Introduction
In the late 1170s or early 1180s a man called William, probably from Norwich, faced a dilemma and appealed to Pope Alexander III (1159–81), through John of Oxford, bishop of Norwich (1175–1200) for advice.1 He had lived with a woman by whom he had children and whom in the presence of many people he had promised to take as his wife. However, when he spent the night at the house of a neighbour he slept with the neighbour’s daughter. The girl’s father found them in the same bed and forced them to marry with words in the present tense. William’s dilemma was, as he explained to the bishop and the pope, that he wanted guidance as to which woman he ought to adhere to. The papal advice was that it depended on whether his promise to marry the first woman had been made before or after he had had intercourse with her. Unfortunately, William could not remember when he had made the promise, so the pope asked the bishop of Norwich to find out. If William had promised to marry the first woman before he had intercourse with her, he should remain with her. If not, he should marry the second one unless the father’s coercion had caused him to be fearful.
This particular case is important for two reasons. First, it became the formal expression of the rules governing valid marriages because known under its first three words Veniens ad nos it entered the papal decretal collection, the Liber Extra, which from 1234 was the standard collection of papal rulings that was supposed to be followed throughout the Christian world in matters pertaining to marriage. The rules implicit in Alexander III’s advice were that (in the case of the first woman) future consent freely given between a man and a woman of marriageable age makes an indissoluble union from the moment intercourse takes place, and (in the case of the second woman) present consent freely given, even in the most informal of circumstances, between a man and a woman of marriageable age constitutes an indissoluble marriage. Modern scholarship on the Veniens ad nos ruling of c. 1180 is extensive and opinions differ as to why Alexander III’s ruling became the accepted one to ensure that men and women accepted the consequences of lovemaking and procreation while adhering to the theological ideals of indissolubility and monogamy. At one extreme there is Charles Donahue’s 1972 argument that with his rulings Alexander III set out a papal blueprint for the regulation of marriage based on the free consent of partners (rather than parents or lords) that must be
1 X 4.1.15 (Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. A. Friedberg, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1879), ii, 666–7).
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seen as a conscious challenge to the custom of arranged marriages.2 In contrast, at the other extreme, there is Anne Duggan’s theory that Alexander III’s rulings were an amalgam of pragmatic ad hoc decisions, which offered solutions to local disputes brought before him by local bishops at their wits’ end because they had failed to settle these conflicts themselves.3 She contests the notion of a purposefully conceived papal policy and instead stresses the contingent and ‘accidental’ nature of the development of papal rulings before 1234.
Secondly, the Veniens ad nos text contains a messy human story about a man embroiled with two women. We know nothing more about the identity of this William and the two women he was involved with other than that, for reasons unknown, he felt it his duty to find out to whom he was bound in marriage, the one with whom he had slept and had children with and whom he had promised to marry, or the one with whom he had slept and then had married in words of present consent, albeit under pressure of the girl’s father. There is thus an additional issue of coercion involved. There is no evidence for involvement of the clergy before William sought advice from the bishop of Norwich and through him from the pope, even though we know of sporadic appeals to bishops and popes from the eleventh century onwards from England and elsewhere in Europe. The appeals are evidence of clerical help and pastoral care for the laity involved in tricky social situations. Canon lawyers have studied them in order to understand the development of canon law on marriage. Unlike canon lawyers identifying legal rulings and the reasons for them, social historians are interested in the human stories of men like William and the women with whom he had liaisons, and the social pressures he was under to make a choice between them. The story raises issues about consent, choice, parental coercion, and male and female agency.
In this book I will aim to provide an analysis of the experience of married life by men and women in Christian medieval Europe c. 900–1300. My focus will be on the social and emotional life of the married couple rather than on the institutional history of marriage.4 Such a study will, I contend, constitute a fresh contribution to our understanding of married life. By thinking about marriage as a lived experience by married men (including a significant minority of clergymen) and women, and by elucidating the role of the clergy, I aim to reach a better understanding of why
2 Charles Donahue, Jr., ‘The policy of Alexander the Third’s consent theory of marriage’, in Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law. Toronto, 21–5 August 1972, ed. S. Kuttner (Vatican City, 1976), 251–81, followed by J. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, 1987), 331–7.
3 Anne J. Duggan, ‘The effect of Alexander III’s rules on the formation of marriage in Angevin England (R. Allen Brown Memorial Lecture)’, ANS, 33 (2010), 1–22 and ‘Master of decretals: a reassessment of Alexander III’s contribution to canon law’, in Pope Alexander III (1159–81). The Art of Survival, ed. Peter D. Clarke and Anne J. Duggan (Farnham, 2012), 365–417 at 382–5, 392–4, and 404–5.
