Lock Her Up! Elite Women, Treason and Imprisonment in Late Medieval Scotland

This article will assess the assumption that women lacked ‘political agency’ in instances of treason or lesser rebellion against the Scottish crown. The trials and sentencing of the countess of Strathearn and the countess of Douglas, as well as the extra-judicial imprisonments of the countess of Ross and the duchess of Albany provide us with an opportunity to assess contemporary attitudes toward women and their culpability for the crime of treason in late medieval Scotland. While there was a gendered difference between the punishment for treason in the Middle Ages, the leniency afforded female accomplices through imprisonment rather than execution was by no means an indicator of their lack of ‘political agency’. The discussion adapts new approaches to narratives of imprisonment in order to show the active, latent, and potential power of women convicted or implicated in plots of rebellion in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Scotland. This article will show the significance of elite women's imprisonment through the cases studies of the countess of Strathearn, the countess of Douglas, the countess of Ross, the duchess of Albany. In doing so, it will emphasise that women's culpability was tied to their legal status as widow or female heir. The article argues that we can use evidence of imprisonment as an indicator of ‘public’ female political agency in the later Middle Ages.