Marriage, a History (20 page)

T
he upper classes of medieval Europe made up only a tiny percentage of the total population, and their marital power struggles were not typical. No commoner ever received a marriage proposal delivered by hundreds of armed knights, assorted bishops, and a wagonful of treasures. When the marriage of a peasant or urban craftsman showed signs of strain, neighbors didn’t write concerned letters to the papacy about whether the couple should be allowed to divorce and remarry. In fact, for the first eight centuries of its existence, the church itself showed little concern about what made for a valid marriage or divorce among the lower classes of society. Gradually, however, all social classes came to live by the rules for forming and dissolving marriages that had emerged out of the conflicts and compromises among monarchs, nobles, and various factions of the church during the early medieval period.

In the early Western kingdoms, local Church councils often accommodated both Roman traditions and Germanic custom by permitting divorce for a variety of reasons. There was even the equivalent of no-fault divorce, when a couple swore that “discord reigns between us and communal life has become impossible.” One legal formula declared that because “there is no charity according to God” between a particular couple, “they have decided that each of them should be free to enter into the service of God in a monastery or to contract a new marriage.”
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Even after the Church had begun to enforce stricter limits on divorce and remarriage toward the end of the eighth century, many peasant families still believed that childlessness was grounds to take a new mate, and local priests generally looked the other way when their parishioners acted on this assumption. Ireland, the last country in Western Europe to legalize divorce in the twentieth century, was also the last country to make it illegal in the Middle Ages. If an Irishman told secrets about his wife’s sexual performance, for example, this was considered good reason for her to leave him. Long after the Church was forbidding people elsewhere in Europe from divorcing, Irish husbands and wives were still going their own way at will.
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Women were not necessarily impoverished by divorce in the medieval world. Because no one in the Middle Ages ever claimed that the man was the main breadwinner, a divorced wife was entitled to a percentage of the household estate in line with the labor she had contributed to it. Irish jurists ruled that divorcing women deserved a percentage of the farm’s lambs and calves since wives kept the animals, made the wool into cloth, and turned the milk into cheese and butter. In tenth-century Wales the king declared that a divorced man could have the pigs because he normally kept them in the woods near home, but the wife got the sheep because she took them to the highlands during the summer. The husband got the drinking cups and the chickens; the wife got the milk and cheese-making equipment, along with the flax, linseed, wool, and butter.

Churchmen in Ireland and Wales occasionally objected to the breakup of marriages, but like their colleagues on the Continent, they had their hands full trying to get their own priests to adhere to vows of celibacy. A majority of the clergy were married in the early Middle Ages, and despite growing opposition to the practice from the fifth century, change came very slowly. In 742 Pope Zachary declared that bishops and priests who lived in adultery or had more than one wife could not perform religious rites. By the eleventh century the Gregorian reformers were spearheading an organized campaign against clerical marriage. But Church authorities who tried to force the pace sometimes ran into trouble. When the Bishop of Paris ordered his priests to give up their wives and children, they chased him out of the cathedral. In 1077, Pope Gregory VII reported that the clergy of Cambrai, Wales, had seized a supporter of priestly celibacy and burned him alive. England, Italy, and Germany also saw violent clashes over this issue. Not until 1139 did canon law completely forbid clerical marriage.
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The Church was also slow to insist that a priest had to officiate for marriages of the laity to be valid. In the mid-twelfth century Pope Alexander III considered issuing a ruling that a marriage was valid only if it had been solemnized in a church, but he ultimately decided the order was impractical. Marriage practices throughout Europe were still so diverse and so informal that such a declaration would, in the words of one European historian, “have rendered a massive proportion of marriages invalid.”
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The Church was dealing with a population whose traditions considered mutual intent or the blessing of a parent sufficient to solemnize a marriage. If it had refused to accept these informal marriages as valid, how could it enforce its prohibitions against divorce and its strictures against “living in sin”? It wasn’t until the sixteenth century on the Continent—and not until 1753 in England—that governments and churches could enforce a rule requiring specific legal and public formalities to validate a marriage.

Until the twelfth century the Church held that a marriage was valid if entered into by mutual consent and then sealed by sexual intercourse. This made nonconsummation grounds for annulment. Then, in the mid-twelfth century, Peter Lombard, Bishop of Paris, argued that if sex was necessary for a valid marriage, Mary and Joseph could not have been legally married. In Lombard’s view, a promise to wed (“words of the future”) did not create a marriage unless it was followed by sex, but he insisted that an exchange of consent in the present—“I take you as my husband” and “I take you as my wife”—made a marriage legally and sacramentally binding even if the couple did not engage in sex. Lombard’s views became official church teaching.

This created a peculiar situation. If a couple claimed they were married by consent, no one could gainsay it, even if the parents could prove the two young people had never been alone long enough to have a ceremony or sleep together. But if only one of the pair claimed to have married by consent, and the Church believed it, the other was trapped for life, since nonconsummation was no longer grounds for divorce.

The Church did not like being put in the awkward position of defending young couples who, by privately exchanging their vows, married in defiance of their parents’ wishes. In remedy, the Fourth Lateran Council declared in 1215 that “we absolutely prohibit clandestine marriages.” For a marriage to be valid, the council stated, three things were necessary: The bride had to have a dowry, which effectively undercut the independence of a young woman from her parents; banns had to be published beforehand; and the wedding had to take place in a church.

As a result, a proper marriage became a long, drawn-out affair. It began with a formal betrothal negotiated by both sets of parents. This included a prenuptial marriage contract covering the property transactions that would occur at and after marriage, such as the amount of the dowry brought by the wife, the groom’s marriage gift to her, what arrangements would be made if the bride were widowed, and how property would be dispersed to children and grandchildren. If the man was expected to take over his parents’ farm or business, the marriage agreement might also stipulate the kind of support they could expect from the couple during their old age: a specific room in the house or in an adjacent home, with designated furnishings; a set amount of firewood each fall; a milk cow or a mule for personal use.