4 Select Cases from the Ecclesiastical Courts of the Province of Canterbury c. 1200–1301, ed. N. Adams and C. Donahue (Selden Society; London, 1981), 81–2 gives in a nutshell the main outline of medieval marriage as formulated by Pope Alexander III. For much more in-depth analysis of the canon law on marriage, see Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society. For marriage as regulated by the ecclesiastical courts, for the later Middle Ages, for England see R. H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974); for England and northern France, see Charles Donahue, Jr., Law, Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2007).
the requirement of free consent of the parties to marriage became the norm for valid marriage in a society dominated by people (men!) who wanted to make use of other people’s marriages for political, economic, or practical reasons. It is, for example, puzzling that in a Christian patriarchy, where men held virtually all authority, and men and women were subject to the authority of their parents, their lords, and the clergy, legitimacy of marriage was recognized as being based on the acceptance of the autonomy of individual men and women in their choice of partner.
Plenty has been written about the history of marriage as a social institution, but, as we shall see, this scholarship has not engaged with the lived experience of married people or people living together in stable monogamous relationships. We can find the lived experience most often in snippets of narratives that were not necessarily written with marriage or the married life in mind. At the elite level, with the advice of kin, parents arranged marriages for their children. Fathers, sons, and brothers negotiated in person with male friends or relatives to set up unions, often with minimal input from the young people themselves. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries arranged marriages remained the norm, albeit against a backdrop of increased debate involving young people who challenged the patriarchy by demanding a say in their future. The challenge to the patriarchy was not exclusively concerned with marriage but also with entry into monasteries and child oblation, the giving of children at a young age to monasteries. Here too young people were asking for their input in any decision to be sent away from home. Well below the elite level unfree peasants, too, began to challenge their lords to have a say in their choice of a marriage partner, instead of being assigned one or denied a chosen one. By the end of the twelfth century in all these cases we find that a shift had occurred in society, which allowed a greater say to young men and women to enforce their giving of consent to being married or sent into a monastic career. There is good reason to explore why these developments took place and to find out whether an analysis of the lived experience of medieval married people can help to understand why these various challenges to the patriarchy happened.
In order to understand the origin of these challenges to the patriarchy it is important to move away from the theological- and canon law-based scholarship on marriage in the Middle Ages and focus on the practice of the married life. The lived experience of medieval men and women can be teased out of narrative historical sources and vernacular fiction. It is there that we find detail of domestic arrangements not only of betrothals and weddings but of the daily lives of married couples. Most of the detail comes in the form of little vignettes, such as two men watching a tournament and deciding on the marriage of their daughters, a married couple sitting on their bed in the bedroom discussing whether they should enter the monastic life alone or with their young children, including a soon-to-be-born baby, or a distressed husband and wife on a bench in front of the house discussing the awful start of their marriage. We find distraught wives setting off in search of lost husbands after wars, lost husbands returning from war finding a rival in their wife’s bed, or a homesick nobleman writing from the Holy Land to his wife to say that he loves her and their children. Stories of real men and women in happy or strained relationships reveal the strategies they followed in order to make their lives
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tolerable and reduce conflict. These spotlight moments in the lives of historical medieval couples will put flesh and blood on the bones of the more abstract ‘husbands and wives’ we encounter from the normative and theological literature.
Amongst the men and women who tentatively began to challenge the making of marriage as a male prerogative, there is one voice that emerges with some prominence, and that is the voice of the aristocratic woman. In fiction and historical reality she is becoming a mouthpiece for greater demands of self-determination. Chronicles, saints’ lives, and romances offer us specific examples of women, more often than men (who may have been less malcontent within the patriarchy), who were dissatisfied with decisions on marriage (or entry in the monastic life) made for them and who preferred to take their future into their own hands. A crucial question is whether the women’s actions may have been a contributory factor to the change in thinking about self-determination and consent in the arrangement of marriages, or whether they were a mere by-product of a wider cultural shift which had effected the demand for change. In other words, can we establish whether a woman’s assertive voice was a motor of change or whether it was a mere manifestation of the change that sought greater freedom for the individual which inevitably was seen to come at the expense of the interest of family or kin? It is my contention in this book that the men and women who became engaged to be married and married preferred to have some say in the process of the conventional arranged marriage, and that increasingly such expectations were being voiced. We hear these voices because it was well understood that a measure of compatibility between partners regarding social status, intellect, and emotional bond increased the likelihood that a marriage would last.
Existing scholarship on marriage, deeply concerned with the legal and theological requirements of marital unions, has stressed the growing role of the clergy as a dominant force in the process leading to the formalization of rules for marriage by the middle of the thirteenth century. As we shall see, the presence of clergy in the leadup to marriages and in married life grew during the period covered by this book. The expansion of clerical involvement in the marriage process should not, however, be equated with the attribution of an exclusive role to the clergy in creating the culture in which consent between couples, as opposed to consent between the parents/ kin/lords of couples, became the norm. Admittedly, the requirement of consent between partners had always been the theological position of the Christian Church from the Church Fathers onwards, even though its practical application has been difficult to trace before 1100 or so. Yet, somehow an alliance of clergy and laity created an environment in which debate about free consent to get married (or enter the monastic life) came to the fore. For a variety of reasons lay men and women saw in the clerical idea of free consent a tool that could be used to push their own demands for self-determination in the face of parents, kin, or lords.
