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Capital Benefits: The Social Networks of Joyce Jeffreys, Spinster and Roneylending in Seventeenth Century Hereford
| The ‘diary’ of Mistress Joyce Jeffreys, spinster and member of the lesser Herefordshire gentry, is currently held in the British Library. It is not a diary in the usual sense of the word, but rather a set of accounts listing the author’s cash receipts and expenditures between 1638 and 1648. The accounts are unusual in a number of ways: that they belonged to a woman, and a single woman in addition makes them extremely rare documents; furthermore, the woman in question was a moneylender, and had been throughout much of her life; in addition, and most significantly for this conference, she lived most of her adult life within the suburbs of the city of Hereford. What is perhaps most exciting about Joyce’s accounts, however, is that along with the extraordinary detail they offer about her moneylending activities in and beyond Hereford, they reveal a considerable amount of detail about her daily life, personal circumstances, social activities and family relationships. The entries are interspersed with visits to friends and acquaintances, invitations to official occasions, and gifts to a broad and diverse range of kin relations. This paper aims to draw on the content of these entries to reveal the social networks of the lady in question, adding weight in the process to the growing challenge presented by current scholarship to the traditional image of seventeenth century spinsterhood as ‘a form of social derogation’, in which never-married women were condemned to ‘a lifetime of peripheral existence’, playing out a ‘functionless role . . . at the margins of other people’s lives’.
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