The estates lists that Patterson refers to have no doubt been crucial in sustaining the scholarly view that medieval society conceptualized medieval men and women differently. In a recent book on medieval women, Henrietta Leyser states that ‘Medieval women were classified according to their sexual status: men might be thought of collectively as knights, merchants, crusaders; women were virgins, wives or widows.’ The model offered is that men were defined by what they did, their occupation or function, whereas for women it was their marital, sexual or social status. Other scholars have pointed to similar categorizations in, for example, European law codes, sermons and tax returns. However, exceptions to such a general rule can always be found.

Texts classify people according to their own interests. In the records of infringements of the Statute of Labourers of 1351, for example, women are often categorized by occupation, an alternative model perhaps. Such models do not exist in isolation, though, but interact and conflict. This article will consider closely three late fourteenth century English texts which demonstrate such co-existence, interplay and competition. The contention is that not only was there an overlap between a woman’s marital/sexual/social statuses, as intimated in the quotations from Patterson and Leyser, but that occupational and economic statuses were also important to women’s identities, especially their work ones. However, the extent varies according to the specific textual and historical contexts.

The aftermath of the Black Death is an appropriate testing ground for thinking about the conceptualization of women in relation to work. First, it has been argued that the profound demographic and economic effects of successive plagues both speeded up changes in social ordering and led to moves to shore up ‘traditional society’.