In the process of collaboration between clergy and laity we should not underestimate the role played by the married clergy. A significant minority of medieval clergy was married and became deeply upset about the Church’s proposal to enforce celibacy for all clergy, from sub-deacons upwards to bishops. The married priests and their wives protested vociferously against increasingly tighter ecclesiastical
regulations on a ban on marriage, even chaste marriage. In this book I intend to open a discussion on the role of the married clergy in the medieval debate on the good of marriage. As we shall see, much of the medieval debate was a rhetorical one on the advantages and disadvantages of marriage, which nevertheless can tell us a great deal about contemporary perceptions of married life. It needs stressing that for our understanding of medieval married life it does not matter whether the husband was a priest or not. What my exploration of the married priesthood and their emphasis on marriage as a good thing reveals is the power of the couple’s emotional and sexual bond.
Most existing scholarship on the emotions of the courting, betrothed, and married couple is based on medieval fictional texts, themselves written primarily in the vernacular languages. They are without doubt the most revealing in giving us the detail and texture of the couple’s feelings and the environment in which they lived. As I hope to show, however, the historical sources can be a very good match to their fictional counterpart in giving us an idea about medieval people’s thinking about marriage. The fact that the clergy wrote so much of this literature does not detract from the clerical authors’ observational powers to give us a reasonably reliable idea about the lived experience of married life. One particular group of witnesses, as we shall see, consists of the sons of married couples, who as monks provide us with touching portrayals of their parents’ marriages, mostly based on conversations with them. As with all testimonies we have to be sensitive to the construction of these stories, the impetus for their creation, and the use of them. We should not forget that they are eyewitness accounts of parents formed in childhood; these fathers and mothers were remembered by their children with an acuity that may not have lost much of its sharpness after a long separation. Sometimes memories of married couples surface in the decretals of matrimonial court cases from the time of their children. Sons and daughters, as well as nephews and nieces, in pursuit of an inheritance might construct the marriages of parents, or uncles and aunts, not as historical portraits but as unions with legal flaws (often reflecting contemporary circumstances) that served their own ends. All these stories reveal emotions that often feel raw, genuine, and immediate, feelings we as historians should not trivialize.
Thus far we have not touched on heterosexual relationships that were not marriages but existed alongside them as polygynous unions or concubinage. They were common, and some scholars have recently argued that these unions, rather than monogamous ones, constituted the social norm, especially amongst the elite. This recent scholarship needs to be addressed alongside scholarship devoted to the existence in medieval north-western Europe of a significant minority of single men and women. Modern sociologists and anthropologists have convincingly shown that the single existence of men and women is unique in a global context as nowhere else on our planet are there societies where singlehood in large numbers existed alongside married couples. In a study of medieval married life it is important to ponder the question to what extent these alternative living arrangements (with one or more partners or as bachelor or maiden) were realistic options for young men and women, and what their agency was in following the alternative course to marriage.
Married
In the remainder of this introduction I will set out a brief history of the institution of marriage up to the rulings of Alexander III, which I will follow with a historiographical survey of the main thinking about medieval marriage in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Then I will set out the thematic argument for this book, followed by some observations about the source material and the chronological and geographical boundaries of my study.
THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE
The Christian idea of marriage owed much to St Paul, the apostle, as laid down in his letters to the Corinthians (1 Co. 7: 1–16) and Ephesians (5: 22–33). His message, based on the notion that the woman is subject to the man, consisted of three principles, namely that marriage was the only way to sanction (hetero)sexual activity, that it was indissoluble or in other words that man and woman were bound to each other forever, and that they owed each other sex. He was the architect of the concept of the so-called conjugal debt, namely that the married couple owed each other sex and could not refuse it, as well as the notion that marriage was ‘a great mystery’ (sacramentum, Ephesians 5: 31–2). This concept would later result in thinking of marriage as one of the seven sacraments. Paul’s principles were formulated in contrast to the sexuality of Roman society with Christian thinkers favouring a social life characterized by abstinence and monogamy.5 This could lead to what seem to be extreme interpretations that contain clear misogynistic tendencies such as those expressed by Jerome (d. 420).6 These religious ideas of Christian marriage remained well known throughout the early Middle Ages to theologians, bishops, and higher clergy as we know from their scholarly work and to an extent also from liturgical tracts, writings that contained the order, readings, and prayers for the services celebrated in churches throughout the liturgical year.7
Much ink was also spent on the degrees of consanguinity (relationship by blood) and affinity (by marriage) within which the Christian faithful were allowed to marry.8 Initially, the Church allowed any marriage with someone beyond genealogical memory or, in other words, with anyone who could not be remembered as having blood ties between families. In practice the range of memory was thought of as within four degrees of kinship. Around the millennium Burchard, bishop of
5 See Chapter 4.
6 Jerome (d. 420), Adversus Iovinianum (PL 23, cols. 205–336) and for discussion D. G. Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy and Heresy in Ancient Christianity. The Jovanianist Controversy (Oxford, 2007), 232 (for date), and 243–84 (the impact of Jerome’s work on the theology of marriage); see also Chapter 6.
