Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  The Peculiar History of Incest Laws

  The Roman Catholic Church’s definition of incest is one of the most intriguing features of medieval marriage. Neither the Old nor New Testament provided any basis for it. But in the mid-sixth century, church synods began to denounce as incestuous the Old Testament practice of marrying a brother’s widow. Also, during the sixth and seventh centuries bishops began condemning marriage to first and second cousins, stepmothers or stepdaughters, and the widows of uncles. In 721, Pope Gregory II even forbade marriage with the godmother of one’s child or with the mother of one’s godchild.13

  A few decades later marriage was forbidden up to the seventh degree of separation, or “as far as memory could go back.” This made it illegal to marry a descendant of one’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather! By the end of the eighth century it was incestuous to marry in-laws, the kin of godparents or godchildren, or a relative of someone you had once had sexual intercourse with. It was also forbidden to marry a relative of someone you had previously promised but failed to marry. These prohibitions were so broad that almost any match could be ruled invalid. One historian notes that, at least in theory, the incest rules prohibited young village men from wedding “all the marriageable girls they could possibly know and a great many more besides.”14

  Whatever the reasons for their breadth, these incest prohibitions became very useful weapons in the power struggles of the age. If enforced consistently, these rules would have prevented kings and nobles from using marriages with kin—even very distant kin—to consolidate wealth and social status. But in the medieval period the Church still enforced most of its principles on marriage erratically and arbitrarily. It spent little time investigating the marriages of common folk, although it readily sold dispensations when a conscientious commoner asked for a formal exemption from the rules that most people simply ignored. Even in a royal or aristocratic marriage, the Church seldom inquired into the degree of familial connection unless it was engaged in a power struggle with one of the families involved or was asked to intervene.

  The Church also routinely granted exemptions for the sake of political or economic advantage. In 1200, when rivals complained that the projected marriage between Otto IV of Germany and the daughter of the Duke of Brabant should be forbidden because the two were too closely related, the pope assured the duke that the Church would allow the match despite its technical violation of incest rules. “Because of the great usefulness which we hope will be procured from this marriage,” the pope declared, the duke could give his daughter in marriage with his conscience “not only cleansed but cheered.”15

  Still, there was no guarantee of a dispensation if a proposed match was challenged, so aristocrats had to take the Church’s definition of incest into account when planning a marriage. Although the prohibitions against incestuous marriage could usually be circumvented, a marriage that fell within the prohibited degrees of relatedness was always vulnerable to attack from enemies who hoped to illegitimize an heir or destabilize an alliance. Nobles began to avoid such marriages whenever possible and ended up creating a more far-flung set of cooperating lineages and a more inclusive noble class than in many other regions of the world.16

  The incentive to avoid marriage within one’s own family group was one of the distinctive features of the Western European upper classes. But we should not exaggerate how much influence the church’s incest rules had on how aristocrats and royalty organized their marriages. Marrying a relative could be a valuable political and economic stratagem, and families often violated incest rules when it was expedient.

  Allegations of incest could cut both ways for church officials and noble families. On the one hand, the oft-ignored rules could be invoked by a king or noble who enlisted a sympathetic Church official to block a rival’s projected marriage. At the beginning of the twelfth century, Henry I of England, who manipulated his production of legitimate and illegitimate children so successfully, was able to torpedo an engagement between his nephew and a daughter of the House of Anjou by spreading the word that the two were cousins.

  On the other hand, because the rules were so routinely ignored at the time of marriage, they could later be used to invalidate an existing marriage. A claim of incest provided an escape clause from the Church’s strictures against divorce. A married couple, or one of the pair, who desired a divorce might suddenly discover that the marriage had been incestuous all along. In the late eleventh century the Count of Anjou was able to repudiate five of his own marriages by dint of diligent genealogical research. In 1152 the divorce of King Louis VII of France and Eleanor of Aquitaine was approved when the couple pointed out that they were related within four or five degrees. The excuse served, even though this had been common knowledge at the time of their wedding and Louis’s next wife, Constance of Castile, was even more closely related to him than Eleanor had been. As one historian notes, the church’s “abhorrence of incest provided a gap in the laws of monogamy through which a king . . . could drive a coach and horses.”17

