Missing Women: Sex Ratios in England, 1000–1500

Abstract

Abstract This article proposes that late medieval English men may have outnumbered women by a significant margin, perhaps as high as 110 to 115 men for every 100 women. Data from both documentary and archaeological sources suggest that fewer females survived to adulthood and that those who did may have died younger than their husbands and brothers. Historians of medieval England have said little about the possibility of a skewed sex ratio, yet if women were indeed “missing” from the population as a whole in a significant and sustained way, we must reinterpret much of the social, economic, gender, and cultural history of late medieval England.

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