7 Kenneth Stevenson, Nuptial Blessing. A Study of Christian Marriage Rites (London, 1982), 33–94; Philip L. Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church. The Christianization of Marriage during the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods (Boston, 1994).
8 For what follows see Patrick Corbet, Autour de Burchard de Worms. L’Eglise allemande et les interdits de parenté (IXème–XIIème siècle) (Frankfurt am Main, 2001), 79–114 and Karl Ubl, Inzestverbot und Gesetzgebung. Die Konstruktion eines Verbrechens (300–1100) (Berlin, 2008), 384–477, with rejection of the influential suggestions by Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983), 56–9. For later periods, see also Sam Worby, Law and Kinship in ThirteenthCentury England (Woodbridge, 2010) and Donahue, Jr., Law, Marriage and Society, 27–31.
Worms (1000–25), tidied up this rather unsatisfactory system and suggested a tighter ‘net’: not only one that prohibited marriage within six or seven degrees of consanguinity counting vertically back to a common ancestor but also sideways amongst cousins (by blood and affinity). This system proved far too restrictive and breach of these rules became the norm to such an extent that in 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council returned to the Carolingian preference for a prohibition of range within the fourth degree (i.e. third cousins). The writings on marriage were refined and thought about a great deal, especially at times when cases of (elite) marital conflict needed resolution. It is also crucial to understand that the canon law on marriage evolved in the writings of men who did not necessarily agree with one another on important aspects such as intercourse and consent, and that canon law was deeply influenced by theological thinking, in particular about the notion that marriage was a sacrament. Inspired, as we have seen, by St Paul, and stressed as important by St Augustine, it was explicitly associated with the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist by Anselm of Laon around 1100 and further developed by Hugh of St Victor (c. 1130).9 They emphasized that the man and woman who married by giving their consent in the present tense established the sacramentum themselves and thus, importantly, that it was not bestowed on them (like baptism and the eucharist) by a priest.
Two further developments in canon law and theology were important. In the first redaction of his Decretum, compiled in the 1130s, the canon lawyer Gratian established the position on coercion, formulated significantly with respect to women: Causa 31, quaestio 2 addressed the issue whether a daughter can be forced into marriage, citing two of Pope Urban II’s decretals agreeing with women who were forced into marriage by the lords of the regions in which they lived, though in both cases the girls’ families agreed with the girls not the lords.10 In the second redaction, revised in the 1140s, Gratian (or the second redactor) added an explication that without a father’s consent ‘there cannot be lawful marriage’; the first redaction triumphed.11 Its notion of marital legitimacy as grounded in the couple’s consent, rather than their parents’, was fully endorsed c. 1150 by the theologian Peter Lombard
9 Heinrich J. F. Reinhardt, Die Ehelehre der Schule des Anselm von Laon. Eine theologie-und kirchenrechtsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zu den Ehetexten der frühen Pariser Schule des 12. Jahrhunderts (Münster, 1974), 54–62; Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, 280–311; and ‘Marrying and its documentation in pre-Modern Europe: consent, celebration and property’, in To Have and to Hold. Marrying and Its Documentation in Western Christendom, 400–1600, ed. Philip L. Reynolds and John Witte (Cambridge, 2007), 9 n. 23.
10 Gratian, Decretum, Pars secunda, Causa 31, questio 2, c. 1 and 4, Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. Friedman, I, 113–14; Michael M. Sheehan, Marriage, Family, and Law in Medieval Europe. Collected Studies, ed. James K. Farge (Cardiff, 1996), 93–4 and more recently Anders Winroth, ‘Marital consent in Gratian’s Decretum’, in Readers, Texts and Compilers in the Earlier Middle Ages, Studies in Medieval Canon Law in Honour of Linda Fraser Mogerl, ed. Kathleen G. Cushing and Martin Brett (Farnham, 2009), 111–21 at 114 building upon the classic study of John T. Noonan, ‘Marriage in the Middle Ages, 1: power to choose’, Viator, 4 (1973), 419–34; the fundamental work on the two redactions of the Decretum is Anders Winroth, The Making of Gratian’s Decretum (Cambridge, 2000).
11 Winroth, ‘Marital consent’, 115; Sheehan, Marriage, 97, and Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society, 238.
