January 2011
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13 Reads
In 1360 Clementie Tsuul appeared before the aldermen to register an agreement she had made with her two sons to divide the family property.1 In it she explained the provisions that her husband and she together, and later she as a widow alone, had made for their four daughters. Ogier Tsuul, her husband, was still alive in 1336 when the first daughter, also named Clementie, was married, and the parents gave her “land and other property” worth forty pounds groot.2 When Ogier died, “friends of the children” had asked the younger Clementie if she wanted to have a share of her father’s property, in which case she would have to “bring in what she had taken away.”3 The daughter Clementie declined, suggesting that forty pounds was a fair approximation of her share of her father’s estate. In 1341, the widow Clementie placed her second daughter Kateline as a nun in the convent of Waasmunster and gave her “household furnishings and other property taken out of the common nest” worth twenty pounds groot.4 The third daughter Zoetin married in the same year, and Clementie gave her “city lots and money” worth forty pounds groot.5 The last daughter, Alleene, married in 1353, and Clementie gave her “city lots, chattels and money” also worth forty pounds groot.6 All three married daughters received the same amount of property, and significantly, each received some immovable and some movable property. The movable part of the marriage gift—the “other property,” the money and the chattels—became community property, which was jointly owned but under the husband’s control during the marriage.7 But the land and the city lots became the daughters’ personal property, giving them some measure of control.