Her price is above pearls: Family and farming records of Alice Le Strange

摘要

The important part played in early modern economic management by several shrewd, intelligent and capable women has long been recognised. Dame Alice Le Strange (1585-1656), wife of Sir Hamon Le Strange of Hunstanton (1583-1654), was however exceptional in the range, detail, and innovative character of her accounting activities. In 2012, Elizabeth Griffiths and Jane Whittle published a major study based on her household books and records of general expenditure. The volume reviewed here contains a selection of Alice's farming and estate accounts. Her prominent role in the running of the Le Strange estates in north-west Norfolk was an unusual one for a married woman. Within the family team, Sir Hamon provided 'strategic direction', while Alice acted as 'accountant and co-ordinator'. Alice's involvement increased over time. The couple were married in 1604. From 1613, she received rents from bailiffs and entered them in her household books. In 1617 she started accounts for each of the flocks allocated to each of her children, boys and girls, as a means of training them in sheep farming (p. 20). In 1619 or 1620 (compare pp. 2, 35), as co-heiress to her father, Richard Stubbe, Alice inherited his estate in Sedgeford, near Hunstanton. She achieved a radical improvement of the estate records for Sedgeford, and then, from 1632, of those for the rest of the Le Strange estates in neighbouring parishes. At some stage, probably after the early 1640s, Alice made a series of notes about the family's finances, including her own inheritance, the dowry brought by the couple's eldest son's wife, sales and purchases of land, and investment in the dyking and embankment of fen and marsh. Among the major causes of indebtedness were the need to raise a dowry to marry one surviving daughter in 1636, and, more seriously, the consequences of Sir Hamon's involvement in unsuccessful royalist resistance in 1643. In that year, Alice recorded, 'wee were plundered by the rebells of 1660 sheep all our corne & divers horses' (p. 75). Their estates were sequestrated, and they suffered various other exactions.