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as only the couple’s consent made the marriage into a sacramentum. 12 The effect of these men’s thinking can be traced immediately, and crucially, in Pope Adrian IV’s decretal of 1155, addressed to Bishop Eberhard I of Salzburg (1147–64), that no lord can prevent serfs from marrying,13 though, again, Gratian 2 insisted on the lord’s consent being needed for the unfree to marry.14 Importantly, Gratian 1, Peter Lombard and Adrian IV stressed the couple’s autonomy and paved the way (as we can now see in retrospect) for the argument laid out in the c. 1180 decretal of Pope Alexander III, Veniens ad nos, which in due course became the norm.15 To what extent these scholarly musings were formulated in response to demands from ‘below’ is one of the questions this book will address. As medievalists know well, the increasing visibility of the theory of marriage caused endless discussion not only amongst educated lawyers and theologians but also amongst the families involved in marital unions. After c. 1180 at the elite level arranged marriages continued. Yet, in the thirteenth century marriage litigation in the church courts grew and revealed that the new regulations on nominal gender equality and self-determination were followed despite these rules’ inherent weakness. This weakness was that there were all sorts of issues that remained unresolved as a result of Alexander III’s decree, not least whether consent to marry meant consent to have sexual intercourse, in both scenarios of present and future consent.16 Because St Paul had been unambiguous that man and woman owed each other sex and could not refuse it, many a case was taken to court on this issue of consent to have sex.17 Also, it is crucial to remember that in Alexander III’s view any consent given to marry was binding, whether it was given privately or publicly. Because the Church argued that consent was the main issue, any couple exchanging the words ‘I agree to marry you’, supposed to express consent in the present tense, were by virtue of that exchange of words deemed to be married. No witnesses were necessary. As can be imagined, because the Church had made the act of marriage so easy, but ending a marriage difficult—remember that marriage was deemed indissoluble and for life—conflicts arose. For this reason the universal Church (as opposed to some regional ecclesiastical practice) encouraged, but never formally required,
12 Peter Lombard, Magistri Lombardi Parisiensis episcopi Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, Book IV dist. 26–36, 3rd ed. (Grottaferrata, 1971–81), ii, 416–75.
13 The fundamental study on this canon law remains P. Landau, ‘Hadrians IV Dekretale “dignum est” (X. 4.9.1.) und die Eheschliessung Unfreier in der Diskussion von Kanonisten und Theologen des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts’, Studia Gratiana, 12 (1967), 512–53. For its interpretation as to what happened in England, see Paul Brand, Paul Hyams, and Rosamond Faith, ‘Seigneurial control of women’s marriage’, Past and Present, 99 (1983), 123–48 at 130 and in France Robert F. Berkhofer III, ‘Marriage, lordship and the “greater unfree” in twelfth-century France’, Past and Present, 173 (2001), 3–27 at 15–21; see also Winroth, ‘Marital consent’, 116–17 and Duggan, ‘Master of decretals’, 368–9.
14 Winroth, ‘Marital consent’, 118.
15 Sheehan, Marriage, 98–9; Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society, 130; Winroth, ‘Marital consent’, 112.
16 James A. Brundage, ‘Implied consent to intercourse’, in Consent and Coercion to Sex and Marriage in Ancient and Medieval Societies, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou (Dumbarton Oaks, 1993), 245–56.
17 The classic study of the ‘marital debt’ remains Pietro Vaccari, ‘La tradizione canonica del “debitum” coniugale e la posizione di Graziano’, Studia Gratiana, 1 (1953), 533–47 at 545–7; see also Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society, 235–6.
public weddings in the presence of a priest and witnesses.18 Before we can answer the question ‘What happened until the moment that Alexander III’s decree became the norm not only in theory but also increasingly in practice?’, we have to ask when roughly this norm became ‘rule’. Historians tend to point to the early thirteenth century and identify the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 with its adoption of the calling of banns for three weeks prior to marriage as a decisive moment.19 Yet, my discussion will cover the period up to the end of that century in order to catch as wide a chronological scope without losing my focus on the central Middle Ages, even though I acknowledge that parental pressure remained a force in the later Middle Ages and beyond.20
After this brief sketch of the development in canon law and theology of early medieval marriage it is time to turn to the customary secular practice of marriage. Arrangement of marriages, as far as we can tell, and that is mostly for the elite, by parents was customary, as will become clear in Chapter 1. Normally men (fathers or brothers of the bride) initiated the marriage process by approaching the girl’s family in order to exchange her for land or moveable wealth. An agreement reached between two parties was the stage of the betrothal, when man and woman might meet, followed at some later stage by a wedding ceremony when the woman would be handed over by her kin, the so-called traditio. Again, depending on social status and wealth, this might be a lavish affair of festive meals, drinking, and music, drawn out over several days. During this period the man would collect his woman, or the bride would be brought to the husband and handed over, together with whatever property she would bring in. The bride would then join her husband in his house. On the whole, it was women who left their natal home to move in with their husbands rather than vice versa, except in the case of (elite) heiresses. Until the twelfth century there is very little evidence that ‘on the ground’ any clergy was involved either in the negotiating process or at the wedding itself, except at royal or princely level. This is surprising given the liturgical evidence for consent.21 The research by liturgists is very important as we shall see below, though at times a little
18 Note that there could be local requirements to marry in a church and in the presence of a priest, especially in later medieval England and northern France (Sheehan, Marriage, 133–66; Donahue, Law, Marriage and Society, 32–3).
