Bring Up the Bodies

Abstract

Magna Carta proclaimed freemen could be imprisoned only by the law of the land. Husbands employed Blackstone’s coverture rule to capture ‘errant’ wives. Yet as Scutt explains, Magna Carta worked for women: in 1891 habeas corpus freed Emily Jackson from her husband. Judges said she could leave him, and he could not imprison her. Yet Caroline Norton found habeas corpus could not release her children from a brutal husband’s control. Nor, for centuries, did courts challenge Hale’s infamous dictum that consent to marriage denies wives the right not to be raped. But 100 years after Jackson went free, over 750 years after Magna Carta, courts declared Hale wrong. Runnymede’s barons and King John notwithstanding, Magna Carta’s principle has made women’s bodies (in this regard) at last their own.