‘A Mutual Assent of her Mind’? Women, Debt, Litigation and Contract in early

guides for tradesmen published in England in the early modern period, appropriately placed much emphasis on the importance of informal contracts in doing business. The author claimed that when goods were ‘sold and delivered, but no price agreed upon, then this was ‘a Contract upon Trust or Credit’.1 Although the pamphlet’s title was directed towards the tradesman, the author, significantly, included a lengthy section on the nature of a wife’s possible contracts, pointing out that there were cases ‘where the Wife doth use to sell and manage the Estate of the Husband without him’, and that there were things sold, ‘such as are proper for a Wife to sell, as Eggs, Butter, Cheese, etc. and necessary apparel’.2 Besides this rather limited list of things sold generally by women, wives, as this quota-tion indicates, were involved in many other sorts of business with thei