19 Brundage, ‘Implied consent’, 251 (as date of a clerical consensus to emerge); Sheehan, Marriage, 99–103.
20 For late medieval England, see Shannon McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London (Philadelphia, 2006), 74–119 at 74–8, 94–5 and Helmholtz, Marriage Litigation, 47–8; for late medieval France, see G. Ribordy, ‘Le fiançialles dans le rituel matrimonial de la noblesse française à la fin du Moyen Age: tradition laique ou ecclésiastique’, Revue Historique, 303 (2001), 885–911 at 888.
21 Stevenson, Nuptial Blessing, 33–94, itself an important correction to Protais Mutembe and JeanBaptiste Molin, Le rituel du mariage en France du XIIe au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1974), which was compiled as guidance for modern marriage ritual in Africa; I am grateful to David Maxwell for this observation; Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, 402–3; for the Anglo-Norman realm in the late eleventh century, see Pierre Bauduin, ‘La dos dans la Normandie ducale’, in Dot et douaires dans le haut Moyen Åge, ed. F. Bougard, L. Feller, and R. Le Jan (Rome, 2002), 429–55 at 434–5 and Megan McLauglin, Sex, Gender and Authority in an Age of Reform, 1000–1122 (Cambridge, 2010), 26–7, with some (undated) charter evidence for payments to parish priests on the occasion of a wedding celebration in the Vendôme.
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frustrating, due to their lack of consultation of any non-liturgical material.22 Bearing the requirement for consent embedded in medieval liturgy in mind prompts yet again the question how we might explain why society after c. 1180 began widely to accept individual consent and self-determination as a condition for the legality of marriage. Before I return to this question it is important to cast our mind back for a brief look at the history of marriage formation and the exchange of property.
The historical roots for the contractual nature of the marital state and the process whereby people became married are reasonably clear. In Roman times marriage was a contract that required consent from spouses and parentes (parents or family), but contract on consent was always public as witnesses were required.23 The bride would be given by her father an advance on her inheritance, sometimes called Roman dowry, while the groom might contribute to the marriage in the form of the arrha sponsaliciae to be paid as a sort of guarantee of contract before the wedding.24 Consent was a Roman legacy accepted by the Christian Church, whose clergy stressed spousal free will and consent rather than that of the parentes . What Christianity brought to the Roman law of marriage was the notion of indissolubility and monogamy. Christianity also forbade divorce, relatively easy before conversion to Christianity and polygyny, though as we shall see in practice these ecclesiastical rules did not always count for much.
Yet, the Roman notion of marriage as a contract between two families (often arranged by men) is not dissimilar in principle from what historians traditionally— though increasingly controversially—call the ‘Germanic’ one, which comes close to the process I sketched above.25 ‘Germanic’ is the label attached to the arrangement of marriage in the law codes of the new kingdoms of the Lombards, Visigoths, Burgundians, Franks, and Anglo-Saxons that emerged after the fall of the Roman Empire. The scholarly debate about the ‘barbarian’ and ‘Germanic’ characteristics of these new principalities is a complex one. Suffice for the moment to say that there is undeniably a difference between the Roman and non-Roman marital tradition, of which the most important is that the former allowed the bride a measure of consent and some financial autonomy about dowry (see below); other differences concern the ignorance of the concepts of monogamy or indissolubility amongst the latter. This means that in those areas where Roman law survived, or was revived, after the demise of the Roman Empire we observe traces of its marriage arrangements. Little or no such traces can be found further north in Europe where the ‘Germanic’ tradition of parental consent and private domestic arrangements was the norm. There men initiated a match for their son (or themselves) with a girl from
22 For example, on the blessing of the marriage bed none of the authors seems to know the admittedly scattered historical evidence from chronicles, such as the testimony of Lambert of Ardres c. 1200; see below 71.
23 For the effects of Christianity on marriage in the Roman Empire, see Kate Cooper, The Fall of the Roman Household (Cambridge, 2007), Judith Evans Grubbs, Law and Family in Late Antiquity. The Emperor Constantine’s Marriage Legislation (Oxford, 1995), and ‘Marrying and its documentation in later Roman law’, in To Have and to Hold, ed. Reynolds and Witte, 43–94 at 54–63 on consent.
