Travels into Spain

several children with his last two wives, while legality of both unions remained questionable. The situation grew increasingly complex, with competing potential heirs and wives clamoring for financial support and settlements. As Ralph lay sick and dying, he created three separate and contradictory settlements to prepare for the potential outcomes of several pending lawsuits: one settlement if Elizabeth was found to be his lawful wife, another one for if the courts agreed that Ann was his wife, and one if neither were his wife. After Ralph’s death, another court decided that Ann’s annulment from John was faulty and reversed it. Elizabeth’s claim to be Ralph’s lawful wife was also rejected. Married three times and the father of at least ten children, Ralph died a bachelor without a single legitimate heir. In the complex but unfinished legal instruments Ralph had prepared, he did provide financial benefits and settlements via trusts for his many children and their mothers, so he did not entirely leave them out in the cold. These alternate agreements and methods provided common ways for Tudor men to provide for illegitimate offspring. Ralph’s brother – his legal heir – and two surviving wives(?), and their children, continued to fight over property in multiple lawsuits after Ralph’s death. In retelling the Rishton story, Poos expounds at length on sixteenth century practices the disputes reveal. When describing Ralph’s first marriage at the tender age of eight or nine, Poos provides an in-depth discussion about the history of child marriages, with a focus on the evidence from Lancashire. Agreeing with other scholars who have studied the phenomena in the northwest and providing an in-depth statistical analysis, Poos argues that while still not common, child marriages occurred more frequently in the Lancashire region than elsewhere and was a means for parents and relatives to make property agreements. Based on a comparative study of gentry marriage distances in Lancashire, Wiltshire, and Northamptonshire, Poos also concludes that the Lancashire gentry found marriage partners closer to home, creating a close-knit network of familial and financial connections. Poos also argues convincingly that the Lancashire gentry were not just very litigious, but remarkably adept at nimbly navigating the multi-layered legal systems and overlapping jurisdictions, skilled at shopping around for legal courts that may provide the most desirable outcomes, using the different levels of church, common law, and equity courts. Several persons involved in the Rishton disputes had legal training and were well versed in byzantine property law. Poos pays close attention to the procedural, linguistic, and administrative limitations of using court documents as evidence of individual voices and is careful to say what the records can tell us and what they leave out. He generously provides the reader with substantial quotes from the court records, especially from the multitude of witness depositions. The last chapter details how the story of the Rishtons lived on in local memory, was rescued by antiquarians from the late seventeenth through the early twentieth century and used and partially retold in papers and magazines producing local or regional historical vignettes in the twentieth. Ralph Rishton’s extraordinary marital career provides a very dramatic story of familial conflict. His marriages into three additional local gentry families dragged many more into the complex litigations that lasted for decades. Nevertheless, some of the drama dissipates while reading the book: it is sometimes difficult to get a grasp on the humans behind the lawsuits. This may be largely a result of the existing sources, which are almost exclusively court and estate records. Poos’s vast knowledge of the eleven different jurisdictions and courts that tried the cases related to the Rishton suits is impressive. He has unearthed every possible bit of evidence, and carefully and convincingly analyzes it, often elaborating even further in the substantial footnotes. He has provided the definite account of the legal turns of the Rishton family. Given that many of the cases deals with contested marriages, potential adultery, and illegitimate children, the book could have benefited from a more extensive analysis of gender. The book will be instructive for historians and students interested in family, social, and legal history in early modern England. Readers who are not knowledgeable in Tudor property law, or the details of legal procedures, might find portions of Poos’s text difficult to follow. The book might have been more accessible if Poos could have translated some of those sections for non-expert readers. It is important to be precise in terminology, naturally, but ending sections of complex legal discussion with a couple of sentences summarizing the meaning for non-experts would have been useful.