  In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council narrowed the definition of incest to four degrees of separation. The council’s stated aim was to enforce the modified ban more stringently. But popes continued to grant dispensations for political or financial gain. Under the papacy of Boniface IV (1389-1404), marital dispensations were openly available for sale, with a sliding fee scale based on the value of the concession being sought.18

  So for all their formal acceptance of church doctrine, kings and nobles continued to expect the Church to accommodate their marital strategies if the stakes were high enough. And one reason that the stakes were so often so high was that in the Western kingdoms, unlike Byzantium or Islam, women played an exceptionally important role in establishing claims to noble or royal blood.19

  The Importance of a Highborn Wife

  As we have seen, the insecurity of dynastic claims in early medieval Europe gave women a large role in conferring status and wealth in their own right. The ideal noble was like Sir Galahad of King Arthur’s Round Table, “descended on both sides from kings and queens.”20 The commonly held belief that a couple actually mixed their blood during sexual intercourse gave women a critical role in the hereditary transmission of nobility.

  A man with ambitions to rule needed a wife or mother with an exalted bloodline of her own. Even after Charlemagne’s descendants had been in power for two centuries—long enough, one would think, to establish a dynastic claim through the male line—Hugh Capet refused to swear allegiance to Charles of Lorraine, the latest in the line, because he had married a wife from the lesser nobility. Hugh said he would not bend his knee to a queen who was the daughter of one of his own vassals.21

  Marriage alliances had defensive as well as offensive purposes. Because no medieval European kingdom was powerful enough to dominate surrounding regions by force, a ruler might, if his rival married the daughter of a powerful neighbor, rush to marry her sister, in order to neutralize the benefits of the first man’s marriage. In the tenth century, the rival Capetian and Carolingian dynasties engaged in just such a matrimonial arms race. When the Capetian ruler Hugh the Great married a daughter of the Anglo-Saxon king Edward the Elder, the Carolingian monarch Charles the Simple married another of Edward’s daughters. Another Capetian ruler’s betrothal to a woman from a powerful family in Aquitaine spurred his Carolingian rival to also marry his son off to a prominent Aquitainean.22

  A woman in medieval Europe could inherit and transmit property as well as bloodlines, and her property could not be stripped from her and taken over by her husband or his kin. When Eleanor of Aquitaine married King Louis VII of France, her dowry doubled the size of his kingdom. When she left him, she took her territory with her. When Agnes, daughter of Count Baldwin IV of Hainault, married Raoul I of Coucy in 1160, her dowry included the right to collect the annual tax revenues from some of her father’s holdings. This not only gave her leverage in her marriage but made her husband eager to defend and preserve the count’s rea
lm.23

  A woman whose parents married her off was much more likely to have to leave her own relatives and live with her husband’s family than a man in the same position. While this could put her at a disadvantage, it did not necessarily render her helpless. Many a queen or countess built up an extensive personal power base at her husband’s court. With her own favored group of courtiers, attendants, and clients at hand, and jealous brothers or fathers watching from afar, her husband had to think twice about thwarting her will, so long as she produced the required heirs.

  An Anglo-Saxon poem described the ideal queen as one who “shall prosper beloved among her people, shall be cheerful, shall keep a secret, shall be generous with horses and treasures.” Inasmuch as these were the very traits that cemented power relations in the personalized politics of early medieval kingdoms, the royal wife was practically an officer of the state. She typically handed out the yearly gifts to knights and high officials, the closest thing to a salary they received. Frequently she also controlled the access of courtiers and favor seekers to the king. It is not surprising that courtiers wrote flattering poems to queens and countesses or that minstrels sang their praises. Most great ladies had what amounted to their own in-house public relations apparatus, producing a constant stream of songs and poetry in their honor. An intelligent and well-connected wife could be the power not only behind but alongside the throne.24