24 Grubbs, ‘Marrying and its documentation in later Roman law’, 64–72.
25 Ruth Mazo Karras, Unmarriages. Women, Men and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2012), 18–24.
another family who was then exchanged for a gift (of cash, property, or, say, a horse), initially known as the ‘bride price’. Polygyny at the elite level was preferred above monogamy and remarriage during the lifetime of the previous spouse was common.26 The property exchange in both traditions survived and presents a perplexing complex for modern scholars that needs some elucidation, not only because we encounter these gifts in the period covered by this book time and again as a source of negotiation before marriage and as a source of agitation during the married life, but also as testimony to a north–south divide in marital arrangements across Europe.27
Across Europe the bride price was a gift from (the father of) the groom to the couple as a contribution to their finances.28 It was known as the Morgengabe (literally ‘morning gift’), the gift from the husband to the wife after consummation had taken place. In due course, in southern European towns, the Morgengabe was replaced by the Roman dowry, with a crucial shift taking place. Instead of the main gift going from the husband or his family to the couple, the bride’s family settled a gift (dowry) on their daughter on the point of betrothal.29 The husband’s family was still allowed to bring in something but no such gift was allowed to trump the bride’s family contribution. Elsewhere, in northern Europe, it looks as if the Morgengabe morphed into dower as the contribution made by the husband (or his family) for the maintenance of his wife, especially after his death. In England, northern France, and the Low Countries, the assignment of dower became part of the marriage ceremony at the door of the church (see below). There too the dowry emerged early in the eleventh century as a gift from the bride’s family to the bride, but not as in Roman times in southern Europe as a substitute for her inheritance.30 It has been argued that the introduction of dowry in northern Europe was the result of the north copying the practice of Roman dowry in Italian cities. In particular, Susan Mosher Stuard forcefully argues that a process of the north imitating the south is a more cogent explanation for the appearance of dowry in the north than ‘reinvention that reflected only indigenous decision-making’ in northern France, England, and the Low Countries.31 Thus dowry and dower in northern Europe began to replace the earlier Morgengabe and the bride price for reasons that are still debated.
26 The topic is discussed in detail in Chapter 7, itself inspired by recent work of Jan Rüdiger, Der König und seine Frauen. Polygynie und Politische Kultur in Europa (9.–13. Jahrhundert) (Berlin, 2015) and Sara McDougall, Royal Bastards. The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800–1230 (Oxford, 2017).
27 For what follows the most recent compact discussion, preoccupied mostly with southern Europe, is Susan Mosher Stuard, ‘Brideprice, dowry and other marital assigns’, in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (Oxford, 2013), 148–62 and the much longer editorial introduction in To Have and to Hold, ed. Reynolds and Witte, 1–42 on regional variation of customary practices across Europe.
28 The classic study for southern Europe is Diane Owen Hughes, ‘From brideprice to dowry in Mediterranean Europe’, Journal of Family History, 3 (1978), 263–96 at 266–76.
29 Owen-Hughes, ‘From brideprice’, 268–9 and Reynolds, ‘Marrying and its documentation’, 29–37; for the early Middle Ages see also the important collection of studies covering the period up to c. 1000 in François Bougard, Laurent Feller, and Régine Le Jan, eds, Dots et douaires dans le haut Moyen Âge (Rome, 2002). There is an urgent need for a fresh study of the rise of the dowry in north-western Europe in the eleventh century.
30 Stuard, ‘Brideprice’, 148–62. 31 Stuard, ‘Brideprice’, 157.
There is agreement to some extent on the effects of the increasingly patrilinear structure of elite society where landholding began to be concentrated in the hands of the eldest son at the expense of younger sons and daughters (except for heiresses).32 As a result, young landless sons with little or no income vied for brides, who they (or their fathers) could no longer ‘buy’ with a Morgengabe or ‘bride price’. Instead, the marriage purchase power shifted from grooms (and their fathers) to fathers and brothers of brides. The women’s family had to woo the relatively impecunious men with sums of money or land (the dowry) to marry their daughters or sisters. For what follows in this book, it may be significant that the rise of the dowry changed the relationship between father (or brother) and daughter (or sister), giving potentially an opportunity for the woman to ask for a greater say in the marital arrangements made for her. As this brief summary reveals, the history of the exchange of wealth on marriage at the time of the betrothal and wedding is as complex as it is important. The history of the couple’s property during their marriage is an equally important issue due to the potential for problems as to whose wealth it was and who of the couple could dispose of it.
