The many mitigating exceptions Gouge proffers to the rule established by coverture that a wife may not alienate property without or against her husband’s consent suggests that this rule may have been as honored in the breach as in the observance. Gouge’s admonition to “ever beare in minde those Cautions,” indicates that he himself finds them as important as the rule itself, a claim that is further supported by the fact that he goes on to devote some fifteen chapters of his treatise to a detailed examination of these exceptions.91 As if this weren’t enough, he rather obsequiously promises that he “will be as willing to admit” “any other warrantable caution [that] shall be shewed [him].”
It is worth noting that Gouge recognizes the existence of certain “proper goods of a wife” even during coverture. Under this category, Gouge includes goods termed paraphernalia, usually restricted to a wife’s clothes and personal ornaments, which the common law itself recognized as “proper” to wives.92 Also included in this category are goods set aside as “separate estate” (“Goods proper to the wife are such as before mariage she her selfe, or her friends except from the husband to her sole and proper use and disposing, whereunto he also yeeldeth”), or as a jointure (“such as after mariage he giveth unto her to dispose as she please”). More contentiously, he broadens the category of a wife’s “proper goods” still further to include “such as some friend of hers, suppose father, mother, brother, or any other, observing her husband to be a very hard man, not allowing sufficient for her selfe … shall give unto her to dispose as she please, charging her not to let her husband know thereof” (291). Gouge here astonishingly condones, under certain circumstances, a wife’s keeping or concealing goods from her husband. While goods given to a wife became the property of the husband, according to the law of coverture, Gouge appears to base this exception on the notion that coverture was, as Amy Erickson puts it, “an economic exchange” in which the “bride’s portion was exchanged for her maintenance during marriage.”93 By “not allowing sufficient” funds for his wife’s maintenance, Gouge suggests, he has reneged on his side of the bargain, thereby forfeiting his control over goods given to the wife by her family and friends to make up for his “hard” treatment of her. Margaret Phillips seems to have shared Gouge’s view on this matter; for she defends her concealment of goods in her chest by arguing that her husband had not “allowed unto her sufficient maintenance.”94 The notion of coverture as an economic exchange may well have been one of the “popular understanding[s]” of female property rights described by Walker above. An early seventeenth-century engraving suggests as much, further associating wives’ economic dissatisfaction with the threat of cuckoldry: “My dotard Husband, gives not mee / those halfe of dues, wch needfull be:” the motto reads, “And therefor since I shuch things lack, / Thus horne I him behind his back” (see Figure 2).
Beyond her de jure rights to certain property during coverture, Gouge recognizes the quite considerable extent of the wife’s de facto managerial control over what he terms the “common goods … set forth by the husband to be spent about the family.” Of these, he says, “I doubt not but the wife hath power to dispose them; neither is she bound to aske any further consent of her husband. For it is the wives place and dutie to guide or governe the house” (291). Gouge goes so far as to extend this dutie to “such goods as the husband hath not set apart, but reserved to his owne disposing,” under what he terms “extraordinary” circumstances, “whereby the wife by disposing the goods without or against the consent of her husband may bring a great good to the family, or prevent and keepe a great mischiefe from it” (292). Given the examples he attests, however, one wonders just how unusual or “extraordinary” such circumstances in fact were; for he claims that a wife may substitute her own judgment for that of her husband when the latter spends excessively on such common activities as “carding, dicing, and drinking” (292).
Figure 2. Engraving sold by Hugh Perry, “at the signe of the Harrow, in Brittains Bursse” in 1628. The motto reads: “My dotard Husband, gives not mee / those halfe of dues, wch needfull be: / And therefor since I shuch things lack, / Thus home I him behind his back.” By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
There is a certain pragmatism in Gouge’s recognition of the numerous circumstances that made the stricture of the common law untenable in practice. He maintains, for example, that a husband may be “very blockish, and stupid” and therefore “unfit to manage his affaires,” in which case “the whole government lieth upon the wife, so as her husbands consent [to dispose of property] is not to be expected” (287–88). So too, husbands may be “a long time farre off absent from the house … and in his absence ha[ve] left no order for the ordering of things at home: in this case also there is no question, but that the wife hath power to dispose matters without her husbands consent” (288). The notion of “consent” is itself a highly complex matter, according to Gouge, for a “generall consent” may be “given … without distinct respect to this or that particular,” so that “libertie is granted to a wife by her husband to doe all things as seemeth good in her owne eyes” (288). Particular consent may be either “expressed or implied,” the former by “word, writing, message, or signe” (all of which, of course, are open to interpretation and thus misinterpretation), and the latter “when by any probable conjecture it may be gathered that the husbands will is not against such a thing, though he have not manifested his minde concerning that very particular” (289). The convoluted syntax of Gouge’s final formulation of the law of coverture’s restrictions on women’s rights concerning marital property indicates just how unstraightforward this law could be in practice. A wife, he says, may not “privily and simply without, or openly and directly against her husbands consent distribute such common goods of the family as her husband reserveth to his owne disposing, there being no extraordinary necessity” (293). As if this weren’t diluted enough, he acknowledges that “the question [is] in controversie” and characterizes his formulation as one “whereunto I for my part subscribe”—suggesting that it is but his own opinion.
Gouge’s many mitigating exceptions to the law of coverture capitulate to the daily exigencies of household management, which necessitated flexibility and autonomy in the decision-making process. The degree to which wives were indeed making such decisions regarding the disposition of household property is reflected in pawnbroking records of the period. The majority of customers listed in the pawnbroking records of Philip Henslowe were women, many of them housewives, as is clear from the designation “goody,” “goodwife” and “Mrs.”95 Judging from the frequency with which these women pawned and redeemed their goods, the pawnshop appears to have been an indispensable tool in the often difficult task of making ends meet. Several of the wives listed in Henslowe’s accounts were reduced to pawning their wedding rings (the sine qua non of marital property). The lighthearted posies engraved in these rings belie the desperation that their expropriation would appear to represent: “hope helpeth hevenes [heaviness]” reads one; “god hath A poynted I ame content” reads another.96 While it may have been difficult for a wife to pawn her wedding ring without her husband’s knowledge or consent, other goods pawned by wives in Henslowe’s records may have gone undetected, as in the following entry: “lent … the 2 of June 1593 upon A lockinge glasse & iiij dieper napkins &