Marriage, a History (21 page)

She also rebutted Robert’s testimony by calling a friend of hers to testify that she had seen Maude and Thomas Torald sitting together in the house and that Maude had told her, “Behold, here sits my husband,” to which Thomas responded: “For the greater and more evident notice of this matter, know that this Maude is my wife.”

Most marriages did not involve such complications, of course. The power plays of royalty, the schemes of fortune hunters, and the stratagems of people trying to get around the prohibitions against divorce affected only a minority of couples. Moreover, despite the Church’s grudging acceptance of clandestine marriage, most people of the day did not believe marriage was meant to be a private decision. So although an enterprising young couple did have opportunities to defy their parents and neighbors, the marriage decisions of most commoners in Europe were as constrained in their own way as the marriage choices of the aristocracy.
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Many European peasants in the Middle Ages were legally bound to a lord and his lands. Serfs owed their master a certain number of days of labor and a certain amount of produce each year, in addition to small monetary taxes. They also had to obey the lord’s will in many personal matters and submit themselves to his “justice.” The feudal lord’s “right of the first night,” whereby a nobleman had the right to deflower a peasant’s daughter upon her wedding, is a myth. But a lord typically did have a financial, if not a sexual, interest in his serfs’ daughters, and the Church rarely objected to the control he exercised over their marriages.

In some regions the lord of an estate (or the abbot if a peasant worked on church lands) could prevent his serf from marrying a woman from another manor. In other regions, lords even had the right to choose husbands for their tenants’ daughters. As late as 1344 the lord of a manor in the Black Forest of Germany required that each of his male householders over the age of eighteen and every female fourteen or older had to marry someone of his choosing. The regulation applied even to widows and widowers. In other cases, peasants could pay fines that freed them to choose their own partners, but they were still required to marry somebody or pay even bigger penalties. In some places lords managed to make a profit even when their tenants didn’t marry. Women who were sexually active without being married had to pay
leirwite
—literally a fine for lying down, and another fine for each child born out of wedlock.
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Landowners had a stake in their serfs’ marriages because the division of labor between husband and wife lay at the heart of rural economies. No individual, male or female, could run a farm single-handedly. The man focused on outdoor agricultural labor; indeed, a male peasant was usually called a plowman. In addition to plowing, he spread manure, dug peat for fuel, and harvested crops by hand, swinging heavy sickles or scythes. He threshed the grain, turned the hay, and sometimes hired himself out to work in the fields of larger landowners. His wife milked the cows, made butter and cheese, fed the chickens and ducks, cleaned and carded wool, prepared flax (a process that involved fifteen steps), brewed beer, and carried water. Women also took their surplus products to market, washed their clothes in the village stream, and had their grain ground at the mill. Both men and women helped with the harvest, gleaned the fields, and collected firewood. Women, like men, sometimes hired themselves out as agricultural laborers.

Only rarely could a peasant man or woman carve out an independent life as a single person. The married couple peasant household was the basic unit of production. The dues this household owed to the lord were calculated on the basis of the work done by both the man and the woman. The yearly dues of chickens and eggs on the estates in medieval Germany, for example, were so explicitly considered the wife’s responsibility that a family was exempted from this payment when she was pregnant.
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The importance of marriage in creating a viable household economic unit meant that even free peasants, who were not bound to a lord or an abbot, were very anxious to get themselves, and later their offspring, properly married. They were equally concerned that their neighbors marry appropriate spouses, because the very geography of village life and peasant farming made marriage a public matter. A family’s landholdings were often scattered into a number of separate long, narrow strips. A marriage that allowed for the amalgamation of side-by-side plots of land was considered particularly advantageous. But the regular rotation of crops and the proximity of landholdings required the whole village to decide what to plant where and when to plow and harvest. Even people with no direct economic interest in the outcome of a marriage had a stake in who married whom and whether the new husband or wife would be an asset to the neighborhood.

Family farms in the medieval European countryside could not survive without networks of mutual aid and communal accountability. Many villages had customs like those recorded in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries for Brigstock, England. There all the men were divided up into tithing groups of ten or more who took responsibility for one another’s behavior. If one committed a theft, for example, the others would have to produce him at court or be liable for punishment themselves.
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So for social as well as economic reasons, there was pressure on villagers to choose mates and in-laws who would pull their own weight in communal enterprises.

Neighbors had many ways to prevent or punish matches they considered inappropriate. The threat of disapproval and ostracism was no small matter when you shared planting and plowing with your neighbors, did your wash together, and used a neighbor’s oven to bake your bread. Villagers might also engage in ritual harassment of the offending couple. These rituals, called charivaris, or “rough music,” were boisterous, obscene, humiliating, and sometimes painful ways to punish people who violated community norms. Neighbors surrounded the house, singing rude songs and burning effigies. They might even break in, pull the offenders out, and humiliate them by forcing them to ride backward on a mule or dunking them in a nearby pond.

Such community demonstrations were often directed at a couple that seemed ill matched in age or status, thereby removing an eligible single person from an already uncomfortably small pool. Marriage outside the community was also frowned upon. Sometimes the young men or women of a neighborhood would physically confront a stranger who came courting, calling out rude names and pelting him or her with rocks and vegetables.

Parents were anxious that their children marry into the “right” families. Titles and kingdoms might not be at stake in village life, but having an in-law with a cousin in the bishop’s court or an uncle who was the lord’s bailiff could be a big asset in mediating disputes. The wealthier peasants were usually linked through marriage alliances, although a village might split into factions along lines of kinship, patronage, and intermarriage. Here again marriage was far too central to village life to be a couple’s private business.

