The past hundred years have witnessed a see-sawing of historians' perceptions of the legal status of women in early modern England. To Frederick Pollock and F.W. Maitland, writing in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the position was clear. By the time of Edward I, ‘a sure instinct has already guided the law to a general rule which will endure until our own time. As regards private rights women are on the same level as men, though postponed in the canons of inheritance; but public functions they have none.’ Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, Alice Clark and other historians in the vanguard of feminist history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries agreed that women enjoyed a degree of legal independence in England prior to the seventeenth century, under customary law at least. However, far from ‘enduring until their own time’, they suggested that the combined influences of capitalism, industrialisation, the emergence of the professions and the rise to supremacy of the common law steadily undermined any independence women had once enjoyed.