Before the ledger closed. Women who traded, lent, and owned in medieval market towns

She stood before the market bailiff, her hand on a bale of Flemish wool, and declared its price. In the records of fourteenth-century English towns, women appear not as exceptions but as participants-trading wool, lending silver, leasing stalls, and enforcing debts. This book traces the legal and economic architecture that allowed married women, widows, and single women to act as economic agents within urban marketplaces, using borough court rolls, guild registers, and debt litigation records.