Along the Shoreline: Women's roles in the early modern maritime economy of the West Country

This thesis will investigate how women's domestic and commercial roles in the early modern West Country contributed to the British maritime economy. This research is essential as current studies about the maritime community focus primarily on women's domestic duties or unusual careers such as piracy or female tars. However, early modern women also worked in traditionally male roles to keep maritime industries operating, especially in periods of war and impressment.

This project is an essential and original addition to both maritime and gender studies and will enable better understanding and acknowledgement in academic and heritage sectors about the contributions of maritime women in paid and unpaid roles.

This study focuses on communities in Devon and Cornwall, including ports such as Falmouth and Plymouth, and smaller locations of maritime activity such as Cockington, Torbay where there are unresearched records from the early modern period ('Inventory Of the goods of Richard Hosgood of Cockington, saylor, desesed prysed by Bernard Honywell and Gregory Alward. 4 July 1671', 1671). While studies of British maritime work have focused on London due to the availability of extensive parish records, the records of the maritime industries of the West Country have not been thoroughly researched.

The West Country was a significant area of England's maritime activity and naval recruitment during the early modern period; therefore, analysis of these archival documents will contribute new evidence toward the understanding of women's employment in the maritime economy. The study aims to answer the following questions:

Does women's work in maritime communities challenge traditional understanding of early modern gender roles?

Was female agency in the maritime community dependent on the absence of male relatives, widowhood, or particular types of household economy such as fishing?

How do women's roles in the maritime communities of the southwest differ from those in London and other European countries?

This study will consist of archival analysis of documents. The predominant collections for this project are held at the National Archive, the Devon Heritage Centre, the Box Plymouth, kresen kernow in Truro, the National Maritime Museum Greenwich and the Gale State Papers Online. Probate records are an essential data set for this project as wills and inventories indicate ownership of objects and property by women in coastal communities.

Land deeds and leases will also be analysed to identify ownership of land or vessels by women. The analysis of unstudied Devon and Cornwall probate records makes this project an original and exciting contribution. Additionally, the National Archives provide many PCC wills for the West Country that will address the deficiency from documents lost in the Devon archives.

This will provide a good geographical spread of data to identify patterns of women's maritime work in the West Country.

Information from these documents will be analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, and with attention to change over time - particularly as to whether periods of war and impressment altered gendered work in maritime communities. It will then be determined if certain geographical locations had prominent female contribution to the maritime community.

Overall, the results of this study will identify that women's work in this sector had a fundamental role in contributing towards the British economy despite the absence of women's work in traditional historiography.

This study will be conducted with the appreciation that the concept of gender to a modern audience is a turbulent and changing social issue of identity for many. However, this research will focus on the early modern concept of gendered work with gender being recognised by a person's sex at birth. Non-typical gendered roles in this study therefore refer to cisgender women partaking in typically cisgender male roles.