After the Norman Conquest, however, women did not own any property after marriage, which made it more common for women to be given away to the richest, not the best husbands, as their families would keep their gifts.
Also, in contrast to the Norman ideal that a new bride became part of her husband's household and fell solely under his control, an Anglo-Saxon woman remained under the protection of her kin even after marriage if she was wronged, and women and men could both begin divorce proceedings. During the Norman era, women had no property rights after they were married, and everything they owned passed into their husband's authority, as did any independence they had previously enjoyed as legal persons. This was confirmed in ecclesiastical doctrine as well as the law of the land, giving a moral authority to the subjugation of women. Even the language referring to people changed after the Norman Conquest. Before, the word mann was a generic term that referred to both men and women. Under the French-speaking Normans, a gender neutral sense of personhood did not exist.
Even during the pre-Norman era, laws had become progressively more punitive against women. During the 7th century, a woman who separated from her husband because he treated her unkindly was entitled to half his estate, to care for his children if she took them under her care. Widows had to remain unmarried for twelve months after the death of their husbands although they were free to marry after their mourning...
During the Anglo-Saxon period they could not forced to join a nunnery after their husbands died. Yet after the Norman Conquest, it was considered spiritually dangerous for a woman to be 'free' even women who did wish to join nunneries were locked in far more patriarchal relationships with Church authorities than women who had lived previously. The tone of priests addressing nuns takes on a much more punitive tone, regarding women's inherently sinful nature.
This is not to suggest that life was easy for women in Anglo-Saxon England. For example, the punishment for raping a woman was different if she was high born or common and it was a more serious offense for a woman to commit adultery. Women suffered the indignities of frequent pregnancies, miscarriages and childbirth which took a greater toll upon their constitutions in a world without proper medical care. And unfortunately, much of the oral literature and legends that formed the 'text' of Anglo-Saxon women's own voices and literature is now lost, and is replaced by the winning, Norman view of history. But Fell's use of legal documents, her comparative data of different Anglo-Saxon provinces over time, and even the final essays of the work that argue that Norman religious attitudes and ways of conceptualizing female and male relationships in the chivalric mode, rather than in the Anglo-Saxon argot of equality, created a Norman world where life may have been hard for everyone, but it was far harder to be a woman.
