This grant will fund a two-year project entitled ‘Women as capital lenders in nineteenth-century Yorkshire: Evidence from the Registers of Deeds’.
This project will investigate the role that women played as capital lenders in the expansion of industrial towns and development of middle-class suburbs using mortgage documents from the East, North and West Ridings of Yorkshire. In Phase 1, documents from the towns of Middlesbrough and Scarborough (both in the North Riding of Yorkshire) will be compared for the period 1885-1889. Both towns expanded during this period, but for very different reasons. In Phase 2, similar documents for the towns of Halifax (West Riding) and Kingston upon Hull (East Riding) will be examined and compared with Middlesbrough to establish if women’s financial strategies differed across towns with diverse industrial bases and levels of female economic activity.