In August 1507 James Wardlaw reached an agreement with his neighbour about the building works on his Edinburgh house. He promised that the corbel stone supporting the roof of the passageway beside the house should be as high as ‘any servant maid of Alexander Mauchane may bear a middle-sized tub with water on her head, without any stop or impediment caused by the said corbel’. The critical task of provisioning a household with water, carried out by un-named women, was implicitly acknowledged.
Women’s work was integral to the life of medieval towns. However, the circumstances of women’s lives, how their labour was organised, and the ways their activities were recorded meant that women appear less often than men in documentary evidence. Their paid work was usually organised to fit around their unpaid household responsibilities and therefore tended to be more parttime than men’s. It was more likely to be temporary, changing as their marital status changed over their life-cycle. Women rarely appeared in the guild records of merchants and craftsmen, nor could they serve in local government offices. In tax records, a household was represented by the male head of the household unless it was headed by a widow. Husbands could represent their wives in court, and a woman’s actions were often hidden behind her husband’s name in matters that concerned her.
Despite this, women and their work do appear in the records, both in incidental references and in more official sources. Women worked both in partnership with family members and independently. One Canongate merchant on his deathbed stated that ‘the goods that I have and the debts that are owed me, the said Margaret my spouse knows’, highlighting the cooperative nature of spouses’ work in the family business. Moreover, certain economic activities dominated by women were heavily regulated, resulting in frequent appearances in court.
One factor greatly affecting women and their work was their marital status, which had legal implications for
