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In 1573 Isabella Whitney, a woman of genteel birth from Cheshire who like so many of her female contemporaries had left north-west England to become a servant in London, produced a poem in which she mourned being forced to leave the metropolis. Written in the form of a will and elegiac in tone, Whitney provided a list of what she had ‘left to London’, including details of the extensive range of retailers which were to be found within the walls of the medieval city. These included butchers “that every day shall kill”; “brewers store and bakers at your will”; mercers “with silk so rich as any would desire”; and goldsmiths “with jewels such as are for ladies meet”. The mercers and goldsmiths, Whitney told her readers, were based in Cheapside, and she expounded on where other goods might be purchased too, noting that woollens might be bought in Watling Street and Candlewick Street; linens in Friday Street; hose in Burchin Lane; “boots, shoes or pantables” in St Martin’s; and beds in Cornhill, while tailors were to be found in Bow. “In many places, shops are full” observed Isabella, reassuring her readers with the promise that ‘I left you nothing scant”. (Whitney [1573] 2000: 13-15).

This is the first work to explore how women from the middling sorts and the labouring poor fashioned identities as honest individuals of good repute. Using depositions, interrogations and trial reports from the London church courts, the Bridewell hospital and the Old Bailey, alongside ballads, jest-books, pamphlets and plays, this book outlines how women's working roles as mothers, housewives, servants, domestic managers and retailers, as well as their social interactions with their fellow Londoners, shaped their reputations in a growing metropolis which was to become the laregst city in Europe by 1700. By paying equal attention to both paid and unpaid forms of work, and by covering the whole of the seventeenth century rather than solely the decades before 1640 or after 1660, this book provides the most holistic study to date of early modern notions of female honesty, credit and worth.