As a result, marriages in peasant villages could involve as many interested parties as those of minor nobles. Take the case of the fourteenth-century widow Raymonde d’Argelliers, who lived in the village of Montaillou, near what is now the border of France and Spain. Her second marriage, Raymonde told a court investigating heresy in the village, was “a result of the negotiations by the brothers Guillaume, Bernard, and Jean Barbès of Niort, the brothers Bernard and Arnaud Marty of Montaillou, Pierre-Raymond Barbès, priest of Freychenet, and Bernadette Tavern and Guillemette Barbès of Niort.”
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Although peasants zealously scrutinized who should marry whom, they tended to be cavalier about the order in which a couple engaged in childbirth and marriage. A letter written by the Bishop of Lincoln, in England, in the thirteenth century noted that the traditional custom during a wedding, if a couple had had a child born before the ceremony, was to stretch a “care-cloth” over the child as the couple knelt in front of the altar, so the child was legitimized. According to English common law, the subsequent marriage of a couple did not legitimize their previously born children, but peasants simply ignored that.

A woman who did not marry the father of her out-of-wedlock child was not necessarily considered damaged goods in peasant communities. A historian who examined the records of Halesowen Manor, in England, between 1270 and 1348 estimates that for every two women who gave birth in marriage, one woman gave birth out of wedlock. Many of these women subsequently married, some of them quite well, suggesting they did not face permanent stigmatization. Even so, richer peasants, with more to lose in inheritance disputes, tended to avoid bearing children out of wedlock.
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Marriage, not childbearing, marked men’s and women’s transition to adulthood in peasant society. In many parts of England, all unmarried men and women, regardless of age, were called lads or maids and were expected to defer to the married “masters” and “dames” of the village.
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The badge of adulthood meant different things for each sex. For a man, marriage was closely connected to economic independence. A man got married when he inherited land or took over his father’s craft. In thirteenth-century England the word for an unmarried man—
anilepiman,
or “only man”—also meant “landless man,” while the word
husbond
could mean either a married man or a man with a substantial landholding. A married man with his own land and household was the basic political figure of village life. He was responsible for his wife and children as well as for any servants or apprentices who lived in his house. He answered for their misdeeds, disciplined them when necessary, and represented them at village meetings or in the courts.
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For women, the relationship between marriage and authority was more ambiguous. Marriage marked a female as an adult, but it restricted rather than expanded her legal standing. A married woman lost the right to dispose of land, go to court, or handle her own affairs. Yet women in rural Europe needed marriage to achieve economic security and social status. No woman, married or not, could be part of the tithing group that kept the peace. Nor could a woman serve in any village office or act as a pledge for other people, the way peasant men frequently did. Acting as a pledge created obligations in others, and men could use the pledge system to establish dense networks of mutual aid that involved dozens of other people. Only through her husband could a woman gain this kind of influence beyond the household, even though marriage stripped her of the right to make economic contracts.
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Some historians argue that the mutual dependence of husband and wife in production made medieval peasant marriages economic and emotional partnerships. Certainly, the fact that peasant husbands often made wives their executors implies a good deal of mutual respect. So does the gradual adoption of jointure, in which husband and wife held their land in common so that the woman would inherit the entire property, not just the traditional widow’s third, when her husband died.
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However, any property a woman brought to marriage came under her husband’s control. He could dispose of any movable property or leases she inherited without consulting her, although he was not supposed to sell any free-hold land she inherited without her consent. Court cases show that some wives successfully guarded their rights. In the countryside around Barcelona in the early eleventh century, for example, Maria, the daughter of a wealthy peasant named Vivas, agreed that her husband could sell a field she had inherited from her father in order to meet some household needs. She insisted that in return she be compensated with a piece of land from her
husband
’s inheritance. He resisted, but she eventually got him in front of a scribe, where he signed over the land, according to the deed,
pro pax maritum
—for the sake of peace in the marriage.
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However, if a husband refused to make concessions for the sake of household peace, a wife had little recourse. By law, husbands controlled all household resources, including any earnings wives brought in, and could “discipline” their wives by force if necessary. The extent of a husband’s authority in medieval thought was illustrated by the laws of England, Normandy, and Sicily defining a wife’s murder of her husband as a form of treason, punishable by burning at the stake.
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Marriage in urban areas followed many of the same patterns. The revival of trade in Western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries created densely packed towns such as Paris, London, Milan, and Florence, where artisans and merchants conducted business out of homes, shops, and taverns. These towns provided a larger pool of potential spouses than was available in agricultural villages and offered more opportunities for unsupervised courting. Nevertheless, marriage was seldom a truly private affair anywhere during the Middle Ages.

In cities, as in peasant villages, intermediaries were frequently involved in introducing a couple, testing the waters to see if a relationship might be taken to a new level, and conducting the property negotiations that accompanied marriage. Such matchmaking was not restricted to women. Indeed, according to historian Shannon McSheffrey, “it was the duty and privilege of senior men to ensure that suitable marriages were made, and unsuitable unions prevented.”
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In cities, as in the countryside, marriage was often a business partnership, with far-reaching economic implications for friends and relations on both sides. Merchant families used marriage alliances to raise capital and build business networks, and in many areas of northwestern Europe, a merchant’s wife became her husband’s partner in economic activities. She might keep the books for the family business or help out in the shop, act as an agent for her husband in his absence, and carry on her husband’s trade after his death.