"Life was certainly very difficult for Alice during this period of her life. The Good Parliament, the death of Edward III, her trial, her forfeiture and the eventual loss of all her estate upon Wyndesore’s death in 1384 presented a series of challenges that would try the most hardened of political players. However, Ormrod’s interpretation that Alice was a passive victim of misogynistic conspiracy to bind her in suppressive shackles of marital union is not the only possible interpretation. Alternatively, it can be argued that Alice was an equal partner in her marriage to Wyndesore and fully complicit in the negotiations that led to the deal between him and the council in March 1380 and that therefore far from being a weapon that was used against her, Alice was able to utilise her marriage to her benefit.
[...] There is clear evidence that Alice’s marriage to Wyndesore created more problems for the government than it solved. As a single woman, alone, banished, her goods forfeited, Alice would have felt vulnerable and isolated, with little hope of recovering her fortune. As a married woman, on the other hand, Alice was in a much stronger legal position to pursue the reversal of her forfeiture alongside her husband and as Majorie McIntosh has shown, many women preferred to be femme couvert rather than femme sole for this very reason. Alice was, after all, used to enjoying the ‘coverage’ of a man even if he was not her husband. More importantly, as Wyndesore and Alice’s early petitions demonstrate, they were immediately able to take advantage of the confusion surrounding their marriage by claiming that Alice’s forfeiture should be annulled on the basis that she was tried as a single woman when she was actually married. Ormrod himself has highlighted that many of the petitions that were submitted against Alice in 1378 may have been rejected purely on the basis that they identified Alice by the name Perrers and not her married name Wyndesore. [...]
Consequently, I suggest that the situation in which Alice found herself in March 1380 was far from the conjugal prison that Ormrod presents her as being in. There were limitations to her success: the judgement against her remained in place, she was a long way from the position she had held at the height of her power and, in many ways, it must have been very difficult for Alice to be so reliant on her husband. But her banishment had been lifted and she could look forward to making the most of this new phase in her life as a noblewoman and wife. Her husband, through a series of protracted negotiations, had regained a large portion of her former estate, which, as far as Alice was concerned, he had enfeoffed to a group of trustees who would deliver seisin to her upon his death. Indeed, until John Wyndesore took possession of William’s lands in 1384, there is nothing to suggest that even Alice was not reasonably happy with her situation."
— Laura Tompkins, The Uncrowned Queen: Alice Perrers, Edward III and Political Crisis in Fourteenth-Century England, 1360-1377 (PhD Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2013)
