Ordinary women make just as thrilling history as great men

In 1348, the year the Black Death reached England and devastated the country, Matilda, the wife of Robert Comberworth, attacked someone called Magota and drew blood. She was fined 3d. Agnes, the wife of William Walker, attacked William de Pudsey and was fined four times the amount. Amica, an official watch-woman tasked with guarding a fruit crop, caught a certain Cecilia stealing. These women are among the many who star in Philippa Gregory’s latest book.

Post-Conquest England is well-trodden ground, but Gregory’s history is not one of great men. It is of normal women – the women of legal battles, petitions, wills and letters. Her characters farm, pray, heal the sick, revolt and go to war. They are mothers, political agents, activists and victims. They are 50 per cent of the population over 900 years.

The Norman Conquest was ‘Doomsday for women’, according to Gregory. The Normans introduced oppression painted with a veneer of legal tradition. Women were excluded from inheritance and generally undervalued and undermined. Gregory notes that the Bayeux Tapestry has ‘more penises on it than it does women: 88 on the horses and five on the men’, one of whom is naked, chasing a woman from a burning house. But this history is not one of female victims (though domestic abuse and sexual violence certainly figure) but of women who demonstrated agency in multiple ways.

We see them involved in the business of credit, such as the 13th-century Jewish English moneylender Licoricia of Winchester, who became ‘one of the country’s greatest financiers’. The textile industry also had a strong female element. In 1239, Henry III commissioned Mabel of Bury to create an embroidered standard for Westminster Abbey. At a humbler level, women bartered goods and took seasonal jobs such as sheep shearing and harvesting.