She is but a girl: Talk of Young Women as Daughters, Wives, and Mothers in the Records of the English Consistory Courts, 1550–1650

A remarkable document from England’s Consistory Court of Chester contains a harrowing account of young Katherine Prescott’s coming of age.² Her father, Henry, determined that twelve-year-old Katherine should marry William Bower, aged fifteen, who was ‘of a very good estate […] in good[es], tenement[es] and land[es]’. Being ‘greatly perplexed and troubled in mind’, Katherine voiced dissent, saying she would ‘leape into a worke pitt and drowne her self before she married William Bower’. Henry Prescott was unmoved; his ‘p[er] suasions, threat[es], and menaces’ as well as a promise to withdraw his financial support and paternal blessing forced Katherine into her