some rural areas equally fragmentary. By using case studies topographical differences are also exposed and a much more nuanced approach to understanding Tudor domestic life than has been attempted in other English Dioceses.

Dr Cheryl Butler is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Hon Fellow of the University of Winchester, she is a trustee of the Hampshire Archives Trust and on the editorial committee for the Hampshire Papers and the Southampton Records Society. She has written extensively on the history of Southampton and organised many large scale community heritage projects including The Tudor Revels, Titanic 100, Agincourt 600, Jane Austen 200, and Peartree 400. She has a particular interest in women’s history in the sixteenth century. Her latest book examines early black history in Southampton ‘Telling Other hiStories: early black history in Southampton c1500-1900.

Jackie Wilkinson’s career was spent as a Human Resources Consultant working in large international computer companies.  After retirement she took a BA (1st class), then an MA (Merit) at the University of Winchester in History and completes a PhD in January 2022 on patterns of community life in Hampshire as seen through depositions submitted to Winchester Consistory Court between c1560 and c1610.  Her particular interest is the lives of ordinary people whose matrimonial and defamation cases in different geographical settings (the Isle of Wight, Winchester and Southampton urban areas and Basingstoke, a rural market town), took up the majority of the court’s time.