The extent of the husband’s control over the dowry and dower is a related historiographical problem with (again) a distinct northern and southern European aspect to it. Whereas in the south the Morgengabe was the property of the wife who had control over it, the (Roman) dowry newly introduced in the eleventh-century south fell under the control of the husband, even though it was legally the property of his wife.33 In the south civil (Roman) law was in conflict with canon law about the wife’s use of the dowry she brought in. This led to frequent disputes because canon law allowed women to bequeath their possessions (i.e. money belonging to their dowry) through a will, while husbands maintained that they had control over these monies and could therefore block their wife’s actions.34 But there were local exceptions. For example, in Genoa, women were in control of the wealth they brought into their marriage, allowing them freely to invest in industry and trade.35 As for the north there is scholarly consensus that dower assigned at the church’s door on the occasion of the wedding was controlled by the husband and only after his death, when legally transferred, became the widow’s property.36 Although dowry came from the wife’s family and in theory belonged to the bride, because her husband controlled all finances and she was subjected to his authority, she had no automatic right of access to it. Having said this, a husband could not alienate dowry wealth without her consent.37 It is interesting that we seem to see a shift in
32 Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest. The Making of Modern Marriage, trans. Barbara Bray (New York, 1993), 92–106 for a discussion of dowry and dower; for a more local but much clearer discussion of dowries, see Amy Livingstone, Out of Love for My Kin Aristocratic Family Life in the Lands of the Loire, 1000–1200 (Ithaca, 2010), 122–4. On the use of dowries as a sign of a shortage of brides in ‘a marriage market’, in a comparative global context, see Maristella Botticini and Aloysius Stow, ‘Why dowries?’, American Economic Review, 93 (2003), 1385–98.
33 Stuard, ‘Brideprice’, 151. 34 Stuard, ‘Brideprice’, 151.
35 Stuard, ‘Brideprice’, 154.
36 For England, see Judith A. Green, The Aristocracy of Norman England (Cambridge, 1997), 364–82.
37 Penny Shine Gold, The Lady and the Virgin. Image, Attitude and Experience in Twelfth-Century France (Chicago, 1985), 124–5.
modern historiography as to what this means about women’s agency during marriage. Whereas, for example, in 1985 Penny Shine Gold stressed female powerlessness in the face of the husband’s authority over the use of dowry property income, thirty years later Amy Livingstone stressed the power women had to block alienation of such property.38 As we shall see, the exchange of property connected with marriage was itself often a contributory factor in tensions that could arise between husband and wife.39 Incidentally, it is important to bear in mind that there is nothing in Alexander III’s decree of c. 1180 on the subject of property. Even though canon law of an earlier period acknowledged that its presence could be accepted as proof of the legitimacy of a marriage, absence of property arrangements did not invalidate a marriage. 40 In due course, as we have seen already, some of this property was expected to be exchanged during the wedding ceremony at the church door, which brings me back to the question of the liturgy of weddings, and its bearing on the development of thinking about marriage, especially amongst the clergy. In the brief excursus that follows I will set out the evidence, if only to alert the reader to the fact that on the whole liturgists do not take account of other sources apart from liturgical manuscripts, ignoring the hagiographical or chronicle evidence. In contrast, historians take some interest in liturgical evidence but only in conjunction with the intellectual evidence on thinking about marriage, not in combination with literary or historical narratives.
The liturgy of marriage shows a divide between the Roman Gregorian tradition of the bridal mass and prayers for the couple on the one hand, attested in Italy and southern France, and the Iberian-Anglo-Norman tradition on the other.41 Whereas the former represents the Roman Christian tradition of bridal blessings in conjunction with a Gregorian mass, the latter reveals a fusing of a domestic ceremony of secular origin with a bridal mass. Like Stevenson, I am inclined to think that the domestic secular ceremony may well be of Germanic heritage. According to RomanGregorian custom a priest blessed the bride (and sometimes the groom) in church before the communion in mass. In other words, the nuptial blessing became part of the bridal mass. In contrast, the Iberian-Anglo-Norman tradition suggests that originally a series of blessings in a domestic setting at home, including the blessing of a ring (in Spain two rings), the bed chamber, the bed, and the couple, preceded the couple’s visit to the church, where a liturgical ceremony would be held. There is scholarly consensus that the coming together of a domestic ceremony with a ceremony in church began in the eleventh century in north-western Europe. Whether the practice originated in early eleventh-century Normandy or in England is a problem that remains to be solved, though, as we shall see, I have not found any evidence
38 Gold, The Lady, 124 and Livingstone, Out of Love for My Kin, 124–5.
39 E.g. Livingstone, Out of Love for My Kin, 127–9 (disputes over dowry) and 138–40 (disputes over dower).
40 E.g. Burchard of Worms, Decretorum Libri XX, Liber IX. 6, stipulated that without a dos there cannot be a legitimate marriage, PL 140, col. 816; see also Chapter 1.
41 For detailed discussion, see Stevenson, Nuptial Blessing, 33–94, which corrects the standard work by Mutembe and Molin, Le rituel du mariage, itself a corrective of K. Ritzer, Formen, Riten und religiöses Brauchtum der Eheschlieschung in den christlichen Kirchen des ersten Jahrtausends (Münster, 1962). See also the brief overview by Sheehan, Marriage, 110–15, which predates Stevenson’s work.
