Jointure

Jointure was a legal arrangement used mainly in late medieval and early modern Britain, describing an estate that a husband's family settled on a married couple, most often to guarantee the wife a livelihood if she outlived her husband and became a widow, a purpose that made the term largely interchangeable with dower in everyday use. In practice a jointure transferred land or income from the husband's family to the couple at or around the time of marriage, establishing a form of joint ownership that shielded the wife from being left without means if her husband died first. As a widow's provision, jointure sat within the broader system of marriage settlements that regulated property, inheritance and a wife's economic security across English and British legal history, a system that would later be reshaped by married women's property legislation in the nineteenth century.