The political structure of early modern England was, definitively, patriarchal. And yet, women wielded direct authority on the local level in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at a scale not seen in the periods before or after. While historians have long recognised that early modern parishes occasionally elected female officers, this thesis is the first full-length study of female office-holding in the rural parish. As such, it reveals that we have underestimated the frequency of female nomination to parish office throughout this period, requiring a reevaluation of current historical knowledge on custom, state formation, gender relations and the nature of parish government. This thesis begins with a simple question: why were women chosen, and why were they chosen more often in some parishes than in others? By mapping female office-holding over time and space, we find that the nomination of women was firmly linked to specific local customs of election which privileged landholding. Examined intersectionally, instances of female nomination allow us to deepen our understanding of these electoral customs, why they were developed and the extent of their authority. First, we consider why householding and landholding might come before gender in considerations of eligibility for parish office, concluding that office-holding was a liability attached to the land, regardless of who held it. Property-based customs of election, it is argued, developed as a way of spreading financial risk among substantial tenements, which provided security to parish transactions. Finally, patterns of nomination and deputyship in the seventeenth century suggest that these customs were carefully preserved, even as they came to have less bearing on who carried out the duties of the office. Thus, the nomination of women to parish office in early modern England was, more than anything else, a byproduct of their neighbours' ongoing dedication to custom.