Next came the reading of the banns at church for three consecutive weeks prior to the wedding. This was a way to inform the community about the impending marriage, so anyone could come forward if he or she knew of some reason (such as a prior marriage) that the wedding should not take place.

Finally there was the formal exchange of vows at the church door, in front of witnesses and with the priest’s blessing. Friars, such as the one who agreed to marry the young lovers in Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet,
were not under the authority of bishops and might be prevailed upon to conduct a secret or hasty wedding, but parish priests were subject to strict penalties if they married a couple in the absence of witnesses and posted banns.

These provisions should have made secret weddings rare, and people who wanted to remain in everyone’s good graces took care to follow these procedures. But ultimately, the Lombard doctrine boiled down to this: A freely given consent to marry trumped all the other formalities that the Lateran Council had laid out so carefully. If a couple said, using the present tense, “I take thee as my husband” and “I take thee as my wife,” they were married, with or without witnesses, banns, blessings, or anything else, whether they said the words in a chapel, a kitchen, a field, or a barn, and whether or not they had ever had sex or taken up residence together.

The Church viewed a clandestine marriage as disobedient, illicit, even reprehensible, but nonetheless valid. The basic principle of Christian marriage was that an unbreakable bond was created by the consent of the two parties. Consequently, although marriage was seldom a matter of free choice in any sense recognizable today, it was easier in medieval Western Europe to get married without the permission of parents and social superiors than it had been in the past or was in most other contemporary kingdoms or empires.

But while there were now more ways to get into a legally recognized marriage, there were fewer ways to
get out
of it. By the twelfth century, when the Gregorian reformers really began to flex their muscles on the question of no marriage for the clergy and no divorce for the laity, Church law no longer made any provision for divorce at all. A husband or wife could get a judicial separation for only three reasons: adultery; a partner’s heresy, described as “spiritual fornication”; and extreme cruelty, although the cruelty had to be very extreme for a woman to initiate a separation. None of these reasons justified divorce. Even if a separation was granted, neither partner—not even the “innocent” one—could remarry.

Only an annulment freed people to marry again. And even a woman’s failure to produce an heir was no longer sufficient grounds to annul a marriage. A man’s
impotence
was grounds for annulment, but to prove it, he had to submit to a humiliating ordeal designed to make sure he and his wife were not colluding to end their marriage. As one church legal expert laid out the procedure, “The man and woman are to be placed together in one bed and wise women are to be summoned around the bed for many nights. And if the man’s member is always found useless and as if dead, the couple are well able to be separated.”
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In 1433, at York, England, the court recorded a case in which the “wise women” took the investigation into their own hands: “The . . . witness exposed her naked breasts and with her hands warmed at the said fire, she held and rubbed the penis and testicles of the said John. And she embraced and frequently kissed the said John, and stirred him up in so far as she could to show his virility and potency, admonishing him for shame that he should there and then prove and render himself a man. And she says, examined and diligently questioned, that the whole time aforesaid, the said penis was scarcely three inches long . . . remaining without any increase or decrease.”

There were two other grounds for annulment. If the couple were too closely related, by blood or by the marriage of other relatives, their marriage could be dissolved. Annulment was also possible if one party had previously consented to marry someone else. Just as the church’s incest rules provided an escape hatch for many nobles and kings, the exchange of consent rule provided a useful way for commoners to claim that a marriage was invalid.

In our day we can usually prove if a prior marriage existed by following a paper trail. But in the Middle Ages the court had only the doctrine of present consent for proof. The majority of disputes over marriage in the Middle Ages did not involve suits for divorce but were disagreements over whether a marriage had been contracted by consent. Imagine the possibilities for confusion, collusion, and outright fraud. A fortune hunter could claim that a rich woman had previously consented to a marriage and was therefore legally obliged to break off her engagement to another man. A woman in an unhappy marriage could belatedly “admit” that she had previously exchanged words of consent with another man, even though she had never lived with him, so that she now had to leave her present spouse and go live with her “real” one.

In 1337, Alice Palmer told the court that she had previously given Ralph Fouler five shillings to testify falsely that she had not agreed to marry Geoffrey Brown. Now, however, she regretted her denial and wanted the court to know that even though Geoffrey had subsequently married someone else, she had actually agreed to marry him first and was therefore his lawful wife. Was this a belated attack of conscience, or did she now believe he was a better prospect than she had first judged?
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In the late thirteenth century, Edmund de Nastok received a handsome dowry from Richard de Brok for marrying Brok’s daughter Agnes. Then Elizabeth de Ludehale came to the court claiming a prior contract of marriage with Edmund. In this case, the court decided that Elizabeth and Edmund had cooked up the scheme beforehand, to set themselves up with the money Edmund received from Agnes’s father. They had to return the dowry, along with sixteen pounds in damages.

It may surprise the modern reader to learn that until the seventeenth century the most typical prior consent suit was brought not by a deserted woman or unwed mother but by a man trying to force a woman into marriage after she had rejected him or had even married someone else. In 1470 a London court heard a case stemming from the competition of two rivals to marry a wealthy widow. One of the suitors, Robert Grene, asked a local lord of a manor to go to the home of the widow, Maude Knyff, to witness what would be said between Robert and Maude. The obliging lord testified that he looked through the window, saw the two embrace, and heard Maude pledge her troth to Robert and accept a ring from him. Maude vehemently denied this, claiming that Robert took a ring
off
her finger against her will.