In The Patriarch's Wife, Margaret Ezell posed the rhetorical question: ‘was seventeenth-century England a society of submissive, deferential, opinionless females whose quietude was ensured by their ignorance and a hostile legal system?’ If we broaden her question to include the sixteenth century, the answer is clearly no. As countless examples in the foregoing chapters confirm, the central courts at Westminster regularly processed cases involving knowledgeable women who were neither submissive nor deferential. The legal system was certainly hostile in the sense that crown, judiciary and parliament each accorded women fewer rights than men, but these bodies never denied women rights altogether, and female litigants went to court in their thousands.

Women's relationship with the law was far from ideal, but it was not as uniformly bleak as some commentators have assumed. A variety of separate courts operated side by side in England, applying principles of equity or administering common law, ecclesiastical law or custom. Even the most male-centred of these jurisdictions provided women with distinctive rights and assistance, as well as burdening them with distinctive obligations and restrictions on their freedoms.