  Queens and ladies could also use the marriages of their children, other relatives, and retainers to build far-flung networks for themselves and their families. In the thirteenth century, Beatrice of Savoy arranged the marriage of her four daughters so skillfully that the duchy of Savoy gained an alliance with the kings of England, France, and Naples. Eleanor of Castile, who married King Edward I of England in 1254, built up a personal power base in her new land by arranging nearly two dozen marriages for various godchildren, cousins, courtiers, and ladies-in-waiting. Knights who married her women were granted lands from her dower holdings and got special favors through her influence. The children of these unions were raised with Eleanor’s own children, creating intergenerational networks of loyalty for the queen.25

  A well-connected woman could also make things very sticky for her husband if she chose to leave him. In tenth-century Ireland, where Christian strictures were especially slow to take hold, one princess became the wife of four different provincial kings in succession. Each time she and her family were offered better terms, she took her wealth and her powerful kin connections to a new consort.26

  An intractable wife might also simply abandon her husband, derailing his family’s plans. In the late tenth century a Carolingian king of northern France sent his son, in his early teens, to marry the widow of a powerful count. The widow was doubly valuable because her brother was also an Angevin lord who would make a useful ally against the king’s Capetian rivals. But the widow was twice the boy’s age and not much inclined to play the blushing, obedient bride. After two years of mutual antipathy, she walked out on her young husband, leaving him penniless and powerless in what was essentially foreign territory. His father had to rescue him and bring him home.27

  Other couples gritted their teeth and stuck it out. In the twelfth century Count Philip of Flanders married an heiress to extensive and valuable lands. When he caught her in adultery, he had her lover brutally murdered, but he did not divorce her. Holding on to her inheritance was more important to him than avenging the insult to his honor. The prospect of losing an heiress could make even the proudest husband put up with adultery.28

  It became rarer for a woman to be an heiress after the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when many aristocratic families began to protect their properties from dilution by restricting inheritance to the eldest son, a practice called primogeniture. Where primogeniture took root, the right of women to inherit and dispose of property decreased, and with it, much of their centrality to marriage alliances.29

  But restrictions on women’s right to inherit property and transmit royal status developed unevenly. Male heirship may have been the ideal, but few kings were willing to pass the crown on to a nephew or cousin instead of a daughter if they didn’t have a son. Even the Capetian monarchs in France, who had the demographic good luck to hand their kingdom down through consistent male descent for more than three hundred years, did not prohibit women’s succession until 1328. Elsewhere, shifting political fortunes, along with high death rates for men, meant that women remained important in the politics of succession and alliance until the late Middle Ages. Primogeniture may have created fewer heiresses, but by concentrating wealth in a single heir, it created richer ones.30

  Another long-term limitation on the independence and status of highborn women was the growing power of the Catholic Church. In the eleventh century the Church stepped up its campaign to prevent noble families from marrying their daughters to high church officials or installing them as heads of great monasteries and abbeys. Yet royal and noble women found new ways to protect themselves. Wealthy wives judiciously used religious donations to build their own networks of patronage and influence in the Church. Some even provided themselves insurance for their future retirement from marriage by founding religious houses on their ancestral lands. They would send their children to be educated there and would take up residence after their husbands died or their marriages fell apart. A wife whose religious allies allowed her to leave her marriage and become a nun could checkmate her husband if she left him without producing an heir and her church allies refused to let him remarry.

  Astute queens and noblewomen were careful to cultivate ties with powerful church officials, who could aid them when they were no longer willing or able to play the high-stakes marriage game. Ecclesiastical allies could make a huge difference if a husband attempted to repudiate his wife against her will. Alternatively, a friendly monastery could provide refuge for a wife who was divorced or left her husband on her own account. Churchmen might offer women places of retreat, defend their right to remain unmarried after being widowed, or help them prevent separated husbands from remarrying.

  Queens, then, were not just valuable prizes in the game of matrimonial politics. They were often accomplished players in their own right. Small wonder that when medieval Europeans adopted the game of chess from the Muslim world, the most powerful piece on the board, which the Muslims called the vizier, or adviser, was renamed “the queen.”31

  Chapter 7

  How the Other 95 Percent Wed: Marriage Among the Common Folk of the Middle Ages

  The 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.”1

  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 th
at 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.2

  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.3