Ninety-seven years ago, the English legal historian Frederic William Maitland gave a lecture called ‘Why the History of English Law is Not Written’. This essay has something of a similar theme, on a much more modest scale: ‘Why a recent, scholarly, relatively comprehensive history of medieval English law as it applied to women has not been written’. Its purpose is both to examine factors which may have deterred historians from undertaking such a project and to attempt an overview of the kind of work in women's legal history that has been, and is being, done.