Femmes Soles: Women Who Ran Their Own Businesses
Most medieval Englishwomen who worked were legally “covered” by their husbands — meaning any contracts, debts, or legal responsibility from their trade technically belonged to him, not her. But a distinct category of women, the femmes soles, stood entirely outside that arrangement, running their own businesses under their own legal responsibility, sometimes with spectacular results.
One of the best-documented examples is a wealthy London businesswoman who inherited both her father’s mercantile connections and, later, her husband’s trading interests, running an embroidery-supply business that employed out-workers rather than doing the stitching herself. Her commissions reached genuinely royal heights: a single embroidered bishop’s cope, commissioned by the king and gifted by the queen to the Pope in Rome, took a year to make and cost £100 — an eye-watering sum for the period. She also successfully fought a customs dispute after a shipload of her imported pepper and exotic spices was seized at Dover, using a royal writ that had already pardoned her outstanding customs duties against a separate debt the crown owed her, and won.
Official civic appointments for women were vanishingly rare, but not entirely unheard of. When the man responsible for collecting tolls on London Bridge — a genuinely complex job, since charges varied by cargo, owner, and carrier — died in 1433, his widow simply took over the role, apparently intended only as a temporary stopgap. She proved so efficient and trustworthy that she remained in the post for twenty years, collecting the city’s bridge revenues the entire time. It didn’t, unfortunately, open the door for other women to follow her into similar civic roles — but for two decades, London’s bridge finances ran entirely through one woman’s hands, by simple demonstrated competence rather than any change in the rules.
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