The Prosopography of Ordinary Women in Late Medieval London

While prosopography is generally understood as identifying common characteristics among groups of people, who are otherwise hard to study, most of my work has started with an individual whose actions are notable. I have then moved to find them in wills, parish or city records, tax lists, or court cases. Yet even as I trace an individual, the social characteristics of a composite “biography” still inform the decisions I make about how to interpret the gaps and silences in records.

I am currently working on a book about a late medieval London lodging house. Women, single, widowed, and married made up just over a quarter of the tenants. Some of these women live in the house for a decade or more, but many more stay for only a year or less. While a few appear in other records, most do not. Thus, the more traditional use of prosopography is necessary to make the most of their fleeting appearances in the rental. The ability to see stability and transiency is unusual in my work, and adds a new dimension to what I can say about medieval women’s lives.

This paper will compare two women who lived in the same room in the lodging house nearly a hundred years apart. Agnes Botreaux arrived in 1412, the young widow of a goldsmith and Margaret Knytter moved in in 1520, after living in a lodging house in Westminster. Embedding what little I know about them in London’s economy, comparing them to the experiences of other women in the house, and situating them in the neighborhood illustrates how the lives of women on their own changed in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century.